Influences of Geographic Environment - Ellen Churchill Semple (libby ebook reader .TXT) 📗
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It is the economic effects of such periods of enforced idleness which are most obvious, both in their power to restrict national wealth and keep down density of population. When long, they limit subsistence to the products of a short growing season, except where local mining adds considerable sources of revenue. In the Russian government of Yaroslaf, located on the northernmost bend of the Volga within the agricultural belt, and containing the chief inland wheat market of the Empire, the field labor of four months must support the population for the remaining eight months of the year. The half of Russia included in the cold forest zone of the north maintains meagerly a sparse population, and can hope for an increase of the same only by the encouragement of Industrial pursuits. Here the long winter leisure has created the handicrafts on which so many villages rely, and which in turn have given rise to peddling,1444 as we have seen it do in high mountain regions where altitude intensifies and prolongs the winter season. Agricultural and industrial life are still undivorced, just as in primitive communities. The resulting population has also the primitive mark of great sparsity, so that modern industry, which depends upon a concentrated labor force, is here inhibited. Hence Russian manufactures, which are so active in the governments of Vladimir, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, cease beyond the sixtieth parallel, which defines the northern limit of the agricultural belt and the beginning of the forest and the fur zone.1445 [See maps pages 8 and 612.]
The rigorous climate of Russia was undoubtedly one cause for the attachment of the peasants to the soil in 1593. This measure was resorted to at a time when the Muscovite dominion from its center in Great Russia had recently been extended at the expense of the Tartars, and had thus embraced fertile southern lands, which tempted the northern peasant away from his unfruitful fields.1446 This attraction, coupled with the free and hopeful life of the frontier, met the migrant instinct bred in the peasant by the wide plains and far horizon of Russia, so that the north threatened to be left without cultivators. Later, the harsh climatic conditions of the north were advanced as an argument against the abolition of serfdom, on the ground that this system alone secured to the landed proprietor a steady labor supply, and guaranteed to the peasant his maintenance during the long, idle winter.
The duration and severity of the cold season has put a drag upon the wheel of enterprise in Canada, as opposed to the warmer United States. The prairies of the Canadian Northwest, whose fertile soil should early have attracted settlement, were a closed land till railroads could pour into it every summer from the warmer south and east a seasonal tide of laborers. These follow the harvest as it advances from point to point, and then withdraw in autumn either to the lumber camps of eastern Canada, Minnesota and Wisconsin, or to seek other forms of out-door labor in the more southern states, thus lifting from the Canadian farmer the burden of their winter support.
In the lower latitudes of the Temperate Zones, where the growing season is long and the dormant period correspondingly short and mild, we find agriculture based upon clearly distinguished winter and summer crops, as in the northern Punjab (30° to 34° N. L.);1447 or producing a quick succession of valuable crops, where the fertility of the soil can be maintained by manures or irrigating streams, as in many of the warmer Southern States and in Spain1448 respectively. In Argentine, where tillage is extensive, land abundant, and population sparse, where, in fact, "skimp farming" is the rule, the shrewd cultivator takes advantage of the long growing season to stretch out his period of sowing and reaping, and thus tills a larger area. The International Harvester Company of America, investigating the reason for the small number of reaping machines employed in Argentine in proportion to the area under cultivation, found that the simple climatic condition of a long growing season enabled one reaper to serve about twice the acreage usual in the United States, because it could work twice as long.1449
Over and beyond slight local variations of climate and season within the same zone, which contribute their quota to economic and historical results, it is the fundamental differences between the hot, cold and temperate climatic zones that produce the most conspicuous and abiding effects. These broad belts, each with its characteristic climatic conditions and appropriate civilization, form so many girdles of culture around the earth. They have their dominant features of heat and cold, variously combined with moisture and aridity, which give a certain zonal stamp to human temperature and development.
The two cold belts have little claim to the name of cultural zones, since their inability to support more than an insignificant population has made them almost a negligible factor in history. [Compare maps pages 8, 9, and 612.] The discoveries and settlements of the Northmen in Greenland remained a barren historical event, though the vikings' ships reached a new hemisphere. Iceland is the only land in this sub-arctic region which ever figured upon the stage of history; and its rôle was essentially passive. Such prominence as it acquired was due to its island nature and its situation in a swirl of the Gulf Stream, which ameliorates the worst climatic effects of its far northern location, and brings it just within the upper limit of the temperate belt. The wide sub-arctic lowlands of Russia and Siberia, which, from the Ural Mountains to the lower Amur River, stretch the cold zone well below the sixtieth parallel, have at times in the last three centuries and especially in the past decade thrown their great mass into the scale of eastern Asiatic history. This has been possible because the hot summer characteristic of continental climates forces the July isotherm of 20°C. northward over the vast heated surface of Asia nearly to the sixtieth parallel, well within the borders of Siberia. It gives that belt the short but warm growing season with protracted hours of sunshine which is so favorable to cereals, lending to Omsk, Tomsk, Vitimsk and all the stretch of Russian settlements in Siberia, an admirable summer climate like that of the Canadian Northwest.1450
The North Temperate Zone is preëminently the culture zone of the earth. It is the seat of the most important, most steadily progressive civilizations, and the source of all the cultural stimuli which have given an upward start to civilization in other zones during the past three centuries. It contains the Mediterranean basin, which was the pulsing heart of ancient history, and all the modern historically important regions of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. The temperate belt of the southern hemisphere also is following its lead, since European civilization has been transplanted to other parts of the world. This is the zone which least suffers from the drawbacks of climatic monotony or extremes, and best combines, especially in the northern hemisphere, the wide range of annual and seasonal variety so favorable to economic and cultural development, with the incalculable advantage of large land area.
Man grew in the temperate zone, was born in the Tropics. There, in his primitive, pre-civilized state, he lived in a moist, warm, uniform climate which supplied abundantly his simple wants, put no strain upon his feeble intellect and will. That first crude human product of Nature's Pliocene workshop turned out in the steaming lowland of Java, and now known to us as the Pithecanthropus erectus, found about him the climatic conditions generally conceded to have been necessary for man in his helpless, futile infancy. Where man has remained in the Tropics, with few exceptions he has suffered arrested development. His nursery has kept him a child. Though his initial progress depended upon the gifts which Nature put into his hands, his later evolution depended far more upon the powers which she developed within him. These have no limit, so far as our experience shows; but their growth is painful, reluctant. Therefore they develop only where Nature subjects man to compulsion, forces him to earn his daily bread, and thereby something more than bread. This compulsion is found in less luxurious but more salutary geographic conditions than the Tropics afford, in an environment that exacts a tribute of labor and invention in return for the boon of life, but offers a reward certain and generous enough to insure the accumulation of wealth which marks the beginning of civilization.1451
Most of the ancient civilizations originated just within the mild but drier margin of the Temperate Zone, where the cooler air of a short winter acted like a tonic upon the energies relaxed by the lethargic atmosphere of the hot and humid Tropics; where congenial warmth encouraged vegetation, but where the irrigation necessary to secure abundant and regular crops called forth inventiveness, coöperation, and social organization, and gave to the people their first baptism of redemption from savagery to barbarism. Native civilizations of limited development have arisen in the Tropics, but only where, as in Yemen, Mexico and Peru, a high, cool, semi-arid plateau, a restricted area of fertile soil, and a protected location alternately coddled and spurred the nascent people.
As the Tropics have been the cradle of humanity, the Temperate Zone has been the cradle and school of civilization. Here Nature has given much by withholding much. Here man found his birthright, the privilege of the struggle.
NOTES TO CHAPTER XVII
1409.G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 15. London, 1904.
1410.Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, Vol. I, Book XIV. London, 1906.
1411.W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 574-578. New York, 1899.
1412.Julius Hann, Handbook of Climatology, Part I, pp. 223-224. New York, 1903.
1413.Isaiah Bowman, Distribution of Population in Bolivia, Bulletin of Geographical Society of Philadelphia, Vol. VII, pp. 40, 41.
1414.Ratzel, Aus Mexico, p. 415, Note 14. Breslau, 1878.
1415.Julius Hann, Handbook of Climatology, Part I, pp. 224-227. New York, 1903.
1416.G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 23. London, 1904.
1417.Julius Hann, Handbook of Climatology, Part I, pp. 171-173. New York, 1903.
1418.Ibid., pp. 188-189.
1419.Ibid., pp. 57-58.
1420.Risley and Gait, Census of India for 1901, Vol. I, Part 1, pp. 14-21, map p. 4. Calcutta, 1903.
1421.H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 173-174. London, 1904.
1422.G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 65-66. London, 1904.
1423.Ibid., 126-128. Holdich, India, p. 259. London, 1905.
1424.G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 114, 382. London, 1904.
1425.J. Russell Smith, The Economic Importance of the Tropical Plateaus in America, House Doc. 460, 58-3--53, pp. 829-835. Washington, 1904.
1426.G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 160. London, 1904.
1427.E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, Chap. XV. Boston, 1903.
1428.W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 215-238. New York, 1899.
1429.Ibid., p. 276, Map p. 274.
1430.E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, p. 280-283. Boston, 1903.
1431.G.G Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 434, 436. London, 1904.
1432.H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 1009. New York, 1902.
1433.Ratzel, History of
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