Influences of Geographic Environment - Ellen Churchill Semple (libby ebook reader .TXT) 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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Pure agricultural lands of central Europe support 100 to the square mile, and those of southern Europe, 200; when combining some industry, from 250 to 300. But these figures rise to 500 or more in lowland India and China. Industrial districts of modern Europe, such as England, Belgium, Saxony, Departments Nord and Rhone in France, show a density of 500 to 800 to the square mile. [See maps pages 8 and 9.]
With every increase of the population inhabiting a given area, and with the consequent multiplication and constriction of the bonds uniting society with its land, comes a growing necessity for a more highly organized government, both to reduce friction within and to secure to the people the land on which and by which they live. Therefore protection becomes a prime function of the state. It wards off outside attack which may aim at acquisition of its territory, or an invasion of its rights, or curtailment of its geographic sphere of activity. The modern industrial state, furthermore, with the purpose of strengthening the nation, assists or itself undertakes the construction of highways, canals, and railroads, and the maintenance of steamship lines. These encourage the development of natural resources and of commerce, and hence lay the foundation for an increased population, by multiplying the relations between land and people.
A like object is attained by territorial expansion, which often follows in the wake of commercial expansion. This strengthens the nation positively by enlarging its geographic base, and negatively by forcing back the boundaries of its neighbors. The expansion of the Thirteen Colonies from the Atlantic slope to the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes by the treaty concluding the Revolution was a strong guarantee of the survival of the young Republic against future aggressions either of England or Spain, though it exchanged the scientific or protecting boundary of the Appalachian Mountains for the unscientific and exposed boundary of a river. The expansion to the Rocky Mountains by the Louisiana purchase not only gave wider play to national energies, stimulated natural increase of population, and attracted immigration, but it eliminated a dangerous neighbor in the French, and placed a wide buffer of untenanted land between the United States and the petty aggressions of the Spanish in Mexico. Rome's expansion into the valley of the Po, as later into Trans-Alpine Gaul and Germany, had for its purpose the protection of the peninsula against barbarian inroads. Japan's recent aggression against the Russians in the Far East was actuated by the realization that she had to expand into Korea at the cost of Muscovite ascendency, or contract later at the cost of her own independence.
If a state lacks the energy and national purpose, like Italy, or the possibility, like Switzerland, for territorial expansion, and accepts its boundaries as final, the natural increase of population upon a fixed area produces an increased density, unless certain social forces counteract it. Without these forces, the relation of men to the land would have tended to modify everywhere in the same way. Increase in numbers would have been attended by a corresponding decrease in the amount of land at the disposal of each individual. Those states which, like Norway and Switzerland, cannot expand and which have exploited their natural resources to the utmost, must resign themselves to the emigration of their redundant population. But those which have remained within their own boundaries and have adopted a policy of isolation, like China, feudal Japan during its two and a half centuries of seclusion, and numerous Polynesian islands, have been forced to war with nature itself by checking the operation of the law of natural increase. All the repulsive devices contributing to this end, whether infanticide, abortion, cannibalism, the sanctioned murder of the aged and infirm, honorable suicide, polyandry or persistent war, are the social deformities consequent upon suppressed growth. Such artificial checks upon population are more conspicuous in natural regions with sharply defined boundaries, like islands and oases, as Malthus observed;123 but they are visible also among savage tribes whose boundaries are fixed not by natural features but by the mutual repulsion and rivalry characterizing the stage of development, and whose limit of population is reduced by their low economic status.
There is a great difference between those states whose inhabitants subsist exclusively from the products of their own country and those which rely more or less upon other lands. Great industrial states, like England and Germany, which derive only a portion of their food and raw material from their own territory, supply their dense populations through international trade. Interruption of such foreign commerce is disastrous to the population at home; hence the state by a navy protects the lines of communication with those far-away lands of wheat fields and cattle ranch. This is no purely modern development. Athens in the time of Pericles used her navy not only to secure her political domination in the Aegean, but also her connections with the colonial wheat lands about the Euxine.
The modern state strives to render this circle of trade both large and permanent by means of commercial treaties, customs-unions, trading-posts and colonies. Thus while society at home is multiplying its relations with its own land, the state is enabling it to multiply also its relations with the whole producing world. While at home the nation is becoming more closely knit together through the common bond of the fatherland, in the world at large humanity is evolving a brotherhood of man by the union of each with all through the common growing bond of the earth. Hence we cannot avoid the question: Are we in process of evolving a social idea vaster than that underlying nationality? Do the Socialists hint to us the geographic basis of this new development, when they describe themselves as an international political party?
It is natural that the old philosophy of history should have fixed its attention upon the geographic basis of historical events. Searching for the permanent and common in the outwardly mutable, it found always at the bottom of changing events the same solid earth. Biology has had the same experience. The history of the life forms of the world leads always back to the land on which that life arose, spread, and struggled for existence. The philosophy of history was superior to early sociology, in that its method was one of historical comparison, which inevitably guided it back to the land as the material for the first generalization. Thus it happens that the importance of the land factor in history was approached first from the philosophical side. Montesquieu and Herder had no intention of solving sociological and geographical problems, when they considered the relation of peoples and states to their soil; they wished to understand the purpose and destiny of man as an inhabitant of the earth.
The study of history is always, from one standpoint, a study of progress. Yet after all the century-long investigation of the history of every people working out its destiny in its given environment, struggling against the difficulties of its habitat, progressing when it overcame them and retrograding when it failed, advancing when it made the most of its opportunities and declining when it made less or succumbed to an invader armed with better economic or political methods to exploit the land, it is amazing how little the land, in which all activities finally root, has been taken into account in the discussion of progress. Nevertheless, for a theory of progress it offers a solid basis. From the standpoint of the land social and political organizations, in successive stages of development, embrace ever increasing areas, and make them support ever denser populations; and in this concentration of population and intensification of economic development they assume ever higher forms. It does not suffice that a people, in order to progress, should extend and multiply only its local relations to its land. This would eventuate in arrested development, such as Japan showed at the time of Perry's visit. The ideal basis of progress is the expansion of the world relations of a people, the extension of its field of activity and sphere of influence far beyond the limits of its own territory, by which it exchanges commodities and ideas with various countries of the world. Universal history shows us that, as the geographical horizon of the known world has widened from gray antiquity to the present, societies and states have expanded their territorial and economic scope; that they have grown not only in the number of their square miles and in the geographical range of their international intercourse, but in national efficiency, power, and permanence, and especially in that intellectual force which feeds upon the nutritious food of wide comparisons. Every great movement which has widened the geographical outlook of a people, such as the Crusades in the Middle Ages, or the colonization of the Americas, has applied an intellectual and economic stimulus. The expanding field of advancing history has therefore been an essential concomitant and at the same time a driving force in the progress of every people and of the world.
Since progress in civilization involves an increasing exploitation of natural advantages and the development of closer relations between a land and its people, it is an erroneous idea that man tends to emancipate himself more and more from the control of the natural conditions forming at once the foundation and environment of his activities. On the contrary, he multiplies his dependencies upon nature;124 but while increasing their sum total, he diminishes the force of each. There lies the gist of the matter. As his bonds become more numerous, they become also more elastic. Civilization has lengthened his leash and padded his collar, so that it does not gall; but the leash is never slipped. The Delaware Indians depended upon the forests alone for fuel. A citizen of Pennsylvania, occupying the former Delaware tract, has the choice of wood, hard or soft coal, coke, petroleum, natural gas, or manufactured gas. Does this mean emancipation? By no means. For while fuel was a necessity to the Indian only for warmth and cooking, and incidentally for the pleasureable excitement of burning an enemy at the stake, it enters into the manufacture of almost every article that the Pennsylvanian uses in his daily life. His dependence upon nature has become more far-reaching, though less conspicuous and especially less arbitrary.
These dependencies increase enormously both in variety and amount. Great Britain, with its twenty thousand merchant ships aggregating over ten million tons, and its immense import and export trade, finds its harbors vastly more important to-day for the national welfare than in Cromwell's time, when they were used by a scanty mercantile fleet. Since the generation of electricity by water-power and its application to industry, the plunging falls of the Scandinavian Mountains, of the Alps of Switzerland, France, and Italy, of the Southern Appalachians and the Cascade Range, are geographical features representing new and unsuspected forms of national capital, and therefore new bonds between land and people in these localities. Russia since 1844 has built 35,572 miles (57,374 kilometers) of railroad in her European territory, and thereby derived a new benefit from her level plains, which so facilitate
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