Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
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Emerson's statement that the vast size of the United States is reflected in the big views of its people applies not only to political policy, which in the Monroe Doctrine for the first time in history has embraced a hemisphere; nor is it confined to the big scale of their economic processes. Emerson had in mind rather their whole conception of national mission and national life, especially their legislation,325 for which he anticipated larger and more Catholic aims than obtain in Europe, hampered as it is by countless political and linguistic boundaries and barred thereby from any far-reaching unity of purpose and action.
Canada, British South Africa, Australia and the United States, though widely separated, have in common a certain wide outlook upon life, a continental element in the national mind, bred in their people by their generous territories. The American recognizes his kinship of mind with these colonial Englishmen as something over and above mere kinship of race. It consists in their deep-seated common democracy, the democracy born in men who till fields and clear forests, not as plowmen and wood-cutters, but as makers of nations. It consists in identical interests and points of view in regard to identical problems growing out of the occupation and development of new and almost boundless territories. Race questions, paucity of labor, highways and railroads, immigration, combinations of capital, excessive land holdings, and illegal appropriation of land on a large scale, are problems that meet them all. The monopolistic policy of the United States in regard to American soil as embodied in the Monroe Doctrine, and the expectation lurking in the mental background of every American that his country may eventually embrace the northern continent, find their echo in Australia's plans for wider empire in the Pacific. The Commonwealth of Australia has succeeded in getting into its own hands the administration of British New Guinea (90,500 square miles.) It has also secured from the imperial government the unusual privilege of settling the relations between itself and the islands of the Pacific, because it regards the Pacific question as the one question of foreign policy in which its interests are profoundly involved. In the same way the British in South Africa, sparsely scattered though they are, feel an imperative need of further expansion, if their far-reaching schemes of commerce and empire are to be realized.
The effort to annihilate space by improved means of communication has absorbed the best intellects and energies of expanding peoples. The ancient Roman, like the Incas of Peru, built highways over every part of the empire, undaunted by natural obstacles like the Alps and Andes. Modern expansionists are railroad builders. Witness the long list of strategic lines, constructed or subsidized by various governments during the past half century—the Union Pacific, Central Pacific, Canadian Pacific, Trans-Siberian, Cairo-Khartoum, Cape Town-Zambesi, and now the proposed Trans-Saharan road, designed to unite the Mediterranean and Guinea colonies of French Africa. The equipment of the American roads, with their heavy rails, giant locomotives, and enormous freight cars, reveals adaptation to a commerce that covers long distances between strongly differentiated areas of production, and that reflects the vast enterprises of this continental country. The same story comes out in the ocean vessels which serve the trade of the Great Lakes, and in the acres of coal barges in a single fleet which are towed down the Ohio and Mississippi by one mammoth steel tug.
The abundant natural resources awaiting development in such big new countries give to the mind of the people an essentially practical bent. The rewards of labor are so great that the stimulus to effort is irresistible. Economic questions take precedence of all others, divide political parties, and consume a large portion of national legislation; while purely political questions sink into the background. Civilization takes on a material stamp, becomes that "dollar civilization" which is the scorn of the placid, paralyzed Oriental or the old world European. The genius of colonials is essentially practical. Impatience of obstacles, short cuts aiming at quick returns, wastefulness of land, of forests, of fuel, of everything but labor, have long characterized American activities. The problem of an inadequate labor supply attended the sudden accession of territory opened for European occupation by the discovery of America, and caused a sudden recrudescence of slavery, which as an industrial system had long been outgrown by Europe. It has also given immense stimulus to invention, and to the formation of labor unions, which in the newest colonial fields, like Australia and New Zealand, have dominated the government and given a Utopian stamp to legislation.
Yet underlying and permeating this materialism is a youthful idealism. Transplanted to conditions of greater opportunity, the race becomes rejuvenated, abandons outgrown customs and outworn standards, experiences an enlargement of vision and of hope, gathers courage and energy equal to its task, manages somehow to hitch its wagon to a star.
NOTES TO CHAPTER VI
292.
Chamberlain and Salisbury, Geology, Vol. III, pp. 483-485. New York, 1906.
293.Ibid., p. 137 and map p. 138.
294.Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. I, chap. IV, pp. 124-132; Vol. II, chap; XII, p. 134. New York, 1895. H. W. Conn, The Method of Evolution, p. 54. London and New York, 1900.
295.Ibid., pp. 194-197, 226-227, 239-242, 342-350.
296.Eatzel, Der Lebensraum, eine bio-geographische Studie, p. 51. Tubingen, 1901.
297.D.G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 271, 293-295. Philadelphia, 1901.
298.A. Heilprin, Geographical Distribution of Animals, pp. 57-61. London, 1894.
299.W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 39, maps pp. 43, 78. New York, 1899.
300.Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. II, chap. XII, pp. 130-131. New York, 1895.
301.Richard Semon, In the Australian Bush, p. 211. London, 1899.
302.J.H.W. Stuckenburg, Sociology, Vol. I, p. 324. New York and London, 1903.
303.E. G. Semple, The Influences of Geographic Environment on the Lower St. Lawrence. Bulletin American Geographical Society, Vol. XXXVI, pp. 464-465. 1904.
304.B. Limedorfer, Finland's Plight, Forum, Vol. XXXII, pp. 85-93.
305.Eleventh Census, Report on the Indians, p. 35. Washington, 1894.
306.A.B. Wallace, Australasia, Vol. I, p. 454. London, 1893.
307.W.S. Barclay, Life in Terra del Fuego, The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 55, p. 97. January, 1904.
308.A.E. Wallace, Australasia, Vol. I, pp. 454-455. London, 1893.
309.Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. II, chap. XIII, p. 178. New York, 1895.
310.Ibid., Vol. II, chap. XII, p. 167-168.
311.Nesbit Bain, Finland and the Tsar, Fortnightly Review, Vol. 71, p. 735. E. Limedorfer, Finland's Plight, Forum, Vol. 32, pp. 85-93.
312.Archibald Geikie, The Scenery of Scotland, pp. 398-399. London, 1887.
313.Railways in Asia Minor, Littell's Living Age, Vol. 225, p. 196.
314.J. Ellis Barker, Modern Germany, pp. 38-66. London, 1907.
315.The Polish Danger in Prussia, Westminster Review, Vol. 155, p. 375.
316.Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol. I, pp. 223-224. Leipzig, 1897.
317.Plato, Critias, 112. Aristotle, Politics, Book II, chap. VII; Book IV, chap. IV; Book VII, chap. IV.
318.Plato, De Legibus, Book V, chaps. 8, 9, 10, 11.
319.Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses, pp. 180-187. Stuttgart, 1899.
320.Blanqui, History of Political Economy, pp. 150-152. New York, 1880.
321.Carl Ritter, Comparative Geography, p. 63. New York, 1865.
322.E. C. Semple, American History and its Geographic Conditions, pp. 42-43, 109, 110. Boston, 1903.
323.James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 405-6. New York, 1897.
324.P. L. Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. VIII. Letter to John Bacon, April 30, 1803; and Confidential Message to Congress on the Expedition to the Pacific, January 18, 1803.
325.Emerson, The Young American, in Nature Addresses and Lectures, pp. 369-371. Centenary Edition, Boston.
Nature abhors fixed boundary lines and sudden transitions; all her forces combine against them. Everywhere she keeps her borders melting, wavering, advancing, retreating. If by some cataclysm sharp lines of demarcation are drawn, she straightway begins to blur them by creating intermediate forms, and thus establishes the boundary zone which characterizes the inanimate and animate world. A stratum of limestone or sandstone, when brought into contact with a glowing mass of igneous rock, undergoes various changes due to the penetrating heat of the volcanic outflow, so that its surface is metamorphosed as far as that heat reaches. The granite cliff slowly deposits at its base a rock-waste slope to soften the sudden transition from its perpendicular surface to the level plain at its feet. The line where a land-born river meets the sea tends to become a sandbar or a delta, created by the river-borne silt and the wash of the waves, a form intermediate between land and sea, bearing the stamp of each, fluid in its outlines, ever growing by the persistent accumulation of mud, though ever subject to inundation and destruction by the waters which made it. The alluvial coastal hems that edge all shallow seas are such border zones, reflecting in their flat, low surfaces the dead level of the ocean, in their composition the solid substance of the land; but in the miniature waves imprinted on the sands and the billows of heaped-up boulders, the master workman of the deep leaves his mark. [See map page 243.]
Under examination, even our familiar term coastline proves to be only an abstraction with no corresponding reality in nature. Everywhere, whether on margin of lake or gulf, the actual phenomenon is a coast zone, alternately covered and abandoned by the waters, varying in width from a few inches to a few miles, according to the slope of the land, the range of the tide and the direction of the wind. It has one breadth at the minimum or neap tide, but increases often two or three fold at spring tide, when the distance between ebb and flood is at its maximum. At the mouth of Cook's Inlet on the southern Alaskan coast, where the range of tides is only eight feet, the zone is comparatively narrow, but widens rapidly towards the head of the inlet, where the tide rises twenty-three feet above the ebb line, and even to sixty-five feet under the influence of a heavy southwest storm. On flat coasts we are familiar with the wide frontier of salt marshes, that witness the border warfare of land and sea, alternate invasion and retreat. In low-shored estuaries like those of northern Brittany and northwestern Alaska, this amphibian girdle of the land expands to a width of four miles, while on precipitous coasts of tideless sea basins it contracts to a few inches. Hence this boundary zone changes with every impulse of the mobile sea and with every varying configuration of the shore. Movement and external conditions are the factors in its creation. They make something that is only partially akin to the two contiguous forms. Here on their outer margins land and ocean compromise their physical differences, and this by a law which runs through animate and inanimate nature. Wherever one body moves in constant contact with another, it is subjected to modifying influences which differentiate its periphery from its
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