Influences of Geographic Environment Part 6

[Sidenote: Geographical mark of low-type societies.]

The larger the amount of territory necessary for the support of a given number of people, whether the proportion be due to permanent poverty of natural resources as in the Eskimo country, or to r.e.t.a.r.ded economic development as among the Indians of primitive America or the present Sudanese, the looser is the connection between land and people, and the lower the type of social organization. For such groups the organic theory of society finds an apt description. To quote Spencer, "The original cl.u.s.ters, animal and social, are not only small, but they lack density. Creatures of low type occupy large s.p.a.ces considering the small quant.i.ty of animal substance they contain; and low-type societies spread over areas that are wide relatively to the number of their component individuals."[104] In common language this means small tribes or even detached families spa.r.s.ely scattered over wide areas, living in temporary huts or encampments of tepees and tents s.h.i.+fted from place to place, making no effort to modify the surface of the land beyond scratching the soil to raise a n.i.g.g.ardly crop of grain or tubers, and no investment of labor that might attach to one spot the spa.r.s.e and migrant population. [See density maps pages 8 and 9.]

[Sidenote: Land and state.]

The superiority over this social type of the civilized state lies in the highly organized utilization of its whole geographic basis by the mature community, and in the development of government that has followed the increasing density of population and multiplication of activities growing out of this manifold use of the land. Sedentary agriculture, which forms its initial economic basis, is followed by industrialism and commerce. The migratory life presents only limited acc.u.mulation of capital, and restricts narrowly its forms. Permanent settlement encourages acc.u.mulation in every form, and under growing pressure of population slowly reveals the possibilities of every foot of ground, of every geographic advantage. These are the fibers of the land which become woven into the whole fabric of the nation's life. These are the geographic elements const.i.tuting the soil in which empires are rooted; they rise in the sap of the nation.

[Sidenote: Strength of the land bond in the state.]

The geographic basis of a state embodies a whole complex of physical conditions which may influence its historical development. The most potent of these are its size and zonal location; its situation, whether continental or insular, inland or maritime, on the open ocean or an enclosed sea; its boundaries, whether drawn by sea, mountain, desert or the faint demarking line of a river; its forested mountains, gra.s.sy plains, and arable lowlands; its climate and drainage system; finally its equipment with plant and animal life, whether indigenous or imported, and its mineral resources. When a state has taken advantage of all its natural conditions, the land becomes a const.i.tuent part of the state,[105] modifying the people which inhabit it, modified by them in turn, till the connection between the two becomes so strong by reciprocal interaction, that the people cannot be understood apart from their land. Any attempt to divide them theoretically reduces the social or political body to a cadaver, valuable for the study of structural anatomy after the method of Herbert Spencer, but throwing little light upon the vital processes.

[Sidenote: Weak land tenure of hunting and pastoral tribes.]

A people who makes only a transitory or superficial use of its land has upon it no permanent or secure hold. The power to hold is measured by the power to use; hence the weak tenure of hunting and pastoral tribes.

Between their scattered encampments at any given time are wide interstices, inviting occupation by any settlers who know how to make better use of the soil. This explains the easy intrusion of the English colonists into the spa.r.s.ely tenanted territory of the Indians, of the agricultural Chinese into the pasture lands of the Mongols beyond the Great Wall, of the American pioneers into the hunting grounds of the Hudson Bay Company in the disputed Oregon country.[106] The frail bonds which unite these lower societies to their soil are easily ruptured and the people themselves dislodged, while their land is appropriated by the intruder. But who could ever conceive of dislodging the Chinese or the close-packed millions of India? A modern state with a given population on a wide area is more vulnerable than another of like population more closely distributed; but the former has the advantage of a reserve territory for future growth.[107] This was the case of Kursachsen and Brandenburg in the sixteenth century, and of the United States throughout its history. But beside the danger of inherent weakness before attack, a condition of relative underpopulation always threatens a r.e.t.a.r.dation of development. Easy-going man needs the prod of a pressing population. [Compare maps pages 8 and 103 for examples.]

[Sidenote: Land and food supply.]

Food is the urgent and recurrent need of individuals and of society. It dictates their activities in relation to their land at every stage of economic development, fixes the locality of the encampment or village, and determines the size of the territory from which sustenance is drawn. The length of residence in one place depends upon whether the springs of its food supply are perennial or intermittent, while the abundance of their flow determines how large a population a given piece of land can support.

[Sidenote: Advance from natural to artificial basis of subsistence.]

Hunter and fisher folk, relying almost exclusively upon what their land produces of itself, need a large area and derive from it only an irregular food supply, which in winter diminishes to the verge of famine. The transition to the pastoral stage has meant the subst.i.tution of an artificial for a natural basis of subsistence, and therewith a change which more than any other one thing has inaugurated the advance from savagery to civilization.[108] From the standpoint of economics, the forward stride has consisted in the application of capital in the form of flocks and herds to the task of feeding the wandering horde;[109] from the standpoint of alimentation, in the guarantee of a more reliable and generally more nutritious food supply, which enables population to grow more steadily and rapidly; from the standpoint of geography, in the marked reduction in the per capita amount of land necessary to yield an adequate and stable food supply. Pastoral nomadism can support in a given district of average quality from ten to twenty times as many souls as can the chase; but in this respect is surpa.s.sed from twenty to thirty-fold by the more productive agriculture. While the subsistence of a nomad requires 100 to 200 acres of land, for that of a skillful farmer from 1 to 2 acres suffice.[110] In contrast, the land of the Indians living in the Hudson Bay Territory in 1857 averaged 10 square miles per capita; that of the Indians in the United States in 1825, subsidized moreover by the government, 1-1/4 square miles.[111]

[Sidenote: Land in relation to agriculture.]

With transition to the sedentary life of agriculture, society makes a further gain over nomadism in the closer integration of its social units, due to permanent residence in larger and more complex groups; in the continuous release of labor from the task of mere food-getting for higher activities, resulting especially in the rapid evolution of the home; and finally in the more elaborate organization in the use of the land, leading to economic differentiation of different localities and to a rapid increase in the population supported by a given area, so that the land becomes the dominant cohesive force in society. [See maps pages 8 and 9.]

[Sidenote: Migratory agriculture]

Agriculture is adopted at first on a small scale as an adjunct to the chase or herding. It tends therefore to partake of the same extensive and nomadic character[112] as these other methods of gaining subsistence, and only gradually becomes sedentary and intensive. Such was the superficial, migratory tillage of most American Indians, s.h.i.+fting with the village in the wake of the retreating game or in search of fresh unexhausted soil. Such is the agriculture of the primitive Korkus in the Mahadeo Hills in Central India. They clear a forested slope by burning; rake over the ashes in which they sow their grain, and reap a fairly good crop in the fertilized soil. The second year the clearing yields a reduced product and the third year is abandoned. When the hamlet of five or six families has exhausted all the land about it, it moves to a new spot to repeat the process.[113]

The same superficial, extensive tillage, with abandonment of fields every few years, prevails in the Tartar districts of the Russian steppes, as it did among the cattle-raising Germans at the beginning of their history. Tacitus says of them, _Arva per annos mutant et superest ager_,[114] commenting at the same time upon their abundance of land and their reluctance to till. Where nomadism is made imperative by aridity, the agriculture which accompanies it tends to become fixed, owing to the few localities blessed with an irrigating stream to moisten the soil.

These spots, generally selected for the winter residence, have their soil enriched, moreover, by the long stay of the herd and thus avoid exhaustion.[115] Often, however, in enclosed basins the salinity of the irrigating streams in their lower course ruins the fields after one or two crops, and necessitates a constant s.h.i.+fting of the cultivated patches; hence agriculture remains subsidiary to the yield of the pastures. This condition and effect is conspicuous along the termini of the streams draining the northern slope of the Kuen Lun into the Tarim basin.[116]

[Sidenote: Geographic checks to progress.]

The desultory, intermittent, extensive use of the land practised by hunters and nomads tends, under the growing pressure of population, to pa.s.s into the systematic, continuous, intensive use practised by the farmer, except where nature presents positive checks to the transition.

The most obvious check consists in adverse conditions of climate and soil. Where agriculture meets insurmountable obstacles, like the intense cold of Arctic Siberia and Lapland, or the alkaline soils of Nevada and the Caspian Depression, or the inadequate rainfall of Mongolia and Central Arabia, the land can produce no higher economic and social groups than pastoral hordes. Hence shepherd folk are found in their purest types in deserts and steppes, where conditions early crystallized the social form and checked development. [Rainfall map chap. XIV.]

[Sidenote: Native animal and plant life as factors.]

Adverse conditions of climate and soil are not the only factors in this r.e.t.a.r.dation. The very unequal native equipment of the several continents with plant and animal forms likely to accelerate the advance to nomadism and agriculture also enters into the equation. In Australia, the lack of a single indigenous mammal fit for domestication and of all cereals blocked from the start the pastoral and agricultural development of the natives. Hence at the arrival of the Europeans, Australia presented the unique spectacle of a whole continent with its population still held in the vise of nature. The Americas had a limited variety of animals susceptible of domestication, but were more meagerly equipped than the Old World. Yet the Eskimo failed to tame and herd the reindeer, though their precarious food-supply furnished a motive for the transition.

Moreover, an abundance of gra.s.s and reindeer moss (_Cladonia rangiferina_), and congenial climatic conditions favored it especially for the Alaskan Eskimo, who had, besides, the nearby example of the Siberian Chukches as reindeer herders.[117] The buffalo, whose domesticability has been proved, was never utilized in this way by the Indians, though the Spaniard Gomara writes of one tribe, living in the sixteenth century in the southwestern part of what is now United States territory, whose chief wealth consisted in herds of tame buffalo.[118]

North America, at the time of the discovery, saw only the dog hanging about the lodges of the Indians; but in South America the llama and alpaca, confined to the higher levels of the Andes (10,000 to 15,000 feet elevation) were used in domestic herds only in the mountain-rimmed valleys of ancient Peru, where, owing to the restricted areas of these intermontane basins, stock-raising early became stationary,[119] as we find it in the Alps. Moreover, the high ridges of the Andes supported a species of gra.s.s called _ichu_, growing up to the snowline from the equator to the southern extremity of Patagonia. Its geographical distribution coincided with that of the llama and alpaca, whose chief pasturage it furnished.[120] In contrast, the absence of any wild fodder plants in j.a.pan, and the exclusion of all foreign forms by the successful compet.i.tion of the native bamboo gra.s.s have together eliminated pastoral life from the economic history of the island.

The Old World, on the other hand, furnished an abundant supply of indigenous animals susceptible of domestication, and especially those fitted for nomadic life, such as the camel, horse, a.s.s, sheep and goat.

Hence it produced in the widespread gra.s.slands and deserts of Europe, Asia, and Africa the most perfect types of pastoral development in its natural or nomadic form. Moreover, the early history of the civilized agricultural peoples of these three continents reveals their previous pastoral mode of life.

North and South America offered over most of their area conditions of climate and soil highly favorable to agriculture, and a fair list of indigenous cereals, tubers, and pulses yielding goodly crops even to superficial tillage. Maize especially was admirably suited for a race of semi-migratory hunters. It could be sown without plowing, ripened in a warm season even in ninety days, could be harvested without a sickle and at the pleasure of the cultivator, and needed no preparation beyond roasting before it was ready for food.[121] The beans and pumpkins which the Indians raised also needed only a short season. Hence many Indian tribes, while showing no trace of pastoral development, combined with the chase a semi-nomadic agriculture; and in a few districts where geographic conditions had applied peculiar pressure, they had accomplished the transition to sedentary agriculture.

[Sidenote: Land per capita under various cultural and geographic conditions.]

Every advance to a higher state of civilization has meant a progressive decrease in the amount of land necessary for the support of the individual, and a progressive increase in the relations between man and his habitat. The stage of social development remaining the same, the per capita amount of land decreases also from poorer to better endowed geographical districts, and with every invention which brings into use some natural resource. The following cla.s.sification[122] ill.u.s.trates the relation of density of population to various geographic and socio-economic conditions.

Hunter tribes on the outskirts of the habitable area, as in Arctic America and Siberia, require from 70 to 200 square miles per capita; in arid lands, like the Kalahari Desert and Patagonia, 40 to 200 square miles per capita; in choice districts and combining with the chase some primitive agriculture, as did the Cherokee, Shawnee and Iroquois Indians, the Dyaks of Borneo and the Papuans of New Guinea, 1/2 to 2 square miles per capita.

Pastoral nomads show a density of from 2 to 5 to the square mile; practicing some agriculture, as in Kordofan and Sennar districts of eastern Sudan, 10 to 15 to the square mile. Agriculture, undeveloped but combined with some trade and industry as in Equatorial Africa, Borneo and most of the Central American states, supports 5 to 15 to the square mile; practised with European methods in young or colonial lands, as in Arkansas, Texas, Minnesota, Hawaii, Canada and Argentine, or in European lands with unfavorable climate, up to 25 to the square mile.

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.]

[Sidenote: Density of population and government.]

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, a.s.sists or itself undertakes the construction of highways, ca.n.a.ls, and railroads, and the maintenance of steams.h.i.+p 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.

[Sidenote: Territorial expansion of the state.]

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.

j.a.pan'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.

[Sidenote: Checks to population.]

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 j.a.pan 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.

[Sidenote: Extra-territorial relations.]

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?

[Sidenote: Geography in the philosophy of history.]

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.

[Sidenote: Theory of progress from the standpoint of geography.]

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 succ.u.mbed 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 a.s.sume 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 j.a.pan 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.

[Sidenote: Man's increasing dependence upon nature.]

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 emanc.i.p.ate 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, c.o.ke, petroleum, natural gas, or manufactured gas. Does this mean emanc.i.p.ation? 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.

[Sidenote: Increase in kind and amount.]

These dependencies increase enormously both in variety and amount. Great Britain, with its twenty thousand merchant s.h.i.+ps 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 the construction and cheap operation of railroads, that they have become in this aspect alone a new feature in her national economy. On the other hand, the galling restrictions of Russia's meager and strategically confined coasts, which tie her hand in any wide maritime policy, work a greater hards.h.i.+p to-day than they did a hundred years ago, since her growing population creates a more insistent demand for international trade. In contrast to Russia, Norway, with its paucity of arable soil and of other natural resources, finds its long indented coastline and the coast-bred seamans.h.i.+p of its people a progressively important national a.s.set. Hence as ocean-carriers the Norwegians have developed a merchant marine nearly half as large again as that of Russia and Finland combined--1,569,646 tons[125] as against 1,084,165 tons.

This growing dependence of a civilized people upon its land is characterized by intelligence and self-help. Man forms a partners.h.i.+p with nature, contributing brains and labor, while she provides the capital or raw material in ever more abundant and varied forms. As a result of this cooperation, held by the terms of the contract, he secures a better living than the savage who, like a mendicant, accepts what nature is pleased to dole out, and lives under the tyranny of her caprices.