Influences of Geographic Environment Part 71

This compression of the isotherms emphasizes the differences of national characters produced in part by dissimilar climatic conditions. Contrasts in temperament, manner of life, and point of view, like that between the New Englander and Virginian, Chilean and Bolivian in the Americas, Breton and Provencal in France, Castilian and Andalusian in Spain, Gurkha and Bengali in India, seem to bleach out when they are located far apart, owing to many grades of transition between; but they become striking, stimulating, productive of important economic and political results, when close juxtaposition enables them to react sharply one upon the other. In effecting these nice differentiations of local types, climate is nearly always one of the factors at work, emphasizing perhaps an existing ethnic difference. Even the slight variations of temperature to be found in the same zone or the same climatic region produce distinct results, especially where they are harnessed, as is usually the case, with some other geographic condition of relief, area or soil, pulling in the same direction. Mexico, Peru, Italy, Switzerland, Greece and Asia Minor, with its high plateau interior and its contrasted Euxine and Aegean coasts, represent each a complex of climatic differences, which, reinforced by other geographic factors, have made in these regions a polychrome picture of national life.

[Sidenote: Effect of climate upon distribution of immigration]

Climatic contrasts aid differentiation also by influencing both natural and artificial selection in the distribution of peoples. This effect is conspicuous in the distribution of immigrants in all colonial lands like Africa, South America and in every part of the United States.[1427] The warm, moist air of the Gulf and South Atlantic States is attracting back to the congenial habitat of the "black belt" the negroes of the North, where, moreover, their numbers are being further depleted by a harsh climate, which finds in them a large proportion of the unfit. The presence of a big negro laboring cla.s.s in the South, itself primarily a result of climate, has long served to exclude foreign immigration, which sought therefore the unoccupied lands and the congenial climate of the more bracing North. Hence it is both a direct and indirect effect of climate that the North shows a large proportion of aliens, and the white population of the South an almost unadulterated English stock.

[Sidenote: Climate and race temperament.]

The influence of climate upon race temperament, both as a direct and indirect effect, can not be doubted, despite an occasional exception, like the cheery, genial Eskimos, who seem to carry in their sunny natures an antidote to the cold and poverty of their environment. In general a close correspondence obtains between climate and temperament.

The northern peoples of Europe are energetic, provident, serious, thoughtful rather than emotional, cautious rather than impulsive. The southerners of the sub-tropical Mediterranean basin are easy-going, improvident except under pressing necessity, gay, emotional, imaginative, all qualities which among the negroes of the equatorial belt degenerate into grave racial faults. If, as many ethnologists maintain, the blond Teutons of the north are a bleached out branch of the brunette Mediterranean race, this contrast in temperament is due to climate. A comparison of northern and southern peoples of the same race and within the same Temperate Zone reveals numerous small differences of nature and character, which can be traced back directly or indirectly to climatic differences, and which mount up to a considerable sum total.

The man of the colder habitat is more domestic, stays more in his home.

Though he is not necessarily more moderate or continent than the southerner, he has to pay more for his indulgences, so he is economical in expenditures. With the southerner it is "easy come, easy go." He therefore suffers more frequently in a crisis. The low cost of living keeps down his wages, so that as a laborer he is poorly paid. This fact, together with his improvidence, tends to swell the proletariat in warm countries of the Temperate Zone; and though here it does not produce the distressing impression of a proletariat in Dublin or Liverpool or Boston, it is always degrading. It levels society and economic status downward, while in the cooler countries of the Temperate Zone, the process is upward. The laborer of the north, owing to his providence and larger profits, which render small economies possible, is constantly recruited into the cla.s.s of the capitalist.

[Sidenote: Contrasted temperaments in the same nation.]

Everywhere a cold climate puts a steadying hand on the human heart and brain. It gives an autumn tinge to life. Among the folk of warmer lands eternal spring holds sway. National life and temperament have the buoyancy and thoughtlessness of childhood, its charm and its weakness.

These distinctions and contrasts meet us everywhere. The southern Chinese, and especially the Cantonese, is more irresponsible and hot-blooded than the Celestial of the north, though the bitter struggle for existence in the over-crowded Kw.a.n.gtung province has made him quite as industrious; but on his holidays he takes his pleasure in singing, gambling, and various forms of dissipation. The southern Russian is described as more light-hearted than his kinsman of the bleaker north, though both are touched with the melancholy of the Slav. In this case, however, the question immediately arises, how far the dweller of the southern wheat lands owes his happy disposition to the easy conditions of life in the fertile Ukraine, as opposed to the fiercer struggle for subsistence in the glaciated lake and forest belt of the north. Similar distinctions of climate and national temperament exist in the two sections of Germany. The contrast between the energetic, enterprising, self-contained Saxon of the Baltic lowland and the genial, spontaneous Bavarian or Swabian is conspicuous, though the only geographical advantage possessed by the latter is a warmer temperature attended by a sunnier sky. He contains in his blood a considerable infusion of the Alpine stock and is therefore racially differentiated from the northern Teuton,[1428] but this hardly accounts for the difference of temperament, because the same Alpine stock is plodding, earnest and rather stolid on the northern slope of the Alps, but in the warm air and suns.h.i.+ne of the southern slope, it abates these qualities and conforms more nearly to the Italian type of character. The North Italian, however, presents a striking contrast to the indolent, irresponsible, improvident citizens of Naples, Calabria and Sicily, who belong to the contrasted Mediterranean race, and have been longer subjected to the relaxing effects of sub-tropical heat.

[Sidenote: Complexity of the geographic problem.]

Where the climatic difference is small, it is nevertheless often conspicuous enough to eclipse other concomitant factors which are at work, and hence to encourage the formation of some easy blanket theory of climatic influences. But just because the difference is slight, all attending geographic and ethnic circ.u.mstances ought to be scrutinized, to insure a correct statement of the geographical equation. The contrast between the light-hearted, gracious peasants of warm, sunny Andalusia and the reserved, almost morose inhabitants of cool and cloudy Asturias is the effect not only of climate but of the easy life in a fertile river plain, opposed to the bitter struggle for existence in the rough Cantabrian Mountains. Moreover, a strong infusion of Alpine blood has given this group of Spanish mountaineers the patience and seriousness which characterizes the race in other parts of continental Europe.[1429]

The conditions which have differentiated Scotch from English have been climate, relief, location, geologic composition of the soil, and ethnic composition of the two peoples. The divergent development of Northerners and Southerners in America arose from contrasts in climate, soil and area. It was not only the enervating heat and moisture of the Southern States, but also the large extent of their fertile area which necessitated slave labor, introduced the plantation system, and resulted in the whole aristocratic organization of society in the South.[1430]

[Sidenote: Monotonous climatic conditions.]

When one type of climate extends monotonously over a vast area, as in Russia. Siberia, Central Asia or immense tracts of Africa, the differences of temperature which p.r.i.c.k and stimulate national endeavor in small climatic districts here lose much of their force. Their effects flatten out into insignificance, overwhelmed by the encounter with too large a territory. All the southern continents are handicapped by the monotony of their zonal location. The map of annual isotherms shows Africa quite enclosed between the two torrid lines of 20 Centigrade, except for a narrow sub-tropical belt along the Barbary coast in the north, and in the south an equally narrow littoral extending east and north from the Cape of Good Hope. At first glance, the large area of South Africa lying on the temperate side of the Tropic of Capricorn raises hopes for a rich economic, social and cultural development here; but these are dashed by an examination of the isotherms. Excessive heat lays its r.e.t.a.r.ding touch upon everything, while a prevailing aridity (rainfall less than 10 inches or 25 centimeters), except on the narrow windward slope of the eastern mountains, gives the last touch of climatic monotony. The coastal belt of Cape Colony and Natal raise tropical and sub-tropical products[1431] like all the rest of the continent, while the semi-arid interior is committed with little variations to pastoral life. [See maps pages 484 and 487.] Climatic monotony, operating alone, would have condemned South Africa to poverty of development, and will unquestionably always avail to impoverish its national life. South African history has been made by its mines and by its location on the original water route to India; the first have dominated its economic development, and the latter has largely determined its ethnic elements--English, Dutch, and French Huguenots, while the magnet of the mines has drawn other nationalities and especially a large Jewish contingent into the urban centers of the Rand.[1432] In the background is the native Kaffir and Hottentot stocks, whose blood filters into the lower cla.s.ses of the white population. The diversity of these ethnic elements may compensate in part for the monotony of climatic conditions, which promise to check differentiation.

However, climatic control is here peculiarly despotic. We see how it has converted the urban merchants of Holland and the skillful Huguenot artisan of France into the crude pastoral Boer of the Transvaal.

In contrast to South Africa, temperate South America has an immense advantage in its large area lying outside the 20C. isotherm, and in the wide range of mean temperatures (from 20C. to 5C.) found between the Tropic of Capricorn and Tierra del Fuego. Climate and relief have combined to make the mouth of the La Plata River the site of the largest city of the southern hemisphere. Buenos Ayres, with a population of over a million, reflects its large temperate hinterland.

[Sidenote: The effects of Arctic cold.]

Frigid zones and the Tropics alike suffer from monotony, of Arctic the one of cold and the other of heat. The Arctic climatic belt, extending from the isotherm of 0C. (32F.) to the pole, includes inhabited districts where the mean annual temperature is less than -15C. (or 5F.), as at the Greenland village of Etah on Smith's Sound and the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk. Here the ground is covered with, ice or snow most of the year, and permanently frozen below the surface. Animal and plant life are reduced to a minimum on the land, so that man, with every poleward advance of his thin-strung settlements, is forced more and more to rely on the sea for his food. Hence he places his villages on narrow strips of coast, as do the Norse of Finmarken, the Eskimo and the Tunguse inhabiting the Arctic rim of Asia. Products of marine animals make the basis of his domestic economy. Farther inland, which means farther south, all tribes live by hunting and fis.h.i.+ng. The Eurasian Hyperboreans find additional subsistence in their reindeer herds, which they pasture on the starchy lichen (Cladonia rangiferina) of the tundra. [See maps pages 103, 153.]

[Sidenote: Similarity of cultural development.]

Though these Arctic folk are sprung from diverse race stocks, close vicinal location around an enclosed sea has produced some degree of blood relations.h.i.+p. But whatever their origins, the harsh conditions of their life have imposed upon them all a similar civilization. All population is spa.r.s.e and more or less nomadic, since agriculture alone roots settlement. They have the same food, the same clothing, the same types of summer and winter dwellings, whether it is the earth hut of the Eskimo or of the coast Lapp, the Siberian Yukagirs of the Kolima River, or the Samoyedes of northeastern Russia.[1433] The spur of necessity has aroused their ingenuity to a degree found nowhere in the drowsy Tropics of Africa. Dread of cold led the Yakuts of the Lena Valley to glaze the windows of their huts with slabs of ice, which are better nonconductors of heat and cold, and can be made more perfectly air-tight than gla.s.s.

Hence these windows have been adopted by Russian colonists. The Eskimo devised the oil lamp, an invention found nowhere else in primitive America, and fis.h.i.+ng tackle so perfect that white men coming to fish in Arctic waters found it superior to their own.

Owing to the inexorable restriction of their natural resources, contact with European commerce has impoverished the Hyperborean natives. It has caused the rapid and ruthless exploitation of their meager resources, which means eventual starvation. So long as the Ostyaks, before the coming of the Russians, were sole masters of the vast forests of the Obi Valley, they commanded a supply of fish and fur animals which sufficed for their spa.r.s.e population. But the greed of the Russian fish dealers and fur traders, and the devastating work of the lumbermen have made double war upon Ostyak sources of subsistence.[1434] The appearance of the white man in Alaskan waters was the signal for the indiscriminate killing of seal and other marine animals, till the Eskimo's supply of food and furs has been seriously invaded, from Greenland to the outermost Aleutian Islands. In all this wide territory, climatic conditions forbid any subst.i.tute for the original products, except the domesticated reindeer on the tundra of the mainland; but this would necessitate the transformation of the Eskimo from a hunting to a pastoral people. This task the government at Was.h.i.+ngton has undertaken, but with scant success.

[Sidenote: Cold and health]

In contrast to the numerous indirect effects of a frigid climate, no direct physiological effect can be positively ascribed to intense cold.

It lays no bodily handicap on health and energy, as does the excessive heat of the Tropics. The coldest regions where tillage is possible are tolerable places of residence, because their winters are intensely dry.

That of central Siberia, which is drier than the driest desert, makes tent life comfortable in the coldest season, provided the tenter be clad in furs. The low temperatures of the Canadian Northwest for the same reason have not repelled settlers even from the Southern States.

Negroes, however, meet a climatic barrier in America at the isotherm of 5 Centigrade (41 F.). They are found in New England and Nova Scotia, generally with a large admixture of white blood; but there and farther north where the climate is moist as well as cold, they show a fatal tendency to pulmonary diseases.

[Sidenote: The small amount of tropical emigration]

The acclimatization of tropical people in temperate regions will never be a question of widespread importance. The negroes were involuntary immigrants to America, under conditions that can never recur. Their concentration in the "black belt," where they find the heat and moisture in which they thrive, and their climatically conditioned exclusion from the more northern states are matters of local significance. Economic and social r.e.t.a.r.dation have kept the hot belt relatively underpopulated. The density map shows much the largest part of it with a population less than 25 to the square mile. Only the small portion contained in India, southernmost China, and Java shows a density over 125 to the square mile (or 50 to the square kilometer). This density has to rise to 500 or more to the square mile before emigration begins. The would-be exiles then have a wide choice of new homes in other tropical lands, where they find congenial climate and phases of economic development into which they will fit. East Indian coolies are found in Cape Colony, Natal, Zanzibar, Trinidad, and British Guiana, where they const.i.tute 38 per cent. of the population.

[Sidenote: Effects of tropical climate.]

The redundant population of crowded western and southern Europe also seek these spa.r.s.ely inhabited Tropics, but they come heavily handicapped by the necessity of acclimatization. They leave their homes from Trondhjem and Stockholm in the north to the Mediterranean in the south, where the mean annual temperatures vary from 5 to 17 C, (41 to 63 F.), to seek the Torrid Zone which averages 25 C. or 77 F. over most of its territory. The effects of a tropical climate are due to intense heat, to its long duration without the respite conferred by a bracing winter season, and its combination with the high degree of humidity prevailing over most of the Torrid Zone. These are conditions advantageous to plant life, but hardly favorable to human development.

They produce certain derangements in the physiological functions of heart, liver, kidneys and organs of reproduction. Bodily temperature rises, while susceptibility to disease and rate of mortality show an increase ominous for white colonization. The general effect is intense enervation; this starts a craving for stimulants and induces habits of alcoholism which are accountable for many bodily ills usually attributed to direct climatic influences. Transfer to the Tropics tends to relax the mental and moral fiber, induces indolence, self-indulgences and various excesses which lower the physical tone.[1435] The social control of public opinion in the new environment is weak, while temptation, due to both climatic and social causes, is peculiarly strong. The presence of an inferior, more or less servile native population, relaxes both conscience and physical energy just when both need a tonic. The result is general enervation, deterioration both as economic and political agents.

[Sidenote: Historical significance of deterioration]

This is the effect of climate which has had the most far-reaching and persistent historical consequences. Our study of the historical movements of peoples in the northern hemisphere revealed a steady influx from colder into tropical and sub-tropical lands, followed always by enervation and loss of national efficiency, due partly to the debilitating heat of the new habitat, partly to its easier conditions of living, whether the intruders came as conquerors and appropriated the fat of the land, or as immigrant colonists who dropped into slack methods of agriculture, because rain and sun and soil made their reluctant labor scarcely necessary. Everywhere in the Tropics the enervating effects of heat, moisture, and abundance make not only the natives averse to steady work, but start the energetic European immigrant down the same easy descent to Avernus. Pa.s.sing over the deterioration of the Aryans in India, the Persians in Mesopotamia, and the Vandals in Africa, we find that modern instances show the transformation to be very rapid. The French who since 1715 have occupied the islands of Reunion and Mauritius have lost much of their thrift and energy, though their new homes lie just within the southern tropic, and are blessed with an oceanic climate. Yet the volunteer troops sent by Reunion to aid in the recent subjugation of the Hovas in Madagascar proved to be utterly useless.[1436] The Spaniards who come to-day to Mexico have great energy, born of their former hard conditions of life in Spain. But their children are reared in a country whose mean annual temperature, even on the plateau, exceeds that of Spain by 10C. (or 18F.), a difference equal to that between Mobile and New York, or Madrid and Christiania. Hence they are less energetic and vigorous, while the third generation are typical Mexicans in their easy-going way of life.[1437] The Germans who recently have colonized southern Brazil in great numbers show a similar deterioration under similar increase of mean annual temperature, combined with somewhat greater humidity, which intensifies the debilitating effects of the heat. An investigation made in 1900 by the International Harvester Company of America revealed the fact that the German farmer in the State of Santa Catharina rarely cultivated over one acre of grain.[1438] Much of the iron in the blood and conscience of the New England missionary stock which went to Hawaii two generations ago has been dissolved out by the warm rain and balmy air of the islands.

[Sidenote: The problem of acclimatization.]

In all these instances the white race has been successfully transplanted. It has domiciled itself on the borders of the Tropics and has propagated its kind, though it has abated some of the vigorous qualities which characterized it in its temperate fatherland. In the real Tropics like India, Cochin China, the Malay Archipelago, and Central Africa, the whole perplexing and urgent problem of European colonization turns on the difficulty or impossibility of acclimatization; and this in turn affects the whole economic, ethnic and political destiny of present colonial holdings. If acclimatization is impossible, the alternative is an imported ruling cla.s.s, constantly invalided and as constantly renewed, aided by a similar commercial body acting as superintendents of labor; the whole machine of government and economic exploitation is supported by a permanent servile native population, doing the preeminently tropical work of agriculture, which is so fatal to the white man in a torrid climate. This means that the conquering white race of the Temperate Zone is to be excluded by adverse climatic conditions from the productive but undeveloped Tropics, unless it consents to hybridization, like the Spaniards and Portuguese of tropical America. In that national struggle for existence which is a struggle for s.p.a.ce, it means an added advantage for the Mediterranean peoples, that they are more tolerant of a torrid climate than the blond Teutons, whose disability in this regard is p.r.o.nounced; it means that the apt.i.tude of the Chinese for a wide range of climatic accommodation, from the Arctic circle to the equator, lends color to "the yellow peril."

[Sidenote: Historical importance of the temperate zones.]

In contrast to the monotonous extremes of climate in the hot and cold zones, temperate lands are characterized by the intermediate degrees of annual temperature and marked seasonal diversity which are so favorable to human development. In Arctic lands labor is paralyzed by cold as it is by heat in the enervating and overproductive Tropics. In one, the growing season is too short and ill-favored; in the other, too long to stimulate man to sustained industry. Hence the Temperate Zones, whose climate avoids both these extremes and abounds in contrasts, whose summers are productive enough to supply food for the winter, and whose winters give both motive and energy for the summer's work, are richer in cultural possibilities and hence in historical importance.

[Sidenote: Effects of contrasted seasons.]

The advantage of the Temperate Zone is not only its moderate and adequate allowance of heat, but its contrast of seasons. Beyond the range of a vertical sun, grades of temperature change rapidly from lat.i.tude to lat.i.tude and from summer to winter. The seasons bring variety of activities, which sharply react upon one another.

Manufactures were in their origin chiefly winter industries, as they still are in small isolated communities. The modern factory system flourishes best in cooler parts of the Temperate Zone, where the agricultural demands of the summer, spreading over a shorter period, leave a longer time for winter work, and where that once long winter of the Glacial Period, by the scouring action of the ice cap, has reduced the fertile area of the northern fields. The factory system is also favored, as Heinrich von Treitschke maintains, by the predominance of cool or cold weather, which facilitates the concentration of numerous workmen in large buildings, and renders possible long labor hours the year round,[1439]--conditions unthinkable in a warm climate. The iron and steel industries which have grown up about Birmingham, Alabama, find that the long hot summers and mild winters reduce the efficiency of their skilled labor imported from the North.

[Sidenote: Effects of length of seasons.]

[Sidenote: Effect of long winters.]

The length of the seasons is of conspicuous importance. It determines, for instance, whether a given climate permits continuous field work with summer and winter crops, whether field work is possible at all, and how long it is interrupted by excessive cold. Buckle maintains that climate not only enervates or invigorates man, but affects also the constancy of his work and his capacity for sustained labor throughout the year. He considers "that no people living in a very northern lat.i.tude have ever possessed that steady and unflinching industry for which the inhabitants of temperate regions are remarkable" and a.s.signs as a reason "that the severity of the weather, and, at some seasons, the deficiency of light, render it impossible for the people to continue their usual out-of-door employments." The result of this he finds to be desultory habits of work, which help to make the national character fitful and capricious.

He cites in ill.u.s.tration of his principle the people of the Scandinavian and Iberian peninsulas, whom he finds marked "by a certain instability and fickleness of character," owing to the fact that in Norway and Sweden agricultural labor experiences long interruptions, due to the severity of the winter and the shortness of the days; in Spain and Portugal owing to the heat and drought of summer.[1440] The extreme continental climate of northern of Russia with its violent contrast of the seasons, its severe and protracted winters, enables Leroy-Beaulieu to make a safer application of this principle to the empire of the Czars, which, unlike Scandinavia, feels no ameliorating effect from the mild Atlantic winds and commands no alternative industries like dairy farming, fisheries, and maritime trade.[1441] Hence Leroy-Beaulieu attributes the unsystematic, desultory habits of work prevailing among the northern peasants to the long intermission of labor in winter, and to the alternation of a short period of intense activity with a long period of enforced idleness. He finds them resembling southern peoples in their capacity for sudden spurts of energy rather than sustained effort, thinks them benumbed by the sloth of the far north, which is not unlike the sloth of the south.[1442]

The dominant continental and central location of Russia enables its climatic extremes to operate with little check. The peripheral location of Scandinavia in the path of the Atlantic winds modifies its climate to a mild oceanic type, and its dominant maritime situation gives its people the manifold resources of a typical coast land. Hence Buckle's estimate of national character in the Scandinavian Peninsula has little basis as to fact or cause. Irregularity of agricultural labor does not mean here cessation of all labor, and hence does not produce the far-reaching effect ascribed to it. Only about one-third of the Norwegian population is engaged in agriculture. The restriction of its arable and meadow land to 3 per cent. of the whole territory, and the fact that a large proportion of the people are employed in s.h.i.+pping and the fisheries,[1443] are due to several geographic factors besides climate. The same thing is true of Sweden in a modified degree.

[Sidenote: Complexity of climatic effects.]

Caution should be exercised in drawing conclusions from climate alone or from only one phase of its influence. The duration and intensity of the seasons affects not only the manner of work, but the whole mode of life of a people. On the Yukon, in Iceland, and the high mountain valleys of the Alps, winter puts a check not only upon out-of-door labor, but upon all public or community life. Intercourse stops or is greatly restricted. The outside world drops away. In Iceland, the law courts are in session only in summer when the roads by sea and land are open. In the Kentucky mountains the district schools close before Christmas, when the roads become impa.s.sable from rain and snow; the summer is the gala time for funeral services, for only then can the preacher or "circuit-rider" reach the graves made in the winter. Therefore the funerals in one community acc.u.mulate, so to speak, and finally, when leisure comes after the August harvest, they make the occasion for important social gatherings. Much of the influence of winter lies in its power to isolate.

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 spa.r.s.e 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 alt.i.tude 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.]

[Sidenote: Social effects of long winters.]

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 lat.i.tudes 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 Spain[1448] respectively. In Argentine, where tillage is extensive, land abundant, and population spa.r.s.e, 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]