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 impassable 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 accumulate, 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 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.]
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 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 Spain[1448] 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]
Zones of culture.