Every river is a route followed by political power, and is therefore at the same time a point of attraction and line of direction. The Germans have pushed their way along the Elbe between the Danes and the Slavs, and along the Vistula between the Slavs and the Lithuanians or old Prussians. The river that supports an embryonic nation holds it together when developed. The influence of the Mississippi was directed against the outbreak of the Civil War in America. As pearls are strung along a cord, so the provinces of new and old Egypt are connected by the Nile. Austria-Hungary is not the Danube nation only because the river was the life nerve of its development, but also because eighty-two per cent. of Austro-Hungarian territory is included within the regions drained by it. When the natural connection of rivers is broken then this power of cohesion ceases. The political and economic disunion of the Rhine, the Main, and other German rivers preceded the dissolution of the German Empire.
Rivers as Sources of Power
Where two rivers join there is always a meeting of two lines of political tendencies, and the place of their junction is the point whence the political forces must be controlled and held together. This is the significance of the situations of Mainz, Lyons, Belgrade, St. Louis, and Khartoum. The course followed by flowing water is far less direct than that of historical movements; the latter take the shortest way, and do not continue along the stream where a loop is formed; or they may follow a tributary that runs on in the original direction of the main stream, as in the case of the very ancient highway along the Oder and the Neisse to Bohemia. The sides of sharp angles formed by a river in its course lead to a salient point as, Regensburg and Orléans. A tributary meeting the main stream at this point forms the best route to a neighbouring river, or the angle may become a peninsula, so bounded by a tributary stream at its base as almost to take the form of an island.
Rivers as Dividers of Land
Breaks in the continuity of the land occasioned by rivers are caused rather by the channel in which the water flows than by the river itself. Thus we often find that dry river-beds are effective agents of this dividing up of the land. Permanent inequalities of the earth’s surface are intensified by flowing water. Therefore a river system separates the land into natural divisions. These narrow clefts are ever willingly adopted as boundary lines, especially in cases where it is necessary to set general limits to an extensive territory. Thus Charles the Great bounded his empire by the Eider, Elbe, Raab, and Ebro. Smaller divisions of land are formed by the convergence of tributaries and main streams, and again still smaller portions are created by the joining together of the lesser branches of tributaries, these taking an especially important place in the history of wars: for example, those formed by the Rhine, Weser, Elbe, and Oder, and on a lesser scale by the Moselle, Seille, and Saar. Fords are always important; in Africa they have even been points at which small states have begun to develop. Rivers as highways in time of war no longer have the value once attributed to them by Frederick the Great, who called the Oder “the nurse of the army.” Yet rivers were of such great moment in this respect in the roadless interior of America during the Civil War that the getting of information as to water-levels was one of the most important tasks of the army intelligence department. Rivers will always remain superior to railways as lines of communication during time of war, at least in one respect, for they cannot be destroyed.
THE MAKING OF THE NATIONS—III
Professor FREDERICK RATZEL