What Steam-power has Done
On the other hand, the vast open plains of Russia have allowed the Slavs of the districts which lie round Novgorod, Moscow, and Kiev to spread out among and Russify the Lithuanian and Finnish, to some extent also the Tartar, races, who originally held by far the larger part of that area. So, too, the Ural range, which, though long, is neither high nor difficult to pass, has opposed no serious obstacle to the overflow of population from Russia into Siberia. That in North America the Alleghanies have had a comparatively slight effect upon political history, although they did for a time arrest the march of colonisation, is due partly to the fact that they are a mass of comparatively low parallel ranges, with fertile valleys between, partly to the already advanced civilisation of the Anglo-Americans of the Atlantic seaboard, who found no great difficulty in making their way across, against the uncertain resistance of small and non-cohesive Indian tribes. A far more formidable natural barrier is formed between the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific slope by the Rocky Mountains, with the deserts of Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Idaho. But the discovery of steam power has so much reduced the importance of this barrier that it does not seriously threaten the maintenance of a united American republic.
In one respect the New World presents a remarkable contrast to the Old. The earliest civilisations of the latter seem to have sprung up in fertile river valleys. Those of the former are found not on the banks of streams like the Nile or Euphrates, but on elevated plateaux, where the heat of a tropical sun is mitigated by height above sea level. It was in the lofty lake basin of Tezcuco and Mexico, and on the comparatively level ground which lies between the parallel ranges of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes, that American races had reached their finest intellectual development, not in the far richer, but also hotter and less healthy river valleys of Brazil, or (unless we are to except Yucatan) on the scorching shores of the Caribbean Sea. Nature was in those regions too strong for man, and held him down in savagery.
How Nature fixes Sites of Cities
In determining the courses of great rivers, Nature has determined the first highways of trade and fixed the sites of many cities. Nearly all the considerable towns founded more than three centuries ago owe their origin either to their possessing good havens on the sea-coast, or to the natural strength of their position on a defensible hill, or to their standing close to a navigable river. Marseilles, Alexandria, New York, Rio de Janeiro, are instances of the first; Athens, Edinburgh, Prague, Moscow, of the second; Bordeaux, Cologne, New Orleans, Calcutta, of the third. Rome and London, Budapest, and Lyons combine the advantages of the second with those of the third. This function of rivers in directing the lines of commerce and the growth of centres of population has become much less important since the construction of railroads, yet population tends to stay where it has been first gathered, so that the fluviatile cities are likely to retain their preponderance. Thus the river is as important to the historian as is the mountain range or the sea.
Climate and Commerce
From the physical features of a country it is an easy transition to the capacities of the soil. The character of the products of a region determines the numbers of its inhabitants and the kind of life they lead. A land of forests breeds hunters or lumbermen; a land of pasture, which is too rough or too arid or too sterile for tillage, supports shepherds or herdsmen probably more or less nomadic. Either kind of land supports inhabitants few in proportion to its area. Fertile and well-watered regions rear a denser, a more settled, and presumably a more civilised population. Norway and Tyrol, Tibet and Wyoming, and the Orange River Colony, can never become so densely peopled as Bengal or Illinois or Lombardy, yet the fisheries of its coast and the seafaring energy of its people have sensibly increased the population of Norway. Thus he who knows the climate and the productive capacity of the soil of any given country can calculate its prospects of prosperity. Political causes may, of course, intervene. Asia Minor and the Valley of the Euphrates, regions once populous and flourishing, are now thinly inhabited and poverty-stricken because they are ruled by the Turks.
But these cases are exceptional. Bengal and Lombardy and Egypt have supported large populations under all kinds of government. The products of each country tend, moreover, to establish definite relations between it and other countries, and do this all the more as population, commerce, and the arts advance. When England was a great wool-growing and wool-exporting country, her wool export brought her into close political connection with the wool-manufacturing Flemish towns. She is now a cotton-manufacturing country, needing cotton which she cannot grow at all, and consuming wheat which she does not grow in sufficient quantities. Hence she is in close commercial relations with the United States on one side, which give her most of her cotton and much of her wheat, and with India, from which she gets both these articles, and to which she exports a large part of her manufactured cotton goods.
Common Needs make for Peace
So Rome, because she needed the corn of Egypt, kept Egypt under a specially careful administration. The rest of her corn came from Sicily and North Africa, and the Vandal conquest of North Africa dealt a frightful blow to the declining Empire. In these cases the common interest of sellers and buyers makes for peace, but in other cases the competition of countries desiring to keep commerce to themselves occasions war. The Spanish and Dutch fought over the trade to India in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, when the Portuguese Indies belonged to Spain, as the English and French fought in the eighteenth. And a nation, especially an insular nation, whose arable soil is not large enough or fertile enough to provide all the food it needs, has a powerful inducement either to seek peace or else to be prepared for maritime war. If such a country does not grow enough corn or meat at home, she must have a navy strong enough to make sure that she will always be able to get these necessaries from abroad. Attica did not produce all the grain needed to feed the Athenians, so they depended on the corn ships which came down from the Euxine, and were practically at the mercy of an enemy who could stop those ships.