Influences of Geographic Environment Part 20

[Sidenote: Evolution of territorial policies.]

The advance from a small, self-dependent community to interdependent relations with other peoples, then to ethnic expansion or union of groups to form a state or empire is a great turning point in any history. Thereby the clan or tribe discards the old paralyzing seclusion of the primitive society and the narrow habitat, and joins that march of ethnic, political and cultural progress which has covered larger and larger areas, and by increase of common purpose has cemented together ever greater aggregates.

Nothing is more significant in the history of the English in America than the rapid evolution of their s.p.a.cial ideals, their abandonment of the small territorial conception brought with them from the mother country and embodied, for example, in that munificent land grant, fifty by a hundred miles in extent, of the first Virginia charter in 1606, and their progress to schemes of continental expansion. Every accession of territory to the Thirteen Colonies and to the Republic gave an impulse to growth. Expansion kept pace with opportunity. Only in small and isolated New England did the contracted provincial point of view persist. It manifested itself in a narrow policy of concentration and curtailment, which acquiesced in the occlusion of the Mississippi River to the Trans-Allegheny settlements by Spain in 1787, and which later opposed the purchase of the Louisiana territory[322] and the acquisition of the Philippines.

All peoples who have achieved wide expansion have developed in the process vast territorial policies. This is true of the pastoral nomads who in different epochs have inundated Europe, northern Africa and the peripheral lands of Asia, and of the great colonial nations who in a few decades have brought continents under their dominion. In nomadic hordes it is based upon habitual mobility and the possession of herds, which are at once incentive and means for extending the geographical horizon; but it suffers from the evanescent character of nomadic political organization, and the tendency toward dismemberment bred in all pastoral life by dispersal over scattered grazing grounds. Hence the empires set up by nomad conquerors like the Saracens and Tartars soon fall apart.

[Sidenote: Colonial expansion.]

Among highly civilized agricultural and industrial peoples, on the other hand, a vast territorial policy is at once cause and effect of national growth; it is at once an innate tendency and a conscious purpose tenaciously followed. It makes use of trade and diplomacy, of scientific invention and technical improvement, to achieve its aims. It becomes an accepted mark of political vigor and an ideal even among peoples who have failed to enlarge their narrow base. The model of Russian expansion on the Pacific was quickly followed by awakened j.a.pan, stirred out of her insular complacence by the threat of Muscovite encroachment. Germany and Italy, each strengthened and enlarged as to national outlook by recent political unification, have elbowed their way into the crowded colonial field. The French, though not expansionists as individuals, have an excellent capacity for collective action when directed by government. The officials whom Louis XIV sent to Canada in the seventeenth century executed large schemes of empire reflecting the dilation of French frontiers in Europe. These ideals of expansion seem to have been communicated by the power of example, or the threat of danger in them, to the English colonists in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and later to Washington and Jefferson.

[Sidenote: The mind of colonials.]

The best type of colonial expansion is found among the English-speaking people of America, Australia and South Africa. Their s.p.a.cial ideas are built on a big scale. Distances do not daunt them. The man who could conceive a Cape-to-Cairo railroad, with all the schemes of territorial aggrandizement therein implied, had a mind that took continents for its units of measure; and he found a fitting monument in a province of imperial proportions whereon was inscribed his name. Bryce tells us that in South Africa the social circle of "the best people" includes Pretoria, Johannesburg, Kimberley, Bloemfontein and Cape Town--a social circle with a diameter of a thousand miles![323]

The spirit of our western frontier, so long as there was a frontier, was the spirit of movement, of the conquest of s.p.a.ce. It found its expression in the history of the Wilderness Road and the Oregon Trail.

When the center of population in the United States still lingered on the sh.o.r.e of Chesapeake Bay, and the frontier of continuous settlement had not advanced beyond the present western boundary of Virginia and Pennsylvania, the s.p.a.cious mind of Thomas Jefferson foresaw the Mississippi Valley as the inevitable and necessary possession of the American people, and looked upon the trade of the far-off Columbia River as a natural feeder of the Mississippi commerce.[324]

Emerson's statement that the vast size of the United States is reflected in the big views of its people applies not only to political policy, which in the Monroe Doctrine for the first time in history has embraced a hemisphere; nor is it confined to the big scale of their economic processes. Emerson had in mind rather their whole conception of national mission and national life, especially their legislation,[325] for which he antic.i.p.ated larger and more Catholic aims than obtain in Europe, hampered as it is by countless political and linguistic boundaries and barred thereby from any far-reaching unity of purpose and action.

Canada, British South Africa, Australia and the United States, though widely separated, have in common a certain wide outlook upon life, a continental element in the national mind, bred in their people by their generous territories. The American recognizes his kinship of mind with these colonial Englishmen as something over and above mere kinship of race. It consists in their deep-seated common democracy, the democracy born in men who till fields and clear forests, not as plowmen and wood-cutters, but as makers of nations. It consists in identical interests and points of view in regard to identical problems growing out of the occupation and development of new and almost boundless territories. Race questions, paucity of labor, highways and railroads, immigration, combinations of capital, excessive land holdings, and illegal appropriation of land on a large scale, are problems that meet them all. The monopolistic policy of the United States in regard to American soil as embodied in the Monroe Doctrine, and the expectation lurking in the mental background of every American that his country may eventually embrace the northern continent, find their echo in Australia's plans for wider empire in the Pacific. The Commonwealth of Australia has succeeded in getting into its own hands the administration of British New Guinea (90,500 square miles.) It has also secured from the imperial government the unusual privilege of settling the relations between itself and the islands of the Pacific, because it regards the Pacific question as the one question of foreign policy in which its interests are profoundly involved. In the same way the British in South Africa, spa.r.s.ely scattered though they are, feel an imperative need of further expansion, if their far-reaching schemes of commerce and empire are to be realized.

[Sidenote: Colonials as road builders.]

The effort to annihilate s.p.a.ce by improved means of communication has absorbed the best intellects and energies of expanding peoples. The ancient Roman, like the Incas of Peru, built highways over every part of the empire, undaunted by natural obstacles like the Alps and Andes.

Modern expansionists are railroad builders. Witness the long list of strategic lines, constructed or subsidized by various governments during the past half century--the Union Pacific, Central Pacific, Canadian Pacific, Trans-Siberian, Cairo-Khartoum, Cape Town-Zambesi, and now the proposed Trans-Saharan road, designed to unite the Mediterranean and Guinea colonies of French Africa. The equipment of the American roads, with their heavy rails, giant locomotives, and enormous freight cars, reveals adaptation to a commerce that covers long distances between strongly differentiated areas of production, and that reflects the vast enterprises of this continental country. The same story comes out in the ocean vessels which serve the trade of the Great Lakes, and in the acres of coal barges in a single fleet which are towed down the Ohio and Mississippi by one mammoth steel tug.

[Sidenote: Practical bent of colonials.]

The abundant natural resources awaiting development in such big new countries give to the mind of the people an essentially practical bent.

The rewards of labor are so great that the stimulus to effort is irresistible. Economic questions take precedence of all others, divide political parties, and consume a large portion of national legislation; while purely political questions sink into the background. Civilization takes on a material stamp, becomes that "dollar civilization" which is the scorn of the placid, paralyzed Oriental or the old world European.

The genius of colonials is essentially practical. Impatience of obstacles, short cuts aiming at quick returns, wastefulness of land, of forests, of fuel, of everything but labor, have long characterized American activities. The problem of an inadequate labor supply attended the sudden accession of territory opened for European occupation by the discovery of America, and caused a sudden recrudescence of slavery, which as an industrial system had long been outgrown by Europe. It has also given immense stimulus to invention, and to the formation of labor unions, which in the newest colonial fields, like Australia and New Zealand, have dominated the government and given a Utopian stamp to legislation.

Yet underlying and permeating this materialism is a youthful idealism.

Transplanted to conditions of greater opportunity, the race becomes rejuvenated, abandons outgrown customs and outworn standards, experiences an enlargement of vision and of hope, gathers courage and energy equal to its task, manages somehow to hitch its wagon to a star.

NOTES TO CHAPTER VI

[292] Chamberlain and Salisbury, Geology, Vol. III, pp. 483-485. New York, 1906.

[293] _Ibid._, p. 137 and map p. 138.

[294] Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. I, chap. IV, pp. 124-132; Vol. II, chap; XII, p. 134. New York, 1895. H. W. Conn, The Method of Evolution, p. 54. London and New York, 1900.

[295] _Ibid._, pp. 194-197, 226-227, 239-242, 342-350.

[296] Ratzel, _Der Lebensraum, eine bio-geographische Studie_, p. 51.

Tubingen, 1901.

[297] D. G, Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 271, 293-295. Philadelphia, 1901.

[298] A. Heilprin, Geographical Distribution of Animals, pp. 57-61.

London, 1894.

[299] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 39, maps pp. 43, 78. New York, 1899.

[300] Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. II, chap. XII, pp. 130-131. New York, 1895.

[301] Richard Semon, In the Australian Bush, p. 211. London, 1899.

[302] J.H.W. Stuckenburg, Sociology, Vol. I, p. 324. New York and London, 1903.

[303] E. G. Semple, The Influences of Geographic Environment on the Lower St. Lawrence. Bulletin American Geographical Society, Vol. x.x.xVI, pp. 464-465. 1904.

[304] B. Limedorfer, Finland's Plight, _Forum_, Vol. x.x.xII, pp. 85-93.

[305] Eleventh Census, Report on the Indians, p. 35. Washington, 1894.

[306] A.B. Wallace, Australasia, Vol. I, p. 454. London, 1893.

[307] W.S. Barclay, Life in Terra del Fuego, _The Nineteenth Century_, Vol. 55, p. 97. January, 1904.

[308] A.E. Wallace, Australasia, Vol. I, pp. 454-455. London, 1893.

[309] Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. II, chap. XIII, p. 178. New York, 1895.

[310] _Ibid._, Vol. II, chap. XII, p. 167-168.

[311] Nesbit Bain, Finland and the Tsar, _Fortnightly Review_, Vol. 71, p. 735. E. Limedorfer, Finland's Plight, _Forum_, Vol. 32, pp. 85-93.

[312] Archibald Geikie, The Scenery of Scotland, pp. 398-399. London, 1887.

[313] Railways in Asia Minor, _Littell's Living Age_, Vol. 225, p. 196.

[314] J. Ellis Barker, Modern Germany, pp. 38-66. London, 1907.

[315] The Polish Danger in Prussia, _Westminster Review_, Vol. 155, p.

375.

[316] Heinrich von Treitschke, _Politik_, Vol. I, pp. 223-224. Leipzig, 1897.

[317] Plato, Critias, 112. Aristotle, Politics, Book II, chap. VII; Book IV, chap. IV; Book VII, chap. IV.

[318] Plato, _De Legibus_, Book V, chaps. 8, 9, 10, 11.

[319] Roscher, _National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses_, pp. 180-187. Stuttgart, 1899.