Influences of Geographic Environment | Page 9

What is to-day a fact of geography
becomes to-morrow a factor of history. The two sciences cannot be
held apart without doing violence to both, without dismembering what
is a natural, vital whole. All historical problems ought to be studied
geographically and all geographic problems must be studied
historically. Every map has its date. Those in the Statistical Atlas of the
United States showing the distribution of population from 1790 to 1890
embody a mass of history as well as of geography. A map of France or
the Russian Empire has a long historical perspective; and on the other
hand, without that map no change of ethnic or political boundary, no
modification in routes of communication, no system of frontier
defences or of colonization, no scheme of territorial aggrandizement
can be understood.
[Sidenote: Multiplicity of geographic factors.]
The study of physical environment as a factor in history was
unfortunately brought into disrepute by extravagant and ill-founded
generalization, before it became the object of investigation according to
modern scientific methods. And even to-day principles advanced in the
name of anthropo-geography are often superficial, inaccurate, based
upon a body of data too limited as to space and time, or couched in
terms of unqualified statement which exposes them to criticism or
refutation. Investigators in this field, moreover, are prone to get a
squint in their eye that makes them see one geographic factor to the
exclusion of the rest; whereas it belongs to the very nature of physical
environment to combine a whole group of influences, working all at the
same time under the law of the resolution of forces. In this plexus of

influences, some operate in one direction and some in another; now one
loses its beneficent effect like a medicine long used or a garment
outgrown; another waxes in power, reinforced by a new geographic
factor which has been released from dormancy by the expansion of the
known world, or the progress of invention and of human development.
[Sidenote: Evolution of geographic relations.]
These complex geographic influences cannot be analyzed and their
strength estimated except from the standpoint of evolution. That is one
reason these half-baked geographic principles rest heavy on our mental
digestion. They have been formulated without reference to the
all-important fact that the geographical relations of man, like his social
and political organization, are subject to the law of development. Just
as the embryo state found in the primitive Saxon tribe has passed
through many phases in attaining the political character of the present
British Empire, so every stage in this maturing growth has been
accompanied or even preceded by a steady evolution of the geographic
relations of the English people.
Owing to the evolution of geographic relations, the physical
environment favorable to one stage of development may be adverse to
another, and vice versa. For instance, a small, isolated and protected
habitat, like that of Egypt, Phoenicia, Crete and Greece, encourages the
birth and precocious growth of civilization; but later it may cramp
progress, and lend the stamp of arrested development to a people who
were once the model for all their little world. Open and wind-swept
Russia, lacking these small, warm nurseries where Nature could cuddle
her children, has bred upon its boundless plains a massive, untutored,
homogeneous folk, fed upon the crumbs of culture that have fallen
from the richer tables of Europe. But that item of area is a variable
quantity in the equation. It changes its character at a higher stage of
cultural development. Consequently, when the Muscovite people,
instructed by the example of western Europe, shall have grown up
intellectually, economically and politically to their big territory, its area
will become a great national asset. Russia will come into its own, heir
to a long-withheld inheritance. Many of its previous geographic

disadvantages will vanish, like the diseases of childhood, while its
massive size will dwarf many previous advantages of its European
neighbors.
[Sidenote: Evolution of world relations.]
This evolution of geographic relations applies not only to the local
environment, but also to the wider world relations of a people. Greeks
and Syrians, English and Japanese, take a different rank among the
nations of the earth to-day from that held by their ancestors 2,000 years
ago, simply because the world relations of civilized peoples have been
steadily expanding since those far-back days of Tyrian and Athenian
supremacy. The period of maritime discoveries in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries shifted the foci of the world relations of European
states from enclosed seas to the rim of the Atlantic. Venice and Genoa
gave way to Cadiz and Lagos, just as sixteen centuries before Corinth
and Athens had yielded their ascendency to Rome and Ostia. The keen
but circumscribed trade of the Baltic, which gave wealth and historical
preeminence to Lübeck and the other Hanse Towns