Perhaps the strangest thing of all is this: in a city of two millions of people there are no hotels! That means, of course, that there are no visitors.

In the older cities of Europe, where the processes of segregation have gone farther, neighborhood distinctions are likely to be more marked than they are in America. East London is a city of a single cla.s.s, but within the limits of that city the population is segregated again and again by racial and vocational interests. Neighborhood sentiment, deeply rooted in local tradition and in local custom, exercises a decisive selective influence upon city population and shows itself ultimately in a marked way in the characteristics of the inhabitants.

2. Isolation as a Result of Segregation[111]

There is the observed tendency of mental defectives to congregate in localized centers, with resulting inbreeding. Feeble-mindedness is a social level and the members of this level, like those in other levels, are affected by social and biological tendencies, such as the congregation of like personalities and the natural selection in matings of persons of similar mental capacities. These are general tendencies and not subject to invariable laws. The feeble-minded are primarily quant.i.tatively different from normals in mental and social qualities, and do not const.i.tute a separate species. The borderline types of high-grade feeble-minded and low-grade normals may therefore prove exceptions to the general rule. But such studies as Davenport and Danielson's "Hill Folk," Davenport and Estabrook's "Nams," Dugdale's "Jukes," Kostir's "Sam Sixty," G.o.ddard's "Kallikaks," Key's "Vennams"

and "Fale-Anwals," Kite's "Pineys," and many others emphatically prove that mental defectives show a tendency to drift together, intermarry, and isolate themselves from the rest of the community, just as the rich live in exclusive suburbs. Consequently they preponderate in certain localities, counties, and cities. In a large measure this segregation is not so much an expression of voluntary desire as it is a situation forced upon mental defectives through those natural intellectual and social deficiencies which restrict them to environments economically and otherwise less desirable to normal people. This phenomenon is most conspicuous in rural communities where such migratory movements as the modern city-drift have exercised a certain natural selection, but it is also plainly evident in the slums and poorer sections of the cities, both large and small, as any field worker will testify. Closely related to this factor of isolation are the varying percentages of mental defectives found in different states and in different sections of the same state, city or community. It is therefore likely that the percentages of mental defectives among different groups of juvenile delinquents will vary according to the particular ward, city, county, or state, whence the delinquents come. For this reason it is essential to any study of the number of mental defectives in a group of juvenile delinquents coming from a particular locality, that some idea should be available as to the probable or approximate number of mental defectives in that community. If more mental defectives are found among the population in the slum quarter of a city than in the residential quarter, it is to be expected that there will be more mental defectives in groups of juvenile delinquents from the slum quarter, because, in the first place, they const.i.tute a larger proportion of the population, and because, secondly, of their greater p.r.o.neness to social offenses.

Moreover, the prevalence of the feeble-minded in certain localities may affect the att.i.tude of the law-enforcing machinery toward the children of that community.

A further result of the innate characteristics and tendencies of the feeble-minded is to be found in the effect upon them of the biological law of natural selection, resulting from the universal struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. We need not discuss here its profound influences, economic and otherwise, upon the lives of the mentally defective in general, but it will be profitable to review briefly the effect of natural selection upon the juvenile delinquent group.

Any group of delinquents is subject to this selection from the times of offenses to final commitment. It undergoes a constant sifting process whose operation is mainly determined by the natural consequences of the group members; a large proportion of the "lucky," the intelligent, or the socially favored individuals escape from the group, so that the remaining members of the group are the least fit socially and intellectually. The mentally defective delinquents const.i.tute an undue proportion of this unfit residue, for although they may receive as many favors of chance as do their intellectually normal fellow-delinquents, they cannot, like them, by reason of intelligence or social status, escape the consequences of their delinquent acts. Furthermore, the feeble-minded offender is caught oftener than are his more clever and energetic companions of normal endowments, and after apprehension he is less likely to receive the benefits of police and court prejudices, or the advantages of family wealth and social influence. If placed on probation he is more likely to fail, because of his own weaknesses and his unfavorable environment. Hence the feeble-minded delinquent is much more likely to come before the court and also to be committed to a reformatory, jail, or industrial school than is his companion of normal mind. Therefore practically every group of juvenile delinquents which ultimately reaches commitment will have a very different aspect with regard to its proportion of mental defectives from that larger group of offenders, apprehended or non-apprehended, of which it was once a part.

In fact, it is doubtful if any group of apprehended, detained, or probationed offenders can be said to be representative, or at least to be exactly representative, of the true proportion of mental defectives among all delinquents. Except where specific types of legal procedure bring about the elimination of the defectives, it seems as if it must inevitably result that the operation of natural selection will continually increase the proportion of mental defectives above that existing in the original group.

This factor of natural selection has not to our knowledge been given adequate consideration in any published investigation on delinquency.

But if our estimate of its effects is at all justified, then most examinations of juvenile delinquents, especially in reform and industrial schools, have disclosed proportions of mental defectives distinctly in excess of the original proportion previously existent among the entire ma.s.s of all offenders. The reports of these examinations have given rise to quite erroneous impressions concerning the extent of criminality among the feeble-minded and its relation to the whole volume of crime, and have consequently led to inaccurate deductions. The feeble-minded are undoubtedly more p.r.o.ne to commit crime than are the average normals; but through disregard of the influences of this factor of natural selection, as well as of others, both the proportion of crime committed by mental defectives and the true proportion of mental defectives among delinquents and criminals have very often been exaggerated.

D. ISOLATION AND NATIONAL INDIVIDUALITY

1. Historical Races as Products of Isolation[112]

The continent of Europe differs from the other great land-ma.s.ses in the fact that it is a singular aggregation of peninsulas and islands, originating in separate centers of mountain growth, and of enclosed valleys walled about from the outer world by elevated summits. Other continents are somewhat peninsulated; Asia approaches Europe in that respect; North America has a few great dependencies in its larger islands and considerable promontories; but Africa, South America, and Australia are singularly united lands.

The highly divided state of Europe has greatly favored the development within its area of isolated fields, each fitted for the growth of a separate state, adapted even in this day for local life although commerce in our time binds lands together in a way which it did not of old. These separated areas were marvelously suited to be the cradles of peoples; and if we look over the map of Europe we readily note the geographic insulations which that remarkably varied land affords.

Beginning with the eastern Mediterranean, we have the peninsula on which Constantinople stands--a region only partly protected from a.s.sault by its geographic peculiarities; and yet it owes to its partial separation from the mainlands on either side a large measure of local historic development. Next, we have Greece and its a.s.sociated islands, which--a safe stronghold for centuries--permitted the nurture of the most marvelous life the world has ever known. Farther to the west the Italian peninsula, where during three thousand years the protecting envelope of the sea and the walls of Alps and Apennines have enabled a score of states to attain a development; where the Roman nation, absorbing, with its singular power of taking in other life, a number of primitive centers of civilization, grew to power which made it dominant in the ancient world. Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, have each profited by their isolation, and have bred diverse qualities in man and contributed motives which have interacted in the earth's history. Again, in Spain we have a region well fitted to be the cradle of a great people; to its geographic position it owed the fact that it became the seat of the most cultivated Mahometanism the world has ever known. To the Pyrenees, the mountain wall of the north, we owe in good part the limitation of that Mussulman invasion and the protection of central Europe from its forward movement, until luxury and half-faith had sapped its energies. Going northward, we find in the region of Normandy the place of growth of that fierce but strong folk, the ancient Scandinavians, who, transplanted there, held their ground, and grew until they were strong enough to conquer Britain and give it a large share of the quality which belongs to our own state.

To a trifling geographic accident we owe the isolation of Great Britain from the European continent; and all the marvelous history of the English folk, as we all know, hangs upon the existence of that narrow strip of sea between the Devon coast and the kindred lowlands of northern France.

East of Britain lie two peninsulas which have been the cradle of very important peoples. That of Sweden and Norway is the result of mountain development; that of Denmark appears to be in the main the product of glacial and marine erosion, differing in its non-mountainous origin from all the other peninsulas and islands of the European border. Thus on the periphery of Europe we have at least a dozen geographical isolated areas, sufficiently large and well separated from the rest of the world to make them the seats of independent social life. The interior of the country has several similarly, though less perfectly, detached areas. Of these the most important lie fenced within the highlands of the Alps. In that extensive system of mountain disturbances we have the geographical conditions which most favor the development of peculiar divisions of men, and which guard such cradled peoples from the destruction which so often awaits them on the plains. Thus, while the folk of the European lowlands have been overrun by the successive tides of invasion, their qualities confused, and their succession of social life interrupted, Switzerland has to a great extent, by its mountain walls, protected its people from the troubles to which their lowland neighbors have been subjected. The result is that within an area not twice as large as Ma.s.sachusetts we find a marvelous diversity of folk, as is shown by the variety in physical aspect, moral quality, language, and creed in the several important valleys and other divisions of that complicated topography.

After a race has been formed and bred to certain qualities within a limited field, after it has come to possess a certain body of characteristics which gives it its particular stamp, the importance of the original cradle pa.s.ses away. There is something very curious in the permanence of race conditions after they have been fixed for a thousand years or so in a people. When the a.s.semblage of physical and mental motives are combined in a body of country folk, they may endure under circ.u.mstances in which they could not have originated; thus, even in our domesticated animals and plants, we find that varieties created under favorable conditions, obtaining their inheritances in suitable conditions, may then flourish in many conditions of environment in which they could not by any chance have originated. The barnyard creatures of Europe, with their established qualities, may be taken to Australia, and there retain their nature for many generations; even where the form falls away from the parent stock, the decline is generally slow and may not for a great time become apparent.

This fixity of race characteristics has enabled the several national varieties of men to go forth from their nurseries, carrying the qualities bred in their earlier conditions through centuries of life in other climes. The Gothic blood of Italy and of Spain still keeps much of its parent strength; the Aryan's of India, though a world apart in its conditions from those which gave it character in its cradle, is still, in many of its qualities, distinctly akin to that of the home people.

Moor, Hun and Turk--all the numerous folk we find in the present condition of the world so far from their cradle-lands--are still to a great extent what their primitive nurture made them. On this rigidity which comes to mature races in the lower life as well as in man, depends the vigor with which they do their appointed work.

2. Geographical Isolation and Maritime Contact[113]

Greece, considering its limited total extent, offers but little motive, and still less of convenient means, for internal communication among its various inhabitants. Each village or township occupying its plain with the inclosing mountains, supplied its own main wants, whilst the transport of commodities by land was sufficiently difficult to discourage greatly any regular commerce with neighbors. In so far as the face of the interior country was concerned, it seemed as if nature had been disposed from the beginning to keep the population of Greece socially and politically disunited by providing so many hedges of separation and so many boundaries, generally hard, sometimes impossible, to overleap. One special motive to intercourse, however, arose out of this very geographical const.i.tution of the country, and its endless alternation of mountain and valley. The difference of climate and temperature between the high and low grounds is very great; the harvest is secured in one place before it is ripe in another, and the cattle find during the heat of summer shelter and pasture on the hills, at a time when the plains are burnt up. The practice of transferring them from the mountains to the plain according to the change of season, which subsists still as it did in ancient times, is intimately connected with the structure of the country, and must from the earliest period have brought about communication among the otherwise disunited villages.

Such difficulties, however, in the internal transit by land were to a great extent counteracted by the large proportion of coast and the accessibility of the country by sea. The prominences and indentations in the line of Grecian coast are hardly less remarkable than the multiplicity of elevations and depressions which everywhere mark the surface. There was no part of Greece proper which could be considered as out of reach of the sea, while most parts of it were convenient and easy of access. As the only communication between them was maritime, so the sea, important even if we look to Greece proper exclusively, was the sole channel for transmitting ideas and improvements, as well as for maintaining sympathies--social, political, religious, and literary--throughout these outlying members of the h.e.l.lenic aggregate.

The ancient philosophers and legislators were deeply impressed with the contrast between an inland and a maritime city: in the former, simplicity and uniformity of life, tenacity of ancient habits and dislike of what is new or foreign, great force of exclusive sympathy and narrow range both of objects and ideas; in the latter, variety and novelty of sensations, expansive imagination, toleration, and occasional preference for extraneous customs, greater activity of the individual and corresponding mutability of the state. This distinction stands prominent in the many comparisons inst.i.tuted between the Athens of Pericles and the Athens of the earlier times down to Solon. Both Plato and Aristotle dwell upon it emphatically--and the former especially, whose genius conceived the comprehensive scheme of prescribing beforehand and insuring in practice the whole course of individual thought and feeling in his imaginary community, treats maritime communication, if pushed beyond the narrowest limits, as fatal to the success and permanence of any wise scheme of education. Certain it is that a great difference of character existed between those Greeks who mingled much in maritime affairs and those who did not. The Arcadian may stand as a type of the pure Grecian landsman, with his rustic and illiterate habits--his diet of sweet chestnuts, barley cakes, and pork (as contrasted with the fish which formed the chief seasoning for the bread of an Athenian)--his superior courage and endurance--his reverence for Lacedaemonian headship as an old and customary influence--his sterility of intellect and imagination as well as his slackness in enterprise--his unchangeable rudeness of relations with the G.o.ds, which led him to scourge and p.r.i.c.k Pan if he came back empty-handed from the chase; while the inhabitant of Phokaea or Miletus exemplifies the Grecian mariner, eager in search of gain--active, skilful, and daring at sea, but inferior in steadfast bravery on land--more excitable in imagination as well as more mutable in character--full of pomp and expense in religious manifestations toward the Ephesian Artemis or the Apollo of Branchidae: with a mind more open to the varieties of Grecian energy and to the refining influences of Grecian civilization.

The configuration of the Grecian territory, so like in many respects to that of Switzerland, produced two effects of great moment upon the character and history of the people. In the first place, it materially strengthened their powers of defense: it shut up the country against those invasions from the interior which successively subjugated all their continental colonies; and it at the same time rendered each fraction more difficult to be attacked by the rest, so as to exercise a certain conservative influence in a.s.suring the tenure of actual possessors: for the pa.s.s of Thermopylae between Thessaly and Phokis, that of Kithaeron between Boeotia and Attica, or the mountainous range of Oneion and Geraneia along the Isthmus of Corinth, were positions which an inferior number of brave men could hold against a much greater force of a.s.sailants. But, in the next place, while it tended to protect each section of Greeks from being conquered, it also kept them politically disunited and perpetuated their separate autonomy. It fostered that powerful principle of repulsion, which disposed even the smallest township to const.i.tute itself a political unit apart from the rest, and to resist all idea of coalescence with others, either amicable or compulsory. To a modern reader, accustomed to large political aggregations, and securities for good government through the representative system, it requires a certain mental effort to transport himself back to a time when even the smallest town clung so tenaciously to its right of self-legislation. Nevertheless, such was the general habit and feeling of the ancient world, throughout Italy, Sicily, Spain, and Gaul. Among the h.e.l.lens it stands out more conspicuously, for several reasons--first, because they seem to have pushed the multiplication of autonomous units to an extreme point, seeing that even islands not larger than Peparethos and Amorgos had two or three separate city communities; secondly, because they produced, for the first time in the history of mankind, acute systematic thinkers on matters of government, amongst all of whom the idea of the autonomous city was accepted as the indispensable basis of political speculation; thirdly, because this incurable subdivision proved finally the cause of their ruin, in spite of p.r.o.nounced intellectual superiority over their conquerors; and lastly, because incapacity of political coalescence did not preclude a powerful and extensive sympathy between the inhabitants of all the separate cities, with a constant tendency to fraternize for numerous purposes, social, religious, recreative, intellectual, and aesthetical. For these reasons, the indefinite multiplication of self-governing towns, though in truth a phenomenon common to ancient Europe as contrasted with the large monarchies of Asia, appears more marked among the ancient Greeks than elsewhere; and there cannot be any doubt that they owe it, in a considerable degree, to the mult.i.tude of insulating boundaries which the configuration of their country presented.

Nor is it rash to suppose that the same causes may have tended to promote that unborrowed intellectual development for which they stand so conspicuous. General propositions respecting the working of climate and physical agencies upon character are indeed treacherous; for our knowledge of the globe is now sufficient to teach us that heat and cold, mountain and plain, sea and land, moist and dry atmosphere, are all consistent with the greatest diversities of resident men: moreover, the contrast between the population of Greece itself, for the seven centuries preceding the Christian era, and the Greeks of more modern times, is alone enough to inculcate reserve in such speculations.

Nevertheless we may venture to note certain improving influences, connected with their geographical position, at a time when they had no books to study, and no more advanced predecessors to imitate.

We may remark, first, that their position made them at once mountaineers and mariners, thus supplying them with great variety of objects, sensations, and adventures; next, that each petty community, nestled apart amidst its own rocks, was sufficiently severed from the rest to possess an individual life and attributes of its own, yet not so far as to subtract it from the sympathies of the remainder; so that an observant Greek, commercing with a great diversity of half-countrymen, whose language he understood, and whose idiosyncrasies he could appreciate, had access to a larger ma.s.s of social and political experience than any other man in so unadvanced an age could personally obtain. The Phoenician, superior to the Greek on shipboard, traversed wider distances and saw a greater number of strangers, but had not the same means of intimate communion with a multiplicity of fellows in blood and language. His relations, confined to purchase and sale, did not comprise that mutuality of action and reaction which pervaded the crowd at a Grecian festival. The scene which here presented itself was a mixture of uniformity and variety highly stimulating to the observant faculties of a man of genius--who at the same time, if he sought to communicate his own impressions, or to act upon this mingled and diverse audience, was forced to shake off what was peculiar to his own town or community, and to put forth matter in harmony with the feelings of all.

It is thus that we may explain, in part, that penetrating apprehension of human life and character, and that power of touching sympathies common to all ages and nations, which surprises us so much in the unlettered authors of the old epic. Such periodical intercommunion of brethren habitually isolated from each other was the only means then open of procuring for the bard a diversified range of experience and a many-colored audience; and it was to a great degree the result of geographical causes. Perhaps among other nations such facilitating causes might have been found, yet without producing any results comparable to the Iliad and Odyssey. But Homer was nevertheless dependent upon the conditions of his age, and we can at least point out those peculiarities in early Grecian society without which Homeric excellence would never have existed--the geographical position is one, the language another.

3. Isolation as an Explanation of National Differences[114]

To decide between race and environment as the efficient cause of any social phenomenon is a matter of singular interest at this time. A school of sociological writers, dazzled by the recent brilliant discoveries in European ethnology, show a decided inclination to sink the racial explanation up to the handle in every possible phase of social life in Europe. It must be confessed that there is provocation for it. So persistent have the physical characteristics of the people shown themselves that it is not surprising to find theories of a corresponding inheritance of mental attributes in great favor.

This racial school of social philosophers derives much of its data from French sources. For this reason, and also because our anthropological knowledge of that country is more complete than for any other part of Europe, we shall confine our attention primarily to France. In the unattractive upland areas of isolation is the Alpine broad-headed race common to central Europe. At the north, extending down in a broad belt diagonally as far as Limoges and along the coast of Brittany, there is intermixture with the blond, long-headed Teutonic race; while along the southern coast, penetrating up the Rhone Valley, is found the extension of the equally long-headed but brunet Mediterranean stock. These ethnic facts correspond to physical ones; three areas of geographical isolation are distinct centers of distribution of the Alpine race.

The organization of the family is the surest criterion of the stage of social evolution attained by a people. No other phase of human a.s.sociation is so many-sided, so fundamental, so pregnant for the future. For this reason we may properly begin our study by an examination of a phenomenon which directly concerns the stability of the domestic inst.i.tution--viz., divorce. What are the facts as to its distribution in France? Marked variations between different districts occur. Paris is at one extreme; Corsica, as always, at the other. Of singular interest to us is the parallel which at once appears between this distribution of divorce and that of head form. The areas of isolation peopled by the Alpine race are characterized by almost complete absence of legal severance of domestic relations between husband and wife.

Do the facts instanced above have any ethnic significance? Do they mean that the Alpine type, as a race, holds more tenaciously than does the Teuton to its family traditions, resenting thereby the interference of the state in its domestic inst.i.tutions? A foremost statistical authority, Jacques Bertillon, has devoted considerable s.p.a.ce to proving that some relation between the two exists. Confronted by the preceding facts, his explanation is this: that the people of the southern departments, inconstant perhaps and fickle, nevertheless are quickly pacified after a pa.s.sionate outbreak of any kind. Husband and wife may quarrel, but the estrangement is dissipated before recourse to the law can take place. On the other hand, the Norman peasant, Teutonic by race, cold and reserved, nurses his grievances for a long time; they abide with him, smoldering but persistent. "Words and even blows terminate quarrels quickly in the south; in the north they are settled by the judge." From similar comparisons in other European countries, M.

Bertillon draws the final conclusion that the Teutonic race betrays a singular preference for this remedy for domestic ills. It becomes for him an ethnic trait.

Another social phenomenon has been laid at the door of the Teutonic race of northern Europe; one which even more than divorce is directly the concomitant of modern intellectual and economic progress. We refer to suicide. Morselli devotes a chapter of his interesting treatise upon this subject to proving that "the purer the German race--that is to say, the stronger the Germanism (e.g., Teutonism) of a country--the more it reveals in its psychical character an extraordinary propensity to self-destruction."

Consider for a moment the relative frequency of suicide with reference to the ethnic composition of France. The parallel between the two is almost exact in every detail. There are again our three areas of Alpine racial occupation--Savoy, Auvergne, and Brittany--in which suicide falls annually below seventy-five per million inhabitants. There, again, is the Rhone Valley and the broad diagonal strip from Paris to Bordeaux, characterized alike by strong infusion of Teutonic traits and relative frequency of the same social phenomenon.

Divorce and suicide will serve as examples of the mode of proof adopted for tracing a number of other social phenomena to an ethnic origin. Thus Lapouge attributes the notorious depopulation of large areas in France to the sterility incident upon intermixture between the several racial types of which the population is const.i.tuted. This he seeks to prove from the occurrence of a decreasing birth-rate in all the open, fertile districts where the Teutonic element has intermingled with the native population. Because wealth happens to be concentrated in the fertile areas of Teutonic occupation, it is again a.s.sumed that this coincidence demonstrates either a peculiar acquisitive apt.i.tude in this race or else a superior measure of frugality.

By this time our suspicions are aroused. The argument is too simple. Its conclusions are too far-reaching. By this we do not mean to deny the facts of geographical distribution in the least. It is only the validity of the ethnic explanation which we deny. We can do better for our races than even its best friends along such lines of proof. With the data at our disposition there is no end to the racial attributes which we might saddle upon our ethnic types. Thus, it would appear that the Alpine type in its sterile areas of isolation was the land-hungry one described by Zola in his powerful novels. For, roughly speaking, individual land-holdings are larger in them on the average than among the Teutonic populations. Peasant proprietorship is more common also; there are fewer tenant farmers. Crime in the two areas a.s.sumes a different aspect. We find that among populations of Alpine type, in the isolated uplands, offenses against the person predominate in the criminal calendar. In the Seine basin, along the Rhone Valley, wherever the Teuton is in evidence, on the other hand, there is less respect for property; so that offenses against the person, such as a.s.sault, murder, and rape, give place to embezzlements, burglary, and arson. It might just as well be argued that the Teuton shows a predilection for offenses against property; the native Celt an equal propensity for crimes against the person.

Appeal to the social geography of other countries, wherein the ethnic balance of power is differently distributed, may be directed against almost any of the phenomena we have instanced in France as seemingly of racial derivation. In the case either of suicide or divorce, if we turn from France to Italy or Germany, we instantly perceive all sorts of contradictions. The ethnic type, which is so immune from propensity to self-destruction or domestic disruption in France, becomes in Italy most p.r.o.ne to either mode of escape from temporary earthly ills. For each phenomenon culminates in frequency in the northern half of the latter country, stronghold of the Alpine race. Nor is there an appreciable infusion of Teutonism, physically speaking, herein, to account for the change of heart. Of course, it might be urged that this merely shows that the Mediterranean race of southern Italy is as much less inclined to the phenomenon than the Alpine race in these respects, as it in turn lags behind the Teuton. For it must be confessed that even in Italy neither divorce nor suicide is so frequent anywhere as in Teutonic northern France. Well, then, turn to Germany. Compare its two halves in these respects again. The northern half of the empire is most purely Teutonic by race; the southern is not distinguishable ethnically, as we have sought to prove, from central France. Bavaria, Baden, and Wurtemberg are scarcely more Teutonic by race than Auvergne. Do we find differences in suicide, for example, following racial boundaries here?

Far from it; for Saxony is its culminating center; and Saxony, as we know, is really half-Slavic at heart, as is also eastern Prussia.

Suicide should be most frequent in Schleswig-Holstein and Hanover, if racial causes were appreciably operative. The argument, in fact, falls to pieces of its own weight, as Durkheim has shown. His conclusion is thus stated:

"If the Germans are more addicted to suicide, it is not because of the blood in their veins, but of the civilization in which they have been raised."

A summary view of the cla.s.s of social phenomena seemingly characteristic of the distinct races in France, if we extend our field of vision to cover all Europe, suggests an explanation for the curious coincidences and parallelisms noted above, which is the exact opposite of the racial one.

Our theory, then, is this: that most of the social phenomena we have noted as peculiar to the areas occupied by the Alpine type are the necessary outcome, not of racial proclivities but rather of the geographical and social isolation characteristic of the habitat of this race. The ethnic type is still pure for the very same reason that social phenomena are primitive. Wooden ploughs pointed with stone, blood revenge, an undiminished birth-rate, and relative purity of physical type are all alike derivatives from a common cause, isolation, directly physical and coincidently social. We discover, primarily, an influence of environment where others perceive phenomena of ethnic inheritance.

4. Natural versus Vicinal Location in National Development[115]

In contradistinction to continental and intercontinental location, anthropogeography recognizes two other narrower meanings of the term.

The innate mobility of the human race, due primarily to the eternal food-quest and increase of numbers, leads a people to spread out over a territory till they reach the barriers which nature has set up, or meet the frontiers of other tribes and nations. Their habitat or their specific geographic location is thus defined by natural features of mountain, desert, and sea, or by the neighbors whom they are unable to displace, or more often by both.

A people has, therefore, a twofold location, an immediate one, based upon their actual territory, and a mediate or vicinal one, growing out of its relations to the countries nearest them. The first is a question of the land under their feet; the other, of the neighbors about them.

The first or natural location embodies the complex of local geographic conditions which furnish the basis for their tribal or national existence. This basis may be a peninsula, island, archipelago, an oasis, an arid steppe, a mountain system, or a fertile lowland. The stronger the vicinal location, the more dependent is the people upon the neighboring states, but the more potent the influence which it can, under certain circ.u.mstances, exert upon them. Witness Germany in relation to Holland, France, Austria, and Poland. The stronger the natural location, on the other hand, the more independent is the people and the more strongly marked is the national character. This is exemplified in the people of mountain lands like Switzerland, Abyssinia, and Nepal; of peninsulas like Korea, Spain, and Scandinavia; and of islands like England and j.a.pan. Today we stand amazed at that strong primordial brand of the j.a.panese character which nothing can blur or erase.

Clearly defined natural locations, in which barriers of mountains and sea draw the boundaries and guarantee some degree of isolation, tend to hold their people in a calm embrace, to guard them against outside interference and infusion of foreign blood, and thus to make them develop the national genius in such direction as the local geographic conditions permit. In the unceasing movements which have made up most of the historic and prehistoric life of the human race, in their migrations and counter-migrations, their incursions, retreats, and expansions over the face of the earth, vast unfenced areas, like the open lowlands of Russia and the gra.s.slands of Africa, present the picture of a great thoroughfare swept by pressing throngs. Other regions, more secluded, appear as quiet nooks, made for a temporary halt or a permanent rest.

Here some part of the pa.s.sing human flow is caught as in a vessel and held till it crystallizes into a nation. These are the conspicuous areas of race characterization. The development of the various ethnic and political offspring of the Roman Empire in the naturally defined areas of Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and France ill.u.s.trates the process of national differentiation which goes on in such secluded-locations.