degrees in our thriving zones, and we should probably relapse into lethargic
savagery. In a semitropical climate a nation of half a billion souls may
breed like ants, but enervating heat may subject it to repeated conquest by
warriors from more stimulating habitats. Generations of men establish a
growing mastery over the earth, but they are destined to become fossils in
its soil.
Geography is the matrix of history, its nourishing mother and
disciplining home. Its rivers, lakes, oases, and oceans draw settlers to their
shores, for water is the life of organisms and towns, and offers inexpensive
roads for transport and trade. Egypt was “the gift of the Nile,” and
Mesopotamia built successive civilizations “between the rivers” and along
their effluent canals. India was the daughter of the Indus, the Brahmaputra
and the Ganges; China owed its life and sorrows to the great rivers that
(like ourselves) often wandered from their proper beds and fertilized the
neighborhood with their overflow. Italy adorned the valleys of the Tiber,
the Arno, and the Po. Austria grew along the Danube, Germany along the
Elbe and the Rhine, France along the Rhone, the Loire, and the Seine. Petra
and Palmyra were nourished by oases in the desert.
When the Greeks grew too numerous for their boundaries, they founded
colonies along the Mediterranean (“like frogs around a pond,” said
Plato
[Plato (427?-347 B.C.)]) and along the Euxine, or Black, Sea. For
two thousand years–from the battle of Salamis (480 B.C.) to the defeat of
the Spanish Armada (1588)–the northern and southern shores of the
Mediterranean were the rival seats of the white man’s ascendancy. But in
and after 1492 the voyages of Columbus [Columbus, Christopher (1446?
-1506)] and Vasco da Gama [Gama, Vasco da (1469?-1524)] invited men to
brave the oceans; the sovereignty of the Mediterranean was challenged;
Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Venice declined; the Renaissance began to fade; the
Atlantic nations rose, and finally spread their suzerainty over half the
world. “Westward the course of empire takes its way,” wrote George
Berkeley [Berkeley, George (1685-1753)] about 1730. Will it continue
