prising, and his resource and his initiative have not been so highly developed; and environment has also had its effect. The South was formerly purely an agricultural region, and the nature of its crops -cotton, tobacco, rice- and the conditions under which they were grown were conducive to laissezfaire and invited to a leisurely life. The struggle for existence pressed with less severity in the South and held latent those qualities that are brought out by the stress of competition or the conflict with nature. Since the South has ceased to be purely an agricultural region and has turned its energies to manufactures, its iron furnaces and cotton mills now fast competing with the North, it has lost some of its former characteristics and there is in progress another of those psychological transitions that have at successive periods produced American racial development. The change, however, is slow, and its full effect will not be seen in this generation.

Speaking broadly, it may be said that all the gradations of temperature to be found in Europe are experienced in the United States, which is one of the physical factors that have entered into the composition of a new race. The constant effort of breeders of stock and of floriculturists is to improve the breed or the flower by crossing it with a strain the product of a different environment, or to graft on it a growth that has its own peculiarities of soil and climate. Here we see the recognition of the

fundamental law that in the animal and vegetable kingdoms what corresponds to character in - in animals and fruits and flowers structure, size, color is the result of environment. Man has less scientifically endeavored to improve the human race and has trusted to the happygo-lucky chance of natural selection. There is to-day no unmixed race. The theory of the unvitiated strain, both in man and animals, is now known to be a fallacy. The great races are races of mixed blood and cross-breeding. King Cophetua needs the blood of the beggar maid to revive the royal line. Nations like trees die from the top and are strengthened at the roots; they must be fed from the ground up. A nation whose people marry and intermarry in their own class has pronounced its doom, for strength is to be found only in a judicious admixture of blood to overcome the degeneration of luxury and the absence of effort.

The effect on a homogeneous people living in a country whose climatic variations are extreme is eventually to amalgamate in the race the composite climatic influence. The daughter of a Russian father and a Spanish mother will, under normal conditions, inherit some of the temperamental or climatic qualities of one or both; and that child marrying an Englishman will transmit to her child, in a more or less marked degree, her own qualities as well as those of its father. But between the Rus

sian and the Spaniard, between two people of alien races, there is always the insurmountable barrier of race and language, of customs and traditions, of history and political institutions, frequently of religion. In the United States climatic influence encounters no obstacles. The man from Maine, where winter is Siberian in its severity, marries a girl from Louisiana, whose summer is as voluptuously enticing as that of Spain, and they move to California, where in some parts roses bloom in the open air in winter and in other parts the fog is as cold and penetrating as it is off the English coast; their child marries a man from Dakota, where the summer is dry and hot and in winter the land lies buried deep under its covering of snow. But the man from Maine and the woman from Louisiana, the Californian or the Dakotan, are as one in language, in thought, in purpose, and the same ambitions animate both; both owe allegiance to the same political institutions; neither knows any other country which means more to the one than it does to the other. A woman, an alien, may merge herself in the life and country of her husband, and yet there is that indefinable something, the result of heredity and environment, that makes her a little apart from her husband and his people, no matter how completely she adjusts herself to her new surroundings. Nothing of this kind exists in the United States, where the people are one people; sectional rivalries and physical conditions and the influence of descent pro

duce a variation in the type, but not a departure from it.1

The United States, as a whole, enjoys about the same average temperature as western Europe as a whole, but the winters are much colder and the summers are much warmer in America than in Europe. Climatically the United States is a northern and a southern country, but with distinctive phenomena not elsewhere found. The isothermal lines ascend as they approach New York; the temperature at fifty-two degrees of latitude in the United Kingdom is similar to that at thirty-two degrees of latitude in the United States, a difference of nine hundred and fifty-six miles. The inhabitants of the British Isles, Boutmy says, can travel from one end of the country to the other without experiencing any change of temperature, but in the United States the passage from ocean to ocean is marked by frequent changes of temperature, as it is also by frequent variations of soil. The soil is rich and fertile in places, arid and sterile in others, but the fertile area vastly overbalances the sterile regions, and the spirit of enterprise is encouraged because energy intelligently directed is sure to be

1 "How rapidly nationalities merge in this country is seen in a case that is not imaginary, of a young man whose father was a Frenchman and whose mother was an American of English descent. His wife's mother is an Irish woman, and her father a German. Thus that marriage rolled four nationalities into one within two generations."- Horace Graves: "The Huguenot in New England," The New England Magazine, vol. xi, p. 503.

2 Channing: A Student's History of the United States, p. 2 et seq. Boutmy: The English People, p. 4.

profitably rewarded. Nature says to the American that if he works hard and brings to his labor that intelligence which is demanded, he can feel sure of ample returns, but he must not relax his efforts.

It is one of the paradoxes of Nature, which has had its effect on the character of the people, that in those regions which produce the great staples to support life, the wheat- and corn-growing belts, the variations of temperature are extreme, intense heat as well as intense cold being necessary properly to germinate and ripen the crops. Hence it follows that the farmer and the agricultural laborer must be men of strong constitutions, able to withstand the great drain on their vital forces that comes from arduous labor under burning suns and the isolation of long, hard winters. Boutmy quotes Leroy-Beaulieu to the effect that the extreme severity of the climate in the Muscovite plains, and the great variations between the maximum and minimum temperatures, enervate and depress man instead of stimulating him. The effect of winter in causing mental depression has been well established in the United States. It is a fact resting on competent authority that when the West was even less sparsely settled than it is to-day insanity among the women living in farmhouses was not infrequent; the silence, the monotony, the absence of all society, the neverending vista of the snow-covered plains, deathlike in their silence, with no moving creature or thing to afford even a momentary diversion, unbalanced