the cold or to defy its rigor depended not upon the general effort of the community as it does at the present day when every activity of life is specialized, but upon the skill, the resource, the industry of the individual, who must match his cunning against the cunning of his quarry, learn its habits, display the same patience. And in this the huntsman differed in no wise from the farmer, the woodsman, the early trader. The sense of community was strong, each man felt himself a part of the body politic and social, and yet each knew that he must rely on his good right arm for success. In countries where life can be sustained on a handful of rice or a small quantity of fruit that requires little or no cultivation and clothing is a burden, Nature does not call upon her children to display their resource or their initiative, but in climates where these things are vital for the preservation and development of life the inexorable demand must either be met with the proper intelligence and skill or the race must perish. The law of survival, especially in those early days, has been strikingly demonstrated. Those unsuited for their new environment and conditions, who were too weak, or too lazy, or too ignorant to adapt themselves to their physical and other surroundings, died; the strong, the industrious, and the intelligent survived and transmitted to their descendants their own qualities of mind and body.

The English people have been vastly influenced by the physiography of their country, and it is

peculiarly appropriate that the shoot from their race that spread across the sea and from which sprung a new race should have had its character moulded by the same influences. It was the custom of the early historians to attribute to certain influences, political, military, dynastic, the rise and fall of nations, and to find in them the causes that made or wrecked nations; and later historians, while not ignoring what may be termed primary historical causes, have included commerce as one of the elements that go to the making of national character. The methods of the historian and the political psychologist differ. The latter must examine more minutely remote causes, for he finds in them not only the motives of action, but discovers that those actions were the inexorable result of causes no more to be defied or prevented than the movements of the planets in their preordained orbits. No study of race development can be complete unless proper consideration is given to the geographic conditions under which the race was nurtured.

"The effect of the size of their country can be traced in the ideas of the American people, which are marked by a certain largeness and daring. The small territorial standards of the early European settlers have become profoundly modified by American continental conditions. The mere area of the individual states increases from the east towards the west. The commonwealths of New England seem pigmies in size compared with the trans-Mississippi

states. There are twenty-six states in the smaller half of the country east of the Mississippi, and only twenty-three states and territories west of it." 1

The larger area of the Western States show how "profoundly modified" the American temperament has become by American conditions. Beginning as an Englishman, accustomed to think in small areas, the geographical unit being the compact English county, it was natural for the pioneer to carry his conception of size with him and to begin his planting on a diminutive scale. The scattered and independent settlements and colonies, finally merged into states, were still to be held within restricted areas, because the imagination of man at that time was not vivid enough to grasp the truth, so foreign to all past experience and tradition, that danger did not necessarily reside in mere size, and that a political system was not dependent upon its geographic limits. It was only when the Englishman ceased to be an Englishman and became an American under the influence of American conditions that he cast off his insularity and became continental; it was then he quickly adapted himself to the wide range and vision that the size of the continent inspired, and size no longer had terrors for him. The men who went from New England to settle the West took on the largeness of the domain over which they ruled. To this day the less confined, broader view of the Westerner

1 Semple: American History and its Geographic Conditions, p. 242.

is contrasted with the more rigid conception of life of the descendants of the Pilgrims and the Puritans. Between the men of the East and those of the West there is a difference, the difference that always distinguishes an older and a newer civilization; that is marked when the older civilization develops under the stimulus of man touching elbows with his fellow man and the majesty of Nature is less fearful; and the newer, when men are isolated and "range after range of mountains, and mile after mile of rugged plateau separate them from the seats of civilization and government.”

To sum up and to bear in mind the physiographic conditions of the United States as affecting a people native to the soil or quickly brought in harmony with it by the force of circumstances, these are the principal things to be noticed: The climate is generally drier, the alternating seasons both cooler and hotter than those of northern Europe; because of the relatively unclouded sky there is more sunlight.1 There is a greater quantity of ozone in the northern latitudes, and therefore it is more stimulating and produces a kinetic energy and vitality that finds its expression in constant activity and restlessness, both mental and physical.

This was quickly recognized by the first settlers. "Experience doth manifest," one of their chroniclers writes, "that there is hardly a more healthful place to be found in the world that agreeth better 1 Shaler: Nature and Man in America, p. 264.

with our English bodies. Many that have been weak and sickly in Old England, by coming hither have been thoroughly healed, and grown healthful and strong. For here is an extraordinary clear and dry air, that is of most healing nature to all such as are of a cold, melancholy, phlegmatic, rheumatic temper of body." And he ends his glowing tribute to the life-giving properties of New England air with this happy epigram: “I think it is a wise course for all cold complexions to come to take physic in New England; for a sup of New England's air is better than a whole draught of Old England's ale." 1

The "keen, alert mind" and the "incessant, unremitting energy" of the present-day American are ascribed by an American writer to climatic influences, and he finds in the so-called "cold wave," or sudden drop of temperature accompanying a downrush of cool air, something that clearly differentiates American from European weather. This is the theory of Gilbert H. Grosvenor, and it is this cold wave, he believes, that stirs up the sluggish immigrant and fires his ambition. "We Americans," he says, “are always talking about our mountains of gold and coal and iron, of our fat fields of corn and wheat, but few of us ever realize that we have in our climate a great advantage over all other nations. In the cold wave, which

1 Young's Chronicles of Massachusetts, pp. 251-252.

The Century Magazine, June, 1905.