in summer and winter so often sweeps across the land and sends the thermometer tumbling thirty degrees in almost as many minutes, we have a constant, a never diminishing asset of priceless value. The wave acts as a tonic, but, unlike any tonic made by man, it carries no reaction. No other land has cold waves like ours. To the cold dry air of this periodic cold wave, which brings extraordinary changes of temperature, we owe much of the keen, alert mind, the incessant, unremitting energy of our American race. "The cold wave is born in the heavens miles above our heads, usually over the Rocky Mountains plateau. Suddenly a mass of bitterly cold air will tumble down upon Montana. It rushes down as though poured through an enormous funnel. As it falls it gains momentum, and, reaching the earth, spreads over the Mississippi Valley and then over the Atlantic States, covering them like a blanket. It scatters the foul, logy, breath-soaked atmosphere in our towns and cities, and puts ginger into the air. We fill our lungs with it and live. New waves are always coming, following each other in regular procession like the waves on a seashore." On the Atlantic and Pacific coasts there are numerous good harbors; on the Southern coast from Hatteras around Florida to Mexico, there are fewer ports. "Despite the imperfection of the harbors from Hatteras southward, the coast of North America is, on the whole, the most completely maritime of any continent except Europe. Its landlocked waters, including the Great Lakes, are of vast extent; the total number of excellent ports possibly exceeds that of the Old World." 1 Rainfall, except in the arid and subarid regions of the West and Southwest, is generally distributed, and the average precipitation is of sufficient volume to nourish the soil and produce abundant crops. The great climatal variations make it possible for all cereals and fruits found in the temperate zone to be grown, and in those regions where the temperature is subtropical the products of the soil show their exotic origin. Vast plains are the breeding-grounds of the animals that man needs for food and his convenience; forests and fields are the habitation of birds and game; the waters, both coastal and inland, teem with many varieties of edible fish; mineral wealth is inexhaustible. These things—the size of the continent, the climate, the rainfall, the abundance of food — are the elements that go to make a race what it is and produce their clearly defined psychological characteristics. 1 Shaler, op. cit., p. 217. CHAPTER V THE OLD IN THE NEW ENVIRONMENT THERE came in the first place to America Englishmen from a small, compact country to whom the extremes of heat or cold were unknown, who had been accustomed to an almost stable climate, so that it justified the saying of Charles II that it "invited men abroad more days in the year and more hours in the day than another country." Its soil was fertile and yielded its reward to effort intelligently directed, and yet not so luxuriant that it did not demand persistent industry. Remote as the villages of Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire and Yorkshire were from London in those days, they were still not isolated from the capital, and their people enjoyed that sense of security that comes from contact with the great world. England in the beginning of the seventeenth century was a land of cities and towns and villages, whose people tilled their farms and went about their ordained tasks in an orderly manner and whose civilization and conventions had come to them as a natural growth. The Englishmen in America faced an unbroken wilderness, stern, harsh, forbidding. Of the immensity of the country they knew nothing, and not being gifted with the vivid imagination of the Southerner they dreamed still less. What they confronted was Nature in her most savage mood. "In similar circumstances Popham's settlers had despaired and fled; but the Plymouth Pilgrims were strong in religious faith, and in the sense of a divine mission." These Englishmen, as Fiske tells us, had heard of warm countries like Italy and cold countries like Russia; harsh experience soon taught them that there are climates in which the summer of Naples may alternate with the winter of Moscow. As if to forbid them entrance the water froze when the Pilgrims landed; consumption soon reaped its rich harvest. These intrepid adventurers learned then that truth which not until nearly three centuries later did science establish-that between Nature and man wages a never-ending war, and only man fit to survive lives. There at the very beginning the choice was forced upon them either to subdue Nature and make of her their slave or surrender to her. They conquered, but the far-reaching consequences of that struggle between man and Nature we are only now beginning to appreciate. These Englishmen, these pioneers of their race, must subjugate Nature, who assumed a form hitherto unknown to them, and whose moods were so varied. It was from the beginning a savage, brutal, unrelenting fight; and it would result in making men morose, taciturn, harsh, weighed down by the immensity of the struggle, despairing, hopeless almost of overcoming their gigantic adversary; or it would make them self-reliant, determined to the verge of obstinacy, full of hope, supremely confident in their ultimate success. If the weight of Nature did not press upon them and crush them and deaden all power of imagination,— and imagination is only another name for hope, then it would make them take everything in the spirit of a rude jest, a Gargantuan practical joke, that was not enjoyed, but pride forbade that they should wince. And that was their attitude. They jested with Nature, they gave back to her what she gave to them, and it made them rough, boisterous, fond of horseplay and the commonplace, and yet could it be otherwise? — it produced a certain gravity and melancholy. This has left its ineradicable impress on national character. We have to-day the American love of fun, which must be obvious and broad without being coarse. Dainty humor, that lightness and delicacy of touch for which the French are famous, does not appeal to them; and of wit, as distinguished from humor, there is almost no national appreciation. The screaming farce rather than the gossamer comedy, whose words are as elusive almost as the intangible essence of the perfume of the forest, is their measure of enjoyment. It has come to be believed that the Americans have a livelier sense of the ridiculous than any other people, but this is one of those cases of endowing a race with mythical qualities. Exaggeration, rough caricature, they understand, but they have no nice |