Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/469

 STUDIES IN POLITICAL AREAS 45 5

tinental power according to the geographic conditions ; but she lacked the colonists with which to carry out completely her beautiful plan of connecting the river basins of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi through the inland sea of the great lakes. 1

An energetic people quickly spreads over a wide territory, seeking out first the places with highly favorable conditions and using most rapidly those advantages which are most accessible. Something of the power which is employed to overcome the distances is applied to the industrial undertakings, which in turn derive therefrom a greater degree of activity. The general advantageous conditions for production and trade, with their large profits and big wages, are still more stimulating in their effect. The resources of the new soil are ruthlessly exploited. Superficially and monotonously, cultivation and exhaustion fol- low, and in field, forest, and mine quickly degenerate into the most wasteful exploitation. All the early processes of produc- tion in North America are those of a landowner who, with little labor, works an immense area for quick, high returns. In Russia, as in North America and Australia, therefore, we see the same phenomenon : every new branch of production after a few years falls into a crisis as a result of feverish over-production in " the hot-house air of colonial enterprise." And in these countries, as in all similar regions, we hear the demand for more routes of communication, because the exploitation of the ground spreads more rapidly than the highways and railroads, and it tries to find markets for its redundant products. Finally it wants more ground when that which is available will no longer yield enough with the superficial methods of cultivation employed; that is, it seeks political expansion. In this light, the question of the agricultural competition of North America with Europe is essen- tially a question of space. Max Sering says that one of the chief tasks of his report on the agricultural competition of North

1 Throughout their effort in North America the French showed a capacity

for understanding the great questions of political geography .... They seemed

to have understood the possibilities of the Mississippi valley a century and a half

before the English began to understand them." U. S. SHALER, in the introduction to

V, of Winsor's Narrative and > tory of Amerifa, p. xxiii.