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 greater communities into certain natural groups whence arose regional consciousness and, almost of necessity, a mame, a capital, a flag, international boundaries, sentiment for a na- tional life and the traditions that logically follow, worship of revolutionary heroes, the machinery of government. The physical geography was unfavorable to that broad and sweep- ing occupation of the greater part of the continent by a people disposed to try to agree upon common principles as in the United States. The Desert of Atacama effectively separated the settlements of Peru and Chile until national traditions had become fixed and glorified in the local history and literature. Similarly divided were the settlements of Chile and Argentina, less by the great mountain wall between them than by the arid country east of the mountains and the sheer space to be overcome in reaching the settlements of the Plata long con- fined to the coastal region. The rubber-yvielding Amazon country was long curiously like the Desert of Atacama in its gravitative pull upon outside industrial countries of the tem- perate zone while yet acting as a vast barrier to international communication. There was no concentration of wealth, as in the case of Java and Ceylon with their modern rubber plantations. Except for widely extended traffic by canoe and launch on the part of notoriously migratory, unstable, and limited groups of whites supplemented by a thin native population this vast forest had every quality of a barrier and none of those of a connecting zone despite its naturally avail- able fluvial system. It has remained a great belt of division between Colombia, Venezucla, and the Guianas on the north and Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, and parts of Brazil on the south.

Even with a limited territory to govern, it has been hard to maintain political unity. The natural layout of fertile plains, basins, valleys, mountain ranges, streams, and trails, separates the people of a given country into small units. Bolivia and Peru both illustrate this condition and effect. There are four centers of gravitation in Bolivia—La Paz, Oruro, Sucre, and Cochabamba—and each had its strongly independent local life and only a limited effect upon the other centers. Mere distance, to be traversed only by primitive means in the