Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 6.djvu/245

Rh height or magnitude of our mountain peaks when you stand near them. You must draw back a little; you must mount some secondary height at a distance. Then you may see the whole clearly.

The two main facts that form and direct the history of men are characteristics of race and variations of physical circumstances. But they who argue the unity of the human race are forced to admit that physical or material circumstances must have produced the racial differences that so remarkably divide or distinguish the types of mankind. The doctrine of unity demands as its essential postulate an admission of the paramount control of physical agents over the human aspect and organization. Man, in every situation, is dependent largely on nature. Never can he escape her domination. Differences of climate, of soil, of situations, distribution by Nature of plant life and of animal life, varying so greatly in different parts of the earth, are leading factors in race differentiation. Why had not man in America risen higher in the scale prior to the discovery? Chiefly because he had had no help from domestic animals. The horse and the sheep were unknown in America, and of the bovine species the untamable buffalo was the only representative. Man in America had no animal to furnish his clothing, to supply milk or sure abundance of flesh food, or to draw his plough. Everywhere, moreover, in the presence of the sea, man finds conditions very different from those far inland. It might have been supposed that pioneer life on the Pacific Coast would be very similar to that in the Mississippi Valley. In fact, it was altogether different. Proximity to the sea made another climate, that affected all life; and the sea afforded a highway for intercourse with the world, which, in spite of distance, gave advantages here unknown to the early settlers in the heart of the continent.