Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/512

496 of Syene? While we allow that the Aryan blood of the Hellenes had much to do with the differences which mark them off from the Negroid Egyptians, can we doubt that Hellenic civilization would have been very different if the settlers of Attica had happened rather to occupy the valley of the Nile; and that the Egyptians would have become a race of enterprising sailors and foreign merchants if they had chanced to make their homes on the shores of the Cyclades and the Corinthian Gulf?

Or, again, let us look for a moment at Britain. Who can suppose that the destiny of our country has not been profoundly affected by the existence of great coal-fields beneath its surface? Even if we possessed no mineral wealth, it is probable that our geographical position would still have insured us a considerable commercial importance as the carriers of the civilized world. Britain happens to occupy the central point in the hemisphere of greatest land, and this fact, aided by its insular nature, could not fail to make it a great mercantile country as soon as navigation, nursed in the Mediterranean, had advanced sufficiently to embrace the whole ocean-coasts of Asia, Africa, and America. But without coal and iron we should have been mere merchants, not manufacturers. London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Southampton might possibly have been not inconsiderable marts for exchanging the products of other countries, and for balancing the trade in raw cotton or sugar from India and America against the textile fabrics and the hardware of France and Belgium. But we should have had no Birmingham, no Manchester, no Sheffield, no Leeds, no Bradford, no Paisley, no Belfast. Our population would not have reached one half its present size. Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, and the busy mining district of South Wales would be as thinly inhabited as Merionethshire and Connemara. The Black Country would be a quiet pastoral and agricultural region like the remainder of Warwick and Stafford. We should have no great towns except on the seaboard and the navigable rivers, and even these would only attain a fraction of their existing dimensions. Most of our people would be engaged in farming, and there would be no great wealthy class to crowd into Brighton, Scarborough, Cheltenham, Torquay, and the Scottish Highlands.

But this is not all: the difference in our national character would no doubt be very great. Coal has stimulated our inventive faculties and our enterprise, and has given an indirect impetus to science and art. Without it we should have had fewer mechanical improvements, fewer scientific discoveries, fewer railways, fewer colleges and schools. All these things have reacted upon our general level of intelligence and taste, and have enabled us to hold our own among the most advanced European nations. But without coal and iron we should have fallen back to somewhat the same position as that now held by Holland or Scandinavia, allowance being made for a larger territory in the first