Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/503

Rh therefore, was squarely a question of the old versus the new. By analysis of its results, we may perhaps gain an inkling of the temper of the people.

Our map herewith denotes by its lightest shades the areas of most advanced modern ideas where the radicalism of the nineteenth-century type had cut itself loose from all bonds with the past. The opposite extreme, where both politics and religion combined to rejuvenate the conservative party, is tinted black. The intermediate gradation of sentiment is demonstrated by the degrees of light or dark shading. Inspection of this map reveals a certain parallelism with all those that we have studied heretofore. Especially do we note the conservatism of Brittany, Auvergne, and the southwest. It should be said that the apparent conservatism of the most northern departments was due to the local protection-and-free-trade issue, complicated by the Boulanger episode. For this reason these manufacturing centers should be eliminated from our comparison. Savoy and the high Alpine departments also were strongly affected by their proximity to the republican institutions in Switzerland. We must allow for that fact also. A curious contrast, ever persistent in all our ethnic or social maps, is that which is manifested between the coast strip along the Mediterranean and the mountains north of it. A light strip of radicalism extends all along the sea and up the Rhône Valley, setting apart Auvergne from Savoy. Whether this radicalism bears any relation to the high percentage of urban population hereabouts—a product partly of climate, as we have seen—or whether it is an expression of the impulsive temperament of the Mediterranean race, we leave it to others to decide. It is a fact, at all events.

Having made allowance for all the disturbing factors above named, it is roughly true that the areas of Alpine racial occupation manifest a distinct tendency toward conservatism in politics. We incline to the belief that here, again, is the influence of physical circumstances appreciable. Cliffe-Leslie, keenly alive to the weakness of the old dollars-and-cents political economy, may have been right, after all. He concludes: "One may, I think, point with certainty to the difference of environment and conditions of life in the mountains and in the plains, as the source of the superior force of religion, family feeling, and ancient usage in the former. On its moral and social side the contrast between mountain and plain is the contrast between the old world and the new; between the customs, thoughts, and feelings of ancient and modern times." Politics at one extreme, ethnology at the other, have afforded us constant proof of the truth of this generalization. The close interrelation which of necessity exists between every form of human phenomenon in a