Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/535

Rh forget this curious fact, and to point out, as if it required emphasizing, that there is nothing foreign to geographical thought in the association of geography and patriotism, and that the home country is worthy of careful study, particularly when, as with us, our home country is not Yorkshire, nor England, nor the United Kingdom, but the whole British Empire. That is my justification and my apology for taking Political Geography and the British Empire as my subject, if justification and apology seem to any one to be necessary. To the generous hearts of our distinguished foreign visitors who honor us quite as much as they delight us by their presence, I am sure of my appeal. Every true man loves his own country the best in the world. That beautifying love of country does not require him to be ignorant of or hate other countries. The community of the civilized nations, no longer to be described as Christendom even, for Japan has been received into it, is a mighty fact in geography no less than in politics. To love mankind one must begin by loving individuals; before attaining to true cosmopolitanism one must first be patriotic.

Now, besides dealing with the topography of the globe, geography considers also the collective distribution of all animal, vegetable and mineral productions which are found upon its surface. The aspect of the science which deals with man's environment, and with those influences which mold his national character and compel his social as well as his political organization, is profoundly interesting intrinsically and of enormous practical usefulness when rightly applied. Given the minute topography of a country, a complete description of its surface features, its rivers, mountains, plains and boundaries, a full account of its vegetable and mineral resources, a knowledge of its climatic variations, we have at once disclosed to us the scene where we may study with something like clearness man's procession through the ages. Many of the secrets of human action in the past are explained by the land-forms of the globe, while existing social conditions and social organizations can often thereby be intelligently examined and understood. Persistent national characteristics are often easy to explain from such considerations. For instance, the doggedness of the Dutch river-population, caused very greatly by a perpetual struggle against the sea, or the commercial carrier-instinct of the Norwegians, those northern folk born in a country which is all sea-coast of countless indentations. Having few products to barter, the Norwegians hire themselves to transport the merchandise of other peoples. We British also were obviously predestined to isolation and insularity, when perhaps in the human period the Thames ceased to be a tributary of the Rhine. Our Irish fellow-countrymen were similarly fated for all time to lead a separate, special and national life apart from our own, when at a still earlier period, geologically, the Irish channel was formed.