Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/536

528 Such large-scale facts are not to be overlooked; there are others, however, of varying degrees of prominence. Some merely require to be interpreted thoughtfully, while others, after diligent study, may still remain dubious and matter for speculation. Geography is the true basis of historical investigation and the elucidation of contemporary movements. At the present time great social and political changes are occurring throughout the world—in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and in the islands of the great seas. These changes are absolutely dependent upon the physical peculiarities of the different lands acting upon generations of men during a prolonged period of time. As a consequence of certain soils, geographical characteristics and climates, we notice how harsh surroundings have disciplined some races to hardiness and strenuous industry, accompanied by keen commercial activity, which is itself both a result of increasing population and the cause of still greater overcrowding. Then we see other people at first sight more happily circumstanced. With them the struggle to live is less ferocious, their food is found with little toil. But we perceive that the outcome of generations of Nature's favoritism has been to leave them less forceful and less ingenious in the never-ending warfare of existence. By comparison they grow feeble of defense against the hungrier nations, ravenous for provender. Man forever preys upon his own kind, and an easy life in bland surroundings induces a flabbiness which is powerless against the iron training of harsh latitudes, or against the fierce energy and the virile strength produced by hereditary wrestling with unkindly ground.

The discovery of America and Vasco da Gama's voyage round the Cape originated movements and brought into play those subtle influences of foreign lands upon alien sojourners, and through them upon their distant kindred, which alter the course of history and modify national manners and perhaps national characteristics also. The colonization of territories in the temperate zone by European Governments, separated by vast ocean-spaces from their offshoots, has given origin to new and distinct nations different from the parent stock in modes of thought and in ways of life, a result due mainly, no doubt, to local physical conditions, but in part also, if only in part, to detachment, to complete and actual severance from the mother country. This brings us to that most interesting and important topic, geographically speaking, of Distance, an aspect of our science which is of the utmost concern to traders and statesmen; indeed, an eminent German geographer defines geography as the Science of Distances. To this subject of Distance I wish in particular to direct your attention, and especially to its bearings upon the British Empire.

The British Empire is equal in size to four Europes, while its population approximates four hundred millions. Although that may