Influences of Geographic Environment Part 66

The broken relief of ancient Greece produced the small city state; but in the rugged mountains of Arcadia the principle of physical and political subdivision went farther. Here, for four centuries after the first Olympiad, the population, poorest and rudest of all Greece, was split up into petty hill villages, each independent of the other.[1378]

The need of resisting Spartan aggression led for the first time, in 371 B.C., to the formation of a _commune Arcadum_, a coalescence of all the fractional groups const.i.tuting the Arcadian folk;[1379] but even this union, effected only by the masterly manipulation of the Theban Epaminondas, proved short-lived and incomplete. What was true of the Arcadian villages was true of the city states of Greece. The geography of the land instilled into them the principle of political aloofness, except when menaced by foreign conquest. Cooperation is efficient only when it springs from a habit of mind. Greek union against the Persians was very imperfect; and against the Roman, the feeble leagues were wholly ineffective. The influence of this dismembering environment still persists. As ancient Greece was a complex of city states, modern Greece is a complex of separate districts, each of which holds chief place in the minds of its citizens, and unconsciously but steadily operates against the growth of a national spirit in the modern sense.[1380]

[Sidenote: Types of mountain states.]

A mountain environment encourages political disunion in several forms.

Sometimes it favors the survival of a turbulent feudal n.o.bility, based upon clan organization, as among the medieval Scotch, who were not less rebellious toward their own kings than toward the English conquerors.[1381] Feudal rule seems congenial to the mountaineer, whose conservative nature, born of isolation, clings to hereditary chiefs and a long established order. Feudal communities and dwarf republics exist side by side in the northern Caucasus,[1382] attended by that primitive a.s.sertion of individual right, the blood feud.[1383] Often the two forms of government are combined, but the feudal element is generally only a dwindling survival from a remote past. The little Republic of Andorra, which for a thousand years has preserved its existence in the protection of a high Pyrenean valley, is a self-governing community, organized strictly along the lines of a Tyrolese or Swiss commune; but the two _viguiers_ or agents, who in some matters outrank the president, are official appointments tracing back to feudal days, when Andorra was a seigneurie of the Comte of Urgel.[1384] Tyrol offers a striking parallel to this. In its local affairs it has in effect a republican form of government, enjoying as high degree of autonomy as any Swiss canton; but the great Brenner route, which could confer both power and wealth on its possessor, made the Tyrol an object of conquest to the feudal n.o.bles of the early Middle Ages. Their hereditary dominion is now vested in the archdukes of Austria, to whom the Tyrolese have shown unfailing fidelity, but from whom they have exacted complete recognition of their rights.[1385]

Tyrol's neighbor Switzerland ill.u.s.trates the pure form of commune, canton and republic, which is the logical result of a rugged mountain relief. Here commune and canton are the real units of government. In the federal power at Bern the Swiss peasant takes little interest, often not even knowing the name of the national president. In the highest ranges a canton coincides with a mountain-rimmed valley--Valais with the basin of the upper Rhone, Glarus with the upper Linth, Uri with the Reuss, Graubunden with the upper Rhine, to which is joined by many pa.s.s routes the spa.r.s.ely peopled Engadine, Ticino with the drainage basin of upper Lake Maggiore, Unterwalden with the southern drainage valleys of Lake Lucerne. Where the mountains are lower, or where pa.s.ses connect valleys of high levels, cantonal boundaries may overstep geographical barriers. A commune generally consists of the villages strung along a narrow lateral valley, isolated and sufficient unto itself politically. A close parallel to the Alpine commune is found among the Kabyles of the Atlas Mountains. Their political structure is based upon the _Jemaa_ or commune, a small sovereign republic whose independence is fiercely defended. It enjoys complete local autonomy, is governed by an a.s.sembly of all the adult male inhabitants, and grants this body the usual functions except the administration of justice, which, characteristically, is replaced by blood feuds as the inalienable right of the individual. Romans, Arabs, Turks and French have in turn exercised over these mountain Berbers only nominal control, except when their internal dissensions made them vulnerable.[1386]

[Sidenote: Significance of their small size.]

The mountains, by the segregating power of their ridges and ranges, first produce these little independent communities, and then, throwing around them strong protecting arms, enfold them in an embrace which long provides security to them in their weakness. These minute mountain states, therefore, tend to reflect in their size the isolation of their environment, and indirectly the weakness of the surrounding nations. The original Swiss _Eidgenossensschaft_ of the four forest cantons, embedded in the high Alps, braced against a mountain wall, held its own against the feeble feudal states of Austria and Germany. The rugged relief of Graubunden and the spirit of freedom cradled there enabled its peasants in the Middle Ages to overthrow the feudal lords, and to establish a federal republic. This typical mountain state was a league composed of three other leagues. Each component league consisted of a group of districts, having the power of sovereign states, and consisting in turn of a group of communes, which were quite independent in local affairs.

This triune league formed in time an alliance with the Swiss Confederation, but did not become a member of it till the Vienna adjustment of 1815. Similar is the story of the mountain shepherds of Appenzell, who formed a little peasant republic, despite their bishop overlord of St. Gall; and who later during the Reformation, on the ground of religious differences, divided into two yet smaller states.[1387] The relation between size and inaccessibility is most strikingly ill.u.s.trated in the high Himalayan ranges west of Kashmir and north of the Punjab. Here is the s.h.i.+naka district, which includes the Chilas, Darel, Tanger and other valleys branching off from the Indus, and which is inhabited by Dards of Indo-European stock. Each s.h.i.+naka valley is a small cantonal republic, and each village of each republic is a commune managing its own affairs by an a.s.sembly. One settlement of only twelve houses enjoys complete autonomy. Besides the village a.s.semblies there is a state parliament handling questions of general policy, to which each village sends representatives. One dissentient vote can defeat a measure. The majority cannot control the minority; for if one village of a state disagrees with the others, it is free to carry out its own policy, even in the matter of foreign alliances.[1388] Here is home rule run to seed.

[Sidenote: Slight power of mountain chiefs.]

Small size is sometimes coupled with monarchical rule, degenerating occasionally into despotism among aggressive robber tribes. The inaccessible Hunza Valley is occupied on opposite sides of its deep gorge by two rival states, the Hunzas and the Nagaris, whose combined population amounts to scarcely 25,000 souls. Hostile to each other, they unite only to resist an invading force. While the Hunza Thum is a tyrant, the Nagari ruler has little voice in the government. The Tibeto-Burman hill folk of the eastern Himalayas are divided into clans, and concede a mild authority to a chief who rules a group of clan villages, but only rarely is able to secure power over a larger district. The Khasia Hills of a.s.sam are broken up into twenty-three petty states, each under its own Rajah or chief, who has, however, little authority beyond the administration of justice.[1389]

Everywhere in mountain regions appears this repugnance to centralized authority. Protection by environment obviates the necessity of protection through combination. The spirit of clan exclusiveness, the absence of a common national sentiment, characterize equally the tribesmen of mountainous Albania, of Persian Luristan,[1390] and highland Kurdistan. Along the rugged upheaved area which forms the western boundary of India from the Khaibar Pa.s.s to the sea, British officials have had to negotiate with the native Pathan and Baluch "jirgahs,"

a.s.semblies of the chief men of the countless clans into which the tribes are divided, as the only visible form of authority tolerated.[1391]

Combination must be voluntary and of a type to exact a modic.u.m of submission. These requirements are best answered by the confederation, which may gradually a.s.sume a stable and elaborate form among an advanced people like the Swiss; or it may const.i.tute a loose yet effective union, as in the famous Samnite confederacy of the central Apennines; or a temporary league like that of the ancient Arcadians, or the group of confederated sheiks of Bellad el Kobail, the "Country of the Highlanders" in mountainous Yemen, who in 1790 established a republican form of union for defense against their more powerful neighbors.[1392]

[Sidenote: Mountain isolation and differentiation.]

The power of mountains to protect makes them asylums of refuge for displaced peoples. This fact explains the confused ethnology which often characterizes these isolated regions, especially when they lie near or across natural highways of human migration. As a tide of humanity sweeps around or across the mountains, a branch stream turns into a side valley, where it is caught and held. There it remains unaltered, crystallizing in its seclusion, subjected for ages to few modifying influences from without. Its people keep their own language and customs, little affected by a totally different race stock similarly placed in a neighboring alcove of the mountains. Lack of communication engenders an endless multiplication of dialects, as we find them in the Alps, the Caucasus, in Kafirstan of the Hindu Kush and in Nepal. Diversity of speech, itself a product of isolation, reacts upon that political and social aloofness of mountain folk, to emphasize and fix it.

[Sidenote: Survival of primitive races in mountains.]

From this principle it follows that the same highland region shows strong differentiation and marked social individuality from one district to another, and from one valley to the next, despite a prevailing similarity of local geographic conditions. In fact, the very similarity of those conditions, strong in their power to isolate, present the conditions for inevitable variation. A mountain region gets its population from diverse sources, or, which is quite as important, at different times from the same source. For instance, Nepal received contingents of Rajput conquerors, dislodged from the Punjab, in the seventh century, the eleventh, and finally the dominant Gurkhas at the end of the eighteenth. To-day these represent different degrees of amalgamation with the local Tibetan stock of Nepal. They are distinguished from each other by a diversity of languages, and a multiplicity of dialects, while the whole piedmont of the country shows a yet different blend with the Aryan Hindus of the Ganges valley, who have seeped into the Terai and been drawn up, as if by capillary attraction, into the hill valleys of the outer range. The Vindhyan Range and its a.s.sociated highlands, long before the dawn of Indian history, caught and held in their careful embrace some of the fragile aboriginal tribes like the Kolarian Ho, Santals and Korkus. Centuries later the Dravidian Bhils and Gonds sought refuge here before the advancing Indo-Aryans, and found asylums in the secluded valleys.[1393] Finally those same northern plains whence the Dravidians had come, after the Mohammedan conquest of central India in the sixteenth century, sent flying to the refuge of the hills a large contingent of Hindus of mingled Dravidian and Aryan stocks, but stamped with the culture of the Ganges basin. These occupied the richer valleys and the more accessible plateaus of the highlands, driving the primitive Gonds and Bhils back into the remoter recesses of the mountains.[1394] Dravidians and aboriginal Kolarians survive in their purity in the wilder and more inaccessible regions, but in the lower valleys their upper cla.s.ses show signs of mixtures with the Rajput invaders, while the lower cla.s.ses betray little Aryan blood.[1395]

[Sidenote: Diversity of peoples and dialects.]

Afghanistan, of disordered relief, set as a transit region between the plains of Mesopotamia, the Oxus and the Indus, has a confused ethnology in keeping with the tangle of dissected plateaus and mountain systems which const.i.tute its surface. Here we find three distinct branches of the Indo-European race, divided up into various peoples of diverse tongues and subdivided further into countless tribes; and two branches of Mongol-Tartars scattered, as if out of a pepper box, from the Helmund to the Oxus, tossed in among diverse peoples of Iranic and Galcha origin in hopeless confusion. The various Afghan tribes, separated from each other by natural barriers and intervening alien stocks, though similar in physical type, speech, religion and culture, have no sense of unity, no common political aims, while the appalling list of tribes const.i.tuting the population of the country[1396] offers little hope of Afghanistan ever developing national cohesion. Kafiristan alone, which lies in the Hindu Kush range for the most part at an alt.i.tude of 12,000 feet or more, harbors in its recesses many remnants of primitive peoples, speaking various languages and dialects, strangers alike to any native affinity or political union. It is a mere agglomeration of ethnic fragments, in which the people of one village are often unable to converse with those of the next.[1397] Relief has fas.h.i.+oned the ethnology of the Caucasus in the same way. No other equally small area in the world contains such a variety of peoples and tongues, differing from one another in race, language, and customs so fundamentally as the Caucasus.

From the heterogeneous survivals of extremely old ethnic stocks, lodged in the high valleys, to the intrusive Russians of the lower piedmont, the Caucasus might be called an ethnographical sample card.[1398]

The rugged configuration of the Alps, from the Rhone to the Danube, has preserved the broad-headed Alpine race, which was perhaps the primitive stock of Central Europe. The great river valleys leading into this ma.s.sive highland, like the Rhine, Aar, Inn and Adige, show the intrusion of a long-headed race from both north and south; but lofty and remote valleys off the main routes of travel, like the Hither Rhine about Dissentis, the little Stanzerthal of the upper Inn, and the Pa.s.sierthal of the upper Adige above Meran, show the race preserved in its purity by the isolating environment.[1399] Here each segregated lateral valley becomes an area of marked linguistic and social differentiation; only where it opens into the wider longitudinal valleys are its peculiarities of speech and custom diluted by the intrusive current of another race.

Switzerland has received three different streams of language, and broken them up into numerous rivulets of dialect. On its small area of 16,125 square miles (41,346 square kilometers) thirty-five dialects of German are spoken, sixteen of French, eight of Italian and five of Romansch, a primitive and degenerate Latin tongue, surviving from the ancestral days of Roman occupation.[1400] The yet smaller territory of the Tyrol has all these languages except French, whose place is taken by various forms of Slavonic speech, which have entered by the western tributaries of the Danube.[1401]

[Sidenote: Constriction of mountain areas of ethnic survivals.]

Rarely is a polyglot mountain population able to work out its own political salvation, as the Swiss have done. More often political union must be forced upon them from without. Oftener still, when the highlanders are primitive survivals, ill-matched against the superior invaders from the plain, they are doomed to a process of constriction of territory and deterioration of numbers, which proceeds slowly or rapidly according to the inaccessibility of their environment and the energy of the intruders. Deliberate, unenterprising nations, like the Chinese, Turks and Indo-Aryans long tolerate the presence of alien mountain tribes, who remain like enemies brought to bay in their isolated fortresses. The conquerors throw around them at their leisure a cordon of settlement, which, slowly ascending the piedmont, draws closer and closer about the mountaineers. The situation of many mountain tribes reminds one of a besieged stronghold. Russian wars against the Caucasus have rightly been described as protracted sieges. The heroic history of Switzerland in relation to its neighbors has been that of a skillfully conducted defense, both military and diplomatic. The territory of China is dotted over with detached groups of aborigines, who have survived wherever a friendly mountain has offered them an asylum. Variously known as Lolos, Mantze or Miaotse, they have preserved everywhere a semi-independence in pathless mountains, whither Chinese troops do not dare to follow them;[1402] but the more numerous and patient Chinese agriculturalists are in many sections slowly encroaching upon their territories, driving them farther and farther into the recesses of their highlands. The same process goes on in Formosa, where the Chinese have gradually forced the native Malays into mountain fastnesses among the peaks which rise to 14,000 feet (4500 meters). There, split up by internecine feuds into numberless clans and tribes, ignorant of one another's languages, raiding each other's territories and the coastal plains tilled by Chinese colonists, they await their doom, while the piedmont zone between has already given birth to a typical border race of halfbreeds, more Chinese than Malay.[1403]

[Sidenote: Isolation and r.e.t.a.r.dation of mountain regions.]

"To have and to hold" is the motto of the mountains. Like remote islands, they are often museums of social antiquities. Antiquated races and languages abound. The mountaineers of the Southern Appalachians speak to-day an eighteenth century English. Their literature is the ballad poetry of old England and Scotland, handed down from parent to child. Clan feuds settle questions of justice, as in the Caucasus and the Apennines. Religion is orthodox to the last degree, sectarianism is rigid, and Joshua's power over the sun remains in some lonely valleys undiscounted.[1404] These are all the marks of isolation and r.e.t.a.r.dation which appear in similar environments elsewhere. Especially religious dogmas tend to show in mountains a tenacity of life impossible in the plains. The Kafirs, inhabiting the high Hindu Kush Mountains of Badakshan, and apparently of Pelasgic, early Greek, or Persian origin, have a religion blended of paganism, Zoroastrianism and Brahmanism.[1405]

One intruding faith has been unable to dislodge the previous inc.u.mbent, so the three have combined. The great historical destiny of the small, barren, isolated Judean plateau was to hold aloof the chaste religion of the desert-bred Jews from the sensuous agricultural G.o.ds of the Canaanites; to conserve and fix it; if need be, to narrow it to a provincial tribal faith, to stamp it with exclusiveness, conservatism, and formalism, as its adherents with bigotry,[1406] for this is always the effect of geographical seclusion. But when all these limitations of Judaism are acknowledged, the fact remains that that segregated mountain environment performed the inestimable service for the world of keeping pure and undefiled the first and last great gift of the desert, a monotheistic faith.

Buddhism, once the official religion of Korea but disestablished three centuries ago, has taken refuge in the Diamond Mountains, far from the main roads; there a dull, moribund form of the faith dozes on in the monasteries and monastic shrines of these secluded highlands.[1407]

Driven out of India, Buddhism survives only in the Himalayan border of the country among the local Tibeto-Burman peoples, and in Ceylon, whose mountain city of Kandy is its stronghold. The persecuted Waldenses, a heretic sect who fled in 1178 from the cities of France to the Alps, took refuge in the remote valleys of the Pellice, Chisone, and Augrogne some thirty miles southwest of Turin. There, protected equally against attack and modification, the Waldenses have maintained the old tenets and organization of their religion.[1408]

[Sidenote: Conservatism of mountain peoples.]

The mountain-dweller is essentially conservative. There is little in his environment to stimulate him to change, and little reaches him from the outside world. The "spirit of the times" is generally the spirit of a past time, when it has penetrated to his remote upland. He is strangely indifferent to what goes on in the great outstretched plains below him.

What filters in to him from the outside has little suggestion for him, because it does not accord with the established order which he has always known. Hence innovation is distasteful to him. This repugnance to change reaches its clearest expression, perhaps, in the development and preservation of national costumes. _Tracht,_ which is crystallized style in dress, appears nowhere so widespread and so abundantly differentiated as in mountain districts. In Switzerland, every canton has its distinctive costume which has come down from a remote past. The peasants of Norway, of the German and Austrian Alps, of the Basque settlements in the Pyrenees, of mountain-bound Alsace and Bohemia, give local color to the landscape by the picturesqueness of their national dress.

[Sidenote: Mental and moral qualities.]

With this conservatism of the mountaineer is generally coupled suspicion toward strangers, extreme sensitiveness to criticism, superst.i.tion, strong religious feeling, and an intense love of home and family. The bitter struggle for existence makes him industrious, frugal, provident; and, when the marauding stage has been outgrown, he is peculiarly honest as a rule. Statistics of crime in mountain regions show few crimes against property though many against person. When the mountain-bred man comes down into the plains, he brings with him therefore certain qualities which make him a formidable compet.i.tor in the struggle for existence,--the strong muscles, unjaded nerves, iron purpose, and indifference to luxury bred in him by the hard conditions of his native environment.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XVI

[1253] Heinrich von Treitschke, _Politik,_ Vol. I, p. 218. Leipzig, 1897.

[1254] For full discussion, see H.R. Mill, International Geography, pp.

79-81. New York, 1902.

[1255] J. Thomson, Through Masai Land, pp. 78-82, 113-115, 122, 140-141, 163-167, 406-407. London, 1885.

[1256] J. Russell Smith, Plateaus in Tropical America, in Report of Eighth International Geographical Congress, pp. 829-831. Was.h.i.+ngton, 1905.

[1257] Isaiah Bowman, The Distribution of Population in Bolivia, _Bulletin American Geographical Society,_ pp. 74-78, Vol. VII. 1909.

[1258] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, p. 157. London, 1902.

[1259] Roosevelt, Winning of the West, Vol. I, pp. 52-56. New York, 1895. C.C. Royce, The Cherokee Nation of Indians, Fifth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, pp. 140-143. Was.h.i.+ngton, 1887.

[1260] W.Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, pp. 253-254. New York, 1899.

[1261] G.L. Gomme, The Village Community, pp. 72, 75-95. New York, 1890.

[1262] H.R. Mill, International Geography, pp. 148, 154, 155. New York, 1902.

[1263] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 204, 207. London, 1903.

[1264] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 304. New York, 1902.

[1265] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 221. London, 1903.

[1266] Alfred Stead, j.a.pan by the j.a.panese, p. 425. London, 1904. Henry Dyer, Dai Nippon, p. 241. New York, 1904.

[1267] Boyd Winchester, The Swiss Republic, pp. 307-308. Phila., 1891.

[1268] Wilhelm Deecke, Italy, pp. 190, 358-361. London, 1904.

[1269] Elisee Reclus, Europe, Vol. I, p. 284. New York, 1882.

[1270] S.P. Scott, History of the Moorish Empire in Spain, Vol. III, pp.