Source book for social origins
by William Isaac Thomas
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Excerpt:
In density of population lies not only steadiness of and security for vigorous growth, but also the immediate means of promoting civilization. The closer men are in contact, the more they can impart to each other, the less does what is acquired by civilization go to waste, the higher does competition raise the activity of all their powers. The increase and maintenance of the numbers are intimately connected with the development of culture; a population thinly scattered over a large district means low civilization, while in old or new centres of civilization we find the people in dense masses. China and India reckon their inhabitants at 600,000,000, but an equivalent area of the intervening region of the Central Asiatic nomads, Mongolia, Tibet, East Turkestan, cannot show a sixtieth of the number. Sixsevenths of the earth's inhabitants belong to civilized countries.
While the history of the European nations for centuries past shows the same decided tendency to increase which we observe even in ancient times, the uncivilized races offer examples of shrinkage and retrogression such as we find in the case of the others, if at all, only lasting over a short period, and then as the result of casualties such as war and pestilence. The very thinness of the population is a cause of their decay; their smaller numbers are more readily brought to the point of dwindling or vanishing. Rapid using-up of the vital powers is a characteristic of all the races in the lower stages of civilization. Their economical basis is narrow and incomplete, frugality only too often verges on poverty, scarcity is a frequent visitor, and all those measures of precaution with which sanitary science surrounds our life are lacking. In the struggle with the too powerful forces of nature, as in the Arctic regions or the steppe-districts of the southern hemisphere, on the confines of the inhabited world, they often succumb till they are completely wiped out, and a whole race perishes. It is quite a mistake to refer, as is often done, the extinction of barbarous races, of which we hear so much, solely to contact with superior civilization. But closer consideration enables us to recognise self-destruction as a no less frequent case. The two work as a rule together; neither would attain its end so quickly without the co-operation of the other. The basis of a healthy increase in population is an approximate balance of the sexes; this among uncivilized people is generally disturbed, and the number of children small. War, murder, and kidnapping all contribute to reduce the population. Human life is of small value, as human sacrifices and cannibalism sufficiently indicate. Lastly, man in a state of nature is far from possessing that ideal health of which so many have fabled; the negroes of Africa can alone be described as a robust race. Australians, Polynesians, Americans, on the other hand, are far more subject to diseases than civilized men are, and adapt themselves to new climates with difficulty. There is no question but that these peoples were in many districts slowly dying out by sickness before the appearance of Europeans. But no doubt the arrival of civilization disturbs society down to its roots. It contracts the available space, thus altering one of the conditions upon which, as we shall hereafter see, the peculiar social and political arrangements of races in a natural state were framed. It introduces wants and enjoyments which are not in harmony with the mode of living usual among these people, or their capacity for labour. It brings upon them diseases previously unknown, which on a new soil commit frightful ravages; and inevitable quarrels and fighting besides. Over the larger territories, such as North America, Australia, New Zealand, the progress of civilization led to the crowding of the aboriginal races into the least favourable districts, and therewith to the diminution of their numbers.—F. Ratzel, History of Mankind, 1:10-12. (Trans, of Vblkerkunde.) The Macmillan Co., 1896.
THE OPERATION OF GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN HISTORY
.... Man can no more be scientifically studied apart from the ground which he tills, or the lands over which he travels, or the seas over which he trades, than polar bear or desert cactus can be understood apart from its habitat. Man's relations to this environment are infinitely more numerous and complex than those of the most highly organized plant or animal. So complex are they that they constitute a legitimate and necessary object of special study. The investigation which they receive in anthropology, ethnology, sociology, and history is piecemeal and partial, limited as to the race, cultural development, epoch, country or variety of geographic conditions taken into account. Hence all these sciences, together with history, so far as history undertakes to explain the causes of events, fail to reach a satisfactory solution of their problems largely because the geographic factor which enters into them all has not been thoroughly analyzed. Man has been so noisy about the way he has "conquered Nature," and Nature has been so silent in her persistent influence over man, that the geographic factor in the equation of human development has been overlooked.
In every problem of history there are two main factors, variously stated as heredity and environment, man and his geographic conditions, the internal forces of race and the external forces of habitat. Now the geographic element in the long history of human development has been operating strongly and operating persistently. Herein lies its importance. It is a stable force. It never sleeps. This natural environment, this physical basis of history, is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem—shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive man.
History tends to repeat itself largely owing to this steady, unchanging geographic element. If the ancient Roman consul in far-away Britain often assumed an independence of action and initiative unknown to the provincial governors of Gaul, and if centuries later Roman Catholicism in England maintained a similar independence toward the Holy See, both facts have their cause in the remoteness of Britain from the center of political or ecclesiastical power in Rome. If the independence of the Roman consul in Britain was duplicated later by the attitude of the Thirteen Colonies toward England, and again within the young republic by the headstrong self-reliance, impatient of government authority, which characterized the early trans-Allegheny commonwealths in their aggressive Indian policy, and led them to make war and conclude treaties for the cession of land like sovereign states; and if this attitude of independence in the overmountain men reappeared in a spirit of political defection looking toward secession from the Union and a new combination with their British neighbor on the Great Lakes or the Spanish beyond the Mississippi, these are all the identical effects of geographical remoteness made yet more remote by barriers of mountain and sea. This is the long reach which weakens the arm of authority,
no matter what the race or country or epoch
