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term State" is, when strictly considered, an abstract term, Government is emphatically concrete. More than that, Government is purely mechanical and governed by no general laws. Its varying forms are in all cases determined by political expediency, and the examination of its essential character involves no such philosophical considerations as will interest us in our present inquiry. The subject of Government thus lies almost wholly without the field of Political Theory, and is comprehended within the domains of descriptive and historical politics.

Simple and definite as is this distinction between the State and its governmental machinery (corresponding as it does very much to the distinction between a given person and the material bodily frame in which such person is organized), we shall find it to be one that has been but seldom made. In fact, it has been the confusion between these two terms that has led directly or indirectly to a great majority of the erroneous results reached by political philosophers in the past.

21. Definition of government. Dealey, in a recent book, gives the following suggestive definition of government :

As the state is the nation organized for the protection of life and property, there will evidently be in every state a definite political organization authorized to exercise the sovereign powers of the state. This organization is called the government, and may be defined as that organization in which is vested by constitution the right to exercise sovereign powers.

CHAPTER III

PHYSICAL BASIS OF THE STATE

22. Physical causes that act in history. The following suggestive chapter outlines the general nature of the relation between the natural environment and political development: 1

The reciprocal influence of Man and Nature is one of the hard subjects with which modern scientists and philosophers are called upon to deal. The action of Nature and the reaction of man, or, as some might prefer to state it, the action of man and the reaction of Nature, are the questions that it presents for answer. While it is not necessary that the teacher of history should deal with these questions on their speculative side, it is necessary for him to recognize the principal physical factors.

Naturally, the first of these factors to attract attention was climate, the influence of which on the character and history of nations was recognized by the Greek thinkers. This recognition is well illustrated by the passage, hereafter quoted, in which Aristotle points out the contrast between Asia and Europe. However, the Greek writers never worked out the subject.

Bodin, who died in 1596, was apparently the first modern writer to investigate the historical influence of physical causes, as well as the first to vindicate the claim of all religious confessions in a state to equal political toleration. Dividing nations into northern, middle, and southern, he investigated with much fullness of knowledge how climate and other geographical conditions affect the bodily strength, the courage, the intelligence, the humanity, the chastity, and, in short, the mind, morals, and manners of peoples; what influence mountains, winds, diversities of soil, etc., exert; and elicited a great number of general views, some of which are false, but some also true.

In the Spirit of Laws, published in 1748, Montesquieu sought to explain how laws are related to manners, climates, creeds, and forms of government. He laid great stress on the physical factors in civilization, and is sometimes said to have originated the doctrine of climates. Five of his books bear titles that indicate, in a general way, the range of his inquiries: Of Laws as relative to the Nature of Climate; In what manner 1 Copyright, 1893, by D. Appleton and Company.

the Laws of Civil Slavery are relative to the Nature of the Climate ; How the Laws of Domestic Slavery have a Relation to the Nature of the Climate; How the Laws of Political Servitude have a Relation to the Nature of the Climate; of Laws in the Relation that they bear to the Nature of the Soil. Although he trenches upon the practical denial of the freedom of man, he stills checks himself, arguing that laws also bear a relation to the principles which form the general spirit of the morals and customs of a nation — that is, the principles of human nature.

Mr. Buckle pushed the naturalistic theory to its farthest limit. He denied all freedom to man, and made climate, food, soil, and the general aspects of Nature the supreme and ultimate historical causes. For example, he attributed the superstition of Italy, Spain, and Portugal to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and the Calvinistic theology of Scotland to the rocks and mountains of the country and the surrounding ocean waste.

Dr. J. W. Draper wrote his History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Civil Polity in America, and History of the Civil War, on the naturalistic theory.

M. Taine laid great stress upon soil, sky, sea, climate, and food as factors in the intellectual and literary history of England; in fact, he wrote his History of English Literature on what he called scientific lines. This distinguished writer was accustomed to refer historical results to race, environment, and the time.

The distinguished scholar and diplomatist, Mr. George P. Marsh, handled the subject in his Man and Nature, now better known under the title, The Earth, as modified by Human Action. He undertook to "indicate the character and extent of the changes produced by human actions in the physical conditions of the globe, to point out the dangers of undue interference with the spontaneous arrangements of the organic or inorganic world, to suggest the possibility and importance of the restoration of harmonies that have been disturbed, and incidentally to illustrate the doctrine that man is, in both kind and degree, a power of a higher order than any of the other forms of animated life, which, like him, are nourished at the table of bounteous Nature." Without discussing his subject in its speculative bearings, Mr. Marsh accumulates a mass of most interesting facts showing that man can waste and repair Nature, and that he is rather her master than her slave.

The general subject has not been introduced for discussion on its speculative side, but merely to pave the way for some examples of physical causation. First, however, it should be observed that Nature exerts upon man two kinds of influence. How far climate, food, soil, and the general aspects of Nature affect his mind and character directly, we

have no means of determining; but it is obvious that the direct effect of such agents is much less than the indirect effect. Through the social wants and activities that they create and modify, through man's occupations and pleasures, through his general habits, they exert upon him a profound influence from his cradle to his grave. The sum total of such influence is known as environment.

Professor Bryce, discussing with much learning and acuteness the relations of history and geography, divided the general subject of environment into three groups of factors, all closely related:

I. The influences that are due to the configuration of the earth's surface that is to say, to the distribution of land and sea, the arrangement of mountain chains, table-lands, and valleys, the existence of rivers, and the basins which they drain. Nothing can be more evident than that these facts almost wholly controlled the early movement of races, such as migration, and that they powerfully affect military operations, the character and extent of conquests, the size and the boundaries of states, the location and character of cities, the direction, kind, and abundance of facilities for travel and transportation, the presence or absence of harbors, and maritime commerce, growth of military and naval power, the development of special industries, and many other things of the greatest interest.

Dr. Draper remarks that Europe is geographically a peninsula, and historically a dependency of Asia. The plains of Central and Northern Asia are prolonged through Central Europe to the German Ocean and the Baltic; the average height of the larger continent is 1,132 feet above the level of the sea, of the smaller one 671 feet; from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, north of the great central east-and-west mountain axis, a distance of more than 6,000 miles, an army could march without having to encounter any elevation of more than a few hundred feet; with an abundance of springs and headwaters, but without any stream capable of offering a serious obstacle, this tract has a temperature well suited to military operations; it coincides practically with the annual isothermal line of fifty degrees, keeping just north of the limit of vine production in which physical facts Dr. Draper finds the reasons why the Oriental hordes have again and again poured themselves over Europe. The Spanish Peninsula has a marked geographical character, as any one who will look at its mountain and river systems, its plains and forests on a map, can see; and this character has given a marked individuality to Spanish warfare from the earliest times, as well as influenced its history in many other important ways. Spain is a hard country to subdue, an easy one to defend - as witness its history in the days of Hannibal, of Sertorius, and of Napoleon and Wellington. .

The position and configuration of England, her insular character and relations to the continent, the distribution of her river valleys and uplands, and the relations of these features to one another and to the seashore, have had a prodigious influence upon English history and character.

II. The influences which belong to meteorology and climate, meaning thereby the conditions of heat and cold under which a race of men develops itself with the amount of rain and the recurrence of drought. The winds also play their part. These agents directly affect man's health, strength, and mental character; while indirectly, through soil and fertility, with which they are so closely connected, they almost wholly control his occupations. It is no accident that great peoples and states have never appeared beyond the polar circles or within the tropics, or that the main historical movement has been confined to the north temperate zone. The Greek genius was largely indebted to the physical influences under which it was developed. "Mild and clement is our atmosphere," says Euripides; "the cold of winter is for us without rigor, and the arrows of Phoebus do not wound us." . . . Thucydides observed that thought was the only peculiarity of the Athenians.

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III. The third class of elements that make up environment are the productions which a country offers to human industry. Here we inventory mines, quarries, the products of wells and springs, field and forest, fisheries of all kinds, and animals both wild and domesticated. Professor Bryce illustrates how a narrow range of productions fatally restricts progress in the arts and refinements of life, by instancing Iceland. The race is of admirable quality, but the country produces nothing save a few sheep and horses, and some sulphur; it has not even fuel, except such driftwood as is cast upon its shores. He adds that if the highest European races were placed in Central or Northern Asia they would find it almost impossible to develop a high type of civilization for want as well of fuel as of the sources of commercial wealth. Before entering upon that industrial stage in which she has distanced all other countries, England had reached a high stage of agricultural development; she has now acquired such a momentum that she could possibly survive as an industrial nation the exhaustion of her mineral wealth; but she could never have emerged from the agricultural state and attained her present industrial, commercial, and financial standing without her abundant supplies of tin, copper, iron, and coal. In the earlier period the center of her population, power, and wealth lay in the south, where the richest agricultural districts are found; but in the present period this center has moved northward, where exist the sinews of manufacturing and commerce. Geological maps and maps showing the