MAN AND THE MAP.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 16372, 28 October 1916, Page 1 (Supplement)

MAN AND THE MAP.

THE MAKING OF NATIONS.

BY TOHC.VGA. EVKttt phase of the war brings home to us the vital influence of geographical conditions upon the evolution of society. Man is a creature of tho map. Nations are made by rivers, mountain ranges and seas. States and empiros are restrained by oceans and limited by continents. The maritime empires are exceptional. The sea-bound states are still pioneers of an Ago not yet come to its full growth. In the British Empire we have a type of the political organisation which must triumph as man triumphs over natural obstacles; as the arts and sciences of peace submerge and overwhelm the barbaric conditions which make for war. Since the disastrous overthrow of the Roman Empire the European world nas been divided against itself because no other single nation has been able to unite it under one authority and mutual combination has not yet been allowed opportunity. In one way wo need never regret the Roman Empire, which failed simply because it did not offer the averago man sufficient inducement to defend and maintain it. On tho other hand, the plight of tho average man throughout the Dark Ages teaches us that it is better to reform the social organisation as it exists at any given period than to relapse into barbarism. However that may be, it is the geographical influences in European politics which have been potential in the production of Modern Europe and the geographical influences in the world at large which have brought about that vast extension of the European world that we term " civilisation." If Europe had been a great plain the rebuilding of a military empire would have been easy enough. The seas and mountains, the water channels and the flowing rivers of Europo have made European nationalities and created European democracy.' More Primitive New Zealand. Under more primitive conditions, were sailing unknown, steam undreamed cf, gunpowder uninvented, and road-making never thought of, were.the social conditions of Saxon England reproduced in New Zea:land, ( we should have hero at least three distinct and independent political organisations, possibly more. The North of Auckland would probably bo isolated from the regions south of the isthmus; the South Island would certainly be unrelated to the North Island; the mountains might easily separata the peoples of what are now Auckland and Wellington provinces; the Southern Alps might well divide the political centres of Canterbury and Westland. It was the mountainous and barren northern counties, not any inherent differences of peoples, which made Scotland and England two nations. It was the Irish Sea which made Ireland a separate country politically as well as geographically. The Pyrenees are the Tower of Babel between French and Spanish. The Alps made Italy. To this day the Turks are alien and stranger in Europe because they are on the wrong side of the narrowest of all great salt-water channels. Over and over again, in the growing centuries of the development of Modern •Europe, the Straits of Dover have foiled and defeated the efforts of military nations to re-establish another such empire as that of Ancient Rome. We made such an attempt ourselves, by the way, under the Angevin kings, and were then so heavily handicapped by the Channel that we most happily and most completely failed. Crecy/Agincourt, Poictiers are famous vietories. Kings of England have ruled from the Cheviots to the Pyrenees, from Paris to the Bay of Biscay. Yet the French provinces were never Anglicised as England was never Normanised, and Joan if Arc is the heroine of a national revival whom France remembers with gratitude and England has learned to honour and esteem. Never has the Channel served us better than when it brought to nought the ambitious schemes of our feudal kings and gave to Britain and the British that national life and liberty-loving inspiration which'became strong enough to bridge oceans in times then undreamed of and unborn. This English Channel, which foiled English attempts to conquer France, foiled a little later the Spanish attempt to dominate the European nations, for behind the " silver sea" Elizabethan England dwelt securely and grew strong enough to drive the Spaniard from her seas; later it was seagirt Britain which turned the scales of doubtful war against Louis of France; later against Napoleon. Once again, the Channel is the deadliest enemy of the Prussian bid for " worldpower," is the navy-held moat that has stood between an unarmed Britain and I the hosts of the Kaiser. When we see how venomously in its decline Germany can attack Roumania. we should be able to realise what the sea meant to a Britain that opposed Germany in its day of greatest strength. When the war is over and peace is wore, and the historian of some future century tells the tale of Prussia and its downfall, he will assuredly say that Britain played its predestined part of making a great European tyranny no longer possible. The Greatness of Greece. The conceptions which we call nationality and democracy, political freedom, international goodwill, are essentially European. They flamed up in Greece— not the Greece of Constantinc— seas and mountains, gulfs and islands gave, impregnable ramparts for the holding of liberty-loving men. Greece was indeed a little Europe, and though its true greatness passed when the Macedonian triumphed, its teaching 'and its lessons I were borne as seed on the four winds of I Heaven to take root and to flourish in I congenial soil. The Greece that beat | back the Persian seems to have little in I common with the Europe that beat back i the Turk and the Moor, but at least this j Europe could read and understand the. i tragedies of Euripcdes and could follow I with bat<'d hreath the story of Xenophon. Again lads and men, lovers of the noble games, and with glad life eager in their veins, die without fear and suffer without regret for the freedom of their j peoples and the lands where they were born. The spirit of Ancient Greece lives and breathes through Western Europe today, through that wonderful Western Europe which has spiritualised the Greek ideals, denied all helotage, and binds diverse tongues and once-inimical nations in a nobler and greater Hellenic League for the freedom of all mankind. And the map! Look at the map and see bow the -sea makes our nations, how th« mountains set a limit to tyranny, how those whom Nature aids against aggression arc drawn to combine and to co-operate of free-will for mutual good and common purposes. The ocean fought for British colonists against-Hanoverian tyranny, but the oceans bind together those whose desire is to one another, and who only seek each other's good. It was inevitable that Europe, with its Mediterraneans and its Baltics, its Alps and Carpathians, its Danubes and its Rhines, its Channels and its Britains, should give birth to free nations, and that from it freedom and democracy should spread and flourish oven to pur own uttermost isles of the ecu.