De l’influence exercée sur quelques-uns des peuples d’Europe, par les circonstances locales au milie

CHAP. 42: > Of the influence exercised on some of the peoples of Europe, by the local circumstances in the midst of which they have been placed. — Of the relations that exist between these circumstances and the kind of progress they have made.

If it were necessary to determine the influence that the diverse local circumstances in the midst of which each of the peoples of Europe has been placed have exercised upon all of them, it would be necessary to write a work in several volumes, and even then one would be obliged to leave it incomplete. I will therefore limit myself to indicating the principal ones; this indication will suffice for the object I propose. Each person will, moreover, be able to easily supplement what I will have omitted on some peoples, by examining the course that others have followed in their progress.The peoples of Europe have made immense progress in civilization over the last few centuries; in all the States into which this part of the world is divided, the products of agriculture and manufactures are more varied, more considerable, and better suited to satisfying our needs than they were at the end of the Roman republic; but the temperature of the atmosphere has undergone a no less happy revolution; it is today much milder than it was at the epoch when the Romans began to carry their conquests beyond Italy. In the time when Horace and Juvenal wrote, the Tiber was annually covered with ice, and this is a phenomenon that is no longer seen; the Thracian Bosphorus is represented to us by Ovid with features that it is no longer possible to recognize; Dacia, Pannonia, the Crimea, even Macedonia are described to us as countries of frosts equal to Moscow, and these countries now support olive trees and produce excellent wines; finally, our Gaul, in the time of Caesar and Julian, saw, each winter, all its rivers frozen in such a way as to serve as bridges and roads for several months, and these cases have become rare and of short duration. This revolution in the temperature of the atmosphere is incontestably one of the causes that have most favored the migration of some of the plants that are most useful to us, and that have exercised on agriculture, and on the arts it requires or favors, the most fortunate influence.

The parts of the earth that were the most anciently civilized are China, Hindustan, Persia, a part of Arabia, Egypt, and Asia Minor. Civilization passed from there into the parts of Europe that border the Mediterranean; and it arrived only much later on the coasts and in the islands of the Ocean. When the Roman armies invaded the island of Great Britain, they found its inhabitants naked and tattooed like the savages of the South Sea [442]. Now, a simple inspection of the terrestrial sphere is sufficient to be convinced that, before the discovery of a passage at the Cape of Good Hope, no part of the world was better situated than the islands of Greece and the coasts that border the Mediterranean, to enrich itself with the productions and discoveries of the peoples of Egypt and of southern Asia. One can follow, in Europe, the march of human knowledge, starting from Egypt and heading toward the islands and coasts of Europe that are closest to it, toward those that are the best watered and that enjoy the mildest climate, especially if one considers the change that the temperature of the atmosphere has undergone since the decadence of the Roman empire [443].

The progress that the sciences have brought to navigation has, it is true, brought about a great revolution in commerce; the peoples who, before the discovery of a passage at the Cape of Good Hope, found themselves the most distant from the most civilized and richest lands on earth, and who could have no direct communication with them, such as some of the peoples of northern Germany and those of the British Isles, have had perhaps easier communications than the peoples of Egypt, Greece, and Italy; but these communications only began to exist when these latter peoples had made immense progress. It was not the Dutch, nor the English, nor even the French who opened to all the other peoples of Europe easy communications with most of the nations of the globe; it was the Italians, the Spanish, the Portuguese. The latter would probably not have made these great discoveries for a long time, if the Egyptians had not transmitted to the Greeks, and, by means of them, to the peoples of Italy, their knowledge and that of the civilized peoples of Asia.

It would be very difficult, perhaps it is even impossible, to expound, in a specific manner, how and in what order the plants, animals, processes, and discoveries useful to men spread throughout the diverse parts of Europe; but, if we do not possess the necessary knowledge to mark each of the steps of European civilization, we can at least indicate some general phenomena proper to making conceivable how it spread, and what are the causes that have placed obstacles in its way or that have favored it.

In Europe as in Asia, there are countries that are not susceptible to producing any kind of plants proper for human subsistence, such as the lands of the northern extremity of the Russian empire. In these regions, there is no possible progress for agriculture; this art cannot even exist there, nor consequently any of those that depend on it. There are other parts of Europe that are susceptible to producing almost all kinds of plants proper to serve us as subsistence; such are the lands that are bathed by the Mediterranean. But, between a country that produces nothing, and one where almost all the productions of the earth can grow, there are a great number of intermediate stages; one does not pass immediately from one to the other. One can thus conceive that knowledge relative to agriculture, and to the numerous arts connected with it, extends as one passes from a terrain that is not susceptible to being cultivated, like Lapland, to a terrain on which the most varied and most useful productions can grow.

This progress can take place in two ways: by the passage from a sterile soil to one that is not; or by a revolution in the temperature of the atmosphere, which renders the soil susceptible to producing plants that were excluded from it by the rigor of the climate. If France, for example, at the time it was conquered by the Romans, was a country as cold as Canada, one could not have cultivated there the vine, nor the olive tree, nor the mulberry tree, nor many other useful plants that are cultivated there today. For the migration of these plants to take place, it was necessary that the climate become mild enough for them to be able to multiply there. It was necessary, moreover, that they exist in a country with which one had easy communications, and that one had the means to be instructed in the art of propagating them, and in the often more difficult art of using their products. The absence of a single one of these circumstances was sufficient for the population to remain stationary for centuries; but also, the simple transportation of a plant like the vine, of an insect like the silkworm, of an animal like the ox, or of a simple agricultural process, was sufficient to change the fate of a large part of the population.

The first peoples to be civilized in Europe were therefore those who had the easiest and most numerous communications, and whose soil was susceptible to the best cultivation. Those, on the contrary, who were barbarous the longest, are those who had the fewest communications, or who lived on a land little suited to a varied cultivation; these are the inhabitants of Russia, Poland, Courland, Hungary. The Russians, with a European territory that exceeds in extent all the other States of Europe taken together, have no more points of communication than the kingdom of the Netherlands, and these communications are less free and less easy. The waters that head toward the east flow into the Caspian Sea, which has no outlets, and which is largely surrounded by a desert. Those that head toward the south arrive at the extremity of the Sea of Azov or at the bottom of the Black Sea, whose outlet the Turks can arbitrarily close, and which presents, on the side of Asia, only deserted coasts. The waters that flow to the north arrive in a sea of ice, and cannot be used for navigation. To the west, the Russians have only two ports: that of Saint Petersburg, which is covered with ice for a large part of the year, and which receives no river proper for internal navigation, and that of Riga. Communications by the Black Sea were nil at the time when the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Romans had carried the products of their soil to all the coasts of southern Europe; since, at the end of the Roman republic, the northern coasts of this sea were considered as we today consider Siberia. One can make, on the communications of Poland, Hungary, and a part of Austria, observations analogous to those I have just made on Russia. These countries were not only deprived of communications with all the civilized parts of the world, they were also deprived, by the nature of their soil and the temperature of their climate, of the ability to appropriate most of the productions of the southern lands.

The revolution that has taken place in the temperature of the atmosphere, and the progress that navigation has made since the discovery of the compass and of a passage at the Cape of Good Hope, have rapidly advanced, on the path of civilization, several of the peoples who occupy the basins of the Rhine and the Elbe; but the progress of these peoples is nevertheless much later than that which had been made by the peoples of Italy or France, situated in equally favorable positions.

France is one of the countries of Europe best situated with respect to the temperature of the atmosphere and the facility of communications: by the Gironde, the Loire, and the Seine, it reaches the Ocean, and can communicate with all the peoples of the north, with Spain and Portugal; by the Rhone, it can communicate with all the peoples of the south and the east; an intermediary between Italy and England, it can easily profit from the advantages of both; at the same time that it is situated so as to have commercial relations with all nations, it enjoys, on a great number of points, a temperature mild enough to multiply within it all the productions that can grow in temperate climates; however, the basins of its rivers are not vast enough, nor its coasts sufficiently well indented to offer to internal and external navigation the means that other countries possess: there is no doubt that this is one of the obstacles to its prosperity.

Spain appears at first to be one of the most favorably situated countries with respect to the facility of communications and the temperature of the atmosphere; but this is but an appearance. The mountain chains that cross the peninsula all run from east to west; the principal rivers almost all take the same direction, and follow lines that diverge only very little. The points at which they discharge are not subject to Spanish domination; the lower part of the basins is subject to Portugal, or, to put it better, to the influence of England. It results from this that the Spanish possess only the upper part of the great basins, and that, consequently, they are hemmed in between several mountains without it being possible for them to reach the sea. One must except only the populations of the east and that of the basin of the Guadalquivir; for, on the northern side, there is no watercourse that communicates with the interior. The peoples who inhabit the center of the peninsula are in a position analogous to that of the peoples who inhabit the upper part of the basin of the Nile. It must be added that a large part of Spain is very elevated above sea level, and that it thus finds itself under a much colder climate than the peoples who live on the banks of the Rhine.

Communications between individuals and between nations, whether by means of streams, rivers, seas, or by any other means, have therefore been, in all parts of the earth, the most active agents of civilization. If one indeed seeks what have been the events that have exercised the most extensive influence on the fate of nations, one will find that it is either the discovery of some great means of communication, or the destruction of some power that held peoples or individuals in isolation: it is astronomy and the compass that showed navigators the route they had to follow to travel, with certainty, from one place to another; it is the discovery of America that carried into this new continent all the productions and all the knowledge of the old, and that carried into the old all the productions of the new; it is the discovery of a passage to the Indies, by the Cape of Good Hope, that furnished the most civilized peoples of Europe a sure and easy communication with all the most civilized peoples of Asia, and that gave to both the means to make an exchange of their knowledge and their riches; it is the printing press that gave to each the means to communicate to all his ideas, his processes, his discoveries; finally, it is the Reformation that broke, in a large part of the world, the obstacles that opposed the free communication of thoughts among men.

The nature of the soil and the temperature of the atmosphere have, on all agricultural productions, an influence that it is not necessary to demonstrate; but, in their turn, the products of agriculture exercise on almost all the arts an influence no less extensive. It is evident that a nation whose territory would support numerous herds, or would produce cotton, flax, silk, would have, for devoting itself to diverse kinds of industry, very great advantages over one whose soil would be proper only to producing vines, all other things being equal. But it is no less evident that a nation that would find in the nature of its soil and in the course of its waters, the means to transport and to work cotton, wool, flax, silk, with the least possible expense, could give to certain branches of industry and commerce a development that a nation that did not possess the same means of transport and manufacture could not give them, even if its soil produced all the materials proper to be manufactured.

We will better understand the influence exercised on the prosperity of a people and on the diverse kinds of industry to which it devotes itself, by the nature of its soil, the course of its waters, and the temperature of the atmosphere, if we leave generalities, and if we take a particular example. I will choose England by preference, as being, of all countries, the one that, in proportion to the extent of its territory, is, without any doubt, the most industrious, the richest, and the most powerful that has ever existed.

England is distinguished today from all other peoples by four particular characteristics: by the perfection of its agriculture, and especially by that of its livestock; by the number and activity of its manufactures; by the extent of its commerce and the strength of its navy, and by the equality with which civilization is spread throughout the country. There are writers who, imagining that there is nothing one cannot do with books and decrees, do not doubt that the English nation owes these diverse kinds of superiority to the form of its government, to the liberty of its newspapers, to its judges, to its jury, and to some other institutions. Without a doubt, all this contributes greatly; one cannot contest that legislators by right of birth, or chosen in their majority by the favorites of the prince, a chancellery that never renders justice with precipitation, numerous biblical societies, a powerful and richly paid clergy, contribute greatly to making a nation prosper. However, however beneficent these institutions may be, it is impossible to believe that they are sufficient to fatten and multiply the herds, to fertilize the lands, to give motion to machines, to transport, by navigation, to all parts of the country, the riches it produces or that it obtains by exchanges. There exist, therefore, other causes of prosperity that must be sought.England, in times of greatest heat, is never warmed by a sun ardent enough to dry out the soil and reduce the plants to dust, as happens in the southern regions of Europe. It never experiences anything but a very moderate heat, and its insular position exposes it to gentle and frequent rains. If the summers are less hot and less dry than in France, the winters are much milder: the earth there rarely remains covered with snow, and the frosts there are not severe; one finds, in the fields, plants that, in the south of France, could be preserved only in greenhouses [444]. It results from the nature of the soil, the temperature, and the humidity of the atmosphere, that the vegetation of the plants most proper for the nourishment of livestock is almost never interrupted, neither by an excess of dryness and heat, nor by an excess of cold. Thus, at the same time that the soil produces a very great quantity of excellent fodder to feed the animals inside buildings, the time during which one is obliged to shelter them is much shorter than in most other countries. It is not necessary to show how these diverse circumstances have contributed to directing industry toward the multiplication and perfection of herds, and how this perfection and this multiplication have furnished to other branches of agriculture, means of labor and production [445]. Nor is it necessary to show how certain branches of agricultural industry tend more than others to excite manufacturing industry, whether by offering it substances and raw materials, or by opening up markets for it [446].

The soil of England contains inexhaustible mines of coal. The existence of these mines acts in two ways on all branches of industry. There is no need to devote a part of the surface of the soil to the production of the wood necessary for heating. The land that, in France and in other countries, is destined for the production of wood, is employed in England to produce fodder or grains. In this latter country, the value of the land is in its depth, instead of being on its surface as in others: the forests, if I may express myself thus, are found below the soil. The coal mines not only serve for the heating of families and the preparation of their food, they give, moreover, to most branches of industry a power that nothing could replace. I have sought to know what would be, in England, the number of horses necessary to set in motion the machines that are moved by the force given to steam by the fire of coal, and what would be the quantity of fodder necessary to feed these horses. I have not been able to acquire in this regard information such as I would have desired; but Englishmen who know their country well and who, by profession, occupy themselves with the objects I would have wished to know in detail, have assured me that, even if a territory as extensive as England and France were employed entirely to produce fodder, they would believe it insufficient to feed so great a number of horses. Such an affirmation is doubtless exaggerated; however, when one considers that the horses employed to set machines in motion work only six hours out of twenty-four; that, consequently, a machine of the force of ten horses would require forty always in a state to work; that, to replace the old and the sick, and to maintain the breed, an almost equal number would be needed; finally, that there exists an incalculable number of machines, among which there are several of the force of four hundred horses, I was convinced that in fact it would be necessary to convert an immense territory into pastures to replace the coal mines. The soil of England therefore conceals in its bosom a force of industry that no nation has yet found within itself; it has, if it is permissible to express oneself thus, the virtue of producing manufactured goods, just as the soil of a part of France has the virtue of producing wines, silk, and oils [447].

The soil of England, at the same time that it contains the matter that is to give motion to its machines, contains all the metals it needs to manufacture them; so that it obtains, with almost no displacement, the heaviest and most cumbersome materials that are necessary to a nation of manufacturers.

The coasts of England are indented on all sides in such a way as to offer its navy numerous ports, and to permit ships to arrive, in a way, all the way to the center of its territory. The Thames, which, by itself, has but a small volume of water, has so little slope from Richmond to its mouth, that, by the effect of the tide, it fulfills the office of two great rivers that would run parallel to one another, but in opposite directions. When the tide rises, not only does it have enough force to stop the waters of the Thames and to swell them so as to render it navigable for the largest ships, it even has enough to establish a current capable of carrying to London all the merchandise that the commerce of the world has brought to the mouth of the river. When the tide falls, the waters pushed back into the interior resume their course, and carry to the sea the merchandise that internal navigation has gathered at the same point. The interior of the country is cut by so many rivers and so arranged, that the means have been found to establish canals in almost all directions. It has resulted from these diverse circumstances and from the insular state of the country, not only that manufacturing industry and commerce have had sure and inexpensive means of transport, but also that agricultural industry has been able to transport, at little cost, its products from the places where they abounded, to the places where they were less common, and that thus, on all parts of the territory, it has been possible to make almost equal progress [448].

I have neglected some of the physical circumstances that have contributed to bringing the prosperity of England to the point it has reached; but those that I have indicated are sufficient to make conceivable how causes that exist in the nature of things act upon nations and contribute to their development [449].

If we now summarize the external or local circumstances that contribute the most to the development of a people, we will find that the most favorable position is that where the land, cut by numerous streams of fresh water, can produce, in a given space, the greatest quantity and the greatest variety of subsistence; that where the temperature of the atmosphere and the division of the seasons suspend, for the least possible time, the labors of vegetation and those of human industry; that where the interior of the soil contains the most considerable and the most easily extracted riches; that where external and internal communications give to exchanges the greatest possible facility; that where invasions are least to be feared; that where the force and nature of the winds maintain salubrity in the atmosphere, without being an obstacle to the cultivation of the lands, nor to the health of the inhabitants [450].

The position that is, on the contrary, the most unfavorable to the development and civilization of a people, is that where the soil it inhabits most resists cultivation; that where the land, deprived of streams of fresh water, is either burned by the ardor of the sun, or rendered sterile by the rigor of the weather; that where the labors of vegetation and those of industry experience, by an effect of the temperature of the atmosphere and the division of the seasons, the longest and most irregular interruptions; that where the soil contains only mineral substances of little value, or of difficult extraction; that where the configuration of the soil and the geographical position render communications and exchanges difficult or impossible; that where the force, direction, or nature of the winds oppose the cultivation of the lands, or affect, in a painful manner, the physical and moral faculties of man.

There is one circumstance that exercises an immense influence on the civilization or on the barbarism of certain peoples: it is the position in which they find themselves relative to other peoples. A nation that might be placed in the midst of a multitude of circumstances favorable to its development, but that would at the same time be exposed to the invasions of peoples condemned, by their position, to an eternal barbarism, could make progress only with difficulty. This is one of the most powerful obstacles that the peoples of Persia, China, Hindustan, and, I could say, of almost all parts of the globe, have found to their advancement. The action of peoples upon one another is sometimes felt at immense distances: to find the causes of the barbarism of nations placed near the tropics or on the shores of the seas, one must go to seek them near the poles or on the plateaus of the mountains.

In speaking of the influence that the circumstances surrounding nations exercise upon them, I am thus far from claiming that this influence cannot be paralyzed, at least in part, by more powerful causes. Men are not subject only to the action of the things in the midst of which they are placed; they exercise upon one another an action that is no less powerful. This action, which they receive and which they impress alternately, has for its result, sometimes to make them advance, sometimes to render them stationary, sometimes to make them retrogress. I will expound, in the following chapters, the causes, nature, and consequences of this action; its causes will be seen in the nature of their needs, in the diversity of their social habits, and in the greater or lesser development of certain of their faculties; its nature will be seen in the diverse relations that exist between them, in their religious and political systems, and in other analogous circumstances; its effects will be seen in their virtues or in their vices, in their errors or in their enlightenment, in their riches or in their poverty, in their happiness or in their misery.