THE American continent is the most obliging continent of all. I am speaking, of course, of America as a purely geographical unit, not as an economic factor in the development of industry nor as a political laboratory for experiments in diverse new forms of government.But from a geographical point of view, America is almost everything that possibly could be desired.

It is the only continent on the western hemisphere and therefore has no immediate competitors as Africa, Asia and Europe have. It is situated between the two largest seas of the world and it was settled by white men during a period when the Atlantic had just become the center of civilization.

It reaches from the North Pole to the South Pole and therefore enjoys every sort of climate. That part which lies nearest to the equator is also the highest and therefore enjoys a temperature which makes it fit for human habitation.

It has practically no deserts. It has been blessed with wide plains which are situated in the moderate zone and which are therefore predestined to become the world's granaries.

It has a coast line which is neither too simple nor too complicated and which is therefore eminently fitted for the establishment of deep-sea harbors.

As its chief mountain-ranges run from north to south, its fauna and flora could freely escape the advance of the glaciers of the ice period and had a better chance to survive than those of Europe.

More than almost any other continent it is blessed with coal and iron and oil and copper and those other raw materials which the machine age needs in ever increasing quantities.

It was practically uninhabited when the white man arrived(there were only 10,000,000 Indians on the whole continent)and there was therefore no teeming native population to prevent the invaders from doing whatever they pleased to do or to interfere seriously race-problem except the with the development of the country according to the white man's plans. As a result America has no serious unfortunate ones of its own making.

The tremendous economic opportunities of the new and empty continent attracted the most energetic elements from every other nation and together these were able to develop a mixed race of their own, which has adapted itself to its novel and unusual but very simple geographical background in a remarkably short space of time.

And finally and perhaps most important of all, the people who inhabit that continent today have no history of their own that is forever dragging them back to a past that will never come back. Unencumbered by that unfortunate luggage(which everywhere else has proved itself to be more of a nuisance than a blessing)they can forge ahead much faster than other races which must push the ancestral wheelbarrow ahead of them wherever they go.

As for the actual geographic features of the two American continents, they are not only very simple and much more symmetrical than those of any other continents, but in their main features North and South America resemble each other so closely that we can discuss them at the same time without running any risk of causing any confusion in the reader's mind.

Both North and South America resemble triangles with the sole difference that the South American triangle is situated a little further towards the east than the northern triangle, which undoubtedly accounts for the fact that South America was discovered long before North America and was already fairly well known while most of North America still bore the legend of“terra incognita”.

Both the western sides of the triangles of North and South America consist of a mountain ridge which runs sharply from the north to the south and which occupies approximately onethird of the surface while the other two-thirds in the east consist of a wide plain, separated from the ocean(in both cases)by two shorter mountain-ranges, the hills of Labrador and the Appalachians in North America and the mountains of Guiana and the Brazilian highlands in South America.

In the matter of their rivers, too, the two continents behave similarly. A few of the less important ones run northward while the St.Lawrence and the Amazon run almost parallel with each other, and the Parana and the Paraguay imitate the Mississippi and the Missouri by meeting each other halfway and then running the rest of their course at right angles with the St.Lawrence and the Amazon respectively.

As for Central America, the narrow strip of land which runs from east to west, geologically speaking it is really a part of the northern continent. Then suddenly, in Nicaragua, the landscape and the fauna and flora begin to change and it becomes part of the southern continent.The rest of Central America consists of high mountains, which is one of the reasons why Mexico, although as near the equator as the Sahara Desert, is a densely populated country with an excellent climate.

South America, of course, is much nearer to the equator than North America and the Amazon River practically follows the line of the equator in the course of its magnificent career from the Andes to the Atlantic. But speaking in very general terms(as I am now doing)here we have a magnificent case wherewith to study the influence of the geographical surroundings upon Man and of Man upon his geographical surroundings.

Nature built herself two large stages and finished them both in practically the same way. A main entrance on the right, a high wall on the left, and a large open space in the middle provided with a richly stored larder.Then she gave the northern stage to a company of Germanic strolling actors, who thus far had played the smaller theaters in the provincial towns, a troupe of humble origin, accustomed to long hours and the plain roles of butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers.But the southern stage she rented out to noble old tragedians of the best Mediterranean school, who were accustomed to perform only in the presence of royalty and each one of whom could handle a sword or a rapier with a grace entirely unknown to their northern colleagues whose arms were stiff from the handling of spade and axe, whose backs were prematurely bent by their ceaseless struggle with an unyielding soil.

Then she raised the curtain on both stages at almost exactly the same moment and bade the world come in and watch the entertainment. And behold, ere the first act was half over, neither stage looked quite the same as it had done when the opening lines were spoken.And when the second act began, such a change was noticeable among the ladies and gentlemen and the children of the cast that the audience gasped and whispered,“Can such things be?”

The vessels of the old Vikings looked very picturesque but they were exceedingly clumsy vehicles when it came to the actual business of sailing them across a choppy sea. As a result those hardy Norsemen were continually blown out of their normal course, for they had neither compass nor log and their sailing rig was as clumsy as that of those Egyptian feluccas which you may still admire on a roll of papyrus painted in the valley of the Nile,3000 years ago.

Now if you will kindly look at the map of the Gulf Stream(there are several in this book)you will see that the Gulf Stream, after having crossed the ocean from Africa to America, recrosses the northern part of the Atlantic from the south-west to the north-east in a leisurely fashion, bestows its blessings upon the coast of Norway, visits the Arctic Ocean, and then decides to go home by way of Iceland and Greenland, where it changes its name and its temperature, to travel southward once more, first as the Greenland current and next as the Labrador current, that accursed stream which sprinkles chunks of Greenland's azure glaciers all over the northern part of the Atlantic.

The Norsemen, sailing by God and by guess, as my own ancestors used to call this procedure, had reached Iceland as early as the ninth century. Once, however, regular communications had been established between Iceland and Europe, the discovery of Greenland and America became inevitable.Just as a Chinese or Japanese junk, blown out of its course, must inevitably reach the shores of British Columbia or California, being carried thither by the Kuro Siwo, the Gulf Stream of the Pacific, so a Norseman, bound from Trondheim to Iceland and being prevented by fog from locating his place of destination(and even today with all the instruments in the world, a fog is a terrible thing),would sooner or later find himself on the east coast of Greenland, or, if the fog continued and his luck held out, on the very coasts of the great landbarrier to the east which those early visitors called Vineland, because it raised a kind of grapes from which they could make an excellent sort of wine.

Now it is well to remember that there have been a great many discoveries made of which the world at large never heard at all. The average skipper has an instinctive fear of making a fool of himself before his colleagues by telling them a yarn which none of them will believe anyway, and which afterwards may prove to have been the result of an hallucination, or of low clouds mistaken for a mountain-range, or a strip of sunlight, maybe, interpreted as a flat coast.Australia was undoubtedly seen from the distance by a number of French and Spanish sailors long before Abel Tasman set foot on shore and cut himself a new goose-quill to report to the authorities in Batavia about the monstrous size of the natives.The Azores and Canary Islands were discovered and forgotten and rediscovered so often that our school books have a hard time trying to find out just exactly when they should be first mentioned among the world's great discoveries.French fishermen had undoubtedly found their way to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland centuries before the days of Columbus.But they merely told their neighbors that the fishing was good and let it go at that.Fish interested them.Another piece of land was just another piece of land.There was enough land in Brittany for everybody.Why worry about something that lay so far away from home?

As in everything I have ever written I have steadfastly defended the doctrine that humanity comes ahead of nationality, I shall not lose myself in the usual acrimonious disputes concerning the desirability of celebrating Columbus Day or Leif Ericsson Day or a day in honor of some French sailor who eventually may be dug out of the archives of Normandy. Suffice it to say that we have documentary evidence proving that the Norsemen visited these shores during the first ten years of the eleventh century and that a small group of sailors, preponderantly Spanish but with certain foreign admixtures, and more or less obeying the commands of an Italian captain, visited these shores during the last ten years of the fifteenth century, and that when they arrived here they found out that they could not possibly be the original discoverers because the country was already inhabited by people who were of unmistakable Asiatic origin, wherefore, if the honor of“having been there first”must go to any specific group of people, the Mongolians are the logical candidates for all our future commemorative tablets.

We have a monument to our Unknown Soldier. Another and slightly larger pile of marble erected to our Unknown Discoverer would not be out of place.But as the relatives of that poor man are now forbidden by law to set foot on the soil of our continent, I fear me that nothing will ever come of this plan.

Concerning the descendants of those first intrepid explorers who undoubtedly hailed from the Far East, we know a great deal, but the one thing that would really interest us will probably remain a mystery until the end of time. And that one thing is this—how did the people of Asia actually reach the American continent?Did they sail across the narrow northern part of the Pacific Ocean, or did they walk across the ice of the Bering Strait, or did they come at a time when America and Asia were still connected by a narrow bridge of land?Well, we just don't happen to know.Nor can I see that it matters very much.When the white man reached these distant shores he came in contact with a race which, except in a few isolated spots, had barely passed out of the late stone age and which had not yet reached that stage of development when the wheel was used to relieve the human back of its manifold burdens or when the domesticated animals had set their owners free from the everlasting drudgery of gaining a meagre daily livelihood by means of hunting and fishing.Even with his bows and arrows the copper-colored man was no match for the white man who was able to kill his enemies at a distance by means of a gun.

The red man, reduced from the rank of a host to that of a guest, will continue to exist for a few centuries longer. Then he will be completely absorbed by his former enemies and will only survive as a vague historical memory.That is too bad, for the red man had many very excellent qualities, both of body and mind.

But that is the way things happen and I don't see what we can do about it.

And now let us for the last time look at a map.

From the Bering Strait to the Isthmus of Panama the west coast of America is protected against the Pacific Ocean by a barrier of high mountains. This barrier is not everywhere of the same width and parts of it consist of parallel ridges, all of which, however, run in the same direction, that is to say, from north to south.

In Alaska this mountain-chain is clearly a continuation of the mountains of eastern Asia. It is divided into two sections by the wide basin of the Yukon River, the main river of this northern territory, which was part of the Russian Empire until the year 1867 when the United States acquired these 590,000 square miles of wilderness in consideration of 7,000,000 American dollars.

The reason Russia was satisfied with so little was probably due to her ignorance about the country's potential riches. Seven million dollars for a few fishing villages and a chaos of snowcovered mountains seemed quite a good bargain at that time.But in 1896 gold was discovered in the Klondike, and Alaska got on the map, as the popular saying has it.The trip of a thousand miles from Vancouver to Juneau and then via Skagway and the Chilkoot and Chilkat passes to Dawson, the center of the Klondike territory(carrying one's pack on one's own back, as animals were very expensive and could hardly wade through the dense snow at the elevation of 3500 feet just south of the Polar Circle),was about as inconvenient as any trip ever undertaken by mankind in search of material wealth.But a pot of gold at the end of the trail awaited the early arrivals, and on such occasions every man is always certain that he will be the first on the spot.

Since then, however, it has been found that Alaska is not merely a gold land(as well as the country most densely covered by glaciers)but that it also has a great deal of copper and silver and coal, besides being an ideal country for fur-trapping and fishing. As a result the revenue derived from it during the first forty years of its existence as an American territory has been twenty times as large as the original cost.

Just south of Alaska, the mountain-range gets split into two parts of which the eastern branch, the Rockies, turn further inland, while the western branch continues to run exactly parallel with the ocean. But while the Rockies never change their name until they lose themselves among the highlands of Mexico, the mountains of the Pacific slope, after they have bade farewell to Mount McKinley, the highest mountain of the Alaska range and the highest peak on the whole North American continent(20,300 feet)are known by quite a number of different names.In Canada they are called the St.Elias Range and the Coast Range.But after they have passed Vancouver Island(a rocky island cut off from the mainland by Johnston Strait and the Strait of Georgia)they are divided into two parts, of which the western half is still called the Coast Range while the eastern hills are known as the Cascades in Washington and Oregon and the Sierra Nevada in California.The wide open space between the two is the valley of the Sacramento River and the San Joaquin River which meet in the middle just before they run into San Francisco Bay, the widest and deepest and the best sheltered harbor of the world, which connects with the Pacific Ocean by means of the famous Golden Gate.

When the advance guard of the Spanish pioneers reached the valley, it was absolutely uncultivated. Today by means of irrigation it has been turned into the fruit garden of the world where apples and peaches and plums and oranges and apricots grow and prosper in exchange for a very reasonable amount of labor.

This valley proved to be a veritable godsend to California, for when the great gold rush of the forties of the last century had come to an end, the miners and their followers discovered that they could hope to make quite a comfortable living by merely changing their profession and by becoming fruit farmers instead of prospectors. In Alaska and in Australia, once the veins of gold had been exhausted, there was no possible chance of feeding the multitudes, and they disappeared as fast as they had come, leaving behind them their empty towns and villages and tin cans.But California, instead of being impoverished by its golden treasures, as most gold-providing countries have been, was actually enriched by them, and the fact should be noted down as unique in the history of mankind.

When it was shown that way down deep below the soil there lay vast reservoirs of oil, the future of the state was entirely insured. It is true that this entire region is a bit shaky and that the deep incision of the Gulf of California may cause an occasional shifting of the different layers of rock which are apt to be dangerous(especially when followed by fire)but earthquakes are only temporary inconveniences while sunshine and an agreeable and even climate are permanent blessings.California has only started upon its career as one of the most densely populated spots of the entire northern continent.

Between the Sierra Nevada and the actual range of the Rockies lies an enormous valley consisting of three parts. In the north lies the Columbia plateau which sends the Snake River and the Columbia River to the Pacific and in the south it is bordered by the Wasatch Mountains and the Colorado plateau through which the Colorado River has dug its famous canyon.Between these two plateaus lies the depression known as the Great Basin which the Mormons chose as their permanent place of residence after they had been forced to flee from the eastern part of the United States and which in spite of its lack of moisture(the Great Salt Lake is full of water but it is much saltier than the ocean)they have in less than a single century been able to turn into a most profitable venture.

That this entire region is of a highly volcanic nature and that it must have been shaken about considerably is shown by the fact that from the bottom of the Death Valley, which is 276 feet below the surface of the ocean, one can see the top of that Mount Whitney which is the highest peak of the entire United States(14,496 feet).

To the east of the Rockies lies that tremendous plain which on the north is bounded by the Arctic Ocean, on the south by the Gulf of Mexico and on the east by the Laurentian Highlands of Labrador and the Appalachians of the United States. That part of the world alone could, if brought under the proper cultivation, feed the whole population of our globe.The so-called Great Plains(where the Rockies gradually slope off into the flat country)and the Central Plains through which the Mississippi and the Missouri and the Ohio and the Arkansas and the Red Rivers flow to the Gulf of Mexico, are one vast granary.The northern part is less well favored because here the rivers, the Mackenzie and the Athabasca and the Saskatchewan and the Albany River, all lose themselves either in the Arctic Ocean or in the Hudson Bay and are therefore only of local importance, being frozen up for the greater part of each year.But the Missouri, which rises near the Yellowstone Park in Montana and the Mississippi(together with the Missouri the longest river in the world),which takes its origin on the divide between Lake Winnipeg in Canada and Lake Superior, are navigable almost all the way from their sources to their deltas and pass through a region that in centuries to come will resemble eastern China in its density of population.

The other lakes of this slightly elevated region which is the divide between the Hudson Bay(or the Arctic Ocean),the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, are Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. The latter two are connected by a short river which is unnavigable on account of a water-fall, called Niagara(Niagara is a little wider than the Victoria Falls of the Zambesi River but only half as high, while the Yosemite Falls beat them both with a height of over a thousand feet)and they are therefore connected by a canal, the Welland Canal.The Huron Lake and Lake Superior are also connected by a canal, the Sault Ste.Marie Canal, which has more tonnage pass through its locks than the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal and the Kiel Canal put together.

The waters of these lakes then pass into the Atlantic Ocean through the St. Lawrence River, emptying into the St.Lawrence Bay which is a sort of inland sea, situated between the Canadian mountains in the west, the island of Newfoundland in the east(it was“New”when John Cabot found it in 1497 and in 1500 when it got its first Portuguese governor-general)and Cape Breton Island and Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the South.The Cabot Strait, separating Newfoundland from Cape Breton Island, bears witness to the fact that this region was first visited by an Italian.

As the northern part of Canada, the so-called Northwestern Territory, is too cold to be entirely suited to the white man's occupation, we rarely hear of it except in connection with its picturesque local police force. It is a land of lakes and most of it used to belong to the Hudson Bay Company.This company was founded in 1670,exactly fifty-nine years after Henry Hudson, the discoverer of the bay that bears his name, had been murdered there by his mutinous sailors.The“adventurers of England”who organized the company lived up to their name but without much discrimination.Had they been given another half century they would have killed off all the live stock of the lakes and forests(even during the breeding season the slaughter of fur-bearing animals did not cease)and the Indians, most liberally supplied with fire-water, would have exterminated themselves completely by way of the gin bottle.Wherefor the Queen's Most Gracious Majesty finally intervened, annexed most of the company's sovereign territory to Her Majesty's dominions in Canada and left the Hudson Bay Company behind as an historical curiosity which still(though greatly diminished in size)continues to do business in the same region(262 consecutive years under the same management)but no longer on the old, irresponsible scale of former times.

The Labrador peninsula between the Hudson Bay and the St. Lawrence is too near the cold currents that come from Greenland's icy shores to be of any value to anybody.But the Dominion of Canada is only at the threshold of its enormous future and today suffers chiefly from a very serious lack of population.

Politically Canada is one of the most interesting remains of a former dream of empire. We are apt sometimes to forget that when George Washington was born, the North American continent belonged for the greater part to France and to Spain and that the English colonies along the coast of the Atlantic were only a small Anglo-Saxon enclave surrounded entirely by hostile nations.As early as 1608 the French had established themselves at the mouth of the St.Lawrence River.Then they had turned their attention to the interior, first of all travelling due west until Champlain reached Lake Huron.They explored the entire region of the Great Lakes, Marquette and Joliet found the upper part of the Mississippi, and La Salle in 1682 descended the river to the sea and took possession of its entire valley which he called Louisiana after King LouisⅩ　Ⅳ.By the end of the seventeenth century, the French were laying claim to all the land as far as the Rocky Mountains, beyond which the territories of His Most Catholic Majesty of Spain were supposed to begin.The Alleghenies, which were a real barrier in those days, separated this enormous French colonial empire from the English and the Dutch possessions along the Atlantic seaboard and from Florida which was another colony of Spain.

If LouisⅩ　Ⅳand LouisⅩ　Ⅴhad known a little more geography;indeed, if a map had ever meant something more important to these artistic monarchs than a color scheme that could be worked out very nicely in a new Gobelin, the people of New England and Virginia would now probably speak French and the whole of North America would be administered from Paris.But those who decided the destinies of Europe did not realize what the New World meant.As a result of their indifference, Canada became English, Quebec and Montreal ceased to be French cities and a few generations later, New Orleans and the whole of the Far West were sold to the Republic that had been recently founded by a few rebellious little English provinces along the Atlantic seaboard.And even the great Napoleon thought that he had done a clever stroke of business when he looked at the state of American golden dollars which he had got in exchange for what is now the richest part of the United States.

In 1819 Florida was added to these newly acquired domains, and in 1848 Texas and New Mexico and Arizona and California and Nevada and Utah were taken away from Mexico;and less than a hundred years after it had seemed certain that the northern half of the continent was to be a hinterland of two Latin powers, it had completely changed hands and had become an extension of the great north European plain.

As for the subsequent economic development of those heterogeneous parts which the chances of war, but above all things the indifference and lack of foresight of the original owners, had so suddenly and unexpectedly thrown together, it took on such proportions as the world had never seen. As soon as the first railroads had been constructed and the first steamers had been built, hundreds of thousands of immigrants followed the water routes to the Great Lakes or crossed the Alleghenies to take their share of the Great Plains and make them ready for human habitation and raise that wheat which was to make Chicago the most important grain center of the world.

When the triangle between the Great Lakes, the Alleghenies and the foothills of the Rockies were found to contain coal and oil and iron and copper in unprecedented quantities, this region became the great factory area of the new commonwealth with cities like Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and St. Louis and Cleveland and Detroit and Buffalo attracting laborers from all over the world to assist the earlier arrivals in exploiting these hidden treasures.And as these towns needed harbors from which to export their steel and iron and their oil and their automobiles, the old colonial settlements of the Atlantic seaboard, New York and Boston and Philadelphia and Baltimore achieved positions of eminence which they had never enjoyed before.

Meanwhile the southern states, at last emerging from the dark days of the reconstruction period(infinitely more disastrous than the Civil War itself had been),were scraping together enough money to begin raising their cotton crops without the assistance of slave labor. Galveston and Savannah and New Orleans returned to life.The railroads and telegraph lines and telephone wires turned the whole nation into one enormous farm and factory.60,000,000 Europeans crossed the ocean in less than half a century and joined the earlier arrivals in planning and building and making and selling and such a workshop as they set up the world had never seen before.But neither had Nature ever given a nation such unlimited opportunities as we enjoyed—a gigantic plain with an excellent climate and an excellent soil, protected on both sides by convenient mountain-ranges and practically uninhabited—almost inexhaustible resources—handy water-ways to which history had added an almost more important gift, one nation and one language and no past.

What these advantages really mean to a nation we realize as soon as we go a little further down south and reach Mexico and Central America. Mexico, with the exception of the peninsula of Yucatan, where the ancient Mayans lived, is a mountainous region which slowly increases in height from the Rio Grande towards the south until in the plateau of Sierra Madre and that of Anáhuac it reaches peaks of sixteen and seventeen thousand feet.Most of these higher mountains like Popocatepetl(17,543 feet)and Orizaba(18,564)and Ixtaccihuatl(16,960)are of volcanic origin, but Colima(13,092)is the only active volcano at the present moment.

On the Pacific side, the Sierra Madre rises sharply from the coast;but on the Atlantic side the mountains slope down more gradually and since the European invaders came from the east it was easy enough for them to find their way to the interior. The advance guard arrived during the first years of the sixteenth century.That was the time of Spain's great disappointment because the new discoveries of that damnable Genoese had proved to be a flop, a howling failure, no gold, no silver, naked savages who lay down and died when you tried to make them work, and endless mosquitoes.

Then rumor began to spread that beyond the mountains of the nearby mainland there lived an emperor of a people called the Aztecs, who dwelled in golden castles and slept in golden beds and ate from golden plates. Ferdinand Cortez and his three hundred adventurers landed in Mexico in the year 1519.With the help of one dozen cannon and thirteen blunderbusses he conquered the whole realm of poor Montezuma who was strangled to death ere he could witness the complete annihilation of what only a short time before had been a nation not much less efficiently administered than the realm of the Habsburg monarch in whose name he was murdered.

After that and for almost 300 years, until 1810 to be exact, Mexico remained a Spanish colony and was treated as such. Several of her native products were no longer allowed to be cultivated for fear that they might compete with the less acceptable products of the mother country.And most of the wealth which the soil produced disappeared into the pockets of a few rich landowners or was set apart for the benefit of those religious establishments which even today are fighting to retain their hold upon the common lands.

Then, during the middle of the last century, shortly after the grotesque adventure of poor Austrian Maximilian, who had hoped to become Montezuma's successor with the help of the French, it was discovered that Mexico was not only a very rich agricultural country but that her soil contained as much or perhaps more iron and oil deposits than the United States. Thereupon the 15,000,000 Mexicans, of whom nearly 40%were still of pure Indian stock, were almost as badly off as they had been when Cortez first visited them.For now the big banking interests took a hand in their internal affairs and arranged for revolutions, which were then answered by counter-revolutions on the part of the natives, until the record of a hundred years(it averages twenty revolutions per year)was broken just before the Great War and it seemed that the whole country would dissolve into murder and bloodshed.Fortunately during the Great War, when the big financial interests were otherwise occupied(that war cost a great deal of money),Mexico had a breathing space, and today a few strong men are trying to undo the harm of three centuries of neglect and sickness and analphabetism and apparently with success, for Vera Cruz and Tampico(the two harbors on the Gulf)are reporting larger and larger export figures.For half a dozen years Washington and Mexico City have not merely been on speaking terms, but have actually spoken to each other almost politely and with a smile.

The isthmus of central America which connects the two continents is exceedingly fertile, raises coffee, bananas, sugar and whatever else foreign capital is willing to plant there;but the climate is hard on the white man, and the black man is not particularly interested in working for the white man, and the volcanoes, which abound in this region, are hard on both the blacks and the whites.

To most people Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica are merely romantic names, unless they collect postage stamps, for this one rule holds good all over the world:“the emptier the country's national treasury, the more elaborate its stamps”. But the next country, the Republic of Panama, is of importance to us.It is a child of our own, though I suppose we had to take it, as we are the only independent nation which has to guard a Pacific as well as an Atlantic sea-front, and if we had waited for Colombia to sell it to us, we would still be haggling with the Colombian senators about the price they wanted to affix their signature to the deed of surrender.

That this isthmus was only a very narrow strip of land had already been known to the Spaniards after Balboa from his peak in Darien had contemplated both oceans at one and the same moment. And as early as the year 1551 the Spaniards were playing with the idea of digging a canal of their own.Since then every generation was to hear of new plans.Every man of any importance in the realm of science favored the world with at least one set of blueprints showing how the puzzle could be best solved.But digging a canal through almost thirty miles of hard rock was a serious problem until Alfred Nobel made his unfortunate invention and gave us that dynamite with which he expected to remove tree-stumps and boulders from a farmer's fields but which he never intended to be used for the more common purpose of killing one's neighbors.

Then came the California gold rush when thousands of people hastened to Panama so as not to be obliged to make the long detour via Cape Horn;and for them the trans-isthmus railroad was built in 1855. Fifteen years later the world heard of the unexpected success of the Suez Canal.Ferdinand de Lesseps, its author, now decided to try his hand at connecting the Pacific with the Atlantic.But the company he founded was scandalously mismanaged and his engineers had made so many errors in their calculations and his workmen died so miserably from malaria and yellow fever, that after eight years of struggle against the forces of Nature and the less direct but even more disastrous forces of the Paris Exchange, the French company went most disreputably out of existence.

Then nothing was done for almost a dozen years and palm trees grew out of the smokestacks of the locomotives left behind by de Lesseps, until finally in the year 1902 the United States government bought the rights of the bankrupt French concern. Thereupon Washington and the Republic of Colombia began to haggle about the price that America would eventually have to pay for a strip of land wide enough for her canal.Until Theodore Roosevelt, tired of the delay, arranged for a private little rebellion of his own in that somewhat out-of-the-way part of the world, recognized the new and independent Republic of Panama in less than twenty-four hours, and began to dig.That happened in the year 1903 and in 1914 the job was finished.

This changed the Caribbean Sea from an inland sea to part of the commercial highway between Europe and Asia and it greatly increased the value of the islands which cut it off from the Atlantic Ocean. The Bahamas, which are English, and Cuba are a little too far out of the way, as is of course Bermuda, another English possession half way between New York and Florida.But Jamaica(English)and Haiti and San Domingo(nominally independent but ask Washington!)are in a better position to derive some benefits from the canal.So is Porto Rico and so are all the Lesser Antilles, the small islands to the east and the south, which face the Greater Antilles, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica and Puerto Rico.

These Lesser Antilles were of much greater value to the European nations of the seventeenth century than the American mainland. For they were hot and sufficiently moist to raise sugarcane and the slaves, once on shore, could not disappear in the jungle.Today they still raise sugar and cocoa and coffee but most of them would be deeply grateful if they could make a few extra pennies as halfway stations for ships bound from Europe to the Panama Canal.In order of their appearance these are first of all the so-called Leeward Islands, St.Thomas, Santa Cruz, St.Martin, Saba, St.John, St.Eustatius(a small rock, chief port for smuggled supplies during the Revolution),Guadalupe, Dominica, Martinique(very volcanic like most of the others and almost destroyed by Mt.Pelée in 1902),St.Lucia and St.Vincent and Barbados.

The Windward Islands consist of Blanquilla(which belongs to Venezuela),Bonaire, Curacao and Oruba, which are Dutch. All of these islands once upon a time were part of the outer ridge of a mountain chain that connected the Guiana Range of Venezuela with the Sierra Madre of Mexico.That mountain ridge was destroyed but the high individual tops remained behind.

From an industrial point of view, none of these islands is doing any too well. The abolition of slavery has destroyed the former riches of all of them and today they are best known as winter resorts or coaling stations or oil-distributing centers.Only Trinidad, just off the delta of the Orinoco, retains some of her prosperity because its volcanoes have favored it with large asphalt deposits, worked by Hindus, who came here to take the place of the old slaves and who now form one-third of the total population.

During the war when we learned more geography and in a shorter space of time than we had ever done before it was quite customary for the younger generation to switch from German(which soon was to be a dead language anyway)to Spanish, on the ground that there was“a great future for that language in South America”. That future did not particularly manifest itself while the actual fighting was going on.Indeed, business transactions with that vast continent suffered a very serious slump.

Afterwards we discovered the reason. All the technical details of foreign trade in Peru and Brazil and Ecuador and whatever these other countries might be called had thus far been entrusted to patient little German clerks who were supposed to be familiar with that sort of thing, which was most unfortunately beyond the mental reach of their employers.When South America joined the Allies(for most of them had a few German ships in their harbors and needed loans)these poor Teutonic ink-slingers had been sent to concentration camps and the foreign correspondence of those South American commercial establishments had come to a sudden end, to be resumed as soon as peace had been declared and the Heinies were back at their ledgers.

Gradually the truth then began to dawn upon us. Although South America was a continent of tremendous natural wealth, it was so hopelessly underpopulated and in many respects so far behind the rest of the world that it would take at least another half century before it would be of the slightest value to any one except the few rich families who had either retained their possessions from the days of Spanish domination or had gained them afterwards in their quality of uncle or nephew to one of the quick-change South American presidents.

Now if in the present volume I devote only a few pages to South America, do not suspect me of anti-Latin feelings. On the contrary, being of northern descent myself, I am able to appreciate the many virtues of the southern races much better than they are able to do themselves.But at the beginning of this book I told you that I would try to write a“human”geography, being firmly convinced that the importance of any given piece of land depends entirely upon the total sum of the contributions the inhabitants of that particular territory, be it large or small, have made to the sum total of human happiness in the form of science or commerce or religion or one of the arts.From that angle, alas, South America so far has been almost as barren as Australia or Mongolia.Which, I repeat, may be due to the lack of population, which in turn may be due to the fact that a great deal of South America lies just beneath the equator and that in the other parts the white man has never been able to replace the native or is so swamped by half-breeds of different hue(mulattoes, who are the descendants of whites and Negroes, Mestizos, who are the children of Indians and whites or Zambos, who are the offspring of Negroes and Indians)that they are never quite able to assert their political or intellectual powers.

South America has been the scene of some strange political experiments. A Brazilian Empire was something quite new under the sun although it lasted less than a century, and that extraordinary Jesuit free state in Paraguay(which lasted much longer than the empire on its eastern front)will probably always receive honorable mention in learned works devoted to applied Utopias.And South America produced at least one man of more than extraordinary ability, the great Bolivar who not merely set his own country free, as our own George Washington did, but who was directly or indirectly responsible for the successful outcome of most of the revolutionary movements of the entire continent.I do not for a moment doubt that there have been a great many other men who have loomed large in the local histories of Uruguay and Bolivia, but our planet at large has never heard of them and I wonder seriously whether upon close acquaintanceship they would prove to be of the calibre that is necessary to elevate them to the rank of world figures.And so it will be sufficient for the purpose of this book if I present you with a brief catalogue of mountains, rivers and states and promise you faithfully that I will fill in the human details a thousand years hence.

The entire western coast of South America consists of a continuation of our own Rockies and of the Mexican Sierra Madre and it is known as the Cordilleras de los Andes or the Andes for short. The Andes was the Spanish name which the conquerors had given to those irrigation canals which the Indians had built all over the slopes of their native hills.By merely destroying those canals and dams, the Spaniards were afterwards able to let many tribes starve to death and since the Conquistadores had taken the long and dangerous trip across the ocean to get rich quick and not to found a permanent home in a new world, this was as good a way of robbing the natives of their possessions as any other.

When approaching the South Pole, the Andes break off into a number of islands of which Tierra del Fuego is the best known. Between Chile and Tierra del Fuego lies the strait which Magellan navigated with such great difficulty on the white man's first trip around the world and which is still called after him.The southernmost point of the island is Cape Horn, so called after the native town of the man who discovered it(the little town of Hoorn in Holland)and not after a cow, as so many people seem to believe.The Strait of Magellan is of course of great strategic importance.Hence the Falkland Islands which guard it are British territory.

The Andes, like the whole of this enormous mountain-range that runs from the Arctic to the Antartic Circle, are volcanic. The Chimborazo in Ecuador(now extinct)is 20,702 feet high.The Aconcagua in the Argentine beats them all with 22,834 feet.While the Cotopaxi with 19,550 feet(also in Ecuador)holds the record for being the highest active volcano of the entire planet.

The South American Andes resemble their North American sisters in two other respects, The high mountain ridges enclose several wide plateaus which form the natural confines for such states as Bolivia or Ecuador. Furthermore there are very few convenient passes so that the railroad between Argentine and Chile, the only trans-Andean railroad, has to climb to a height which far surpasses that of the Swiss mountain passes like the St.Bernard or the Gothard ere it can bore its tunnels.

As for the mountains of the east, the Appalachians of South America, they consist of the Guiana Ridge in the north and the Brazilian Highlands of the east, each one containing a number of independent Sierras and Serras of its own, and forming the remnants of a much vaster range which was gradually cut in two by the valley of the Amazon. The Amazon is not the longest river in the world but the river that takes care of more water than any other.It literally has hundreds of branches of which more than fifteen are quite as long as the Rhine, while several others, such as the Madeira and the Tapajos, are a great deal longer.

North of the Guiana Mountains there is another valley, that of the Orinoco River. The Orinoco, which is actually connected with the Amazon by way of the curious Rio Negro(imagine the Ohio being part of the Mississippi and the Potomac at the same time!)is much better suited for navigation than the Amazon.For it does not have to break its way through the mountains just before it reaches the sea, as the Amazon is obliged to do, and its mouth is almost twenty miles wide, while the river itself, a terrific water-carrier, maintains a steady depth of 300 feet for several hundred miles inland, which is of great convenience to sea-going vessels.

As for the Parana, the north-south river of South America, on the way to the sea it picks up the Paraguay and the Uruguay rivers and then becomes the Rio de la Plata on which Montevideo, the capital of the state of Uruguay is situated. Like the Orinoco, the Parana is a good inland water-way.

In one particular respect, South America is much better off than most of the other continents, except Europe. It has practically no deserts.Except for northern Chile, most of her try enjoys a sufficient amount of moisture, while the Amazon region and the whole of the eastern coast of Brazil are drenched by equatorial rains which make the Amazon territory much more densely and evenly wooded than that of the Congo.But as a result of its steady rainfall, the rest of the continent, especially in the southern part, which is not quite so near the equator, is excellently suited for purposes of agriculture, and the Argentine pampas and the Orinoco llanos and the Brazilian campos are close rivals of our own Great Plains.

As for the countries which we find on South America today, few of them grew out of what we might call historical inevitability. They were the unexpected and haphazard results of successful revolutions rather than the products of slow growth and development.The United States of Venezuela with a population of 3,216,000 is a little too near the equator to develop a very energetic race of men.But around the Lagoon of Maracaibo in the north oil has been discovered and that has made Maracaibo the most important harbor of Venezuela, a position thus far held by La Guaira, the port of Caracas, the capital, which lies rather inconveniently just behind a low mountain ridge that separates it from the sea.

On the west of Venezuela lies Colombia with the capital city of Bogota, which lies so far inland that it was a most inconvenient place to reach until the introduction of a regular airplane service with Barranquilla at the mouth of the Magdalena River. Colombia is fertile and has great natural wealth and furthermore, like the United States, it is situated on two oceans.But it will need lots of immigrants from northern Europe before it can begin to develop any of its natural resources.

Ecuador is also a poor country and, although the port of Guayaquil, the harbor of Quito, the capital, has done a great deal better since the opening up of the Panama Canal, there is nothing to report about this nation except that it used to export a lot of quinine and nowadays exports more cocoa than anything else.

Peru, further south along the coast of the Pacific, was the seat of a very powerful Indian state when the Spaniards first arrived in the New World. It was ruled by a caste of nobles, the Incas, or children of the sun, who elected the supreme ruler or the Inca of the whole country, who thereupon was granted despotic rights.Nevertheless and in spite of or because of their feudal character, the Peruvians had developed a much higher and much more human form of civilization than the Aztecs.

But when Pizarro reached these parts, the Inca empire was more than 400 years old and that is a long time for any particular form of government to last. There were many political parties in the land and there was rivalry between different groups of nobles.Pizarro played one side against the other and then in 1531 conquered the whole country.He imprisoned the reigning Inca and turned the Indians into slaves.Whatever could be stolen or plundered was dragged away and sent to Spain.The ruins of the old Incas, the remnants of roads and castles around Lake Titicaca way up in the Andes(3300 square miles of water 12,875 feet above sea-level)and endless old bits of pottery and other bits of art show us what was lost when a capable and competent race was suddenly transformed into the indolent and miserable natives who now wander aimlessly through the streets of Cuzco, the old capital, or take part in some revolution.

Lima is the modern capital where the future fate of Peru's treasures in silver and copper and oil is to be decided, unless the President of the Republic and his foreign banking friends have long since removed the contents of these mines and have deposited them in the vaults. Such things are possible.They explain why this chapter can be so short.

Bolivia, the poor hand-locked state, was not always a landlocked state and La Paz, the capital, once upon a time had direct access to the sea. But during the famous saltpetre war of 1879—1882 when Peru and Chile fought for the Arica district, Bolivia was foolish enough to side against Chile.When Chile won the war, Bolivia lost her coastal region.Bolivia is a very rich country.Among other things it is the third tin-producing country of the world, but a density of population of less than five per square mile, a total population of less than 3,000,000 and most of those Indians who remained behind when the Inca Empire was destroyed—no, it will take a great deal of time to do anything with or for that unfortunate land.

The two southernmost states, Chile and the Argentine, are by far the most important of the entire continent but their prosperity is a direct result of their geographical situation. They lie in the temperate zone.Hence they have fewer Indians(the tropics makes them breed faster)and they have attracted a better class of immigrants.

Chile is richer in natural wealth than the Argentine. Arica(from where you take the railroad for Bolivia),Antofagasta, Iquique and Valparaiso are the four most important harbors of the west coast of South America, just as Santiago, the capital, is the largest city of that entire region.The southern part of Chile is beginning to raise cattle which is slaughtered and frozen and sent to Europe from Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magellan.

As for the Argentine, it is the great cow-country of South America. The flat territory along the Parana River, almost as large as one-third of Europe, is the richest part of the entire continent.Meat and wool and hides and butter are exported in such quantities that they have been able to affect our own prices for those commodities in a most unpleasant fashion.The steady immigration of Italian laboring men and farmers during the last ten years will make the Argentine one of the greatest grain and flax producers of the western hemisphere, while the sheep culture makes Patagonia one of the most dangerous competitors of Australia.

The capital of the Argentine is Buenos Aires, also on the Rio de la Plata, just opposite the small state of Uruguay which has very much the same soil and climate as the Argentine and which, having rid itself of the last of its Indian population, does in a small way, but very successfully, what the Argentinians are doing on such a very large scale that very often they run the risk of coming to grief through over-speculation and bad financial management.

Paraguay finally, the third of the Rio de la Plata states and in many ways the most favored of them all, would now be prosperous if it had not been for the disastrous war of 1864—1870 when the poor Indians, trained in military service by their former Jesuit masters(who however in 1769 had lost the country to the Spanish crown),had gone on the war-path in behalf of a crazy man who also happened to be their President. This poor man, having quite needlessly declared war on all his three powerful neighbors, continued the fight until fivesixths of the male population of the entire country had been killed.At the end of this period of slaughter, conditions were so bad that the Paraguayans had to revert to polygamy to get their country repopulated.It will take another century however ere this rich little state shall have fully recovered from that catastrophe.

There remains one more country to be discussed—Brazil. As a colony it was badly neglected, first by the Dutch and afterwards by the Portuguese who forbade the natives and the settlers to deal with any one except a few accredited merchants of Lisbon and who kept this entire region in a state of almost complete economic bondage until the year 1807 when the royal family of Portugal was forced to flee before Napoleon and moved over the Rio de Janeiro.Then the tables were turned and for almost a dozen years the despised colony ruled the mother country.And when His Portuguese Majesty sailed for Lisbon in 1821 he left his son, Dom Pedro, behind as his representative.A year later the son proclaimed himself Emperor of an independent Brazil.And since then the Portuguese language is the only tie that binds the colony to the erstwhile mother country, for the house of Braganza, which had probably given Brazil the best government any South American state had ever enjoyed, was forced to abdicate in 1889 as the result of a military upheaval, and the last of the American emperors left for Paris and the cemetery.

Brazil, with 3,285,000 square miles of territory and therefore as large as the United States and covering half of the entire South American continent, is at the same time the richest of all the different countries south of the equator. It is divided into three parts—the Amazon lowlands or the valley of the Amazon;the coastlands of the Atlantic;and the highlands, where Santos is the town which provides half of the world with its daily coffee.Besides coffee Brazil grows rubber in the Pará or Belem district, just south of the mouth of the Amazon, and in Manaos where the Rio Negro joins the Amazon.Then there are the tobacco and the cocoa of Bahia on the east coast and the grazing fields of the high plateau of Matto Grosso.And finally there are the diamonds and the other precious stones of the darkest interior, gems which are so difficult to reach that they have never been very thoroughly exploited.And the same holds true for the iron ore and the other metals which are all of them awaiting the building of more railroads.

And finally there are three little European colonies in South America, the only remnants of the old colonial possessions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They are British Guiana or Demerara;Dutch Guiana or Surinam, which the Dutch got in exchange for the New Netherlands and the city of Nieuw Amsterdam;and French Guiana or Cayenne.If the French had not chosen Cayenne as one of their penal colonies and if we did not see an occasional scrap of unpleasant scandal coming from that lost and unhealthy swamp and attaching itself right to the center of our front pages, we would feel tempted to forget that the Guianas existed.Which would probably be just as well for they contribute very little to either the prosperity or the sum total of happiness of the human race, and they are the living reminders of the day when the whole of South America meant but one thing to the visitor from over the seas—a rich store-house to be plundered at will.