Chapter II

The influence of geographical situation and of climate on human culture is a subject so vast and profound that only the combined industry and genius of a Humboldt or an Elie Reclus could possibly ever exhaust it. And even a perception of the fact that man everywhere responds to his environment, reflects his environment, adapts himself to and, in the end, identifies himself completely with his environment, does not account for all the profound racial differences between man and man. Setting these differences apart, we may nevertheless say that all human cultures derive from five recognizable types: river culture, largely pacific and agricultural; desert culture, largely nomadic and warlike; mountain culture, largely fluctuating between mysticism and realism, alternately conservative and adventurous; tropical-swamp culture, largely theocratic, conservative and defensive; and marine culture, largely democratic, inventive and adaptable. The best example of the first class is ancient China; of the second, the Persians or the Arabs; of the third, the Greeks, Etruscans and early Romans; of the fourth, the Hindus, Cambodians, Aztecs and Mayas; of the fifth the Cretans, Phœnicians and English.

A glance at the map will show that the nature of the North American continent, as of Russia, was such as to insure that any culture either country achieved was destined to be largely of the river type. The central portion of the United States is occupied by the immense river system of the Mississippi and its tributaries. This system flows through immense plains, and its lower reaches are consequently subject to frequent and damaging floods, forming an immense delta of two hundred and fifty miles of intensely fertile black soil. To eastward the region of the Appalachians and of the Blue Ridge is heavily forested and of much poorer soil, but beyond these again, in the Atlantic seaboard, is a series of rivers, running generally southward and eastward, with good harbours at their mouths, and generally highly fertile in their lower reaches, though less subject to floods. The interior of the country, it is true, was not settled until after the winning of independence at the close of the eighteenth century; but the whole political development of the Colonies was an advance towards the type of government that was most suitable to the environment later found and assimilated in the Ohio, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Missouri regions: a preponderantly agricultural community, intensely suspicious of outside interference, deeply rooted in family sentiment and respect for the soil, narrowly conservative in outlook and largely ruled by primitive moral precept. Westward of the Mississippi stretches the open prairie region tending to break down this life into the more undeveloped forms of pure nomadism.

The purest example of such a culture is, as has already been pointed out, the civilization of China. If we examine the moral and religious basis of ancient Chinese life, we find that everything is made to centre about the perpetuation of family life, and the maintenance of the fertility of the soil. All outward forms, from the ritual spring ploughing that the Emperor himself performed annually at the Temple of Agriculture in Pekin, to the precepts of Confucius, derive from the one prevailing desire to ensure an unchanging round of harvests with the least disturbance of outward conditions. Such a people is not predominantly warlike, and is better for defence than for conquest. They are better qualified to display the firm qualities, great endurance, immense solidarity, and a uniformity of style, than the feats of daring and mental adaptability displayed by mountain and marine peoples. In contrast with desert or tropical-swamp peoples, their mythology is undeveloped, their religious ardour halts at the frontiers of an ethical positivism.

In contrast with the map of North America, the map of Russia shows even more clearly the characteristics of a featureless forest, an unmarked plain. Yet a glance at this map will show that here too, the development of culture has depended on the existence of great river systems. The Volga with its tributaries, the Oka, the Dnieper, the Western Dvina all have their headwaters within a few miles of each other, and all radiate from a common centre, where the black soil belt of central Russia, intensely favourable to agriculture, meets the forest belt of the north. The position of these rivers, and the direction in which they flowed, fixed inevitably the centre of the Ancient Russian commonwealth. The Volga and the Oka communicate with the Caspian; the Dnieper and its eastward neighbour, the Don, with the Black Sea; the Dvina, and its tributaries, the Lovat and the Volckov, flow into the Baltic. In the early Middle Ages this became naturally the great trade route between Persia and the Eastern Roman Empire, and the Hansa settlements, as well as the Scandinavian peoples. Its Scandinavian Viking origin is shown by the Varangian establishment of Kiev as the capital, back in the ninth century, with Novgorod and Smolensk as outlying centres; unfortunately the political unity that the converted Viking invaders were able to impose upon the timid, conservative, and heathen Slavonic masses, was dependent upon their ability to wage incessant war upon swarms of barbarians from farther east. From the Pechenegs in 862, down to the Polovtsy in 1238, the ancient Russian culture lay at the mercy of perpetual Tartar invasion from the desert plains of Central Asia: Kiev finally fell in 1238, and the insignificant independent principality of Moscow more northward only survived by its comparative difficulty of access and by the payment of a great tribute to the Tartar Khans. The first ruler of Muscovy who began to win out in the long struggle with the Tartars, a struggle which left the Russian people profoundly modified ethnologically in the direction of a Mongolian type, was precisely Ivan III, whom we have already seen sending to Rome to obtain the hand of the niece of the last Eastern Emperor; with his reign we begin Modern Russia which profoundly differs from, though it is the resultant of the physical and racial forces that shaped mediæval Russia. Here too we have a settled agricultural people, clinging to great river systems, apprehensive of foreign invasion, intensely conservative, strongly patriarchal, and primitively religious. The chief difference between these people and the first Anglo-Saxon settlers of America was psychological. In the case of the American colonies, social and political unity depended on each individual’s attitude to his neighbour; in the case of Russia, threatened on all sides with invasion, it depended on the purely military and arbitrary power exercised by a personal sovereign, the prince of Moscow.

2

The English-speaking colonies of America are generally supposed to have asserted their complete independence in 1776 and to have won it in 1783, when the fact is that they were completely independent almost from the beginning. In theory and in theory only, they were begun as an extension of royal property to the new-found continent. The Tudor sovereigns were as highly imbued with the idea of the divine right of kings as any other European sovereign of the time; their ideas on this subject were not different from the ideas of their enemy, Philip II of Spain. It will be remembered that the Spanish had pushed forward their conquests and settlements on the principle that the money raised to undertake them should be provided by the adventurers themselves; except in the case of Columbus, the crown itself was not financially interested in the exploits of the conquistadores of Mexico or Peru. But once the country was won, one-fifth of the revenue had to go to the crown. The Tudor plan was not very different. King James merely granted permission to explore and settle to the Virginia Company, which itself raised the funds; how much of the profits of the enterprise would return to him was left open. The profit was expected to accrue from the discovery of gold mines, or the exploration of a new trade route to the East Indies.

The experience of the Virginia Company is particularly interesting in this connection. After five years of struggle and the expenditure of a great deal of money, it was found that the country contained nothing of value as regards mines, and could only be a source of revenue if developed agriculturally. Thereupon in 1612, King James gave way and permitted each settler henceforward to take out an assignment of land. The result was that the Virginia Company henceforward would at last be able to assimilate profits, not on the basis of prospective mineral discovery, but on the basis of exchange of commodities between the old world and the new. But in order to keep the colony prosperous, it was necessary to put its government in the hands of those who best understood and were able to cope with the novel conditions. Therefore some measure of self-government was permitted. Apart from the royal governor and six councillors appointed by the Company, a popular assembly was called together composed of two representatives elected by each town, hundred, or plantation. Laws passed by this assembly could be vetoed in England; but such a veto on the part of the King would lead to the passive but unalterable resistance which is well known to all students of early agricultural communities. For a few years after 1612, King James did not dare to interfere, and the Virginia Company prospered by raising tobacco. Then, thanks to the whispers of sedition within the colony that were carried to his ears, as well as the protests of the Spanish Ambassador, who became more and more annoyed at the English establishing themselves in nominally Spanish territory, James decided to interfere. In 1624 he dissolved the Virginia Company, and the colony again became crown property. But he died the next year, without interfering with the popular assembly, which continued under his successor. Had this popular assembly not existed, Virginia would have probably become de-populated. The same type of popular assembly was formed by the other colonies, after the example of Virginia, and the history of the thirteen colonies up to the time of the Revolution is a story of the struggles between the colonists themselves and their royal governors; a struggle which culminated only with complete independence.

The American colonies were not able to live and grow at all without this local self-government on the democratic model, to build roads, put up meeting-houses, make schools, fight the Indians, and impose tariffs and taxes on their own products. It will be remembered that in 1623, just before attempting to crush the Virginia Company altogether, King James had been persuaded, after a long struggle with popular opinion, to grant a monopoly on all tobacco brought to England to the Virginia settlers. This monopoly, long agitated for, and supported by the whole force of the powerful popular faction in the Virginia Company itself, which had already sunk some two hundred thousand pounds in the development of the new country, led to extravagant hopes on the part of the London merchants who had supported the Virginia enterprise from the beginning, of obtaining a great return from their investment. The corresponding downfall of the company, and the reassertion of royal authority, worked as a rapid cause of disillusionment with the power of the crown, and largely contributed to the popular revolution against the Stuarts which broke out in 1640.

The New England colonies, even more than Virginia, began as settlements which had obtained nothing but a tacit permission to leave the country from the English crown. Massachusetts, the first of them, owed its being to the activities of certain English separatists, who finding no religious liberty in England itself, first went to Holland, and after six years, finally decided to cross the ocean to a spot where they would be entirely free from outside interference. To these Plymouth settlers, there were added in 1630 a great body of Puritans who nominally were members of the Church of England but in reality in complete revolt against Archbishop Laud, whose avowed aim was the destruction of the Low-Church party. The refusal of these numerically preponderant settlers to admit anyone to citizenship except members of their own particular communion led to the settlement, by the dissenting elements, of Rhode Island, and to the establishment of Connecticut, neither of which had any support from the English Crown and both of which were rooted in popular government. Meantime between these and the colonies of Virginia and Maryland (which again had been formed by religious refugees on a basis of tolerance) to the south, stood New Amsterdam, which the Dutch had organised on the old feudal system of making each great landholder responsible for the life and death of his tenants. The Dutch experiment was a painful failure and became assimilated into the other English settlements after 1664.

Thus, the development of the American seaboard colonies under English auspices led to the creation of a number of practically independent republics, differing widely in their views as to the relation between politics and religion, owning a nominal sovereignty to the English Crown, but in reality highly suspicious and intolerant of outside interference, determined to support themselves with as little help from others as possible and altogether transforming themselves from being mere frontier trading posts to self-supporting but rival commonwealths. They were separated from each other by the fact that they had been originally planted near the mouths of navigable bays and rivers: the Chesapeake, the Delaware, the Hudson, the Charles. The intervening territory was still the no-man’s land of the Indian. The fact that the Indian had to be pushed off the land before it could be settled, and the fact that the Indian always resisted, gave the American colonies their only solidarity. This is shown by the New England Confederation of 1643 which came into being as a result of the Pequot War, and the general fear of a league of Indians to drive out the whites. It comprised the settlements of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven.

The conditions in the interior were such as to make it certain that only the English idea of gradually pushing the Indians westward by means of a fringe of settlements could in any way prevail. The Spaniards in the south and southwest had deliberately come into the country only in order to exploit it; their interest was solely in finding El Dorado, and only a few devoted missionaries among them took any interest in the conditions of the Indian tribes, or tried to promote agricultural settlement. The fact that the Spanish cared nothing for anything but ostentation and conquest gave a superficial veneer of European civilization to their chief centres of settlement, but left the wilderness practically untouched between them. In fact, the Spanish attitude of complete exploitation helped in the long run the Indian cause, because the Spanish conquerors did not scruple to mingle their blood with that of the Indian captives with the result that a mixed race soon uprose, largely Indian in outlook, and ferociously independent, which was destined later to give endless trouble to the Spaniards themselves as to the people of the United States. And as the white race pushed westward, and the evidences of mineral wealth increased, while the prospective returns from agriculture correspondingly diminished, something of the Spanish attitude was naturally assimilated by the Anglo-Saxon pioneer stock, with the result that the Spanish philosophy of reckless daring and lazy indifference became the basis of the cowboy and “bad man” type of the far West. The French had scarcely done better; except for a few settlements of fisherfolk in Canada, they had contented themselves with building a chain of trading posts about the Great Lakes and the chief tributaries of the Mississippi, and had become a breed of trappers and fur-traders. They too had no race prejudice against intermingling their blood with the Indians. Thus, the idea of the English invaders to conquer by means of complete settlement and assimilation of the land to the forms of English culture was inevitably the only path by which the land could become permanently what is known in America as “a white man’s country”; but even in their case, as it happened, something of the Indian outlook and social system inevitably entered and modified the English colonial forms of life. This was due to religious as well as economic differences. The middle-class, mercantile, dissenting fanaticism of New England instinctively despised the planter aristocracy, strongly episcopalian and conservative, of Virginia and the Carolinas; the planter aristocracy equally hated the pioneer squatter type that developed in the valleys beyond the Blue Ridge; and this division of sentiment between the various sections of the community was destined to run like a discordant thread throughout the warp and woof of all later American life. It corresponded roughly to the long-standing tribal antagonisms of the dispossessed Indian tribes. Nor was this all. The investigations of American anthropologists have conclusively shown that the children of European immigrants, born in America, tend to take Indian characteristics, a taller stature and a more powerful physical development than their parents. Most notably is this the case in the change of head form. The Indian head with its high cheek-bones, heavy jaw, sloping forehead, and great development of the back and base of the skull, recurs, according to Professor Franz Boas, even in the children of immigrants who have only lived for a few months in America. So great is the influence of climate, and perhaps also of diet, upon the naturally conservative, slow-changing Anglo-Saxon. Moreover in the settling of America, the Celtic side of the English genius strongly manifested itself; and a considerable portion of the population, in the Southern colonies at least, were Celtic in type and in sympathy. The Germanic tradition of the town-meeting and the local assembly was curiously crossed with the Scots-Irish tradition of the family feud and the local uprising.

We have now to compare this growth of the American settlements with the growth of the Egyptian social system, as set out in our first chapter. In the loose confederation of the geographically separate colonies, we have a parallel to the division of the Egyptian territory into separate nomes, under the sway of different tribes. In the rivalry between Upper and Lower Egypt, we have a rivalry akin to the rivalry between the Northern and the Southern colonies. In the shrewd practical pragmatic realism of the American frontiersmen, we have something that recalls the lack of space-feeling, the pastoral and agricultural conventions that inform Egyptian art. Even in the respect that the American colonies were to show for the royal charter, the legal document, the written word, we have much that recalls to mind the superstitious respect with which all the Egyptians regarded their hieroglyphic writing. Only a Pharaoh is needed to complete the picture, but the American colonies could not produce a Pharaoh, nor a priestly cult to support him; because instead of the single valley of the Nile, they were pushing up twenty great rivers; instead of a single dominant religion, they had a dozen different ones to choose from.

3

As we have already seen, Ivan III, who became the independent ruler of Moscow in 1462, and in 1472 married Zoë (who later took the name of Sophia), the niece of the last Christian ruler of Constantinople, was the first sovereign of Russia whose power became so important as to make some impression on the course of Western European History. He was the first to take the title of Sovereign of All Russia, and Czar, and his reign lasting down to 1505 is the record of his struggle to make that title good. In order to do so, he first had to deal with the Golden Horde of the heathen Tartars, encamped for three centuries on the lower Volga; but this power, which had continually kept Russia in subjection, was now breaking up of itself, thanks to internal dissensions about succession with the Tartars of the Crimea. Ivan’s chief enemies lay in fact to the westward, in the great military and feudal powers of Poland and Lithuania.

These two powers had acted largely together ever since 1386. In each case the country was ruled by an independent sovereign, supported by great feudal nobles. These nobles, whether as bishops, barons whose castles commanded the trade-routes, landowners commanding the loyalty of hundreds of serfs, were one and all jealous of any independent action on the part of the king. And inasmuch as the sovereign in each country depended entirely on their support in the case of war, and the Tartar menace no less affected the security of Lithuania and of Poland than that of Russia, the stability of both countries depended on the continued loyalty and bravery, and the lack of inner causes of friction, among the gentry themselves. This gentry, the _szlachta_, was world-famous for its pride and fighting spirit. During the centuries that followed the downfall of the old principality of Kiev in 1226, the Lithuanian knights, backed by Poland, had absorbed the richest and most fertile portion of Russia, the plain of the Dnieper, including Smolensk and Kiev itself. To the north lay two independent mercantile commonwealths, important centres of trade between the Urals to eastward, and the Hansa towns of the Baltic to westward: Novgorod and Pskov. These were ruled by their own town councils of nobles, or boyars; they were more disposed to be friendly to Poland or Lithuania than to Moscow. Against them no less than these two usurping powers, Ivan III and his successor Basil III who died in 1533, had to make war, in order to recover that which he regarded as his lost patrimony: Russia itself.

The process that these princes inaugurated was completed by the accession to the throne of Ivan III’s grandson in 1533, the most extraordinary and tragic of all Russian rulers, known to later history as Ivan the Terrible. During his long reign of forty-nine years the whole system of complete autocratic government, resting ultimately on the will of the Czar alone, that ruled Russia outwardly and inwardly down to the advent of the Bolsheviks to power in 1917, came into existence. When he came to the throne, his predecessors had already won back the Dnieper territory as far as Smolensk from Lithuania, but this was not enough. If the principality of Moscow, which now stretched from the Black Sea to the shores of the Gulf of Finland, and to the Urals, was to develop into a power capable of imposing its will on Europe, it must have access to the Baltic. The mineral wealth of the Urals, the sturgeon from the lower Volga, the furs and hides of the forest belt, were in as great demand now by Sweden and the Hansa Confederacy as the ancient products of Constantinople and the Levant that had penetrated through the same territory in the Middle Ages had been. Unfortunately the outlet to the Baltic lay through Livonia which was Polish territory; and Poland and the Hansa knights, their allies, were not disposed to let the Moscow Czars have sole control over this trade route. Under Ivan IV, the attention of Muscovy turned from Lithuania to Poland, and later to Sweden, which held Esthonia, the other outlet to the Baltic, and a struggle ensued which went on till 1582, ending in a complete check to the ambitions of the Moscow rulers. The outlet to the Baltic Sea and accordingly to a position where Russia could treat with the powers of Europe, as an independent equal, was not to be granted for a full century. Meantime, during this same reign, the Crimean Tartars who had succeeded the Golden Horde, and who had been friendly enough to support Ivan IV’s predecessor in his Lithuanian wars, became again hostile and turned to close alliance with the dreaded Turks who had effectively closed the Black Sea outlet. As late as 1574, Moscow itself was raided and burned by a force of 120,000, who took away over a hundred thousand captives. Although the Muscovy Czars now controlled the whole resources of the country from the frontier of Siberia to the Polish plain, they were powerless until by establishing sea-contact with Europe, they could obtain in exchange for their fish, furs and minerals, weapons, munitions, and an army on the European model to combat their enemies to the south and east.

This necessity for finding an outlet to the sea controlled all of Russia’s later historical policy, as the necessity of warding off interference from overseas controlled the whole policy of the dawning American colonies. The necessity in each case was dictated by geographical situation, no less than by sociological conditions. A glance at the map will show that Russia is, strictly speaking, a country without a coastline, whose three outlets to the Ocean, through the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the White Sea, lie always at the mercy either of hostile powers or of the elements. On the other hand, America lies completely open on the Atlantic seaboard. There is entry through a score of open rivers and bays, and the ocean-path being the way by which settlement was made and maintained, it is easy to see how much the colonists (who were in continual conflict with the English crown over their scarcely won and jealously guarded liberties) longed to be able to close the way of access behind them; or only keep it open for those who would agree with their semi-agricultural, semi-nomad spirit of independence. But if we turn from this picture to the map of Russia, it is equally easy to see how, if the whole power of Muscovy was not to fall apart, and the country to revert to being in part a conquest of hostile Poland, in part a mere nomad dependency of Tartary, it was necessary to keep a sea-route open for the marketing of Muscovy’s products, and also necessary to enlist all the European aid possible in improving the general backwardness of the country. So as early as 1547 we find Ivan the Terrible sending the Saxon Schlitte as emissary to Europe to obtain artisans and scholars; many of the churches of Moscow itself were the work of Italian architects; and the history of Ivan’s later negotiations with England for a commercial treaty (which as he said “weighed heavier on him than tribute”) and even for a bride, in the person of one of Elizabeth’s maids of honour, is well known. In order to maintain an insecure position between the two dangers of the Tartar Caspian and the Teutonic Baltic, the autocratic ruler of Muscovy had to call in the aid of Western Europe--and with it, the subversive radicalism that Western Europe was to later develop. In order to maintain their own insecure position between the danger of an Indian Confederation to westward, and the danger of Crown interference from overseas, the independently spirited colonists had to sink their own radical differences of outlook and religion and become artificially centralised about the most powerful classes in the community which were the merchants and landowners. Thus the two countries, so much akin in climate and physical features, and even in the highly mixed nomad population that inhabited them--not to mention the perhaps common Mongolian parentage of the underlying Tartar and Indian--early took the path of polar opposition in temperament. The one became more and more autocratic and despotic as the other became more and more democratic and egalitarian. In the one, the outlying districts were always swayed by a centralised power; but as this power depended on military conquest, loot and tribute for its maintenance, it was in continual danger of collapse. In the other, the separate colonies formed a loose confederation that would be likely to collapse of itself from without if it could not find a centre.

Here in this opposition of social organisation we find what in Russia chiefly recalls Ancient Babylonia. Older than Egypt--for recent archæological researches into the Sumerian civilisation have left no doubt on that point--Babylonia was at first ruled by independent city-dynasties, as was Russia during the Varangian period. It only achieved unity under the dominance of a single city, which geographically stood at its centre, and whose local god-cult was made, probably under military pressure, the official state religion. Here we have a parallel to the position of Moscow and to the development of the official Russian church under Ivan the Terrible. This unity could only be maintained so long as the central sovereign was a man of powerful and strong personality: a Hammurabi or a Sargon. This condition also obtained in Russia, as anyone can see by consulting the next chapter of this book. The only thing in short lacking to this parallel is that Babylonia-Assyria achieved its own symbolic mythology, a symbolic mythology of great importance to the development of the Hebrews, and consequently of Christianity; while early Muscovy, and the later Russian Empire, only borrowed the essential basis of theirs from the already formulated system of Eastern Christianity. But this failure of the central intelligence of the Slav to distinguish independently the immediate needs of his own temporal destiny from the limitless drift of eternity, is characteristic; its psychological implications run like a red thread throughout the entire course of later Russian history.