This uniformity is advantageous to early development in a small plain, because of the juxtaposition of contrasted environments, but is stultifying to national life in an immense expanse of monotony like that of Russia.  Here sameness leaves its stamp on everything.  Language is differentiated with only two dialects, that of the Great Russians of the north and the Little Russians of the southern steppes, who were so long exposed to Tartar influences.  Most other languages of Europe, though confined to much smaller areas, show far greater diversity.[1042] While the Russian of Kazan or Archangel can converse readily with the citizen of Riga or St. Petersburg, Germans from highland Bavaria and Swabia are scarcely intelligible to Prussian and Mecklenberger.  And whereas Germany a few decades ago could count over a hundred different kinds of national dress or Tracht, Great Russia alone, with six times the area, had only a single type with perhaps a dozen slight variations.  Leroy-Beaulieu comments upon this eternal sameness.  “The cities are all alike; so are the peasants, in looks, habits, in mode of life.  In no country do people resemble one another more; no other country is so free from political complexity, those oppositions in type and character, which even yet we encounter in Italy and Spain, in France and Germany.  The nation is made in the likeness of the country; it shows the same unity, we might say the same monotony, as the plains on which it dwells.”

[Sidenote:  Influence of soils in low plains.]

The more flat and featureless a lowland is, the more important become even the slightest surface irregularities which can draw faint dividing lines among the population.  Here a gentle land-swell, river, lake, forest, or water-soaked moor serves as boundary.  Especially apparent is the differentiating influence of difference of soils.  Gravel and alluvium, sand and clay, chalk and more recent marine sediments, emphasize small geographical differences throughout the North German lowland and its extension through Belgium and Holland; here various soils differentiate the distribution of population.  In the Netherlands we find the Frisian element of the Dutch people inhabiting chiefly the clay soils and low fens of the west and northwest, the Saxon in the diluvial tracts of the east, and the Frankish in the river clays and diluvium of the south.  All the types have maintained their differences of dialect, styles of houses, racial character, dress and custom.[1043] The only distinctive region in the great western lowland of France, which comprises over half of the country, is Brittany, individualized in its people and history by its peninsula form, its remote western location, and its infertile soil of primary rocks.  Within the sedimentary trough of the Paris Basin, a slight Cretacean platform like the meadow land of Perche[1044] (200 to 300 meters elevation) introduces an area of thin population devoted to horse and cattle raising in close proximity to the teeming