Carolina, are peopled by the purest English stock in the United States, descendants of the backwoodsmen of the late eighteenth century.  Difficulty of access and lack of arable land have combined to discourage immigration.  In consequence, foreign elements, including the elsewhere ubiquitous negro, are wanting, except along the few railroads which in recent years have penetrated this country.  Here survive an eighteenth century English, Christmas celebrated on Twelfth Night, the spinning wheel, and a belief in Joshua’s power to arrest the course of the sun.[75]

An easily accessible land is geographically hospitable to all new-comers, facilitates the mingling of peoples, the exchange of commodities and ideas.  The amalgamation of races in such regions depends upon the similarity or diversity of the ethnic elements and the duration of the common occupation.  The broad, open valley of the Danube from the Black Sea to Vienna contains a bizarre mixture of several stocks—­Turks, Bulgarians, various families of pure Slavs, Roumanians, Hungarians, and Germans.  These elements are too diverse and their occupation of the valley too recent for amalgamation to have advanced very far as yet.  The maritime plain and open river valleys of northern France show a complete fusion of the native Celts with the Saxons, Franks, and Normans who have successively drifted into the region, just as the Teutonic and scanter Slav elements have blended in the Baltic plains from the Elbe to the Vistula.

[Sidenote:  Change of habitat.]

Here are four different classes of geographic influences, all which may become active in modifying a people when it changes its habitat.  Many of the characteristics acquired in the old home still live on, or at best yield slowly to the new environment.  This is especially true of the direct physical and psychical effects.  But a country may work a prompt and radical change in the social organization of an immigrant people by the totally new conditions of economic life which it presents.  These may be either greater wealth or poverty of natural resources than the race has previously known, new stimulants or deterrents to commerce and intercourse, and new conditions of climate which affect the efficiency of the workman and the general character of production.  From these a whole complex mass of secondary effects may follow.

The Aryans and Mongols, leaving their homes in the cool barren highlands of Central Asia where nature dispensed her gifts with a miserly hand, and coming down to the hot, low, fertile plains of the Indian rivers, underwent several fundamental changes in the process of adaptation to their new environment.  An enervating climate did its work in slaking their energies; but more radical still was the change wrought by the contrast of poverty and abundance, enforced asceticism and luxury, presented by the old and new home.  The restless, tireless shepherds became a sedentary, agricultural people; the abstemious nomads,—­spare, sinewy, strangers to indulgence—­became a race of rulers, revelling in luxury, lording it over countless subjects; finally, their numbers increased rapidly, no longer kept down by the scant subsistence of arid grasslands and scattered oases.