A report on the situation in the Caucasus, addressed to Czar Nicholas in 1829, contains an epitome of the history of mountain peoples.  It runs as follows:  “The Circassians bar out Russia from the south, and may at their pleasure open or close the passage to the nations of Asia.  At present their intestine dissensions, fostered by Russia, hinder them from uniting under one leader; but it must not be forgotten that, according to traditions religiously preserved among them, the sway of their ancestors extended as far as to the Black Sea. * * * The imagination is appalled at the consequence which their union under one leader might have for Russia, which has no other bulwark against their ravages than a military line, too extensive to be very strong."[1377] Here we have the whole story—­a mountain people pillaging the lowlands, exercising a dangerous and embarrassing control over the passes, and thereby calling down upon themselves conquest from without; weakened by a contracting territory within the highlands and a shrinking area of plunder without, doomed to eventual defeat by the yet more ominous weakness of political dismemberment.

[Sidenote:  Individualism and independence]

Mountain tribes are always like a pack of hounds on the leash, each straining in a different direction.  Wall-like barriers, holding them apart for centuries, make them almost incapable of concerted action, and restive under any authority but their own.  Clan and tribal societies, feudal and republican rule, always on a small scale, characterize mountain sociology.  All these are attended by an exaggerated individualism and its inevitable concomitant, the blood feud.  Mountain policy tends to diminish the power of the central authority to the vanishing point, giving individualism full scope.  Social and economic retardation, caused by extreme isolation and encouraged by protected location, tend to keep the social body small and loosely organized.  Every aspect of environment makes against social integration.

The broken relief of ancient Greece produced the small city state; but in the rugged mountains of Arcadia the principle of physical and political subdivision went farther.  Here, for four centuries after the first Olympiad, the population, poorest and rudest of all Greece, was split up into petty hill villages, each independent of the other.[1378] The need of resisting Spartan aggression led for the first time, in 371 B.C., to the formation of a commune Arcadum, a coalescence of all the fractional groups constituting the Arcadian folk;[1379] but even this union, effected only by the masterly manipulation of the Theban Epaminondas, proved short-lived and incomplete.  What was true of the Arcadian villages was true of the city states of Greece.  The geography of the land instilled into them the principle of political aloofness, except when menaced by foreign conquest.  Cooperation is efficient only when it springs from a habit of