efficiency, power, and permanence, and especially in that intellectual force which feeds upon the nutritious food of wide comparisons.  Every great movement which has widened the geographical outlook of a people, such as the Crusades in the Middle Ages, or the colonization of the Americas, has applied an intellectual and economic stimulus.  The expanding field of advancing history has therefore been an essential concomitant and at the same time a driving force in the progress of every people and of the world.

[Sidenote:  Man’s increasing dependence upon nature.]

Since progress in civilization involves an increasing exploitation of natural advantages and the development of closer relations between a land and its people, it is an erroneous idea that man tends to emancipate himself more and more from the control of the natural conditions forming at once the foundation and environment of his activities.  On the contrary, he multiplies his dependencies upon nature;[124] but while increasing their sum total, he diminishes the force of each.  There lies the gist of the matter.  As his bonds become more numerous, they become also more elastic.  Civilization has lengthened his leash and padded his collar, so that it does not gall; but the leash is never slipped.  The Delaware Indians depended upon the forests alone for fuel.  A citizen of Pennsylvania, occupying the former Delaware tract, has the choice of wood, hard or soft coal, coke, petroleum, natural gas, or manufactured gas.  Does this mean emancipation?  By no means.  For while fuel was a necessity to the Indian only for warmth and cooking, and incidentally for the pleasureable excitement of burning an enemy at the stake, it enters into the manufacture of almost every article that the Pennsylvanian uses in his daily life.  His dependence upon nature has become more far-reaching, though less conspicuous and especially less arbitrary.

[Sidenote:  Increase in kind and amount.]

These dependencies increase enormously both in variety and amount.  Great Britain, with its twenty thousand merchant ships aggregating over ten million tons, and its immense import and export trade, finds its harbors vastly more important to-day for the national welfare than in Cromwell’s time, when they were used by a scanty mercantile fleet.  Since the generation of electricity by water-power and its application to industry, the plunging falls of the Scandinavian Mountains, of the Alps of Switzerland, France, and Italy, of the Southern Appalachians and the Cascade Range, are geographical features representing new and unsuspected forms of national capital, and therefore new bonds between land and people in these localities.  Russia since 1844 has built 35,572 miles (57,374 kilometers) of railroad in her European territory, and thereby derived a new benefit from her level plains, which so facilitate the construction and cheap operation of railroads, that they have become in this aspect