LITMIR.BIZ

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the country which to-day occupies the major part of the inhabitable portion of North America is indicated the twofold nature of its history; for the story of the United States may evidently be approached, either from the standpoint of a federal nation, or from that of its component political units. These units, although in themselves separate states, are geographically divided from one another, for the most part, by boundaries which are purely artificial. Natural frontiers consist of the sea, deserts, mountains, rivers, and the now almost obsolete ones of forests and swamps. A glance at the map shows that such natural barriers are only a negligible part of the boundaries between our various states and territories. Rivers alone form an exception, and these, for several reasons, are the least satisfactory for the purpose.¹ Were the federal tie dissolved, and these now united commonwealths to become completely independent, and possibly hostile, the artificial character of their limits would at once become obvious.

      From this it has followed, as settlement has gradually spread over the continent, bringing innumerable communities into existence, that these have tended to group themselves into sections, united by common modes of thought, ways of life, and economic needs. Histories of the individual states are almost as arbitrarily localized as the histories of the counties within them; but the story of any of the sections into which the country has divided from time to time possesses an organic unity created by the forces of life itself.

      Some of these divisions have tended to remain permanent, while others have passed with the development of the country. During the colonial period, when the English inhabited only the comparatively narrow strip of land between the sea and the mountain-barrier of the Appalachian system, the colonists fell into three natural groups,—the New England, the Middle, and the Southern,—determined by climatic, economic, and cultural conditions. These factors, operating with others somewhat more fortuitous, made the distinctions both lasting and marked, the extreme northern and southern groups exhibiting their differences more clearly than the intermediate one lying between them.

      When the frontier was extended west of the mountain-barrier,—and, indeed, on a smaller scale, even earlier,—another grouping came into existence, that of East and West, or old settlement and frontier. This division was also to persist, with an ever-enlarging East and an ever-retreating West. If the economic and political ideas of these new sections were to remain somewhat sharply contrasted, the distinctions between the original extreme eastern groups were also continued, like lengthening shadows across the mountain ridges, and the whole country was to find itself aligned in two hostile groupings in the most tragic division that it has yet had to face—that between the North and the South.

      In the New England group we have one which, in spite of minor differences, is unusually homogeneous. Not only are the boundaries between the six states which now form it negligible, but the section, as a whole, is a geographical unit, within which a common life, based upon generally similar economic, political, and religious foundations, has constituted a distinct cultural strain in the life of the nation. The “New England idea” and the “New England type” have been as sharply defined as they have been persistent; and, if, in our own day, they seem, to some extent, to be passing, their influence may be no less living because spread broadcast throughout the whole land, and absorbed into the common national life. Effective natural boundaries, defining a limited area, are of determining influence in fostering the life of primitive peoples or of civilized colonies. Diffusion over an unlimited space, in the one case, tends to weaken the hold on the land and the growth of the state, while, in the other, it greatly retards the development of those elements that make for civilized life. Aside from other factors, the possession by the English, in the settlement period, of a limited and protected area, naturally restricted by the sea and the mountains, resulted, speaking broadly, in the building up of thickly settled, compact colonies as contrasted with the boundless empire of the French, opened to them by their control of the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence rivers. It is noteworthy that, of the great river-highways leading to the interior of the continent,—the St. Lawrence, the Hudson-Mohawk, and the Mississippi,—none was at first possessed by the English, who had everywhere, unwittingly but fortunately, selected portions of the coast where their natural tendency to expand was temporarily held in check.

The Appalachian barrier, which thus served to protect and to concentrate the efforts of the English, may be said to extend from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Alabama, coming nearest to the coast in passing across New York. In the northern part of Maine, where the mountains descend to a low water-shed, enormous forests, with no easy river-route facilitating peaceful or warlike travel, formed almost as effective a barrier; while passage southward, along the coast, was impeded during the early period by the presence of a foreign nation, the Dutch. There were, indeed, certain narrow entrances to this enclosed territory from the north, as the larger streams, flowing southward from the water-shed along the Canadian boundary, could be utilized, in connection with those flowing northward from its other slope to the St. Lawrence. The many falls along their courses, entailing laborious carries in the dense forest, together with the necessary longer ones across the height of land, made these routes more suitable, however, for the military needs of savages than for the movement of troops in large bodies, or for the purposes of trade.² The main passage for travel and transport from Canada to the south lay wholly to the west of New England, by way of the Richelieu River and Lake Champlain, which latter well deserved its Indian name of “key to the country.”

      Within the boundaries thus roughly defined and the sea, lies a land said to contain a greater diversity of natural features than any other of equal area in the United States. To the west and north are the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, the Green Mountains of Vermont, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and the scattered peaks of Maine. From a height of fifteen hundred to two thousand feet at the base of the mountains, a gently sloping upland descends gradually to Long Island Sound and the Atlantic. Although, at first glance, its surface seems to present only a confused mass of low-lying hills, their tops are seen to show a marked uniformity of level as they gradually slope downward toward the south and east; and geological evidence makes it almost certain that, at one time, this region was a plain, resulting from the wearing down, by denudation, of an earlier mountain range. Subsequent alterations in its surface, due to erosion and other factors, gave rise to the present uplands and lowlands, which have been of determining influence in the peopling of the section, the rugged uplands offering so hard a subsistence that they were nowhere willingly chosen for settlement so long as land might still be had in the lowlands.

Although, largely in the eighteenth century, economic pressure in the happier valleys forced many farmers to move to the hills, the opening of the West drew many of, them to the prairies during the following century, and the population, like water which had been forced above its level, slowly drained off the uplands again, through the sluiceway of the Mohawk Valley. To-day, dying hill-towns, abandoned farms, and the yet unpeopled wilderness of northern Maine, tell the story of this struggle against geographical conditions.³

      This formation of upland and valley extends to the shore-line of Sound and ocean, the broad coastal plain, which is so marked a feature from New Jersey southward, being almost wholly absent in New England. This is probably due to a subsidence of the shore, which allowed the ocean to flow back over part of the land, and which also explains the many hundred islands off the coast of Maine, and the drowned river valleys along the Sound. So numerous are the islands, bays, and headlands of the rugged coast north of the Isles of Shoals, that they expand the two hundred and thirty miles of shore to nearly three thousand, if all are included in the measurement. In this section, also, there are many good harbors, particularly that of Portland, but the coast is so greatly dissected as to make land communication along it very difficult; while the small boats, which partially served the needs of commerce and travel in early days, were seriously interfered with by the great rise and fall of the tides. Both these conditions tended to isolate the colonial settlements and hinder their development. The upland country, with its poorer soil and more difficult conditions of life, also approaches nearer to the sea in Maine and New Hampshire than farther south, so that, although Portsmouth, too, has a fine harbor, those states have always been more thinly settled than the others.

      The coast of Massachusetts is less rugged, but more varied. South of the granite headland of Cape Ann, the shores of Boston Bay are still rocky and irregular; but both shores

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