THE BUSINESS OF EUROPE The Centers of Activity.—Individual occupations, as well as civiliz tion and business in general have certain centers where their develo ment is especially high. In Europe agriculture, for example, has su a center in northern France from Normandy northeastward along til English Channel to Belgium. A few hundred or a thousand miles awa the intensive farming and market gardening of this region give plat to one-crop agriculture, cattle and sheep raising, irrigation, fishinf and lumbering. In other occupations a similar charge takes place one travels away from the European centers of high developmen Western Germany serves as an illustration of the most highly develope mining communities, for nowhere else is coal more thoroughly utilize( In secondary production England seems to have the strongest claim to be reckoned as the main center, for manufacturing is there developed to an extraordinary degree. Transportation and commerce comprise another great group of activities which are most highly developed in certain centers and decline outward. The Netherlands stand very high in this respect. Such activities as government, religion, science, art, and literature likewise reach their highest development within three or four hundred miles of the Straits of Dover. If the area of greatest activity were not divided among three great nations and several small ones, all speaking different languages and all more or less jealous of one another its supremacy would be still more evident.
The European Center of us consider the agri culture of Normandy, Picardy, Artois, and Flanders, a region extending roughly from Le Havre and Paris on the southwest to Brussels and Bruges on the northeast. In spite of the ravages of war, this Franco Belgian area, no longer than Massachusetts, is one of the fairest districts in the world. The following table shows how many of the crops and animals mapped in Finch and Baker's admirable Geography of the TVorld's produced abundantly in this area. Two stars mean abundant production, one star moderate production, and no star no production worth mentioning. The stars in parentheses after the designation Ill. refer to an area equal to the Franco-Belgian area and extending east and west across the richest part of central Illinois.
The climate of northern France of course forbids the cultivation of many of the thirty-eight products which the experts of the United States Department of Agriculture have included in their atlas of agri culture. Nevertheless, eighteen are raised in great abundance, six in4 moderate abundance, and only fourteen are negligible. In an equal area( in central Illinois, almost the best agricultural region in the United States, twelve are raised abundantly, eight moderately, and eighteen are' negligible. Both regions produce an abundance of wheat, oats, apples, vegetables, horses, cattle, and swine, hut northern France also produces an abundance of eleven other products and central Illinois of only five., The Farms of the Center of noticeable feature of the Franco-Belgian region from Normandy tc Flanders is the luxuriance of the vegetation. In Normandy, according to a local proverb, " grass grows so fast that it pushes up the cattle, and a stick lost in the grass in the evening cannot be found next day." In the interior of Flanders, " thick hedges, rows of trees in imposing avenues, clusters of elms about the houses, groves on the less fertile portions, adorn the countryside, half concealing it beneath a veil of green." The pastures are chiefly meadows where horses, cattle, sheep, and swine are seen at certain seasons. But so intensive is the cultiva tion that much of the year the animals are stall-fed, the crushed fibers of the sugar beet being one of the most nutritious foods. Whether the animals are in the meadows or clustered around the barns, they are always present on practically every farm. The farmers have learned the lesson of preserving the fertility of their land not only by rotating the crops, hut by keeping many animals. Hence, the soil is still rich after hundreds of years of cultivation. Much of the time on a tour among the farms one feels as if riding on park roads through a market garden. There are few ragged edges such as abound in America, no bushy pastures, no desolate " cut-over " hillsides where the forest has been slashed down. Each field is devoted to some useful crop; each patch of trees is carefully cultivated and pruned, the best trees for lumber being cut at intervals without spoiling the young trees that are not yet ready.