The transformation of Roman society when the recivilization of western Europe began had made it what is called °feudal.° The slaves had become serfs organized in co-opera tive agricultural communities; the great Roman landlords had become fighting nobles; from this type of society in all its changes, onward until the Revolution, and through the Revolu tion to our own day, Gaul through every vicis situde has remained the pivot upon which the mind of western Europe has turned. And if at the present moment French armor plating, French road making, the French system of fortification, the French organization of local government, French weights and measures, French field artillery, French submarines, French motor cars, French historians, and the dual polarity of French philosophy, Catholic and anti-Catholic, have imposed themselves upon Europe, this modern accident is but in the general and normal tradition of an his torical condition necessary to western Europe.
Apart from these human and therefore most important factors, certain merely material, lim iting and therefore inferior factors must be considered. These will be discovered no less than those to conspire in favor of this perma nent position of France.
Of material influences in Europe the two most considerable contrasts are the contrast between the northern and the southern type of climate, and the contrast between the tidal ocean and the non-tidal Mediterranean.
A vast number of characteristics may be connected with either of these physical con trasts, and with either portion of each. That materialism which was the dominating note of the last generation and which is but slowly passing regarded climate and such material considerations as we are now discussing as the principal cause of all the differences that could be discovered by the historian. No man would now lend himself to such crudities. The tribal system does indeed roughly contrast with the municipal, in the same way that north does against south, and those who use such terms as °Latin peoples,° etc., conceal beneath their ignorance an appreciation of certain obvious truths which may be roughly connected with climatic conditions. But apart from such speculations, certain very definite material re sults follow from the pair of contrasts I have mentioned. Thus. the rivers of northern Europe are highways; they are usually placid and broad and fairly deep, and are penetrated by the tide far within the plains of that region. Even Scandinavia, which has no such rivers, enjoys the corresponding presence of fjords.
The Rhine, the Elbo, the Chelif, the Tiber, the Po, the Adige, are net highways. The Seine, the Rhine, the Thames and the Trent are. Again, the seaport in a tidal sea, to be of value, must be chosen in a more particulai locality than in a tideless one. Again, the north gives us longer if not fiercer storms. Again the beach in a heavy tide is less suitable for land ing; a heavier type of vessel tends to develop, and with it the possibility of further adventures.
It is evident also that with difference of climate a different architecture, a different agriculture and different social habits will arise; and my point is that the contrast between the two zones in Europe is normally a sharp con trast. Nowhere does one feel it more strongly than in the passage from Switzerland of the German sort over or through the Saint Gothard to Airolo. Between the two points which are but nine or ten miles apart, the whole of life appears to change.
Now Gaul affords the obvious link between these halves of civilization, and, typically enough, Paris, the capital, is in its aspect now a Northern and now a Southern town. It was southern under the Roman occupation, grad ually grew northern again during the Dark Ages, and during the Middle Ages was purely Gothic without a vestige of the South about it (except that it was just on the limit of the wine-drinking country). Then again with Renaissance it became again gradually the Southern thing which it is to-day.
Again, on a modern battleship, if it be Ger man or English, you will have only the North ern type of man, accustomed as a rule to the tidal sea. with all the quality of seamanship developed under those conditions, while on an Italian battleship you will have men brought up as boys with the latine sail, the absence of tidal currents, the steeper seas, the sudden gust and the long calms of the Mediterranean. On a French battleship you will have both types of men.
Consider again climate not by meaningless scientific terms of measurement, but as it is expressed in the common experience of life. In the South frost is rare, snow is rare; the long months of cold which render life difficult are not known save in the mountains. The south of Gaul is in this condition. It builds with a flat roof, it knows nothing of skating nor of the preservation of plants through the winter, nor of the isolation which cold else where has produced in the past through long periods of the year. In the North all those conditions are as common a part of life as they are in Holland or in England.