543. Present-day peoples and their governments.— There are many different governments as well as many peoples in this region. Portugal is a republic; Spain, Italy, and Greece are monarchies, each with a king, and a parliament hav ing less power than the British or a Scandinavian parliament. Greece gained greatly when the men who wrote the Treaty of Ver sailles, after the World War, tried to give all peoples the chance to rule themselves. For about a hundred years only that part of the Greek race which lived in Greece had been independent; the rest of the Greeks in Macedonia, Asia Minor, and on the islands of the /Egean, had been ruled by the Turk. Now, after more than two thousand years of foreign rule, nearly all the Greeks are united under their own king. We have already studied the government of the Serbs, of theAlbanians (Sec. 526), and of the French. (Sec. 458.) 544. The Spaniards, Italians, and Greeks are gay and merry people. They are fond of music, and many of them love to wear bright-colored clothing. On holidays and feast days the people often sing and dance out of doors. Many towns or districts have special styles of clothing, and some of the people would no more think of changing the style of their clothes than they would think of changing their flag. It is believed that the beauty of the region has helped to inspire many painters, sculptors, and archi tects whose works have helped to make Greece, Italy, and Spain famous.
The Spaniards and Portuguese suffer from the results of their wrong ideas about work. Many of them still think that a gentleman should neither work, nor have anything to do with a factory, a store, or a farm. Hence most of the work in these countries is done by the uneducated and, therefore, the less efficient people. The ablest people' of Spain and Portugal try to enter one of the professions, or govern ment em ploy, or the army. If they cannot do this they too often waste their time sitting about the cafés doing nothing. These peo ple could double the products of their coun try if they had sensible ideas about work.
545. Arabs.—On the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean are the Arabs —tall, solemn, dark-skinned people, most of whom dress in long, white, flowing robes. (Fig. 447).
Most of the people of Palestine and Syria are Arabs, although a part of them are Jews. Palestine is now under the protec tion of England and it is planned that it shall again become a Jewish state.
546. Peoples of North Africa.—In Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco there is a mixture of races. The Arab lives in the lowlands. The highlands are still held by the ancient Berbers. (Sec. 577.) In 1830 France began to take possession of Algeria. In 1881 she began to take Tunis, and a few years ago Spain and France began to take possession of Morocco.
The conquest has required much fighting, but the coasts are controlled by the armies of France and Spain, and gradually these Europeans are taking town after town in the interior, and are stopping the wars be tween the different native tribes which have fought each other for so many centuries.
Those parts of the Mediterranean Region that were ruled by the Turk or the Arab can double their products and their population if they can have a more just and honest government, better education for the people, and scientific methods in agriculture.
547. Climate.—You remember (Sec. 65) that the United States lies in the zone of pre vailing westerly winds. Europe does also.
Just as California has winter rains and sum mer drought, so has the Mediterranean Region, and for the same reason. (Secs. 182, 193.) We may think of this region as the California of the Old World, so similar are the two regions in climate and products. In southern California, we found that the forests grew only on the higher mountains. It is the same in the Mediterranean Region. Frosts are com mon in winter, but snow comes seldom. In spring the land is green with grass. In summer the sun shines without mercy for days and weeks and months. The grass withers; almost the whole region is brown. In summer, dust rises from the roads and settles on everything. Pasturing ani mals climb far away to the mountain pastures to get fresh grass. The heat of the summer noon is so intense that the people have formed the habit of stop ping work for a few hours in the middle of the day. They rest in the shade and refresh themselves by tak ing a nap, which the Spanish call a siesta.
548. Warm sheltered nooks. — The mountain walls to the north of the Mediterranean keep off the cold winds of winter, and therefore places at the southern base of the moun tains are warm in the same way that the sunny side of a house wall is warm on a cold, windy, winter day.
In these sheltered nooks many crops can be grown much farther north than one would expect to find them.
(1) One of the warm nooks is south of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in southern Spain. It contains the garden spots of Malaga and Almeria, rich in fruit like Pasadena (Sec.180).
(2) Another warm sheltered nook is the Riviera, along the Gulf of Genoa, in Italy. It is on the express-train route from Paris to Rome, and has become a famous pleasure region. Many of the people from north Europe and elsewhere spend part of the winter there, much as our people visit Florida and California. The little patches of land that lie between the mountains and the sea are clustered thick with villages, gar dens, and hotels.