The law of the resolutions of forces applies in geography as in the movement of planets.  Failure to recognize this fact often enables superficial critics of anthropo-geography to make a brave show of argument.  The analysis of these interacting forces and of their various combinations requires careful investigation.  Let us consider the interplay of the forces of land and sea apparent in every country with a maritime location.  In some cases a small, infertile, niggardly country conspires with a beckoning sea to drive its sons out upon the deep; in others a wide territory with a generous soil keeps its well-fed children at home and silences the call of the sea.  In ancient Phoenicia and Greece, in Norway, Finland, New England, in savage Chile and Tierra del Fuego, and the Indian coast district of British Columbia and southern Alaska, a long, broken shoreline, numerous harbors, outlying islands, abundant timber for the construction of ships, difficult communication by land, all tempted the inhabitants to a seafaring life.  While the sea drew, the land drove in the same direction.  There a hilly or mountainous interior putting obstacles in the way of landward expansion, sterile slopes, a paucity of level, arable land, an excessive or deficient rainfall withholding from agriculture the reward of tillage—­some or all of these factors combined to compel the inhabitants to seek on the sea the livelihood denied by the land.  Here both forces worked in the same direction.

In England conditions were much the same, and from the sixteenth century produced there a predominant maritime development which was due not solely to a long indented coastline and an exceptional location for participating in European and American trade.  Its limited island area, its large extent of rugged hills and chalky soil fit only for pasturage, and the lack of a really generous natural endowment,[12] made it slow to answer the demands of a growing population, till the industrial development of the nineteenth century exploited its mineral wealth.  So the English turned to the sea—­to fish, to trade, to colonize.  Holland’s conditions made for the same development.  She united advantages of coastline and position with a small infertile territory, consisting chiefly of water-soaked grazing lands.  When at the zenith of her maritime development, a native authority estimated that the soil of Holland could not support more than one-eighth of her inhabitants.  The meager products of the land had to be eked out by the harvest of the sea.  Fish assumed an important place in the diet of the Dutch, and when a process of curing it was discovered, laid the foundation of Holland’s export trade.  A geographical location central to the Baltic and North Sea countries, and accessible to France and Portugal, combined with a position at the mouth of the great German rivers made it absorb the carrying trade of northern Europe.[13] Land and sea cooeperated in its maritime development.