[Sidenote:  Land and sea opposed.]

Often the forces of land and sea are directly opposed.  If a country’s geographic conditions are favorable to agriculture and offer room for growth of population, the land forces prevail, because man is primarily a terrestrial animal.  Such a country illustrates what Chisholm, with Attic nicety of speech, calls “the influence of bread-power on history,"[14] as opposed to Mahan’s sea-power.  France, like England, had a long coastline, abundant harbors, and an excellent location for maritime supremacy and colonial expansion; but her larger area and greater amount of fertile soil put off the hour of a redundant population such as England suffered from even in Henry VIII’s time.  Moreover, in consequence of steady continental expansion from the twelfth to the eighteenth century and a political unification which made its area more effective for the support of the people, the French of Richelieu’s time, except those from certain districts, took to the sea, not by national impulse as did the English and Dutch, but rather under the spur of government initiative.  They therefore achieved far less in maritime trade and colonization.[15] In ancient Palestine, a long stretch of coast, poorly equipped with harbors but accessible to the rich Mediterranean trade, failed to offset the attraction of the gardens and orchards of the Jezreel Valley and the pastures of the Judean hills, or to overcome the land-born predilections and aptitudes of the desert-bred Jews.  Similarly, the river-fringed peninsulas of Virginia and Maryland, opening wide their doors to the incoming sea, were powerless, nevertheless, to draw the settlers away from the riotous productiveness of the wide tidewater plains.  Here again the geographic force of the land outweighed that of the sea and became the dominant factor in directing the activities of the inhabitants.

The two antagonistic geographic forces may be both of the land, one born of a country’s topography, the other of its location.  Switzerland’s history has for centuries shown the conflict of two political policies, one a policy of cantonal and communal independence, which has sprung from the division of that mountainous country into segregated districts, and the other one of political centralization, dictated by the necessity for cooeperation to meet the dangers of Switzerland’s central location mid a circle of larger and stronger neighbors.  Local geographic conditions within the Swiss territory fixed the national ideal as a league of “sovereign cantons,” to use the term of their constitution, enjoying a maximum of individual rights and privileges, and tolerating a minimum of interference from the central authority.  Here was physical dismemberment coupled with mutual political repulsion.  But a location at the meeting place of French, German, Austrian and Italian frontiers laid upon them the distasteful necessity of union within to withstand aggressions crowding upon them from without.  Hence the growth of the Swiss constitution since 1798 has meant a fight of the Confederation against the canton in behalf of general rights, expanding the functions of the central government, contracting those of canton and commune.[16]