same race and within the same Temperate Zone reveals numerous small differences of nature and character, which can be traced back directly or indirectly to climatic differences, and which mount up to a considerable sum total.  The man of the colder habitat is more domestic, stays more in his home.  Though he is not necessarily more moderate or continent than the southerner, he has to pay more for his indulgences, so he is economical in expenditures.  With the southerner it is “easy come, easy go.”  He therefore suffers more frequently in a crisis.  The low cost of living keeps down his wages, so that as a laborer he is poorly paid.  This fact, together with his improvidence, tends to swell the proletariat in warm countries of the Temperate Zone; and though here it does not produce the distressing impression of a proletariat in Dublin or Liverpool or Boston, it is always degrading.  It levels society and economic status downward, while in the cooler countries of the Temperate Zone, the process is upward.  The laborer of the north, owing to his providence and larger profits, which render small economies possible, is constantly recruited into the class of the capitalist.

[Sidenote:  Contrasted temperaments in the same nation.]

Everywhere a cold climate puts a steadying hand on the human heart and brain.  It gives an autumn tinge to life.  Among the folk of warmer lands eternal spring holds sway.  National life and temperament have the buoyancy and thoughtlessness of childhood, its charm and its weakness.  These distinctions and contrasts meet us everywhere.  The southern Chinese, and especially the Cantonese, is more irresponsible and hot-blooded than the Celestial of the north, though the bitter struggle for existence in the over-crowded Kwangtung province has made him quite as industrious; but on his holidays he takes his pleasure in singing, gambling, and various forms of dissipation.  The southern Russian is described as more light-hearted than his kinsman of the bleaker north, though both are touched with the melancholy of the Slav.  In this case, however, the question immediately arises, how far the dweller of the southern wheat lands owes his happy disposition to the easy conditions of life in the fertile Ukraine, as opposed to the fiercer struggle for subsistence in the glaciated lake and forest belt of the north.  Similar distinctions of climate and national temperament exist in the two sections of Germany.  The contrast between the energetic, enterprising, self-contained Saxon of the Baltic lowland and the genial, spontaneous Bavarian or Swabian is conspicuous, though the only geographical advantage possessed by the latter is a warmer temperature attended by a sunnier sky.  He contains in his blood a considerable infusion of the Alpine stock and is therefore racially differentiated from the northern Teuton,[1428] but this hardly accounts for the difference of temperament, because the same Alpine stock is plodding, earnest