THE RACIAL GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE. 485 



therefore, was squarely a question of the old versus the new. By 

 analysis of its results, we may perhaps gain an inkling of the temper 

 of the people. 



Our map herewith denotes by its lightest shades the areas of most 

 advanced modern ideas where the radicalism of the nineteenth-cen- 

 tury type had cut itself loose from all bonds with the past. The 

 opposite extreme, where both politics and religion combined to 

 rejuvenate the conservative party, is tinted black. The intermediate 

 gradation of sentiment is demonstrated by the degrees of light or 

 dark shading. Inspection of this map reveals a certain parallelism 

 with all those that we have studied heretofore. Especially do we 

 note the conservatism of Brittany, Auvergne, and the southwest. 

 It should be said that the apparent conservatism of the most northern 

 departments was due to the local protection-and-free-trade issue, com- 

 plicated by the Boulanger episode. For this reason these manufac- 

 turing centers should be eliminated from our comparison. Savoy 

 and the high Alpine departments also were strongly affected by their 

 proximity to the republican institutions in Switzerland. We must 

 allow for that fact also. A curious contrast, ever persistent in all our 

 ethnic or social maps, is that which is manifested between the coast 

 strip along the Mediterranean and the mountains north of it. A 

 light strip of radicalism extends all along the sea and up the Rhone 

 Valley, setting apart Auvergne from Savoy. Whether this radical- 

 ism bears any relation to the high percentage of urban population 

 hereabouts a product partly of climate, as we have seen or 

 whether it is an expression of the impulsive temperament of the 

 Mediterranean race, we leave it to others to decide. It is a fact, at 

 all events. 



Having made allowance for all the disturbing factors above 

 named, it is roughly true that the areas of Alpine racial occupation 

 manifest a distinct tendency toward conservatism in politics. We 

 incline to the belief that here, again, is the influence of physical cir- 

 cumstances appreciable. Cliffe-Leslie, keenly alive to the weakness 

 of the old dollars-and-cents political economy, may have been right, 

 after all. He concludes : " One may, I think, point with certainty 

 to the difference of environment and conditions of life in the moun- 

 tains and in the plains, as the source of the superior force of religion, 

 family feeling, and ancient usage in the former. On its moral and 

 social side the contrast between mountain and plain is the con- 

 trast between the old world and the new; between the customs, 

 thoughts, and feelings of ancient and modern times." Politics at 

 one extreme, ethnology at the other, have afforded us constant proof 

 of the truth of this generalization. The close interrelation which 

 of necessity exists between every form of human phenomenon in a 



