212 TRANSACTIONS OP SECTION E. 



Section E.— GEOGRAPHY. 

 President of the Section : Professor L. W. Lyde, M.A. 



TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9. 

 The President delivered the following Address : — 



The Intenmtional Rivers of Europe. 



This subject was chosen before the publication of the Treaty of Peace, and 

 was dictated by a wish to combine my geographical creed with the political 

 conditions of an ' Americanised ' Europe. The Treaty embodies so many of 

 the principles which I wished to emphasise, that my treatment should perhaps 

 now be rather historical tlian political. 



My geographical faith is in Outlook; the jargon of to-day is about Leagues 

 of Nations. This is the day of nations and nationalities, and geographers 

 must rejoice in the fact, because civilisation depends on a blend of varied 

 influences— each an individual element, a genius loci— and the triumph of 

 nationality must curb that tendency to a drab cosmopolitanism which would 

 crush out all such variety. But these varied influences cannot blend into a 

 pro"Tessive civilisation unless they have all possible facilities for friendly 

 meeting; for instance, International Rivers should not be, like International 

 Finance, anti-national, but really inter-national, ' between nations,' common to 

 all nations, and encouraging the friendly meeting of divei-se political elements 

 and ideas. Liberty always makes for differentiation— in nations as m indi- 

 viduals; and if our international intercourse becomes really 'free' the desired 

 variety is guaranteed. 



Tills is why I w-ould like to press the truth that Outlook is, or ought to 

 be, the motto of geography. It is so for many of us, and it ought to be for 

 all Bat the word covers both a process and an objective. The Outlook is 

 essentially over Big Mother Eai'th; the process is visualisation— the picturing 

 of forma and forces, places and peoples, beyond the horizon, all possible horizons 

 being included in the one great unit of the globe. But the geographical inter- 

 action of the Man and the Place cannot toe dissociated— least of all m Political 

 CTeography— from the historical interdependence of group and group. Both 

 alike are concerned with progress. We want to know, therefore, the whole 

 simple truth— what the particular features and phenomena mean _ as world 

 features and world phenomena, not what special meaning can be read into them, 

 or extracted from them, by some local and interested political unit. Geography 

 is, first of all, the visualisation of the world and the relations of the various 

 parts of that world. . , i j i + 



Now, the one predominant feature of the earths surface is not land, but. 

 water. Nearly all international problems to-day have to do, explicitly or 

 implicitly, with the ocean, i.e. with access to cheap water transport on the 

 medium which covers three-quarters of the whole surface of the earth. Even 

 the problem of Alsace-Lorraine, itself perhaps purely a land probleni, conceals-— 

 especially from the Swiss point of view— a problem of access to the sea; anrf 

 the problems of Poland, of Italy, of Jugoslavia, are obviously sea-problems or 

 sea-problems very slightly disguised. 



