E.— GEOGRAPHY 113 



monotheistic it has been by the spread of influences from the southern. 

 One may look upon this as a return gift for the horse, passed on from the 

 northern to the southern steppe and effecting there so many of the contacts 

 which made big reHgious ideas develop. 



The southern steppe may be divided into regions such as Iran, Arabia, 

 north Africa. The northern steppe in its turn is divisible into the low 

 steppe of Turan or Turkestan with extensions into Europe, the plateau 

 steppe around Gobi and the Takla Makan, and the mountain steppe or, 

 rather, desert of Tibet. Moreover, the borders of the northern steppe, 

 towards the rainier lands both west and east, have been in many ways 

 rather distinct. Their nomads have been able to use oxen to draw wheeled 

 carts, on which the tents were built. The wheeled nomads near the 

 cultivators of the loess, the fertile soil of the steppe edges, offer a special 

 case of contact of nomad and peasant. The nomads with control of large 

 spaces and transport by horse and wheeled ox carts have been able to make 

 their power seriously felt. 



VII. Consciousness of Kind in its Geographical Settings. 



The social group gathered around land held in trust along the genera- 

 tions has added to the expressions of its common life and to its conscious- 

 ness of kind by developments of language and religion, of peculiarities of 

 clothing and hairdressing, and other shibboleths, but it would apparently 

 be exaggerating matters were we to think of our modern idea of linguistic 

 nationalism as at all widely developed in early times. As already stated, 

 the village, or the pays, or other small district was, of old, the effective 

 unit. Consciousness of kind might be strongly developed in the Hebrew 

 group that came back from exile in Babylon, but speaking generally that 

 consciousness had to grow much further before modern nationalism could 

 arise from it. In India distinctions between pastoralist conquerors and 

 cultivator subjects gave impetus to the growth of caste, and this was an 

 alternative channel along which consciousness of kind could grow. 

 Nationalism in India is quite a modern political reaction. In China 

 conquerors from the steppe have always had to merge themselves in the 

 people, for the great mass of whom there has been no urgent need of 

 common action against the outsider, at any rate until our own time ; and 

 in China, again, nationalism is just in its birth-throes. In Japan, on the 

 other hand, there was a prolonged struggle, on a relatively narrow front, 

 for the conquest of land inhabited by aborigines, remnants of whom have 

 been absorbed into the group of the intensely nationalist conquerors, 

 organised as a feudal hierarchy. 



In the classical lands of the Mediterranean, a variety of environmental 

 and other causes, too familiar to need discussion here, made the city the 

 general unit of society, and it is a commonplace that in many parts of the 

 Mediterranean region even a place that has a population of what we in 

 north-west Europe call a village affects the form and lineaments of a city. 

 Consciousness of kind in considerable measure developed among these 

 small units, and only the middle of the nineteenth century saw the rise of 

 Italian nationalism in the guise of a struggle against foreign domination. 

 Greek nationalism, also, came to birth as the struggle against Turkish 



