178 REVIEWS 



thrown on many topics. English success and French failure in North 

 America are shown to have been largely due to geographic conditions. 

 At the north the French followed every stream into the interior in 

 quest of furs. "They spread themselves thin over an enormous area," 

 and therefore failed. The Appalachian Barrier confined the English 

 to the coast, and the many resulting advantages contributed to their 

 success. It is popularly supposed that our possession of the Louisiana 

 territory is due to a series of fortunate circumstances in European poli- 

 tics. Miss Semple shows that, once having passed the Appalachians, 

 geographic conditions made it inevitable that the Americans should 

 control the interior at least as far west as the Rockies. 



The purchase of Louisiana was the occasion, not the cause, of the acquisi- 

 tion of the trans-Mississippi country. That must have come sooner or later. 

 Even if the French had established themselves in Louisiana, they could not 

 long have resisted the operation of geographic factors and the enterprising 

 spirit of the western people, itself in part a product of environment. The 

 trans-Mississippi region, hopelessly arid beyond the one-hundredth meridian, 

 could never have supported a large enough population to resist the Ameri- 

 cans, with whom the common navigation of the Mississippi would soon have 



brought them to blows Had England conquered Louisiana from 



France — the chance which Napoleon feared — even her superior colonizing 

 methods could not have made the country support a population large enough 

 to cope with the thickly planted American settlements in the wide, rich, well- 

 watered regions to the east. In a conflict between a cis-Mississippi and a 

 trans-Mississippi power, the former had every geographical condition in its 

 favor — coast-line, rivers, climate, soil, and habitable area. The Americans 

 were destined to hold the West. The purchase hastened and facilitated the 

 process. 



The excellent discussion of the War of 181 2 throws much light on 

 a period which, to be understood, must be approached from the geo- 

 graphic side. Geographic conditions made this a frontier war and 

 controlled all operations. The author does not overestimate the 

 importance of the geographic view-point when she says : 



The sea-tights of this war, if studied merely m their chronological sequence 

 as presented in the ordinary school histories, leave only a confused impres- 

 sion, of which the student, young or old, retains little at all and less that is 

 valuable. But an analysis of the geographical distribution of these engage- 

 ments reveals a wide underlying system which explains their purpose and 

 brings order out of an apparent chaos. 



The Gadsden Purchase has been almost universally condemned as 

 a purchase involving the payment of an enormous price for a small 



