98 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
Napoleon came on the scene, Poland was dismembered and no longer 
on the map, Sweden and Turkey were maimed and shrunken, and the 
three great realms of Russia, Prussia, and Austria were overshadowing 
Europe. Let a person of the most moderate intelligence get those two 
vignettes into his head, and the framework for nearly a century and a 
half of crowded history is at his command. 
It is of course by no means only, or even mainly, of its cartographic or 
diagrammatic functions that we think when we try to press geography 
into closer touch with history in our educational system. Geography 
and its first cousin economics have very largely shaped history, and 
without some knowledge of them the study of history is liable to be both 
arid and misleading. ‘That is a truism to which it will be convenient to 
return later. A consequence of it, however, at which it is worth while to 
glance in passing, is that geography has much to teach to those who are 
actually making history to-day, and equally merits attention by those who 
fill the useful réle of critics of the makers of history. We are frequently 
told that a little knowledge of geography would have been of advantage 
at Paris while the Peace Treaties were being negotiated in 1919-20. 
Possibly so; but a bowing acquaintance with geography would not be 
out of place in the multitude who find it so easy to pull the treaties to 
pieces. I say nothing about the Polish corridor. For various reasons we 
may fear or even dislike it; but geography jogs our memory as to the 
long history of Poland’s wide access to the sea, and as to the isolation in 
which East Prussia was born and prospered. A less simple issue is 
raised by the energetic and expensive propaganda now being carried on 
for a revision, on ethnological and geographical grounds, of the new 
boundaries of Hungary. The ethnography of the Succession States of 
the old Habsburg Empire may well puzzle the wisest of us; but the 
framers of the Treaty of ‘Trianon were certainly not ignorant of geography. 
It is one thing to claim that the broad plain between the Tatra range and 
the Danube eastward of Bratislava is Magyar in culture. It would have 
been a very different matter to include that fertile area in the borders of 
Hungary ; and the prosperity which has come to Bratislava and Komarom, 
in spite of racial grievances, is some tribute to the geographical basis of 
the new boundaries. Further east, still along the Danube, there were 
racial arguments for leaving a slice of Carpathian Ruthenia in Hungary ; 
but the result, to quote Dr. Seton Watson, would have been ‘ to cut the 
natural communication between a long series of valleys, to cut off the 
hinterland—one of the poorest and most neglected districts of the old 
Hungary—from the plains which produce the food, to leave Ruthenia 
without railways, and to destroy the railway connections between Czecho- 
slovakia and Roumania.’ These are minor but pregnant instances of the 
value of the large-scale map in the making of history. 
Having now glanced at several sections of the perimeter of our field, 
we have found in each of them one definite pointer towards the centre of 
interest which is common to them all. Prehistoric geography attracts 
us by reason of its mystery and romance; but the romance lies in the 
fact that the grim powers of nature—oceans, volcanoes, sinking con- 
tinents, towering glaciers—were all co-operating in the slow preparation 
