104 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
colonisation in North America, pinning the English settlements down 
to the. Atlantic coast, and leaving the Mississipi valley open to the enter- 
prise of the French. Or, harking much further back, it would point 
to an older barrier, the tumbled hills and impenetrable forests running 
across the Indian peninsula parallel to the Nerbudda valley, which 
protected, it may be for a thousand years, the Dravidian culture of the 
south from the invasion by Indo-Aryan influences. As types of whole 
nations which have had to wrestle with nature, it might single out Spain 
and Holland. Spain, after the melting away of its oversea dominion and 
the decay of its prestige in Europe, unconsciously surrendered to its 
geographical position. Sheltered behind the Pyrenees, it showed a 
disposition to cut itself out of European politics ; partitioned into un- 
connected sections by intractable mountain ranges, it has allowed the 
same habit of local dissension, which rendered it an easy prey to the Moors, 
to divide its people and weaken its national life once more. Holland, 
on the contrary, typifies a stout refusal to surrender to nature. Its 
people, undismayed by losing their former command of the High Seas, 
turned upon their own sea and ejected it ; so that they have transformed 
into a rich agricultural and industrial land what was once a vast expense 
of tidal marsh and fen, and they are still doing it. 
These are only haphazard incidents in the age-long contest. ‘The 
chief purposes of human geography are to record how the forces are 
arrayed to-day, and to help in the intelligent estimating of how they 
will sway the future. The materials for its task are the extreme diversity 
of nature on the one hand, and the unity of man on the other ; for it 
must deal with the family of mankind as a whole, and with their needs 
as a whole: a home, food, and clothing, and the labour on nature’s products 
by which they earn their shelter and their means of existence. As it 
stands on the threshold of its modern task, geography has to sound its 
trumpet and call in the support of its bordering sciences, geology, 
climatology, botany and all the others, but most especially of one which 
has not yet been mentioned ; for only with their help can it succeed. 
How it will prosper in its endeavour is the responsibility of our educa- 
tionalists ; and it is no small satisfaction to know how far they are prepared 
to go in giving our new science its appropriate place in the teaching 
curricula of our educational system. But in that direction there is still 
much to be done. For, in order to fit geography more usefully into 
the mental equipment of educated men and women, it seems that the 
problem is to secure a new emphasis on the physical features of our 
globe, so as to give them an organic and dynamic, rather than a tabular 
and static, value. 
If we think of the world as an abiding place and study the geography 
of any one country first from that point of view, it does not satisfy us to 
know the names of its chief towns and rivers, or of its mountains, capes, 
and bays should it happen to possess any. Each city has some 
individuality, and a dossier of its own, into which we should like to 
peep. ‘There is something to tell us how it came into existence, whether 
it is growing or decaying, what keeps it together, what is its racial, political, 
or commercial importance ; in short, why men built it, why they live in 
