The Home of Mankind

by Hendrik Willem van Loon

  England did not become a great commercial nation in the twinkling of an eye. But all through the feudal ages the forces were at work which made her into one. Though in theory both the barons and the bishops looked down on the merchants and affected to despise trade, in practice they did a good deal to foster commerce. The Plantagenet kings by giving charters to walled towns and by patronizing the London City Companies played their part. No doubt the fact that several of these spendthrift gentlemen were only too glad to borrow money at high rates of interest front wealthy Lord Mayors and Aldermen had something to do with their polite attitude! Owing to the heavy losses suffered by the old knightly families in the Crusades and in the Hundred Years War many cadets, or younger sons, of such families were lain to bind themselves apprentices to London merchants. Foreign craftsmen, such as the Flemish weavers, were encouraged by Edward III to come and settle in his dominions, and Henry V, the victor of Agincourt, had very clear-cut notions about the importance to England of a strong navy and a big mercantile marine.

  Yet all these things had probably less to do with England’s rapid rise as a trading power than had the actions of another and a very different Henry, Henry VIII, him of the six wives. When Henry fell in love with Anne Boleyn, and divorced his Spanish queen in order to marry her, he quarrelled with the Pope and with Spain. England had to learn to stand on her own legs. She had no friend either in Rome or in Madrid. Then there came a time when it looked as if Spain might pick up this little, grey-green, rainy land and all its stubborn, sturdy inhabitants, and put them in her pocket. But that was not to be. Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn’s red-haired only daughter, came to the throne. Elizabeth’s seamen sailed all the seas then known to man—they defied the Don in his strongholds in the New World, they opened up ocean-paths of profit and adventure, and they took a long step towards making their country what she afterwards became—the commercial mistress of the globe.

  During two-thirds of the year over Britain the winds blew (and continue to blow) from the west, which meant rain. To-day agriculture, as I told you when we talked of the northern European States, is no longer as absolutely dependent upon Nature as it used to be a thousand or even a hundred years ago. We can’t as yet make rain, but the chemical engineer has taught us how to overcome many difficulties which the contemporaries of Chaucer and Queen Bess accepted as acts of God against which there was neither remedy nor redress. There again the geological structure of the island proved a great boon to the landowners of the east. A cross-section of the British Isles shows that they resemble two or three books lying flat but which have slipped and remain sloping, with the back of one on the edge of the other, but tilted much higher in the west than in the east. It is a result of the fact, mentioned before, that Britain is part of a very old continent, that the oldest mountains which used to cover the east have been entirely worn away by water and wind, while the rock formations of the west, although very old, are still standing upright and won’t be gone before another ten or fifteen million years. These mountains which occupy the territory called Wales (one of the last strongholds of the original Celtic tongues) act as a fence to break the force of the Atlantic rainstorms ere they reach the lowlands of the east, and they temper their violence so successfully that the great eastern plain enjoys an almost ideal climate for the purpose of cultivating grain and breeding cattle.

  THERE ARE MANY LIGHTHOUSES ON THE COASTS OF BRITAIN

  Since the invention of the steam-boat, which allows us to order our grain from the Argentine or Canada, and since the introduction of cold storage for the purpose of transporting frozen meats from one end of the world to the other, no nation, able to pay the price, is any longer dependent upon its own farms and fields for the purpose of feeding the home population. But until a hundred years ago, the owners of the food supply were also the masters of the world. Whenever they decided to lock the doors of their larder, millions of people died a slow death of starvation. The wide plain bounded by the English Channel in the south, the Severn in the west (the river that divides Wales from England and runs into the Bristol Channel), the Humber and Mersey in the north, and the North Sea in the east was therefore the most important part of the old England, for it produced the greatest amount of food.

  IF THE ENGLISH CHANNEL SHOULD RUN DRY

  COLD

  Of course, when I speak of a ‘plain,’ I do not mean a plain in the American sense of the word. The great central English plain is no flat pancake like Kansas, but consists of a rolling landscape. The river Thames runs through the heart of it. The Thames takes its origin among the Cotswold hills, famous for their sheep and near the city of Bath, where ever since the days of the Romans the victims of British cookery have come together to partake of the hot calcium and sodium baths and fortify their constitutions by further slabs of underdone beef and half-drowned vegetables.

  The Thames then flows between the Chiltern hills and the White Horse hills, provides the University of Oxford with a convenient water supply for its rowing experiments, and finally enters the lower Thames valley, situated between the low hills of the East Anglian Ridge and the North Downs, which would run all the way to France if the Strait of Dover had not eaten its way through this soft chalky substance in its laudable effort to connect the Atlantic with the North Sea.

  It is on this river that the world’s biggest town is situated. Like Rome and most other cities that go back to obscure and remote dates, the city of London was not an accident or the result of a sovereign’s whim. It was situated where it stands to-day as a result of sheer economic necessity. In order to get from southern England to northern England without being dependent upon the proverbially bad ‘goodwill’ of the nefarious tribe of ferrymen, it was necessary to construct a bridge. And London arises at the exact spot where the river ceased to be navigable, but was not too wide to allow the engineers of twenty centuries ago to build something that would safely carry people and merchandise from one shore to the next without getting their feet wet.

  When the Romans left, a great many things were changed in the British Isles, but London remained behind, and to-day, with more than 8,000,000 population, it covers an area five times as large as Babylon, the biggest city of antiquity, and four times as large as that of Paris.

  ENGLAND ENJOYS THE ENORMOUS ADVANTAGE OF BEING SITUATED IN THE HEART OF THE LAND-MASSES OF OUR PLANET

  The heart of London, the ‘city,’ is now merely a workshop. In 1800 it still had 130,000 inhabitants. The number has since shrunk to less than 14,000. But every day almost half a million people come down to the city to administer the billions of capital which England, out of her vast surplus wealth, has invested in foreign enterprises, and to supervise the distribution of those almost incredible quantities of colonial products which lie heaped up in the storehouses stretching all the way from Tower Bridge to a distance of twenty miles below London Bridge.

  As the Thames must remain open to traffic all the time, the only way to handle the shipping was by building docks and warehouses along both sides of the river. Americans who want to know what international commerce really means should visit these London docks. It will give them the feeling that New York is after all still some sort of a provincial village, a little too for removed from the main highways of trade. Eventually this may change; the centre of commerce seems to be moving westward. But London still is supreme in her knowledge of the technique of foreign trade, while New York is only beginning to learn the rudiments.

  But I am digressing and must return for a moment to the English ‘plain’ of 1500. Its entire southern rim consisted of hills. In the extreme west lay Cornwall and Devon, similar in many ways to Brittany, from which it was separated by the English Channel. Cornwall is a curious land where the Celtic tongue maintained itself until two centuries ago, and where strange stone monuments, in all respects resembling those of Brittany, support the theory that once upon a time all these regions must have been inhabited by people of the same race. Cornwall, by the way, was the first part of England to be dis
covered by the sailors from the Mediterranean. The Phoenicians in their quest of lead and zinc and copper (remember that they flourished at the beginning of the metal age) used to come as far north as the Scilly Islands. There they met the savages from the fog-bound mainland and did their bartering.

  Beyond Cornwall lies the Bristol Channel, the ‘Wrong Channel’ of the maps of the seventeenth century because skippers who returned from America were very apt to mistake it for the English Channel and were then shipwrecked among these treacherous waters where the tide may rise as high as forty feet.

  North of the Bristol Channel lie the mountains of Wales. They were of no great importance to anybody until the discovery of their coal and iron beds and of the copper deposits of the nearby island of Anglesey which turned that part of the country into one of the richest industrial units of the entire kingdom. Cardiff, an old Roman fort, is now one of the greatest coal centres of the world. It is connected with London by a railway which dives underneath the river Severn. This tunnel has gained almost as much fame in engineering circles as the bridge which connects the mainland of Wales with the island of Anglesey and the island of Holyhead, from where one starts for Kingstown, a port for the city of Dublin.

  This ancient quadrangle of England, where every city and village is so hoary with age and history that I almost fear to mention their names lest I be tempted to make this a geography of England rather than of the whole world, has until this day remained the backbone of the landowning classes. In France, where large estates are not absolutely unknown but rather rare, there are ten times as many landowners as in this part of Britain. In Denmark the proportional difference is even greater. That this class of country squires has lost so much of its former importance is not due to any lack of virtue of their own but rather to that change in our economic life brought about by the invention of the steam-engine by James Watt. When that mathematically inclined instrument maker of the University of Glasgow began to play with his grandmother’s tea-kettle, steam was still a plaything used to work a few slow and laborious pumps. When he died, steam ruled supreme, and land was no longer the main source of riches.

  It was then, during the first forty years of the last century, that the centre of economic gravity, which since the beginning of history had lain in the south, moved northward to Lancashire, where steam set the cotton mills of Manchester a-spinning in the moist air, and to Yorkshire, where steam turned Leeds and Bradford into the woollen centres of the whole world, and made Sheffield the breeding-place for all those millions of tons of steel plates and girders which were needed to build the ships that must carry the finished products of the British Isles to the ends of the earth.

  The upheaval caused by the substitution of steam for human muscles was the most formidable revolution mankind had experienced. The engines, of course, were not able to think for themselves, and they needed a certain number of human attendant: to feed them and tend them and tell them when it was time to begin and to stop. In return for such very simple services, the firm hands were promised what to them seemed riches. The country people listened to the lure of the city. The cities grew by leaps and bounds, and within a remarkably short space of time eighty per cent. of the country population had moved to the towns. It was then that England accumulated that vast surplus wealth which will keep her going long after all her other assets shall have been exhausted.

  Many people nowadays ask themselves whether that point has actually been reached. Time only will tell—time, meaning the next ten or twenty years. But it will be very interesting to see what happens.

  SCOTLAND

  The Romans knew of the existence of the Scots. Somewhere in the north, beyond the last line of imperial block-houses and the last of the Northumbrian hovels, there lay a land of inhospitable mountains inhabited by rough tribes of shepherds and sheep-owners. They dwelt in almost legendary simplicity, counted descent through the mother, instead of through the father as the greater part of the world did, had no roads except a few trails almost too steep for a horse, and had resisted all efforts to civilize them with such ferocious violence that the best policy had seemed to be that of leaving them strictly alone. But as they were also formidable cattle-thieves, and had a way of suddenly descending from their mountains to steal the sheep of the Cheviot hills and the cows of Cumberland, it was considered wise to protect these regions by building a high wall running all the way from the Tyne to the Solway.

  This was done, and during the four centuries of Roman domination in England the Scots, with the exception of a few punitive expeditions, were rarely exposed to the blessings of civilization. They continued their old commercial relations with their Celtic cousins in Ireland, but their needs were few and they rarely came in contact with the rest of the world. Little of the ancient Roman wall remains, but even to-day the Scots live very much a life of their own, and they have been able to develop a culture of their own.

  The fact that Scotland is such a dreadfully poor land may have helped them to retain their individuality. The greater part of their country is mountainous. Long before the appearance of man these mountains were as high as the Alps. Erosion (wind and rain) wore them gradually away, and great geological upheavals did the rest. Then came the ice, the same ice that covered Scandinavia, and the little bit of soil that had accumulated in the valleys was swept away by it. No wonder that only twenty per cent. of the population of Scotland can maintain themselves in the Highlands and Southern Uplands. The other eighty per cent. are gathered together in the Lowlands, a narrow strip of land, often not more than fifty miles wide, which runs from the Clyde in the west to the Firth of Forth in the east. In this valley, a wide rift between two mountain-ranges of volcanic origin (most of its castles are built on the necks of extinct volcanoes), lie the two big Scottish cities, Edinburgh, the ancient capital, and Glasgow, the modern city of iron and coal and shipbuilding and manufacturing. These two are connected by a canal for barges. Another canal, the Caledonian, running from the Firth of Lorne to the Moray Firth, allows small vessels to go directly from the Atlantic to the North Sea without being obliged to navigate the difficult waters between John o’ Groats and the Orkneys and Shetlands, remnants of the big continent that reached from Ireland to the North Cape of Norway. But it is little used.

  Despite the prosperity of Glasgow the country is far from rich, and the average Scottish peasant spends his days in frugal living. This has perhaps made him a little too ‘careful’ in spending his hard-earned pennies, but it has also taught him to depend entirely upon his own efforts, upon his own intellectual courage, regardless of what the rest of the human race may say.

  The historical accident by which the throne of England passed at the death of Queen Elizabeth to her Scottish cousin James Stuart made Scotland a part of the English kingdom. Thereafter the Scots could enter England at will, and whenever that island proved too narrow for their ambitions they could roam across the length and the breadth of its Empire. Their thrift and intelligence and their general lack of emotions made them ideally fit for leadership among the provinces in distant climes.

  EIRE (IRELAND)

  And now a different story, one of those inexplicable tragedies of human destiny in which a race possessed of unlimited mental possibilities turned its back upon the pursuit of the substance and wasted its strength upon a futile endeavour to grasp the shadow of lost causes.

  Who was to blame? I don’t know. Nobody knows. Geology? Hardly. Ireland, also a remnant of the great Arctic continent of prehistoric days, would have been much better off if during the period of readjustment the centre of the land had not sunk so deep below the mountainous ridges of the seaboard, giving the entire country the shape of a soup-plate and making it almost impossible for its few rivers to wend their way towards the sea without developing such a large number of curves as to render them practically unnavigable.

  The climate? No, for it is not very different from that of England, only perhaps a trifle more moist and a little more foggy.

  The geogra
phic situation? Again the answer is no, for after the discovery of America Ireland was the nearest and the most conveniently situated of all European countries to engage in commerce with the New World.

  Then what? Once more I am afraid it was the incalculable human element which upset all prophecies, turned every natural advantage into a physical disability, victories into defeat, and courage into a sullen acceptance of a dreary and not very cheerful fate.

  Has the atmosphere anything to do with it? We have all of us heard how dearly the Irish people love their fairy stories. Every Irish play and every Irish peasant tale mentions elves and werewolves and goblins and leprechauns and, truth to tell, in these prosaic days we sometimes get a little tired of their kobolds and pixies and all their whimsical relatives.

  Wandering again, you will say. What, if you please, has all this got to do with geography? Nothing with the geography that restricts itself to the enumeration of mountains and rivers and cities and statistics concerning the export of coal and the import of woollens. But man is not merely a tummy in search of food. He has also got a mind and the gift of imagination. And there is something unnatural about this country called Ireland. When you see other countries from a distance, you say to yourself, “There is a piece of land. It seems to be high or flat, brown or black or green. There are people there and they probably eat and drink, are all handsome or ugly, happy or miserable, and they live and die and are buried with or with out the benefit of clergy.”

  But with Ireland it is different. Ireland has an air of otherworldliness or rather un-worldliness. An air of solitude pervades the sky. The loneliness of the atmosphere becomes almost tangible. Whatever was true yesterday is now surrounded by doubt. What seemed so simple only a few hours before has suddenly become complicated. Just toward the west lies the deep abyss of the silent ocean. It is less mysterious than the land at your feet.