ain and give it a large share of the quality which belongs
to our own state.

To a trifling geographic accident we owe the isolation of Great Britain
from the European continent; and all the marvelous history of the
English folk, as we all know, hangs upon the existence of that narrow
strip of sea between the Devon coast and the kindred lowlands of
northern France.

East of Britain lie two peninsulas which have been the cradle of very
important peoples. That of Sweden and Norway is the result of mountain
development; that of Denmark appears to be in the main the product of
glacial and marine erosion, differing in its non-mountainous origin from
all the other peninsulas and islands of the European border. Thus on the
periphery of Europe we have at least a dozen geographical isolated
areas, sufficiently large and well separated from the rest of the world
to make them the seats of independent social life. The interior of the
country has several similarly, though less perfectly, detached areas. Of
these the most important lie fenced within the highlands of the Alps. In
that extensive system of mountain disturbances we have the geographical
conditions which most favor the development of peculiar divisions of
men, and which guard such cradled peoples from the destruction which so
often awaits them on the plains. Thus, while the folk of the European
lowlands have been overrun by the successive tides of invasion, their
qualities confused, and their succession of social life interrupted,
Switzerland has to a great extent, by its mountain walls, protected its
people from the troubles to which their lowland neighbors have been
subjected. The result is that within an area not twice as large as
Massachusetts we find a marvelous diversity of folk, as is shown by the
variety in physical aspect, moral quality, language, and creed in the
several important valleys and other divisions of that complicated
topography.

After a race has been formed and bred to certain qualities within a
limited field, after it has come to possess a certain body of
characteristics which gives it its particular stamp, the importance of
the original cradle passes away. There is something very curious in the
permanence of race conditions after they have been fixed for a thousand
years or so in a people. When the assemblage of physical and mental
motives are combined in a body of country folk, they may endure under
circumstances in which they could not have or