ingsgate shows no symptom of
falling short of the demand.

AN ENGLISH SHIRE.

For the reasons which have determined the existence of Sussex as a
county of England, and which have given it the exact boundaries that it
now possesses, we must go back to the remote geological history of the
secondary ages. Its limits and its very existence as a separate shire
were predetermined for it by the shape and consistence of the mud or
sand which gathered at the bottom of the great Wealden lake, or filled
up the hollows of the old inland cretaceous sea. Paradoxical as it
sounds to say so, the Celtic kingdom of the Regni, the South Saxon
principality of AElle the Bretwalda, the modern English county of
Sussex, have all had their destinies moulded by the geological
conformation of the rock upon which they repose. Where human annals see
only the handicraft and interaction of human beings--Euskarian and
Aryan, Celt and Roman, Englishman and Norman--a closer scrutiny of
history may perhaps see the working of still deeper elements--chalk and
clay, volcanic upheaval and glacial denudation, barren upland and
forest-clad plain. The value and importance of these underlying facts
in the comprehension of history has, I believe, been very generally
overlooked; and I propose accordingly here to take the single county of
Sussex in detail, in order to show that when the geological and
geographical factors of the problem are given, all the rest follows as
a matter of course. By such detailed treatment alone can one hope to
establish the truth of the general principle that human history is at
bottom a result of geographical conditions, acting upon the
fundamentally identical constitution of man.

In a certain sense, it is quite clear that human life depends mainly
upon soil and conformation, to an extent that nobody denies. You cannot
have a dense population in Sahara; and you can hardly fail to have one
in the fruitful valley of the Nile. The growth of towns in one district
rather than another must be governed largely by the existence of rivers
or harbours, of coal or metals, of agricultural lowlands or defensible
heights. Glasgow could not spring up in inland Leicestershire, nor
Manchester in coalless Norfolk. Insular England must naturally be the
greatest shipping country in Europe; while no large foreign trade is
possible in any Bohemia except Shakespeare's. So much everybody admits.
But it seems to me that these