only for warmth and cooking, and incidentally for the pleasureable
excitement of burning an enemy at the stake, it enters into the
manufacture of almost every article that the Pennsylvanian uses in his
daily life. His dependence upon nature has become more far-reaching,
though less conspicuous and especially less arbitrary.

[Sidenote: Increase in kind and amount.]

These dependencies increase enormously both in variety and amount. Great
Britain, with its twenty thousand merchant ships aggregating over ten
million tons, and its immense import and export trade, finds its harbors
vastly more important to-day for the national welfare than in Cromwell's
time, when they were used by a scanty mercantile fleet. Since the
generation of electricity by water-power and its application to
industry, the plunging falls of the Scandinavian Mountains, of the Alps
of Switzerland, France, and Italy, of the Southern Appalachians and the
Cascade Range, are geographical features representing new and
unsuspected forms of national capital, and therefore new bonds between
land and people in these localities. Russia since 1844 has built 35,572
miles (57,374 kilometers) of railroad in her European territory, and
thereby derived a new benefit from her level plains, which so facilitate
the construction and cheap operation of railroads, that they have become
in this aspect alone a new feature in her national economy. On the other
hand, the galling restrictions of Russia's meager and strategically
confined coasts, which tie her hand in any wide maritime policy, work a
greater hardship to-day than they did a hundred years ago, since her
growing population creates a more insistent demand for international
trade. In contrast to Russia, Norway, with its paucity of arable soil
and of other natural resources, finds its long indented coastline and
the coast-bred seamanship of its people a progressively important