political parties tends to follow geographical lines of cleavage. In our
own Civil War the dividing line between North and South did not always
run east and west. The mountain area of the Southern Appalachians
supported the Union and drove a wedge of disaffection into the heart of
the South. Mountainous West Virginia was politically opposed to the
tidewater plains of old Virginia, because slave labor did not pay on the
barren "upright" farms of the Cumberland Plateau; whereas, it was
remunerative on the wide fertile plantations of the coastal lowland. The
ethics of the question were obscured where conditions of soil and
topography made the institution profitable. In the mountains, as also in
New England, a law of diminishing financial returns had for its
corollary a law of increasing moral insight. In this case, geographic
conditions worked through the medium of direct economic effects to more
important political and ethical results.

The roots of geographic influence often run far underground before
coming to the surface, to sprout into some flowering growth; and to
trace this back to its parent stem is the necessary but not easy task of
the geographer.

[Sidenote: Time element.]

The complexity of this problem does not end here. The modification of
human development by environment is a natural process; like all other
natural processes, it involves the cumulative effects of causes
operating imperceptibly but persistently through vast periods of time.
Slowly and deliberately does geography engrave the subtitles to a
people's history. Neglect of this time element in the consideration of
geographic influences accounts equally for many an exaggerated assertion
and denial of their power. A critic undertakes to disprove modification