This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This fortress built by Nature for herself This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, Shakespeare. Friend, call me what you will; no jot care I; William Watson. THE LAND AND ITS INHABITANTS THE large island off the north-west coast of Europe, which we call Great Britain, but which continental nations often call England, now contains nearly 89,000 square miles, of which a minute fraction is shorn off every year by the encroaching sea. There are only four larger islands in the world, if we exclude the two island continents of Antarctica, which is about one-and-a-half times larger than Europe, and Australia, which approaches the area of the United States, and also ice-covered Greenland, which is nearly ten times the size of Great Britain. The four larger islands are New Guinea, with 330,000 square miles, Borneo, with 280,000, Madagascar with 228,000, and Sumatra with 160,000. Great Britain is exceeded in area by no less than nine States of the American Union. The area of England and Wales, that part of the island to which this book will be almost exclusively restricted, is given as 58,340 square miles. It is a perilously small base for a nation which has aspired successfully to be a worldpower. Great Britain was not always an island. In the early Pleistocene, the period of the greatest continental elevation, the west coast of Europe ran some way to the west of Ireland, and at one time even included Iceland within its unbroken land frontier. There was then no North Sea; the Thames flowed into the Rhine, and this great river reached the Arctic gulf near the latitude of the Faroe Islands. This was the time when the great mammals could cross the land-bridge at Gibraltar or roam from the steppes of Asia, to stalk over the plains of Britain. But this period, and the subsequent changes which severed England from the Continent by strips of shallow salt-water and cut off Ireland from the main island, are no part of the story of the English people. Let us look at the familiar map of Europe as it is to-day. We are now in the Atlantic period of history, which followed the Mediterranean period of Classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. Before the discovery of the New Hemisphere, our island seemed to be at "the utmost corner of the world," as Shakespeare says. Virgil went further, and spoke of the Britons as completely sundered from the whole world." Indeed, Europe itself, after the fall of the West Roman Empire, had long been in a state of blockade. To the North and North-West was the ice, which spares Scandinavia, but lies in a broad belt round the coast of Greenland, and so retarded the discovery of the North American Continent, which appears on the map to be easily accessible from this side. Westward lay the uncharted waste of waters; south of the Mediterranean stretched the great desert; the East had been overrun by the foes of God and man. Since the age of discovery, the position of Britain has been very different. Until lately it was, by geographical position, the most favoured of all nations, intrenched by nature against European invasion, and looking out over the main highway of commerce from numerous good harbours. This geographical primacy is no longer ours; for the Pacific trade will in a short time be almost as important as the Atlantic, and North America, with harbours on both oceans, and a vast territory, rich in every natural product, between them, has a decisive advantage which must, for an indefinite period, make the United States the centre of the world's wealth and commerce. But our position in the north-west of Europe-which we share with France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany-is, though no longer the best in the world, more advantageous than that of the Mediterranean countries. Not only are we nearer to the Atlantic, and to important sources of raw material and good markets, but the productive plains of western Europe are near the coast, and traversed by navigable rivers. It is true that the plains of England lie to the east, the west being hilly or mountainous. But the chains of hills are broken by estuaries like those of the Clyde and Mersey, and our eastern ports are still near the Atlantic. We are in some ways less favoured than the French, whose large rivers are all easily connected by canals, and who have the great advantage of harbours both on the Atlantic and on the Mediterranean. But our coal has hitherto given us an advantage over our neighbours. The contrast between the eastern and the western coastline of Britain must strike everyone who looks at a map. The difference is almost as great as between the shattered Pacific coast of southern Chile and the monotonous sea-board of the Argentine Republic on the Atlantic side. The comparatively great length of the island from north to south has also retarded its political union, and has fostered a not unwholesome provincialism. The northern part of the island still remains a distinct though not separate nation, and rejects the name of England. The climate of England has been roundly abused since classical antiquity. "The atmosphere," says Strabo, "is rainy rather than snowy, and when it is fine, fog prevails a great part of the time, so that the sun is often visible for three or four hours only, about the middle of the day." "The climate, says Tacitus, "is disgusting, from the frequency of rain and fog; but the cold is never severe.' "It is always foggy," says Herodian. "Britain is deficient in sunshine,' says Minucius Felix, "but it is warmed by the temperature of the sea which surrounds it." On the other side Charles II," who never said a foolish thing," observed that there is hardly any other country where a man can work comfortably in the open air the whole year round. The temperature in winter is far higher than those of most other lands in the same latitude. It is difficult to realize that we are no further from the Pole than Labrador, with its Arctic climate. It has been usual to attribute this abnormal warmth to the Gulf Stream, which crosses the Atlantic from the Gulf of Mexico, making the water several degrees warmer than the air. On the east coast of North America the climate is affected in the opposite direction by the cold currents from Greenland, and northern Chile is kept cool and deprived of rainfall by a cold stream from the Antarctic. But we are now told that our typical "Oceanic " climate, with its mild winters and cool summers and rainfall nearly evenly distributed throughout the year, is chiefly due to the prevailing westerly winds, which reach our shores charged with moisture. The air rises as it meets the hills near our western coasts, and as it rises it expands and cools, and condensation takes place. A heavy rainfall is the result, especially where the western slope is steep. In Skye and Mull the annual fall often exceeds a hundred inches, and among the Carnarvonshire hills it is not much less. At Ambleside about eighty inches of rain fall during the year, and there are still wetter spots in the same district. But the notion that England as a whole is a wet country is erroneous. The moist westerly winds have shed much of their vapour before they reach our eastern counties, so that the country becomes progressively drier as we travel eastwards. In Cornwall the rainfall is about forty-five inches, in Devonshire about forty, in East Anglia under twenty-five. But Leicestershire and Bedfordshire are also named as dry counties. A high rainfall and a deficiency of sunshine do not always go together. The southern slopes of the hills |