ABSTRACT
A SIMPLE human society, as among primitive pastoral or hunting peoples, when it has attained, almost or completely, a stage of equilibrium in its economic, social, and political organization (no matter how little or how highly specialized its way of life may be), is likely, so long as the equilibrium remains undisturbed, to be without history. It has no incentive towards achievement or even to change of any sort, and hence there is nothing to record of it, over long periods of time. The challenge of nature, once adequately met, ceases to be a challenge, and without its stimulus there can be no noteworthy response. Now there have been evolved, in the north-western quarter of the Old World, groups of men whose history, or the history of their emigrant peoples, is to-day the most extensive and most important of any on earth. This is not an accident, but the result of long-protracted effort, not through a continual advance, but rather in a series of progressions which have taken place by fits and starts and which were invoked in response to the stimulus of the environment in which these groups of men have lived. One of the most potent factors in this environment, in Italy as elsewhere, is regional. For all life, of plants and animals, as well as of man, is profoundly affected by geographical location, by land-forms and bodies of water, by soil and minerals, and by climate; and the human responses, even the most strenuous, that are made to these influences, either to benefit from them or to overcome them, appear most clearly in the effects which they produce in man himself. Even when an entire territory is reclaimed from a
previously manless or almost manless condition, as happened in Italy in not very remote prehistoric times, climate still remains to affect the health and energy of his race, and perhaps will be the last factor of all in his environment to be controlled by man. But it is the regional environment as a whole that furnishes man with the means of satisfying his material needs of food and drink, of clothing, shelter, tools, and means of transport; that determines the kind of occupation which he must follow for that purpose-hunting, fishing, herding, farming, lumbering, or manufacturing; that sets a limit to his numbers, which in turn exercise no mean control over his power of gratifying higher needs, such as recreation, art, religion, science, government, education. For while it is true that local conditions may modify man's responses, and that much may be done to provide for his higher needs by determination and energy in face of great odds, it is also true that satisfaction of such needs is in large measure dependent upon a certain degree of "density of population" and on a certain degree of prosperity; they are crippled by abject poverty and become impossible in isolation. Compared, then, with the forces of geographic location, of natural resources, of climate, and of natural selection, all the human inventions, discoveries, and ideas, all the influence of men of genius, all the economic forces that bind mankind closely together, the growth and pressure of population, the interplay of war, religion, human intrigue, and ambition-all these are secondary.
