ABSTRACT
THE United States of America is like India, like Russia, like Australia, and to a certain extent like China, in one vital respect; she is almost a continent in herself. Western Europe knows nothing similar, and western Europeans—ourselves—will never understand the United States unless we grasp this overriding consideration: the United States is not merely a very big country; she is so enormous as to embrace all, and more than all, the geographical variations of the whole of Europe. England and Wales are together about 58,000 square miles, Scotland is just under 30,000: the United States is just over 3 million square miles or about 34 times as large as England, Scotland and Wales.
