Note 642 — Chapter XI · —The Anthropo-Geography Of Rivers

Navigable rivers opening passages directly from the sea are obviously nature-made gates and paths into wholly new countries; but the accessibility with which they endow a land becomes later a permanent factor in its cultural and economic development, a factor that remains constantly though less conspicuously operative when railroads have done their utmost to supplant water transportation. The importance of inland waterways for local and foreign trade and intercourse has everywhere been recognized. The peoples who have long maintained preëminence among the commercial and maritime nations of the world have owed this in no small part to the command of these natural highways, which have served to give the broad land basis necessary for permanent commercial ascendency. This has been the history of England, Holland, France and the recent record of Germany. The medieval League of the Rhine Cities flourished by reason of the Rhone-Rhine highway across western Europe. The Hanseatic League, from Bruges all the way east to Russian Novgorod, owed their brilliant commercial career, not only to the favorable maritime field in the enclosed sea basins in front of them, but also to the series of long navigable rivers behind them from the Scheldt to the Neva and Volchov. Wherefore we find the League, originally confined to coast towns, drawing into the federation numerous cities located far up these rivers, such as Ghent, Cologne, Magdeburg, Breslau, Cracow, Pskof and Novgorod.642