Note 1402 — Chapter XVI · —Influences Of A Mountain Environment

Rarely is a polyglot mountain population able to work out its own political salvation, as the Swiss have done. More often political union must be forced upon them from without. Oftener still, when the highlanders are primitive survivals, ill-matched against the superior invaders from the plain, they are doomed to a process of constriction of territory and deterioration of numbers, which proceeds slowly or rapidly according to the inaccessibility of their environment and the energy of the intruders. Deliberate, unenterprising nations, like the Chinese, Turks and Indo-Aryans long tolerate the presence of alien mountain tribes, who remain like enemies brought to bay in their isolated fortresses. The conquerors throw around them at their leisure a cordon of settlement, which, slowly ascending the piedmont, draws closer and closer about the mountaineers. The situation of many mountain tribes reminds one of a besieged stronghold. Russian wars against the Caucasus have rightly been described as protracted sieges. The heroic history of Switzerland in relation to its neighbors has been that of a skillfully conducted defense, both military and diplomatic. The territory of China is dotted over with detached groups of aborigines, who have survived wherever a friendly mountain has offered them an asylum. Variously known as Lolos, Mantze or Miaotse, they have preserved everywhere a semi-independence in pathless mountains, whither Chinese troops do not dare to follow them;1402 but the more numerous and patient Chinese agriculturalists are in many sections slowly encroaching upon their territories, driving them farther and farther into the recesses of their highlands. The same process goes on in Formosa, where the Chinese have gradually forced the native Malays into mountain fastnesses among the peaks which rise to 14,000 feet (4500 meters). There, split up by internecine feuds into numberless clans and tribes, ignorant of one another's languages, raiding each other's territories and the coastal plains tilled by Chinese colonists, they await their doom, while the piedmont zone between has already given birth to a typical border race of halfbreeds, more Chinese than Malay.1403