Note 1440 — Chapter XVII · —The Influence Of Climate

The length of the seasons is of conspicuous importance. It determines, for instance, whether a given climate permits continuous field work with summer and winter crops, whether field work is possible at all, and how long it is interrupted by excessive cold. Buckle maintains that climate not only enervates or invigorates man, but affects also the constancy of his work and his capacity for sustained labor throughout the year. He considers "that no people living in a very northern latitude have ever possessed that steady and unflinching industry for which the inhabitants of temperate regions are remarkable" and assigns as a reason "that the severity of the weather, and, at some seasons, the deficiency of light, render it impossible for the people to continue their usual out-of-door employments." The result of this he finds to be desultory habits of work, which help to make the national character fitful and capricious. He cites in illustration of his principle the people of the Scandinavian and Iberian peninsulas, whom he finds marked "by a certain instability and fickleness of character," owing to the fact that in Norway and Sweden agricultural labor experiences long interruptions, due to the severity of the winter and the shortness of the days; in Spain and Portugal owing to the heat and drought of summer.1440 The extreme continental climate of northern of Russia with its violent contrast of the seasons, its severe and protracted winters, enables Leroy-Beaulieu to make a safer application of this principle to the empire of the Czars, which, unlike Scandinavia, feels no ameliorating effect from the mild Atlantic winds and commands no alternative industries like dairy farming, fisheries, and maritime trade.1441 Hence Leroy-Beaulieu attributes the unsystematic, desultory habits of work prevailing among the northern peasants to the long intermission of labor in winter, and to the alternation of a short period of intense activity with a long period of enforced idleness. He finds them resembling southern peoples in their capacity for sudden spurts of energy rather than sustained effort, thinks them benumbed by the sloth of the far north, which is not unlike the sloth of the south.1442