nger kept down by the scant subsistence of arid
grasslands and scattered oases.

In a similar way, the Arab of the desert became transformed into the
sedentary lord of Spain. In the luxuriance of field and orchard which
his skilful methods of irrigation and tillage produced, in the growing
predominance of the intellectual over the nomadic military life, of the
complex affairs of city and mart over the simple tasks of herdsman or
cultivator, he lost the benefit of the early harsh training and
therewith his hold upon his Iberian empire. Biblical history gives us
the picture of the Sheik Abraham, accompanied by his nephew Lot, moving
up from the rainless plains of Mesopotamia with his flocks and herds
into the better watered Palestine. There his descendants in the garden
land of Canaan became an agricultural people; and the problem of Moses
and the Judges was to prevent their assimilation in religion and custom
to the settled Semitic tribes about them, and to make them preserve the
ideals born in the starry solitudes of the desert.

[Sidenote: Retrogression in new habitat.]

The change from the nomadic to the sedentary life represents an economic
advance. Sometimes removal to strongly contrasted geographic conditions
necessitates a reversion to a lower economic type of existence. The
French colonists who came to Lower Canada in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries found themselves located in a region of intense
cold, where arable soil was inferior in quality and limited in amount,
producing no staple like the tobacco of Virginia or the wheat of
Maryland or the cotton of South Carolina or the sugar of the West
Indies, by which a young colony might secure a place in European trade.
But the snow-wrapped forests of Canada yielded an abundance of
fur-bearing animals, the fineness and thickness of whose pelts were born
of this frozen north. Into their remotest haunts at the head of Lake
Superior or of Hudson Bay, long lines of rivers and lakes opened level
water roads a thousand miles or more from the crude little colonial
capital at Quebec. And over in Europe beaver hats and fur-trimmed
garments were all the style! So the plodding farmer from Normandy and
the fisherman from Poitou, transferred to Canadian soil, were
irresistibly drawn into the adventurous life of the trapper and
fur-trader. The fur trade became the accepted basis of colonial life;
the _voyageur_ and _courier de bois_, clad in skins, paddling up
ice-rimme