uest, which compels the mountain clans
to combine for common defense of their freedom. The combination thus
made is reluctant, loose, easily broken, generally short-lived. It
becomes close and permanent only under a constant pressure from without,
and then assumes a form allowing to the constituent parts the greatest
possible measure of independence. The Swiss canton and commune are the
result of a segregating environment; the Swiss Republic is the result of
threatened encroachments by the surrounding states. It owed its first
genuine federal constitution to Napoleon.

A report on the situation in the Caucasus, addressed to Czar Nicholas in
1829, contains an epitome of the history of mountain peoples. It runs as
follows: "The Circassians bar out Russia from the south, and may at
their pleasure open or close the passage to the nations of Asia. At
present their intestine dissensions, fostered by Russia, hinder them
from uniting under one leader; but it must not be forgotten that,
according to traditions religiously preserved among them, the sway of
their ancestors extended as far as to the Black Sea. * * * The
imagination is appalled at the consequence which their union under one
leader might have for Russia, which has no other bulwark against their
ravages than a military line, too extensive to be very strong."[1377]
Here we have the whole story--a mountain people pillaging the lowlands,
exercising a dangerous and embarrassing control over the passes, and
thereby calling down upon themselves conquest from without; weakened by
a contracting territory within the highlands and a shrinking area of
plunder without, doomed to eventual defeat by the yet more ominous
weakness of political dismemberment.

[Sidenote: Individualism and independence]

Mountain tribes are always like a pack of hounds on the leash, each
straining in a different direction. Wall-like barriers, holding them
apart for centuries, make them almost incapable of concerted action, and
restive under any authority but their own. Clan and tribal societies,
feudal and republican rule, always on a small scale, characterize
mountain sociology. All these are attended by an exaggerated
individualism and its inevitable concomitant, the blood feud. Mountain
policy tends to diminish the power of the central authority to the
vanishing point, giving individualism full scope. Social and economic
retardation, caused by extreme isolation and encouraged by protected
locatio