n, tend to keep the social body small and loosely organized.
Every aspect of environment makes against social integration.

The broken relief of ancient Greece produced the small city state; but
in the rugged mountains of Arcadia the principle of physical and
political subdivision went farther. Here, for four centuries after the
first Olympiad, the population, poorest and rudest of all Greece, was
split up into petty hill villages, each independent of the other.[1378]
The need of resisting Spartan aggression led for the first time, in 371
B.C., to the formation of a _commune Arcadum_, a coalescence of all the
fractional groups constituting the Arcadian folk;[1379] but even this
union, effected only by the masterly manipulation of the Theban
Epaminondas, proved short-lived and incomplete. What was true of the
Arcadian villages was true of the city states of Greece. The geography
of the land instilled into them the principle of political aloofness,
except when menaced by foreign conquest. Cooperation is efficient only
when it springs from a habit of mind. Greek union against the Persians
was very imperfect; and against the Roman, the feeble leagues were
wholly ineffective. The influence of this dismembering environment still
persists. As ancient Greece was a complex of city states, modern Greece
is a complex of separate districts, each of which holds chief place in
the minds of its citizens, and unconsciously but steadily operates
against the growth of a national spirit in the modern sense.[1380]

[Sidenote: Types of mountain states.]

A mountain environment encourages political disunion in several forms.
Sometimes it favors the survival of a turbulent feudal nobility, based
upon clan organization, as among the medieval Scotch, who were not less
rebellious toward their own kings than toward the English
conquerors.[1381] Feudal rule seems congenial to the mountaineer, whose
conservative nature, born of isolation, clings to hereditary chiefs and
a long established order. Feudal communities and dwarf republics exist
side by side in the northern Caucasus,[1382] attended by that primitive
assertion of individual right, the blood feud.[1383] Often the two forms
of government are combined, but the feudal element is generally only a
dwindling survival from a remote past. The little Republic of Andorra,
which for a thousand years has preserved its existence in the protection
of a high Pyrenean valley, is a self-governing communit