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]

The dominant continental and central location of Russia enables its
climatic extremes to operate with little check. The peripheral location
of Scandinavia in the path of the Atlantic winds modifies its climate to
a mild oceanic type, and its dominant maritime situation gives its
people the manifold resources of a typical coast land. Hence Buckle's
estimate of national character in the Scandinavian Peninsula has little
basis as to fact or cause. Irregularity of agricultural labor does not
mean here cessation of all labor, and hence does not produce the
far-reaching effect ascribed to it. Only about one-third of the
Norwegian population is engaged in agriculture. The restriction of its
arable and meadow land to 3 per cent. of the whole territory, and the
fact that a large proportion of the people are employed in shipping and
the fisheries,[1443] are due to several geographic factors besides
climate. The same thing is true of Sweden in a modified degree.

[Sidenote: Complexity of climatic effects.]

Caution should be exercised in drawing conclusions from climate alone or
from only one phase of its influence. The duration and inte