fur zone.[1445]
[See maps pages 8 and 612.]

[Sidenote: Social effects of long winters.]

The rigorous climate of Russia was undoubtedly one cause for the
attachment of the peasants to the soil in 1593. This measure was
resorted to at a time when the Muscovite dominion from its center in
Great Russia had recently been extended at the expense of the Tartars,
and had thus embraced fertile southern lands, which tempted the northern
peasant away from his unfruitful fields.[1446] This attraction, coupled
with the free and hopeful life of the frontier, met the migrant instinct
bred in the peasant by the wide plains and far horizon of Russia, so
that the north threatened to be left without cultivators. Later, the
harsh climatic conditions of the north were advanced as an argument
against the abolition of serfdom, on the ground that this system alone
secured to the landed proprietor a steady labor supply, and guaranteed
to the peasant his maintenance during the long, idle winter.

The duration and severity of the cold season has put a drag upon the
wheel of enterprise in Canada, as opposed to the warmer United States.
The prairies of the Canadian Northwest, whose fertile soil should early
have attracted settlement, were a closed land till railroads could pour
into it every summer from the warmer south and east a seasonal tide of
laborers. These follow the harvest as it advances from point to point,
and then withdraw in autumn either to the lumber camps of eastern
Canada, Minnesota and Wisconsin, or to seek other forms of out-door
labor in the more southern states, thus lifting from the Canadian farmer
the burden of their winter support.

In the lower latitudes of the Temperate Zones, where the growing season
is long and the dormant period correspondingly short and mild, we find
agriculture based upon clearly distinguished winter and summer crops, as
in the northern Punjab (30 deg. to 34 deg. N. L.);[1447] or producing a quick
succession of valuable crops, where the fertility of the soil can be
maintained by manures or irrigating streams, as in many of the warmer
Southern States and in Spain[1448] respectively. In Argentine, where
tillage is extensive, land abundant, and population sparse, where, in
fact, "skimp farming" is the rule, the shrewd cultivator takes advantage
of the long growing season to stretch out his period of sowing and
reaping, and thus tills a larger area. The International Harvester
Company of America, i