to exploit. Dwelling on the highway of the ocean, living in easy
intercourse with distant countries, which would have been far more
difficult of access by land-travel over territories inhabited by hostile
races, exchanging with these both commodities and ideas, food-stuffs and
religions, they become the children of civilization, and their
sun-burned seamen the sturdy apostles of progress. Therefore it may be
laid down as a general proposition, that the coasts of a country are
the first part of it to develop, not an indigenous or local
civilization, but a cosmopolitan culture, which later spreads inland
from the seaboard.

[Sidenote: Retarded coastal peoples.]

Exceptions to this rule are found in barren or inaccessible coasts like
the Pacific littoral of Peru and Mexico, and on shores like those of
California, western Africa and eastern Luzon, which occupy an adverse
geographic location facing a neighborless expanse of ocean and remote
from the world's earlier foci of civilization. Therefore the descent
from the equatorial plateau of Africa down to the Atlantic littoral
means a drop in culture also, because the various elements of
civilization which for ages have uninterruptedly filtered into Sudan
from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, have rarely penetrated to the
western rim of the highland, and hence never reached the coast.
Moreover, this steaming lowland, from the Senegal River to the Kamerun
Mountains, has been a last asylum for dislodged tribes who have been
driven out by expanding peoples of the plateau. They have descended in
their flight upon the original coast dwellers, adding to the general
condition of political disruption, multiplying the number of small weak
tribes, increasing the occasions for intertribal wars, and furthering
the prevailing degradation. The seaboard lowlands of Sierra Leone,
Liberia and the Ivory Coast have all suffered thus In historic
times.[516] All this region was the original home of the low, typical
"Guinea Nigger" of the Southern plantation. The coasts of Oregon and
California showed a parallel to this in their fragmentary native tribes
of retarded development, whose level of culture, low at best, sank
rapidly from the interior toward the seaboard. They seem to have been
intruders from the central highlands, who further deteriorated in their
weakness and isolation after reaching the coast. They bore every mark of
degradation in their short stature, linguistic and tribal disme