e
specialized. Then every extension of the subsidiary territory and
intensification of production with advancing civilization increases the
mass of men and wares passing through these ocean gateways. The shores
of New York, Delaware, and Chesapeake bays are more important to the
country now than they were in early colonial days, when their back
country extended only to the watershed of the Appalachian system. Our
Gulf coast has gained in activity with the South's economic advance from
slave to free labor, and from almost exclusive cotton planting to
diversified production combined with industries; and it will come into
its own, in a maritime sense, when the opening of the Panama Canal will
divert from the Atlantic outlets those products of the Mississippi basin
which will be seeking Trans-Pacific markets.

[Sidenote: Interplay of geographic factors in coastlands.]

A careful analysis of the life of coast peoples in relation to all the
factors of their land and sea environment shows that these are
multiform, and that none are negligible; it takes into consideration the
extent, fertility, and relief of the littoral, its accessibility from
the land as well as from the sea, and its location in regard to outlying
islands and to opposite shores, whether near or far; it holds in view
not only the small articulations that give the littoral ready contact
with the sea, but the relation of the seaboard to the larger continental
articulations, whether it lies on an outrunning spur of a continental
mass, like the Malacca, Yemen, or Peloponnesian coast, or upon a
retiring inlet that brings it far into the heart of a continent, and
provides it with an extensive hinterland; and, finally, it never ignores
the nature of the bordering sea, which furnishes the school of
seamanship and fixes the scope of maritime enterprise.

All these various elements of coastal environment are further
differentiated in their use and their influence according to the
purposes of those who come to tenant such tide-washed rims of the land.
Pirates seek intricate channels and hidden inlets for their lairs; a
merchant people select populous harbors and navigable river mouths;
would-be colonists settle upon fertile valleys opening into quiet bays,
till their fields, and use their coasts for placid maritime trade with
the mother country; interior peoples, pushed or pushing out to the tidal
periphery of their continent, with no maritime history behind them,
bui