natural and therefore cheap highways assume
paramount importance, especially in the forest and agricultural stages
of development, when the products of the land are bulky in proportion to
their value. Small countries with deeply indented coasts, like Greece,
Norway, Scotland, New England, Chile, and Japan, can forego the
advantage of big river systems; but in Russia, Siberia, China, India,
Canada, the United States, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentine, the history
of the country, economic and political, is indissolubly connected with
that of its great rivers. The storm center of the French and English
wars in America was located on the upper Hudson, because this stream
enabled the English colonies to tap the fur trade of the Great Lakes,
and because it commanded the Mohawk Valley, the easiest and most obvious
path for expansion into the interior of the continent. The Spanish,
otherwise confining their activities in South America to the Caribbean
district and the civilized regions of the Andean highlands, established
settlements at the mouth of the La Plata River, because this stream
afforded an approach from the Atlantic side toward the Potosi mines on
the Bolivian Plateau. The Yangtze Kiang, that great waterway leading
from the sea across the breadth of China and the one valuable river
adjunct of maritime trade in the whole Orient, was early appropriated by
the discerning English as the British "sphere of influence."

[Sidenote: Rivers as highways of expansion.]

No other equally large area of the earth is so generously equipped by
nature for the production and distribution of the articles of commerce
as southern Canada and that part of the United States lying east of the
Rocky Mountains. The simple build of the North American continent,
consisting of a broad central trough between distant mountain ranges,
and characterized by gentle slopes to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of
Mexico, has generated great and small rivers with easy-going currents,
that everywhere opened up the land to explorer, trader and settler. The
rate of expansion from the "Europe-fronting shore" of the continent was
everywhere in direct proportion to the length of the rivers first
appropriated by the colonists. North of Chesapeake Bay the lure to
landward advance was the fur trade. The Atlantic rivers of the coast
pre-empted by the English were cut short by the Appalachian wall. They
opened up only restricted fur fields which were soon exhausted, so