communities. If you were to point this out to the leaders of an isolated community they would be quick to deny the influ- ence thus alleged. To them the ambitions of a powerful poli- tician, the corruption of the central government, the ignorance of the masses, and the greedy nature of the exploiting foreigner are the first causes of disorganization and complaint. While these are the immediate agencies that affect his life and welfare, they are not the ultimate and basic factors in it. The isolated community never sces itself molded by its environ- ment. It looks outside for the source of its troubles.
In considering the effect of physical geography upon life it is not to be supposed that we are talking of barriers that keep people physically apart; as we have already said, it is a ques- tion of the effort that has to be expended to pass obstacles. Even passable mountain barriers exact a toll. ‘They tend to increase the degree of separation of peoples naturally separated by earlier traditions, by the location of their chief commercial outlets, by the association of each with a regional environment that has become fixed in history and in national consciousness. ‘The Atacama country, by changes in political ownership, by the war fought over it, by the persistent pioneer quality of its settlements, by the distinctive and strongly individualized quality of its native life, powerfully illuminates the history and geography of South America. It reveals the mode by which the effects of physical circumstance were combined with racial traits to produce not a single great nation, as in the case of the United States, but instead a number of nations, small in population and cultural elements if not in area, and insecure. Of each it could be said that its existence was dependent upon a vigorous ‘‘regionalism,”’ strongly embedded in the racial memory in the homelands of Spain and Portugal and strongly developed in its new environment, where the race in its settled stage seemed long overcome by the magnitude of the physical barriers raised on every side despite the heroic work of the first explorers and founders like Pizarro and Orellano and Aguirre and a host of others whose historical stature can never overmatch their achievements.
