“But they are evanescent possibilities, and the founders of empires who rely on them will some day be brought back with stunning, abject terror, as we now are, to the realization of first principles, that latitudes are invincible barriers to the diffusion of the race, and that the nations neglecting their plain meaning court disaster. Well; you know the explanation of all these whims of nature. The old story; the Gulf Stream with its millions of units of heat forced northward by wind pressure, and accelerated eastward by the equatorial velocity it starts out with, our insular position bathed in oceanic waters, holding immense deposits of the sun’s heat; the open seas north of us; the great furnace stores of heat in Africa, like a nearby factory heating our thin coasts. That is common knowledge--but these accidents of position, these migratory tides are holding in check invincible tendencies. Like a child’s push against an evenly balanced boulder they keep off the descent of disaster, but like another child’s push in the opposite direction, a sudden alteration of coast lines reduces our boasted exemption to a shadow, and London, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Glasgow, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Hamburgh--the great cities of the world--pay at last the penalty of an infringement of nature’s Common Law. “Heat is life, and cold is death, and no blank optimism may hope for national achievement in the frosts of winter. Our civilization, the civilization of northern Europe, has overstepped the limits of climatic permission, as this globe is made. We are the victims of a deception. Primary conditions of temperature are returning, a meteorological hoax is exploded, and 50 degrees north latitude will mean in Europe what it has always meant elsewhere. But look at Edinburgh, look at these isothermals on the map, attributing to her the temperature of far southern latitudes. Too obvious an absurdity to last. True enough. Yes, but fugitive; an episode only. So flat a contradiction of the economy of this round earth should never have misled us. And we have had warnings--”