Topographically, we were told, Europe holds an advantage over the North American continent in as much as it has a larger proportion of lowland terrain and a smaller proportion of mountainous land. When we travelled across America, however, we passed through few of its mountainous regions, so our subjective impression was that it was Europe which had more high peaks.

To have a great deal of low-lying land is not invariably an advantage to a country; nor is an abundance of mountainous terrain necessarily the reverse. Most of the Russian plain is uncultivated; Holland has productive wet pastureland but suffers from a lack of timber; and there is little activity on the great North German plain. Conversely, countries such as Saxony, Bohemia and Switzerland, although situated among mountains, surpass others in wealth. A country like France has mountains and coasts, fields and forests, but when we passed through it we saw that the plains along the northern coast were infertile and the lowlands on the southern coast were also barren.

There are no limits to the uses that human intelligence may make of the benefits offered by land and water. With sufficient numbers of people nature can be conquered. Thus, provided the people work hard, a country will grow rich even if its soil is poor; but if its people are idle, the country will be impoverished even if its soil is fertile. People who live along the coasts devote themselves to commerce; people who live in the mountains put their effort into manufacturing. Both depend upon nature's resources.