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Hilaire Belloc
O.M. DENT & SONS Ltd.
England has been built up upon the framework of her rivers, and, inthat pattern, the principal line has been the line of the Thames.
Partly because it was the main highway of Southern England, partlybecause it looked eastward towards the Continent from which thenational life has been drawn, partly because it was better served bythe tide than any other channel, but mainly because it was the chiefamong a great number of closely connected river basins, the ThamesValley has in the past supported the government and the wealth ofEngland.
Among the most favoured of our rivals some one river system hasdeveloped a province or a series of provinces; the Rhine has done so,the Seine and the Garonne. But the great Continental river systems—atleast the navigable ones—stand far apart from one another: in thissmall, and especially narrow, country of Britain navigable riversystems are not only numerous, but packed close together. It isperhaps on this account that we have been under less necessity in thepast to develop our canals; and anyone who has explored the Englishrivers in a light boat knows how short are the portages between onebasin and another.
Now not only are we favoured with a multitude of navigablewaterways—the tide makes even our small coastal rivers navigableright inland—but also we are quite exceptionally favoured in themwhen we consider that the country is an island.
If an island, especially an island in a tidal sea, has a good riversystem, that system is bound to be of more benefit to it than would bea similar system to a Continental country. For it must mean that thetide will penetrate everywhere into the heart of the plains, carryingthe burden of their wealth backward and forward, mixing their peoples,and filling the whole national life with its energy; and this will beespecially the case in an island which is narrow in proportion to itslength and in which the rivers are distributed transversely to itsaxis.
When we consider the river systems of the other great islands ofEurope we find that none besides our own enjoys this advantage. Sicilyand Crete, apart from the fact that they do not stand in tidal water,have no navigable rivers. Iceland, standing in a tidal sea, too farnorth indeed for successful commerce, but not too far north for thegrowth of a civilisation, is at a similar disadvantage. Great Britainand Ireland alone—Great Britain south of the Scottish Mountains, thatis—enjoy this peculiar advantage; and there are few things moreinstructive when one is engaged upon the history of England than totake a map and mark upon it the head of each navigable piece of waterand the head of its tideway, for when this has been done all England,with the exception of the Welsh Hills and the Pennines, seems to bepenetrated by the influence of the sea.
The conditions which give a river this great historic importance, thefundamental character, therefore, which has lent to the Thames itsmeaning in English history, is twofold: a river affords a permanentmeans of travel, and a river also forms an obstacle and a boundary.Men are known to have agglomerated in the beginning of society in twoways: as nomadic hordes and as fi