It is otherwise in states of very simple vicinal grouping, coupled with

only a single country or at best two. Spain, from the time Hamilcar

Barca made it a colony of ancient Carthage, down to the decline of its

Saracen conquerors, was historically linked with Africa. Freeman calls

attention to "the general law by which, in almost all periods of

history, either the masters of Spain have borne rule in Africa or the

masters of Africa have borne rule in Spain." The history of such simply

located countries tends to have a correspondingly one-sided character.

Portugal's development has been under the exclusive influence of Spain,

except for the oversea stimuli brought to it by the Atlantic. England's

long southern face close to the French coast had for centuries the

effect of interweaving its history with that of its southern neighbor.

The conspicuous fact in the foreign history of Japan has been its

intimate connection with Korea above all the other states.[259] Egypt,

which projects as an alluvial peninsula into an ocean of desert from

southwestern Asia, has seen its history, from the time of the Shepherd

Kings to that of Napoleon, repeatedly linked with Palestine and Syria.

Every Asiatic or European conquest of these two countries has eventually

been extended to the valley of the Nile; and Egypt's one great period of

expansion saw this eastern coast of the Mediterranean as far as the

Euphrates united to the dominion of the Pharaohs. Here is a one-sided

geographical location in an exaggerated form, emphasized by the

physical and political barrenness of the adjacent regions of Africa and

the strategic importance of the isthmian district between the

Mediterranean and Indian Ocean.

[Sidenote: Scattered location due to geographic conditions.]

The forms of vicinal location thus far considered presuppose a compact

or continuous distribution, such as characterizes the more fertile and

populous areas of the earth. Desert regions, whether due to Arctic cold

or extreme aridity, distribute their sparse population in small groups

at a few favored points, and thus from physical causes give rise to the

anthropo-geographical phenomenon of scattered location. Districts of

intense cold, which sustain life only in contact with marine supplies of

food, necessitate an intermittent distribution along the seaboard, with

long, unoccupied stretches between. This is the location we are familiar

with among the Eskimo of Greenland and Alaska, among the Norse and Lapps

in the rugged Norwegian province of Finmarken, where over two-thirds of

the population live by fishing. In the interior districts of this

province about Karasjok and Kantokeino, the reindeer Lapps show a

corresponding scattered grouping here and there on the inhospitable

slopes of the mountains.[260] In that one-half of Switzerland lying above

the altitude where agriculture is possible, population is sprinkled at

wide intervals over the sterile surface of the highlands.

A somewhat similar scattered location is found in arid deserts, where

population is restricted to the oases dropped here and there at wide

intervals amid the waste of sand. But unlike those fragments of human

life on the frozen outskirts of the habitable world, the oasis states

usually constitute links in a chain of connection across the desert

between the fertile lands on either side, and therefore form part of a

series, in which the members maintain firm and necessary economic

relations. Every caravan route across the Sahara is dotted by a series

of larger or smaller tribal settlements. Tripoli, Sokna, Murzuk, Bilma

and Bornu form one such chain; Algiers, El Golea, Twat, the salt mines

of Taudeni, Arawan and Timbuctoo, another. Bagdad, Hayil, Boreyda and

Mecca trace the road of pilgrim and merchant starting from the Moslem

land of the Euphrates to the shrine of Mohammed.[261]

[Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF SETTLEMENT IN THE NORWEGIAN PROVINCE OF

FINMARKEN.]

[Sidenote: Island way station on maritime routes.]

Not unlike this serial grouping of oasis states along caravan routes

through the desert are the island way stations that rise out of the

waste of the sea and are connected by the great maritime routes of

trade. Such are the Portuguese Madeiras, Bissagos, and San Thomé on the

line between Lisbon and Portuguese Loanda in West Africa; and their

other series of the Madeiras, Cape Verde, and Fernando, which

facilitated communication with Pernambuco when Brazil was a Portuguese

colony. The classic example of this serial grouping is found in the line

of islands, physical or political, which trace England's artery of

communication with India--Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Perim, Aden,

Sokotra, and Ceylon, besides her dominant position at Suez.

[Sidenote: Scattered location of primitive tribes.]

Quite different from this scattered distribution, due to physical

conditions, in an otherwise uninhabited waste is that wide dispersal of

a people in small detached groups which is the rule in lower stages of

culture, and which bespeaks the necessity of relatively large

territorial reserves for the uneconomic method of land utilization

characteristic of hunting, fishing, pastoral nomadism, and primitive

agriculture. A distribution which claims large areas, without, however,

maintaining exclusive possession or complete occupation, indicates among

advanced peoples an unfinished process,[262] especially unfinished

expansion, such as marked the early French and English colonies in

America and the recent Russian occupation of Siberia. Among primitive

peoples it is the normal condition, belongs to the stage of

civilization, not to any one land or any one race, though it has been

called the American form of distribution.

Not only are villages and encampments widely dispersed, but also the

tribal territories. The Tupis were found by the Portuguese explorers

along the coast of eastern Brazil and in the interior from the mouth of

the La Plata to the lower Amazon, while two distant tribes of the Tupis

were dropped down amid a prevailing Arawak population far away among the

foothills of the Andes in two separate localities on the western

Amazon.[263] [See map page 101.] The Athapascans, from their great

compact northern area between Hudson Bay, the Saskatchewan River, and

the Eskimo shores of the Arctic Ocean sent southward a detached offshoot

comprising the Navajos, Apaches and Lipans, who were found along the Rio

Grande from its source almost to its mouth; and several smaller

fragments westward who were scattered along the Pacific seaboard from

Puget Sound to northern California.[264] The Cherokees of the southern

Appalachians and the Tuscaroras of eastern North Carolina were detached

groups of the Iroquois, who had their chief seat about the lower Great

Lakes and the St. Lawrence. Virginia and North Carolina harbored also

several tribes of Sioux,[265] who were also represented in southern

Mississippi by the small Biloxi nation, though the chief Sioux area lay

between the Arkansas and Saskatchewan rivers. Similarly the Caddoes of

Louisiana and eastern Texas had one remote offshoot on the Platte River

and another, the Arikaras, on the upper Missouri near its great bend.

[See map page 54.] But the territory of the Caddoes, in turn, was

sprinkled with Choctaws, who belonged properly east of the Mississippi,

but who in 1803 were found scattered in fixed villages or wandering

groups near the Bayou Teche, on the Red River, the Washita, and the

Arkansas.[266] Their villages were frequently interspersed with others of

the Biloxi Sioux.

This fragmentary distribution appears in Africa among people in parallel

stages of civilization. Dr. Junker found it as a universal phenomenon in

Central Africa along the watershed between the White Nile and the

Welle-Congo. Here the territory of the dominant Zandeh harbored a motley

collection of shattered tribes, remnants of peoples, and intruding or

refugee colonies from neighboring districts.[267] The few weak bonds

between people and soil characterizing retarded races are insufficient

to secure permanent residence in the face of a diminished game supply,

as in the case of the Choctaws above cited, or of political disturbance

or oppression, or merely the desire for greater independence, as in that

of so many African tribes.

[Illustration: DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES IN 1800.]

[Sidenote: Ethnic islands of expansion.]

A scattered location results in all stages of civilization when an

expanding or intruding people begins to appropriate the territory of a

different race. Any long continued infiltration, whether peaceful or

aggressive, results in race islands or archipelagoes distributed through

a sea of aborigines. Semitic immigration from southern Arabia has in

this way striped and polka-dotted the surface of Hamitic Abyssinia.[268]

Groups of pure German stock are to-day scattered through the Baltic and

Polish provinces of Russia.[269] [See map page 223.] In ancient times the

advance guard of Teutonic migration crossed the Rhenish border of Gaul,

selected choice sites here and there, after the manner of Ariovistus,

and appeared as enclaves in the encompassing Gallic population. While

the Anahuac plateau of Mexico formed the center of the Aztec or Nahuatl

group of Indians, outlying colonies of this stock occurred among the

Maya people of the Tehuantepec region, and in Guatemala and

Nicaragua.[270]

Such detached fragments or rather spores of settlement characterize all

young geographical boundaries, where ethnic and political frontiers are

still in the making. The early French, English, Dutch, and Swedish

settlements in America took the form of archipelagoes in a surrounding

sea of Indian-owned forest land; and in 1800, beyond the frontier of

continuous settlement in the United States long slender peninsulas and

remote outlying islands of white occupation indicated American advance

at the cost of the native. Similarly the Portuguese, at the end of the

sixteenth century, seized and fortified detached points along the coast

of East Africa at Sofala, Malindi, Mombassa, Kilwa, Lamu, Zanzibar and

Barava, which served as way stations for Portuguese ships bound for

India, and were outposts of expansion from their Moçambique

territory.[271] The snow-muffled forests of northern Siberia have their

solitudes broken at wide intervals by Russian villages, located only

along the streams for fishing, gold-washing and trading with the native.

These lonely clearings are outposts of the broad band of Muscovite

settlement which stretches across southern Siberia from the Ural

Mountains to the Angara River.[272] [See map page 103.]

[Sidenote: Political islands of expansion.]

The most exaggerated example of scattered political location existing

to-day is found in the bizarre arrangement of European holdings on the

west coast of Africa between the Senegal and Congo rivers. Here in each

case a handful of governing whites is dropped down in the midst of a

dark-skinned population in several districts along the coast. The six

detached seaboard colonies of the French run back in the interior into a

common French-owned hinterland formed by the Sahara and western Sudan,

which since 1894 link the Guinea Coast colonies with French Algeria and

Tunis; but the various British holdings have no territorial cohesion at

any point, nor have the Spanish or Portuguese or German. The scattered

location of these different European possessions is for the most part

the expression of a young colonizing activity, developed in the past

fifty years, and signalized by the vigorous intrusion of the French and

Germans into the field. To the anthropo-geographer the map of western

Africa presents the picture of a political situation wholly immature,

even embryonic. The history of similar scattered outposts of political

expansion in America, India and South Africa teaches us to look for

extensive consolidation.

[Sidenote: Ethnic islands of survival.]

Race islands occur also when a land is so inundated by a tide of

invasion or continuous colonization that the original inhabitants

survive only as detached remnants, where protecting natural conditions,

such as forests, jungles, mountains or swamps, provide an asylum, or

where a sterile soil or rugged plateau has failed to attract the

cupidity of the conqueror. The dismembered race, especially one in a

lower status of civilization, can be recognized as such islands of

survival by their divided distribution in less favored localities, into

which they have fled, and in which seldom can they increase and

recombine to recover their lost heritage. In Central Africa, between the

watersheds of the Nile, Congo and Zambesi, there is scarcely a large

native state that does not shelter in its forests scattered groups of

dwarf hunter folk variously known as Watwa, Batwa, and Akka.[273] They

serve the agricultural tribes as auxiliaries in war, and trade with them

in meat and ivory, but also rob their banana groves and manioc patches.

The local dispersion of these pygmies in small isolated groups among

stronger peoples points to them as survivals of a once wide-spread

aboriginal race, another branch of which, as Schweinfurth suggested, is

probably found in the dwarfed Bushmen and Hottentots of South

Africa.[274] [See map page 105.]

Similar in distribution and in mode of life are the aborigines of the

Philippines, the dwarf Negritos, who are still found inhabiting the

forests in various localities. They are dispersed through eight

provinces of Luzon and in several other islands, generally in the

interior, whither they have been driven by the invading Malays.[275] [See

map page 147.] But the Negritos crop out again in the mountain interior

of Formosa and Borneo, in the eastern peninsula of Celebes, and in

various islands of the Malay Archipelago as far east as Ceram and

Flores, amid a prevailing Malay stock. Toward the west they come to the

surface in the central highland of Malacca, in the Nicobar and Andaman

Islands, and in several mountain and jungle districts of India. Here

again is the typical geographic distribution of a moribund aboriginal

race, whose shrivelled patches merely dot the surface of their once wide

territory.[276] The aboriginal Kolarian tribes of India are found under

the names of Bhils, Kols and Santals scattered about in the fastnesses

of the Central Indian jungles, the Vindhyan Range, and in the Rajputana

Desert, within the area covered by Indo-Aryan occupation.[277] [See map

page 103.]

[Sidenote: Discontinuous distribution.]

Such broad, intermittent dispersal is the anthropological prototype of

the "discontinuous distribution" of biologists. By this they mean that

certain types of plants and animals occur in widely separated regions,

without the presence of any living representatives in the intermediate

area. But they point to the rock records to show that the type once

occupied the whole territory, till extensive elimination occurred, owing

to changes in climatic or geologic conditions or to sharpened

competition in the struggle for existence, with the result that the type

survived only in detached localities offering a favorable

environment.[278] In animal and plant life, the ice invasion of the

Glacial Age explains most of these islands of survival; in human life,

the invasion of stronger peoples. The Finnish race, which in the ninth

century covered nearly a third of European Russia, has been shattered by

the blows of Slav expansion into numerous fragments which lie scattered

about within the old ethnic boundary from the Arctic Ocean to the

Don-Volga watershed.[279] The encroachments of the whites upon the red

men of America early resulted in their geographical dispersion. The map

showing the distribution of population in 1830 reveals large detached

areas of Indian occupancy embedded in the prevailing white

territory.[280] The rapid compression of the tribal lands and the

introduction of the reservation system resulted in the present

arrangement of yet smaller and more widely scattered groups. Such

islands of survival tend constantly to contract and diminish in number

with the growing progress, density, and land hunger of the surrounding

race. The Kaffir islands and the Hottentot "locations" in South Africa,

large as they now are, will repeat the history of the American Indian

lands, a history of gradual shrinkage and disappearance as territorial

entities.

[Sidenote: Contrasted location.]

Every land contains in close juxtaposition areas of sharply contrasted

cultural, economic and political development, due to the influence of

diverse natural locations emphasizing lines of ethnic cleavage made

perhaps by some great historical struggle. In mountainous countries the

conquered people withdraw to the less accessible heights and leave the

fertile valleys to the victorious intruders. The two races are thus held

apart, and the difference in their respective modes of life forced upon

them by contrasted geographic conditions tends still farther for a time

to accentuate their diversity. The contrasted location of the dislodged

Alpine race, surviving in all the mountains and highlands of western

Europe over against the Teutonic victors settled in the plains,[281] has

its parallel in many parts of Asia and Africa; it is almost always

coupled with a corresponding contrast in mode of life, which is at least

in part geographically determined. In Algeria, the Arab conquerors, who

form the larger part of the population, are found in the plains where

they live the life of nomads in their tents; the Berbers, who were the

original inhabitants, driven back into the fastnesses of the Atlas

ranges, form now an industrious, sedentary farmer class, living in stone

houses, raising stock, and tilling their fields as if they were market

gardeners.[282] In the Andean states of South America, the eastern slopes

of the Cordilleras, which are densely forested owing to their position

in the course of the trade-winds, harbor wild, nomadic tribes of hunting

and fishing Indians who differ in stock and culture from the Inca

Indians settled in the drier Andean basins.[283] [See map page 101.]

[Sidenote: Geographical polarity.]

Every geographical region of strongly marked character possesses a

certain polarity, by reason of which it attracts certain racial or

economic elements of population, and repels others. The predatory tribes

of the desert are constantly reinforced by refugee outlaws from the

settled agricultural communities along its borders.[284] The mountains

which offer a welcome asylum for the persecuted Waldenses have no lure

for the money-making Jew, who is therefore rarely found there. The

negroes of the United States are more and more congregating in the Gulf

States, making the "Black Belt" blacker. The fertile tidewater plains

of ante-bellum Virginia and Maryland had a rich, aristocratic white

population of slave-holding planters; the mountain backwoods of the

Appalachian ranges, whose conditions of soil and relief were ill adapted

for slave cultivation, had attracted a poorer democratic farmer class,

who tilled their small holdings by their own labor and consequently

entertained little sympathy for the social and economic system of the

tidewater country. This is the contrast between mountain and plain which

is as old as humanity. It presented problems to the legislation of

Solon, and caused West Virginia to split off from the mother State

during the Civil War.[285]

Each contrasted district has its own polarity; but with this it attracts

not one but many of the disruptive forces which are pent up in every

people or state. Certain conditions of climate, soil, and tillable area

in the Southern States of the Union made slave labor remunerative, while

opposite conditions in the North combined eventually to exclude it

thence. Slave labor in the South brought with it in turn a whole train

of social and economic consequences, notably the repulsion of foreign

white immigration and the development of shiftless or wasteful

industrial methods, which further sharpened the contrast between the two

sections. The same contrast occurs in Italian territory between Sicily

and Lombardy. Here location at the two extremities of the peninsula has

involved a striking difference in ethnic infusions in the two districts,

different historical careers owing to different vicinal grouping, and

dissimilar geographic conditions. These effects operating together and

attracting other minor elements of divergence, have conspired to

emphasize the already strong contrast between northern and southern

Italy.

[Sidenote: Geographical marks of growth.]

In geographical location can be read the signs of growth or decay. There

are racial and national areas whose form is indicative of development,

expansion, while others show the symptoms of decline. The growing people

seize all the geographic advantages within their reach, whether lying

inside their boundaries or beyond. In the latter case, they promptly

extend their frontiers to include the object of their desire, as the

young United States did in the case of the Mississippi River and the

Gulf coast. European peoples, like the Russians in Asia, all strive to

reach the sea; and when they have got there, they proceed to embrace as

big a strip of coast as possible. Therefore the whole colonization

movement of western and central Europe was in the earlier periods

restricted to coasts, although not to such an excessive degree as that

of the Phoenicians and Greeks. Their own maritime location had

instructed them as to the value of seaboards, and at the same time made

this form of expansion the simplest and easiest.

[Sidenote: Marks of inland expansion.]

On the other hand, that growing people which finds its coastward advance

blocked, and is therefore restricted to landward expansion, seizes upon

every natural feature that will aid its purpose. It utilizes every

valley highway and navigable river, as the Russians did in the case of

the Dnieper, Don, Volga, Kama and Northern Dwina in their radial

expansion from the Muscovite center at Moscow, and as later they used

the icy streams of Siberia in their progress toward the Pacific; or as

the Americans in their trans-continental advance used the Ohio,

Tennessee, the Great Lakes, and the Missouri. They reach out toward

every mountain pass leading to some choice ultramontane highway. Bulges

or projecting angles of their frontier indicate the path they plan to

follow, and always include or aim at some natural feature which will

facilitate their territorial growth. The acquisition of the province of

Ticino in 1512 gave the Swiss Confederation a foothold upon Lake

Maggiore, perhaps the most important waterway of northern Italy, and the

possession of the Val Leventina, which now carries the St. Gotthard

Railroad down to the plains of the Po. Every bulge of Russia's Asiatic

frontier, whether in the Trans-Caucasus toward the Mesopotamian basin

and the Persian Gulf, or up the Murghab and Tedjend rivers toward the

gates of Herat, is directed at some mountain pass and an outlet seaward

beyond.

If this process of growth bring a people to the borders of a desert,

there they halt perhaps for a time, but only, as it were, to take breath

for a stride across the sand to the nearest oasis. The ancient

Egyptians advanced by a chain of oases--Siwa, Angila, Sella and Sokna,

across the Libyan Desert to the Syrtis Minor. The Russians in the last

twenty-five years have spread across the arid wastes of Turkestan by way

of the fertile spots of Khiva, Bukhara and Merv to the irrigated slopes

of the Hindu Kush and Tian Shan Mountains. The French extended the

boundaries of Algiers southward into the desert to include the caravan

routes focusing at the great oases of Twat and Tidekelt, years before

their recent appropriation of the western Sahara.

[Sidenote: Marks of decline.]

As territorial expansion is the mark of growth, so the sign of decline

is the relinquishment of land that is valuable or necessary to a

people's well-being. The gradual retreat of the Tartars and in part also

of the Kirghis tribes from their best pasture lands along the Volga into

the desert or steppes indicates their decrease of power, just as the

withdrawal of the Indians from their hunting grounds in forest and

prairie was the beginning of their decay. Bolivia maimed herself for all

time when in 1884 she relinquished to Chile her one hundred and eighty

miles of coast between the Rio Lao and the twenty-fourth parallel. Her

repeated efforts later to recover at least one seaport on the Pacific

indicate her own estimate of the loss by which she was limited to an

inland location, and deprived of her maritime periphery.[286]

[Sidenote: Interpretation of scattered and marginal location.]

The habits of a people and the consequent demands which they make upon

their environment must be taken into account in judging whether or not a

restricted geographical location is indicative of a retrograde process.

The narrow marginal distribution of the Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshean

Indians on the islands and coastal strips of northwestern America means

simply the selection of sites most congenial to those inveterate fisher

tribes. The fact that the English in the vicinity of the Newfoundland

Banks settled on a narrow rim of coast in order to exploit the

fisheries, while the French peasants penetrated into the interior

forests and farmlands of Canada, was no sign of territorial decline.

English and French were both on the forward march, each in their own

way. The scattered peripheral location of the Phoenician trading

stations and later of the Greek colonies on the shores of the

Mediterranean was the expression of the trading and maritime activity of

those two peoples. Centuries later a similar distribution of Arab posts

along the coast of East Africa, Madagascar and the western islands of

the Sunda Archipelago indicated the great commercial expansion of the

Mohammedan traders of Oman and Yemen. The lack came when this

distribution, normal as a preliminary form, bore no fruit in the

occupation of wide territorial bases. [See map page 251.]

[Sidenote: Prevalence of ethnic islands of decline.]

In general, however, any piecemeal or marginal location of a people

justifies the question as to whether it results from encroachment,

dismemberment, and consequently national or racial decline. This

inference as a rule strikes the truth. The abundance of such ethnic

islands and reefs--some scarcely distinguishable above the flood of the

surrounding population--is due to the fact that when the area of

distribution of any life form, whether racial or merely animal, is for

any cause reduced, it does not merely contract but breaks up into

detached fragments. These isolated groups often give the impression of

being emigrants from the original home who, in some earlier period of

expansion, had occupied this outlying territory. At the dawn of western

European history, Gaul was the largest and most compact area of Celtic

speech. For this reason it has been regarded as the land whence sprang

the Celts of Britain, the Iberian Peninsula, the Alps and northern

Italy. Freeman thinks that the Gauls of the Danube and Po valleys were

detachments which had been left behind in the great Celtic migration

toward the west;[287] but does not consider the possibility of a once far

more extensive Celtic area, which, as a matter of fact, once reached

eastward to the Weser River and the Sudetes Mountains and was later

dismembered.[288] The islands of Celtic speech which now mark the western

flank of Great Britain and Ireland are shrunken fragments of a Celtic

linguistic area which, as place-names indicate, once comprised the whole

country.[289] Similarly, all over Russia Finnic place-names testify to

the former occupation of the country by a people now submerged by the

immigrant Slavs, except where they emerge in ethnic islands in the far

north and about the elbow of the Volga.[290] [See map page 225.] Beyond

the compact area of the Melanesian race occupying New Guinea and the

islands eastward to the Fiji and Loyalty groups, are found scattered

patches of negroid folk far to the westward, relegated to the interiors

of islands and peninsulas. The dispersed and fragmentary distribution of

this negroid stock has suggested that it formed the older and primitive

race of a wide region extending from India to Fiji and possibly even

beyond.[291]

[Sidenote: Contrast between ethnic islands of growth and decline.]

Ethnic or political islands of decline can be distinguished from islands

of expansion by various marks. When survivals of an inferior people,

they are generally characterized by inaccessible or unfavorable

geographic location. When remnants of former large colonial possessions

of modern civilized nations, they are characterized by good or even

excellent location, but lack a big compact territory nearby to which

they stand in the relation of outpost. Such are the Portuguese fragments

on the west coast of India at Goa, Damaon, and Diu Island, and the

Portuguese half of the island of Timor with the islet of Kambing in the

East Indies. Such also are the remnants of the French empire in India,

founded by the genius of François Dupleix, which are located on the

seaboard at Chandarnagar, Carical, Pondicherry, Yanaon and Mahe. They

tell the geographer a far different story from that of the small

detached French holding of Kwang-chan Bay and Nao-chan Island on the

southern coast of China, which are outposts of the vigorous French

colony of Tongking.

The scattered islands of an intrusive people, bent upon conquest or

colonization, are distinguished by a choice of sites favorable to growth

and consolidation, and by the rapid extension of their boundaries until

that consolidation is achieved; while the people themselves give signs

of the rapid differentiation incident to adaptation to a new

environment.

NOTES TO CHAPTER V

[239] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I. pp.

98-101. New York. 1893.

[240] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp.

5-8, 12, 13, 19-28, 37. New York, 1897.

[241] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 272-273. New York, 1899.

[242] Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, Vol. II, chap.

I. 1846.

[243] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 336, 334. Map. p. 53. New York,

1899.

[244] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 137. London, 1903.

[245] Eleventh Census, Report for Alaska, pp. 66, 67, 70. Washington,

1893.

[246] Livingstone, Travels in South Africa, p. 56. New York, 1858.

[247] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol I, pp. 36,

108. New York, 1893.

[248] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, pp. 127-130,

170. London, 1907.

[249] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 147, 150, 170-173.

New York, 1897.

[250] Alexander P. Engelhardt, A Russian Province of the North, pp. 135,

140-147, 165, 170. Translated from the Russian. London, 1899.

[251] For full and able discussion, see H. J. Mackinder, The

Geographical Pivot of History, in the _Geographical Journal_, April,

1904. London.

[252] The Anglo-Russian Agreement, with map, in _The Independent_,

October, 10, 1907.

[253] Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p.

xii. London, 1904.

[254] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, p. 526; Vol II, pp.

34-35, 50-52 and map. Washington, 1903.

[255] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. II, pp. 225-226. New York, 1859.

[256] W.Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, pp. 402-410, map. New York,

1899.

[257] Frederick J. Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American

History, in the _Annual Report of the American Historical Association_

for 1893, pp. 199-227. Washington, 1894.

[258] Hugh R. Mill, International Geography, pp. 150-152. New York,

1902.

[259] W.E. Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Vol. I, pp. 75, 83. New York,

1903. Henry Dyer, Dai Nippon, pp. 59, 69. New York, 1904.

[260] Norway, Official Publication, pp. 4, 83, 99, and map. Christiania,

1900.

[261] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 221-224, map. London, 1902.

[262] Heinrich von Treitschke, _Politik_, Vol. I, p. 224. Leipzig, 1897.

[263] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 189-191. New York,

1902-1906.

[264] Eleventh Census, _Report on the Indians_, pp. 36-37. Washington,

1894.

[265] John Fiske, Old Virginia and her Neighbors, Vol. II, p. 299.

Boston, 1897.

[266] Eleventh Census, _Report on the Indians_, pp. 30-31. Washington,

1894.

[267] Dr. William Junker, Travels in Africa, 1882-1886, pp. 30, 31, 34,

37, 44, 50-54, 64, 94-95, 140, 145-148. London, 1892.

[268] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 193-195. London,

1896-1898.

[269] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp. 124-129.

Hew York, 1893.

[270] D.G. Brinton, The American Race, p. 266. Philadelphia, 1901.

[271] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, pp. 484, 485. New York,

1902-06.

[272] Nordenskiold, The Voyage of the Vega, p. 291. New York, 1882.

[273] H.M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vol. II, pp. 100-103,

218. In Darkest Africa, Vol. I, pp. 208, 261, 374-375; Vol. II, pp.

40-44.

[274] Georg Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, Vol. II, chap. XI, 3rd

edition, London.

[275] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 411, 436, 532, 533.

Washington, 1903.

[276] Quatrefages, The Pygmies, pp. 24-51. New York, 1895.

[277] Sir T.H. Holdich, India, pp. 202-203, map. London, 1905.

[278] Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. II, chap. XII. New York, 1895.

[279] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, pp.

66-70, maps facing pp. 64 and 80. New York, 1893.

[280] Eleventh Census of the United States, _Report on Population_, Part

I, map p. 23. Washington, 1894.

[281] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, Chapters 7, 8, 11. New York, 1899.

[282] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 910. New York, 1902.

[283] _Ibid._, pp. 832, 836.

[284] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 175, 257. London,

1896-1898.

[285] E.C. Semple, American History and its Geographic Conditions, pp.

280-287. Boston, 1903.

[286] C.E. Akers, History of South America, 1854-1894, pp. 501-502,

556-562. New York, 1904.

[287] E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, p. 14. London, 1882.

[288] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. VI, pp. 125-132, map. New

York, 1902-1906. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 274, 297, 308, 472-473.

New York, 1899.

[289] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 183-191. London,

1904.

[290] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 26, 353, 361-365. Map. New York,

1899.

[291] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, 214-218. London, 1896-1898.

CHAPTER VI

GEOGRAPHICAL AREA

[Sidenote: The size of the earth.]

Every consideration of geographical area must take as its starting point

the 199,000,000 square miles (510,000,000 square kilometers) of the

earth's surface. Though some 8,000,000 square miles (21,000,000 square

kilometers) about the poles remain unexplored, and only the twenty-eight

per cent. of the total constituting the land area is the actual habitat

of man, still the earth as a whole is his planet. Its surface fixes the

limits of his possible dwelling place, the range of his voyages and

migrations, the distribution of animals and plants on which he must

depend. These conditions he has shared with all forms of life from the

amoeba to the civilized nation. The earth's superficial area is the

primal and immutable condition of earth-born, earth-bound man; it is the

common soil whence is sprung our common humanity. Nations belong to

countries and races to continents, but humanity belongs to the whole

world. Naught but the united forces of the whole earth could have

produced this single species of a single genus which we call Man.

[Sidenote: Relation of area to life.]

The relation of life to the earth's area is a fundamental question of

bio-geography. The amount of that area available for terrestrial life,

the proportion of land and water, the reduction or enlargement of the

available surface by the operation of great cosmic forces, all enter

into this problem, which changes from one geologic period to another.

The present limited plant life of the Arctic regions is the impoverished

successor of a vegetation abundant enough at the eighty-third parallel

to produce coal. That was in the Genial Period, when the northern

hemisphere with its broad land-masses presented a far larger area for

the support of life than to-day. Then the Glacial Period spread an

ice-sheet from the North Pole to approximately the fiftieth parallel,

forced back life to the lower latitudes, and confined the bio-sphere to

the smaller land-masses of the southern hemisphere and a girdle north of

the equator. The sum total of life on the globe was greatly reduced at

the height of glaciation, and since the retreat of the ice has probably

never regained the abundance of the Middle Tertiary; so that our period

is probably one of relative impoverishment and faulty adjustment both

of life to life and of life to physical environment.[292] The continent of

North America contained a small vital area during the Later Cretaceous

Period, when a notable encroachment of the sea submerged the Atlantic

coastal plain, large sections of the Pacific coast, the Great Plains,

Texas and the adjacent Gulf plain up the Mississippi Valley to the mouth

of the Ohio.[293]

The task of estimating the area supporting terrestrial life which the

earth presented at any given time is an important one, not only because

the amount of life depends upon this area, but because every increase of

available area tends to multiply conditions favorable to variation.

Darwin shows that largeness of area, more than anything else, affords

the best conditions for rapid and improved variation through natural

selection; because a large area supports a larger number of individuals

in whom chance variations, advantageous in the struggle for existence,

appear oftener than in a small group. This position is maintained also

by the most recent evolutionists.[294]

On purely geographical grounds, also, a large area stimulates

differentiation by presenting a greater diversity of natural conditions,

each of which tends to produce its appropriate species or variety.[295]

Consider the different environments found in a vast and varied continent

like Eurasia, which extends from the equator far beyond the Arctic

Circle, as compared with a small land-mass like Australia, relatively

monotonous in its geographic conditions; and observe how much farther

evolution has progressed in the one than in the other, in point of

animal forms, races and civilization. If we hold with Moritz Wagner and

others that isolation in naturally defined regions, alternating with

periods of migration, offers the necessary condition for the rapid

evolution of type forms, and thus go farther than Darwin, who regards

isolation merely as a fortunate contributory circumstance, we find that

for the evolution of mankind it is large areas like Eurasia which afford

the greatest number and variety of these naturally segregated habitats,

and at the same time the best opportunity for vast historical movements.

[Sidenote: The struggle for space.]

Evolution needs room but finds the earth's surface limited. Everywhere

old and new forms of life live side by side in deadly competition; but

the later improved variety multiplies and spreads at the cost of less

favored types. The struggle for existence means a struggle for space.[296]

This is true of man and the lower animals. A superior people, invading

the territory of its weaker savage neighbors, robs them of their land,

forces them back into corners too small for their support, and continues

to encroach even upon this meager possession, till the weaker finally

loses the last remnant of its domain, is literally crowded off the

earth, becomes extinct as the Tasmanians and so many Indian tribes have

done.[297] The superiority of such expansionists consists primarily in

their greater ability to appropriate, thoroughly utilize and populate a

territory. Hence this is the faculty by which they hasten the extinction

of the weaker; and since this superiority is peculiar to the higher

stages of civilization, the higher stages inevitably supplant the lower.

[Sidenote: Area an index of social and political development.]

The successive stages of social development--savage, pastoral nomadic,

agricultural, and industrial--represent increasing density of

population, increasing numerical strength of the social group, and

finally increasing geographical area, resulting in a vastly enlarged

social group or state. Increase in the population of a given land is

accompanied by a decrease in the share which each individual can claim

as his own. This progressive readjustment to a smaller proportion of

land brings in its train the evolution of all economic and social

processes, reacting again favorably on density of population and

resulting eventually in the greatly increased social group and enlarged

territory of the modern civilized state. Hence we may lay down the rule

that change in areal relations, both of the individual to his decreasing

quota of land, and of the state to its increasing quota of the earth's

surface is an important index of social and political evolution.

Therefore the rise and decline not only of peoples but of whole

civilizations have depended upon their relations to area. Therefore

problems of area, such as the expansion of a small territory, the

economic and political mastery of a large one, dominate all history.

[Sidenote: The Oikoumene.]

Humanity's area of distribution and historical movement call the

Oikoumene. It forms a girdle around the earth between the two polar

regions, and embraces the Tropics, the Temperate Zones, and a part of

the North Frigid, in all, five-sixths of the earth's surface. This area

of distribution is unusually large. Few other living species so nearly

permeate the whole vital area, and many of these have reached their wide

expansion only in the company of man. Only about 49,000,000 square miles

(125,000,000 square kilometers) of the Oikoumene is land and therefore

constitutes properly the habitat of man. But just as we cannot

understand a nation from the study of its own country alone, but must

take into consideration the wider area of its spreading activities, so

we cannot understand mankind without including in his world not only his

habitat but also the vastly larger sphere of his activities, which is

almost identical with the earth itself. The most progressive peoples

to-day find their scientific, economic, religious and political

interests embracing the earth.

[Sidenote: Unity of the human species in the relation to the earth.]

Mankind has in common with all other forms of life the tendency toward

expansion. The more adaptable and mobile an organism is, the wider the

distribution which it attains and the greater the rapidity with which it

displaces its weaker kin. In the most favored cases it embraces the

whole vital area of the earth, leaving no space free for the development

of diversity of forms, and itself showing everywhere only superficial

distinctions. Mankind has achieved such wide distribution. Before his

persistent intrusions and his mobility, the earth has no longer any

really segregated districts where a strongly divergent type of the man

animal might develop. Hence mankind shows only superficial distinctions

of hair, color, head-form and stature between its different groups. It

has got beyond the point of forming species, and is restricted to the

slighter variations of races. Even these are few in comparison with the

area of the earth's surface, and their list tends to decrease. The

Guanches and Tasmanians have vanished, the Australians are on the road

to extinction; and when they shall have disappeared, there will be one

variety the less in humanity. So the process of assimilation advances,

here by the simple elimination of weaker divergent types of men, there

by amalgamation and absorption into the stock of the stronger.

This unity of the human species has been achieved in spite of the fact

that, owing to the three-fold predominance of the water surface of the

globe, the land surface appears as detached fragments which rise as

islands from the surrounding ocean. Among these fragments we have every

gradation in size, from the continuous continental mass of

Eurasia-Africa with its 31,000,000 square miles, the Americas with

15,000,000, Australia with nearly 3,000,000, Madagascar with 230,000,

and New Zealand with 104,000, down to Guam with its 199 square miles,

Ascension with 58, Tristan da Cunha with 45, and the rocky Islet of

Helgoland with its scant 150 acres. All these down to the smallest

constitute separate vital districts.

[Sidenote: Isolation and differentiation.]

Small, naturally defined areas, whether their boundaries are drawn by

mountains, sea, or by both, always harbor small but markedly individual

peoples, as also peculiar or endemic animal forms, whose differentiation

varies with the degree of isolation. Such peoples can be found over and

over again in islands, peninsulas, confined mountain valleys, or

desert-rimmed oases. The cause lies in the barriers to expansion and to

accessions of population from without which confront such peoples on

every side. Broad, uniform continental areas, on the other hand, where

nature has erected no such obstacles are the habitats of wide-spread

peoples, monotonous in type. The long stretch of coastal lowlands

encircling the Arctic Ocean and running back into the wide plains of

North America and Eurasia show a remarkable uniformity of animal and

plant forms[298] and a striking similarity of race through the Lapps, the

Samoyedes of northern Russia, the various Mongolian tribes of Arctic

Siberia to Bering Strait, and the Eskimo, that curiously transitional

race, formerly classified as Mongolian and more recently as a divergent

Indian stock; for the Eskimos are similar to the Siberians in stature,

features, coloring, mode of life, in everything but head-form, though

even the cephalic indices approach on the opposite shores of Bering

Sea.[299] Where geography draws no dividing line, ethnology finds it

difficult to do so. Where the continental land-masses converge is found

similarity or even identity of race, easy gradations from one type to

another; where they diverge most widely in the peninsular extremities of

South America, South Africa and Australia, they show the greatest

dissimilarity in their native races, and a corresponding diversity in

their animal life.[300] Geographical proximity combined with accessibility

results in similarity of human and animal occupants, while a

corresponding dissimilarity is the attendant of remoteness or of

segregation. Therefore, despite the distribution of mankind over the

total habitable area of the earth, his penetration into its detached

regions and hidden corners has maintained such variations as still exist

in the human family.

[Sidenote: Monotonous race type of small area.]

If the distribution of the several races be examined in the light of

this conclusion, it becomes apparent that the races who have succeeded

in appropriating only limited portions of the earth's surface, though

each may be a marked variant of the human family, are characterized by

few inner diversities, either of physical features or culture. Their

subdivisions feel only in a slight degree the differentiating effects of

geographic remoteness, which in a small area operates with weakened

force; and they enjoy few of those diversities of environment which

stimulate variation. They form close and distinct ethnic unities also

because their scant numbers restrict the appearance of variations. The

habitat of the negro race in Africa south of the Sahara, relatively

small, limited in its zonal location almost wholly to the Tropics,

poorly diversified both in relief and contour, has produced only a

retarded and monotonous social development based upon tropical

agriculture or a low type of pastoral life. The still smaller, still

less varied habitat of the Australian race, again tropical or

sub-tropical in location, has produced over its whole extent only one

grade of civilization and that the lowest, one physical, mental and

moral type.[301]

[Sidenote: Wide race distribution and inner diversities.]

The Mongoloid area of distribution, on the other hand, is so large that

it necessarily includes a great range of climates and variety of

geographic conditions. [Maps pages 103 and 225.] Representatives of this

race, reflecting their diversified habitats, show many ethnic

differentiations. They reveal also every stage and phase of cultural

development from the industrialism of Japan, with its artistic and

literary concomitants, to the savage economy and retarded intellectual

life of the Chukches fisher tribes or the Giljak hunters of Sakhalin.

The white race, identified primarily with Europe, that choice and

diversified continent, comprised also a large area of southwestern Asia

and the northern third of Africa. It thus extended from the Arctic

Circle well within the Tropics. Its area included every variety of

geographic condition and originally every degree of cultural

development; but the rapid expansion in recent centuries of the most

advanced peoples of this race has made them the apostles of civilization

to the whole world. It has also given them, through the occupation of

Australia and the Americas, the widest distribution and the most varied

habitats. As agents of the modern historical movement, however, they are

subjected to all its assimilating effects, which tend to counteract the

diversities born of geographic segregation, and to raise all branches of

the white race to one superior cosmopolitan type. On the other hand, the

vast international division of labor and specialization of production,

geographically based and entailed by advancing economic development,

besides the differences of traditions and ideals reaching far back into

an historic past and rooted in the land, will serve to maintain many

subtle inner differences between even the most progressive nations.

[Sidenote: Area and language.]

Hence the wide area which Darwin found to be most favorable to

improved variation and rapid evolution in animals, operates to the

same end in human development, and its influence becomes a law of

anthropo-geography. It permeates the higher aspects of life. The wide,

varied area occupied by the Germanic tribes of Europe permitted the

evolution of the many dialects which finally made the richness of

modern German speech. English has gained in vocabulary and idiom with

every expansion of its area. New territories mean to a people new

pursuits, new relations, new wants; and all these become reflected in

their speech. Languages, like peoples, cease to grow with national

stagnation.[302] To such stagnation movement or expansion is the

surest antidote. America will in time make its contribution to the

English tongue. The rich crop of slang that springs up on the frontier

is not wholly to be deplored. The crudeness and vigor of cowboy speech

are marks of youth: they are also promises of growth. Language can not

live by dictionary alone. It tends to form new variants with every

change of habitat. The French of the Canadian _habitant_ has absorbed

Indian and English words, and adapted old terms to new uses;[303] but

it is otherwise a survival of seventeenth century French. Boer speech

in South Africa shows the same thing--absorption of new Kaffir and

English words, coupled with marks of retardation due to isolation.

Religion in the same way gains by wide dispersal. Christianity is one

thing in St. Petersburg, another among the Copts of Cairo, another in

Rome, another in London, and yet another in Boston. Buddhism takes on

a different color in Ceylon, Tibet, China and Japan. In religion as in

other phases of human development, differentiation must mean eventual

enrichment, a larger content of the religious idea, to which each

faith makes its contribution.

[Sidenote: Large area a guarantee of racial or national permanence.]

The larger the area occupied by a race or people, other geographic

conditions being equal, the surer the guarantee of their permanence, and

the less the chance of their repression or annihilation. A broad

geographic base means generally abundant command of the resources of

life and growth. Though for a growing people of wide possessions, like

the Russians, the significance of the land may not be obvious, it

becomes apparent enough in national decline and decay; for these even in

their incipiency betray themselves in a loss of territory. A people

which, voluntarily or otherwise, renounces its hold upon its land is on

the downward path. Nothing else could show so plainly the national

vitality of Japan as her tenacious purpose to get back Port Arthur taken

from her by the Shimonoseki treaty in 1895. A people may decrease in

numbers without serious consequences if it still retains its land; for

herein lies its resources by which it may again hope to grow. The

recurring loss of millions of lives in China from the wide-sweeping

floods of the Hoangho is a passing episode, forgotten as soon as the

mighty stream is re-embanked and the flooded plains reclaimed. The

Civil War in the United States involved a temporary diminution of

population and check to progress, but no lasting national weakness

because no loss of territory. But the expulsion of the American Indians

from their well-stocked hunting grounds in the Mississippi Valley and

Atlantic plain to more restricted and barren lands in the far West, and

the withdrawal of the Australian natives from the fertile coasts to the

desert interior have meant racial renunciation of the sources of life.

Hence a people who are conquered and dislodged from their territory, as

were the ancient Britons by the Saxons, the Slavs from the land between

the Elbe and the Niemen by the mediæval Germans, and the Kaffirs in

South Africa by the Dutch and English, the Ainos from Hondo by the

Japanese, and the whole original Alpine race by the later coming Teutons

from the fertile valleys and plains into the more barren highlands of

western Europe, have little or no chance of regaining their own. When

conquest results not in dislodgement, but only in the subjection of an

undisturbed native population to a new ruling class, the vanquished

retain their hold, only slightly impaired, perhaps, upon their

strength-giving fields, recover themselves, and sooner or later conquer

their conquerors either by absorption or revolution. This was the

history of ancient Egypt with its Shepherd Kings, of England with its

Norman lords, of Mexico and Peru with their Spanish victors.

[Sidenote: Weakness of small states.]

A large area throws around all the life forms which it supports the

protection of its mere distances, which facilitate defense in

competition with other forms, render attack difficult, and afford room

for retreat under pursuit. On the other hand, the small area is easily

compassed by the invaders, and its inhabitants soon brought to bay.

Since there is a general correspondence between size of area and number

of inhabitants, where physical conditions and economic development are

similar, a small area involves a further handicap of numerical weakness

of population. Greece has always suffered from the small size of the

peninsula and the further political dismemberment entailed by its

geographic subdivisions. Despite superior civilization and national

heroism, it has fallen a victim to almost every invader. Belgium,

Holland, Switzerland exist as distinct nations only on sufferance.

Finland's history since 1900 shows that the day for the national

existence of small peoples is passing.[304] The fragmentary political

geography of the Danube basin gives the geographer the impression of an

artist's crayon studies of details, destined later to be incorporated in

a finished picture. Their small areas promise short-lived autonomy. The

recent absorption of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria indicates the

destiny of these Danubian states as fixed by the law of increasing

territorial aggregates.

What is true of states is true also of peoples. The extinction of the

retarded "provisional peoples" of the earth progresses more rapidly in

small groups than in large, and in small islands more quickly than in

continental areas. Of the twenty-one Indian stocks or families which

have died out in the United States, fifteen belonged to the small bands

once found in the Pacific coast states, and four more were similar

fragments found on the lower Mississippi and its bayous.[305] [See map

page 54.] The native Gaunches of Teneriffe Island disappeared long ago.

The last Tasmanian died in 1876. New Zealand, whose area is four times

that of Tasmania, and therefore gives some respite before the

encroachments of the whites, still harbors 47,835 Maoris, or little over

one-third the native population of the island in 1840.[306] But these

compete for the land with nearly one million English colonists, and in

the limited area of the islands they will eventually find no place of

retreat before the relentless white advance.

To the Australians, on the other hand, much inferior to the Maoris, the

larger area of their continent affords extensive deserts and steppes

into which the natives have withdrawn and whither the whites do not care

to follow. Hence mere area, robbed of every other favorable geographical

circumstance, has contributed to the survival of the 230,000 natives in

Australia. Similarly the Arawaks were early wiped out on the island of

Cuba and the Caribs on San Domingo and the smaller Antilles by the

truculent methods of the Spanish conquerors, while both stocks survive

on the continent of South America. Even the truculent methods of the

Spanish conquerors could make little impression upon the relatively

massive populations of Mexico and Peru, whose survival and latter-day

recovery of independence can be ascribed largely though not solely to

their ample territorial base. So the vast area of the United States and

Canada has afforded a hinterland of asylum to the retreating Indians,

whose moribund condition, especially in the United States, is betrayed

by their scattered distribution in small, unfavorable localities. On the

other hand, the vast extent of Arctic and sub-Arctic Canada, combined

with the adverse climatic conditions of the region, will guarantee the

northern Indians a longer survival. In Tierra del Fuego, the

encroachments of sheep-farmers and gold-miners from Patagonia twenty

years ago, by fencing off the land and killing off the wild guanaco,

threatened the existence of this animal and of the Onas natives of the

island. These, soon brought to bay in that natural enclosure, attacked

the farmers, whose reprisals between 1890 and 1900 reduced the number of

the Onas from 2,000 to 800 souls.[307]

[Sidenote: Contrast of large and small areas in bio-geography.]

The same law holds good in bio-geography; here, too, area gives strength

and a small territorial foothold means weakness. The native flora and

fauna of New Zealand seem involved in the same process of extinction as

the native race. The Maoris themselves have observed this fact and

applied the principle to their own obvious fate. They have seen hardy

imported English grasses offering deadly competition to the indigenous

vegetation; the Norway rat, entering by European ships, extirpating the

native variety; the European house fly, purposely imported and

distributed to destroy the noxious indigenous species.[308] The same

unequal combat between imported plants and animals, equipped by the

fierce Iliads of continental areas, and the local flora and fauna has

taken place on the little island of St. Helena, to the threatened

destruction of the native forms.[309]

The preponderant migration of animals from the northern to the southern

hemisphere is attributed by Darwin to the greater extent of land in the

north, whereby the northern types have existed in greater numbers and

have been so perfected through natural selection and competition, that

they have surpassed the southern forms in dominating power and therefore

have encroached successfully.[310] Also the races and nations of the

northern continents have seriously invaded the southern land-masses and

are still expanding. It is the largest continent, Eurasia, which has

been the chief center of dispersal.

[Sidenote: Political domination of large areas.]

The Temperate Zone of North America will always harbor a more powerful

people than the corresponding zone of South America, because the latter

continent begins to contract and tapers off to a point where the other

at the northern Tropic begins to spread out. Therefore North America

possesses more abundantly all the advantages accruing to a continent

from a location in the Temperate Zone. The wide basis of the North Slavs

in Russia and Siberia has given them a natural leadership in the whole

Slav family, just as the broad unbroken area of ever expanding Prussia

gave that state the ascendency in the German Empire over the

geographically partitioned and politically dismembered surface of

southern Germany. English domination of the United Kingdom is based not

only upon race, location, geographical features and resources, but also

on the larger size of England. So in the United States, abolitionist

statesmen adopted the most effective means of fighting slavery when they

limited its area by law, while permitting free states to go on

multiplying in the new territory of the vast Northwest.

In a peninsula political ascendency often falls to the broad base

connecting it with the continent, because this part alone has the area

to support a large population, and moreover commands a large hinterland,

whence it continually draws new and invigorating blood. The geographical

basis of the Aryan and later the Mongol supremacy in India was the wide

zone of lowlands between the Indus and the Brahmaputra. [See map page

103.] The only ancient Greek state ever able to dominate the Balkan

Peninsula was non-Hellenic Macedonia, after it had extended its

boundaries to the Euxine and the Adriatic. To-day a much larger area in

this same peninsular base harbors the widespread southern Slavs, who

numerically and economically far outweigh Albanians and Greeks, and who

could with ease achieve political domination over the small Turkish

minority, were it not for the European fear of a Slavic Bosporus, and

its union with Russia. The Cisalpine Gauls of the wide Po basin

repeatedly threatened the existence of the smaller but more civilized

Etruscan and Latin tribes. The latter, maturing their civilization under

the concentrating influences of a limited area, at last dominated the

larger Celtic district to the north. But in the nineteenth century this

district took the lead in the movement for a United Italy, and now

exercises the strong influence in Italian affairs which belongs to it by

reason of its superior area, location, and more vigorous race. [See map

of Italy's population, Chap. XVI.]

The broad territorial base of the Anglo-Saxon race, Slavs, Germans and

Chinese promises a long ethnic life, whereas the narrow foothold, of the

Danes, Dutch, Greeks, and the Turks in Europe carries with it the

persistent risk of conquest and absorption by a larger neighbor. Such a

fate repeatedly threatens these people, but has thus far been warded

off, now by the protection of an isolating environment, now by the

diplomatic intervention of some not disinterested power. The scattered

fragments of Osman stock in European Turkey, which constitute only about

ten per cent. of the total population, and are almost lost in the

surrounding mass of Slavs and Greeks, provide a poor guarantee for the

duration of the race and their empire on European soil. On the other

hand, the Osmani who are compactly spread over the whole interior of

Asia Minor have a better prospect of national survival.

[Sidenote: Area and literature.]

An important factor in the preservation of national consciousness and

the spread of national influence is always a national language and

literature. This principle is recognized by the government of the Czar

in its Russification of Finland,[311] Poland, and the German centers in

the Baltic provinces, when it substitutes Russian for the local language

in education, law courts and all public offices, and restricts the

publication of local literature. The survival of a language and its

literature is intimately connected with area and the population which

that area can support. The extinction of small, weak peoples has its

counterpart in the gradual elimination of dialects and languages having

restricted territorial sway, whose fate is foreshadowed by the unequal

competition of their literatures with those of numerically stronger

peoples. An author writing in a language like the Danish, intelligible

to only a small public, can expect only small returns for his labor in

either influence, fame, or fortune. The return may be so small that it

is prohibitive. Hence we find the Danish Hans Christian Andersen and the

Norwegian Ibsen writing in German, as do also many Scandinavian

scientists. Georg Brandes abandons his native Danish and seeks a larger

public by making English the language of his books. The incentive to

follow a literary career, especially if it includes making a living, is

relatively weak among a people of only two or three millions, but gains

enormously among large and cultivated peoples, like the seventy million

German-speaking folk of Europe, or the one hundred and thirty millions

of English speech scattered over the world. The common literature which

represents the response to this incentive forms a bond of union among

the various branches of these peoples, and may be eventually productive

of political results.

[Sidenote: Small geographic base of primitive societies.]

Growth has been the law of human societies since the birth of man's

gregarious instinct. It has manifested itself in the formation of ever

larger social groups, appropriating ever larger areas. It has registered

itself geographically in the protrusion of ethnic boundaries,

economically in more intensive utilization of the land, socially in

increasing density of population, and politically in the formation of

ever larger national territorial aggregates. The lowest stages of

culture reveal small tribes, growing very slowly or at times not at all,

disseminated over areas small in themselves but large for the number of

their inhabitants, hence sparsely populated. The size of these primitive

holdings depends upon the natural food supply yielded by the region.

They assume wide dimensions but support groups of only a few families on

the chill rocky coasts of Tierra del Fuego or the sterile plains of

central Australia; and they contract to smaller areas dotted with fairly

populous villages in the fertile districts of the middle Congo or

bordering the rich coast fishing grounds of southern Alaska and British

Columbia. But always land is abundant, and is drawn upon in widening

circles when the food supply becomes inadequate or precarious.

[Sidenote: Influence of small confined areas.]

Where nature presents barriers to far-ranging food-quests, man is forced

to advance from the natural to the artificial basis of subsistence; he

leaves the chase for the sedentary life of agriculture. Extensive

activities are replaced by intensive ones, wide dispersal of tribal

energies by concentration. The extensive forests and grassy plains of

the Americas supported abundant animal life and therefore afforded

conditions for the long survival of the hunting tribes; nature put no

pressure upon man to coerce him to progress, except in the small

mountain-walled valleys of Peru and Mexico, and in the restricted

districts of isthmian Central America. Here game was soon exhausted.

Agriculture became an increasing source of subsistence and was forced by

limited area out of its migratory or _essartage_ stage of development

into the sedentary. As fields become fixed in such enclosed areas, so do

the cultivators. Here first population becomes relatively dense, and

thereby necessitates more elaborate social and political organization in

order to prevent inner friction.

The geographically enclosed district has the further advantage that its

inhabitants soon come to know it out to its boundaries, understand its

possibilities, exploit to the utmost its resources, and because of the

closeness of their relationship to it and to each other come to develop

a conscious national spirit. The population, since it cannot easily

spread beyond the nature-set limits, increases in density. The members

of the compact society react constantly upon one another and exchange

the elements of civilization. Thus the small territory is characterized

by the early maturity of a highly individualized civilization, which

then, with inherent power of expansion, proceeds to overleap its narrow

borders and conquer for itself a wide sphere of influence. Hand in hand

with this process goes political concentration, which aids the

subsequent expansion. Therefore islands, oases, slender coastal strips

and mountain valleys repeatedly show us small peoples who, in their

seclusion, have developed a tribal or national consciousness akin in

its intensity to clan feeling. This national feeling is conspicuous in

the English, Japanese, Swiss and Dutch, as it was in the ancient

city-states of Greece. The accompanying civilization, once brought to

maturity in its narrow breeding place, spreads under favorable

geographic conditions over a much larger space, which the accumulated

race energy takes for its field of activity. The flower which thus early

blooms may soon fade and decay; nevertheless the geographically evolved

national consciousness persists and retains a certain power of renewal.

This has been demonstrated in the Italians and modern Greeks, in the

Danes and the Icelanders. In the Jews it has resisted exile from their

native land, complete political dissolution, and dispersal over the

habitable world. Long and often as Italy had to submit to foreign

dominion, the idea of the national unity of the peninsula was never

lost.

[Sidenote: The process of territorial growth.]

In vast unobstructed territories, on the other hand, the evil of wide,

sparse dispersal is checked only by natural increase of population and

the impinging of one growing people upon another, which restricts the

territory of either. When the boundary waste between the small scattered

tribal groups has been occupied, encroachment from the side of the

stronger follows; then comes war, incorporation of territory,

amalgamation of race and coalescence, or the extinction of the weaker.

The larger people, commanding its larger area, expands numerically and

territorially, and continues to throw out wider frontiers, till it meets

insurmountable natural obstacles or the confines of a people strong as

itself. After a pause, during which the existing area is outgrown and

population begins to press harder upon the limits of subsistence, the

weight of a nation is thrown against the barrier, be it physical or

political. In consequence, the old boundaries are enlarged, either by

successful encroachment upon a neighbor, or, in case of defeat, by

incorporation in the antagonist's territory. But even defeat brings

participation in a larger geographic base, wider coöperation, a greater

sum total of common national interests, and especially the protection of

the larger social group. The Transvaal and the Orange Free State find

compensation for the loss of independence by their incorporation in the

British Empire, even if gradual absorption be the destiny of the Boer

stock.

[Sidenote: Area and growth.]

Of adjacent areas equally advanced in civilization and in density of

population but of unequal size, the larger must dominate because its

people have the resistance and aggressive force inherent in the larger

mass. This is the explanation of the absorption of so many colonies and

conquerors by the native races, when no great cultural abyss or race

antagonism separates the two. The long rule of the Scandinavians in the

Hebrides ended in their absorption by the local Gaelic stock, simply

because their settlements were too small and the number of their women

too few. The lowlands on the eastern coasts of Scotland accommodated

larger bands of Norse, who even to-day can be distinguished from the

neighboring Scotch of the Highlands; but on the rugged western coast,

where only small and widely separated deltas at the heads of the fiords

offered a narrow foothold to the invaders, their scattered ethnic

islands were soon inundated by the contiguous population.[312] The

Teutonic elements, both English and Norwegian, which for centuries

filtered into Ireland, have been swallowed up in the native Celtic

stock, except where religious antagonisms served to keep the two apart.

So the dominant Anglo-Saxon population of England was a solvent for the

Norman French, and the densely packed humanity of China for their Manchu

conquerors.

On the other hand, extensive areas, like early North America and

Australia, sparsely inhabited by small scattered groups who have only an

attenuated connection with their soil and therefore only a feeble hold

upon their land, cannot compete with small areas, if these have the

dense and evenly distributed population which ensures a firm tenure of

the land. Small, geographically confined areas foster this compact and

systematic occupation on the part of their inhabitants, since they put

barriers in the way of precipitate and disintegrating expansion; and

this characteristic compensates in some degree and for a period at least

for the weakness otherwise inherent in the narrow territorial base.

[Sidenote: Historical advance from small to large areas.]

Every race, people, and state has had the history of progress from a

small to a large area. All have been small in their youth. The bit of

land covered by Roma Quadrata has given language, customs, laws,

culture, and a faint strain of Latin blood to nations now occupying half

a million square miles of Europe. The Arab inundation, which flooded the

vast domain of the Caliphs, traced back to that spring of ethnic and

religious energy which welled up in the arid plain of Mecca and the

Arabian oases. The world-wide maritime expansion of the English-speaking

people had its starting point in the lowlands of the Elbe. The makers of

empire in northern China were cradled in the small highland valley of

the Wei River. The little principality of Moscow was the nucleus of the

Russian Empire.

Penetration into a people's remote past comes always upon some limited

spot which has nurtured the young nation, and reveals the fact that

territorial expansion is the incontestible feature of their history.

This advance from small to large characterizes their political area, the

scope of their trade relations, their spheres of activity, the size of

their known world, and finally the sway of their religions. Every

religion in its early stages of development bears the stamp of a narrow

origin, traceable to the circumscribed habitat of the primitive social

group, or back of that to the small circle of lands constituting the

known world whence it sprang. First it is tribal, and makes a

distinction between my God and thy God; but even when it has expanded to

embody a universal system, it still retains vestigial forms of its

narrow past. Jerusalem, Mecca and Rome remain the sacred goal of

pilgrimages, while the vaster import of a monotheistic faith and the

higher ethical teaching of the brotherhood of man have encircled the

world.

When religion, language and race have spread, in their wake comes the

growing state. Everywhere the political area tends gradually to embrace

the whole linguistic area of which it forms a part, and finally the yet

larger race area. Only the diplomacy of united Europe has availed to

prevent France from absorbing French-speaking Belgium, or Russia from

incorporating into her domain that vast Slav region extending from the

Drave and Danube almost to the Gulf of Corinth, now parcelled out among

seven different states, but bound to the Muscovite empire by ties of

related speech, by race and religion. The detachment of the various

Danubian principalities from the uncongenial dominion of the Turks,

though a dismemberment of a large political territory and a seeming

backward step, can be regarded only as a leisurely preliminary for a new

territorial alignment. History's movements are unhurried; the backward

step may prepare for the longer leap forward. It is impossible to resist

the conclusion that the vigorous, reorganized German Empire will one day

try to incorporate the Germanic areas found in Austria, Switzerland and

Holland.

[Sidenote: Gradations in area and in development.]

Throughout the life of any people, from its foetal period in some small

locality to its well rounded adult era marked by the occupation and

organization of a wide national territory, gradations in area mark

gradations of development. And this is true whether we consider the

compass of their commercial exchanges, the scope of their maritime

ventures, the extent of their linguistic area, the measure of their

territorial ambitions, or the range of their intellectual interests and

human sympathies. From land to ethics, the rule holds good. Peoples in

the lower stages of civilization have contracted spacial ideas, desire

and need at a given time only a limited territory, though they may

change that territory often; they think in small linear terms, have a

small horizon, a small circle of contact with others, a small range of

influence, only tribal sympathies; they have an exaggerated conception

of their own size and importance, because their basis of comparison is

fatally limited. With a mature, widespread people like the English or

French, all this is different; they have made the earth their own, so

far as possible.

Just because of this universal tendency towards the occupation of ever

larger areas and the formation of vaster political aggregates, in making

a sociological or political estimate of different peoples, we should

never lose sight of the fact that all racial and national

characteristics which operate towards the absorption of more land and

impel to political expansion are of fundamental value. A ship of state

manned by such a crew has its sails set to catch the winds of the world.

[Sidenote: Preliminaries to ethnic and political expansion.]

Territorial expansion is always preceded by an extension of the circle

of influence which a people exerts through its traders, its deep-sea

fishermen, its picturesque marauders and more respectable missionaries,

and earlier still by a widening of its mere geographical horizon through

fortuitous or systematic exploration. The Northmen visited the coasts of

Britain and France first as pirates, then as settlers. Norman and Breton

fishermen were drawing in their nets on the Grand Bank of Newfoundland

thirty years before Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence. Japanese fishing

boats preceded Japanese colonists to the coasts of Yezo. Trading fleets

were the forerunners of the Greek colonies along the Black Sea and

Mediterranean, and of Phoenician settlements in North Africa, Sicily and

Spain. It was in the wake of trapper and fur trader that English and

American pioneer advanced across our continent to the Pacific; just as

in French Canada Jesuit priest and voyageur opened the way for the

settler. Religious propaganda was yoked with greed of conquest in the

campaigns of Cortez and Pizarro. Modern statesmen pushing a policy of

expansion are alive to the diplomatic possibilities of missionaries

endangered or their property destroyed. They find a still better asset

to be realized on territorially in enterprising capitalists settled

among a weaker people, by whom their property is threatened or

overtaxed, or their trade interfered with. The British acquisition of

Hongkong in 1842 followed a war with China to prevent the exclusion of

the English opium trade from the Celestial Empire. The annexation of the

Transvaal resulted from the expansion of English capitalists to the Rand

mines, much as the advance of the United States flag to the Hawaiian

Islands followed American sugar planters thither. American capital in

the Caribbean states of South America has repeatedly tried to embroil

those countries with the United States government; and its increasing

presence in Cuba is undoubtedly ominous for the independence of the

island, because with capital go men and influence.

When the foreign investor is not a corporation but a government, the

expanding commercial influence looks still more surely to tangible

political results; because such national enterprises have at bottom a

political motive, however much overlaid by an economic exterior. When

the British government secured a working majority of the Suez Canal

stock, it sealed the fate of Egypt to become ultimately a province of

the British Empire. Russian railroads in Manchuria were the

well-selected tool for the Russification and final annexation of the

province. The weight of American national enterprise in the Panama Canal

Zone sufficed to split off from the Colombian federation a peripheral

state, whose detachment is obviously a preliminary for eventual

incorporation into United States domain. The efforts of the German

government to secure from the Sultan of Turkey railroad concessions

through Asia Minor for German capitalists has aroused jealousy in

financial and political circles in St. Petersburg, and prompted a demand

from the Russian Foreign Office upon Turkey for the privilege of

constructing railroads through eastern Asia Minor.[313]

[Sidenote: Significance of sphere of activity or influence.]

Beyond the home of a people lies its sphere of influence or activities,

which in the last analysis may be taken as a protest against the

narrowness of the domestic habitat. It represents the larger area which

the people wants and which in course of time it might advantageously

occupy or annex. It embodies the effort to embrace more varied and

generous natural conditions, whereby the struggle for subsistence may be

made less hard. Finally, it is an expression of the law that for peoples

and races the struggle for existence is at bottom a struggle for space.

Geography sees various forms of the historical movement as the struggle

for space in which humanity has forever been engaged. In this struggle

the stronger peoples have absorbed ever larger portions of the earth's

surface. Hence, through continual subjection to new conditions here or

there and to a greater sum total of various conditions, they gain in

power by improved variation, as well as numerically by the enlargement

of their geographic base. The Anglo-Saxon branch of the Teutonic stock

has, by its phenomenal increase, overspread sections of whole

continents, drawn from their varied soils nourishment for its finest

efflorescence, and thereby has far out-grown the Germanic branch by

which, at the start, it was overshadowed. The fact that the British

Empire comprises 28,615,000 square kilometers or exactly one-fifth of

the total land area of the earth, and that the Russian Empire contains

over one-seventh, are full of encouragement for Anglo-Saxon and Slav,

but contain a warning to the other peoples of the world.

[Sidenote: Nature of expansion in new and old countries.]

The large area which misleads a primitive folk into excessive dispersion

and the dissipation of their tribal powers, offers to an advanced

people, who in some circumscribed habitat have learned the value of

land, the freest conditions for their development. A wide, unobstructed

territory, occupied by a sparse population of wandering tribes capable

of little resistance to conquest or encroachment, affords the most

favorable conditions to an intruding superior race. Such conditions the

Chinese found in Mongolia and Manchuria, the Russians in Siberia, and

European colonists in the Americas, Australia and Africa. Almost

unlimited space and undeveloped resources met their land hunger and

their commercial ambition. Their numerical growth was rapid, both by the

natural increase reflecting an abundant food supply, and by accessions

from the home countries. Expansion advanced by strides. In contrast to

this care-free, easy development in a new land, growth in old countries

like Europe and the more civilized parts of Asia means a slow protrusion

of the frontier, made at the cost of blood; it means either the

absorption of the native people, because there are no unoccupied corners

into which they can be driven, or the imposition upon them of an

unwelcome rule exercised by alien officials. Witness the advance of the

Russians into Poland and Finland, of the Germans into Poland and

Alsace-Lorraine, of the Japanese into Korea, and of the English into

crowded India.

The rapid unfolding of the geographical horizon in a young land

communicates to an expanding people new springs of mobility, new motives

for movement out and beyond the old confines, new goals holding out new

and undreamt of benefits. Life becomes fresh, young, hopeful. Old checks

to natural increase of population are removed. Emigrant bands beat out

new trails radiating from the old home. They go on individual initiative

or state-directed enterprises; but no matter which, the manifold life

in the far-away periphery reacts upon the center to vivify and

rejuvenate it.

[Sidenote: Relation of ethnic to political expansion.]

The laws of the territorial growth of peoples and of states are in

general the same. The main differences between the two lies in the fact

that ethnic expansion, since it depends upon natural increase, is slow,

steady, and among civilized peoples is subject to slight fluctuations;

while the frontiers of a state, after a long period of permanence, can

suddenly be advanced by conquest far beyond the ethnic boundaries,

often, however, only to be as quickly lost again. Therefore the

important law may be laid down, that the more closely the territorial

growth of a state keeps pace with that of its people, and the more

nearly the political area coincides with the ethnic, the greater is the

strength and stability of the state. This is the explanation of the

vigor and permanence of the early English colonies in America. The slow

westward protrusion of their frontier of continuous settlement within

the boundaries of the Allegheny Mountains formed a marked contrast to

the wide sweep of French voyageur camp and lonely trading-station in the

Canadian forests, and even more to the handful of priests and soldiers

who for three centuries kept an unsteady hold upon the Spanish empire in

the Western Hemisphere. The political advance of the United States

across the continent from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi, thence to

the Rocky Mountains, and thence to the Pacific was always preceded by

bands of enterprising settlers, who planted themselves beyond the

frontier and beckoned to the flag to follow. The great empires of

antiquity were enlarged mechanically by conquest and annexation. They

were mosaics, not growths. The cohesive power of a common ethnic bond

was lacking; so was the modern substitute for this to be found in close

economic interdependence maintained by improved methods of

communication. Hence these empires soon broke up again along lines of

old geographic and ethnic cleavage. For Rome, the cementing power of the

Mediterranean and the fairly unified civilization which this enclosed

sea had been evolving since the dawn of Cretan and Phoenician trade,

compensated in part for the lack of common speech and national ideals

throughout the political domain. But the Empire proved in the end to be

merely a mosaic, easily broken.

[Sidenote: Relation of people and state to political boundary.]

The second point of difference between the expansion of peoples and of

states lies in their respective relation to the political frontier. This

confines the state like a stockade, fixing the territorial limits of its

administrative functions; but for the subjects of the state it is an

imaginary line, powerless to check the range of their activities, except

when a military or tariff war is going on. The state boundary, if it

coincides with a strong natural barrier, may for decades or even

centuries succeed in confining a growing people, if these, by

intelligent economy, increase the productivity of the soil whose area

they are unable to extend. Yet the time comes even for these when they

must break through the barriers and secure more land, either by foreign

conquest or colonization. The classic example of the confinement of a

people within its political boundaries is the long isolation of Japan

from 1624 to 1854. The pent-up forces there accumulated, in a population

which had doubled itself in the interval and which by hard schooling was

made receptive to every improved economic method, manifest themselves in

the insistent demand for more land which has permeated all the recent

policy of Japan. But the history of Japan is exceptional. The rule is

that the growing people slowly but continually overflow their political

boundary, which then advances to cover the successive flood plains of

the national inundation, or yet farther to anticipate the next rise.

This has been the history of Germany in its progress eastward across the

Elbe, the Oder, the Vistula and the Niemen. The dream of a greater

empire embraces all the German-speaking people from Switzerland, Tyrol

and Steiermark to those outlying groups in the Baltic provinces of

Russia and the related offshoot in Holland.[314] [See map page 223.]

Though political boundaries, especially where they coincide with natural

barriers, may restrict the territorial growth of a people, on the other

hand, political expansion is always a stimulus to racial expansion,

because it opens up more land and makes the conditions of life easier

for an increasing people, by relieving congestion in the older areas.

More than this, it materially aids while guiding and focusing the

out-going streams of population. Thus it keeps them concentrated for the

reinforcement of the nation in the form of colonies, and tends to reduce

the political evil of indiscriminate emigration, by which the streams

are dissipated and diverted to strengthen other nations. Witness the

active internal colonization practiced by Germany in her Polish

territory,[315] by Russia in Siberia, in an effort to make the ethnic

boundary hurry after and overtake the political frontier.

[Sidenote: Expansion of civilization.]

Just as the development of a people and state is marked by advance from

small to ever larger areas, so is that of a civilization. It may

originate in a small district; but more mobile than humanity itself, it

does not remain confined to one spot, but passes on from individual to

individual and from people to people. Greece served only as a garden in

which the flowers of Oriental and Egyptian civilization were temporarily

transplanted. As soon as they were modified and adapted to their new

conditions, their seed spread over all Europe. The narrow area of

ancient Greece, which caused the early dissemination of its people over

the Mediterranean basin, and thereby weakened the political force of the

country at home, was an important factor in the wide distribution of its

culture. Commerce, colonization and war are vehicles of civilization,

where favorable geographic conditions open the way for trade in the wake

of the victorious army. The imposition of Roman dominion meant

everywhere the gift of Roman civilization. The Crusaders brought back

from Syria more than their scars and their trophies. Every European

factory in China, every Hudson Bay Company post in the wilds of northern

Canada, every Arab settlement in savage Africa is surrounded by a sphere

of trade; and this in turn is enclosed in a wider sphere of influence

through which its civilization, though much diluted, has filtered. The

higher the civilization, the wider the area which it masters. The

manifold activities of a civilized people demand a large sphere of

influence, and include, furthermore, improved means of communication

which enable it to control such a sphere.

Even a relatively low civilization may spread over a vast area if

carried by a highly mobile people. Mohammedanism, which embodies a

cultural system as well as a religion, found its vehicles of dispersal

in the pastoral nomads occupying the arid land of northern Africa and

western Asia, and thus spread from the Senegal River to Chinese

Turkestan. It was carried by the maritime Arabs of Oman and Yemen to

Malacca and Sumatra, where it was communicated to the seafaring Malays.

These island folk, who approximate the most highly civilized peoples in

their nautical efficiency, distributed the meager elements of Mohammedan

civilization over the Malay Archipelago. [See map of the Religions of

the Eastern Hemisphere, in chapter XIV.]

[Sidenote: Cultural advantages of large political area.]

The larger the area which a civilized nation occupies, the more numerous

are its points of contact with other peoples, and the less likely is

there to be a premature crystallization of its civilization from

isolation. Extension of area on a large scale means eventually extension

of the seaboard and access to those multiform international relations

which the ocean highway confers. The world wide expansion of the British

Empire has given it at every outward step wider oceanic contact and

eventually a cosmopolitan civilization. The same thing is true of the

other great colonial empires of history, whether Portuguese, Spanish,

Dutch or French; and even of the great continental empires, like Russia

and the United States. The Russian advance across Siberia, like the

American advance across the Rockies, meant access to the Pacific, and a

modification of its civilization on those remote shores.

A large area means varied vicinal locations and hence differentiation of

civilization, at least along the frontier. How rapidly the vivifying

influences of this contact will penetrate into the bulk of the interior

depends upon size, location as scattered or compact, and general

geographic conditions like navigable rivers or mountains, which

facilitate or bar intercourse with that interior. The Russian Empire has

eleven different nations, speaking even more different languages, on its

western and southern frontiers. Its long line of Asiatic contact will

inevitably give to the European civilization transplanted hither in

Russian colonies a new and perhaps not unfruitful development. The

Siberian citizen of future centuries may compare favorably with his

brother in Moscow. Japan, even while impressing its civilization upon

the reluctant Koreans, will see itself modified by the contact and its

culture differentiated by the transplanting; but the content of Japanese

civilization will be increased by every new variant thus formed.

[Sidenote: Politico-economic advantages.]

The larger the area brought under one political control, the less the

handicap of internal friction and the greater its economic independence.

Vast territory has enabled the United States to maintain with advantage

a protective tariff, chiefly because the free trade within its own

borders was extensive. The natural law of the territorial growth of

states and peoples means an extension of the areas in which peace and

coöperation are preserved, a relative reduction of frontiers and of the

military forces necessary to defend them,[316] diminution in the sum

total of conflicts, and a wider removal of the border battle fields. In

place of the continual warfare between petty tribes which prevailed in

North America four hundred years ago, we have to-day the peaceful

competition of the three great nations which have divided the continent

among them. The political unification of the Mediterranean basin under

the Roman Empire restricted wars to the remote land frontiers. The

foreign wars of Russia, China, and the United States in the past century

have been almost wholly confined to the outskirts of their big domains,

merely scratching the rim and leaving the great interior sound and

undisturbed. Russia's immense area is the military ally on which she can

most surely count. The long road to Moscow converted Napoleon's victory

into a defeat; and the resistless advance of the Japanese from Port

Arthur to the Sungari River led only to a peace robbed of the chief

fruits of victory. The numerous wars of the British Empire have been

limited to this or that corner, and have scarcely affected the

prosperity of the great remainder, so that their costs have been readily

borne and their wounds rapidly healed.

[Sidenote: Political area and the national horizon.]

The territorial expansion of peoples and states is attended by an

evolution of their spacial conceptions and ideals. Primitive peoples,

accustomed to dismemberment in small tribal groups, bear all the marks

of territorial contraction. Their geographical horizon is usually fixed

by the radius of a few days' march. Inter-tribal trade and intercourse

reach only rudimentary development, under the prevailing conditions of

mutual antagonism and isolation, and hence contribute little to the

expansion of the horizon. Knowing only their little world, such

primitive groups overestimate the size and importance of their own

territory, and are incapable of controlling an extensive area. This is

the testimony of all travellers who have observed native African states.

Though the race or stock distribution may be wide, like that of the

Athapascan and Algonquin Indians, and their war paths long, like the

campaigns of the Iroquois against the Cherokees of the Tennessee River,

yet the unit of tribal territory permanently occupied is never large.

[Sidenote: National estimates of area.]

Small naturally defined regions, which take the lead in historical

development because they counteract the primitive tendency towards

excessive dispersal, are in danger of teaching too well their lesson of

concentration. In course of time geographic enclosure begins to betray

its limitations. The extent of a people's territory influences their

estimate of area _per se_, determines how far land shall be made the

basis of their national purposes, fixes the territorial scale of their

conquests and their political expansion. This is a conspicuous

psychological effect of a narrow local environment. A people embedded

for centuries in a small district measure area with a short yardstick.

The ancient Greeks devised a philosophic basis for the advantages of the

small state, which is extolled in the writings of Plato and

Aristotle.[317] Aristotle wanted it small enough, "to be comprehended at

one glance of the statesman's eye." Plato's ideal democracy, by rigid

laws limiting the procreative period of women and men and providing for

the death of children born out of this period or out of wedlock,

restricted its free citizens to 5,040 heads of families,[318] all living

within reach of the agora, and all able to judge from personal knowledge

of a candidate's fitness for office. This condition was possible only

in dwarf commonwealths like the city-states of the Hellenic world. The

failure of the Greeks to build up a political structure on a territorial

scale commensurate with their cultural achievements and with the wide

sphere of their cultural influence can be ascribed chiefly to their

inability to discard the contracted territorial ideas engendered by

geographic and political dismemberment. The little Judean plateau, which

gave birth to a universal religion, clung with provincial bigotry to the

narrow tribal creed and repudiated the larger faith of Christ, which

found its appropriate field in Mediterranean Europe.

[Sidenote: Estimates of area in small maritime states.]

Maritime peoples of small geographic base have a characteristic method

of expansion which reflects their low valuation of area. Their limited

amount of arable soil necessitates reliance upon foreign sources of

supply, which are secured by commerce. Hence they found trading stations

or towns among alien peoples on distant coasts, selecting points like

capes or inshore islets which can be easily defended and which at the

same time command inland or maritime routes of trade. The prime

geographic consideration is location, natural and vicinal. The area of

the trading settlement is kept as small as possible to answer its

immediate purpose, because it can be more easily defended.[319] Such were

the colonies of the ancient Phoenicians and Greeks in the Mediterranean,

of the Medieval Arabs and the Portuguese on the east coast of Africa and

in India. This method reached its ultimate expression in point of small

area, seclusion, and local autonomy, perhaps, in the Hanse factories in

Norway and Russia.[320] But all these widespread nuclei of expansion

remained barren of permanent national result, because they were designed

for a commercial end, and ignored the larger national mission and surer

economic base found in acquisition of territory. Hence they were

short-lived, succumbing to attack or abandoned on the failure of local

resources, which were ruthlessly exploited.

[Sidenote: Limitations of small territorial conceptions.]

That precocious development characteristic of small naturally defined

areas shows its inherent weakness in the tendency to accept the enclosed

area as a nature-made standard of national territory. The earlier a

state fixes its frontier without allowance for growth, the earlier comes

the cessation of its development. Therefore the geographical nurseries

of civilization were infected with germs of decay. Such was the history

of Egypt, of Yemen, of Greece, Crete, and Phoenicia. These are the

regions which, as Carl Ritter says, have given the whole fruit of their

existence to the world for its future use, have conferred upon the world

the trust which they once held, afterward to recede, as it were, from

view.[321] They were great in the past, and now they belong to those

immortal dead whose greatness has been incorporated in the world's

life--"the choir invisible" of the nations.

[Sidenote: Evolution of territorial policies.]

The advance from a small, self-dependent community to interdependent

relations with other peoples, then to ethnic expansion or union of

groups to form a state or empire is a great turning point in any

history. Thereby the clan or tribe discards the old paralyzing seclusion

of the primitive society and the narrow habitat, and joins that march of

ethnic, political and cultural progress which has covered larger and

larger areas, and by increase of common purpose has cemented together

ever greater aggregates.

Nothing is more significant in the history of the English in America

than the rapid evolution of their spacial ideals, their abandonment of

the small territorial conception brought with them from the mother

country and embodied, for example, in that munificent land grant, fifty

by a hundred miles in extent, of the first Virginia charter in 1606, and

their progress to schemes of continental expansion. Every accession of

territory to the Thirteen Colonies and to the Republic gave an impulse

to growth. Expansion kept pace with opportunity. Only in small and

isolated New England did the contracted provincial point of view

persist. It manifested itself in a narrow policy of concentration and

curtailment, which acquiesced in the occlusion of the Mississippi River

to the Trans-Allegheny settlements by Spain in 1787, and which later

opposed the purchase of the Louisiana territory[322] and the acquisition

of the Philippines.

All peoples who have achieved wide expansion have developed in the

process vast territorial policies. This is true of the pastoral nomads

who in different epochs have inundated Europe, northern Africa and the

peripheral lands of Asia, and of the great colonial nations who in a few

decades have brought continents under their dominion. In nomadic hordes

it is based upon habitual mobility and the possession of herds, which

are at once incentive and means for extending the geographical horizon;

but it suffers from the evanescent character of nomadic political

organization, and the tendency toward dismemberment bred in all pastoral

life by dispersal over scattered grazing grounds. Hence the empires set

up by nomad conquerors like the Saracens and Tartars soon fall apart.

[Sidenote: Colonial expansion.]

Among highly civilized agricultural and industrial peoples, on the other

hand, a vast territorial policy is at once cause and effect of national

growth; it is at once an innate tendency and a conscious purpose

tenaciously followed. It makes use of trade and diplomacy, of scientific

invention and technical improvement, to achieve its aims. It becomes an

accepted mark of political vigor and an ideal even among peoples who

have failed to enlarge their narrow base. The model of Russian expansion

on the Pacific was quickly followed by awakened Japan, stirred out of

her insular complacence by the threat of Muscovite encroachment. Germany

and Italy, each strengthened and enlarged as to national outlook by

recent political unification, have elbowed their way into the crowded

colonial field. The French, though not expansionists as individuals,

have an excellent capacity for collective action when directed by

government. The officials whom Louis XIV sent to Canada in the

seventeenth century executed large schemes of empire reflecting the

dilation of French frontiers in Europe. These ideals of expansion seem

to have been communicated by the power of example, or the threat of

danger in them, to the English colonists in Virginia and Pennsylvania,

and later to Washington and Jefferson.

[Sidenote: The mind of colonials.]

The best type of colonial expansion is found among the English-speaking

people of America, Australia and South Africa. Their spacial ideas are

built on a big scale. Distances do not daunt them. The man who could

conceive a Cape-to-Cairo railroad, with all the schemes of territorial

aggrandizement therein implied, had a mind that took continents for its

units of measure; and he found a fitting monument in a province of

imperial proportions whereon was inscribed his name. Bryce tells us that

in South Africa the social circle of "the best people" includes

Pretoria, Johannesburg, Kimberley, Bloemfontein and Cape Town--a social

circle with a diameter of a thousand miles![323]

The spirit of our western frontier, so long as there was a frontier, was

the spirit of movement, of the conquest of space. It found its

expression in the history of the Wilderness Road and the Oregon Trail.

When the center of population in the United States still lingered on the

shore of Chesapeake Bay, and the frontier of continuous settlement had

not advanced beyond the present western boundary of Virginia and

Pennsylvania, the spacious mind of Thomas Jefferson foresaw the

Mississippi Valley as the inevitable and necessary possession of the

American people, and looked upon the trade of the far-off Columbia River

as a natural feeder of the Mississippi commerce.[324]

Emerson's statement that the vast size of the United States is reflected

in the big views of its people applies not only to political policy,

which in the Monroe Doctrine for the first time in history has embraced

a hemisphere; nor is it confined to the big scale of their economic

processes. Emerson had in mind rather their whole conception of national

mission and national life, especially their legislation,[325] for which

he anticipated larger and more Catholic aims than obtain in Europe,

hampered as it is by countless political and linguistic boundaries and

barred thereby from any far-reaching unity of purpose and action.

Canada, British South Africa, Australia and the United States, though

widely separated, have in common a certain wide outlook upon life, a

continental element in the national mind, bred in their people by their

generous territories. The American recognizes his kinship of mind with

these colonial Englishmen as something over and above mere kinship of

race. It consists in their deep-seated common democracy, the democracy

born in men who till fields and clear forests, not as plowmen and

wood-cutters, but as makers of nations. It consists in identical

interests and points of view in regard to identical problems growing out

of the occupation and development of new and almost boundless

territories. Race questions, paucity of labor, highways and railroads,

immigration, combinations of capital, excessive land holdings, and

illegal appropriation of land on a large scale, are problems that meet

them all. The monopolistic policy of the United States in regard to

American soil as embodied in the Monroe Doctrine, and the expectation

lurking in the mental background of every American that his country may

eventually embrace the northern continent, find their echo in

Australia's plans for wider empire in the Pacific. The Commonwealth of

Australia has succeeded in getting into its own hands the administration

of British New Guinea (90,500 square miles.) It has also secured from

the imperial government the unusual privilege of settling the relations

between itself and the islands of the Pacific, because it regards the

Pacific question as the one question of foreign policy in which its

interests are profoundly involved. In the same way the British in South

Africa, sparsely scattered though they are, feel an imperative need of

further expansion, if their far-reaching schemes of commerce and empire

are to be realized.

[Sidenote: Colonials as road builders.]

The effort to annihilate space by improved means of communication has

absorbed the best intellects and energies of expanding peoples. The

ancient Roman, like the Incas of Peru, built highways over every part of

the empire, undaunted by natural obstacles like the Alps and Andes.

Modern expansionists are railroad builders. Witness the long list of

strategic lines, constructed or subsidized by various governments during

the past half century--the Union Pacific, Central Pacific, Canadian

Pacific, Trans-Siberian, Cairo-Khartoum, Cape Town-Zambesi, and now the

proposed Trans-Saharan road, designed to unite the Mediterranean and

Guinea colonies of French Africa. The equipment of the American roads,

with their heavy rails, giant locomotives, and enormous freight cars,

reveals adaptation to a commerce that covers long distances between

strongly differentiated areas of production, and that reflects the vast

enterprises of this continental country. The same story comes out in the

ocean vessels which serve the trade of the Great Lakes, and in the acres

of coal barges in a single fleet which are towed down the Ohio and

Mississippi by one mammoth steel tug.

[Sidenote: Practical bent of colonials.]

The abundant natural resources awaiting development in such big new

countries give to the mind of the people an essentially practical bent.

The rewards of labor are so great that the stimulus to effort is

irresistible. Economic questions take precedence of all others, divide

political parties, and consume a large portion of national legislation;

while purely political questions sink into the background. Civilization

takes on a material stamp, becomes that "dollar civilization" which is

the scorn of the placid, paralyzed Oriental or the old world European.

The genius of colonials is essentially practical. Impatience of

obstacles, short cuts aiming at quick returns, wastefulness of land, of

forests, of fuel, of everything but labor, have long characterized

American activities. The problem of an inadequate labor supply attended

the sudden accession of territory opened for European occupation by the

discovery of America, and caused a sudden recrudescence of slavery,

which as an industrial system had long been outgrown by Europe. It has

also given immense stimulus to invention, and to the formation of labor

unions, which in the newest colonial fields, like Australia and New

Zealand, have dominated the government and given a Utopian stamp to

legislation.

Yet underlying and permeating this materialism is a youthful idealism.

Transplanted to conditions of greater opportunity, the race becomes

rejuvenated, abandons outgrown customs and outworn standards,

experiences an enlargement of vision and of hope, gathers courage and

energy equal to its task, manages somehow to hitch its wagon to a star.

NOTES TO CHAPTER VI

[292] Chamberlain and Salisbury, Geology, Vol. III, pp. 483-485. New

York, 1906.

[293] _Ibid._, p. 137 and map p. 138.

[294] Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. I, chap. IV, pp. 124-132; Vol. II,

chap; XII, p. 134. New York, 1895. H. W. Conn, The Method of Evolution,

p. 54. London and New York, 1900.

[295] _Ibid._, pp. 194-197, 226-227, 239-242, 342-350.

[296] Ratzel, _Der Lebensraum, eine bio-geographische Studie_, p. 51.

Tubingen, 1901.

[297] D. G, Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 271, 293-295. Philadelphia,

1901.

[298] A. Heilprin, Geographical Distribution of Animals, pp. 57-61.

London, 1894.

[299] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 39, maps pp. 43, 78. New York,

1899.

[300] Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. II, chap. XII, pp. 130-131. New

York, 1895.

[301] Richard Semon, In the Australian Bush, p. 211. London, 1899.

[302] J.H.W. Stuckenburg, Sociology, Vol. I, p. 324. New York and

London, 1903.

[303] E. G. Semple, The Influences of Geographic Environment on the

Lower St. Lawrence. Bulletin American Geographical Society, Vol. XXXVI,

pp. 464-465. 1904.

[304] B. Limedorfer, Finland's Plight, _Forum_, Vol. XXXII, pp. 85-93.

[305] Eleventh Census, Report on the Indians, p. 35. Washington, 1894.

[306] A.B. Wallace, Australasia, Vol. I, p. 454. London, 1893.

[307] W.S. Barclay, Life in Terra del Fuego, _The Nineteenth Century_,

Vol. 55, p. 97. January, 1904.

[308] A.E. Wallace, Australasia, Vol. I, pp. 454-455. London, 1893.

[309] Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. II, chap. XIII, p. 178. New York,

1895.