[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 Mocambique 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 Francois 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 mediaeval 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 cooeperation, 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 cooeperation 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.