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.
[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.Return to passage
[293] Ibid., p. 137 and map p. 138.Return to passage
[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.Return to passage
[295] Ibid., pp. 194-197, 226-227, 239-242, 342-350.Return to passage
[296] Ratzel, Der Lebensraum, eine bio-geographische Studie, p. 51. Tubingen, 1901.Return to passage
[297] D. G, Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 271, 293-295. Philadelphia, 1901.Return to passage
[298] A. Heilprin, Geographical Distribution of Animals, pp. 57-61. London, 1894.Return to passage
[299] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 39, maps pp. 43, 78. New York, 1899.Return to passage
[300] Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. II, chap. XII, pp. 130-131. New York, 1895.Return to passage
[301] Richard Semon, In the Australian Bush, p. 211. London, 1899.Return to passage
[302] J.H.W. Stuckenburg, Sociology, Vol. I, p. 324. New York and London, 1903.Return to passage
[303] E. G. Semple, The Influences of Geographic Environment on the Lower St. Lawrence. Bulletin American Geographical Society, Vol. XXXVI, pp. 464-465. 1904.Return to passage
[304] B. Limedorfer, Finland's Plight, Forum, Vol. XXXII, pp. 85-93.Return to passage
[305] Eleventh Census, Report on the Indians, p. 35. Washington, 1894.Return to passage
[306] A.B. Wallace, Australasia, Vol. I, p. 454. London, 1893.Return to passage
[307] W.S. Barclay, Life in Terra del Fuego, The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 55, p. 97. January, 1904.Return to passage
[308] A.E. Wallace, Australasia, Vol. I, pp. 454-455. London, 1893.Return to passage
[309] Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. II, chap. XIII, p. 178. New York, 1895.Return to passage
[310] Ibid., Vol. II, chap. XII, p. 167-168.Return to passage
[311] Nesbit Bain, Finland and the Tsar, Fortnightly Review, Vol. 71, p. 735. E. Limedorfer, Finland's Plight, Forum, Vol. 32, pp. 85-93.Return to passage
[312] Archibald Geikie, The Scenery of Scotland, pp. 398-399. London, 1887.Return to passage
[313] Railways in Asia Minor, Littell's Living Age, Vol. 225, p. 196.Return to passage
[314] J. Ellis Barker, Modern Germany, pp. 38-66. London, 1907.Return to passage
[315] The Polish Danger in Prussia, Westminster Review, Vol. 155, p. 375.Return to passage
[316] Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol. I, pp. 223-224. Leipzig, 1897.Return to passage
[317] Plato, Critias, 112. Aristotle, Politics, Book II, chap. VII; Book IV, chap. IV; Book VII, chap. IV.Return to passage
[318] Plato, De Legibus, Book V, chaps. 8, 9, 10, 11.Return to passage
[319] Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses, pp. 180-187. Stuttgart, 1899.Return to passage
[320] Blanqui, History of Political Economy, pp. 150-152. New York, 1880.Return to passage
[321] Carl Ritter, Comparative Geography, p. 63. New York, 1865.Return to passage
[322] E. C. Semple, American History and its Geographic Conditions, pp. 42-43, 109, 110. Boston, 1903.Return to passage
[323] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 405-6. New York, 1897.Return to passage
[324] P. L. Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. VIII. Letter to John Bacon, April 30, 1803; and Confidential Message to Congress on the Expedition to the Pacific, January 18, 1803.Return to passage
[325] Emerson, The Young American, in Nature Addresses and Lectures, pp. 369-371. Centenary Edition, Boston.Return to passage
VII. GEOGRAPHICAL BOUNDARIES
[Sidenote: The boundary zone in nature.]
Nature abhors fixed boundary lines and sudden transitions; all her forces combine against them. Everywhere she keeps her borders melting, wavering, advancing, retreating. If by some cataclysm sharp lines of demarcation are drawn, she straightway begins to blur them by creating intermediate forms, and thus establishes the boundary zone which characterizes the inanimate and animate world. A stratum of limestone or sandstone, when brought into contact with a glowing mass of igneous rock, undergoes various changes due to the penetrating heat of the volcanic outflow, so that its surface is metamorphosed as far as that heat reaches. The granite cliff slowly deposits at its base a rock-waste slope to soften the sudden transition from its perpendicular surface to the level plain at its feet. The line where a land-born river meets the sea tends to become a sandbar or a delta, created by the river-borne silt and the wash of the waves, a form intermediate between land and sea, bearing the stamp of each, fluid in its outlines, ever growing by the persistent accumulation of mud, though ever subject to inundation and destruction by the waters which made it. The alluvial coastal hems that edge all shallow seas are such border zones, reflecting in their flat, low surfaces the dead level of the ocean, in their composition the solid substance of the land; but in the miniature waves imprinted on the sands and the billows of heaped-up boulders, the master workman of the deep leaves his mark. [See map page 243.]
Under examination, even our familiar term coastline proves to be only an abstraction with no corresponding reality in nature. Everywhere, whether on margin of lake or gulf, the actual phenomenon is a coast zone, alternately covered and abandoned by the waters, varying in width from a few inches to a few miles, according to the slope of the land, the range of the tide and the direction of the wind. It has one breadth at the minimum or neap tide, but increases often two or three fold at spring tide, when the distance between ebb and flood is at its maximum. At the mouth of Cook's Inlet on the southern Alaskan coast, where the range of tides is only eight feet, the zone is comparatively narrow, but widens rapidly towards the head of the inlet, where the tide rises twenty-three feet above the ebb line, and even to sixty-five feet under the influence of a heavy southwest storm. On flat coasts we are familiar with the wide frontier of salt marshes, that witness the border warfare of land and sea, alternate invasion and retreat. In low-shored estuaries like those of northern Brittany and northwestern Alaska, this amphibian girdle of the land expands to a width of four miles, while on precipitous coasts of tideless sea basins it contracts to a few inches. Hence this boundary zone changes with every impulse of the mobile sea and with every varying configuration of the shore. Movement and external conditions are the factors in its creation. They make something that is only partially akin to the two contiguous forms. Here on their outer margins land and ocean compromise their physical differences, and this by a law which runs through animate and inanimate nature. Wherever one body moves in constant contact with another, it is subjected to modifying influences which differentiate its periphery from its interior, lend it a transitional character, make of it a penumbra between light and shadow. The modifying process goes on persistently with varying force, and creates a shifting, changing border zone which, from its nature, cannot be delimited. For convenience' sake, we adopt the abstraction of a boundary line; but the reality behind this abstraction is the important thing in anthropo-geography.
[Sidenote: Gradations in the boundary zone.]
All so-called boundary lines with which geography has to do have this same character,--coastlines, river margins, ice or snow lines, limits of vegetation, boundaries of races or religions or civilizations, frontiers of states. They are all the same, stamped by the eternal flux of nature. Beyond the solid ice-pack which surrounds the North Pole is a wide girdle of almost unbroken drift ice, and beyond this is an irregular concentric zone of scattered icebergs which varies in breadth with season, wind and local current; a persistent decrease in continuity from solid pack to open sea. The line of perpetual snow on high mountains advances or retreats from season to season, from year to year; it drops low on chilly northern slopes and recedes to higher altitudes on a southern exposure; sends down long icy tongues in dark gorges, and leaves outlying patches of old snow in shaded spots or beneath a covering of rock waste far below the margin of the snow fields.
In the struggle for existence in the vegetable world, the tree line pushes as far up the mountain as conditions of climate and soil will permit. Then comes a season of fiercer storms, intenser cold and invading ice upon the peaks. Havoc is wrought, and the forest drops back across a zone of border warfare--for war belongs to borders--leaving behind it here and there a dwarfed pine or gnarled and twisted juniper which has survived the onslaught of the enemy, Now these are stragglers in the retreat, but are destined later in milder years to serve as outposts in the advance of the forest to recover its lost ground. Here we have a border scene which is typical in nature--the belt of unbroken forest, growing thinner and more stunted toward its upper edge, succeeded by a zone of scattered trees, which may form a cluster perhaps in some sheltered gulch where soil has collected and north winds are excluded, and higher still the whitened skeleton of a tree to show how far the forest once invaded the domain of the waste.
[Sidenote: Oscillating boundaries]
The habitable area of the earth everywhere shows its boundaries to be peripheral zones of varying width, now occupied and now deserted, protruding or receding according to external conditions of climate and soil, and subject to seasonal change. The distribution of human life becomes sparser from the temperate regions toward the Arctic Circle, foreshadowing the unpeopled wastes of the ice-fields beyond. The outward movement from the Tropics poleward halts where life conditions disappear, and there finds its boundary; but as life conditions advance or retreat with the seasons, so does that boundary. On the west coast of Greenland the Eskimo village of Etah, at about the seventy-eighth parallel, marks the northern limit of permanent or winter settlement; but in summer the Eskimo, in his kayak, follows the musk-ox and seal much farther north and there leaves his igloo to testify to the wide range of his poleward migration. Numerous relics of the Eskimo and their summer encampments have been found along Lady Franklin Bay in northern Grinnell Land (81 deg. 50' N. L.), but in the interior, on the outlet streams of Lake Hazen, explorers have discovered remains of habitations which had evidently, in previous ages, been permanently occupied.[326] The Murman Coast of the Kola Peninsula has in summer a large population of Russian fishermen and forty or more fishing stations; but when the catch is over at the end of August, and the Arctic winter approaches, the stations are closed, and the three thousand fishermen return to their permanent homes on the shores of the White Sea.[327] Farther east along this polar fringe of Russia, the little village of Charbarova, located on the Jugor Strait, is inhabited in summer by a number of Samoyedes, who pasture their reindeer over on Vaygats Island, and by some Russians and Finns, who come from the White Sea towns to trade with the Samoyedes and incidentally to hunt and fish. But in the fall, when a new ice bridge across the Strait releases the reindeer from their enclosed pasture on the island, the Samoyedes withdraw southward, and the merchants with their wares to Archangel and other points. This has gone on for centuries.[328] On the Briochov Islands at the head of the Yenisei estuary Nordenskiold found a small group of houses which formed a summer fishing post in 1875, but which was deserted by the end of August.[329]
[Sidenote: Altitude boundary zones.]
An altitude of about five thousand feet marks the limit of village life in the Alps; but during the three warm months of the year, the summer pastures at eight thousand feet or more are alive with herds and their keepers. The boundary line of human life moves up the mountains in the wake of spring and later hurries down again before the advance of winter. The Himalayan and Karakorum ranges show whole villages of temporary occupation, like the summer trading town of Gartok at 15,000 feet on the caravan route from Leh to Lhassa, or Shahidula (3,285 meters or 10,925 feet) on the road between Leh and Yarkand;[330] but the boundary of permanent habitation lies several thousand feet below. Comparable to these are the big hotels that serve summer stage-coach travel over the Alps and Rockies, but which are deserted when the first snow closes the passes. Here a zone of altitude, as in the polar regions a zone of latitude, marks the limits of the habitable area.
[Sidenote: "Wallace's Line" a typical boundary zone.]
The distribution of animals and races shows the limit of their movements or expansion. Any boundary defining the limits of such movements can not from its nature be fixed, and hence can not be a line. It is always a zone. Yet "Wallace's Line," dividing the Oriental from the Australian zoological realm, and running through Macassar Strait southward between Bali and Lombok, is a generally accepted dictum. The details of Wallace's investigation, however, reveal the fact that this boundary is not a line, but a zone of considerable and variable width, enclosing the line on either side with a marginal belt of mixed character. Though Celebes, lying to the east of Macassar Strait, is included in the Australian realm, it has lost so large a proportion of Australian types of animals, and contains so many Oriental types from the west, that Wallace finds it almost impossible to decide on which side of the line it belongs.[331] The Oriental admixture extends yet farther east over the Moluccas and Timor. Birds of Javan or Oriental origin, to the extent of thirty genera, have spread eastward well across Wallace's Line; some of these stop short at Flores, and some reach even to Timor,[332] while Australian cockatoos, in turn, have been seen on the west coast of Bali but not in Java, Heilprin avoids the unscientific term line, because he finds his zoological realms divided by "transition regions," which are intermediate in animal types as they are in geographical location.[333] Wallace notes a similar "debatable land" in the Rajputana Desert east of the Indus, which is the border district between the Oriental and Ethiopian realms.[334]
[Sidenote: Boundaries as limits of movements or expansion.]
Such boundaries mark the limits of that movement which is common to all animate things. Every living form spreads until it meets natural conditions in which it can no longer survive, or until it is checked by the opposing expansion of some competing form. If there is a change either in the life conditions or in the strength of the competing forms, the boundary shifts. In the propitious climate of the Genial Period, plants and animals lived nearer to the North Pole than at present; then they fell back before the advance of the ice sheet. The restless surface of the ocean denies to man a dwelling place; every century, however, the Dutch are pushing forward their northern boundary by reclamation of land from the sea; but repeatedly they have had to drop back for a time when the water has again overwhelmed their hand-made territory.
[Sidenote: Peoples as barriers.]
The boundaries of race and state which are subjected to greatest fluctuations are those determined by the resistance of other peoples. The westward sweep of the Slavs prior to eighth century carried them beyond the Elbe into contact with the Germans; but as these increased in numbers, outgrew their narrow territories and inaugurated a counter-movement eastward, the Slavs began falling back to the Oder, to the Vistula, and finally to the Niemen. Though the Mohawk Valley opened an easy avenue of expansion westward for the early colonists of New York, the advance of settlements up this valley for several decades went on at only a snail's pace, because of the compact body of Iroquois tribes holding this territory. In the unoccupied land farther south between the Cumberland and Ohio rivers the frontier went forward with leaps and bounds, pushed on by the expanding power of the young Republic. [See map page 156.]
Anything which increases the expanding force of a people--the establishment of a more satisfactory government by which the national consciousness is developed, as in the American and French revolutions, the prosecution of a successful war by which popular energies are released from an old restraint, mere increase of population, or an impulse communicated by some hostile and irresistible force behind--all are registered in an advance of the boundary of the people in question and a corresponding retrusion of their neighbor's frontier.
[Sidenote: Boundary zone as index of growth or decline.]
The border district is the periphery of the growing or declining race or state. It runs the more irregularly, the greater are the variations in the external conditions as represented by climate, soil, barriers, and natural openings, according as these facilitate or obstruct advance. When it is contiguous with the border of another state or race, the two form a zone in which ascendency from one side or the other is being established. The boundary fluctuates, for equilibrium of the contending forces is established rarely and for only short periods. The more aggressive people throws out across this debatable zone, along the lines of least resistance or greatest attraction, long streamers of occupation; so that the frontier takes on the form of a fringe of settlement, whose interstices are occupied by a corresponding fringe of the displaced people. Such was its aspect in early colonial America, where population spread up every fertile river valley across a zone of Indian land; and such it is in northern Russia to-day, where long narrow Slav bands run out from the area of continuous Slav settlement across a wide belt of Mongoloid territory to the shores of the White Sea and Arctic Ocean.[335] [See maps pages 103 and 225.]
The border zone is further broadened by the formation of ethnic islands beyond the base line of continuous settlement, which then advances more or less rapidly, if expansion is unchecked, till it coalesces with these outposts, just as the forest line on the mountains may reach, under advantageous conditions, its farthest outlying tree. Such ethnic peninsulas and islands we see in the early western frontiers of the United States from 1790 to 1840, when that frontier was daily moving westward.[336] [See map page 156.]
[Sidenote: Breadth of the boundary zone.]
The breadth of the frontier zone is indicative of the activity of growth on the one side and the corresponding decline on the other, because extensive encroachment in the same degree disintegrates the territory of the neighbor at whose cost such encroachment is made. A straight, narrow race boundary, especially if it is nearly coincident with a political boundary, points to an equilibrium of forces which means, for the time being at least, a cessation of growth. Such boundaries are found in old, thickly populated countries, while the wide, ragged border zone belongs to new, and especially to colonial peoples. In the oldest and most densely populated seats of the Germans, where they are found in the Rhine Valley, the boundaries of race and empire are straight and simple; but the younger, eastern border, which for centuries has been steadily advancing at the cost of the unequally matched Slavs, has the ragged outline and sparse population of a true colonial frontier. Between two peoples who have had a long period of growth behind them, the oscillations of the boundary decrease in amplitude, as it were, and finally approach a state of rest. Each people tends to fill out its area evenly; every advance in civilization, every increase of population, increases the stability of their tenure, and hence the equilibrium of the pressure upon the boundary. Therefore, in such countries, racial, linguistic and cultural boundaries tend to become simpler and straighter.
[Sidenote: The broad frontier zone of active expansion.]
The growth is more apparent, or, in other words, the border zone is widest and most irregular, where a superior people intrudes upon the territory of an interior race. Such was the broad zone of thinly scattered farms and villages amid a prevailing wilderness and hostile Indian tribes which, in 1810 and 1820, surrounded our Trans-Allegheny area of continuous settlement in a one to two hundred mile wide girdle. Such has been the wide, mobile frontier of the Russian advance in Siberia and until recently in Manchuria, which aimed to include within a dotted line of widely separated railway-guard stations, Cossack barracks, and penal colonies, the vast territory which later generations were fully to occupy. Similar, too, is the frontier of the Dutch and English settlements in South Africa, which has been pushed forward into the Kaffir country--a broad belt of scattered cattle ranches and isolated mining hives, dropped down amid Kaffir hunting and grazing lands. Broader still was that shadowy belt of American occupation which for four decades immediately succeeding the purchase of Louisiana stretched in the form of isolated fur-stations, lonely trappers' camps, and shifting traders' rendezvous from the Mississippi to the western slope of the Rockies and the northern watershed of the Missouri, where it met the corresponding nebulous outskirts of the far-away Canadian state on the St. Lawrence River.
The same process with the same geographical character has been going on in the Sahara, as the French since 1890 have been expanding southward from the foot of the Atlas Mountains in Algeria toward Timbuctoo at the cost of the nomad Tuaregs. Territory is first subdued and administered by the military till it is fully pacified. Then it is handed over to the civil government. Hence the advancing frontier consists of a military zone of administration, with a civil zone behind it, and a weaker wavering zone of exploration and scout work before it.[337] Lord Curzon in his Romanes lecture describes the northwest frontier of India as just such a three-ply border.
[Sidenote: Economic factors in expanding frontiers.]
The untouched resources of such new countries tempt to the widespread superficial exploitation, which finds its geographical expression in a broad, dilating frontier. Here the man-dust which is to form the future political planet is thinly disseminated, swept outward by a centrifugal force. Furthermore, the absence of natural barriers which might block this movement, the presence of open plains and river highways to facilitate it, and the predominance of harsh conditions of climate or soil rendering necessary a savage, extensive exploitation of the slender resources, often combine still further to widen the frontier zone. This was the case in French Canada and till recent decades in Siberia, where intense cold and abundant river highways stimulated the fur trade to the practical exclusion of all other activities, and substituted for the closely grouped, sedentary farmers with their growing families the wide-ranging trader with his Indian or Tunguse wife and his half-breed offspring. Under harsh climatic conditions, the fur trade alone afforded those large profits which every infant colony must command in order to survive; and the fur trade meant a wide frontier zone of scattered posts amid a prevailing wilderness. The French in particular, by the possession of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi rivers, the greatest systems in America, were lured into the danger of excessive expansion, attenuated their ethnic element, and failed to raise the economic status of their wide border district, which could therefore offer only slight resistance to the spread of solid English settlement.[338] Yet more recently, the chief weakness of the Russians in Siberia and Manchuria--apart from the corruption of the national government--was the weakness of a too remote and too sparsely populated frontier, and of a people whose inner development had not kept pace with their rate of expansion.
[Sidenote: Value of barrier boundaries.]
Wasteful exploitation of a big territory is easier than the economical development of a small district. This is one line of least resistance which civilized man as well as savage instinctively follows, and which explains the tendency toward excessive expansion characteristic of all primitive and nascent peoples. For such peoples natural barriers which set bounds to this expansion are of vastly greater importance than they are for mature or fully developed peoples. The reason is this: the boundary is only the expression of the outward movement or growth, which is nourished from the same stock of race energy as is the inner development. Either carried to an excess weakens or retards the other. If population begins to press upon the limits of subsistence, the acquisition of a new bit of territory obviates the necessity of applying more work and more intelligence to the old area, to make it yield subsistence for the growing number of mouths; the stimulus to adopt better economic methods is lost. Therefore, natural boundaries drawn by mountain, sea and desert, serving as barriers to the easy appropriation of new territory, have for such peoples a far deeper significance than the mere determination of their political frontiers by physical features, or the benefit of protection.
The land with the most effective geographical boundaries is a naturally defined region like Korea, Japan, China, Egypt, Italy, Spain, France or Great Britain--a land characterized not only by exclusion from without through its encircling barriers, but also by the inclusion within itself of a certain compact group of geographic conditions, to whose combined influences the inhabitants are subjected and from which they cannot readily escape. This aspect is far more important than the mere protection which such boundaries afford. They are not absolutely necessary for the development of a people, but they give it an early start, accelerate the process, and bring the people to an early maturity; they stimulate the exploitation of all the local geographic advantages and resources, the formation of a vivid tribal or national consciousness and purpose, and concentrate the national energies when the people is ready to overleap the old barriers. The early development of island and peninsula peoples and their attainment of a finished ethnic and political character are commonplaces of history. The stories of Egypt, Crete and Greece, of Great Britain and Japan, illustrate the stimulus to maturity which emanates from such confining boundaries. The wall of the Appalachians narrowed the westward horizon of the early English colonies in America, guarded them against the excessive expansion which was undermining the French dominion in the interior of the continent, set a most wholesome limit to their aims, and thereby intensified their utilization of the narrow land between mountains and sea. France, with its limits of growth indicated by the Mediterranean, Pyrenees, Atlantic, Channel, Vosges, Jura and Western Alps, found its period of adolescence shortened and, like Great Britain, early reached its maturity. Nature itself set the goal of its territorial expansion, and by crystallizing the political ideal of the people, made that goal easier to reach, just as the dream of "United Italy" realized in 1870 had been prefigured in contours drawn by Alpine range and Mediterranean shore-line.
[Sidenote: The sea as the absolute boundary]
The area which a race or people occupies is the resultant of the expansive force within and the obstacles without, either physical or human. Insurmountable physical obstacles are met where all life conditions disappear, as on the borders of the habitable world, where man is barred from the unpeopled wastes of polar ice-fields and unsustaining oceans. The frozen rim of arctic lands, the coastline of the continents, the outermost arable strip on the confines of the desert, the barren or ice-capped ridge of high mountain range, are all such natural boundaries which set more or less effective limits to the movement of peoples and the territorial growth of states. The sea is the only absolute boundary, because it alone blocks the continuous, unbroken expansion of a people. When the Saxons of the lower Elbe spread to the island of Britain, a zone of unpeopled sea separated their new settlements from their native villages on the mainland. Even the most pronounced land barriers, like the Himalayas and Hindu Kush, have their passways and favored spots for short summer habitation, where the people from the opposite slopes meet and mingle for a season. Sandy wastes are hospitable at times. When the spring rains on the mountains of Abyssinia start a wave of moisture lapping over the edges of the Nubian desert, it is immediately followed by a tide of Arabs with their camels and herds, who make a wide zone of temporary occupation spread over the newly created grassland, but who retire in a few weeks before the desiccating heat of summer.[339]
[Sidenote: Natural boundaries as bases of ethnic and political boundaries.]
Nevertheless, all natural features of the earth's surface which serve to check, retard or weaken the expansion of peoples, and therefore hold them apart, tend to become racial or political boundaries; and all present a zone-like character. The wide ice-field of the Scandinavian Alps was an unpeopled waste long before the political boundary was drawn along it. "It has not in reality been a definite natural line that has divided Norway from her neighbour on the east; it has been a band of desert land, up to hundreds of miles in width. So utterly desolate and apart from the area of continuous habitation has this been, that the greater part of it, the district north of Trondhjem, was looked upon even as recently as the last century as a common district. Only nomadic Lapps wandered about in it, sometimes taxed by all three countries. A parcelling out of this desert common district was not made toward Russia until 1826. Toward Sweden it was made in 1751."[340] In former centuries the Bourtanger Moor west of the River Ems used to be a natural desert borderland separating East and West Friesland, despite the similarity of race, speech and country on either side of it. It undoubtedly contributed to the division of Germany and the Netherlands along the present frontier line, which has been drawn the length of this moor for a hundred kilometers.[341]
[Sidenote: Primitive waste boundaries.]
Any geographical feature which, like this, presents a practically uninhabitable area, forms a scientific boundary, not only because it holds apart the two neighboring peoples and thereby reduces the contact and friction which might be provocative of hostilities, but also because it lends protection against attack. This motive, as also the zone character of all boundaries, comes out conspicuously in the artificial border wastes surrounding primitive tribes and states in the lower status of civilization. The early German tribes depopulated their borders in a wide girdle, and in this wilderness permitted no neighbors to reside. The width of this zone indicated the valor and glory of the state, but was also valued as a means of protection against unexpected attack.[342] Caesar learned that between the Suevi and Cherusci tribes dwelling near the Rhine "silvam esse ibi, infinita magnitudine quae appelletur Bacenis; hanc longe introrsus pertinere et pro nativo muro objectam Cheruscos ab Suevis Suevosque ab Cheruscis injuriis incursionibusque prohibere."[343] The same device appears among the Huns. When Attila was pressing upon the frontier of the Eastern Empire in 448 A.D., his envoys sent to Constantinople demanded that the Romans should not cultivate a belt of territory, a hundred miles wide and three hundred miles long, south of the Danube, but maintain this as a March.[344] When King Alfonso I. (751-764 A.D.) of mountain Asturias began the reconquest of Spain from the Saracens, he adopted the same method of holding the foe at arm's length. He seized Old Castile as far as the River Duoro, but the rest of the province south of that stream he converted into a waste boundary by transporting the Christians thence to the north side, and driving the Mohammedans yet farther southward.[345] Similarly Xenophon found that the Armenian side of the River Kentrites, which formed the boundary between the Armenian plains and the highlands of Karduchia, was unpeopled and destitute of villages for a breadth of fifteen miles, from fear of the marauding Kurds.[346] In the eastern Sudan, especially in that wide territory along the Nile-Congo watershed occupied by the Zandeh, Junker found the frontier wilderness a regular institution owing to the exposure of the border districts in the perennial intertribal feuds.[347] The same testimony comes from Barth,[348] Boyd Alexander,[349] Speke,[350] and other explorers in the Sudan and the neighboring parts of equatorial Africa.
[Sidenote: Border wastes of Indian lands.]
The vast and fertile region defined by the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, lay as a debatable border between the Algonquin Indians of the north and the Appalachians of the south. Both claimed it, both used it for hunting, but neither dared dwell therein.[351] Similarly the Cherokees had no definite understanding with their savage neighbors as to the limits of their respective territories The effectiveness of their claim to any particular tract of country usually diminished with every increase of its distance from their villages. The consequence was that a considerable strip of territory between the settlements of two tribes, Cherokees and Creeks for instance, though claimed by both, was practically considered neutral ground and the common hunting ground of both.[352] The Creeks, whose most western villages from 1771 to 1798 were located along the Coosa and upper Alabama rivers,[353] were separated by 300 miles of wilderness from the Chickasaws to the northwest, and by a 150-mile zone from the Choctaws. The most northern Choctaw towns, in turn, lay 160 miles to the south of the Chickasaw nation, whose compact settlements were located on the watershed between the western sources of the Tombigby and the head stream of the Yazoo.[354] The wide intervening zone of forest and canebrake was hunted upon by both nations.[355]
Sometimes the border is preserved as a wilderness by formal agreement. A classic example of this case is found in the belt of untenanted land, fifty to ninety kilometers wide, which China and Korea once maintained as their boundary. No settler from either side was allowed to enter, and all travel across the border had to use a single passway, where three times annually a market was held.[356] On the Russo-Mongolian border south of Lake Baikal, the town of Kiakhta, which was established in 1688 as an entrepot of trade between the two countries, is occupied in its northern half by Russian factories and in its southern by the Mongolian-Chinese quarters, while between the two is a neutral space devoted to commerce.[357]
[Sidenote: Alien intrusions into border wastes.]
These border wastes do not always remain empty, however, even when their integrity is respected by the two neighbors whom they serve to divide; alien races often intrude into their unoccupied reaches. The boundary wilderness between the Sudanese states of Wadai and Dar Fur harbors several semi-independent states whose insignificance is a guarantee of their safety from conquest.[358] Similarly in the wide border district between the Creeks on the east and the Choctaws on the west were found typical small, detached tribes--the Chatots and Thomez of forty huts each on the Mobile River, the Tensas tribe with a hundred huts on the Tensas River, and the Mobilians near the confluence of the Tombigby and Alabama.[359] Along the desolate highland separating Norway and Sweden the nomadic Lapps, with their reindeer herds, have penetrated southward to 62 deg. North Latitude, reinforcing the natural barrier by another barrier of alien race. From this point southward, the coniferous forests begin and continue the border waste in the form of a zone some sixty miles wide; this was unoccupied till about 1600, when into it slowly filtered an immigration of Finns, whose descendants to-day constitute an important part of the still thin population along the frontier to the heights back of Christiania. Only thirty miles from the coast does the border zone between Norway and Sweden, peopled chiefly by intruding foreign stocks, Lapps and Finns, contract and finally merge into the denser Scandinavian settlements.[360]
Where the border waste offers favorable conditions of life and the intruding race has reached a higher status of civilization, it multiplies in this unpeopled tract and soon spreads at the cost of its less advanced neighbors. The old No Man's Land between the Ohio and Tennessee was a line of least resistance for the expanding Colonies, who here poured in a tide of settlement between the northern and southern Indians, just as later other pioneers filtered into the vague border territory of weak tenure between the Choctaws and Creeks, and there on the Tombigby, Mobile and Tensas rivers, formed the nucleus of the State of Alabama.[361]
[Sidenote: Politico-economic significance of the waste boundary.]
This untenanted hem of territory surrounding so many savage and barbarous peoples reflects their superficial and unsystematic utilization of their soil, by reason of which the importance of the land itself and the proportion of population to area are greatly reduced. It is a part of that uneconomic and extravagant use of the land, that appropriation of wide territories by small tribal groups, which characterizes the lower stages of civilization, as opposed to the exploitation of every square foot for the support of a teeming humanity, which marks the most advanced states. Each stage puts its own valuation upon the land according to the return from it which each expects to get. The low valuation is expressed in the border wilderness, by which a third or even a half of the whole area is wasted; and also in the readiness with which savages often sell their best territory for a song.
For the same reason they leave their boundaries undefined; a mile nearer or farther, what does it matter? Moreover, their fitful or nomadic occupation of the land leads to oscillations of the frontiers with every attack from without and every variation of the tribal strength within. Their unstable states rarely last long enough in a given form or size to develop fixed boundaries; hence, the vagueness as to the extent of tribal domains among all savage peoples, and the conflicting land claims which are the abiding source of war. Owing to these overlapping boundaries--border districts claimed but not occupied--the American colonists met with difficulties in their purchase of land from the Indians, often paying twice for the same strip.
[Sidenote: Common boundary districts.]
Even civilized peoples may adopt a waste boundary where the motive for protection is peculiarly strong, as in the half-mile neutral zone of lowland which ties the rock of Gibraltar to Spain. On a sparsely populated frontier, where the abundance of land reduces its value, they may throw the boundary into the form of a common district, as in the vast, disputed Oregon country, accepted provisionally as a district of joint occupancy between the United States and Canada from 1818 to 1846, or that wide highland border which Norway so long shared with Russia and Sweden. In South America, where land is abundant and population sparse, this common boundary belt is not rare. It suggests a device giving that leeway for expansion desired by all growing states. By the treaty of 1866, the frontier between Chile and Bolivia crossed the Atacama desert at 24 deg. South Latitude; but the zone between 23 deg. and 25 deg. was left under the common jurisdiction of the two states, for exploitation of the guano deposits and mineral wealth.[362] A common border district on a much larger scale is found between Brazil and the eastern frontier of French Guiana. It includes a belt 185 miles (300 kilometers) wide between the Oyapok and Arawary rivers, and is left as a neutral district till its fate is decided by arbitration.[363] All these instances are only temporary phases in the evolution of a political frontier from wide, neutral border to the mathematically determined boundary line required by modern civilized states.
[Sidenote: Tariff free zones.]
Even when the boundary line has been surveyed and the boundary pillars set up, the frontier is prone to assert its old zonal nature, simply because it marks the limits of human movements. Rarely, for instance, does a customs boundary coincide with a political frontier, even in the most advanced states of Europe, except on the coasts. The student of Baedecker finds a gap of several miles on the same railroad between the customs frontier of Germany and France, or France and Italy. Where the border district is formed by a high and rugged mountain range, the custom houses recede farther and farther from the common political line upon the ridge, and drop down the slope to convenient points, leaving between them a wide neutral tariff zone, like that in Haute Savoie along the massive Mont Blanc Range between France and Italy.
Allied to this phase, yet differing from it, is the "Zona Libre" or Free Zone, 12 miles broad and 1,833 miles long, which forms the northern hem of Mexico from the Gulf to the Pacific. Here foreign goods pay only 18-1/2 per cent., formerly only 2-1/2 per cent., of the usual federal duties. Goods going on into the interior pay the rest of the tariff at the inner margin of the Zone. This arrangement was adopted in 1858 to establish some sort of commercial equilibrium between the Mexican towns of the Rio Grande Valley, which were burdened by excessive taxation on internal trade, and the Texas towns across the river, which at this time enjoyed a specially low tariff. Consequently prices of food and manufactured goods were twice or four times as high on the Mexican as on the American side. The result was persistent smuggling, extensive emigration from the southern to the northern bank, and the commercial decline of the frontier states of Mexico, till the Zona Libre adjusted the commercial discrepancy.[364] Since 1816 a tariff free zone a league wide has formed the border of French Savoy along the Canton and Lake of Geneva, thus uniting this canton by a free passway with the Swiss territory at the upper end of the lake.[365]
[Sidenote: Boundary zones of mingled race elements.]
When the political boundary has evolved by a system of contraction out of the wide waste zone to the nicely determined line, that line, nevertheless, is always encased, as it were, in a zone of contact wherein are mingled the elements of either side. The zone includes the peripheries of the two contiguous racial or national bodies, and in it each is modified and assimilated to the other. On its edges it is strongly marked by the characteristics of the adjacent sides, but its medial band shows a mingling of the two in ever-varying proportions; it changes from day to day and shifts backward and forward, according as one side or the other exercises in it more potent economic, religious, racial, or political influences.
Its peripheral character comes out strongly in the mingling of contiguous ethnic elements found in every frontier district. Here is that zone of transitional form which we have seen prevails so widely in nature. The northern borderland of the United States is in no small degree Canadian, and the southern is strongly Mexican. In the Rio Grande counties of Texas, Mexicans constituted in 1890 from 27 to 55 per cent. of the total population, and they were distributed in considerable numbers also in the second tier of counties. A broad band of French and English Canadians overlaps the northern hem of United States territory from Maine to North Dakota.[366] In the New York and New England counties bordering on the old French province of Quebec, they constitute from 11 to 22 per cent. of the total population, except in two or three western counties of Maine which have evidently been mere passways for a tide of habitants moving on to more attractive conditions of life in the counties just to the south.[367] But even these large figures do not adequately represent the British-American element within our boundaries, because they leave out of account the native-born of Canadian parents who have been crossing our borders for over a generation.
[Sidenote: Ethnic border zones in the Alps.]
If we turn to northern Italy, where a mountain barrier might have been expected to segregate the long-headed Mediterranean stock from the broad-headed Alpine stock, we find as a matter of fact that the ethnic type throughout the Po basin is markedly brachycephalic and becomes more pronounced along the northern boundary in the Alps, till it culminates in Piedmont along the frontier of France, where it becomes identical with the broad-headed Savoyards.[368] More than this, Provencal French is spoken in the Dora Baltea Valley of Piedmont; and along the upper Dora Riparia and in the neighboring valleys of the Chisone and Pellice are the villages of the refugee Waldenses, who speak an idiom allied to the Provencal. More than this, the whole Piedmontese Italian is characterized by its approach to the French, and the idiom of Turin sounds very much like Provencal.[369] To the north there is a similar exchange between Italy and Switzerland with the adjacent Austrian province of the Tyrol. In the rugged highlands of the Swiss Grisons bordering upon Italy, we find a pure Alpine stock, known to the ancients as the Rhaetians, speaking a degenerate Latin tongue called Romansch, which still persists also under the names of Ladino and Frioulian in the Alpine regions of the Tyrol and Italy. In fact, the map of linguistic boundaries in the Grisons shows the dovetailing of German, Italian, and Romansch in a broad zone.[370] The traveller in the southern Tyrol becomes accustomed in the natives to the combination of Italian coloring, German speech, and Alpine head form; whereas, if on reaching Italy he visits the hills back of Vicenza, he finds the German settlements of Tredici and Sette Communi, where German customs, folklore, language, and German types of faces still persist, survivals from the days of German infiltration across the Brenner Pass.[371]
[Sidenote: The Slav-German boundary.]
Where Slavs and Teutons come together in Central Europe, their race border is a zone lying approximately between 14 and 24 degrees East Longitude; it is crossed by alternate peninsulas of predominant Germans and Austrians from the one side, Czechs and Poles from the other, the whole spattered over by a sprinkling of the two elements. Rarely, and then only for short stretches, do political and ethnic boundaries coincide. The northern frontier hem of East Prussia lying between the River Niemen and the political line of demarcation is quite as much Lithuanian as German, while German stock dots the whole surface of the Baltic provinces of Russia as far as St. Petersburg, The eastern rim of the Kaiser's empire as far south as the Carpathians presents a broad band of the Polish race, averaging about fifty kilometers (30 miles) in width, sparsely sprinkled with German settlements; these are found farther east also as an ethnic archipelago dotting the wide Slav area of Poland. The enclosed basin of Bohemia, protected on three sides by mountain walls and readily accessible to the Slav stock at the sources of the Vistula, enabled the Czechs to penetrate far westward and there maintain themselves; but in spite of encompassing mountains, the inner or Bohemian slopes of the Boehmer Wald, Erz, and Sudetes ranges constitute a broad girdle of almost solid German population.[372] In the Austrian provinces of Moravia and Silesia, which form the southeastward continuation of this Slav-German boundary zone, 60 per cent. of the population are Czechs, 33 per cent. are German, and 7 per cent., found in the eastern part of Silesia, are Poles.[373]
An ethnic map of the western Muscovite Empire in Europe shows a marked infiltration into White and Little Russia of West Slavs from Poland, and in the province of Bessarabia alternate areas of Russians and Roumanians. The latter in places form an unbroken ethnic expansion from the home kingdom west of the Pruth, extending in solid bands as far as the Dniester, and throwing out ethnic islands between this stream and the Bug.
[Sidenote: Assimilation of culture in boundary zones.]
In the northern provinces of Russia, in the broad zone shared by the aboriginal Finns and the later-coming Slavs, Wallace found villages in every stage of Russification. "In one everything seemed thoroughly Finnish; the inhabitants had a reddish-olive skin, very high cheek bones, obliquely set eyes, and a peculiar costume; none of the women and very few of the men could understand Russian and any Russian who visited the place was regarded as a foreigner. In the second, there were already some Russian inhabitants; the others had lost something of their purely Finnish type, many of the men had discarded the old costume and spoke Russian fluently, and a Russian visitor was no longer shunned. In a third, the Finnish type was still further weakened; all the men spoke Russian, and nearly all the women understood it; the old male costume had entirely disappeared and the old female was rapidly following it; and intermarriage with the Russian population was no longer rare. In a fourth, intermarriage had almost completely done its work, and the old Finnish element could be detected merely in certain peculiarities of physiognomy and accent." This amalgamation extends to their religions--prayers wholly pagan devoutly uttered under the shadow of a strange cross, next the Finnish god Yumak sharing honors equally with the Virgin, finally a Christianity pure in doctrine and outward forms except for the survival of old pagan ceremonies in connection with the dead.[374]
At the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers, this boundary zone of Russians and Finns meets the borderland of the Asiatic Mongols; and here is found an intermingling of races, languages, religions, and customs scarcely to be equalled elsewhere. Finns are infused with Tartar as well as Russian blood, and Russians show Tartar as well as Finnish traits. The Bashkirs, who constitute an ethnic peninsula running from the solid Mongolian mass of Asia, show every type of the mongrel.[375] [See map page 225.]
[Sidenote: Boundary zones of assimilation in Asia.]
If we turn to Asia and examine the western race boundary of the expanding Chinese, we find that a wide belt of mingled ethnic elements, hybrid languages, and antagonistic civilizations marks the transition from Chinese to Mongolian and Tibetan areas. The eastern and southern frontiers of Mongolia, formerly marked by the Great Wall, are now difficult to define, owing to the steady encroachment of the agricultural Chinese on the fertile edges of the plateau, where they have converted the best-watered pastures of the Mongols into millet fields and vegetable gardens, leaving for the nomad's herds the more sterile patches between.[376] Every line of least resistance--climatic, industrial, commercial--sees the Chinese widening this transitional zone. He sprinkles his crops over the "Land of Grass," invades the trade of the caravan towns, sets up his fishing station on the great northern bend of the Hoangho in the Ordos country, three hundred miles beyond the Wall, to exploit the fishing neglected by the Mongols.[377] The well-watered regions of the Nan-Shan ranges has enabled him to drive a long, narrow ethnic wedge, represented by the westward projection of Kansu Province between Mongolia and Tibet, into the heart of the Central Plateau. [See map page 103.] Here the nomad Si Fan tribes dwell side by side with Chinese farmers,[378] who themselves show a strong infusion of the Mongolian and Tibetan blood to the north and south, and whose language is a medley of all three tongues.[379]
[Sidenote: Boundary zones of mountain Tibet.]
In easternmost Tibet, in the elevated province of Minjak (2,600 meters or 8,500 feet), M. Hue found in 1846 a great number of Chinese from the neighboring Sze-Chuan and Yun-nan districts keeping shops and following the primary trades and agriculture. The language of the Tibetan natives showed the effect of foreign intercourse; it was not the pure speech of Lhassa, but was closely assimilated to the idiom of the neighboring Si Fan speech of Sze-Chuan and contained many Chinese expressions. He found also a modification of manners, customs, and costumes in this peripheral Tibet; the natives showed more of the polish, cunning, and covetousness of the Chinese, less of the rudeness, frankness, and strong religious feeling characteristic of the western plateau man.[380] Just across the political boundary in Chinese territory, the border zone of assimilation shows predominance of the Chinese element with a strong Tibetan admixture both in race and civilization.[381] Here Tibetan traders with their yak caravans are met on the roads or encamped in their tents by the hundred about the frontier towns, whither they have brought the wool, sheep, horses, hides and medicinal roots of the rough highland across that "wild borderland which is neither Chinese nor Tibetan." The Chinese population consists of hardy mountaineers, who eat millet and maize instead of rice. The prevailing architecture is Tibetan and the priests on the highways are the red and yellow lamas from the Buddhist monasteries of the plateau. "The Country is a cross between China and Tibet."[382]
Even the high wall of the Himalayas does not suffice to prevent similar exchanges of ethnic elements and culture between southern Tibet and northern India. Lhassa and Giamda harbor many emigrants from the neighboring Himalayan state of Bhutan, allow them to monopolize the metal industry, in which they excel, and to practise undisturbed their Indian form of Buddhism.[383] The southern side of this zone of transition is occupied by a Tibetan stock of people inhabiting the Himalayan frontiers of India and practising the Hindu religion.[384] In the hill country of northern Bengal natives are to be seen with the Chinese queue hanging below a Hindu turban, or wearing the Hindu caste mark on their broad Mongolian faces. With these are mingled genuine Tibetans who have come across the border to work in the tea plantations of this region.[385] [See map page 102.]
[Sidenote: Relation of ethnic and cultural assimilation.]
The assimilation of culture within a boundary zone is in some respects the result of race amalgamation, as, for instance, in costume, religion, manners and language; but in economic points it is often the result of identical geographic influences to which both races are alike subjected. For example, scarcity of food on the arid plateau of Central Asia makes the Chinese of western Kansu eat butter and curds as freely as do the pastoral Mongols, though such a diet is obnoxious to the purely agricultural Chinese of the lowlands.[386] The English pioneer in the Trans-Allegheny wilderness shared with the Indians an environment of trackless forests and savage neighbors; he was forced to discard for a time many essentials of civilization, both material and moral. Despite a minimum of race intermixture, the men of the Cumberland and Kentucky settlements became assimilated to the life of the red man; they borrowed his scalping knife and tomahawk, adopted his method of ambush and extermination in war; like him they lived in great part by the chase, dressed in furs and buckskin, and wore the noiseless moccasin. Here the mere fact of geographical location on a remote frontier, and of almost complete isolation from the centers of English life on the Atlantic slope, and the further fact of persistent contact with a lower status of civilization, resulted in a temporary return to primitive methods of existence, till the settlements secured an increase of population adequate for higher industrial development and for defence.
A race boundary involves almost inevitably a cultural boundary, often, too, a linguistic and religionary, occasionally a political boundary. The last three are subject to wide fluctuation, frequently overstepping all barriers of race and contrasted civilizations. Though one often accompanies another, it is necessary to distinguish the different kinds of boundaries and to estimate their relative importance in the history of a people or state. We may lay down the rule that the greater, more permanent, and deep-seated the contrasts on the two sides of a border, the greater is its significance; and that, on this basis, boundaries rank in importance, with few exceptions, in the following order: racial, cultural, linguistic, and political. The less marked the contrasts, in general, the more rapid and complete the process of assimilation in the belt of borderland.
[Sidenote: The boundary zone in political expansion.]
The significance of the border zone of assimilation for political expansion lies in the fact that it prepares the way for the advance of the state boundary from either side; in it the sharp edge of racial and cultural antagonism is removed, or for this antagonism a new affinity may be substituted. The zone of American settlement, industry, and commerce which in 1836 projected beyond the political boundary of the Sabine River over the eastern part of Mexican Texas facilitated the later incorporation of the State into the Union, just as a few years earlier the Baton Rouge District of Spanish West Florida had gravitated to the United States by reason of the predominant American element there, and thus extended the boundary of Louisiana to the Pearl River. When the political boundary of Siberia was fixed at the Amur River, the Muscovite government began extending the border zone of assimilation far to the south of that stream by the systematic Russification of Manchuria, with a view to its ultimate annexation. Schleswig-Holstein and Alsace-Lorraine, by reason of their large German population, have been readily incorporated into the German Empire. Only in Lorraine has a considerable French element retarded the process. The considerable sprinkling of Germans over the Baltic provinces of Russia and Poland west of the Vistula, and a certain Teutonic stamp of civilization which these districts have received, would greatly facilitate the eastward extension of the German Empire; while their common religions, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, would help obliterate the old political fissure. Thus the borderland of a country, so markedly differentiated from its interior, performs a certain historical function, and becomes, as it were, an organ of the living, growing race or state.
[Sidenote: Tendency toward defection along political frontiers.]
Location on a frontier involves remoteness from the center of national, cultural, and political activities; these reach their greatest intensity in the core of the nation and exercise only an attenuated influence on the far-away borders, unless excellent means of communication keep up a circulation of men, commodities, and ideas between center and periphery. For the frontier, therefore, the centripetal force is weakened; the centrifugal is strengthened often by the attraction of some neighboring state or tribe, which has established bonds of marriage, trade, and friendly intercourse with the outlying community. Moreover, the mere infusion of foreign blood, customs, and ideas, especially a foreign religion, which is characteristic of a border zone, invades the national solidarity. Hence we find that a tendency to political defection constantly manifests itself along the periphery. A long reach weakens the arm of authority, especially where serious geographical barriers intervene; hence border uprisings are usually successful, at least for a time. When accomplished, they involve that shrinkage of the frontiers which we have found to be the unmistakable symptom of national decline.
This defection shows itself most promptly in conquered border tribes of different blood, who lack the bond of ethnic affinity, and whose remoteness emboldens them to throw off the political yoke. The decay of the Roman Empire, after its last display of energy under Trajan, was registered in the revolt of its peripheral districts beyond the Euphrates, Danube, and Rhine, as also in the rapid Teutonization of eastern Gaul, which here prepared the way for the assertion of independence. The border satraps of the ancient Persian Empire were constantly revolting, as the history of Asia Minor shows. Aragon, Old Castile, and Portugal were the first kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula to throw off Saracen dominion. Mountain ranges and weary stretches of desert roads enabled the rebellions in Chinese Turkestan and the border districts of Sungaria in 1863 to be maintained for several years.[387]
[Sidenote: Centrifugal forces on the frontier.]
A feeble grasp upon remote peripheral possessions is often further weakened by the resistance of an immigrant population from beyond the boundary, which brings with it new ideas of government. This was the geographical history of the Texan revolt. A location on the far northern outskirts of Mexican territory, some twelve hundred miles from the capital, rendered impossible intelligent government control, the enforcement of the laws, and prompt defence against the Indians. Remoteness weakened the political cohesion. More than this, the American ethnic boundary lapped far over eastern Texas, forming that border zone of two-fold race which we have come to know. This alien stock, antagonistic to the national ideals emanating from the City of Mexico, dominant over the native population by reason of its intelligence, energy, and wealth, ruptured the feeble political bond and asserted the independence of Texas. Quite similar was the history of the "Independent State of Acre," which in 1899 grew up just within the Bolivian frontier under the leadership of Brazilian caoutchouc gatherers, resisted the collection of taxes by the Bolivian government, and four years later secured annexation to Brazil.[388]
Even when no alien elements are present to weaken the race bond, if natural barriers intervene to obstruct and retard communications between center and periphery, the frontier community is likely to develop the spirit of defection, especially if its local geographic, and hence social, conditions are markedly different from those of the governing center. This is the explanation of that demand for independent statehood which was rife in our Trans-Allegheny settlements from 1785 to 1795, and of that separatist movement which advocated political alliance with either the British colonies to the north or the Spanish to the west, because these were nearer and offered easier access to the sea. A frontier location and an intervening mountain barrier were important factors in the Whisky Rebellion in western Pennsylvania, just as similar conditions later suggested the secession of the Pacific States from the Union. Disaffection from the government was manifested by the Trek Boers of early South Africa, "especially by those who dwelt in the outlying districts where the Government had exerted and could exert little control." In 1795 the people of Graaf-Reinet, a frontier settlement of that time, revolted against the Dutch South African Company and set up a miniature republic.[389]
[Sidenote: The spirit of colonial frontiers.]
The spirit of the colonial frontier is the spirit of freedom, the spirit of men who have traveled far, who are surcharged with energy, enterprise and self-reliance, often with impatience of restraint. A severe process of elimination culls out for the frontier a population strikingly differentiated from the citizens of the old inhabited centers. Then remoteness of location and abundance of opportunity proceed to emphasize the qualities which have squeezed through the sieve of natural and social selection. This is the type bred upon our own frontier, which, West beyond West, has crossed the continent from the backwoods of the Allegheny Mountains to the Pacific. The Siberian frontier develops much the same type on the eastern edge of the Russian Empire. Here army officers find a compensation for their rough surrounding in the escape from the excessive bureaucracy of the capitals. Here is to be noted the independence, self-reliance and self-respect characteristic of other colonial frontiers. The Russian of the Asiatic border is proud to call himself a Siberian: he is already differentiated in his own consciousness. The force of Moscow tradition and discipline is faint when it reaches him, it has traveled so far. Even the elaborate observances of the orthodox Greek Church tend to become simplified on the frontier. The question naturally arises whether in the Russian Empire, as in the United States, the political periphery will in time, react upon the center, infuse it with the spirit of progress and youth.[390]
[Sidenote: Free border states as political survivals.]
When to a border situation is added a geographic location affording conditions of long-established isolation, this tendency to maintain political autonomy becomes very pronounced. This is the explanation of so many frontier mountain states that have retained complete or partial independence, such as Nepal, Bhutan, the Asturias, which successfully withstood Saracen attack, and Montenegro, which has repelled alike Venetian, Servian, and Turkish dominion. Europe especially has numerous examples of these unabsorbed border states, whose independence represents the equilibrium of the conflicting political attractions about them. But all these smallest fragments of political territory have either some commercial or semi-political union with one or another of their neighbors. The little independent principality of Liechtenstein, wedged in between Switzerland and the Tyrol, is included in the customs union of Austro-Hungary. The small, independent duchy of Luxemburg, which has been attached in turn to all the great states which have grown up along its borders, is included in the Zollverein of Germany. The republic of Andorra, far up in a lofty valley of the Pyrenees, which has maintained its freedom for a thousand years, acknowledges certain rights of suzerainty exercised by France and the Spanish bishopric of Urgel.[391]
[Sidenote: Guardians of the marches.]
Oftentimes a state gains by recognizing this freedom-loving spirit of the frontier, and by turning it to account for national defence along an exposed boundary. In consequence of the long wars between Scotland and England, to the Scotch barons having estates near the Border were given the Wardenships of the Marches, offices of great power and dignity; and their clans, accustomed only to the imperfect military organization demanded by the irregular but persistent hostilities of the time and place, developed a lawless spirit. Prohibited from agriculture by their exposed location, they left their fields waste, and lived by pillage and cattle-lifting from their English and even their Scotch neighbors. The valor of these southern clans, these "reivers of the Border," was the bulwark of Scotland against the English, but their mutinous spirit resisted the authority of the king and led them often to erect semi-independent principalities.[392]
[Sidenote: Border nomads as frontier police.]
China has fringed her western boundaries with quasi-independent tribes whose autonomy is assured and whose love of freedom is a guarantee of guerilla warfare against any invader from Central Asia. The Mantze tribes in the mountain borders of Sze-Chuan province have their own rulers and customs, and only pay tribute to China.[393] The highlands of Kansu are sprinkled with such independent tribes. Sometimes a definite bargain is entered into--a self-governing military organization and a yearly sum of money in return for defence of the frontier. The Mongol tribes of the Charkar country or "Borderland" just outside the Great Wall northwest of Pekin constitute a paid army of the Emperor to guard the frontier against the Khalkhas of northern Mongolia, the tribe of Genghis Khan.[394] Similarly, semi-independent military communities for centuries made a continuous line of barriers against the raids of the steppe nomads along the southern and southeastern frontiers of Russia, from the Dnieper to the Ural rivers. There were the "Free Cossacks," located on the debatable ground between the fortified frontier of the agricultural steppe and marauding Crimean Tartars. Nominally subjects of the Czar, they obeyed him when it suited them, and on provocation rose in open revolt. The Cossacks of the Dnieper, who to the middle of the seventeenth century formed Poland's border defence against Tartar invasion, were jealous of any interference with their freedom. They lent their services on occasions to the Sultan of Turkey, and even to the Crimean Khan; and finally, in 1681, attached themselves and their territory to Russia.[395] Here speaks that spirit of defection which is the natural product of the remoteness and independence of frontier life. The Russians also attached to themselves the Kalmucks located between the lower Volga and Don, and used them as a frontier defence against their Tartar and Kirghis neighbors.[396] In this case, as in that of the Cossacks and the Charkars of eastern Mongolia, we have a large body of men living in the same arid grassland, leading the same pastoral life, and carrying on the same kind of warfare as the nomadic marauders whose pillaging, cattle-lifting raids they aim to suppress. The imperial orders to the Charkars limit them strictly to the life of herdmen, with the purpose of maintaining their mobility and military efficiency. So in olden times, for the Don Cossacks agriculture was prohibited on pain of death, lest they should lose their taste for the live-stock booty of a punitive raid. A still earlier instance of this utilization of border nomads is found in the first century after Christ, when the Romans made the Arabian tribe of Beni Jafre, dwelling on the frontier of Syria, the warders of the eastern marches of the Empire.[397]
[Sidenote: Lawless citizens deported to frontiers.]
The advancing frontier of an expanding people often carries them into a sparsely settled country where the unruly members of society can with advantage be utilized as colonists. After centralized and civilized Russia began to encroach with the plow upon the pastures of the steppe Cossacks, and finally suppressed these military republics, the more turbulent and obstinate remnants of them she colonized along the Kuban and Terek rivers, to serve as bulwarks against the incursions of the Caucasus tribes and as the vanguard of the advance southward.[398]
This is one principle underlying the transportation of criminals to the frontier. They serve to hold the new country. There these waste elements of civilization are converted into a useful by-product. They may be only political radicals or religious dissenters: if so, so much the better colonial material. The Russian government formerly transported the rebellious sect of the Molokans or Unitarians to the outskirts of the Empire, where the danger of contagion was reduced. Hence they are to be found to-day scattered in the Volga province of Samara, on the border of the Kirghis steppe, in the Crimea, the Caucasus, and Siberia, still faithful and still persecuted.[399] Since 1709 the Russian advance into Siberia has planted its milestones in settlements formed of prisoners of war, political exiles, and worse offenders.[400] Penal colonists located on the shores of Kamchatka helped build and man the crazy boats which set out for Alaska at the end of the eighteenth century. China settles its thieves and cheats among the villages of its own border provinces of Shensi[401] and Kansu; but its worst criminals it transports far away to the Hi country on the western frontier of the Empire, where they have doubtless contributed to the spirit of revolt that has there manifested itself.[402]
[Sidenote: Drift of lawless elements to the frontiers.]
The abundance of opportunity and lack of competition in a new frontier community, its remoteness from the center of authority, and its imperfect civil government serve to attract thither the vicious, as well as the sturdy and enterprising. The society of the early Trans-Allegheny frontier included both elements. The lawless who drifted to the border formed gangs of horse thieves, highwaymen, and murderers, who called forth from the others the summary methods of lynch law.[403] North Carolina, which in its early history formed the southern frontier of Virginia, swarmed with ruffians who had fled thither to escape imprisonment or hanging, and whose general attitude was to resist all regular authority and especially to pay no taxes.[404] Similarly, that wide belt of mountain forest which forms the waste boundary between Korea and Manchuria is the resort of bandits, who have harried both sides of the border ever since this neutral district was established in the thirteenth century.[405] The frontier communities of the Russian Cossacks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were regular asylums for runaway serfs and peasants who were fleeing from taxation; their hetmans were repeatedly fugitive criminals. The eastern border of Russia formed by the Volga basin in 1775 was described as "an asylum for malcontents and vagabonds of all kinds, ruined nobles, disfrocked monks, military deserters, fugitive serfs, highwaymen, and Volga pirates"--disorderly elements which contributed greatly to the insurrection led by the Ural Cossacks in that year.[406] "The Debatable Land," a tract between the Esk and Sark rivers, formerly claimed by both England and Scotland, was long the haunt of thieves, outlaws and vagabonds, as indeed was the whole Border, subject as it was to the regular jurisdiction of neither side.[407]
[Sidenote: Asylums beyond the border.]
Just beyond the political boundary, where police authority comes to an end and where pursuit is cut short or retarded, the fleeing criminal finds his natural asylum. Hence all border districts tend to harbor undesirable refugees from the other side. Deserters and outlaws from China proper sprinkle the eastern districts of Mongolia.[408] Marauding bands of Apaches and Sioux, after successful depredations on American ranches, for years fled across the line into Mexico and Canada before the hammering hoof-beats of Texas Ranger and United States cavalry, until a treaty with Mexico in 1882, authorizing such armed pursuit to cross the boundary, cut off at least one asylum.[409] Our country exchanges other undesirable citizens with its northern and southern neighbors in cases where no extradition treaty provides for their return; and the borders of the individual states are crossed and recrossed by shifty gentlemen seeking to dodge the arm of the law. The fact that so many State boundaries fall in the Southern Appalachians, where illicit distilling and feud murders provide most of the cases on the docket, has materially retarded the suppression of these crimes by increasing the difficulty both of apprehending the offender and of subpoenaing the reluctant witness.
[Sidenote: Border refugees and ethnic mingling.]
Dissatisfied, oppressed, or persecuted members of a political community are prone to seek an asylum across the nearest border, where happier or freer conditions of life are promised. There they contribute to that mixture of race which characterizes every boundary zone, though as an embittered people they may also help to emphasize any existing political or religious antagonism. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was followed by an exodus of Huguenots from France to the Protestant states of Switzerland, the Palatinate of the Rhine, and Holland, as also across the Channel into southern England; just as in recent years the Slav borderland of eastern Germany has received a large immigration of Polish Jews from Russia. When the Polish king in 1571 executed the leader of the Dnieper Cossacks, thousands of these bold borderers left their country and joined the community of the Don; and in 1722 after the Dnieper community had been crushed by Peter the Great, a similar exodus took place across the southern boundary into the Crimea, whereby the Tartar horde was strengthened, just as a few years before, during an unsuccessful revolt of the Don Cossacks, some two thousand of the malcontents crossed the southern frontier to the Kuban River in Circassia.[410] The establishment of American independence in 1783 saw an exodus of loyalists from the United States into the contiguous districts of Ontario, New Brunswick, and Spanish Florida, Five years later discontent with the Federal Government for its dilatory opposition to the occlusion of the Mississippi and the lure of commercial betterment sent many citizens of the early Trans-Allegheny commonwealths to the Spanish side of the Mississippi,[411] while the Natchez District on the east bank of the river contained a sprinkling of French who had become dissatisfied with Spanish rule in Louisiana and changed their domicile.
These are some of the movements of individuals and groups which contribute to the blending of races along every frontier, and make of the boundary a variable zone, as opposed to the rigid artificial line in terms of which we speak.
NOTES TO CHAPTER VII
[326] A.W. Greely, Report of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, Vol. I, pp. 28-33, 236. Misc. Doc. No. 393. Washington, 1888.Return to passage
[327] A.P. Engelhardt, A Russian Province of the North, pp. 123-130. Translated from the Russian. London, 1899.Return to passage
[328] Nordenskiold, Voyage of the Vega, pp. 60-62. New York, 1882.Return to passage
[329] Ibid., pp. 146, 161.Return to passage
[330] Col. F.E. Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent, pp. 194-199. London, 1904.Return to passage
[331] A.R. Wallace, Geographical Distribution of Animals, Vol. I, pp. 387-389, 426-431, 436-438. London, 1876.Return to passage
[332] Ibid., 409, 424.Return to passage
[333] A. Heilprin, Geographical Distribution of Animals, pp. 105-108. London, 1894.Return to passage
[334] A.R. Wallace, Geographical Distribution of Animals, Vol. I, pp. 313, 321-322. London, 1876.Return to passage
[335] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, ethnographical map. New York, 1893.Return to passage
[336] Eleventh Census of the United States, Population, Part I., maps on pp. xviii-xxiii.Return to passage
[337] L. March Phillipps, In the Desert, pp. 64-68, 77. London, 1905.Return to passage
[338] Fully treated in E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, pp. 22-31. Boston, 1903.Return to passage
[339] Sir S.W. Baker, The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, pp. 88, 128-129, 135. Hartford, 1868.Return to passage
[340] Norway, Official Publication for the Paris Exhibition, pp. 3-4 and map. Christiania, 1900.Return to passage
[341] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 297. London, 1903.Return to passage
[342] Caesar, Bello Gallico, Book IV, chap. 3 and Book VI, chap. 23.Return to passage
[343] Ibid., Book VI, chap. 10.Return to passage
[344] T. Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. II, p. 56, Note I. Oxford, 1892.Return to passage
[345] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. IV, p. 510. New York, 1902-1906.Return to passage
[346] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. IX, chap. 70, pp. 99, 115. New York, 1859.Return to passage
[347] Dr. Wilhelm Junker, Travels in Africa, pp. 18, 45, 79, 87, 115, 117, 138, 191, 192, 200, 308, 312, 325, 332. Translated from the German. London, 1892.Return to passage
[348] H. Barth, Human Society in North Central Africa, Journal Royal Geographical Society, Vol. XXX, pp. 123-124. London, 1860.Return to passage
[349] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, pp. 163-164. London, 1907.Return to passage
[350] John H. Speke, Discovery of the Sources of the Nile, pp. 74, 89, 91, 94, 95, 173, 176-177, 197. New York, 1868.Return to passage
[351] Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, Vol. I, pp. 50, 70, 135. New York, 1895.Return to passage
[352] C. C. Royce, The Cherokee Nations of Indians, p. 140. _Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology_. Washington, 1884.Return to passage
[353] Albert J. Pickett, History of Alabama, pp. 79-89, 113-115, 1851. Reprint, Birmingham, 1900. James Adair, History of the American Indians, p. 257. London, 1775.Return to passage
[354] Ibid., pp. 252-3, 282.Return to passage
[355] Albert J. Pickett, History of Alabama, pp. 133-135. 1851. Reprint, Birmingham, 1900.Return to passage
[356] Archibald Little, The Far East, p. 249. Oxford, 1905.Return to passage
[357] M. Huc, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846, Vol. I, p. 74. Translated from the French. Reprint, Chicago, 1898.Return to passage
[358] Nachtigal, Sahara und Sudan, Vol. I, pp. 102, 448; Vol. III, pp. 203-205, 314. Leipzig, 1889. Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, p. 170. London, 1907.Return to passage
[359] Albert J. Pickett, History of Alabama, pp. 118-119. 1851. Reprint, Birmingham, 1900.Return to passage
[360] Norway, Official Publication for the Paris Exhibition, pp. 5, 83-84. Christiania, 1900.Return to passage
[361] Albert J. Pickett, History of Alabama, pp. 416, 417, 461, 467. 1857. Reprint, Birmingham, 1900.Return to passage
[362] C.E. Akers, History of South America, 1854-1904, p. 435. New York, 1904.Return to passage
[363] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 883. New York, 1902.Return to passage
[364] Matias Romero, Mexico and the United States, pp. 433-441. New York, 1898.Return to passage
[365] E. Hertslet, The Map of Europe by Treaty, 1814-1875, Vol. I, pp. 422, 425, 426; Vol. II, p. 1430.Return to passage
[366] Eleventh Census of the United States, Population, Part I., map No. 10 and p. cxliii.Return to passage
[367] Ibid. Based on comparison of Tables 15 and 33 for the States mentioned.Return to passage
[368] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 250-253. New York, 1899.Return to passage
[369] W. Deecke, Italy, pp. 325, 347, 349. Translated from the German. London, 1904.Return to passage
[370] Sydow-Wagner, Methodischer Schul-Atlas, Voelker und Sprachenkarten, No. 13. Gotha, 1905. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 282-284. New York, 1899.Return to passage
[371] Ibid., pp. 255-257. W. Deecke, Italy, p. 357. London, 1904.Return to passage
[372] Sydow-Wagner, Methodischer Schul-Atlas, Voelker und Sprachenkarten No, 13. Gotha, 1905.Return to passage
[373] Hugh R. Mill, International Geography, p. 309. New York, 1902.Return to passage
[374] D.M. Wallace, Russia, pp. 151-155. New York, 1904.Return to passage
[375] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 362. New York, 1899.Return to passage
[376] Archibald Little, The Far East. Map p. 8 and pp. 171-172. Oxford, 1905. M. Huc, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846. Vol. I, pp. 2-4, 21, 197-201, 284. Reprint, Chicago, 1898.Return to passage
[377] Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 166-170.Return to passage
[378] Ibid., Vol II, p. 23.Return to passage
[379] Ibid., Vol. I, 312-313.Return to passage
[380] Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 319-322, 327.Return to passage
[381] M. Huc, Journey through the Chinese Empire, Vol. I, p. 36. New York, 1871.Return to passage
[382] Isabella Bird Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. II, pp. 70-71, 88, 91, 92, 104-109, 113, 117, 133, 134, 155, 194, 195. London, 1900.Return to passage
[383] M. Huc, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846, Vol. II, pp. 155-156, 264. Reprint, Chicago, 1898.Return to passage
[384] C.A. Sherring, Western Tibet and the British Borderland, pp. 60, 65-73, 205, 347-358. London, 1906. Statistical Atlas of India, pp. 61-62, maps. Calcutta, 1895. Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. I, p. 295-296. Oxford, 1907.Return to passage
[385] Eliza E. Scidmore, Winter India, pp. 106-108. New York, 1903.Return to passage
[386] M. Huc, Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China, 1844-1846, Vol. I, pp. 312-313. Reprint, Chicago, 1898.Return to passage
[387] Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 174-175. New York, 1899.Return to passage
[388] Charles E. Akers, History of South America, 1854-1904, p. 562. New York, 1904.Return to passage
[389] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 108-109. New York, 1897.Return to passage
[390] O.P. Crosby, Tibet and Turkestan, pp. 15-20.Return to passage
[391] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 378. New York, 1902. H. Spencer, A Visit to Andorra, Fortnightly Review, Vol. 67, pp. 44-60. 1897.Return to passage
[392] Wm. Robertson, History of Scotland, pp. 19-20. New York, 1831. The Scotch Borderers, Littell's Living Age, Vol 40, p. 180.Return to passage
[393] Isabella Bird Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. II, pp. 209-210. London, 1900.Return to passage
[394] M. Huc, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846, Vol. I, pp. 41, 42, 97. Reprint, Chicago, 1898.Return to passage
[395] D.M. Wallace, Russia, pp. 352-356. New York, 1904. Article on Cossacks in Encyclopedia Britannica.Return to passage
[396] Pallas, Travels in Southern Russia, Vol. I, pp. 126-129; 442; Vol. II, pp. 330-331. London, 1812.Return to passage
[397] G. Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, p. 9. New York, 1897.Return to passage
[398] D.M. Wallace, Russia, p. 358. New York, 1904. Walter K. Kelly, History of Russia, Vol. II, pp. 394-395. London, 1881.Return to passage
[399] D.M. Wallace, Russia, p. 298. New York, 1904.Return to passage
[400] Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 43, 53. New York, 1899.Return to passage
[401] Francis H. Nichol, Through Hidden Shensi, pp. 139-140. New York, 1902.Return to passage
[402] M. Hue, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China, 1844-1846, Vol. I, p. 23. Reprint, Chicago, 1898.Return to passage
[403] Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, Vol. I, pp. 130-132. New York, 1895.Return to passage
[404] John Fiske, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors, Vol. II, pp. 311, 315-321. Boston, 1897.Return to passage
[405] Archibald Little, The Far East, p. 249. Oxford, 1905.Return to passage
[406] Alfred Rambaud, History of Russia, Vol. II, pp. 45, 199-200. Boston, 1886.Return to passage
[407] Malcolm Lang, History of Scotland, Vol. I, pp. 42-43. London, 1800. The Scotch Borderland, Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. CCLX, p. 191. 1886.Return to passage
[408] Friedrich Ratel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 175, London, 1896.Return to passage
[409] A.B. Hart, Foundations of American Foreign Policy, pp. 81-82. New York, 1901.Return to passage
[410] Alfred Rambaud, History of Russia, Vol. II, pp. 45, 50. Boston, 1886.Return to passage
[411] Justin Winsor, The Westward Movement, p. 366. Boston, 1899.Return to passage