chapter XIV

.]

[Sidenote: Cultural advantages of large political area.]

The larger the area which a civilized nation occupies, the more numerous are its points of contact with other peoples, and the less likely is there to be a premature crystallization of its civilization from isolation. Extension of area on a large scale means eventually extension of the seaboard and access to those multiform international relations which the ocean highway confers. The world wide expansion of the British Empire has given it at every outward step wider oceanic contact and eventually a cosmopolitan civilization. The same thing is true of the other great colonial empires of history, whether Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch or French; and even of the great continental empires, like Russia and the United States. The Russian advance across Siberia, like the American advance across the Rockies, meant access to the Pacific, and a modification of its civilization on those remote shores.

A large area means varied vicinal locations and hence differentiation of civilization, at least along the frontier. How rapidly the vivifying influences of this contact will penetrate into the bulk of the interior depends upon size, location as scattered or compact, and general geographic conditions like navigable rivers or mountains, which facilitate or bar intercourse with that interior. The Russian Empire has eleven different nations, speaking even more different languages, on its western and southern frontiers. Its long line of Asiatic contact will inevitably give to the European civilization transplanted hither in Russian colonies a new and perhaps not unfruitful development. The Siberian citizen of future centuries may compare favorably with his brother in Moscow. Japan, even while impressing its civilization upon the reluctant Koreans, will see itself modified by the contact and its culture differentiated by the transplanting; but the content of Japanese civilization will be increased by every new variant thus formed.

[Sidenote: Politico-economic advantages.]

The larger the area brought under one political control, the less the handicap of internal friction and the greater its economic independence. Vast territory has enabled the United States to maintain with advantage a protective tariff, chiefly because the free trade within its own borders was extensive. The natural law of the territorial growth of states and peoples means an extension of the areas in which peace and coöperation are preserved, a relative reduction of frontiers and of the military forces necessary to defend them,[316] diminution in the sum total of conflicts, and a wider removal of the border battle fields. In place of the continual warfare between petty tribes which prevailed in North America four hundred years ago, we have to-day the peaceful competition of the three great nations which have divided the continent among them. The political unification of the Mediterranean basin under the Roman Empire restricted wars to the remote land frontiers. The foreign wars of Russia, China, and the United States in the past century have been almost wholly confined to the outskirts of their big domains, merely scratching the rim and leaving the great interior sound and undisturbed. Russia's immense area is the military ally on which she can most surely count. The long road to Moscow converted Napoleon's victory into a defeat; and the resistless advance of the Japanese from Port Arthur to the Sungari River led only to a peace robbed of the chief fruits of victory. The numerous wars of the British Empire have been limited to this or that corner, and have scarcely affected the prosperity of the great remainder, so that their costs have been readily borne and their wounds rapidly healed.

[Sidenote: Political area and the national horizon.]

The territorial expansion of peoples and states is attended by an evolution of their spacial conceptions and ideals. Primitive peoples, accustomed to dismemberment in small tribal groups, bear all the marks of territorial contraction. Their geographical horizon is usually fixed by the radius of a few days' march. Inter-tribal trade and intercourse reach only rudimentary development, under the prevailing conditions of mutual antagonism and isolation, and hence contribute little to the expansion of the horizon. Knowing only their little world, such primitive groups overestimate the size and importance of their own territory, and are incapable of controlling an extensive area. This is the testimony of all travellers who have observed native African states. Though the race or stock distribution may be wide, like that of the Athapascan and Algonquin Indians, and their war paths long, like the campaigns of the Iroquois against the Cherokees of the Tennessee River, yet the unit of tribal territory permanently occupied is never large.

[Sidenote: National estimates of area.]

Small naturally defined regions, which take the lead in historical development because they counteract the primitive tendency towards excessive dispersal, are in danger of teaching too well their lesson of concentration. In course of time geographic enclosure begins to betray its limitations. The extent of a people's territory influences their estimate of area _per se_, determines how far land shall be made the basis of their national purposes, fixes the territorial scale of their conquests and their political expansion. This is a conspicuous psychological effect of a narrow local environment. A people embedded for centuries in a small district measure area with a short yardstick. The ancient Greeks devised a philosophic basis for the advantages of the small state, which is extolled in the writings of Plato and Aristotle.[317] Aristotle wanted it small enough, "to be comprehended at one glance of the statesman's eye." Plato's ideal democracy, by rigid laws limiting the procreative period of women and men and providing for the death of children born out of this period or out of wedlock, restricted its free citizens to 5,040 heads of families,[318] all living within reach of the agora, and all able to judge from personal knowledge of a candidate's fitness for office. This condition was possible only in dwarf commonwealths like the city-states of the Hellenic world. The failure of the Greeks to build up a political structure on a territorial scale commensurate with their cultural achievements and with the wide sphere of their cultural influence can be ascribed chiefly to their inability to discard the contracted territorial ideas engendered by geographic and political dismemberment. The little Judean plateau, which gave birth to a universal religion, clung with provincial bigotry to the narrow tribal creed and repudiated the larger faith of Christ, which found its appropriate field in Mediterranean Europe.

[Sidenote: Estimates of area in small maritime states.]

Maritime peoples of small geographic base have a characteristic method of expansion which reflects their low valuation of area. Their limited amount of arable soil necessitates reliance upon foreign sources of supply, which are secured by commerce. Hence they found trading stations or towns among alien peoples on distant coasts, selecting points like capes or inshore islets which can be easily defended and which at the same time command inland or maritime routes of trade. The prime geographic consideration is location, natural and vicinal. The area of the trading settlement is kept as small as possible to answer its immediate purpose, because it can be more easily defended.[319] Such were the colonies of the ancient Phoenicians and Greeks in the Mediterranean, of the Medieval Arabs and the Portuguese on the east coast of Africa and in India. This method reached its ultimate expression in point of small area, seclusion, and local autonomy, perhaps, in the Hanse factories in Norway and Russia.[320] But all these widespread nuclei of expansion remained barren of permanent national result, because they were designed for a commercial end, and ignored the larger national mission and surer economic base found in acquisition of territory. Hence they were short-lived, succumbing to attack or abandoned on the failure of local resources, which were ruthlessly exploited.

[Sidenote: Limitations of small territorial conceptions.]

That precocious development characteristic of small naturally defined areas shows its inherent weakness in the tendency to accept the enclosed area as a nature-made standard of national territory. The earlier a state fixes its frontier without allowance for growth, the earlier comes the cessation of its development. Therefore the geographical nurseries of civilization were infected with germs of decay. Such was the history of Egypt, of Yemen, of Greece, Crete, and Phoenicia. These are the regions which, as Carl Ritter says, have given the whole fruit of their existence to the world for its future use, have conferred upon the world the trust which they once held, afterward to recede, as it were, from view.[321] They were great in the past, and now they belong to those immortal dead whose greatness has been incorporated in the world's life--"the choir invisible" of the nations.

[Sidenote: Evolution of territorial policies.]

The advance from a small, self-dependent community to interdependent relations with other peoples, then to ethnic expansion or union of groups to form a state or empire is a great turning point in any history. Thereby the clan or tribe discards the old paralyzing seclusion of the primitive society and the narrow habitat, and joins that march of ethnic, political and cultural progress which has covered larger and larger areas, and by increase of common purpose has cemented together ever greater aggregates.

Nothing is more significant in the history of the English in America than the rapid evolution of their spacial ideals, their abandonment of the small territorial conception brought with them from the mother country and embodied, for example, in that munificent land grant, fifty by a hundred miles in extent, of the first Virginia charter in 1606, and their progress to schemes of continental expansion. Every accession of territory to the Thirteen Colonies and to the Republic gave an impulse to growth. Expansion kept pace with opportunity. Only in small and isolated New England did the contracted provincial point of view persist. It manifested itself in a narrow policy of concentration and curtailment, which acquiesced in the occlusion of the Mississippi River to the Trans-Allegheny settlements by Spain in 1787, and which later opposed the purchase of the Louisiana territory[322] and the acquisition of the Philippines.

All peoples who have achieved wide expansion have developed in the process vast territorial policies. This is true of the pastoral nomads who in different epochs have inundated Europe, northern Africa and the peripheral lands of Asia, and of the great colonial nations who in a few decades have brought continents under their dominion. In nomadic hordes it is based upon habitual mobility and the possession of herds, which are at once incentive and means for extending the geographical horizon; but it suffers from the evanescent character of nomadic political organization, and the tendency toward dismemberment bred in all pastoral life by dispersal over scattered grazing grounds. Hence the empires set up by nomad conquerors like the Saracens and Tartars soon fall apart.

[Sidenote: Colonial expansion.]

Among highly civilized agricultural and industrial peoples, on the other hand, a vast territorial policy is at once cause and effect of national growth; it is at once an innate tendency and a conscious purpose tenaciously followed. It makes use of trade and diplomacy, of scientific invention and technical improvement, to achieve its aims. It becomes an accepted mark of political vigor and an ideal even among peoples who have failed to enlarge their narrow base. The model of Russian expansion on the Pacific was quickly followed by awakened Japan, stirred out of her insular complacence by the threat of Muscovite encroachment. Germany and Italy, each strengthened and enlarged as to national outlook by recent political unification, have elbowed their way into the crowded colonial field. The French, though not expansionists as individuals, have an excellent capacity for collective action when directed by government. The officials whom Louis XIV sent to Canada in the seventeenth century executed large schemes of empire reflecting the dilation of French frontiers in Europe. These ideals of expansion seem to have been communicated by the power of example, or the threat of danger in them, to the English colonists in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and later to Washington and Jefferson.

[Sidenote: The mind of colonials.]

The best type of colonial expansion is found among the English-speaking people of America, Australia and South Africa. Their spacial ideas are built on a big scale. Distances do not daunt them. The man who could conceive a Cape-to-Cairo railroad, with all the schemes of territorial aggrandizement therein implied, had a mind that took continents for its units of measure; and he found a fitting monument in a province of imperial proportions whereon was inscribed his name. Bryce tells us that in South Africa the social circle of "the best people" includes Pretoria, Johannesburg, Kimberley, Bloemfontein and Cape Town--a social circle with a diameter of a thousand miles![323]

The spirit of our western frontier, so long as there was a frontier, was the spirit of movement, of the conquest of space. It found its expression in the history of the Wilderness Road and the Oregon Trail. When the center of population in the United States still lingered on the shore of Chesapeake Bay, and the frontier of continuous settlement had not advanced beyond the present western boundary of Virginia and Pennsylvania, the spacious mind of Thomas Jefferson foresaw the Mississippi Valley as the inevitable and necessary possession of the American people, and looked upon the trade of the far-off Columbia River as a natural feeder of the Mississippi commerce.[324]

Emerson's statement that the vast size of the United States is reflected in the big views of its people applies not only to political policy, which in the Monroe Doctrine for the first time in history has embraced a hemisphere; nor is it confined to the big scale of their economic processes. Emerson had in mind rather their whole conception of national mission and national life, especially their legislation,[325] for which he anticipated larger and more Catholic aims than obtain in Europe, hampered as it is by countless political and linguistic boundaries and barred thereby from any far-reaching unity of purpose and action.

Canada, British South Africa, Australia and the United States, though widely separated, have in common a certain wide outlook upon life, a continental element in the national mind, bred in their people by their generous territories. The American recognizes his kinship of mind with these colonial Englishmen as something over and above mere kinship of race. It consists in their deep-seated common democracy, the democracy born in men who till fields and clear forests, not as plowmen and wood-cutters, but as makers of nations. It consists in identical interests and points of view in regard to identical problems growing out of the occupation and development of new and almost boundless territories. Race questions, paucity of labor, highways and railroads, immigration, combinations of capital, excessive land holdings, and illegal appropriation of land on a large scale, are problems that meet them all. The monopolistic policy of the United States in regard to American soil as embodied in the Monroe Doctrine, and the expectation lurking in the mental background of every American that his country may eventually embrace the northern continent, find their echo in Australia's plans for wider empire in the Pacific. The Commonwealth of Australia has succeeded in getting into its own hands the administration of British New Guinea (90,500 square miles.) It has also secured from the imperial government the unusual privilege of settling the relations between itself and the islands of the Pacific, because it regards the Pacific question as the one question of foreign policy in which its interests are profoundly involved. In the same way the British in South Africa, sparsely scattered though they are, feel an imperative need of further expansion, if their far-reaching schemes of commerce and empire are to be realized.

[Sidenote: Colonials as road builders.]

The effort to annihilate space by improved means of communication has absorbed the best intellects and energies of expanding peoples. The ancient Roman, like the Incas of Peru, built highways over every part of the empire, undaunted by natural obstacles like the Alps and Andes. Modern expansionists are railroad builders. Witness the long list of strategic lines, constructed or subsidized by various governments during the past half century--the Union Pacific, Central Pacific, Canadian Pacific, Trans-Siberian, Cairo-Khartoum, Cape Town-Zambesi, and now the proposed Trans-Saharan road, designed to unite the Mediterranean and Guinea colonies of French Africa. The equipment of the American roads, with their heavy rails, giant locomotives, and enormous freight cars, reveals adaptation to a commerce that covers long distances between strongly differentiated areas of production, and that reflects the vast enterprises of this continental country. The same story comes out in the ocean vessels which serve the trade of the Great Lakes, and in the acres of coal barges in a single fleet which are towed down the Ohio and Mississippi by one mammoth steel tug.

[Sidenote: Practical bent of colonials.]

The abundant natural resources awaiting development in such big new countries give to the mind of the people an essentially practical bent. The rewards of labor are so great that the stimulus to effort is irresistible. Economic questions take precedence of all others, divide political parties, and consume a large portion of national legislation; while purely political questions sink into the background. Civilization takes on a material stamp, becomes that "dollar civilization" which is the scorn of the placid, paralyzed Oriental or the old world European. The genius of colonials is essentially practical. Impatience of obstacles, short cuts aiming at quick returns, wastefulness of land, of forests, of fuel, of everything but labor, have long characterized American activities. The problem of an inadequate labor supply attended the sudden accession of territory opened for European occupation by the discovery of America, and caused a sudden recrudescence of slavery, which as an industrial system had long been outgrown by Europe. It has also given immense stimulus to invention, and to the formation of labor unions, which in the newest colonial fields, like Australia and New Zealand, have dominated the government and given a Utopian stamp to legislation.

Yet underlying and permeating this materialism is a youthful idealism. Transplanted to conditions of greater opportunity, the race becomes rejuvenated, abandons outgrown customs and outworn standards, experiences an enlargement of vision and of hope, gathers courage and energy equal to its task, manages somehow to hitch its wagon to a star.

NOTES TO