The larger the area occupied by a race or people, other geographic conditions being equal, the surer the guarantee of their permanence, and the less the chance of their repression or annihilation. A broad geographic base means generally abundant command of the resources of life and growth. Though for a growing people of wide possessions, like the Russians, the significance of the land may not be obvious, it becomes apparent enough in national decline and decay; for these even in their incipiency betray themselves in a loss of territory. A people which, voluntarily or otherwise, renounces its hold upon its land is on the downward path. Nothing else could show so plainly the national vitality of Japan as her tenacious purpose to get back Port Arthur taken from her by the Shimonoseki treaty in 1895. A people may decrease in numbers without serious consequences if it still retains its land; for herein lies its resources by which it may again hope to grow. The recurring loss of millions of lives in China from the wide-sweeping floods of the Hoangho is a passing episode, forgotten as soon as the mighty stream is re-embanked and the flooded plains reclaimed. The Civil War in the United States involved a temporary diminution of population and check to progress, but no lasting national weakness because no loss of territory. But the expulsion of the American Indians from their well-stocked hunting grounds in the Mississippi Valley and Atlantic plain to more restricted and barren lands in the far West, and the withdrawal of the Australian natives from the fertile coasts to the desert interior have meant racial renunciation of the sources of life.
Hence a people who are conquered and dislodged from their territory, as were the ancient Britons by the Saxons, the Slavs from the land between the Elbe and the Niemen by the mediæval Germans, and the Kaffirs in South Africa by the Dutch and English, the Ainos from Hondo by the Japanese, and the whole original Alpine race by the later coming Teutons from the fertile valleys and plains into the more barren highlands of western Europe, have little or no chance of regaining their own. When conquest results not in dislodgement, but only in the subjection of an undisturbed native population to a new ruling class, the vanquished retain their hold, only slightly impaired, perhaps, upon their strength-giving fields, recover themselves, and sooner or later conquer their conquerors either by absorption or revolution. This was the history of ancient Egypt with its Shepherd Kings, of England with its Norman lords, of Mexico and Peru with their Spanish victors.
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]
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]