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.
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.
Gradations in area and in development.