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.
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.
Colonial expansion.