A. B. Hart, Foundations of American Foreign Policy, pp. 81-82. New York, 1901.
Alfred Rambaud, History of Russia, Vol. II, pp. 45, 50. Boston, 1886.
Justin Winsor, The Westward Movement, p. 366. Boston, 1899.
Chapter VIII—Coast Peoples
The coast a zone of transition.
Of all geographical boundaries, the most important is that between land and sea. The coast, in its physical nature, is a zone of transition between these two dominant forms of the earth's surface; it bears the mark of their contending forces, varying in its width with every stronger onslaught of the unresting sea, and with every degree of passive resistance made by granite or sandy shore. So too in an anthropo-geographical sense, it is a zone of transition. Now the life-supporting forces of the land are weak in it, and it becomes merely the rim of the sea; for its inhabitants the sea means food, clothes, shelter, fuel, commerce, highway, and opportunity. Now the coast is dominated by the exuberant forces of a productive soil, so that the ocean beyond is only a turbulent waste and a long-drawn barrier: the coast is the hem of the land. Neither influence can wholly exclude the other in this amphibian belt, for the coast remains the intermediary between the habitable expanse of the land and the international highway of the sea. The break of the waves and the dash of the spray draw the line beyond which human dwellings cannot spread; for these the shore is the outermost limit, as for ages also in the long infancy of the races, before the invention of boat and sail, it drew the absolute boundary to human expansion. In historical order, its first effect has been that of a barrier, and for the majority of peoples this it has remained; but with the development of navigation and the spread of human activities from the land over sea to other countries, it became the gateway both of land and sea—at once the outlet for exploration, colonization, and trade, and the open door through which a continent or island receives contributions of men or races or ideas from transoceanic shores. Barrier and threshold: these are the rôles which coasts have always played in history. To-day we see them side by side. But in spite of the immense proportions assumed by transmarine intercourse, the fact remains that the greater part of the coasts of the earth are for their inhabitants only a barrier and not an outlet, or at best only a base for timorous ventures seaward that rarely lose sight of the shore.