More often the small area of an island facilitates its retention in bondage, when the large and less isolated continental districts have thrown off an unwelcome yoke. Athens, with her strong navy, found it an easy task to whip back into the ranks of the Delian Confederacy her recalcitrant island subjects like Naxos, Samos and Thasos; but her mutinous cities in peninsular Chalcidice and isthmian Megara, incited to revolt and aided by their neighbors,[878] were less at her mercy. This principle was recognized by Thucydides,[879] and taken advantage of by the Lacedæmonians during the great war for Spartan supremacy. England has been able to hold Ireland in a vise. Of all her former French territory, she retains only the Channel Isles. Cuba and Porto Rico remained in the crushing grasp of Spain sixty-four years after Mexico and the continental states of Central and South America, by mutual help and encouragement, had secured independence. The islands found that the isolation which confers protection from outside aggression meant for them detachment from friendly sources of succor on the mainland. The desultory help of filibuster expeditions, easily checked at the port of departure or landing, availed little to supplement the inadequate forces of rebellion pent up on their relatively small areas. By contrast, Mexico's larger area and population, continually stirred by American example and encouragement, reinforced by American volunteers and even by United States army officers, found revolt from 1812 to 1824 a comparatively easy task.
Cuba suffered from its geographic aloofness. So did little Crete, which submitted to Turkish oppression sixty years after the continental Greeks had made good their claim to freedom. Nor was this the first time that Cretan liberty had suffered from the detachment of an island environment. Aristotle recognized the principle when he wrote: "The people of Crete have hitherto submitted to the rule of the leading families as Cosmi, because the insular situation of Crete cuts off the interference of strangers or foreigners which might stir up rebellion against the unjust or partial government." And then he adds that this insular exclusion of outside incitement long rendered the fidelity of the Perioeci or serf-like peasants of Crete a striking contrast to the uneasy spirit of the Spartan Helots, who were constantly stirred to revolt by the free farmers of Argos, Messinia and Arcadia.[880] Thus ancient like modern Crete missed those beneficient stimuli which penetrate a land frontier, but are cut off by the absolute boundary of the sea.
Island remains of broken empires.
Island fragments of broken empires are found everywhere. They figure conspicuously in that scattered location indicative of declining power. Little St. Pierre and Miquelon are the last geographical evidences of France's former dominion in Canada. The English Bermudas and Bahamas point back to the time when Great Britain held the long-drawn opposite coast. The British, French, Dutch, Danish, as once even Swedish, holdings in the Lesser Antilles are island monuments to lost continental domains, as recently were Cuba and Porto Rico to Spain's once vast American empire. Of Portugal's widespread dominion in the Orient there remain to her only the island fragments of Timor, Kambing, Macao and Diu, besides two coastal points on the western face of peninsular India. All the former continental holdings of the Sultan of Zanzibar have been absorbed into the neighboring German and British territories, and only the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba remain to him by the temporary indulgence of his strong neighbors. The Sheik of the Bahrein Islands originally held also the large kingdom of El Hasa on the nearby Persian Gulf littoral of Arabia; but he lost this to the Turks in 1840, and now retains the Bahrein Islands as the residuum of his former territories.[881]
Security of such remnants merely passive.
The insular remnants of empires are tolerated, because their small size, when unsupported by important location, usually renders them innocuous; and their geographic isolation removes them from international entanglements, unless some far-reaching anthropo-geographic readjustment lends them a new strategic or commercial importance. The construction of the Suez Canal gave England a motive for the acquisition of Cyprus in 1878, as a nearer base than Malta for the protection of Port Said, just as the present Panama Canal project led the United States to re-open negotiations for the purchase of the Danish Isles. One cannot get away from the impression that the law of political detachability will operate again to make some new distribution of the parti-colored political holdings in the Lesser Antilles. The small size of these islands, and their thalassic location commanding approaches to a large region of only partially developed resources and to the interoceanic passway across it, will pitch them into the dice-box on the occasion of every naval war between their sovereign powers.
The shifting fate of political detachability becomes moderated in islands of the open ocean, because of their remoteness from the colonizing or conquering movements emanating from the continents. In contrast to the changing political connections of thalassic isles, consider the calm or monotonous political history of outlying islands like the Shetland, Faroes, Iceland, Canaries, Madeira, Cape Verde, Azores, St. Helena, Ascension and Hawaii. The Norse colony of Iceland, as a republic, maintained loose connections with its mother country from 874 to 1264; then for nearly six centuries it followed the political fate of Norway till 1814, when an oversight left it in the hands of Denmark on the dissolution of the union of Denmark and Norway. The Azores have known no history except that which came to them from Portugal; even their discovery goes back to a Saracen navigator who, in 1147, sailed from the mouth of the Tagus a thousand miles straight into the sunset.[882] For two hundred years thereafter extreme isolation kept them outside the pale of history till their rediscovery by Prince Henry, the Navigator.
Political autonomy of islands based upon area and location.