These are the two types of continuous location. In contrast to them, a discontinuous or scattered location characterizes the sparse distribution of primitive hunting and pastoral tribes; or the shattered fragments of a conquered people, whose territory has been honeycombed by the land appropriation of the victors; or a declining, moribund people, who, owing to bad government, poor economic methods, and excessive competition in the struggle for existence, have shrunk to mere patches. As a favorable symptom, scattered location regularly marks the healthy growth of an expanding people, who throw out here and there detached centers of settlement far beyond the compact frontier, and fix these as the goal for the advance of their boundary. It is also a familiar feature of maritime commercial expansion, which is guided by no territorial ambition but merely aims to secure widely distributed trading stations at favorable coast points, in order to make the circle of commerce as ample and resourceful as possible. But this latter form of scattered location is not permanently sound. Back of it lies the short-sighted policy of the middleman nation, which makes wholly inadequate estimate of the value of land, and is content with an ephemeral prosperity.
Central versus peripheral location.
A broad territorial base and security of possession are the guarantees of national survival. The geographic conditions which favor one often operate against the other. Peripheral location means a narrow base but a protected frontier along the sea; central location means opportunity for widening the territory, but it also means danger. A state embedded in the heart of a continent has, if strong, every prospect of radial expansion and the exercise of widespread influence; but if weak, its very existence is imperilled, because it is exposed to encroachments on every side. A central location minus the bulwark of natural boundaries enabled the kingdom of Poland to be devoured piecemeal by its voracious neighbors. The kingdom of Burgundy, always a state of fluctuating boundaries and shifting allegiances, fell at last a victim to its central location, and saw its name obliterated from the map. Hungary, which, in the year 1000, occupied a restricted inland location on the middle Danube, by the 14th century broke through the barriers of its close-hugging neighbors, and stretched its boundaries from the Adriatic to the Euxine; two hundred years later its territory contracted to a fragment before the encroachments of the Turks, but afterwards recovered in part its old dimensions. Germany has, in common with the little Sudanese state of Wadai, an influential and dangerous position. A central location in the Sudan has made Wadai accessible to the rich caravan trade from Tripoli and Barca on the north, from the great market town of Kano in Sokoto on the west, and from the Nile Valley and Red Sea on the east. But the little state has had to fight for its life against the aggressions of its western rival Bornu and its eastern neighbor Darfur. And now more formidable enemies menace it in the French, who have occupied the territory between it and Bornu, and the English, who have already caught Darfur in the dragnet of the Egyptian Sudan.[248]
Danger of central location.
Germany, crowded in among three powerful neighbors like France, Russia, and Austria, has had no choice about maintaining a strong standing army and impregnable frontier defenses. The location of the Central European states between the Baltic and the Balkans has exposed them to all the limitations and dangers arising from a narrow circle of land neighbors. Moreover, the diversified character of the area, its complex mountain systems, and diverging river courses have acted as disintegrating forces which have prevented the political concentration necessary to repel interference from without. The Muscovite power, which had its beginning in a modest central location about the sources of the Dwina, Dnieper and Volga, was aided by the physical unity of its unobstructed plains, which facilitated political combination. Hence, on every side it burst through its encompassing neighbors and stretched its boundaries to the untenanted frontier of the sea. Central location was the undoing of the Transvaal Republic. Its efforts to expand to the Indian Ocean were blocked by its powerful British rival at every point—at Delagoa Bay in 1875 by treaty with Portugal, at Santa Lucia Bay in 1884, and through Swaziland in 1894. The Orange Free State was maimed in the same way when, in 1868, she tried to stretch out an arm through Basutoland to the sea.[249] Here even weak neighbors were effective to curtail the seaward growth of these inland states, because they were made the tools of one strong, rapacious neighbor. A central position teaches always the lesson of vigilance and preparedness for hostilities, as the Boer equipment in 1899, the military organization of Germany, and the bristling fortresses on the Swiss Alpine passes prove.
Mutual relations between center and periphery.
How intimate and necessary are the relations between central and peripheral location is shown by the fact that all states strive to combine the two. In countries like Norway, France, Spain, Japan, Korea and Chile, peripheral location predominates, and therefore confers upon them at once the security and commercial accessibility which result from contact with the sea. Other countries, like Russia, Germany and Austro-Hungary, chiefly central in location, have the strategic and even the commercial value of their coasts reduced by the long, tortuous course which connects them with the open ocean. Therefore, we find Russia planning to make a great port at Ekaterina Harbor on the northernmost point of her Lapland coast, where an out-runner from the Gulf Stream ensures an ice-free port on the open sea.[250] An admirable combination of central and peripheral location is seen in the United States. Here the value of periphery is greatly enhanced by the interoceanic location of the country; and the danger of entanglements arising from a marked central location is reduced by the simplicity of the political neighborhood. But our country has paid for this security by an historical aloofness and poverty of influence. Civilized countries which are wholly central in their location are very few, only nine in all. Six of these are mountain or plateau states, like Switzerland and Abyssinia, which have used the fortress character of their land to resist conquest, and have preferred independence to the commercial advantages to be gained only by affiliation with their peripheral neighbors.