The relations of man to the earth are primarily the same as those of any other form of life. The universal laws of the diffusion of life include also the laws of the diffusion of the human species. Hence the study of the geographical distribution of man must be looked upon only as a branch of the study of the geographical distribution of life, and a succession of the conceptions belonging to the latter.
The Material Tie that Binds Men Together
To these conceptions belong the main area of distribution, the habitable world, and all its various parts: zones, continents, and other divisions of the earth’s surface, especially seas, coasts, interiors of lands, bordering regions, divisions exhibiting continuity with others as links in a chain, and isolated divisions. Also relations as to area: the struggle for territory, variations in the life development in small or inextensive regions, in insular or in continental districts, on heights of land and plateaus, and, in addition, the hindrances and the aids to development presented by different conformations; the advance development in small, densely populated districts; or the protection afforded by isolated situations. All must be included. Finally, properties of boundaries must be conceived of as analogous to phenomena occurring on the peripheries of living bodies.
As races are forms of organic life, it follows that the state cannot be comprehended otherwise than as an organised being; every people, every state is organic, as a combination of organic units. Moreover there is something organic in the internal coherence of the groups and individuals from which a state is formed. However, in the case of a people and a state, this coherence is neither material nor structural; states are spiritual and moral organisms. But, together with the spiritual, there is also a material coherence between the individual members of a race or a nation. This is the connection with the ground. The ground furnishes the only material tie that binds individuals together into a state; and it is primarily for this reason that all history exhibits a strong and ever-increasing tendency to associate the state with the soil—to root it to the ground, as it were.
The State and the Soil
The earth is not only the connecting principle, but it is also the single tangible and indestructible proof of the unity of the state. This connection does not decrease during the course of history, as might be supposed, owing to the progressive development of spiritual forces; on the contrary, it ever becomes closer, advancing from the loose association of a few individuals with a proportionately wide area in the primitive community, to the close connection of the dense population of a powerful state with its relatively small area, as in the case of a modern civilised nation. In spite of all disturbances, the economic and political end has ever been to associate a greater and greater number of individuals with the soil. Hence the law that every relation of a race or tribe to the ground strives to take a political form, and that every political structure seeks connection with the ground. The notion of an unterritorial and a territorial epoch in the history of man is incorrect; ground is necessary to every form of state, and also to the germs of states, such as a few negroes’ huts or a ranch in the Far West. Development consists only in a constant increase in the occupation and use of land, and in the fact that, as populations grow, so do they become ever more firmly rooted in their own soils.
If One State Embraced the Whole Earth
At the same time the nature of the movements of peoples must change. Penetration and assimilation of one race by another occur instead of displacement of one by another; and with the rapid decrease of unoccupied territory the fate of the late-comers in history is irrevocably sealed. Since the state is an organism composed of independent individuals and households, its decay cannot be analogous to the death and corruption of a plant or an animal. When plants decay, the cells of which they are composed decay also. But in a decayed state the freed individuals live on and unite together into new political organisms; they increase, and the old necessity for growth continues in the midst of the ruin. The decay of nations is not destruction; it is a remodelling, a transformation. A great political institution dies out; smaller institutions arise in its place. Decay is a life necessity. Nothing could be more incorrect than the idea that the growth of nations would come to an end were one state to embrace the whole earth. If this were to happen, long before the great moment of union came, there would be a multitude of processes of growth already in operation, ready to rebuild in case of decadence, and to provide for a new organisation if needed. As yet the political expansion of the white races over the earth has not resulted in uniformity, but in manifoldness.
