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.

[Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: 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 Pan