ama 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.

[Sidenote: Political autonomy of islands based upon area and location.]

Land-masses, as we have found, are independent by location or
independent by size. Large islands, especially where they occupy an
outskirt location, may long succeed in maintaining an independent
national existence; but to render this permanent, they must supplement
their area by the acquisition of continental lands, according to the law
of increasing territorial aggregates. Great Britain and Japan, though
ethnically and culturally appendages of the nearby mainland, were large
enough, aided by the dividing sea, to maintain political autonomy. They
absorbed all the insular fragments lying about them to extend their
areas, and then each in turn entered upon a career of continenta