l
expansion. To Japan this movement as a determined policy came late, only
when she faced the alternative of absorbing territory or being absorbed
by all-devouring Russia. The isolation of Madagascar resulted in only
slight community of race with Africa, and combined with large area, has
kept the island to a great extent distinct from the political history of
Africa. The impulses which swept the eastern coast of the continent
reached the outlying island with abated force. Arab, Portuguese, Dutch
and English only scratched its rim. The character of its western coasts,
of its vigorous Malayan population, and of the intervening Mozambique
Current rendered conquest difficult from the African shore. Its large
size, with the promise of abundant resources, offered a bait to
conquest, yet put a barrier in its way. Hence we find that not till
1895, when the partition of continental Africa was almost accomplished,
did the French conquest of Madagascar occur.

By contrast, the closely grouped East Indies, long coveted for their
tropical products, suffered a contagion of conquest. The large size of
these islands, so far from granting them immunity, only enabled the
epidemic of Portuguese and Dutch dominion to pass from one to the other
more readily, and that even when the spice and pepper trade languished
from a plethora of products. But even here the size of the islands,
plus the sub-equatorial climate which bars genuine white colonization,
has restricted the effective political dominion of Europeans to the
coasts, and thus favored the survival of the natives undisturbed in the
interior, with all their primitive institutions. The largest islands,
like Borneo and Sumatra, have vast inland tracts still unexplored and
devoted to savagery, thus illustrating the contrast between center and
periphery. When Australia, the largest of all the Pacific island group,
became an object of European expansion, its temperate and sub-tropical
location adapted it for white colonization, and the easy task of
conquering its weak and retarded native tribes encouraged its
appropriation; but the natural autonomy which belongs to large area and
detached location asserted itself in the history of British Australia.
The island continent is now erected into a confederation of states,
enjoying virtual independence. In New Zealand, we find the recent
colonists taking advantage of their isolation to work out undisturbed
certain unique social theories. Here, aga