e way the Damaras have fought the German
subjugation of Southwest Africa.[1109] Moreover, the paucity of economic
and political possibilities in deserts and grasslands discourages
conquest. Conquest pays only where it is a police measure to check
depredations on the bordering agricultural lands, or where such barren
areas are transit lands to a desirable territory beyond. It is chiefly
the "Gates of Herat" and the lure of India which have drawn Russian
dominion across the scorched plains of Turkestan. France has assumed the
big task of controlling the Sahara to secure a safe passway between
French Tunisia and the rich Niger basin of the French Sudan. The recent
British-Egyptian expansion southward across the Nubian steppes had for
its objective the better watered districts of the upper Nile above
Khartum. This desert advance is essentially a latter day phenomenon, the
outcome of modern territorial standards; it is attended or secured by
the railroad. To this fact the projected Trans-Saharan line is the
strongest witness.

Nature everywhere postpones, obstructs, jeopardizes the political
conquest of arid lands. The unstable, fanatical tribesmen of the
Egyptian Sudan, temporarily but effectively united under the Mahdi, made
it necessary for Kitchener to do again in 1898 the work of subjugation
which Gordon had done thirty years before. The body of the Arabian
people is still free. The Turkish sovereignty over them to-day is
nominal, rather an alliance with a people whom it is dangerous to
provoke and difficult to attack. Only the coast provinces of Hejaz,
Yemen and Hasa are subject to Turkey, while the tribes of the interior
and of the southeastern seaboard are wholly independent.[1110] The
Turkoman tribes of Trans-Caspia have been subordinated to Russia largely
by a process of extermination.[1111] China is satisfied with a nominal
dominion over the roaming populations of Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan.
The French pacification and control of Northwest Africa meets a peculiar
problem, due to the extreme restlessness and restiveness of the dominant
Arab race. The whole population is unstable as water; a disturbance or
movement in one tribe is soon communicated to the whole mass.[1112]

[Sidenote: Curtailment of nomadism.]

The steppe or desert policy for the curtailment of nomadism, and the
reclamation of both land and people is to encourage or enforce
sedentary life. The French, to settle the wandering tribes on the Atla