-unions, trading-posts
and colonies. Thus while society at home is multiplying its relations
with its own land, the state is enabling it to multiply also its
relations with the whole producing world. While at home the nation is
becoming more closely knit together through the common bond of the
fatherland, in the world at large humanity is evolving a brotherhood of
man by the union of each with all through the common growing bond of the
earth. Hence we cannot avoid the question: Are we in process of evolving
a social idea vaster than that underlying nationality? Do the Socialists
hint to us the geographic basis of this new development, when they
describe themselves as an international political party?

[Sidenote: Geography in the philosophy of history.]

It is natural that the old philosophy of history should have fixed its
attention upon the geographic basis of historical events. Searching for
the permanent and common in the outwardly mutable, it found always at
the bottom of changing events the same solid earth. Biology has had the
same experience. The history of the life forms of the world leads always
back to the land on which that life arose, spread, and struggled for
existence. The philosophy of history was superior to early sociology, in
that its method was one of historical comparison, which inevitably
guided it back to the land as the material for the first generalization.
Thus it happens that the importance of the land factor in history was
approached first from the philosophical side. Montesquieu and Herder had
no intention of solving sociological and geographical problems, when
they considered the relation of peoples and states to their soil; they
wished to understand the purpose and destiny of man as an inhabitant of
the earth.

[Sidenote: Theory of progress from the standpoint of geography.]

The study of history is always, from one standpoint, a study of
progress. Yet after all the century-long investigation of the history of
every people working out its destiny in its given environment,
struggling against the difficulties of its habitat, progressing when it
overcame them and retrograding when it failed, advancing when it made
the most of its opportunities and declining when it made less or
succumbed to an invader armed with better economic or political methods
to exploit the land, it is amazing how little the land, in which all
activities finally root, has been taken into account in the discussion
of