temporary preeminence to
Spain and Portugal, a new lease of life to little Holland, and ominous
importance to Russia. Germany, who entered the colonial field only in
1880, found little desirable land left; and yet it was especially
Germany who needed an outlet for her redundant population. With all
these states, as with ancient Phoenicia, Greece and Yemen, the initial
purpose was commerce or in some form the exploitation of the new
territory. Colonies were originally trading stations established as safe
termini for trade routes.[181] Colonial government, as administered by
the mother country, originally had an eye single for the profits of
trade: witness the experience of the Thirteen Colonies with Great
Britain. Colonial wars have largely meant the rivalry of competing
nations seeking the same markets, as the history of the Portuguese and
Dutch in the East Indies, and the English and French in America prove.
The first Punic War had a like commercial origin--rivalry for the trade
of _Magna Graecia_ between Rome and Carthage, the dominant colonial
powers of the western Mediterranean. Such wars result in expansion for
the victor.

[Sidenote: Commerce.]

Commerce, which so largely underlies colonization, is itself a form of
historical movement. It both causes and stimulates great movements of
peoples, yet it differs from these fundamentally in its relation to the
land. Commerce traverses the land to reach its destination, but takes
account of natural features only as these affect transportation and
travel. It has to do with systems of routes and goals, which it aims to
reach as quickly as possible. It reduces its cortege to essentials;
eliminates women and children. Therefore it surmounts natural barriers
which block the advance of other forms of the historical movement.
Merchant caravans are constantly crossing the desert, but not so
peoples. Traders with loaded yaks or ponies push across the Karakorum
Mountains by passes where a migrating horde would starve and freeze. The
northern limit of the Mediterranean race in Spain lies sharply defined
along the crest of the Pyrenees, whose long unbroken wall forms one of
the most pronounced boundaries in Europe;[182] yet traders and smugglers
have pushed their way through from time immemorial. Long after Etruscan
merchants had crossed northward over the Alps, Roman expansion and
colonization made a detour around the mountains westward into Gaul, with
the result that the German