nted problems to the legislation of
Solon, and caused West Virginia to split off from the mother State
during the Civil War.[285]

Each contrasted district has its own polarity; but with this it attracts
not one but many of the disruptive forces which are pent up in every
people or state. Certain conditions of climate, soil, and tillable area
in the Southern States of the Union made slave labor remunerative, while
opposite conditions in the North combined eventually to exclude it
thence. Slave labor in the South brought with it in turn a whole train
of social and economic consequences, notably the repulsion of foreign
white immigration and the development of shiftless or wasteful
industrial methods, which further sharpened the contrast between the two
sections. The same contrast occurs in Italian territory between Sicily
and Lombardy. Here location at the two extremities of the peninsula has
involved a striking difference in ethnic infusions in the two districts,
different historical careers owing to different vicinal grouping, and
dissimilar geographic conditions. These effects operating together and
attracting other minor elements of divergence, have conspired to
emphasize the already strong contrast between northern and southern
Italy.

[Sidenote: Geographical marks of growth.]

In geographical location can be read the signs of growth or decay. There
are racial and national areas whose form is indicative of development,
expansion, while others show the symptoms of decline. The growing people
seize all the geographic advantages within their reach, whether lying
inside their boundaries or beyond. In the latter case, they promptly
extend their frontiers to include the object of their desire, as the
young United States did in the case of the Mississippi River and the
Gulf coast. European peoples, like the Russians in Asia, all strive to
reach the sea; and when they have got there, they proceed to embrace as
big a strip of coast as possible. Therefore the whole colonization
movement of western and central Europe was in the earlier periods
restricted to coasts, although not to such an excessive degree as that
of the Phoenicians and Greeks. Their own maritime location had
instructed them as to the value of seaboards, and at the same time made
this form of expansion the simplest and easiest.

[Sidenote: Marks of inland expansion.]

On the other hand, that growing people which finds its coastward advance
blocked, and is