therefore restricted to landward expansion, seizes upon
every natural feature that will aid its purpose. It utilizes every
valley highway and navigable river, as the Russians did in the case of
the Dnieper, Don, Volga, Kama and Northern Dwina in their radial
expansion from the Muscovite center at Moscow, and as later they used
the icy streams of Siberia in their progress toward the Pacific; or as
the Americans in their trans-continental advance used the Ohio,
Tennessee, the Great Lakes, and the Missouri. They reach out toward
every mountain pass leading to some choice ultramontane highway. Bulges
or projecting angles of their frontier indicate the path they plan to
follow, and always include or aim at some natural feature which will
facilitate their territorial growth. The acquisition of the province of
Ticino in 1512 gave the Swiss Confederation a foothold upon Lake
Maggiore, perhaps the most important waterway of northern Italy, and the
possession of the Val Leventina, which now carries the St. Gotthard
Railroad down to the plains of the Po. Every bulge of Russia's Asiatic
frontier, whether in the Trans-Caucasus toward the Mesopotamian basin
and the Persian Gulf, or up the Murghab and Tedjend rivers toward the
gates of Herat, is directed at some mountain pass and an outlet seaward
beyond.

If this process of growth bring a people to the borders of a desert,
there they halt perhaps for a time, but only, as it were, to take breath
for a stride across the sand to the nearest oasis. The ancient
Egyptians advanced by a chain of oases--Siwa, Angila, Sella and Sokna,
across the Libyan Desert to the Syrtis Minor. The Russians in the last
twenty-five years have spread across the arid wastes of Turkestan by way
of the fertile spots of Khiva, Bukhara and Merv to the irrigated slopes
of the Hindu Kush and Tian Shan Mountains. The French extended the
boundaries of Algiers southward into the desert to include the caravan
routes focusing at the great oases of Twat and Tidekelt, years before
their recent appropriation of the western Sahara.

[Sidenote: Marks of decline.]

As territorial expansion is the mark of growth, so the sign of decline
is the relinquishment of land that is valuable or necessary to a
people's well-being. The gradual retreat of the Tartars and in part also
of the Kirghis tribes from their best pasture lands along the Volga into
the desert or steppes indicates their decrease of power, just as the
withdrawal of