romises of growth. Language can not
live by dictionary alone. It tends to form new variants with every
change of habitat. The French of the Canadian _habitant_ has absorbed
Indian and English words, and adapted old terms to new uses;[303] but
it is otherwise a survival of seventeenth century French. Boer speech
in South Africa shows the same thing--absorption of new Kaffir and
English words, coupled with marks of retardation due to isolation.
Religion in the same way gains by wide dispersal. Christianity is one
thing in St. Petersburg, another among the Copts of Cairo, another in
Rome, another in London, and yet another in Boston. Buddhism takes on
a different color in Ceylon, Tibet, China and Japan. In religion as in
other phases of human development, differentiation must mean eventual
enrichment, a larger content of the religious idea, to which each
faith makes its contribution.

[Sidenote: Large area a guarantee of racial or national permanence.]

The larger the area occupied by a race or people, other geographic
conditions being equal, the surer the guarantee of their permanence, and
the less the chance of their repression or annihilation. A broad
geographic base means generally abundant command of the resources of
life and growth. Though for a growing people of wide possessions, like
the Russians, the significance of the land may not be obvious, it
becomes apparent enough in national decline and decay; for these even in
their incipiency betray themselves in a loss of territory. A people
which, voluntarily or otherwise, renounces its hold upon its land is on
the downward path. Nothing else could show so plainly the national
vitality of Japan as her tenacious purpose to get back Port Arthur taken
from her by the Shimonoseki treaty in 1895. A people may decrease in
numbers without serious consequences if it still retains its land; for
herein lies its resources by which it may again hope to grow. The
recurring loss of millions of lives in China from the wide-sweeping
floods of the Hoangho is a passing episode, forgotten as soon as the
mighty stream is re-embanked and the flooded plains reclaimed. The
Civil War in the United States involved a temporary diminution of
population and check to progress, but no lasting national weakness
because no loss of territory. But the expulsion of the American Indians
from their well-stocked hunting grounds in the Mississippi Valley and
Atlantic plain to more restricted and barren lan