natural leadership in the whole
Slav family, just as the broad unbroken area of ever expanding Prussia
gave that state the ascendency in the German Empire over the
geographically partitioned and politically dismembered surface of
southern Germany. English domination of the United Kingdom is based not
only upon race, location, geographical features and resources, but also
on the larger size of England. So in the United States, abolitionist
statesmen adopted the most effective means of fighting slavery when they
limited its area by law, while permitting free states to go on
multiplying in the new territory of the vast Northwest.

In a peninsula political ascendency often falls to the broad base
connecting it with the continent, because this part alone has the area
to support a large population, and moreover commands a large hinterland,
whence it continually draws new and invigorating blood. The geographical
basis of the Aryan and later the Mongol supremacy in India was the wide
zone of lowlands between the Indus and the Brahmaputra. [See map page
103.] The only ancient Greek state ever able to dominate the Balkan
Peninsula was non-Hellenic Macedonia, after it had extended its
boundaries to the Euxine and the Adriatic. To-day a much larger area in
this same peninsular base harbors the widespread southern Slavs, who
numerically and economically far outweigh Albanians and Greeks, and who
could with ease achieve political domination over the small Turkish
minority, were it not for the European fear of a Slavic Bosporus, and
its union with Russia. The Cisalpine Gauls of the wide Po basin
repeatedly threatened the existence of the smaller but more civilized
Etruscan and Latin tribes. The latter, maturing their civilization under
the concentrating influences of a limited area, at last dominated the
larger Celtic district to the north. But in the nineteenth century this
district took the lead in the movement for a United Italy, and now
exercises the strong influence in Italian affairs which belongs to it by
reason of its superior area, location, and more vigorous race. [See map
of Italy's population, Chap. XVI.]

The broad territorial base of the Anglo-Saxon race, Slavs, Germans and
Chinese promises a long ethnic life, whereas the narrow foothold, of the
Danes, Dutch, Greeks, and the Turks in Europe carries with it the
persistent risk of conquest and absorption by a larger neighbor. Such a
fate repeatedly threatens these people,