d district has the further advantage that its
inhabitants soon come to know it out to its boundaries, understand its
possibilities, exploit to the utmost its resources, and because of the
closeness of their relationship to it and to each other come to develop
a conscious national spirit. The population, since it cannot easily
spread beyond the nature-set limits, increases in density. The members
of the compact society react constantly upon one another and exchange
the elements of civilization. Thus the small territory is characterized
by the early maturity of a highly individualized civilization, which
then, with inherent power of expansion, proceeds to overleap its narrow
borders and conquer for itself a wide sphere of influence. Hand in hand
with this process goes political concentration, which aids the
subsequent expansion. Therefore islands, oases, slender coastal strips
and mountain valleys repeatedly show us small peoples who, in their
seclusion, have developed a tribal or national consciousness akin in
its intensity to clan feeling. This national feeling is conspicuous in
the English, Japanese, Swiss and Dutch, as it was in the ancient
city-states of Greece. The accompanying civilization, once brought to
maturity in its narrow breeding place, spreads under favorable
geographic conditions over a much larger space, which the accumulated
race energy takes for its field of activity. The flower which thus early
blooms may soon fade and decay; nevertheless the geographically evolved
national consciousness persists and retains a certain power of renewal.
This has been demonstrated in the Italians and modern Greeks, in the
Danes and the Icelanders. In the Jews it has resisted exile from their
native land, complete political dissolution, and dispersal over the
habitable world. Long and often as Italy had to submit to foreign
dominion, the idea of the national unity of the peninsula was never
lost.

[Sidenote: The process of territorial growth.]

In vast unobstructed territories, on the other hand, the evil of wide,
sparse dispersal is checked only by natural increase of population and
the impinging of one growing people upon another, which restricts the
territory of either. When the boundary waste between the small scattered
tribal groups has been occupied, encroachment from the side of the
stronger follows; then comes war, incorporation of territory,
amalgamation of race and coalescence, or the extinction of the weaker.