by small scattered groups who have only an
attenuated connection with their soil and therefore only a feeble hold
upon their land, cannot compete with small areas, if these have the
dense and evenly distributed population which ensures a firm tenure of
the land. Small, geographically confined areas foster this compact and
systematic occupation on the part of their inhabitants, since they put
barriers in the way of precipitate and disintegrating expansion; and
this characteristic compensates in some degree and for a period at least
for the weakness otherwise inherent in the narrow territorial base.

[Sidenote: Historical advance from small to large areas.]

Every race, people, and state has had the history of progress from a
small to a large area. All have been small in their youth. The bit of
land covered by Roma Quadrata has given language, customs, laws,
culture, and a faint strain of Latin blood to nations now occupying half
a million square miles of Europe. The Arab inundation, which flooded the
vast domain of the Caliphs, traced back to that spring of ethnic and
religious energy which welled up in the arid plain of Mecca and the
Arabian oases. The world-wide maritime expansion of the English-speaking
people had its starting point in the lowlands of the Elbe. The makers of
empire in northern China were cradled in the small highland valley of
the Wei River. The little principality of Moscow was the nucleus of the
Russian Empire.

Penetration into a people's remote past comes always upon some limited
spot which has nurtured the young nation, and reveals the fact that
territorial expansion is the incontestible feature of their history.
This advance from small to large characterizes their political area, the
scope of their trade relations, their spheres of activity, the size of
their known world, and finally the sway of their religions. Every
religion in its early stages of development bears the stamp of a narrow
origin, traceable to the circumscribed habitat of the primitive social
group, or back of that to the small circle of lands constituting the
known world whence it sprang. First it is tribal, and makes a
distinction between my God and thy God; but even when it has expanded to
embody a universal system, it still retains vestigial forms of its
narrow past. Jerusalem, Mecca and Rome remain the sacred goal of
pilgrimages, while the vaster import of a monotheistic faith and the
higher ethical teaching of the brother