hood of man have encircled the
world.

When religion, language and race have spread, in their wake comes the
growing state. Everywhere the political area tends gradually to embrace
the whole linguistic area of which it forms a part, and finally the yet
larger race area. Only the diplomacy of united Europe has availed to
prevent France from absorbing French-speaking Belgium, or Russia from
incorporating into her domain that vast Slav region extending from the
Drave and Danube almost to the Gulf of Corinth, now parcelled out among
seven different states, but bound to the Muscovite empire by ties of
related speech, by race and religion. The detachment of the various
Danubian principalities from the uncongenial dominion of the Turks,
though a dismemberment of a large political territory and a seeming
backward step, can be regarded only as a leisurely preliminary for a new
territorial alignment. History's movements are unhurried; the backward
step may prepare for the longer leap forward. It is impossible to resist
the conclusion that the vigorous, reorganized German Empire will one day
try to incorporate the Germanic areas found in Austria, Switzerland and
Holland.

[Sidenote: Gradations in area and in development.]

Throughout the life of any people, from its foetal period in some small
locality to its well rounded adult era marked by the occupation and
organization of a wide national territory, gradations in area mark
gradations of development. And this is true whether we consider the
compass of their commercial exchanges, the scope of their maritime
ventures, the extent of their linguistic area, the measure of their
territorial ambitions, or the range of their intellectual interests and
human sympathies. From land to ethics, the rule holds good. Peoples in
the lower stages of civilization have contracted spacial ideas, desire
and need at a given time only a limited territory, though they may
change that territory often; they think in small linear terms, have a
small horizon, a small circle of contact with others, a small range of
influence, only tribal sympathies; they have an exaggerated conception
of their own size and importance, because their basis of comparison is
fatally limited. With a mature, widespread people like the English or
French, all this is different; they have made the earth their own, so
far as possible.

Just because of this universal tendency towards the occupation of ever
larger areas and the fo