rmation of vaster political aggregates, in making
a sociological or political estimate of different peoples, we should
never lose sight of the fact that all racial and national
characteristics which operate towards the absorption of more land and
impel to political expansion are of fundamental value. A ship of state
manned by such a crew has its sails set to catch the winds of the world.

[Sidenote: Preliminaries to ethnic and political expansion.]

Territorial expansion is always preceded by an extension of the circle
of influence which a people exerts through its traders, its deep-sea
fishermen, its picturesque marauders and more respectable missionaries,
and earlier still by a widening of its mere geographical horizon through
fortuitous or systematic exploration. The Northmen visited the coasts of
Britain and France first as pirates, then as settlers. Norman and Breton
fishermen were drawing in their nets on the Grand Bank of Newfoundland
thirty years before Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence. Japanese fishing
boats preceded Japanese colonists to the coasts of Yezo. Trading fleets
were the forerunners of the Greek colonies along the Black Sea and
Mediterranean, and of Phoenician settlements in North Africa, Sicily and
Spain. It was in the wake of trapper and fur trader that English and
American pioneer advanced across our continent to the Pacific; just as
in French Canada Jesuit priest and voyageur opened the way for the
settler. Religious propaganda was yoked with greed of conquest in the
campaigns of Cortez and Pizarro. Modern statesmen pushing a policy of
expansion are alive to the diplomatic possibilities of missionaries
endangered or their property destroyed. They find a still better asset
to be realized on territorially in enterprising capitalists settled
among a weaker people, by whom their property is threatened or
overtaxed, or their trade interfered with. The British acquisition of
Hongkong in 1842 followed a war with China to prevent the exclusion of
the English opium trade from the Celestial Empire. The annexation of the
Transvaal resulted from the expansion of English capitalists to the Rand
mines, much as the advance of the United States flag to the Hawaiian
Islands followed American sugar planters thither. American capital in
the Caribbean states of South America has repeatedly tried to embroil
those countries with the United States government; and its increasing
presence in Cuba is undoubtedly omino