us for the independence of the
island, because with capital go men and influence.

When the foreign investor is not a corporation but a government, the
expanding commercial influence looks still more surely to tangible
political results; because such national enterprises have at bottom a
political motive, however much overlaid by an economic exterior. When
the British government secured a working majority of the Suez Canal
stock, it sealed the fate of Egypt to become ultimately a province of
the British Empire. Russian railroads in Manchuria were the
well-selected tool for the Russification and final annexation of the
province. The weight of American national enterprise in the Panama Canal
Zone sufficed to split off from the Colombian federation a peripheral
state, whose detachment is obviously a preliminary for eventual
incorporation into United States domain. The efforts of the German
government to secure from the Sultan of Turkey railroad concessions
through Asia Minor for German capitalists has aroused jealousy in
financial and political circles in St. Petersburg, and prompted a demand
from the Russian Foreign Office upon Turkey for the privilege of
constructing railroads through eastern Asia Minor.[313]

[Sidenote: Significance of sphere of activity or influence.]

Beyond the home of a people lies its sphere of influence or activities,
which in the last analysis may be taken as a protest against the
narrowness of the domestic habitat. It represents the larger area which
the people wants and which in course of time it might advantageously
occupy or annex. It embodies the effort to embrace more varied and
generous natural conditions, whereby the struggle for subsistence may be
made less hard. Finally, it is an expression of the law that for peoples
and races the struggle for existence is at bottom a struggle for space.
Geography sees various forms of the historical movement as the struggle
for space in which humanity has forever been engaged. In this struggle
the stronger peoples have absorbed ever larger portions of the earth's
surface. Hence, through continual subjection to new conditions here or
there and to a greater sum total of various conditions, they gain in
power by improved variation, as well as numerically by the enlargement
of their geographic base. The Anglo-Saxon branch of the Teutonic stock
has, by its phenomenal increase, overspread sections of whole
continents, drawn from their varied soils nourish