ment for its finest
efflorescence, and thereby has far out-grown the Germanic branch by
which, at the start, it was overshadowed. The fact that the British
Empire comprises 28,615,000 square kilometers or exactly one-fifth of
the total land area of the earth, and that the Russian Empire contains
over one-seventh, are full of encouragement for Anglo-Saxon and Slav,
but contain a warning to the other peoples of the world.

[Sidenote: Nature of expansion in new and old countries.]

The large area which misleads a primitive folk into excessive dispersion
and the dissipation of their tribal powers, offers to an advanced
people, who in some circumscribed habitat have learned the value of
land, the freest conditions for their development. A wide, unobstructed
territory, occupied by a sparse population of wandering tribes capable
of little resistance to conquest or encroachment, affords the most
favorable conditions to an intruding superior race. Such conditions the
Chinese found in Mongolia and Manchuria, the Russians in Siberia, and
European colonists in the Americas, Australia and Africa. Almost
unlimited space and undeveloped resources met their land hunger and
their commercial ambition. Their numerical growth was rapid, both by the
natural increase reflecting an abundant food supply, and by accessions
from the home countries. Expansion advanced by strides. In contrast to
this care-free, easy development in a new land, growth in old countries
like Europe and the more civilized parts of Asia means a slow protrusion
of the frontier, made at the cost of blood; it means either the
absorption of the native people, because there are no unoccupied corners
into which they can be driven, or the imposition upon them of an
unwelcome rule exercised by alien officials. Witness the advance of the
Russians into Poland and Finland, of the Germans into Poland and
Alsace-Lorraine, of the Japanese into Korea, and of the English into
crowded India.

The rapid unfolding of the geographical horizon in a young land
communicates to an expanding people new springs of mobility, new motives
for movement out and beyond the old confines, new goals holding out new
and undreamt of benefits. Life becomes fresh, young, hopeful. Old checks
to natural increase of population are removed. Emigrant bands beat out
new trails radiating from the old home. They go on individual initiative
or state-directed enterprises; but no matter which, the manifold life
in t