sipated and diverted to strengthen other nations. Witness the
active internal colonization practiced by Germany in her Polish
territory,[315] by Russia in Siberia, in an effort to make the ethnic
boundary hurry after and overtake the political frontier.

[Sidenote: Expansion of civilization.]

Just as the development of a people and state is marked by advance from
small to ever larger areas, so is that of a civilization. It may
originate in a small district; but more mobile than humanity itself, it
does not remain confined to one spot, but passes on from individual to
individual and from people to people. Greece served only as a garden in
which the flowers of Oriental and Egyptian civilization were temporarily
transplanted. As soon as they were modified and adapted to their new
conditions, their seed spread over all Europe. The narrow area of
ancient Greece, which caused the early dissemination of its people over
the Mediterranean basin, and thereby weakened the political force of the
country at home, was an important factor in the wide distribution of its
culture. Commerce, colonization and war are vehicles of civilization,
where favorable geographic conditions open the way for trade in the wake
of the victorious army. The imposition of Roman dominion meant
everywhere the gift of Roman civilization. The Crusaders brought back
from Syria more than their scars and their trophies. Every European
factory in China, every Hudson Bay Company post in the wilds of northern
Canada, every Arab settlement in savage Africa is surrounded by a sphere
of trade; and this in turn is enclosed in a wider sphere of influence
through which its civilization, though much diluted, has filtered. The
higher the civilization, the wider the area which it masters. The
manifold activities of a civilized people demand a large sphere of
influence, and include, furthermore, improved means of communication
which enable it to control such a sphere.

Even a relatively low civilization may spread over a vast area if
carried by a highly mobile people. Mohammedanism, which embodies a
cultural system as well as a religion, found its vehicles of dispersal
in the pastoral nomads occupying the arid land of northern Africa and
western Asia, and thus spread from the Senegal River to Chinese
Turkestan. It was carried by the maritime Arabs of Oman and Yemen to
Malacca and Sumatra, where it was communicated to the seafaring Malays.
These island folk, who approximat