paths long, like the
campaigns of the Iroquois against the Cherokees of the Tennessee River,
yet the unit of tribal territory permanently occupied is never large.

[Sidenote: National estimates of area.]

Small naturally defined regions, which take the lead in historical
development because they counteract the primitive tendency towards
excessive dispersal, are in danger of teaching too well their lesson of
concentration. In course of time geographic enclosure begins to betray
its limitations. The extent of a people's territory influences their
estimate of area _per se_, determines how far land shall be made the
basis of their national purposes, fixes the territorial scale of their
conquests and their political expansion. This is a conspicuous
psychological effect of a narrow local environment. A people embedded
for centuries in a small district measure area with a short yardstick.
The ancient Greeks devised a philosophic basis for the advantages of the
small state, which is extolled in the writings of Plato and
Aristotle.[317] Aristotle wanted it small enough, "to be comprehended at
one glance of the statesman's eye." Plato's ideal democracy, by rigid
laws limiting the procreative period of women and men and providing for
the death of children born out of this period or out of wedlock,
restricted its free citizens to 5,040 heads of families,[318] all living
within reach of the agora, and all able to judge from personal knowledge
of a candidate's fitness for office. This condition was possible only
in dwarf commonwealths like the city-states of the Hellenic world. The
failure of the Greeks to build up a political structure on a territorial
scale commensurate with their cultural achievements and with the wide
sphere of their cultural influence can be ascribed chiefly to their
inability to discard the contracted territorial ideas engendered by
geographic and political dismemberment. The little Judean plateau, which
gave birth to a universal religion, clung with provincial bigotry to the
narrow tribal creed and repudiated the larger faith of Christ, which
found its appropriate field in Mediterranean Europe.

[Sidenote: Estimates of area in small maritime states.]

Maritime peoples of small geographic base have a characteristic method
of expansion which reflects their low valuation of area. Their limited
amount of arable soil necessitates reliance upon foreign sources of
supply, which are secured by commerce. Hence they