found trading stations
or towns among alien peoples on distant coasts, selecting points like
capes or inshore islets which can be easily defended and which at the
same time command inland or maritime routes of trade. The prime
geographic consideration is location, natural and vicinal. The area of
the trading settlement is kept as small as possible to answer its
immediate purpose, because it can be more easily defended.[319] Such were
the colonies of the ancient Phoenicians and Greeks in the Mediterranean,
of the Medieval Arabs and the Portuguese on the east coast of Africa and
in India. This method reached its ultimate expression in point of small
area, seclusion, and local autonomy, perhaps, in the Hanse factories in
Norway and Russia.[320] But all these widespread nuclei of expansion
remained barren of permanent national result, because they were designed
for a commercial end, and ignored the larger national mission and surer
economic base found in acquisition of territory. Hence they were
short-lived, succumbing to attack or abandoned on the failure of local
resources, which were ruthlessly exploited.

[Sidenote: Limitations of small territorial conceptions.]

That precocious development characteristic of small naturally defined
areas shows its inherent weakness in the tendency to accept the enclosed
area as a nature-made standard of national territory. The earlier a
state fixes its frontier without allowance for growth, the earlier comes
the cessation of its development. Therefore the geographical nurseries
of civilization were infected with germs of decay. Such was the history
of Egypt, of Yemen, of Greece, Crete, and Phoenicia. These are the
regions which, as Carl Ritter says, have given the whole fruit of their
existence to the world for its future use, have conferred upon the world
the trust which they once held, afterward to recede, as it were, from
view.[321] They were great in the past, and now they belong to those
immortal dead whose greatness has been incorporated in the world's
life--"the choir invisible" of the nations.

[Sidenote: Evolution of territorial policies.]

The advance from a small, self-dependent community to interdependent
relations with other peoples, then to ethnic expansion or union of
groups to form a state or empire is a great turning point in any
history. Thereby the clan or tribe discards the old paralyzing seclusion
of the primitive society and the narrow habitat, and joins that ma