rch of
ethnic, political and cultural progress which has covered larger and
larger areas, and by increase of common purpose has cemented together
ever greater aggregates.

Nothing is more significant in the history of the English in America
than the rapid evolution of their spacial ideals, their abandonment of
the small territorial conception brought with them from the mother
country and embodied, for example, in that munificent land grant, fifty
by a hundred miles in extent, of the first Virginia charter in 1606, and
their progress to schemes of continental expansion. Every accession of
territory to the Thirteen Colonies and to the Republic gave an impulse
to growth. Expansion kept pace with opportunity. Only in small and
isolated New England did the contracted provincial point of view
persist. It manifested itself in a narrow policy of concentration and
curtailment, which acquiesced in the occlusion of the Mississippi River
to the Trans-Allegheny settlements by Spain in 1787, and which later
opposed the purchase of the Louisiana territory[322] and the acquisition
of the Philippines.

All peoples who have achieved wide expansion have developed in the
process vast territorial policies. This is true of the pastoral nomads
who in different epochs have inundated Europe, northern Africa and the
peripheral lands of Asia, and of the great colonial nations who in a few
decades have brought continents under their dominion. In nomadic hordes
it is based upon habitual mobility and the possession of herds, which
are at once incentive and means for extending the geographical horizon;
but it suffers from the evanescent character of nomadic political
organization, and the tendency toward dismemberment bred in all pastoral
life by dispersal over scattered grazing grounds. Hence the empires set
up by nomad conquerors like the Saracens and Tartars soon fall apart.

[Sidenote: Colonial expansion.]

Among highly civilized agricultural and industrial peoples, on the other
hand, a vast territorial policy is at once cause and effect of national
growth; it is at once an innate tendency and a conscious purpose
tenaciously followed. It makes use of trade and diplomacy, of scientific
invention and technical improvement, to achieve its aims. It becomes an
accepted mark of political vigor and an ideal even among peoples who
have failed to enlarge their narrow base. The model of Russian expansion
on the Pacific was quickly followed by awakened