widespread
superficial exploitation, which finds its geographical expression in a
broad, dilating frontier. Here the man-dust which is to form the future
political planet is thinly disseminated, swept outward by a centrifugal
force. Furthermore, the absence of natural barriers which might block
this movement, the presence of open plains and river highways to
facilitate it, and the predominance of harsh conditions of climate or
soil rendering necessary a savage, extensive exploitation of the slender
resources, often combine still further to widen the frontier zone. This
was the case in French Canada and till recent decades in Siberia, where
intense cold and abundant river highways stimulated the fur trade to the
practical exclusion of all other activities, and substituted for the
closely grouped, sedentary farmers with their growing families the
wide-ranging trader with his Indian or Tunguse wife and his half-breed
offspring. Under harsh climatic conditions, the fur trade alone afforded
those large profits which every infant colony must command in order to
survive; and the fur trade meant a wide frontier zone of scattered posts
amid a prevailing wilderness. The French in particular, by the
possession of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi rivers, the greatest
systems in America, were lured into the danger of excessive expansion,
attenuated their ethnic element, and failed to raise the economic status
of their wide border district, which could therefore offer only slight
resistance to the spread of solid English settlement.[338] Yet more
recently, the chief weakness of the Russians in Siberia and
Manchuria--apart from the corruption of the national government--was the
weakness of a too remote and too sparsely populated frontier, and of a
people whose inner development had not kept pace with their rate of
expansion.

[Sidenote: Value of barrier boundaries.]

Wasteful exploitation of a big territory is easier than the economical
development of a small district. This is one line of least resistance
which civilized man as well as savage instinctively follows, and which
explains the tendency toward excessive expansion characteristic of all
primitive and nascent peoples. For such peoples natural barriers which
set bounds to this expansion are of vastly greater importance than they
are for mature or fully developed peoples. The reason is this: the
boundary is only the expression of the outward movement or growth, which
is nourish