ed from the same stock of race energy as is the inner
development. Either carried to an excess weakens or retards the other.
If population begins to press upon the limits of subsistence, the
acquisition of a new bit of territory obviates the necessity of applying
more work and more intelligence to the old area, to make it yield
subsistence for the growing number of mouths; the stimulus to adopt
better economic methods is lost. Therefore, natural boundaries drawn by
mountain, sea and desert, serving as barriers to the easy appropriation
of new territory, have for such peoples a far deeper significance than
the mere determination of their political frontiers by physical
features, or the benefit of protection.

The land with the most effective geographical boundaries is a naturally
defined region like Korea, Japan, China, Egypt, Italy, Spain, France or
Great Britain--a land characterized not only by exclusion from without
through its encircling barriers, but also by the inclusion within itself
of a certain compact group of geographic conditions, to whose combined
influences the inhabitants are subjected and from which they cannot
readily escape. This aspect is far more important than the mere
protection which such boundaries afford. They are not absolutely
necessary for the development of a people, but they give it an early
start, accelerate the process, and bring the people to an early
maturity; they stimulate the exploitation of all the local geographic
advantages and resources, the formation of a vivid tribal or national
consciousness and purpose, and concentrate the national energies when
the people is ready to overleap the old barriers. The early development
of island and peninsula peoples and their attainment of a finished
ethnic and political character are commonplaces of history. The stories
of Egypt, Crete and Greece, of Great Britain and Japan, illustrate the
stimulus to maturity which emanates from such confining boundaries. The
wall of the Appalachians narrowed the westward horizon of the early
English colonies in America, guarded them against the excessive
expansion which was undermining the French dominion in the interior of
the continent, set a most wholesome limit to their aims, and thereby
intensified their utilization of the narrow land between mountains and
sea. France, with its limits of growth indicated by the Mediterranean,
Pyrenees, Atlantic, Channel, Vosges, Jura and Western Alps, found its
period o