ore
evades the full influence of his detached environment, though never able
wholly to counteract it. For man in lowest stages of civilization, as
for plants and animals, the isolating influence is supreme; but with
higher development and advancing nautical efficiency, islands assume
great accessibility because of their location on the common highway of
the ocean. They become points of departure and destination of maritime
navigation, at once center of dispersal and goal, the breeding place of
expansive national forces seeking an outlet, and a place of hospitality
for wanderers passing those shores. Yet all the while, that other
tendency of islands to segregate their people, and in this aloofness to
give them a peculiar and indelible national stamp, much as it
differentiates its plant and animal forms, is persistently operative.

[Sidenote: Conservative and radical tendencies.]

These two antagonistic influences of an island environment may be seen
working simultaneously in the same people, now one, now the other being
dominant; or a period of undisturbed seclusion or exclusion may suddenly
be followed by one of extensive intercourse, receptivity or expansion.
Recall the contrast in the early and later history of the Canaries,
Azores, Malta, England, Mauritius and Hawaii, now a lonely,
half-inhabited waste, now a busy mart or teeming way-station. Consider
the pronounced insular mind of the globe-trotting Englishman, the
deep-seated local conservatism characterizing that world-colonizing
nation, at once the most provincial and cosmopolitan on earth. Emerson
says with truth, "Every one of these islanders is an island himself,
safe, tranquil, incommunicable."[818] Hating innovation, glorifying their
habitudes, always searching for a precedent to justify and countenance
each forward step, they have nevertheless led the world's march of
progress. Scattered by their colonial and commercial enterprises over
every zone, in every clime, subjected to the widest range of modifying
environments, they show in their ideals the dominant influence of the
home country. The trail of the Oxford education can be followed over the
Empire, east to New Zealand and west to Vancouver. Highschool students
of Jamaica take Oxford examinations in botany which are based upon
English plant life and ignore the Caribbean flora! School children in
Ceylon are compelled to study a long and unfamiliar list of errors in
English speech current only in the L