om the border character of many islands there follow often
far-reaching historical effects. Like all border regions they are
natural battlegrounds. Their historical episodes are small, often slow
and insidious in their movement, but large in their final content; for
they are prone to end in a sudden dramatic _denouement_ that draws the
startled gaze of all the neighboring world. It was the destiny of Sicily
to make and unmake the fortunes of ancient Carthage. Ceylon, from the
dawn of history, lured traders who enriched and conquerors who oppressed
peninsular India. The advance of Spain to the Canary Isles was the
drowsy prologue to the brilliant drama of American discovery. The island
of Tsushima in the Korean Strait was seized by the forces of Kublai Khan
in 1280 as the base of their attack upon Japan;[875] and when in 1857 the
Russian bear tried to plant a foot on this island, Japan saw danger in
the movement and ordered him off.[876] Now we find Japan newly
established in Sakhalin, the Elliot Islands and Formosa, by means of
which and her own archipelago she blankets the coast of Asia for
twenty-two hundred miles. This geographical situation may be productive
of history.

[Sidenote: Political detachability of islands.]

Islands are detached areas physically and readily detached politically.
Though insularity gives them some measure of protection, their
relatively small size and consequently small populations make them easy
victims for a conquering sea power, and easy to hold in subjection. The
security of an island habitat against aggression therefore, increases
with its size, its efficiency in naval warfare, and its degree of
isolation, the last of which factors depends in turn upon its location
as thalassic or oceanic. Islands of enclosed seas, necessarily small and
never far from the close encircling lands, are engulfed by every tide of
conquest emanating from the nearby shores. Oesel and Dago have been held
in succession by every Baltic power, by the Teutonic Orders, Denmark,
Sweden and Russia. Gotland has acknowledged allegiance to the Hanseatic
League, to Denmark and Sweden. Sardinia, occupying the center of the
western Mediterranean, has figured in a varied series of political
combinations,--with ancient Carthage, Rome, the Saracens of North
Africa, with Sicily, Pisa, Aragon, Piedmont, and finally now with united
Italy.[877] To the land-bred Teutonic hordes which swept over western
Europe in the early centuri