Area itself, important as it is, must yield to location.  Location may mean only a single spot, and yet from this spot powerful influences may radiate.  No one thinks of size when mention is made of Rome or Athens, of Jerusalem or Mecca, of Gibraltar or Port Arthur.  Iceland and Greenland guided early Norse ships to the continent of America, as the Canaries and Antilles did those of Spain; but the location of the smaller islands in sub-tropical latitudes and in the course of the northeast trade-winds made them determine the first permanent path across the western seas.

The historical significance of many small peoples, and the historical insignificance of many big ones even to the nil point, is merely the expression of the preponderant importance of location over area.  The Phoenicians, from their narrow strip of coast at the foot of Mount Lebanon, were disseminators of culture over the whole Mediterranean.  Holland owed her commercial and maritime supremacy, from the thirteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century, to her exceptional position at the mouth of the great Rhine highway and at the southern angle of the North Sea near the entrance to the unexploited regions of the Baltic.  The Iroquois tribes, located where the Mohawk Valley opened a way through the Appalachian barrier between the Hudson River and Lake Ontario, occupied both in the French wars and in the Revolution a strategic position which gave them a power and importance out of all proportion to their numbers.

Location often assumes a fictitious political value, due to a combination of political interests.  The Turkish power owes its survival on the soil of Europe to-day wholly to its position on the Bosporus.  Holland owes the integrity of her kingdom, and Roumania that of hers, to their respective locations at the mouths of the Rhine and the Danube, because the interest of western Europe demands that these two important arteries of commerce should be held by powers too weak ever to tie them up.  The same principle has guaranteed the neutrality of Switzerland, whose position puts it in control of the passes of the Central Alps from Savoy to the Tyrol; and, more recently, that of the young state of Panama, through which the Isthmian Canal is to pass.

[Sidenote:  Content of the term location.]

Geographical location necessarily includes the idea of the size and form of a country.  Even the most general statement of the zonal and interoceanic situation of Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the Russian Empire, indicates the area and contour of their territories.  This is still more conspicuously the case with naturally defined regions, such as island and peninsula countries.  But location includes a complex of yet larger and more potent relations which go with mere attachment to this or that continent, or to one or another side of a continent.  Every part of the world gives to its lands and its people some of its own qualities;