and so again every part of this part.  Arabia, India and Farther India, spurs of the Asiatic land-mass, have had and will always have a radically different ethnic and political history from Greece, Italy and Spain, the corresponding peninsulas of Europe, because the histories of these two groups are bound up in their respective continents.  The idea of a European state has a different content from that of an Asiatic, or North American or African state; it includes a different race or combination of races, different social and economic development, different political ideals.  Location, therefore, means climate and plant life at one end of the scale, civilization and political status at the other.

[Sidenote:  Intercontinental location.]

This larger conception of location brings a correspondingly larger conception of environment, which affords the solution of many otherwise hopeless problems of anthropo-geography.  It is embodied in the law that the influences of a land upon its people spring not only from the physical features of the land itself, but also from a wide circle of lands into which it has been grouped by virtue of its location.  Almost every geographical interpretation of the ancient and modern history of Greece has been inadequate, because it has failed sufficiently to emphasize the most essential factor in this history, namely, Greece’s location at the threshold of the Orient.  This location has given to Greek history a strong Asiatic color.  It comes out in the accessibility of Greece to ancient Oriental civilization and commerce, and is conspicuous in every period from the Argonautic Expedition to the achievement of independence in 1832 and the recent efforts for the liberation of Crete.  This outpost location before the Mediterranean portals of the vast and arid plains of southwestern Asia, exposed to every tide of migration or conquest sent out by those hungry lands, had in it always an element of weakness.  In comparison with the shadow of Asia, which constantly overhung the Greek people and from 1401 to 1832 enveloped them, only secondary importance can be attributed to advantageous local conditions as factors in Greek history.

It is a similar intercontinental location in the isthmian region between the Mediterranean on the west and the ancient maritime routes of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf on the east, which gave to Phoenicia the office of middleman between the Orient and Occident,[240] and predestined its conquest, now by the various Asiatic powers of Mesopotamia, now by the Pharaohs of Egypt, now by European Greeks and Romans, now by a succession of Asiatic peoples, till to-day we find it incorporated in the Asiatic-European Empire of Turkey.  Proximity to Africa has closely allied Spain to the southern continent in flora, fauna, and ethnic stock.  The long-headed, brunette Mediterranean race occupies the Iberian Peninsula and the Berber territory of northwest Africa.[241] This community of race is also