and counter-migrations, their incursions, retreats, and expansions over the face of the earth, vast unfenced areas, like the open lowlands of Russia and the grasslands of Africa, present the picture of a great thoroughfare swept by pressing throngs.  Other regions, more secluded, appear as quiet nooks, made for a temporary halt or a permanent rest.  Here some part of the passing human flow is caught as in a vessel and held till it crystallizes into a nation.  These are the conspicuous areas of race characterization.  The development of the various ethnic and political offspring of the Roman Empire in the naturally defined areas of Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and France illustrates the process of national differentiation which goes on in such secluded locations.

A marked influence upon this development is generally ascribed to the protection afforded by such segregated districts.  But protection alone is only a negative force in the life of a people; it leaves them free to develop in their own way, but does not say what that way shall be.  On the other hand, the fact that such a district embraces a certain number of geographic features, and encompasses them by obstructive boundaries, is of immense historical importance; because this restriction leads to the concentration of the national powers, to the more thorough utilization of natural advantages, both racial and geographical, and thereby to the growth of an historical individuality.  Nothing robs the historical process of so much of its greatness or weakens so much its effects as its dispersion over a wide, boundless area.  This was the disintegrating force which sapped the strength of the French colonies in America.  The endless valleys of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi and the alluring fur trade tempted them to an expansion that was their political and economic undoing.  Russia’s history illustrates the curse of a distant horizon.  On the other hand, out of a restricted geographical base, with its power to concentrate and intensify the national forces, grew Rome and Greece, England and Japan, ancient Peru and the Thirteen Colonies of America.

[Sidenote:  Vicinal location.]

If even the most detached and isolated of these natural locations be examined, its people will, nevertheless, reveal a transitional character, intermediate between those of its neighbors, because from these it has borrowed both ethnic stock and culture, Great Britain is an island, but its vicinal location groups it with the North Sea family of people.  Even in historic times it has derived ancient Belgian stock, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Scandinavian from the long semi-circle of nearby continental lands, which have likewise contributed so much to the civilization of the island.  Similarly, Japan traces the sources of its population to the north of Asia by way of the island of Sakhalin, to the west through Korea, and to the Malay district of the south, whence the Kuro Siwa has swept stragglers to the shores of Kiu-siu.  Like England, Japan also has drawn its civilization from its neighbors, and then, under the isolating influence of its local environment, has individualized both race and culture.  Here we have the interplay of the forces of natural and vicinal location.