with area and the population which that area can support.  The extinction of small, weak peoples has its counterpart in the gradual elimination of dialects and languages having restricted territorial sway, whose fate is foreshadowed by the unequal competition of their literatures with those of numerically stronger peoples.  An author writing in a language like the Danish, intelligible to only a small public, can expect only small returns for his labor in either influence, fame, or fortune.  The return may be so small that it is prohibitive.  Hence we find the Danish Hans Christian Andersen and the Norwegian Ibsen writing in German, as do also many Scandinavian scientists.  Georg Brandes abandons his native Danish and seeks a larger public by making English the language of his books.  The incentive to follow a literary career, especially if it includes making a living, is relatively weak among a people of only two or three millions, but gains enormously among large and cultivated peoples, like the seventy million German-speaking folk of Europe, or the one hundred and thirty millions of English speech scattered over the world.  The common literature which represents the response to this incentive forms a bond of union among the various branches of these peoples, and may be eventually productive of political results.

[Sidenote:  Small geographic base of primitive societies.]

Growth has been the law of human societies since the birth of man’s gregarious instinct.  It has manifested itself in the formation of ever larger social groups, appropriating ever larger areas.  It has registered itself geographically in the protrusion of ethnic boundaries, economically in more intensive utilization of the land, socially in increasing density of population, and politically in the formation of ever larger national territorial aggregates.  The lowest stages of culture reveal small tribes, growing very slowly or at times not at all, disseminated over areas small in themselves but large for the number of their inhabitants, hence sparsely populated.  The size of these primitive holdings depends upon the natural food supply yielded by the region.  They assume wide dimensions but support groups of only a few families on the chill rocky coasts of Tierra del Fuego or the sterile plains of central Australia; and they contract to smaller areas dotted with fairly populous villages in the fertile districts of the middle Congo or bordering the rich coast fishing grounds of southern Alaska and British Columbia.  But always land is abundant, and is drawn upon in widening circles when the food supply becomes inadequate or precarious.

[Sidenote:  Influence of small confined areas.]