When religion, language and race have spread, in their wake comes the growing state.  Everywhere the political area tends gradually to embrace the whole linguistic area of which it forms a part, and finally the yet larger race area.  Only the diplomacy of united Europe has availed to prevent France from absorbing French-speaking Belgium, or Russia from incorporating into her domain that vast Slav region extending from the Drave and Danube almost to the Gulf of Corinth, now parcelled out among seven different states, but bound to the Muscovite empire by ties of related speech, by race and religion.  The detachment of the various Danubian principalities from the uncongenial dominion of the Turks, though a dismemberment of a large political territory and a seeming backward step, can be regarded only as a leisurely preliminary for a new territorial alignment.  History’s movements are unhurried; the backward step may prepare for the longer leap forward.  It is impossible to resist the conclusion that the vigorous, reorganized German Empire will one day try to incorporate the Germanic areas found in Austria, Switzerland and Holland.

[Sidenote:  Gradations in area and in development.]

Throughout the life of any people, from its foetal period in some small locality to its well rounded adult era marked by the occupation and organization of a wide national territory, gradations in area mark gradations of development.  And this is true whether we consider the compass of their commercial exchanges, the scope of their maritime ventures, the extent of their linguistic area, the measure of their territorial ambitions, or the range of their intellectual interests and human sympathies.  From land to ethics, the rule holds good.  Peoples in the lower stages of civilization have contracted spacial ideas, desire and need at a given time only a limited territory, though they may change that territory often; they think in small linear terms, have a small horizon, a small circle of contact with others, a small range of influence, only tribal sympathies; they have an exaggerated conception of their own size and importance, because their basis of comparison is fatally limited.  With a mature, widespread people like the English or French, all this is different; they have made the earth their own, so far as possible.

Just because of this universal tendency towards the occupation of ever larger areas and the formation of vaster political aggregates, in making a sociological or political estimate of different peoples, we should never lose sight of the fact that all racial and national characteristics which operate towards the absorption of more land and impel to political expansion are of fundamental value.  A ship of state manned by such a crew has its sails set to catch the winds of the world.

[Sidenote:  Preliminaries to ethnic and political expansion.]