[Sidenote:  Significance of sphere of activity or influence.]

Beyond the home of a people lies its sphere of influence or activities, which in the last analysis may be taken as a protest against the narrowness of the domestic habitat.  It represents the larger area which the people wants and which in course of time it might advantageously occupy or annex.  It embodies the effort to embrace more varied and generous natural conditions, whereby the struggle for subsistence may be made less hard.  Finally, it is an expression of the law that for peoples and races the struggle for existence is at bottom a struggle for space.  Geography sees various forms of the historical movement as the struggle for space in which humanity has forever been engaged.  In this struggle the stronger peoples have absorbed ever larger portions of the earth’s surface.  Hence, through continual subjection to new conditions here or there and to a greater sum total of various conditions, they gain in power by improved variation, as well as numerically by the enlargement of their geographic base.  The Anglo-Saxon branch of the Teutonic stock has, by its phenomenal increase, overspread sections of whole continents, drawn from their varied soils nourishment for its finest efflorescence, and thereby has far out-grown the Germanic branch by which, at the start, it was overshadowed.  The fact that the British Empire comprises 28,615,000 square kilometers or exactly one-fifth of the total land area of the earth, and that the Russian Empire contains over one-seventh, are full of encouragement for Anglo-Saxon and Slav, but contain a warning to the other peoples of the world.

[Sidenote:  Nature of expansion in new and old countries.]

The large area which misleads a primitive folk into excessive dispersion and the dissipation of their tribal powers, offers to an advanced people, who in some circumscribed habitat have learned the value of land, the freest conditions for their development.  A wide, unobstructed territory, occupied by a sparse population of wandering tribes capable of little resistance to conquest or encroachment, affords the most favorable conditions to an intruding superior race.  Such conditions the Chinese found in Mongolia and Manchuria, the Russians in Siberia, and European colonists in the Americas, Australia and Africa.  Almost unlimited space and undeveloped resources met their land hunger and their commercial ambition.  Their numerical growth was rapid, both by the natural increase reflecting an abundant food supply, and by accessions from the home countries.  Expansion advanced by strides.  In contrast to this care-free, easy development in a new land, growth in old countries like Europe and the more civilized parts of Asia means a slow protrusion of the frontier, made at the cost of blood; it means either the absorption of the native people, because there are no unoccupied corners into which they can be driven, or the imposition upon them of an unwelcome rule exercised by alien officials.  Witness the advance of the Russians into Poland and Finland, of the Germans into Poland and Alsace-Lorraine, of the Japanese into Korea, and of the English into crowded India.