The territorial expansion of peoples and states is attended by an evolution of their spacial conceptions and ideals.  Primitive peoples, accustomed to dismemberment in small tribal groups, bear all the marks of territorial contraction.  Their geographical horizon is usually fixed by the radius of a few days’ march.  Inter-tribal trade and intercourse reach only rudimentary development, under the prevailing conditions of mutual antagonism and isolation, and hence contribute little to the expansion of the horizon.  Knowing only their little world, such primitive groups overestimate the size and importance of their own territory, and are incapable of controlling an extensive area.  This is the testimony of all travellers who have observed native African states.  Though the race or stock distribution may be wide, like that of the Athapascan and Algonquin Indians, and their war paths long, like the campaigns of the Iroquois against the Cherokees of the Tennessee River, yet the unit of tribal territory permanently occupied is never large.

[Sidenote:  National estimates of area.]

Small naturally defined regions, which take the lead in historical development because they counteract the primitive tendency towards excessive dispersal, are in danger of teaching too well their lesson of concentration.  In course of time geographic enclosure begins to betray its limitations.  The extent of a people’s territory influences their estimate of area per se, determines how far land shall be made the basis of their national purposes, fixes the territorial scale of their conquests and their political expansion.  This is a conspicuous psychological effect of a narrow local environment.  A people embedded for centuries in a small district measure area with a short yardstick.  The ancient Greeks devised a philosophic basis for the advantages of the small state, which is extolled in the writings of Plato and Aristotle.[317] Aristotle wanted it small enough, “to be comprehended at one glance of the statesman’s eye.”  Plato’s ideal democracy, by rigid laws limiting the procreative period of women and men and providing for the death of children born out of this period or out of wedlock, restricted its free citizens to 5,040 heads of families,[318] all living within reach of the agora, and all able to judge from personal knowledge of a candidate’s fitness for office.  This condition was possible only in dwarf commonwealths like the city-states of the Hellenic world.  The failure of the Greeks to build up a political structure on a territorial scale commensurate with their cultural achievements and with the wide sphere of their cultural influence can be ascribed chiefly to their inability to discard the contracted territorial ideas engendered by geographic and political dismemberment.  The little Judean plateau, which gave birth to a universal religion, clung with provincial bigotry to the narrow tribal creed and repudiated the larger faith of Christ, which found its appropriate field in Mediterranean Europe.