[Sidenote:  Boundaries as limits of movements or expansion.]

Such boundaries mark the limits of that movement which is common to all animate things.  Every living form spreads until it meets natural conditions in which it can no longer survive, or until it is checked by the opposing expansion of some competing form.  If there is a change either in the life conditions or in the strength of the competing forms, the boundary shifts.  In the propitious climate of the Genial Period, plants and animals lived nearer to the North Pole than at present; then they fell back before the advance of the ice sheet.  The restless surface of the ocean denies to man a dwelling place; every century, however, the Dutch are pushing forward their northern boundary by reclamation of land from the sea; but repeatedly they have had to drop back for a time when the water has again overwhelmed their hand-made territory.

[Sidenote:  Peoples as barriers.]

The boundaries of race and state which are subjected to greatest fluctuations are those determined by the resistance of other peoples.  The westward sweep of the Slavs prior to eighth century carried them beyond the Elbe into contact with the Germans; but as these increased in numbers, outgrew their narrow territories and inaugurated a counter-movement eastward, the Slavs began falling back to the Oder, to the Vistula, and finally to the Niemen.  Though the Mohawk Valley opened an easy avenue of expansion westward for the early colonists of New York, the advance of settlements up this valley for several decades went on at only a snail’s pace, because of the compact body of Iroquois tribes holding this territory.  In the unoccupied land farther south between the Cumberland and Ohio rivers the frontier went forward with leaps and bounds, pushed on by the expanding power of the young Republic. [See map page 156.]

Anything which increases the expanding force of a people—­the establishment of a more satisfactory government by which the national consciousness is developed, as in the American and French revolutions, the prosecution of a successful war by which popular energies are released from an old restraint, mere increase of population, or an impulse communicated by some hostile and irresistible force behind—­all are registered in an advance of the boundary of the people in question and a corresponding retrusion of their neighbor’s frontier.

[Sidenote:  Boundary zone as index of growth or decline.]

The border district is the periphery of the growing or declining race or state.  It runs the more irregularly, the greater are the variations in the external conditions as represented by climate, soil, barriers, and natural openings, according as these facilitate or obstruct advance.  When it is contiguous with the border of another state or race, the two form a zone in which ascendency from one side or the other is being established.  The boundary fluctuates,