Cuba suffered from its geographic aloofness.  So did little Crete, which submitted to Turkish oppression sixty years after the continental Greeks had made good their claim to freedom.  Nor was this the first time that Cretan liberty had suffered from the detachment of an island environment.  Aristotle recognized the principle when he wrote:  “The people of Crete have hitherto submitted to the rule of the leading families as Cosmi, because the insular situation of Crete cuts off the interference of strangers or foreigners which might stir up rebellion against the unjust or partial government.”  And then he adds that this insular exclusion of outside incitement long rendered the fidelity of the Perioeci or serf-like peasants of Crete a striking contrast to the uneasy spirit of the Spartan Helots, who were constantly stirred to revolt by the free farmers of Argos, Messinia and Arcadia.[880] Thus ancient like modern Crete missed those beneficient stimuli which penetrate a land frontier, but are cut off by the absolute boundary of the sea.

[Sidenote:  Island remains of broken empires.]

Island fragments of broken empires are found everywhere.  They figure conspicuously in that scattered location indicative of declining power.  Little St. Pierre and Miquelon are the last geographical evidences of France’s former dominion in Canada.  The English Bermudas and Bahamas point back to the time when Great Britain held the long-drawn opposite coast.  The British, French, Dutch, Danish, as once even Swedish, holdings in the Lesser Antilles are island monuments to lost continental domains, as recently were Cuba and Porto Rico to Spain’s once vast American empire.  Of Portugal’s widespread dominion in the Orient there remain to her only the island fragments of Timor, Kambing, Macao and Diu, besides two coastal points on the western face of peninsular India.  All the former continental holdings of the Sultan of Zanzibar have been absorbed into the neighboring German and British territories, and only the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba remain to him by the temporary indulgence of his strong neighbors.  The Sheik of the Bahrein Islands originally held also the large kingdom of El Hasa on the nearby Persian Gulf littoral of Arabia; but he lost this to the Turks in 1840, and now retains the Bahrein Islands as the residuum of his former territories.[881]

[Sidenote:  Security of such remnants merely passive.]

The insular remnants of empires are tolerated, because their small size, when unsupported by important location, usually renders them innocuous; and their geographic isolation removes them from international entanglements, unless some far-reaching anthropo-geographic readjustment lends them a new strategic or commercial importance.  The construction of the Suez Canal gave England a motive for the acquisition of Cyprus in 1878, as a nearer base than Malta for the protection of Port Said, just as the present Panama Canal project led the United