States to re-open negotiations for the purchase of the Danish Isles.  One cannot get away from the impression that the law of political detachability will operate again to make some new distribution of the parti-colored political holdings in the Lesser Antilles.  The small size of these islands, and their thalassic location commanding approaches to a large region of only partially developed resources and to the interoceanic passway across it, will pitch them into the dice-box on the occasion of every naval war between their sovereign powers.

The shifting fate of political detachability becomes moderated in islands of the open ocean, because of their remoteness from the colonizing or conquering movements emanating from the continents.  In contrast to the changing political connections of thalassic isles, consider the calm or monotonous political history of outlying islands like the Shetland, Faroes, Iceland, Canaries, Madeira, Cape Verde, Azores, St. Helena, Ascension and Hawaii.  The Norse colony of Iceland, as a republic, maintained loose connections with its mother country from 874 to 1264; then for nearly six centuries it followed the political fate of Norway till 1814, when an oversight left it in the hands of Denmark on the dissolution of the union of Denmark and Norway.  The Azores have known no history except that which came to them from Portugal; even their discovery goes back to a Saracen navigator who, in 1147, sailed from the mouth of the Tagus a thousand miles straight into the sunset.[882] For two hundred years thereafter extreme isolation kept them outside the pale of history till their rediscovery by Prince Henry, the Navigator.

[Sidenote:  Political autonomy of islands based upon area and location.]

Land-masses, as we have found, are independent by location or independent by size.  Large islands, especially where they occupy an outskirt location, may long succeed in maintaining an independent national existence; but to render this permanent, they must supplement their area by the acquisition of continental lands, according to the law of increasing territorial aggregates.  Great Britain and Japan, though ethnically and culturally appendages of the nearby mainland, were large enough, aided by the dividing sea, to maintain political autonomy.  They absorbed all the insular fragments lying about them to extend their areas, and then each in turn entered upon a career of continental expansion.  To Japan this movement as a determined policy came late, only when she faced the alternative of absorbing territory or being absorbed by all-devouring Russia.  The isolation of Madagascar resulted in only slight community of race with Africa, and combined with large area, has kept the island to a great extent distinct from the political history of Africa.  The impulses which swept the eastern coast of the continent reached the outlying island with abated force.  Arab, Portuguese, Dutch and English only scratched