its rim.  The character of its western coasts, of its vigorous Malayan population, and of the intervening Mozambique Current rendered conquest difficult from the African shore.  Its large size, with the promise of abundant resources, offered a bait to conquest, yet put a barrier in its way.  Hence we find that not till 1895, when the partition of continental Africa was almost accomplished, did the French conquest of Madagascar occur.

By contrast, the closely grouped East Indies, long coveted for their tropical products, suffered a contagion of conquest.  The large size of these islands, so far from granting them immunity, only enabled the epidemic of Portuguese and Dutch dominion to pass from one to the other more readily, and that even when the spice and pepper trade languished from a plethora of products.  But even here the size of the islands, plus the sub-equatorial climate which bars genuine white colonization, has restricted the effective political dominion of Europeans to the coasts, and thus favored the survival of the natives undisturbed in the interior, with all their primitive institutions.  The largest islands, like Borneo and Sumatra, have vast inland tracts still unexplored and devoted to savagery, thus illustrating the contrast between center and periphery.  When Australia, the largest of all the Pacific island group, became an object of European expansion, its temperate and sub-tropical location adapted it for white colonization, and the easy task of conquering its weak and retarded native tribes encouraged its appropriation; but the natural autonomy which belongs to large area and detached location asserted itself in the history of British Australia.  The island continent is now erected into a confederation of states, enjoying virtual independence.  In New Zealand, we find the recent colonists taking advantage of their isolation to work out undisturbed certain unique social theories.  Here, against a background of arrested aboriginal development, another race evinces a radical spirit of progress; and to these contrasted results equally the detached island environment has contributed its share.

[Sidenote:  Historical effects of island isolation; primitive retardation.]

The historical development of island peoples bears always in greater or less degree the stamp of isolation; but this isolation may lead to opposite cultural results.  It may mean in one case retardation, in another accelerated development.  Its geographical advantages are distinctly relative, increasing rapidly with a rising scale of civilization.  Therefore in an island habitat the race factor may operate with or against the geographic factor in producing a desirable historical result.  If the isolation is almost complete, the cultural status of the inhabitants low, and therefore their need of stimulation from without very great, the lack of it will sink them deeper in barbarism than their kinsmen on the mainland.  The negroes of Africa, taken as a whole, occupy a higher economic