extinction of the original inhabitants, by the process operating now in New Zealand and Australia.  Prior to the arrival of the Europeans in the Antilles, the conquest of these islands by South American Caribs had resulted in race intermixture.  These sea-marauders brought no women with them in their small boats from the distant mainland, so they killed off the men and married the Arawak women of the islands.  Here again insular location plus similarity of race and culture produced amalgamation, as opposed to extermination of the vanquished by over-sea invaders.

While the insular security of a primitive folk like the Tasmanians, Hawaiians and Malagasies is only passive, that of a civilized people like the English and modern Japanese is active, consciously utilized and reinforced.  It is therefore more effective, and productive of more varied political and cultural results.  Such people can allow themselves extensive contact with other nations, because they know it is in their power to control or check such contact at will.  Japan took refuge in its medieval period in a policy of seclusion suggested by its island habitat,[897] relying on the passive protection of isolation.  England, on the other hand, from the time of King Alfred, built up a navy to resist invasion.  The effect, after the political unification of Great Britain, was a guarantee of protection against foreign attack, the concentration of the national defenses in a navy,[898] the elimination of the standing army which despotic monarchs might have used to crush the people, the consequent release of a large working force from military service, and the application of these to the development of English Industry.[899]

[Sidenote:  Islands as places of refuge.]

Islands, as naturally protected districts, are often sought places of refuge by the weak or vanquished, and thus are drawn into the field of historical movement.  We find this principle operating also in the animal world.  The fur seals of the North Pacific have fled from the American coasts and found an asylum on the Pribiloff Islands of Bering Sea, where their concentration and isolation have enabled them to become wards of the United States government, though this result they did not foresee.  The last Rhytina or Arctic sea-cow was found on an island in Bering Strait.[900] So the Veneti of Northern Italy in the fifth century sought an asylum from the desolating Huns and, a century later, from the Lombards, in the deposit islands at the head of the Adriatic, and there found the geographic conditions for a brilliant commercial and cultural development.  Formosa got its first contingent of Chinese settlers in the thirteenth century in refugees seeking a place of safety from Kublai Khan’s armies; and its second in 1644 in a Chinese chief and his followers who had refused to submit to the victorious Manchus.  In 1637 Formosa was an asylum also for Japanese Christians, who escaped thither from the persecutions attending the discovery