South Africa.  Even the Spanish overlords in Mexico and Peru domiciled themselves chiefly in the highlands, where altitude in part counteracts tropical latitude.  European immigration into South America to-day greatly predominates in the temperate portions,—­in Argentine, Uruguay, Paraguay, southern Brazil and southern Chile.  While Argentine’s population includes over one million white foreigners, who comprise twenty per cent. of the total,[202] Venezuela has no genuine white immigration.  Its population, which comprises only one per cent. of pure whites, consists chiefly of negroes, mulattoes, and Sambos, hybrids of negro and Indian race.  In British Guiana, negroes and East Indian coolies, both importations from other tropical lands, comprise eighty-one per cent. of the population.[203]

The movement of Europeans into the tropical regions of Asia, Australasia, Africa and America, like the American advance into the Philippines, represents commercial and political, not genuine ethnic expansion.  Except where it resorts to hybridization, it seeks not new homesteads, but the profits of tropical trade and the markets for European manufactures found in retarded populations.  These it secures either by a small but permanently domiciled ruling class, as formerly in Spanish and Portuguese America, or by a body of European officials, clerks, agents and soldiers, sent out for a term of years.  Such are the seventy-six thousand Britishers who manage the affairs of commerce and state in British India, and the smaller number of Dutch who perform the same functions in the Dutch East India islands.  The basis of this system is exploitation.  It represents neither a high economic, ethical, nor social ideal, and therefore lacks the stamp of geographic finality.

[Sidenote:  Movement to like geographic conditions.]

A migrating or expanding people, when free to choose, is prone to seek a new home with like geographic conditions to the old.  Hence the stamp once given by an environment tends to perpetuate itself.  All people, especially those in the lower stages of culture, are conservative in their fundamental activities.  Agriculture is intolerable to pastoral nomads, hunting has little attraction for a genuine fisher folk.  Therefore such peoples in expansion seek an environment in which the national aptitudes, slowly evolved in their native seats, find a ready field.  Thus arise natural provinces of distribution, whose location, climate, physical features, and size reflect the social and economic adaptation of the inhabitants to a certain type of environment.  A shepherd folk, when breaking off from its parent stock like Abraham’s family from their Mesopotamian kinsmen, seeks a land rich in open pastures and large enough to support its wasteful nomadic economy.  A seafaring people absorb an ever longer strip of seaboard, like the Eskimo of Arctic America, or throw out their settlements from inlet to inlet or island to island, as did Malays