half Latinized the Levant, and widened the intellectual horizon of Europe.  A national or racial sentiment which enhaloes a certain spot may be pregnant with historical results, because at any moment it may start some band of enthusiasts on a path of migration or conquest.  The Zionist agitation for the return of oppressed Jews to Palestine, and the establishment of the Liberian Republic for the negroes in Africa rest upon such a sentiment.  The reverence of the Christian world for Rome as a goal of pilgrimages materially enhanced the influence of Italy as a school of culture during the Middle Ages.  The spiritual and ethnic association of the Mohammedan world with Mecca is always fraught with possible political results.  The dominant tribes of the Sudan, followers of Islam, who proudly trace back a fictitious line of ancestry to the Arabs of Yemen, are readily incited to support a new prophet sprung from the race of Mecca.[211] The pilgrimages which the Buddhists of the Asiatic highlands make to the sacred city of Lhassa ensure China’s control over the restless nomads through the instrumentality of the Grand Lama of Tibet.

[Sidenote:  Results of historical movement.]

Historical movements are varied as to motive, direction, numerical strength, and character, but their final results are two, differentiation and assimilation.  Both are important phases of the process of evolution, but the latter gains force with the progress of history and the increase of the world’s population.

[Sidenote:  Differentiation and area.]

A people or race which, in its process of numerical growth, spreads over a large territory subjects itself to a widening range of geographic conditions, and therefore of differentiation.  The broad expansion of the Teutonic race in Europe, America, Australia and South Africa has brought it into every variety of habitat.  If the territory has a monotonous relief like Russia, nevertheless, its mere extent involves diversity of climate and location.  The diversity of climate incident to large area involves in turn different animal and plant life, different crops, different economic activities.  Even in lowlands the relief, geologic structure, and soil are prone to vary over wide districts.  The monotonous surface of Holland shows such contrasts.  So do the North German lowlands; here the sandy barren flats of the “geest” alternate with stretches of fertile silt deposited by the rivers or the sea,[212] and support different types of communities, which have been admirably described by Gustav Frenssen in his great novel of Joen Uhl.  The flat surface of southern Illinois shows in small compass the teeming fertility of the famous “American bottom,” the poor clay soil of “Egypt” with its backward population, and the rich prairie land just to the north with its prosperous and progressive farmer class.