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 STUDIES IN POLITICAL AREAS. 1

THE POLITICAL TERRITORY IN RELATIO^ TO EARTH AND CONTINENT.

ALTHOUGH only the one-fourth of the earth's surface which remains after allowance is made for the polar regions and the sea is habitable and politically occupied, nevertheless all the super- ficial areas of political geography stand to the earth's surface in the relation of parts to the whole. Just as the different races are members of the one human family, so countries are parts of this maximum political area out of which they have been formed in increasing size and number, as from one widely distributed element, and from which their growth is nourished. Karl Rit- ter's expression, "The Principle of Proportions," means in its deepest sense the spacial relation of every geographic phenome- non to the earth as a whole. In political geography this rela- tion assumes a practical aspect, for all political extensions of territory have had to stop at the limits of the total space and definite regions found established on the earth.

The close connection between every country and the whole earth's surface exists not merely in the abstract, but it lives and operates in the present and all the future. This community of foundation determines the forms of contact and the mutual rela- tions of these lands, so that, in spite of all differences and boundaries, they are never to be thought of as quite isolated existences. Herein lies one great cause of the progress of humanity, that, as more states and larger states grow up, the nearer do they edge together, and so much the more intimately must they act and react upon one another ; history, therefore, means mutual approach and compression. From the time of Hanno and Pytheas, as the known earth has grown at the cost

'Translated by Miss ELLEN C. SEMPLE.

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