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 298 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

of the unknown, political territories have continually increased 1 in size and number, one unknown region after the other taking on political value. In the same way, lands to which we are still strangers will gain political importance, till the whole earth has become familiar and capable of being turned to political account. In Africa, even during the last years, we have seen discovery and political possession going hand in hand ; and we have wit- nessed how the efforts to reach the North and South Pole, on the part of all those nations participating therein, have assumed the character of national enterprises to gain ideal benefits of political value.

The conception of spacial relations on the part of historians is without doubt vitiated by the fact that these relations are expressed in terms which obscure the nature of the thing. When one speaks of "the dominating territorial position" of a nation, he means the large area which serves as its base. The word "territorial" does not describe the nature of the matter, but only the phenomenon ; it is an expression of secondary impor- tance. In the phrase "conditions of power," there lurks, as a rule, the idea of superficial extent ; and particularly is this the case in Droysen's favorite expression, "ponderance of powers" (Ponderation der Mdchte), since here is meant classification accord- ing to relative strength, and in this, of course, superficial extent must always play its great role. In all such inaccurate terms no adequate expression is found for the historical principle, that all events having to do with territorial .changes possess an altogether special importance. When Mommsen (chap, iii., Book 5) calls the Roman conquest of Gaul an event "whose results even today determine the history of the world," he put into words the never-failing tendency of territorial changes to make their influence felt for a long time afterward. Political geography cannot, in the long run, be contented with this merely superficial consideration of a phenomenon so fundamentally geographical, but it must regard a systematic treatment of the same as one of its most important tasks.

The given space of every age has decided how far countries