Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/316

 302 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Only the politically far-sighted understand their own times ; and just as positively, therefore, should it be demanded of the polit- ical as of the physical geographer, that he be familiar with the whole earth. This is the cosmopolitanism that geographical study is meant to promote.

The unequal distribution of land among the continents deter- mines the unequal distribution of political areas. Since Asia is nearly five times as big as Europe, the Americas four times, and Africa three times its size, the non-European world stands in contrast to the European as more spacious, applying therefore a larger standard of measure in questions of territory, making greater demands. Europe and Australia, which include respect- ively only 7.2 per cent, and 6.6 per cent, of all the land of the earth, offer each merely room enough for a single, genuine great power. Australia belongs entirely to the British Empire, and the whole continent together with Tasmania and New Zealand are about to be converted into the commonwealth of Australia, that is, the whole continent be made into one state, the first instance of the kind in history. Besides Russia, which occupies more than half of Europe, that continent has room for only a fairly large number of medium powers ; among these, the Scan- dinavian kingdom, which stands next to Russia in point of size, covers, however, only one-seventh of the area of Russia in Europe. The average size of the European states is about equal to that of Switzerland.

Europe has twenty-four independent states and three small depend- encies the Faroe Islands, Malta and Gibraltar which hold some- what the same relative position as colonies in foreign lands. Among these is only a single state of continental proportions; it embraces 55 per cent, of Europe. Then follow seven states, varying from 293,848 square miles (Norway and Sweden) to 114,410 square miles (Italy), which' are great states according to the European standard of size; ten which are medium states according to the same standard, ranging from the 64,000 square miles of European Turkey proper, to the 11,373 square miles of Belgium ; and six small states, or nine including the small outlying dependencies. The natural causes of this distribution