Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/324

 310 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

iron, the water has always exercised a quickening and stimulat- ing influence ; their states have grown up on islands and coasts, along rivers and lakes. Well articulated coasts, therefore, with numerous bays, peninsulas, islands and river mouths, have been the favored regions where such peoples have built up their states. But since the water acts as a disjunctive factor between the parts of the land, it separates it into naturally defined divisions ; of these Greece and the Mediterranean region in general afford the best examples. States have always grown up in these divisions and have been content to fill them out to the boundaries, where- fore such states were quicker to take on their final form and, with their contracted territorial views, developed to maturity more rapidly. The most ancient states of which the history of the Old World speaks all stand under the influence of the spacial conditions of the Mediterranean lands. Peninsulas, islands and river-born oases form the ground on which they arose, and which did not permit any of them to grow beyond medium dimensions. The greatest of them, the Roman Empire, united to Italy the Iberian and Balkan peninsulas, Asia Minor, Mauretania, Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, all the islands of the Mediterranean, and Britain beyond ; five-sixths of the empire consisted of such naturally defined parts, many of which had before belonged to other states and later again passed over in unaltered size into other hands. The different Mohammedan powers in this region down to the Turkish Empire of our own time have ever anew patched together some of these natural pieces and attained con- sequently about the same superficial extent. Just as Europe spreads out towards the east in continental proportions, and con- tracts towards the west to ever narrower areas, similar also is the distribution of its political divisions. The series, England .122,000 square miles, France 207,000 square miles, Germany 210,000 square miles, Austro-Hungary 261,000 square miles, European Russia with Poland and Finland 2,198,000 square miles, shows the increase of political areas towards the east. The same thing is shown by the fact that west of the thirtieth degree east longitude, the meridian of the mouth of the Danube,