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 450 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

this space, and will always grow with the expansion of the same from age to age. When Clausewitz, in his Campaign of 1812 in Russia, says: "The idea prevalent in Berlin was that Napoleon must founder on the great size of the Russian empire," 1 or when Ralph Waldo Emerson, the New England sage, says, in regard to the United States of America, that it is particularly easy for their people "to originate the broadest views," the fundamen- tal thought in such expressions is this space, which passes over into the spirit of the people, lending it wings or making it crawl. In this sense space is a political force, and not, as otherwise understood, merely a vehicle of political forces. In every great general or ruler we find a largeness of spacial conceptions often far ahead of his time, such as is quite familiar to us in the plans of an Alexander, a Caesar, a Charles the Great, or Napoleon. The quality that transforms the hero into the statesman is the insight into what is spacially possible ; but the discoverer becomes famous by proving the reality of that which had been deemed spacially impossible. And the discerning historian detects behind the events themselves the glimmer of their spacial conditions, and these he brings out to our view.

Roads, the implements of war in this conquest of space, constitute one of the titles to fame of great rulers ; these have been always builders of highways, canals, and bridges. The importance of the shortest routes^of communication over a great territory has been first recognized by the prince and general, certainly not by the merchant who passively adapts himself to the given conditions. Not the Russian tradesman, but the Czar Nicholas I, connected St. Petersburg and Moscow by the rec- tilinear road which has been so often ridiculed, but is in such a high degree statesmanlike. However much an expanding trade, with its peaceful methods, may have contributed to the exten- sion of the commercial field, still war has ever been a great school for the faculty of mastering space. When generals gain the greatest results by unexpected marches, we see in such an achievement not merely a physical exploit, but a purely intellec-

1 Posthumous Works of General Karl von Clausewitz, Vol. VII, p. 28.