Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/465

 STUDIES IN POLITICAL AREAS 451

tual element of superior spacial conception. This gain has often been lost, but in the case of Alexander and Caesar it was pre- served to the posterity, whose horizon it broadened. Again and again in history the fact is made evident that every larger land presents greater problems, and that he triumphs who finds the solution for them. Summed up, they mean a struggle for room, whereby the conception of space continually grows. In our century, North America has taught even greater lessons in the conduct of war than has Russia. In the Civil War the necessity impressed itself on both sides of making use of railroads and telegraphs in an unprecedented degree, of overcoming the wide distances with ever larger masses of cavalry, and even of return- ing to the old institution of ] winter quarters. Significant is the fact that the Confederate armies of the Southwest often con- sisted in half of mounted troops.

The school of space is slow. Every nation must be educated from smaller to larger spacial ideas, and this ever anew, for a lapse from the one stage into the other constantly reoccurs. National decay is in every instance the result of a deteriorated conception of space. The vacillating policy and inadequate military methods of the Romans in the first Punic war indicate the progress of the young state from a doubtful to a sure terri- torial dominion, destined to be led as she was by the guiding hand of historical events by way of Sicily to Libya, and thence to Iberia. Many a territorial conquest of the young Rome was forced upon her ; and only her undesigned supremacy over the lands of the Mediterranean led to her final control of that which, in a political sense, constituted the world. The still unsubdued regions to the north and cast were, according to Mediterranean ideas, a dangerously big country ; but even then one of the weapons with which Rome conquered Greece was its superior capacity for territorial control. It is very interesting to follow the changes in spacial conception from lands of such clearly defined boundaries as Sicily and the Iberian peninsula. In the eyes of Rome they had already become comparatively small ; measured by the standard of the Middle Ages, they were as