Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/468

 454 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

directed and protected, which conquered with the plow these 2,170,000 square miles, and took such deep root there that France since 1883 has been attacking them in Tongking in vain.

To the historians of Roman, German, and English expansion an air of health seems to breathe through those times when political policy stood in close connection with the labor of the people ; but they are often unable to give any explanation of its nature. The element of health lay just in this connection. Whenever we see industrial expansion proceeding upon a soil where it immediately leads to political results also, as is still the case in America today, there we first recognize the causes of so many barriers and restrictions in Europe, where history has become a crowding process and where industrial interests and politics must be scrupulously held apart. In a similar way we see the statesmen and geographers of Europe trying, in non- European questions, to get rid of the small conceptions which Europe inspires. Sir J. Strachey, in his lectures on "India" (1888), designed for the use of practical politicians, empha- sizes again and again the necessity of conceiving India as a world in itself, between whose countries and peoples a greater difference obtains than between those of Europe.

It is very instructive to compare the history of the German races in North America with that of the two great Latin colonial powers, Spain and France, whose settlements have been almost everywhere separated from the former. Spain sent out enough bold and industrious colonists, who rapidly spread out to Cali- fornia and to the La Plata ; but the political organization which it gave to these lands was never adequate to the needs of young communities widely scattered and living under entirely different conditions. The federative movement which broke out at the beginning of this century is clearly the necessary rebound from the absurdity of dividing a mammoth empire, which extended through one hundred degrees of latitude, into three sub-king- doms Peru, Mexico, and New Granada, which was not added till the eighteenth century. France, on the other hand, showed a profound understanding for the organization of a truly con