Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/473

 STUDIES IN POLITICAL AREAS 459

throw. We see the European colonists in the two Americas appearing upon the scene, armed with a superiority in which their larger conception of space very soon made itself felt as the quality most fraught with victory. The Indians were fettered by their limited ideas in this regard ; the Europeans came with designs upon stretches of country reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and only one hundred years after the first discovery their different governments tried to divide up the two continents. 1 The Indians were powerless against the mere spacial magnitude that was developing here, for which they lacked both compre- hension and standard of measure. Voluntarily they relinquished much land which had for them no value, filled out the empty border regions between the tribes, and recognized too late how the separate acts of withdrawal followed fast one after the other, according to a plan to them unintelligible, like the threads of a net whose meshes rapidly grow smaller. Two hundred years after the first modest settlements of the whites, the Indians had lost even the Alleghanies, and warning came that not even the Mississippi was the natural boundary of the new government.

Still greater was the chasm between the two conceptions of political area in other regions, particularly in Australia and New Zealand. The colonists came there in the early years of the nineteenth century with even a broader geographical horizon and with more efficient means of transportation and communica- tion ; and they found natives who did not see out beyond their hunting district. In a much deeper sense than that of its usual application in European history does the saying become true here that two ages meet, one fast bound in narrow spacial con- ceptions, and one soaring on the wings of its big territorial ideas ; and in this conjunction lies the destructive and recreative force in the history of these youthful lands.

A similar contrast is to be found between pastoral peoples, who are accustomed to a wide range of country, and permanent settlers, who live close together. The former want land on the

'The treaty of 1629, which gave to France Canada, Cape Breton, and the bound - kss region of Acadia, really prepared the way for the division of North America.