Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/474

 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

scale of their thinly populated steppes. In times past the Ger- mans appeared with the large demands of a sparse nomadic population before the Romans, Celts, and others, who were already crowded in their territory and about to fall into decay. The kingdoms of the extensive highlands of Asia Minor and Iran loomed up upon the horizon of the Greek mind as states of unheard-of magnitude, and the impression left by these new territorial dimensions was a profound one. Lydia had been an enormously big country to them ; Persia seemed to them a world in itself. They learned too late that the fundamental lack of their city-states was their limited area.

The expansion of a state is growth, and, in so far, an organic change which necessarily has a retroactive effect upon the whole. At first an external phenomenon, in the course of time it will without fail penetrate into the interior. This holds good even of the process of growth, which involves the expenditure of force externally with a corresponding diminution of internal achievement ; but much more is it true of the condition which ensues at the end of a period of growth. The more the energies of a people are directed towards an outside aim, the less con scious do they become of any internal friction. Here lies the secret of the wonderful air of health that breathes through the history of the Hanse towns ; during a period of lamentable decay in the rest of the German empire, they were held firmly together by the bond of a common interest in their expansion along the Baltic. The new territory into which a people grows is a spring from which the feeling of nationality draws new life. If it permits extensive colonization it rejuvenates a people by drawing off the redundant population. The ancients knew the healing power of emigration for internal evils ; and no country has experienced this effect more than England, whose existence cannot now be thought of apart from its uninterrupted expansion and the consequent peaceful internal development of the land itself. Undertakings aiming at extension of territory simply possess the advantage of being easily understood. If they result in an improvement of the geographical situation, they tend to