Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/392

 374 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

keeps a state young. From their very nature the Mediter- ranean countries had to grow old earlier, just as they were earlier to be settled and to reach their zenith. The damp swamp and forest regions of the North, on the contrary, remained younger so long as they could offer to their inhabitants new fields for expansion.

The purely political effects of a narrow territorial environ- ment long continued are embraced in the term " political pro- vincialism " (^Kleinstaaterei). No one has analyzed this quality more clearly than Niebuhr where he gives the history of the fall of Achaia : in substance he says that the nation enjoyed prosperity without opportunity for exercising its powers, and that this prosperity gave rise to moral degeneration. Such a condition finds a corrective when smaller states stand in intimate relations with large ones of the same nationality ; but when they continue their isolated existences, independent of one another, and have no activity within themselves, all virility and worth necessarily die out, and a wretched local vanity appears. Great states call forth stirring emotions, peculiarly their own, which keep our feelings alive and ourselves busied, while in small states passion wastes itself upon paltry interests."

As a concomitant of this dull uniformity of interests among the inhabitants of a confined area we would mention, also, the monotony of aims and activities which tends to drag down to the common level everything preeminent, and wherever possible to obliterate it. The smaller a political territory is, so much the more monotonous is its physical character. Varied land forms, classes of vegetable life, and climatic conditions involve, as a rule, wide areas. In a mountain range, therefore, or a plain, or a forest or prairie region, or in one climatic zone, there are several, or, in the beginning, even numerous political dis- tricts which are naturally of the same or like character ; just for that reason they have little to exchange with one another, and are not in a position to exert reciprocally much influence. More- over, the similarity in the resources and employments of the people works toward the same result.

» VorUsungen iiber dliere Geschichte, edited by M. Niebuhr, 1851, III, p. 523.