cattle ranch. This is no purely modern development. Athens in the time
of Pericles used her navy not only to secure her political domination in
the Aegean, but also her connections with the colonial wheat lands
about the Euxine.

The modern state strives to render this circle of trade both large and
permanent by means of commercial treaties, customs-unions, trading-posts
and colonies. Thus while society at home is multiplying its relations
with its own land, the state is enabling it to multiply also its
relations with the whole producing world. While at home the nation is
becoming more closely knit together through the common bond of the
fatherland, in the world at large humanity is evolving a brotherhood of
man by the union of each with all through the common growing bond of the
earth. Hence we cannot avoid the question: Are we in process of evolving
a social idea vaster than that underlying nationality? Do the Socialists
hint to us the geographic basis of this new development, when they
describe themselves as an international political party?

[Sidenote: Geography in the philosophy of history.]

It is natural that the old philosophy of history should have fixed its
attention upon the geographic basis of historical events. Searching for
the permanent and common in the outwardly mutable, it found always at
the bottom of changing events the same solid earth. Biology has had the
same experience. The history of the life forms of the world leads always
back to the land on which that life arose, spread, and struggled for
existence. The philosophy of history was superior to early sociology, in
that its method was one of historical comparison, which inevitably
guided it back to the land as the material for the first generalization.
Thus it happens that the importance of the land factor in history was