peripheral location to intercept the trade between their back country
and the sea.

These are the two types of continuous location. In contrast to them, a
discontinuous or scattered location characterizes the sparse
distribution of primitive hunting and pastoral tribes; or the shattered
fragments of a conquered people, whose territory has been honeycombed by
the land appropriation of the victors; or a declining, moribund people,
who, owing to bad government, poor economic methods, and excessive
competition in the struggle for existence, have shrunk to mere patches.
As a favorable symptom, scattered location regularly marks the healthy
growth of an expanding people, who throw out here and there detached
centers of settlement far beyond the compact frontier, and fix these as
the goal for the advance of their boundary. It is also a familiar
feature of maritime commercial expansion, which is guided by no
territorial ambition but merely aims to secure widely distributed
trading stations at favorable coast points, in order to make the circle
of commerce as ample and resourceful as possible. But this latter form
of scattered location is not permanently sound. Back of it lies the
short-sighted policy of the middleman nation, which makes wholly
inadequate estimate of the value of land, and is content with an
ephemeral prosperity.

[Sidenote: Central versus peripheral location.]

A broad territorial base and security of possession are the guarantees
of national survival. The geographic conditions which favor one often
operate against the other. Peripheral location means a narrow base but a
protected frontier along the sea; central location means opportunity for
widening the territory, but it also means danger. A state embedded in