Owing to the evolution of geographic relations, the physical environment
favorable to one stage of development may be adverse to another, and
_vice versa_. For instance, a small, isolated and protected habitat,
like that of Egypt, Phoenicia, Crete and Greece, encourages the birth
and precocious growth of civilization; but later it may cramp progress,
and lend the stamp of arrested development to a people who were once the
model for all their little world. Open and wind-swept Russia, lacking
these small, warm nurseries where Nature could cuddle her children, has
bred upon its boundless plains a massive, untutored, homogeneous folk,
fed upon the crumbs of culture that have fallen from the richer tables
of Europe. But that item of area is a variable quantity in the equation.
It changes its character at a higher stage of cultural development.
Consequently, when the Muscovite people, instructed by the example of
western Europe, shall have grown up intellectually, economically and
politically to their big territory, its area will become a great
national asset. Russia will come into its own, heir to a long-withheld
inheritance. Many of its previous geographic disadvantages will vanish,
like the diseases of childhood, while its massive size will dwarf many
previous advantages of its European neighbors.

[Sidenote: Evolution of world relations.]

This evolution of geographic relations applies not only to the local
environment, but also to the wider world relations of a people. Greeks
and Syrians, English and Japanese, take a different rank among the
nations of the earth to-day from that held by their ancestors 2,000 years
ago, simply because the world relations of civilized peoples have been
steadily expanding since those far-back days of Tyrian and Athenian
supremacy. The period of maritime discoveries in the fifteenth and