hinterland, and therefore has been linked historically with Rome, Italy,
and the Adriatic. It is a part of the upper Danube Valley and therefore
shares much of its history with Bavaria and Germany, while the lower
Danube has linked it with the Black Sea, Greece, the Russian steppes,
and Asia. The Asiatic Hungarians have pushed forward their ethnic
boundary nearly to Vienna. The Austrian capital has seen the warring
Turks beneath its walls, and shapes its foreign policy with a view to
the relative strength of the Sultan and the Czar.

[Sidenote: Unity of the earth.]

The earth is an inseparable whole. Each country or sea is physically and
historically intelligible only as a portion of that whole. Currents and
wind-systems of the oceans modify the climate of the nearby continents,
and direct the first daring navigations of their peoples. The
alternating monsoons of the Indian Ocean guided Arab merchantmen from
ancient times back and forth between the Red Sea and the Malabar coast
of India.[33] The Equatorial Current and the northeast trade-wind
carried the timid ships of Columbus across the Atlantic to America. The
Gulf Stream and the prevailing westerlies later gave English vessels the
advantage on the return voyage. Europe is a part of the Atlantic coast.
This is a fact so significant that the North Atlantic has become a
European sea. The United States also is a part of the Atlantic coast:
this is the dominant fact of American history. China forms a section of
the Pacific rim. This is the fact back of the geographic distribution of
Chinese emigration to Annam, Tonkin, Siam, Malacca, the Philippines,
East Indies, Borneo, Australia, Hawaiian Islands, the Pacific Coast
States, British Columbia, the Alaskan coast southward from Bristol Bay
in Bering Sea, Ecuador and Peru.