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STUDIES IN POLITICAL AREAS 371
the rivers and coasts in Sierra Leone to which England, in the absence of rivalry, has limited her expansion only since 1883. The Phoenician and Greek colonial cities sought the spring of political power, not in territory, but in wealth. Founded as they were by emigration, further migration beyond the seas was to them more natural as the last political resource in case of increase of population than expansion over the land. How slight was the bond that held them to the soil is shown by the vast scheme of Bias of Priene to transplant the Greek settlements of Asia Minor to Sardinia in the western Mediterranean. There lies a contrast found throughout universal history in this rapid expansion over a thousand limited areas, all of which taken together could not make one large, enduring state, and the slow, onward, swelling inner colonization of the great powers in the neighboring continents of Africa and Asia.
The matter of area grows still more limited in the case of political possessions which have, as it were, only a symbolic value, and in many cases are no longer to be regarded as political realities. The loges or factories which the French have retained according to the treaty of 1787 upon English soil in India, in addition to the five acknowledged remnants of their empire, at Jugdia, Patna, Dakka, Cossimbasar, and elsewhere, have never been made use of by the French in the sense in which the treaty intended — that is, for trade under the French flag; and never- theless, in spite of all offers on the part of the English, they have never been relinquished. The small islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon (area, ninety-one square miles) off the coast of New Foundland hold a similar position, although they are of considerable commercial value.
Phases of development which according to their nature are limited find the most favorable environment in contracted areas. For that primitive stage of political development in which one clan holds itself apart from another and each forms a small community for itself, mountains and forests encourage the inclination toward restriction of territory. But from the open plains, which do not favor this tendency, state-making on a larger scale penetrates into these retreats. The family element in the feeling of nation-
