Political geography

“ Political versus social geography.
The land is a more conspicuous factor in the history of states than in the history of society, but not more necessary and potent. Wars, which constitute so large a part of political history, have usually aimed more or less directly at acquisition or retention of territory; they have made every petty quarrel the pretext for mulcting the weaker nation of part of its land. ”

“ Treats of the form and size of the earth, of the construction of globes to represent it; determines the latitude and longitude of places on its surface, and all geographical problems pertaining to numbers, distances, and magnitudes.
POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY
Describes, in a general way, the countries and nations of men as they are politically divided, defines their boundaries, and to some extent characterizes their social and civil institutions. A great advance has been made in this branch during the present century. People respecting whom little was known, have come into the family of nations. ”

“ But it is with the political divisions that historical geography has to deal in the first place. With the nature of the land, and with the people who occupy it, it has to deal only so far as they have influenced the political divisions. Our present business in short is, first to draw the map of the countries{3} with which we are concerned as it appeared after each of the different changes which they have gone through, and then to point out the historical causes which have led to the changes on the map. ”

“ Geography has been a determining factor in the social, economic, and political development of every nation on Earth; indeed, it is impossible to understand history without taking into account the location, natural resources, and other geographic characteristics of nations. When we study the geography of our 50 States, as well as the relationship of America to the world as a whole, we gain a better understanding of our Nation's history and development—and a deeper appreciation of its diversity and splendor. ”

“ Geographical influences that have helped determine the discovery and development of this country, and global conditions that have given rise to wave after wave of immigration to our shores, make ours a history that cannot be understood without a ready knowledge of world geography. In order for our Nation to maintain its special heritage and retain its position of global economic and political leadership, it is essential that our citizens have a sound appreciation of basic geographical facts and principles. ”

“ The ultimate cause of the predominant form of federal government may be the geographical diversity of the country, as in the cantons occupying the once isolated mountain valleys of Switzerland, the racial diversity of the people, as in Austria-Hungary, or merely political expediency, as in republics of the American type. ”

“ On account of the importance of thoroughly understanding the articulation of great districts, in contradistinction to a mere division, which implies no organic and living correlation of parts, and which gives over to mathematics, political history, and fortuitous circumstances the duty of explaining geographical phenomena, it is instructive to trace the footsteps of our science back to some of the earlier conceptions. ”

“ For this reason, clusters of islands, a continent divided by many natural barriers, great rivers, ridges of mountains, and arms of the sea, are best fitted for becoming the nursery of independent and respectable nations. The distinction of states being clearly maintained, a principle of political life is established in every division, and the capital of every district, like the heart of an animal body, communicates with ease the vital blood and the national spirit to its members. ”

“ Within this vast empire there are geographic provinces, separate in physical conditions, into which American colonization has flowed, and in each of which a special society has developed, with an economic, political and social life of its own. ”

“ The communities of those days were cities, the communities of our days are nations; but cities and nations alike share in a common political life in which many of the ages that went between their days and ours had no share. ”

“ An approximation to original conditions occurs when a victorious State either establishes cities in the conquered provinces, centralizing in them the power over the respective territories, or transforms cities that already exist into political centres. ”

“ The geographic development and political advancement of our own country in the century of our national existence, is a marked instance of the wisdom of preparing for the future by such acts as legitimately fall within the province of legislation. ”

“ What do we find has been, and is, the tendency of the peoples of this continent? Does not history show, and do not modern and existing tendencies declare, that the lines of cleavage among them lie along the lines of latitude? Men spread from east to west, and from east to west the political lines, which mean the lines of diversity, extend. The central spaces are, and will be yet more, the great centres of population. ”

“ Therefore the important law may be laid down, that the more closely the territorial growth of a state keeps pace with that of its people, and the more nearly the political area coincides with the ethnic, the greater is the strength and stability of the state. ”

“ In the modern teaching of geography, the beginning is made in school-yard or the precinct and from this centre it broadens out to cover one’s city, one’s county, one’s state or province, one’s country, until at last it embraces the round earth. ”

“ Here, in the vast spaces—mere empty light and air, though such pleasant air and such pretty light as yet—the great Federal future seems, under vague bright forms, to hover and to stalk, making the horizon recede to take it in, making the terraces too, below the long colonnades, the admirable standpoints, the sheltering porches, of political philosophy. ”

“ The inevitable result of geographical and political division was the maintenance of a great number of local characteristics in language, differentiating in this respect also each political community from its nearest neighbours. It was only natural that the inhabitants of a country so little adapted to maintain a numerous population should have early sent off swarms to other lands. ”

“ Geography should assume that frontiers are the lines at which peoples meet rather than part; and history should lay stress upon the forces that have made for human unity rather than for national power. ”

“ A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. ”

“ We have seen that in localities differing so widely as do mountain-regions, marshes or mud-islands, and jungles, men of different races have developed political heads of this compound kind. And, on observing that the localities, otherwise so unlike, are alike as being severally made up of parts difficult of access, we can not question that to this is mainly due the governmental form under which their inhabitants unite. ”

“ Every one was something more than a certain aggregate of square miles wherein dwelt an uncertain number of uncertain inhabitants, something more than a Territory transformed into a State by the magic of political legerdemain ”

“ But with a system of representation so complete as ours, aided by the facilities furnished by modern science and art for the circulation of opinion, these difficulties disappear, and with a proper constitutional definition, and establishment of the true functions of the central and local governments, the superficies of a territory, or the number of its inhabitants have not necessarily anything to do with the practicability of combining their political interests under one central administration. ”

“ So large a territory, belonging to the public, forms a subject of national concern of a 250 very delicate nature, especially in popular governments. We know, in the history of other countries, with what views and designs the public lands have been granted. ”

“ It is peculiarly the province of geography to study the present distribution and character of men in relation to their surroundings and these are the facts of mankind that must forever be the chief data of economic history. ”

“ The mountains that divided the country into small isolated districts had a great political importance in giving rise to many separate and independent states, the rivalries and conflicts of which favored the working-out of political problems and the growth of political freedom. ”

“ A number of states, originally independent of one another, differing in origin and language and everything that makes states differ from one another, some of them members of the former Empire, some not, have, as a matter of fact, come together to form a power which fills a large space in modern history and on the modern map. ”

“ It is clear then, that geography is essential to all the transactions of the statesman, informing us, as it does, of the position of the continents, seas, and oceans of the whole habitable earth. Information of especial interest to those who are concerned to know the exact truth of such particulars, and whether the places have been explored or not: for government will certainly be better administered where the size and position of the country, its own peculiarities, and those of the surrounding districts, are understood. ”

“ The leaders of this southern element came, in considerable measure, from well-to-do classes, who migrated to improve their conditions in the freer opportunities of a new country. Land speculation, the opportunity of political preferment, and the advantages which these growing communities brought to practitioners of the law combined to attract men of this class. ”

“ Two thousand miles westward from the rock where their fathers landed, may now be found the sons of the Pilgrims, cultivating smiling fields, rearing towns and villages, and cherishing, we trust, the patrimonial blessings of wise institutions, of liberty, and religion. The world has seen nothing like this. Regions large enough to be empires, and which, half a century ago, were known only as remote and unexplored wildernesses, are now teeming with population, and prosperous in all the great concerns of life; in good governments, the means of subsistence, and social happiness. ”

“ From a thin string of agricultural settlements on the Atlantic coast, here and there dotted with small trading towns, this Republic has in a century expanded into a vast empire spanning a continent, excelling in wealth and material power every other nation on the globe. ”

“ Of the three kinds of land the common mark, save where curtailed or usurped by lords in the days of feudalism, has generally remained public property to this day. The pleasant green commons or squares which occur in the midst of towns and cities in England and the United States most probably originated from the coalescence of adjacent mark-communities, whereby the border-land used in common by all was brought into the centre of the new aggregate. ”

“ But in America geography decrees that two or three papers must serve the entire population of a given area, rich and poor, ignorant and educated, Democrat and Republican, coarse and refined, conservative and radical. ”

“ Our country is not a small province or canton, but an empire, extending over a large and diversified surface, with a population of various conditions and pursuits. It is in this variety that consists its prosperity; for the different parts become useful one to the other, not by identity, but by difference, of production, and thus each by interchange contributes to the interest of the other. ”

“ In proof of this great and striking truth, no other argument requires to be offered, than an immediate reference to the experience of all ages and places: the various nations of the earth, the provinces of each nation, the towns, and even the villages of the same province, differ from each other in their accommodations; and are in every respect more flourishing, the greater their activity in establishing new channels of useful employ, calculated to procure the necessaries and comforts of life. ”

“ Certain wide regions will become specifically administrative and central—the home lands, the mother lands, the centres of education and population, and others will become specifically fields of action. ”

“ Hence we refer to village politics, town politics, national politics, international politics and, in the present instance, to the politics of civilization as a way of life.
Each sample, referred to in our examination of typical civilizations, was built around a center, nucleus or homeland consisting of one or more cities with their adjacent hinterlands. The nucleus of the developing civilization was also the nucleus of an empire. Each nucleus was a center of planned production; accumulating wealth, growing population and expanding authority. ”

“ The vast physiographic provinces of the country formed the basis for the development of natural economic and social areas, comparable in their size, industrial resources, and spirit, to nations of the Old World. ”

“ Our internal geography has attracted the chief attention of the student, not so much from the greater difficulty of the subject as from its vast importance in the early history of our government. It is not, indeed, too much to say that the organization of the present government under the constitution is an event of scarcely greater importance than the determination of the final policy of the states and the nation concerning the unoccupied western lands. ”