mpass of their commercial exchanges, the scope of their maritime
ventures, the extent of their linguistic area, the measure of their
territorial ambitions, or the range of their intellectual interests and
human sympathies. From land to ethics, the rule holds good. Peoples in
the lower stages of civilization have contracted spatial ideas, desire
and need at a given time only a limited territory, though they may
change that territory often; they think in small linear terms, have a
small horizon, a small circle of contact with others, a small range of
influence, only tribal sympathies; they have an exaggerated conception
of their own size and importance, because their basis of comparison is
fatally limited. With a mature, widespread people like the English or
French, all this is different; they have made the earth their own, so
far as possible.
Just because of this universal tendency toward the occupation of ever
larger areas and the formation of vaster political aggregates, in making
a sociological or political estimate of different peoples, we should
never lose sight of the fact that all racial and national
characteristics which operate toward the absorption of more land and
impel to political expansion are of fundamental value. A ship of state
manned by such a crew has its sails set to catch the winds of the world.
Territorial expansion is always preceded by an extension of the circle
of influence which a people exerts through its traders, its deep-sea
fishermen, its picturesque marauders and more respectable missionaries,
and earlier still by a widening of its mere geographical horizon through
fortuitous or systematic exploration.
C. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY CONTACTS
1. Village Life in America (from the Diary of a Young Girl)[128]
_November 21, 1852._--I am ten years old today, and I think I will write
a journal and tell who I am and what I am doing. I have lived with my
Grandfather and Grandmother Beals ever since I was seven years old, and
Anna, too, since she was four. Our brothers, James and John, came too,
but they are at East Bloomfield at Mr. Stephen Clark's Academy. Miss
Laura Clark of Naples is their teacher.
Anna and I go to school at District No. 11. Mr. James C. Cross is our
teacher, and some of the scholars say he is cross by name and cross by
nature, but I like him. He gave me a book by the name of _Noble Deeds of
American Women_, for reward of merit, in my reading class.
_Friday._--Grandmo
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