on of the preponderant importance of location over area. The
Phoenicians, from their narrow strip of coast at the foot of Mount
Lebanon, were disseminators of culture over the whole Mediterranean.
Holland owed her commercial and maritime supremacy, from the thirteenth
to the middle of the seventeenth century, to her exceptional position at
the mouth of the great Rhine highway and at the southern angle of the
North Sea near the entrance to the unexploited regions of the Baltic.
The Iroquois tribes, located where the Mohawk Valley opened a way
through the Appalachian barrier between the Hudson River and Lake
Ontario, occupied both in the French wars and in the Revolution a
strategic position which gave them a power and importance out of all
proportion to their numbers.

Location often assumes a fictitious political value, due to a
combination of political interests. The Turkish power owes its survival
on the soil of Europe to-day wholly to its position on the Bosporus.
Holland owes the integrity of her kingdom, and Roumania that of hers, to
their respective locations at the mouths of the Rhine and the Danube,
because the interest of western Europe demands that these two important
arteries of commerce should be held by powers too weak ever to tie them
up. The same principle has guaranteed the neutrality of Switzerland,
whose position puts it in control of the passes of the Central Alps from
Savoy to the Tyrol; and, more recently, that of the young state of
Panama, through which the Isthmian Canal is to pass.

[Sidenote: Content of the term location.]

Geographical location necessarily includes the idea of the size and form
of a country. Even the most general statement of the zonal and
interoceanic situation of Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the
Russian Empire, indicates the area and contour of their territories.
This is still more conspicuously the case with naturally defined
regions, such as island and peninsula countries. But location includes a
complex of yet larger and more potent relations which go with mere
attachment to this or that continent, or to one or another side of a
continent. Every part of the world gives to its lands and its people
some of its own qualities; and so again every part of this part.
Arabia, India and Farther India, spurs of the Asiatic land-mass, have
had and will always have a radically different ethnic and political
history from Greece, Italy and Spain, the corresponding peninsulas