re of the Danube.

[Sidenote: Thalassic vicinal location.]

The unifying effect of vicinal location is greatly enhanced if the
neighboring people are grouped about an enclosed sea which affords an
easy highway for communication. The integrating force of such a basin
will often overcome the disintegrating force of race antagonisms. The
Roman Empire in the Mediterranean was able to evolve an effective
centralized government and to spread one culture over the neighboring
shores, despite great variety of nationality and language and every
degree of cultural development. A certain similarity of natural
conditions, climatic and otherwise, from the Iberian Peninsula to the
borders of the Syrian desert, also aided in the process of amalgamation.

Where similarity of race already forms a basis for congeniality, such
circumthalassic groups display the highest degree of interactive
influence. These contribute to a further blending of population and
unification of culture, by which the whole circle of the enclosing lands
tends to approach one standard of civilization. This was the history of
the Baltic coast from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, when
the German Hansa distributed the material products of Europe's highest
civilization from Russian Novgorod to Norway. The North Sea group,
first under the leadership of Holland, later under England's guidance,
became a single community of advancing culture, which was a later
reflection of the early community of race stretching from the Faroe and
Shetland Islands to the Rhine and the Elbe. This same process has been
going on for ages about the marginal basins of eastern Asia, the Yellow
and Japan Seas. Community of race and culture stamps China, Korea and
Japan. A general advance in civilization under the leadership of Japan,
the England of the East, now inaugurates the elevation of the whole
group.

[Sidenote: Complementary locations.]

An even closer connection exists between adjoining peoples who are
united by ties of blood and are further made economically dependent upon
one another, because of a contrast in the physical conditions and,
therefore, in the products of their respective territories. Numerous
coast and inland tribes, pastoral and agricultural tribes are united
because they are mutually necessary. In British Columbia and Alaska the
fishing Indians of the seaboard long held a definite commercial relation
to the hunting tribes of the interior, selling them the