tion.]

All peoples in their geographical distribution tend to follow a social
and political law of gravitation, in accordance with which members of
the same tribe or race gather around a common center or occupy a
continuous stretch of territory, as compactly as their own economic
status, and the physical conditions of climate and soil will permit.
This is characteristic of all mature and historically significant
peoples who have risen to sedentary life, maintained their hold on a
given territory, and, with increase of population, have widened their
boundaries. The nucleus of such a people may be situated somewhere in
the interior of a continent, and with growing strength it may expand in
every direction; or it may originate on some advantageous inlet of the
sea and spread thence up and down the coast, till the people have
possessed themselves of a long-drawn hem of land and used this
peripheral location to intercept the trade between their back country
and the sea.

These are the two types of continuous location. In contrast to them, a
discontinuous or scattered location characterizes the sparse
distribution of primitive hunting and pastoral tribes; or the shattered
fragments of a conquered people, whose territory has been honeycombed by
the land appropriation of the victors; or a declining, moribund people,
who, owing to bad government, poor economic methods, and excessive
competition in the struggle for existence, have shrunk to mere patches.
As a favorable symptom, scattered location regularly marks the healthy
growth of an expanding people, who throw out here and there detached
centers of settlement far beyond the compact frontier, and fix these as
the goal for the advance of their boundary. It is also a familiar
feature of maritime commercial expansion, which is guided by no
territorial ambition but merely aims to secure widely distributed
trading stations at favorable coast points, in order to make the circle
of commerce as ample and resourceful as possible. But this latter form
of scattered location is not permanently sound. Back of it lies the
short-sighted policy of the middleman nation, which makes wholly
inadequate estimate of the value of land, and is content with an
ephemeral prosperity.

[Sidenote: Central versus peripheral location.]

A broad territorial base and security of possession are the guarantees
of national survival. The geographic conditions which favor one often
operate against the other.