has long been wrestling with Africa, but it can not get
a grip, owing to the form of its antagonist; it finds no limb by which
the giant can be tripped and thrown. Asia presents a wide border of
marginal lands, some of them like Arabia and India being almost
continental in their proportions. Since Europe began her career of
maritime and colonial expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, she has seized upon these peripheral projections as if they
were the handles on a pilot wheel, and by them she has steered the
course of Asia ever since. These semi-detached outlyers of the continent
have enabled her to stretch a girdle of European influences around the
central core. Such influences, through the avenues of commerce, railway
concessions, missionary propaganda, or political dominion, have
permeated the accessible periphery and are slowly spreading thence into
the interior. China and Persia have felt these influences not less than
India and Tongking; Japan, which has most effectually preserved its
political autonomy, has profited by them most.

This historical contrast between center and periphery of continents
reappears in smaller land masses, such as peninsulas and islands. The
principle holds good regardless of size. The whole fringe of Arabia,
from Antioch to Aden and from Mocha to Mascat, has been the scene of
incoming and outgoing activities, has developed live bases of trade,
maritime growth, and culture, while the inert, somnolent interior has
drowsed away its long eventless existence. The rugged, inaccessible
heart of little Sardinia repeats the story of central Arabia in its
aloofness, its impregnability, backwardness, and in the purity of its
race. Its accessible coast, forming a convenient way-station on the
maritime crossroads of the western Mediterranean, has received a
succession of conquerors and an intermittent influx of every ethnic
strain known in the great basin.

[Sidenote: Periphery of colonization.]

The story of discovery and colonization, from the days of ancient Greek
enterprise in the Mediterranean to the recent German expansion along the
Gulf of Guinea, shows the appropriation first of the rims of islands and
continents, and later that of the interior. A difference of race and
culture between inland and peripheral inhabitants meets us almost
everywhere in retarded colonial lands. In the Philippines, the wild
people of Luzon, Mindoro and the Visayas are confined almost entirely
to