The historical significance of many small peoples, and the historical insignificance of many big ones even to the _nil_ point, is merely the expression 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.]