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 of Europe, because the histories of these two groups are bound up in their respective continents. The idea of a European state has a different content from that of an Asiatic, or North American or African state; it includes a different race or combination of races, different social and economic development, different political ideals. Location, therefore, means climate and plant life at one end of the scale, civilization and political status at the other. [Sidenote: Intercontinental location.] This larger conception of location brings a correspondingly larger conception of environment, which affords the solution of many otherwise hopeless problems of anthropo-geography. It is embodied in the law that the influences of a land upon its people spring not only from the physical features of the land itself, but also from a wide circle of lands into which it has been grouped by virtue of its location. Almost every geographical interpretation of the ancient and modern history of Greece has been inadequate, because it has failed sufficiently to emphasize the most essential factor in this history, namely, Greece's location at the threshold of the Orient. This location has given to Greek history a strong Asiatic color. It comes out in the accessibility of Greece to ancient Oriental civilization and commerce, and is conspicuous in every period from the Argonautic Expedition to the achievement of independence in 1832 and the recent efforts for the liberation of Crete. This outpost location before the Mediterranean portals of the vast and arid plains of southwestern Asia, exposed to every tide of migration or conquest sent out by those hungry lands, had in it always an element of weakness. In comparison with the shadow of Asia, which constantly overhung the Greek people and from 1401 to 1832 enveloped them, only secondary importance can be attributed to advantageous local conditions as factors in Greek history.