The larger the area occupied by a race or people, other geographic conditions being equal, the surer the guarantee of their permanence, and the less the chance of their repression or annihilation. A broad geographic base means generally abundant command of the resources of life and growth. Though for a growing people of wide possessions, like the Russians, the significance of the land may not be obvious, it becomes apparent enough in national decline and decay; for these even in their incipiency betray themselves in a loss of territory. A people which, voluntarily or otherwise, renounces its hold upon its land is on the downward path. Nothing else could show so plainly the national vitality of Japan as her tenacious purpose to get back Port Arthur taken from her by the Shimonoseki treaty in 1895. A people may decrease in numbers without serious consequences if it still retains its land; for herein lies its resources by which it may again hope to grow. The recurring loss of millions of lives in China from the wide-sweeping floods of the Hoangho is a passing episode, forgotten as soon as the mighty stream is re-embanked and the flooded plains reclaimed. The Civil War in the United States involved a temporary diminution of population and check to progress, but no lasting national weakness because no loss of territory. But the expulsion of the American Indians from their well-stocked hunting grounds in the Mississippi Valley and Atlantic plain to more restricted and barren lands in the far West, and the withdrawal of the Australian natives from the fertile coasts to the desert interior have meant racial renunciation of the sources of life. Hence a people who are conquered and dislodged from their territory, as were the ancient Britons by the Saxons, the Slavs from the land between the Elbe and the Niemen by the mediaeval Germans, and the Kaffirs in South Africa by the Dutch and English, the Ainos from Hondo by the Japanese, and the whole original Alpine race by the later coming Teutons from the fertile valleys and plains into the more barren highlands of western Europe, have little or no chance of regaining their own. When conquest results not in dislodgement, but only in the subjection of an undisturbed native population to a new ruling class, the vanquished retain their hold, only slightly impaired, perhaps, upon their strength-giving fields, recover themselves, and sooner or later conquer their conquerors either by absorption or revolution. This was the history of ancient Egypt with its Shepherd Kings, of England with its Norman lords, of Mexico and Peru with their Spanish victors. [Sidenote: Weakness of small states.]