A unitary well-defined territory of well marked and fairly uniform character tends to national unity, not only through making the community a relatively closed one, but also by aiding the imagination to grasp the idea of the nation and offering a common object to the affections and sentiments of the people. Contrast in this respect the physical characters of England and Germany. The boundaries of the latter are almost everywhere artificial and arbitrary and have fluctuated greatly. It would be impossible for a poet to write of Germany as Shakespeare wrote of England:— This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war; This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, and all the rest of that splendid passage. France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Denmark, Scandinavia, are all more fortunate than Germany or Austria in this respect; and the lack of such natural boundaries has been in the past, and threatens to be in the future, a source of weakness to the German nation. We may, I think, not improbably attribute, in part at least, to this circumstance a peculiarity often noticed in German emigrants—namely, that they rapidly become denationalised and assimilated by the peoples among whom they settle, and that an Americanised German, for example, has often less sympathetic feeling for Germany than a foreigner. For, owing largely to the lack of natural boundaries and the consequent fluctuations that have occurred, and the mingling and blending with other peoples, Germany is a less clear-cut conception than Great Britain or France; to be a German is something much less definite than to be an Englishman or a Japanese, or even a Frenchman or a Spaniard[65]. And the presence or lack of definite natural territorial boundaries operates in a similar way through many centuries, determining on the one hand historical continuity to a people as a whole, or on the other hand breaches of historical continuity. The United States of America afford a fine example of the binding influence of a well-defined territory; for here the effect is clearly isolated from racial factors and from slowly accumulated tradition. The Monroe doctrine is the outward official expression of this effect. The private individual effect is a sense of part ownership of a splendid territory with a great future before it. And we are told, I believe truly, that this sense is very strong and very generally diffused even among immigrants; that it inspires an unselfish enthusiasm for the work of developing the immense resources of the country; that this is the idealistic motive of much of the intense activity which we are apt to ascribe to the love of the ‘almighty dollar’; and that it is one of the main causes of the rapid assimilation of immigrants to the national type of mind.