In the settlement of territorial rights and of the sovereignty to be exercised over particular regions there are several factors which require consideration. International boundaries may be drawn along ethnic, economic, geographic, historic, or strategic lines. One or all of these elements may influence the decision, but whatever argument may be urged in favor of any one of these factors, the chief object in the determination of the sovereignty to be exercised within a certain territory is national safety. National safety is as dominant in the life of a nation as self-preservation is in the life of an individual. It is even more so, as nations do not respond to the impulse of self-sacrifice. With national safety as the primary object to be attained in territorial settlements, the factors of the problem assume generally, though not always, the following order of importance: the strategic, to which is closely allied the geographic and historic; the economic, affecting the commercial and industrial life of a nation; and lastly the ethnic, including in the terms such conditions as consanguinity, common language, and similar social and religious institutions. The national safety and the economic welfare of the United States were at stake in the War of Secession, although the attempt to secede resulted from institutional rather than ethnic causes. The same was true when in the Papineau Rebellion of 1837 the French inhabitants of the Province of Lower Canada attempted for ethnic reasons to free themselves from British sovereignty. Had the right of "self-determination" in the latter case been recognized as "imperative" by Great Britain, the national life and economic growth of Canada would have been strangled because the lines of communication and the commercial routes to the Atlantic seaboard would have been across an alien state. The future of Canada, with its vast undeveloped resources, its very life as a British colony, depended upon denying the right of "self-determination." It was denied and the French inhabitants of Quebec were forced against their will to accept British sovereignty.