Frontiers

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Page 53 - It would be futile to assert that an exact Science of Frontiers has been or is ever likely to be evolved: for no one law can possibly apply to all nations or peoples, to all Governments, all territories, or all climates. The evolution of Frontiers is perhaps an art rather than a science, so plastic and malleable are its forms and manifestations.
Page 4 - Frontiers are the chief anxiety of nearly every Foreign Office in the civilized world, and are the subject of four out of every five political treaties or conventions that are novi concluded. . . . Frontier policy is of the first practical importance, and has a more profound effect upon the peace or warfare of nations than any other factor, political or economic.
Page 7 - Frontiers are indeed the razor's edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war or peace, of life or death to nations.
Page 47 - Of all the diplomatic forms or fictions which have latterly been described, it may be observed that the uniform tendency is for the weaker to crystallize into the harder shape. Spheres of Interest tend to become Spheres of Influence; temporary Leases to become perpetual; Spheres of Influence to develop into Protectorates; Protectorates to be the forerunners of ) complete incorporation. The process is not so immoral as it might at first sight appear; it is in reality an endeavour, sanctioned by general...
Page 57 - I am one of those who hold that in this larger atmosphere, on the outskirts of Empire, where the machine is relatively impotent and the individual is strong, is to be found an ennobling and invigorating stimulus for our youth, saving them alike from the corroding ease and the morbid excitements of Western civilization.
Page 42 - Protectorates shade away by imperceptible degrees into the diplomatic concept now popularly known as Spheres of Influence. When first this phrase was employed in the language of diplomacy I do not know, but I doubt if a more momentous early use of it can be traced than that in the assurance first given by Count Gortchakoff to Lord Clarendon in 1869, and often since repeated, that Afghanistan lay ' completely outside the sphere within which Russia might be called upon to exercise her influence...
Page 30 - ... Indies may be observed in the nomenclature of the Frontier. The old American North West or Frontier of a century ago (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) is now the middle region and heart of the United States. Just so in British India, what were the North-West Provinces seventy years...
Page 49 - Asiatic countries it would be true to say that demarcation has never taken place except under European pressure and by the intervention of European agents.
Page 5 - Wars of religion, of alliances, of rebellion, of aggrandizement, of dynastic intrigue or ambition — wars in which the personal element was often the predominant factor — tend to be replaced by frontier wars, ie, wars arising out of the expansion of states and kingdoms, carried to a point, as the habitable globe shrinks, at which the interests or ambitions of one state come into sharp and irreconcilable collision with those of another.
Page 55 - ... the savagery of conflict, the labour of reclamation, and the ardours of the chase, the American nation was born. There that wonderful and virile democracy, imbued with the courage and tenacity of its forefathers, but fired with an eager and passionate exaltation, sprang into being. The panorama of characters and incidents, already becoming ancient history, passes in vivid procession before our eyes. First comes the trapper and the fur trader tracking his way into the Indian hunting-grounds and...

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