5 20 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



sum of happiness if their country contains 208,670 square miles in- 

 stead of 203,070.* Few errors are more evident. There are thou- 

 sands of examples to prove that the welfare of citizens is in no way 

 a function of the extent of the state. If it were so, Russia would 

 be the richest country in Europe, while everybody knows it is ex- 

 actly the contrary. Taxation in that country is pushed to limits that 

 might almost be called absurd, and for that reason the extent of the 

 nation is one of the greatest obstacles to its prosperity. 



As an example to illustrate the absurdity of the idolatry of square 

 miles, take California, which now has 158,360 square miles, f and 

 1,200,000 inhabitants. If in another century the population should 

 rise to forty millions, it might be expedient for the good government 

 of these men to divide the State into several. If the conservatives 

 of that period should declare that they would give the last drop of 

 their blood to preserve the unity of their Commonwealth, they would 

 be afflicted with the square-mile craze, and as foolish as the Euro- 

 peans. Territorial divisions are made for men, not men for ter- 

 ritorial divisions. The object enlightened patriots should pursue 

 is not that a certain geographical extent should be included under 

 one name or many, but that the divisions should conform to the 

 aspirations and desires of the citizens. They should impose as little 

 restraint as possible upon the economical and intellectual progress 

 of societies. 



The inhabitants of the province of Rio Grande recently wanted to 

 secede from Brazil. The Government at Rio Janeiro, afflicted like 

 other governments by the square-mile craze, would not consent to 

 it, and hostilities broke out. Suppose the Rio Grandians had been 

 victorious in this war; what would have been the result? There 

 would have been eleven states in South America instead of ten. 

 No modern political theorist would see the presage of an extraordi- 

 nary calamity in such an event as that. The new state would have 

 been recognized by the other powers, and things would have gone on 

 as before. But if the central Government, respecting the wishes of 

 the Rio Grandians, had consented to the secession, the empirical 

 politicians of our time would have affirmed that the world had been 

 unbalanced. Yet the situation would have been exactly the same 

 in point of territorial divisions — eleven independent states instead of 

 ten. We have then to think that, in the eyes of modern politicians, 

 the avoidance of a war, the fact of sparing hundreds of millions of 

 money and thousands of human lives, diminishes wealth, while the 

 waste of capital and massacres should increase it! It would be hard 

 to be less logical or more absurd. 



* The difference is the extent of Alsace-Lorraine. 



f About the extent of the British Isles, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland combined. 



