Geographic education' — brioham. 401 
Thus by gradual processes have come into being effective and 
powerful means for promoting geography in this country and rais- 
ing it to the level of efficiency which it has reached in some of the 
countries of Europe. We have the Geological Survey, the Depart- 
ment of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, and other or- 
ganizations of Government supplying day by day and year by year 
vast stores of geographic information. We have several mature 
societies engaged in research and in reaching intelligent readers and 
citizens everywhere. We have growing interest and effective agen- 
cies at work in elementary education, and it may at last be said 
that the need of geography is now so fully realized in our universi- 
ties that the demand for qualified teachers exceeds the supply. 
Thus forward movements in geographic education have been in 
progress for many years. But none could have foreseen the wide- 
spread and profound awakening to geographic facts and principles 
that was to come with the recent War of Nations. 
" If we glance at each of the great continents of the globe we see 
how truly the war is called a World War. Of Europe's approxi- 
mately 4,000,000 square miles of territory, seven-eighths was di- 
rectly involved in the conflict. For Africa the fraction is larger, 
32 out of 33 parts having been in belligerency. Asia, with her 
17,000,000 square miles, shows twenty- four twenty-fifths of her terri- 
tory involved in the conflict, while Australia was completely in the 
throes of war. Turning to North America, we shall find that four-' 
fifths of her area of nearly 10,000,000 square miles is occupied by 
two of the great countries that were in the struggle. Only about 
one-half of South America remained nominally neutral. Summing 
it all up, of the 52,000,000 square miles and more of territory mak- 
ing up the land of the entire globe, exclusive of Antarctica, more than 
45,000,000 square miles belong to the belligerent nations, and the 
remaining few million were more or less profoundly affected. 
" The extent of the war and of world changes may be seen if we 
glance at the map of Africa. If Germany had won, she would have 
taken possession of the Belgian Congo and of adjacent British and 
French colonies on the south and north, making a solid block of 
German sovereignty across equatorial Africa from the Atlantic to 
the Indian Ocean. What the extent of her aggressions in North 
Africa from Gibraltar to Suez would have been we can not say, but 
that it would have been large there can be no doubt. As it is, how- 
ever, Germany is excluded from Africa, and both British and French 
possessions are enormously enlarged. Furthermore, the great ob- 
stacle has been removed to the construction of the Cape-to-Cairo 
Railway. That obstacle was a thousand miles of German territory 
in East Africa. 
