Political maps are therefore subject to sudden and radical alterations, as when France's name was wiped off the North American continent in 1763, or when recently Spain's sovereignty in the Western Hemisphere was obliterated.

But the race stocks, languages, customs, and institutions of both France and Spain remained after the flags had departed.

The reason is that society is far more deeply rooted in the land than is a state, does not expand or contract its area so readily.

Society is always, in a sense, _adscripta glebae_; an expanding state which incorporates a new piece of territory inevitably incorporates its inhabitants, unless it exterminates or expels them.

Yet because racial and social geography changes slowly, quietly and imperceptibly, like all those fundamental processes which we call growth, it is not so easy and obvious a task to formulate a natural law for the territorial relations of the various hunter, pastoral nomadic, agricultural, and industrial types of society as for those of the growing state.
[Sidenote: Land basis of society.] Most systems of sociology treat man as if he were in some way detached from the earth's surface; they ignore the land basis of society.