These self-governing colonies with their spheres of influence, with vast areas still unpeopled, have a future before them which is dissociated from the methods of an over-peopled Europe, and among them the preservation of peace is the direct object and condition of their progressive development.
These three last projects would add 2,774,000 acres to the irrigated area of the province, and as they would flow through tracts almost unpeopled, they would afford a most valuable outlet for the congested districts of northern India.
Probably the polar regions alone do not fall within the category of the potentially productive, as even sandy and alkaline desert is rendered habitable where irrigation can be introduced; and vast tracts of fertile soil adapted for immediate exploitation, especially in the temperate zones, both north and south, only remain unpeopled because they are not yet wanted for colonization.
In some ways this is a curiously unpeopled world yet one wholly dependent and organized by our language.