Excerpt from The British Empire Beyond the Seas: An Introduction to World Geography The world at the present time is divided into a large number of separate states which vary greatly in size and importance. At one end of the scale we have small blocks of land, such as the tiny principality of Monaco, and at the other great empires and common wealths. Among these states four stand out by reason of their Size and their large population. These are, in order of size, the British Empire, the Russian Empire, France with its colonies and dependencies, and the republic of China. The accompanying diagram shows the relative areas and populations of these four great states (fig. I). From this diagram We see that the British Empire has by far the largest extension, the Russian coming next to it in this respect. On the other hand, China, with an area slightly less than that of France and its colonies, has a population which exceeds that of the British Empire. Thus China is the most densely peopled of the great states. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.