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This evening I am asking you to consider with me for a while the subject of international boundaries, which, by a process involving many forces, has come to have a very important position in international law. Ratzel, the great German authority in the field of political geography, said that "the mathematical precision of boundaries is a special characteristic of higher civilization; the progress of geodesy and cartography have permitted the making in Europe of political boundaries as well as geographical abstractions." I employ the term "boundary" rather than the term "frontier," for "frontier" is used in two senses: one, that of the boundary; the other, that of the zone, narrower or wider, where one state ends and another begins, in which sometimes the exact limit of that frontier has never been exactly fixed.