[Sidenote: Man's increasing dependence upon nature.]

Since progress in civilization involves an increasing exploitation of natural advantages and the development of closer relations between a land and its people, it is an erroneous idea that man tends to emancipate himself more and more from the control of the natural conditions forming at once the foundation and environment of his activities. On the contrary, he multiplies his dependencies upon nature;[124] but while increasing their sum total, he diminishes the force of each. There lies the gist of the matter. As his bonds become more numerous, they become also more elastic. Civilization has lengthened his leash and padded his collar, so that it does not gall; but the leash is never slipped. The Delaware Indians depended upon the forests alone for fuel. A citizen of Pennsylvania, occupying the former Delaware tract, has the choice of wood, hard or soft coal, coke, petroleum, natural gas, or manufactured gas. Does this mean emancipation? By no means. For while fuel was a necessity to the Indian only for warmth and cooking, and incidentally for the pleasureable excitement of burning an enemy at the stake, it enters into the manufacture of almost every article that the Pennsylvanian uses in his daily life. His dependence upon nature has become more far-reaching, though less conspicuous and especially less arbitrary.

[Sidenote: Increase in kind and amount.]

These dependencies increase enormously both in variety and amount. Great Britain, with its twenty thousand merchant ships aggregating over ten million tons, and its immense import and export trade, finds its harbors vastly more important to-day for the national welfare than in Cromwell's time, when they were used by a scanty mercantile fleet. Since the generation of electricity by water-power and its application to industry, the plunging falls of the Scandinavian Mountains, of the Alps of Switzerland, France, and Italy, of the Southern Appalachians and the Cascade Range, are geographical features representing new and unsuspected forms of national capital, and therefore new bonds between land and people in these localities. Russia since 1844 has built 35,572 miles (57,374 kilometers) of railroad in her European territory, and thereby derived a new benefit from her level plains, which so facilitate the construction and cheap operation of railroads, that they have become in this aspect alone a new feature in her national economy. On the other hand, the galling restrictions of Russia's meager and strategically confined coasts, which tie her hand in any wide maritime policy, work a greater hardship to-day than they did a hundred years ago, since her growing population creates a more insistent demand for international trade. In contrast to Russia, Norway, with its paucity of arable soil and of other natural resources, finds its long indented coastline and the coast-bred seamanship of its people a progressively important national asset. Hence as ocean-carriers the Norwegians have developed a merchant marine nearly half as large again as that of Russia and Finland combined—1,569,646 tons[125] as against 1,084,165 tons.

This growing dependence of a civilized people upon its land is characterized by intelligence and self-help. Man forms a partnership with nature, contributing brains and labor, while she provides the capital or raw material in ever more abundant and varied forms. As a result of this cooeperation, held by the terms of the contract, he secures a better living than the savage who, like a mendicant, accepts what nature is pleased to dole out, and lives under the tyranny of her caprices.

NOTES TO CHAPTER III

[79] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, p. 196. London, 1904.

[80] Gardner, Atlas of English History, Map 29. New York, 1905.

[81] Hereford George, Historical Geography of Great Britain, pp. 58-60. London, 1904.

[82] Lewis Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 62. New York, 1878.

[83] Franklin H. Giddings, Elements of Sociology, p. 247. New York, 1902.

[84] Schoolcraft, The Indian Tribes of the United States, Vol. I, pp. 198-200, 224. Philadelphia, 1853.

[85] Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 231-232, 241.

[86] Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, Vol. I, pp. 70-73, 88. New York, 1895.

[87] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 392-393, 408, Vol. XIX, of History of North America, edited by Francis W. Thorpe, Philadelphia, 1905. Eleventh Census Report on the Indians, p. 51. Washington, 1894.

[88] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, pp. 249-250. New York, 1902-1906.

[89] Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 13-15. London, 1904.

[90] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 126. London, 1896-1898.

[91] Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 24. Stuttgart, 1888.

[92] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 131. London, 1896-1898.

[93] Paul Ehrenreich, Die Einteilung und Verbreitung der Voelkerstaemme Brasiliens, Peterman's Geographische Mittheilungen, Vol. XXXVII, p. 85. Gotha, 1891.

[94] Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 26, Note 5. Stuttgart, 1888.

[95] Ibid., p. 27.

[96] Albert Niblack, The Coast Indians of Southern Alaska and Northern British Columbia, pp. 298-299, 304, 337-339. Washington, 1888.

[97] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 173. London, 1896-1898.

[98] Ibid., Vol. III. pp. 173-174.

[99] Sven Hedin, Central Asia and Tibet, Vol. I, p. 184. New York and London, 1903.

[100] John de Plano Carpini, Journey in 1246, p. 130. Hakluyt Society, London, 1904.

[101] Journey of William de Rubruquis in 1253, p. 188. Hakluyt Society, London, 1903.

[102] Volney, quoted in Malthus, Principles of Population, Chap. VII, p. 60. London, 1878.

[103] Genesis, Chap. XIII, 1-12.

[104] Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Vol. I. p. 457. New York.

[105] Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol. I, pp. 202-204. Leipzig, 1897.

[106] E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, pp. 206-207. Boston, 1903.

[107] Roscher, Grundlagen des National-Oekonomik, Book VI. Bevoelkerung, p. 694, Note 5. Stuttgart, 1886.

[108] Edward John Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. I, p. 303-313. Oxford and New York, 1892.

[109] Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, pp. 31, 52. Stuttgart, 1888.

[110] Ibid., p. 56, Note 5.

[111] For these and other averages, Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, pp. 593-595. New York, 1872.

[112] Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, pp. 79-80, p. 81, Note 7. Stuttgart, 1888. William I. Thomas, Source Book for Social Origins, pp. 96-112. Chicago, 1909.

[113] Capt. J. Forsyth, The Highlands of Central India, pp. 101-107, 168. London, 1889.

[114] Tacitus, Germania, III.

[115] Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 32, Note 15 on p. 36. Stuttgart, 1888.

[116] E. Huntington, The Pulse of Asia, pp. 202, 203, 212, 213, 236-237. Boston, 1907.

[117] Sheldon Jackson, Introduction of Domesticated Reindeer into Alaska, pp. 20, 25-29, 127-129. Washington, 1894.

[118] Quoted in Alexander von Humboldt, Aspects of Nature in Different Lands, pp. 62, 139. Philadelphia, 1849.

[119] Edward John Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. I, pp. 311-321. 333-354, 364-366. New York, 1892.

[120] Prescott, Conquest of Peru, Vol. I, p. 47. New York, 1848.

[121] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, Vol. XIX, pp. 151-161, of The History of North America, edited by Francis W. Thorpe, Philadelphia, 1905.

[122] Ratzel, Anthropo-geographie, Vol. II, pp. 264-265.

[123] Malthus, Principles of Population, Chapters V and VII. London, 1878.

[124] Nathaniel Shaler, Nature and Man in America, pp. 147-151. W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, Chap. I, New York, 1899.

[125] Justus Perthes, Taschen-Atlas, pp. 44, 47. Gotha, 1910.



CHAPTER IV

THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES IN THEIR GEOGRAPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE

[Sidenote: Universality of these movements.]

The ethnic and political boundaries of Europe to-day are the residuum of countless racial, national, tribal and individual movements reaching back into an unrecorded past. The very names of Turkey, Bulgaria, England, Scotland and France are borrowed from intruding peoples. New England, New France, New Scotland or Nova Scotia and many more on the American continents register the Trans-Atlantic nativity of their first white settlers. The provinces of Galicia in Spain, Lombardy in Italy, Brittany in France, Essex and Sussex in England record in their names streams of humanity diverted from the great currents of the Voelkerwanderung. The Romance group of languages, from Portugal to Roumania, testify to the sweep of expanding Rome, just as the wide distribution of the Aryan linguistic family points to many roads and long migrations from some unplaced birthplace. Names like Cis-Alpine and Trans-Alpine Gaul in the Roman Empire, Trans-Caucasia, Trans-Caspia and Trans-Baikalia in the Russian Empire, the Transvaal and Transkei in South Africa, indicate the direction whence the advancing people have come.

[Sidenote: Stratification of races]

Ethnology reveals an east and west stratification of linguistic groups in Europe, a north and south stratification of races, and another stratification by altitude, which reappears in all parts of the world, and shows certain invading dominant races occupying the lowlands and other displaced ones the highlands. This definite arrangement points to successive arrivals, a crowding forward, an intrusion of the strong into fertile, accessible valleys and plains, and a dislodgment of the weak into the rough but safe keeping of mountain range or barren peninsula, where they are brought to bay. Ethnic fragments, linguistic survivals, or merely place names, dropped like discarded baggage along the march of a retreating army, bear witness everywhere to tragic recessionals.

[Sidenote: The name Historical Movement.]

Every country whose history we examine proves the recipient of successive streams of humanity. Even sea-girt England has received various intruding peoples from the Roman occupation to the recent influx of Russian Jews. In prehistoric times it combined several elements in its population, as the discovery of the "long barrow" men and "round barrow" men by archaeologists, and the identification of a surviving Iberian or Mediterranean strain by ethnologists go to prove.[126] Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India tell the same story, whether in their recorded or unrecorded history. Tropical Africa lacks a history; but all that has been pieced together by ethnologists and anthropologists, in an effort to reconstruct its past, shows incessant movement,—growth, expansion and short-lived conquest, followed by shrinkage, expulsion or absorption by another invader.[127] To this constant shifting of races and peoples the name of historical movement has been given, because it underlies most of written history, and constitutes the major part of unwritten history, especially that of savage and nomadic tribes. Two things are vital in the history of every people, its ethnic composition and the wars it wages in defense or extension of its boundaries. Both rest upon historical movements,—intrusions, whether peaceful or hostile, into its own land, and encroachments upon neighboring territory necessitated by growth. Back of all such movements is natural increase of population beyond local means of subsistence, and the development of the war spirit in the effort to secure more abundant subsistence either by raid or conquest of territory.

[Sidenote: Evolution of the Historical Movement.]

Among primitive peoples this movement is simple and monotonous. It involves all members of the tribe, either in pursuit of game, or following the herd over the tribal territory, or in migrations seeking more and better land. Among civilized peoples it assumes various forms, and especially is differentiated for different members of the social group. The civilized state develops specialized frontiersmen, armies, explorers, maritime traders, colonists, and missionaries, who keep a part of the people constantly moving and directing external expansion, while the mass of the population converts the force once expended in the migrant food-quest into internal activity. Here we come upon a paradox. The nation as a whole, with the development of sedentary life, increases its population and therewith its need for external movements; it widens its national area and its circle of contact with other lands, enlarges its geographical horizon, and improves its internal communication over a growing territory; it evolves a greater mobility within and without, which attaches, however, to certain classes of society, not to the entire social group. This mobility becomes the outward expression of a whole complex of economic wants, intellectual needs, and political ambitions. It is embodied in the conquests which build up empires, in the colonization which develops new lands, in the world-wide exchange of commodities and ideas which lifts the level of civilization, till this movement of peoples becomes a fundamental fact of history.

[Sidenote: Nature of primitive movements.]

This movement is and has been universal and varied. When most unobtrusive in its operation, it has produced its greatest effects. To seize upon a few conspicuous migrations, like the Voelkerwanderung and the irruption of the Turks into Europe, made dramatic by their relation to the declining empires of Rome and Constantinople, and to ignore the vast sum of lesser but more normal movements which by slow increments produce greater and more lasting results, leads to wrong conclusions both in ethnology and history. Here, as in geology, great effects do not necessarily presuppose vast forces, but rather the steady operation of small ones. It is often assumed that the world was peopled by a series of migrations; whereas everything indicates that humanity spread over the earth little by little, much as the imported gypsy moth is gradually occupying New England or the water hyacinth the rivers of Florida. Louis Agassiz observed in 1853 that "the boundaries within which the different natural combinations of animals are known to be circumscribed upon the surface of the earth, coincide with the natural range of distinct types of man."[128] The close parallelism between Australian race and flora, Eskimo race and Arctic fauna, points to a similar manner of dispersion. Wallace, in describing how the Russian frontier of settlement slowly creeps forward along the Volga, encroaching upon the Finnish and Tartar areas, and permeating them with Slav blood and civilization, adds that this is probably the normal method of expansion.[129] Thucydides describes the same process of encroachment, displacement, and migration in ancient Hellas.[130] Strabo quotes Posidonius as saying that the emigration of the Cimbrians and other kindred tribes from their native seats was gradual and by no means sudden.[131] The traditions of the Delaware Indians show their advance from their early home in central Canada southward to the Delaware River and Chesapeake Bay to have been a slow zigzag movement, interrupted by frequent long halts, leaving behind one laggard group here and sending out an offshoot there, who formed new tribes and thereby diversified the stock.[132] It was an aimless wandering, without destination and purpose other than to find a pleasanter habitat. The Vandals appear first as "a loose aggregation of restless tribes who must not be too definitely assigned to any precise district on the map," somewhere in central or eastern Prussia.[133] Far-reaching migrations aiming at a distant goal, like the Gothic and Hunnish conquests of Italy, demand both a geographical knowledge and an organization too high for primitive peoples, and therefore belong to a later period of development.[134]

[Sidenote: Number and range.]

The long list of recorded migrations has been supplemented by the researches of ethnologists, which have revealed a multitude of prehistoric movements. These are disclosed in greater number and range with successive investigation. The prehistoric wanderings of the Polynesians assume far more significance to-day than a hundred years ago, when their scope was supposed to have its western limit at Fiji and the Ellice group. They have now been traced to almost every island of Melanesia; vestiges of their influence have been detected in the languages of Australia, and the culture of the distant coasts of Alaska and British Columbia. The western pioneers of America knew the Shoshone Indians as small bands of savages, constantly moving about in search of food in the barren region west of the Rocky Mountains, and occasionally venturing eastward to hunt buffalo on the plains. Recent investigation has identified as offshoots of this retarded Shoshonean stock the sedentary agriculturalists of the Moqui Pueblo, and the advanced populations of ancient Mexico and Central America.[135] Here was a great human current which through the centuries slowly drifted from the present frontier of Canada to the shores of Lake Nicaragua. Powell's map of the distribution of the linguistic stocks of American Indians is intelligible only in the light of constant mobility. Haebler's map of the South American stocks reveals the same restless past. This cartographical presentation of the facts, giving only the final results, suggests tribal excursions of the nature of migrations; but ethnologists see them as the sum total of countless small movements which are more or less part of the normal activity of an unrooted savage people. [Map page 101.]

Otis Mason finds that the life of a social group involves a variety of movements characterized by different ranges or scopes. I. The daily round from bed to bed. II. The annual round from year to year, like that of the Tunguse Orochon of Siberia who in pursuit of various fish and game change their residence within their territory from month to month, or the pastoral nomads who move with the seasons from pasture to pasture. III. Less systematic outside movements covering the tribal sphere of influence, such as journeys or voyages to remote hunting or fishing grounds, forays or piratical descents upon neighboring lands eventuating usually in conquest, expansion into border regions for occasional occupation or colonization. IV. Participation in streams of barter or commerce. V. And at a higher stage in the great currents of human intercourse, experience, and ideas, which finally compass the world.[136] In all this series the narrower movement prepares for the broader, of which it constitutes at once an impulse and a part.

[Sidenote: Importance of such movements in history.]

The real character and importance of these movements have been appreciated by broad-minded historians. Thucydides elucidates the conditions leading up to the Peloponnesian War by a description of the semi-migratory population of Hellas, the exposure of the more fertile districts to incursions, and the influence of these movements in differentiating Dorian from Ionian Greece.[137] Johannes von Muller, in the introduction to his history of Switzerland, assigns to federations and migrations a conspicuous role in historical development. Edward A. Ross sees in such movements a thorough-going selective process which weeds out the unfit, or rather spares only the highly fit. He lays down the principle that repeated migrations tend to the creation of energetic races of men. He adds, "This principle may account for the fact that those branches of a race achieve the most brilliant success which have wandered the farthest from their ancestral home.... The Arabs and Moors that skirted Africa and won a home in far-away Spain, developed the most brilliant of the Saracen civilizations. Hebrews, Dorians, Quirites, Rajputs, Hovas were far invaders. No communities in classic times flourished like the cities of Asia created by the overflow from Greece. Nowhere under the Czar are there such vigorous, progressive communities as in Siberia."[138] Brinton distinguishes the associative and dispersive elements in ethnography. The latter is favored by the physical adaptability of the human race to all climates and external conditions; it is stimulated by the food-quest, the pressure of foes, and the resultant restlessness of an unstable primitive society.[139]

The earth's surface is at once factor and basis in these movements. In an active way it directs them; but they in turn clothe the passive earth with a mantle of humanity. This mantle is of varied weave and thickness, showing here the simple pattern of a primitive society, there the intricate design of advanced civilization; here a closely woven or a gauzy texture, there disclosing a great rent where a rocky peak or the ice-wrapped poles protrude through the warm human covering. This is the magic web whereof man is at once woof and weaver, and the flying shuttle that never rests. Given a region, what is its living envelope, asks anthropo-geography. Whence and how did it get there? What is the material of warp and woof? Will new threads enter to vary the color and design? If so, from what source? Or will the local pattern repeat itself over and over with dull uniformity?

[Sidenote: Geographical interpretation of historical movement.]

It was the great intellectual service of Copernicus that he conceived of a world in motion instead of a world at rest. So anthropo-geography must see its world in motion, whether it is considering English colonization, or the westward expansion of the Southern slave power in search of unexhausted land, or the counter expansion of the free-soil movement, or the early advance of the trappers westward to the Rockies after the retreating game, or the withdrawal thither of the declining Indian tribes before the protruding line of white settlement, and their ultimate confinement to ever shrinking reservations. In studying increase of population, it sees in Switzerland chalet and farm creeping higher up the Alp, as the lapping of a rising tide of humanity below; it sees movement in the projection of a new dike in Holland to reclaim from the sea the land for another thousand inhabitants, movement in Japan's doubling of its territory by conquest, in order to house and feed its redundant millions.

The whole complex relation of unresting man to the earth is the subject matter of anthropo-geography. The science traces his movements on the earth's surface, measures their velocity, range, and recurrence, determines their nature by the way they utilize the land, notes their transformation at different stages of economic development and under different environments. Just as an understanding of animal and plant geography requires a previous knowledge of the various means of dispersal, active and passive, possessed by these lower forms of life, so anthropo-geography must start with a study of the movements of mankind.

[Sidenote: Mobility of primitive peoples.]

First of all is to be noted an evolution in the mobility of peoples. In the lower stages of culture mobility is great. It is favored by the persistent food-quest over wide areas incident to retarded economic methods, and by the loose attachment of society to the soil. The small social groups peculiar to these stages and their innate tendency to fission help the movements to ramify. The consequent scattered distribution of the population offers wide interstices between encampments or villages, and into these vacant spaces other wandering tribes easily penetrate. The rapid decline of the Indian race in America before the advancing whites was due chiefly to the division of the savages into small groups, scattered sparsely over a wide territory. Hunter and pastoral peoples need far more land than they can occupy at any one time. Hence the temporarily vacant spots invite incursion. Moreover, the slight impedimenta carried by primitive folk minimize the natural physical obstacles which they meet when on the march. The lightly equipped war parties of the Shawnee Indians used gorges and gaps for the passage of the Allegheny Mountains which were prohibitive to all white pioneers except the lonely trapper. Finally, this mobility gets into the primitive mind. The Wanderlust is strong. Long residence in one territory is irksome, attachment is weak. Therefore a small cause suffices to start the whole or part of the social body moving. A temporary failure of the food supply, cruelty or excessive exaction of tribute on the part of the chief, occasions an exodus. The history of every negro tribe in Africa gives instances of such secessions, which often leave whole districts empty and exposed to the next wandering occupant. Methods of preventing such withdrawals, and therewith the diminution of his treasury receipts and his fighting force, belong to the policy of every negro chieftain.

[Sidenote: Natural barriers to movement.]

The checks to this native mobility of primitive peoples are two: physical and mental. In addition to the usual barriers of mountains, deserts, and seas before the invention of boats, primeval forests have always offered serious obstacles to man armed only with stone or bronze axe, and they rebuffed even man of the iron age. War and hunting parties had to move along the natural clearings of the rivers, the tracks of animals, or the few trails beaten out in time by the natives themselves. Primitive agriculture has never battled successfully against the phalanx of the trees. Forests balked the expansion of the Inca civilization on the rainy slope of the Andes, and in Central Africa the negro invaded only their edges for his yam fields and plantain groves. The earliest settlements in ancient Britain were confined to the natural clearings of the chalk downs and oolitic uplands; and here population was chiefly concentrated even at the close of the Roman occupation. Only gradually, as the valley woodlands were cleared, did the richer soil of the alluvial basins attract men from the high, poor ground where tillage required no preliminary work. But after four centuries of Roman rule and Roman roads, the clearings along the river valleys were still mere strips of culture mid an encompassing wilderness of woods. When the Germanic invaders came, they too appropriated the treeless downs and were blocked by the forests.[140] On the other hand, grasslands and savannahs have developed the most mobile people whom we know, steppe hunters like the Sioux Indians and Patagonians. Thus while the forest dweller, confined to the highway of the stream, devised only canoe and dugout boat in various forms for purposes of transportation, steppe peoples of the Old World introduced the use of draft and pack animals, and invented the sledge and cart.

[Sidenote: Effect of geographical horizon.]

Primitive peoples carry a drag upon their migrations in their restricted geographical outlook; ignorance robs them of definite goals. The evolution of the historical movement is accelerated by every expansion of the geographical horizon. It progresses most rapidly where the knowledge of outlying or remote lands travels fastest, as along rivers and thalassic coasts. Rome's location as toll-gate keeper of the Tiber gave her knowledge of the upstream country and directed her conquest of its valley; and the movement thus started gathered momentum as it advanced. Caesar's occupation of Gaul meant to his generation simply the command of the roads leading from the Mediterranean to the northern sources of tin and amber, and the establishment of frontier outposts to protect the land boundaries of Italy; this represented a bold policy of inland expansion for that day. The modern historian sees in that step the momentous advance of history beyond the narrow limits of the Mediterranean basin, and its gradual inclusion of all the Atlantic countries of Europe, through whose maritime enterprise the historical horizon was stretched to include America. In the same way, mediaeval trade with the Orient, which had familiarized Europe with distant India and Cathay, developed its full historico-geographical importance when it started the maritime discoveries of the fifteenth century. The expansion of the geographical horizon in 1512 to embrace the earth inaugurated a widespread historical movement, which has resulted in the Europeanization of the world.

[Sidenote: Civilization and mobility.]

Civilized man is at once more and less mobile than his primitive brother. Every advance in civilization multiplies and tightens the bonds uniting him with his soil; makes him a sedentary instead of a migratory being. On the other hand every advance in civilization is attended by the rapid clearing of the forests, by the construction of bridges and interlacing roads, the invention of more effective vehicles for transportation whereby intercourse increases, and the improvement of navigation to the same end. Civilized man progressively modifies the land which he occupies, removes or reduces obstacles to intercourse, and thereby approximates it to the open plain. Thus far he facilitates movements. But while doing this he also places upon the land a dense population, closely attached to the soil, strong to resist incursion, and for economic reasons inhospitable to any marked accession of population from without. Herein lies the great difference between migration in empty or sparsely inhabited regions, such as predominated when the world was young, and in the densely populated countries of our era. As the earth grew old and humanity multiplied, peoples themselves became the greatest barriers to any massive migrations, till in certain countries of Europe and Asia the historical movement has been reduced to a continual pressure, resulting in compression of population here, repression there. Hence, though political boundaries may shift, ethnic boundaries scarcely budge. The greatest wars of modern Europe have hardly left a trace upon the distribution of its peoples. Only in the Balkan Peninsula, as the frontiers of the Turkish Empire have been forced back from the Danube, the alien Turks have withdrawn to the shrinking territory of the Sultan and especially to Asia Minor.

[Sidenote: Diffusion of culture.]

Where a population too great to be dislodged occupies the land, conquest results in the eventual absorption of the victors and their civilization by the native folk, as happened to the Lombards in Italy, the Vandals in Africa and the Normans in England. Where the invaders are markedly superior in culture though numerically weak, conquest results in the gradual permeation of the conquered with the religion, economic methods, language, and customs of the new-comers.[141] The latter process, too, is always attended by some intermixture of blood, where no race repulsion exists, but this is small in comparison to the diffusion of civilization. This was the method by which Greek traders and colonists Hellenized the countries about the eastern Mediterranean, and spread their culture far back from the shores which their settlements had appropriated. In this way Saracen armies soon after the death of Mohammed Arabized the whole eastern and southern sides of the Mediterranean from Syria to Spain, and Arab merchants set the stamp of their language and religion on the coasts of East Africa as far as Mocambique. The handful of Spanish adventurers who came upon the relatively dense populations of Mexico and Peru left among them a civilization essentially European, but only a thin strain of Castilian blood. Thus the immigration of small bands of people sufficed to influence the culture of that big territory known as Latin America.

[Sidenote: Ethnic intermixture.]

That vast sum of migrations, great and small, which we group under the general term of historical movement has involved an endless mingling of races and cultures. As Professor Petrie has remarked, the prevalent notion that in prehistoric times races were pure and unmixed is without foundation. An examination of the various forms of the historical movement reveals the extent and complexity of this mingling process.

In the first place, no migration is ever simple; it involves a number of secondary movements, each of which in turn occasions a new combination of tribal or racial elements. The transference of a whole people from its native or adopted seat to a new habitat, as in the Voelkerwanderungen, empties the original district, which then becomes a catchment basin for various streams of people about its rim; and in the new territory it dislodges a few or all of the occupants, and thereby starts up a fresh movement as the original one comes to rest.

Nor is this all. A torrent that issues from its source in the mountains is not the river which reaches the sea. On its long journey from highland to lowland it receives now the milky waters of a glacier-fed stream, now a muddy tributary from agricultural lands, now the clear waters from a limestone plateau, while all the time its racing current bears a burden of soil torn from its own banks. Now it rests in a lake, where it lays down its weight of silt, then goes on, perhaps across an arid stretch where its water is sucked up by the thirsty air or diverted to irrigate fields of grain. So with those rivers of men which we call migrations. The ethnic stream may start comparatively pure, but it becomes mixed on the way. From time to time it leaves behind laggard elements which in turn make a new racial blend where they stop. Such were the six thousand Aduatici whom Caesar found in Belgian Gaul. These were a detachment of the migrating Cimbri, left there in charge of surplus cattle and baggage while the main body went on to Italy.[142]

[Sidenote: Complex currents of migration.]

A migration rarely involves a single people even at the start. It becomes contagious either by example or by the subjection of several neighboring tribes to the same impelling force, by reason of which all start at or near the same time. We find the Cimbri and Teutons combined with Celts from the island of Batavia[143] in the first Germanic invasion of the Roman Empire. Jutes, Saxons and Angles started in close succession for Britain, and the Saxon group included Frisians.[144] An unavoidable concomitant of great migrations, especially those of nomads, is their tendency to sweep into the vortex of their movement any people whom they brush on the way. Both individuals and tribes are thus caught up by the current. The general convergence of the central German tribes towards the Danube frontier of the Roman Empire during the Marcomannic War drew in its train the Lombards from the lower Elbe down to the middle Danube and Theiss.[145] The force of the Lombards invading Italy in 568 included twenty thousand Saxons from Swabia, Gepidae from the middle Danube, Bulgarians, Slavs from the Russian Ukraine, together with various tribes from the Alpine district of Noricum and the fluvial plains of Pannonia. Two centuries later the names of these non-Lombard tribes still survived in certain villages of Italy which had formed their centers.[146] The army which Attila the Hun brought into Gaul was a motley crowd, comprising peoples of probable Slav origin from the Russian steppes, Teutonic Ostrogoths and Gepidae, and numerous German tribes, besides the Huns themselves. When this horde withdrew after the death of Attila, Gepidae and Ostrogoths settled along the middle Danube, and the Slavonic contingent along the Alpine courses of the Drave and Save Rivers.[147] The Vandal migration which in 409 invaded Spain included the Turanian Alans and the German Suevi. The Alans found a temporary home in Portugal, which they later abandoned to join the Vandal invasion of North Africa, while the Suevi settled permanently in the northwestern mountains of Spain. The Vandals occupied in Spain two widely separated districts, one in the mountain region of Galicia next to the Suevi, and the other in the fertile valley of Andalusia in the south, while the northeastern part of the peninsula was occupied by intruding Visigoths.[148] Add to these the original Iberian and Celtic stocks of the peninsula and the Roman strain previously introduced, and the various elements which have entered into the Spanish people become apparent.[149]

[Sidenote: Cultural modification during migration.]

The absorption of foreign elements is not confined to large groups whose names come down in history, nor is the ensuing modification one of blood alone. Every land migration or expansion of a people passes by or through the territories of other peoples; by these it is inevitably influenced in point of civilization, and from them individuals are absorbed into the wandering throng by marriage or adoption, or a score of ways. This assimilation of blood and local culture is facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of historical movements are slow, a leisurely drift. Even the great Voelkerwanderung, which history has shown us generally in the moment of swift, final descent upon the imperial city, in reality consisted of a succession of advances with long halts between. The Vandals, whose original seats were probably in central or eastern Prussia, drifted southward with the general movement of the German barbarians toward the borders of the Empire late in the second century, and, after the Marcomannic War (175 A.D.), settled in Dacia north of the lower Danube under the Roman sway. In 271 they were located on the middle Danube, and sixty years afterwards in Moravia. Later they settled for seventy years in Pannonia within the Empire, where they assimilated Roman civilization and adopted the Arian form of Christianity from their Gothic neighbors.[150] In Spain, as we have seen, they occupied Galicia and Andalusia for a time before passing over into Africa in 429. Here was a migration lasting two centuries and a half, reaching from the Baltic to the southern shores of the Mediterranean, starting on the bleak sterile plains of the north amid barbarous neighbors, ending in the sunny grain fields and rich cities of Roman Africa. The picture which we get of the victorious Vandals parceling out the estates of Roman nobles, and, from the standpoint of their more liberal faith, profiting by the dissensions of the two Catholic sects of Africa, shows us a people greatly modified by their long sweep through the civilized outskirts of the Empire. So it was with the Lombards and Goths who invaded Italy.

Among primitive tribes, who move in smaller groups and must conform closely to the dictates of their environment, the modifying effects of people and land through which they pass are conspicuous. Ratzel describes the gradual withdrawal of a Hottentot people from western Cape Colony far into the arid interior before the advance of Kaffirs and Europeans by saying: "The stock and name of the Namaquas wandered northward, acquiring new elements, and in course of time filling the old mold with new contents."[151] This is the typical result of such primitive movements. The migration of the Delaware Indians from an early home somewhere northwest of the Great Lakes to their historical habitat between the Hudson and Potomac Rivers was a slow progress, which somewhere brought them into contact with maize-growing tribes, and gave them their start in agriculture.[152] The transit lands through which these great race journeys pass exercise a modifying effect chiefly through their culture and their peoples, less through their physical features and climate. For that the stay of the visitants is generally too brief.

[Sidenote: Effect of early maritime migration.]

Even early maritime migrants did not keep their strains pure. The untried navigator sailing from island to headland, hugging the coast and putting ashore for water, came into contact with the natives. Cross currents of migration can be traced in Polynesian waters, where certain islands are nodal points which have given and received of races and culture through centuries of movement. The original white population of Uruguay differed widely from that of the other Spanish republics of South America. Its nucleus was a large immigration of Canary Islanders. These were descendants of Spaniards and the native Guanches of the Canaries, mingled also with Norman, Flemish and Moorish blood.[153] The Norse on their way to Iceland may have picked up a Celtic element in the islands north of Scotland; but from the Faroe group onward they found only empty Iceland and Greenland. This was an exceptional experience. Early navigation, owing to its limitations, purposely restricted itself to the known. Men voyaged where men had voyaged before and were to be found. Journeys into the untenanted parts of the world were rare. However, the probable eastward expansion of the Eskimo along the Arctic rim of North America belongs in this class, so that this northern folk has suffered no modification from contact with others, except where Alaska approaches Asia.

[Sidenote: The transit land.]

The land traversed by a migrating horde is not to be pictured as a dead road beneath their feet, but rather as a wide region of transit and transition, potent to influence them by its geography and people, and to modify them in the course of their passage. The route which they follow is a succession of habitats, in which they linger and domicile themselves for a while, though not long enough to lose wholly the habits of life and thought acquired in their previous dwelling place. Although nature in many places, by means of valleys, low plains, mountain passes or oasis lines, points out the way of these race movements, it is safer to think and speak of this way as a transit land, not as a path or road. Even where the district of migration has been the sea, as among the Caribs of the Antilles Islands, the Moros of the Philippines, and the Polynesians of the Pacific, man sends his roots like a water plant down into the restless element beneath, and reflects its influence in all his thought and activities.

[Sidenote: War as a form of the historical movement.]

Every aggressive historical movement, whether bold migration or forcible extension of the home territory, involves displacement or passive movement of other peoples (except in those rare occupations of vacant lands), who in turn are forced to encroach upon the lands of others. These conditions involve war, which is an important form of the historical movement, contributing to new social contacts and fusion of racial stocks. Raids and piratical descents are often the preliminary of great historical movements. They first expand the geographical horizon, and end in permanent settlements, which involve finally considerable transfers of population, summoned to strengthen the position of the interloper. Such was the history of the Germanic invasions of Britain, the Scandinavian settlements on the shores of Iceland, Britain, and France, and the incursions of Saharan tribes into the Sudanese states. Among pastoral nomads war is the rule; the tribe, a mobilized nation, is always on a war footing with its neighbors. The scant supply of wells and pasturage, inadequate in the dry season, involves rivalry and conflict for their possession as agricultural lands do not. Failure of water or grass is followed by the decline of the herds, and then by marauding expeditions into the river valleys to supply the temporary want of food. When population increases beyond the limits of subsistence in the needy steppes, such raids become the rule and end in the conquest of the more favored lands, with resulting amalgamation of race and culture.[154]

[Sidenote: Primitive war.]

The wars of savage and pastoral peoples affect the whole tribe. All the able-bodied men are combatants, and all the women and children constitute the spoils of war in case of defeat. This fact is important, since the purpose of primitive conflicts is to enslave and pillage, rather than to acquire land. The result is that a whole district may be laid waste, but when the devastators withdraw, it is gradually repopulated by bordering tribes, who make new ethnic combinations. After the destruction of the Eries by the Iroquois in 1655, Ohio was left practically uninhabited for a hundred and fifty years. Then the Iroquoian Wyandots extended their settlements into northwestern Ohio from their base in southern Michigan, while the Miami Confederacy along the southern shore of Lake Michigan pushed their borders into the western part. The Muskingum Valley in the eastern portion was occupied about 1750 by Delawares from eastern Pennsylvania, the Scioto by Shawnees, and the northeast corner of the territory by detachments of Iroquois, chiefly Senecas.[155] The long wars between the Algonquin Indians of the north and the Appalachian tribes of the south kept the district of Kentucky a No Man's Land, in convenient vacancy for occupation by the white settlers, when they began the westward movement.[156] [Map page 156.]

[Sidenote: Slavery as form of historical movement.]

This desolation is produced partly by killing, but chiefly by enslavement of prisoners and the flight of the conquered. Both constitute compulsory migrations of far-reaching effect in the fusion of races and the blending of civilizations. The thousands of Greek slaves who were brought to ancient Rome contributed to its refinement and polish. All the nations of the known world, from Briton to Syrian and Jew, were represented in the slave markets of the imperial capital, and contributed their elements to the final composition of the Roman people. When we read of ninety-seven thousand Hebrews whom Titus sold into bondage after the fall of Jerusalem, of forty thousand Greeks sold by Lucullus after one victory, and the auction sub corona of whole tribes in Gaul by Caesar, the scale of this forcible transfer becomes apparent, and its power as an agent of race amalgamation. Senator Sam Houston of Texas, speaking of the Comanche Indians, in the United States Senate, December 31, 1854, said: "There are not less than two thousand prisoners (whites) in the hands of the Comanches, four hundred in one band in my own state.... They take no prisoners but women and boys."[157] It was customary among the Indians to use captured women as concubines and to adopt into the tribe such boys as survived the cruel treatment to which they were subjected. Since the Comanches in 1847 were variously estimated to number from nine to twelve thousand,[158] so large a proportion of captives would modify the native stock.

In Africa slavery has been intimately associated with agriculture as a source of wealth, and therefore has lent motive to intertribal wars. Captives were enslaved and then gradually absorbed into the tribe of their masters. Thus war and slavery contributed greatly to that widespread blending of races which characterizes negro Africa. Slaves became a medium of exchange and an article of commerce with other continents. The negro slave trade had its chief importance in the eyes of ethnologists and historians because, in distributing the black races in white continents, it has given a "negro question" to the United States, superseded the native Indian stock of the Antilles by negroes, and left a broad negro strain in the blood of Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. This particular historical movement, which during the two centuries of its greatest activity involved larger numbers than the Tartar invasion of Russia or the Turkish invasion of Europe, for a long period gave to black Africa the only historical importance which it possessed for the rest of the world.[159]

[Sidenote: Fusion by deported and military colonies.]

In higher stages of political development, war aiming at the subjugation of large territories finds another means to fuse the subject peoples and assimilate them to a common standard of civilization. The purpose is unification and the obliteration of local differences. These are also the unconscious ends of evolution by historical movement. With this object, conquerors the world over have used a system of tribal and racial exchanges. It was the policy of the Incas of ancient Peru to remove conquered tribes to distant parts of the realm, and supply their places with colonists from other districts who had long been subjected and were more or less assimilated.[160] In 722 B.C. the Assyrian king, Sargon, overran Samaria, carried away the Ten Tribes of Israel beyond the Tigris and scattered them among the cities of Media, where they probably merged with the local population. To the country left vacant by their wholesale deportation he transplanted people from Babylon and other Mesopotamian cities.[161] The descendants of these, mingled with the poorer class of Jews still left there, formed the despised Samaritans of the time of Christ. The Kingdom of Judah later was despoiled by Nebuchadnezzar of much of its population, which was carried off to Babylon.

This plan of partial deportation and colonization characterized the Roman method of Romanization. Removal of the conquered from their native environment facilitated the process, while it weakened the spirit and power of revolt. The Romans met bitter opposition from the mountain tribes when trying to open up the northern passes of the Apennines. Consequently they removed the Ligurian tribe of the Apuanians, forty-seven thousand in number, far south to Samnium. When in 15 B.C. the region of the Rhaetian Alps was joined to the Empire, forty thousand of the inhabitants were transplanted from the mountains to the plain. The same method was used with the Scordisci and Dacians of the Danube. More often the mortality of war so thinned the population, that the settlement of Roman military colonies among them sufficed to keep down revolt and to Romanize the surviving fragment. The large area of Romance speech found in Roumania and eastern Hungary, despite the controversy about its origin,[162] seems to have had its chief source in the extensive Roman colonies planted by the Emperor Trajan in conquered Dacia.[163] In Iberian Spain, which bitterly resisted Romanization, the process was facilitated by the presence of large garrisons of soldiers. Between 196 and 169 B.C. the troops amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand, and many of them remained in the country as colonists.[164] Compare the settlement of Scotch troops in French Canada by land grants after 1763, resulting in the survival to-day of sandy hair, blue eyes, and highland names among the French-speaking habitants of Murray Bay and other districts. The Turks in the fifteenth century brought large bodies of Moslem converts from Asia Minor to garrison Macedonia and Thessaly, thereby robbing the Anatolian Plateau of half its original population. Into the vacuum thus formed a current of nomads from inner Asia has poured ever since.[165]

[Sidenote: Withdrawal and flight.]

Every active historical movement which enters an already populated country gives rise there to passive movements, either compression of the native folk followed by amalgamation, or displacement and withdrawal. The latter in some degree attends every territorial encroachment. Only where there is an abundance of free land can a people retire as a whole before the onslaught, and maintain their national or racial solidarity. Thus the Slavs seem largely to have withdrawn before the Germans in the Baltic plains of Europe. The Indians of North and South America retired westward before the advance of the whites from the Atlantic coast. The Cherokee nation, who once had a broad belt of country extending from the Tennessee Valley through South Carolina to the ocean,[166] first retracted their frontier to the Appalachian Mountains; in 1816 they were confined to an ever shrinking territory on the middle Tennessee and the southern end of the highlands; in 1818 they began to retire beyond the Mississippi, and in 1828 beyond the western boundary of Arkansas.[167] The story of the Shawnees and Delawares is a replica of this.[168] In the same way Hottentots and Kaffirs in South Africa are withdrawing northward and westward into the desert before the protruding frontier of white settlement, as the Boers before the English treked farther into the veldt. [See map page 105.]

Where the people attacked or displaced is small or a broken remnant, it often takes refuge among a neighboring or kindred tribe. The small Siouan tribes of the Carolinas, reduced to fragments by repeated Iroquois raids, combined with their Siouan kinsmen the Catawbas, who consequently in 1743 included twenty dialects among their little band.[169] The Iroquoian Tuscaroras of North Carolina, defeated and weakened by the whites in 1711, fled north to the Iroquois of New York, where they formed the Sixth Nation of the Confederation. The Yamese Indians, who shifted back and forth between the borders of Florida and South Carolina, defeated first by the whites and then by the Creeks, found a refuge for the remnant of their tribe among the Seminoles, in whom they merged and disappeared as a distinct tribe[170]—the fate of most of these fragmentary peoples. [See map page 54.]

[Sidenote: Dispersal in flight.]

When the fugitive body is large, it is forced to split up in order to escape. Hence every fugitive movement tends to assume the character of a dispersal, all the more as organization and leadership vanish in the catastrophe. The fissile character of primitive societies especially contributes to this end, so that almost every story of Indian and native African warfare tells of shattered remnants fleeing in several directions. Among civilized peoples, the dispersal is that of individuals and has far-reaching historical effects. After the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jews were scattered over the earth, the debris of a nation. The religious wars of France during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries caused Huguenots to flee to Switzerland, Germany, Holland, England, and South Carolina; they even tried to establish a colony on the coast of Brazil. Everywhere they contributed a valuable element to the economic and social life of the community which they joined. The great schism in the Russian Church became an agent of emigration and colonization. It helped to spread the Russian nationality over remote frontier regions of the empire which previously had been almost exclusively Asiatic; and distributed groups of dissenters in the neighboring provinces of Turkey, Roumania, Austria, Poland and Prussia.[171]

[Sidenote: Natural regions of retreat.]

The hope of safety from pursuit drives fugitive peoples into isolated and barren places that are scarcely accessible or habitable, and thereby extends the inhabited area of the earth long before mere pressure of population would have stretched it to such limits. We find these refugee folk living in pile villages built over the water, in deserts, in swamps, mangrove thickets, very high mountains, marshy deltas, and remote or barren islands, all which can be classified as regions of retreat. Fugitives try to place between themselves and their pursuers a barrier of sea or desert or mountains, and in doing this have themselves surmounted some of the greatest obstacles to the spread of the human race.

Districts of refuge located centrally to several natural regions of migration receive immigrants from many sides, and are therefore often characterized by a bizarre grouping of populations. The cluster of marshy islands at the head of the Adriatic received fugitives from a long semi-circle of north Italian cities during the barbarian invasions. Each refugee colony occupied a separate island, and finally all coalesced to form the city of Venice. Central mountain districts like the Alps and Caucasus contain "the sweepings of the plains." The Caucasus particularly, on the border between Europe and Asia, contains every physical type and representative of every linguistic family of Eurasia, except pure Aryan. Nowhere else in the world probably is there such a heterogeneous lot of peoples, languages and religions. Ripley calls the Caucasus "a grave of peoples, of languages, of customs and physical types."[172] Its base, north and south, and the longitudinal groove through its center from east to west have been swept by various racial currents, which have cast up their flotsam into its valleys. The pueblos of our arid Southwest, essentially an area of asylum, are inhabited by Indians of four distinct stocks, and only one of them, the Moquis, show clearly kinship to another tribe outside this territory,[173] so that they are survivals. The twenty-eight different Indian stocks huddled together in small and diverse linguistic groups between the Pacific Ocean and the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Range[174] leave the impression that these protected valleys, similar to the Caucasus in their ethnic diversity, were an asylum for remnants of depleted stocks who had fled to the western highlands before the great Indian migrations of the interior.[175] Making their way painfully and at great cost of life through a region of mountain and desert, they came out in diminished bands to survive in the protection of the great barrier. Of the twenty-one Indian linguistic stocks which have become extinct since the arrival of the white man, fifteen belong to this transmontane strip of the Pacific slope[176]—evidence of the fragmentary character of these stocks and their consequently small power of resistance, [See map page 54.]

[Sidenote: Emigration and colonization.]

Advance to a completely sedentary life, as we see it among modern civilized nations, prohibits the migration of whole peoples, or even of large groups when maintaining their political organization. On the other hand, however, sedentary life and advanced civilization bring rapid increase of population, improved methods of communication, and an enlarged geographical horizon. These conditions encourage and facilitate emigration and colonization, forms of historical movement which have characterized the great commercial peoples of antiquity and the overcrowded nations of modern times. These forms do not involve a whole people, but only individuals and small groups, though in time the total result may represent a considerable proportion of the original population. The United States in 1890 contained 980,938 immigrants from Canada and Newfoundland,[177] or just one-fifth the total population of the Dominion in that same year. Germany since 1820 has contributed at least five million citizens to non-European lands. Ireland since 1841 has seen nearly four millions of its inhabitants drawn off to other countries,[178] an amount only little less than its present population. It is estimated that since 1851 emigration has carried off from County Clare and Kerry seventy-two per cent. of the average population; and yet those counties are still crowded.[179] Among those who abandon their homes in search of easier conditions of living, certain ages and certain social and industrial classes predominate. A typical emigrant group to America represents largely the lower walks of life, includes an abnormal proportion of men and adults, and about three-fourths of it are unskilled laborers and agriculturists.[180]

Colonization, the most potent instrument of organized expansion, has in recent centuries changed the relative significance of the great colonial nations of Europe. It raised England from a small insular country to the center of a world power. It gave sudden though temporary preeminence to Spain and Portugal, a new lease of life to little Holland, and ominous importance to Russia. Germany, who entered the colonial field only in 1880, found little desirable land left; and yet it was especially Germany who needed an outlet for her redundant population. With all these states, as with ancient Phoenicia, Greece and Yemen, the initial purpose was commerce or in some form the exploitation of the new territory. Colonies were originally trading stations established as safe termini for trade routes.[181] Colonial government, as administered by the mother country, originally had an eye single for the profits of trade: witness the experience of the Thirteen Colonies with Great Britain. Colonial wars have largely meant the rivalry of competing nations seeking the same markets, as the history of the Portuguese and Dutch in the East Indies, and the English and French in America prove. The first Punic War had a like commercial origin—rivalry for the trade of Magna Graecia between Rome and Carthage, the dominant colonial powers of the western Mediterranean. Such wars result in expansion for the victor.

[Sidenote: Commerce.]

Commerce, which so largely underlies colonization, is itself a form of historical movement. It both causes and stimulates great movements of peoples, yet it differs from these fundamentally in its relation to the land. Commerce traverses the land to reach its destination, but takes account of natural features only as these affect transportation and travel. It has to do with systems of routes and goals, which it aims to reach as quickly as possible. It reduces its cortege to essentials; eliminates women and children. Therefore it surmounts natural barriers which block the advance of other forms of the historical movement. Merchant caravans are constantly crossing the desert, but not so peoples. Traders with loaded yaks or ponies push across the Karakorum Mountains by passes where a migrating horde would starve and freeze. The northern limit of the Mediterranean race in Spain lies sharply defined along the crest of the Pyrenees, whose long unbroken wall forms one of the most pronounced boundaries in Europe;[182] yet traders and smugglers have pushed their way through from time immemorial. Long after Etruscan merchants had crossed northward over the Alps, Roman expansion and colonization made a detour around the mountains westward into Gaul, with the result that the Germans received Roman civilization not straight from the south, but secondhand through their Gallic neighbors west of the Rhine.

[Sidenote: Commerce a guide to various movements.]

Commerce, though differing from other historical movements, may give to these direction and destination. The trader is frequently the herald of soldier and settler. He becomes their guide, takes them along the trail which he has blazed, and gives them his own definiteness of aim. The earliest Roman conquest of the Alpine tribes was made for the purpose of opening the passes for traders and abolishing the heavy transit duties imposed by the mountaineers.[183] Fur-traders inaugurated French expansion to the far west of Canada, and the Russian advance into Siberia. The ancient amber route across Russia from the Baltic to the Euxine probably guided the Goths in their migration from their northern seats to the fertile lands in southern Russia, where they first appear in history as the Ostrogoths.[184] The caravan trade across the Sahara from the Niger to the Mediterranean coast has itself embodied an historical movement, by bringing out enough negro slaves appreciably to modify the ethnic composition of the population in many parts of North Africa.[185] It was this trade which also suggested to Prince Henry of Portugal in 1415, when campaigning in Morocco, the plan of reaching the Guinea Coast by sea and diverting its gold dust and slaves to the port of Lisbon, a movement which resulted in the Portuguese circumnavigation of Africa.[186]

Every staple place and trading station is a center of geographical information; it therefore gives an impulse to expansion by widening the geographical horizon. The Lewis and Clark Expedition found the Mandan villages at the northern bend of the Missouri River the center of a trade which extended west to the Pacific, through the agency of the Crow and Paunch Indians of the upper Yellowstone, and far north to the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Rivers. Here in conversation with British and French fur-traders of the Northwest Company's posts, they secured information about the western country they were to explore.[187] Similarly the trade of the early Jesuit missions at La Pointe near the west end of Lake Superior annually drew the Indians from a wide circle sweeping from Green Bay and the Fox River in the south, across the Mississippi around to the Lake of the Woods and far north of Lake Superior.[188] Here Marquette first heard of the great river destined to carry French dominion to the Gulf of Mexico.

[Sidenote: Movements due to religion.]

Trade often finds in religion an associate and coadjutor in directing and stimulating the historical movement. China regards modern Christian missions as effective European agencies for the spread of commercial and political power. Jesuit and fur-trader plunged together into the wilds of colonial Canada; Spanish priest and gold-seeker into Mexico and Peru. American missionary pressed close upon the heels of fur-trader into the Oregon country. Jason Lee, having established a Methodist mission on the Willamette in 1834, himself experienced sudden conversion from religionist to colonizer. He undertook a temporary mission back to the settled States, where he preached a stirring propaganda for the settlement and appropriation of the disputed Oregon country, before the British should fasten their grip upon it. The United States owes Hawaii to the expansionist spirit of American missionaries. Thirty years after their arrival in the islands, they held all the important offices under the native government, and had secured valuable tracts of lands, laying the foundation of the landed aristocracy of planters established there to-day. Their sons and grandsons took the lead in the Revolution of 1893, and in the movement for annexation to the United States. Thus sometimes do the meek inherit the earth.

[Sidenote: Religious pilgrimages.]

The famous pilgrimages of the world, in which the commercial element has been more or less conspicuous,[189] have contributed greatly to the circulation of peoples and ideas, especially as they involve multitudes and draw from a large circle of lands. Their economic, intellectual and political effects rank them as one phase of the historical movement. Herodotus tells of seven hundred thousand Egyptians flocking to the city of Bubastis from all parts of Egypt for the festival of Diana.[190] The worship of Ashtoreth in Bambyce in Syria drew votaries from all the Semitic peoples except the Jews. As early as 386 A.D. Christian pilgrims flocked to Jerusalem from Armenia, Persia, India, Ethiopia, and even from Gaul and Britain. Jerusalem gave rise to those armed pilgrimages, the Crusades, with all their far-reaching results. The pilgrimages to Rome, which in the Jubilee of 1300 brought two hundred thousand worshipers to the sacred city, did much to consolidate papal supremacy over Latin Christendom.[191] As the roads to Rome took the pious wayfarers through Milan, Venice, Genoa, Florence, Bologna, and other great cities of Italy, they were so many channels for the distribution of Italian art and culture over the more untutored lands of western Europe.

Though Mecca is visited annually by only seventy or eighty thousand pilgrims, it puts into motion a far greater number over the whole Mohammedan world, from westernmost Africa to Chinese Turkestan.[192] Yearly a great pilgrimage, numbering in 1905 eighty thousand souls, moves across Africa eastward through the Sudan on its way to the Red Sea and Mecca. Many traders join the caravans of the devout both for protection and profit, and the devout themselves travel with herds of cattle to trade in on the way. The merchants are prone to drop out and settle in any attractive country, and few get beyond the populous markets of Wadai. The British and French governments in the Sudan aid and protect these pilgrimages; they recognize them as a political force, because they spread the story of the security and order of European rule.[193] The markets of western Tibet, recently opened to Indian merchants by the British expedition to Lhassa, promote intercourse between the two countries especially because of the sacred lakes and mountains in their vicinity, which are goals of pilgrimage alike to Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist. They offer an opportunity to acquire merit and profit at the same time, an irresistible combination to the needy, pious Hindu. Therefore across the rugged passes of the Himalayas he drives his yaks laden with English merchandise, an unconscious instrument for the spread of English influence, English civilization and the extension of the English market, as the Colonial Office well understands.[194]

[Sidenote: Historical movement and race distribution.]

The forms which have been assumed by the historical movement are varied, but all have contributed to the spread of man over the habitable globe. The yellow, white and red races have become adapted to every zone; the black race, whether in Africa, Australia or Melanesia, is confined chiefly to the Tropics. A like conservatism as to habitat tends to characterize all sub-races, peoples, and tribes of the human family. The fact which strikes one in studying the migrations of these smaller groups is their adherence each to a certain zone or heat belt defined by certain isothermal lines (see map chap. XVII.), their reluctance to protrude beyond its limits, and the restricted range and small numerical strength of such protrusions as occur. This seems to be the conservatism of the mature race type, which has lost some of its plasticity and shuns or succumbs to the ordeal of adaptation to contrasted climatic conditions, except when civilization enables it partially to neutralize their effects.



[Sidenote: Migrations in relation to zones and heat belts.]

In South America, Caribs and Arawaks showed a strictly tropical distribution from Hayti to the southern watershed of the Amazon. The Tupis, moving down the Parana-La Plata system, made a short excursion beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, though not beyond the hot belt, then turned equator-ward again along the coast.[195] In North America we find some exceptions to the rule. For instance, though the main area of the Athapascan stock is found in the frigid belt of Canada and Alaska, north of the annual isotherm of 0 deg.C. (32 deg.F.) small residual fragments of these people are scattered also along the Pacific coast of Oregon and California, marking the old line of march of a large group which drifted southward into Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and the northern part of Mexico. The Shoshone stock, which originally occupied the Great Basin and western intermontane plateau up to the borders of Canada, sent out offshoots which developed into the ancient civilized tribes of tropical Mexico and Central America. Both these emigrations to more southern zones were part of the great southward trend characterizing all movements on the Pacific side of the continent, probably from an original ethnic port of entry near Bering Strait; and part also of the general southward drift in search of more genial climate, which landed the van of northern Siouan, Algonquin and Iroquoian stocks in the present area of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, while the base of their territory stretched out to its greatest width in southern Canada and contiguous parts of the United States. [See map page 54.][196]



[Sidenote: Range of movements in Asia.]

If we turn to the eastern hemisphere, we find the Malays and Malayo-Polynesians, differentiated offshoots of the Mongolian stock, restricted to the Tropics, except where Polynesians have spread to outlying New Zealand. The Chinese draw their political boundary nearly along the Tropic of Cancer, but they have freely lapped over this frontier into Indo-China as far as Singapore.[197] Combined with this expansion was the early infiltration of the Chinese into the Philippines, Borneo, and the western Sunda Isles, all distinctly tropical. The fact that the Chinese show a physical capacity for acclimatization found in no other race explains in part their presence into the Tropics. In contrast, the Aryan folk of India, whether in their pure type as found in the Punjab and Rajputana Desert, or mingled with the earlier Dravidian races belong to the hot belt but scarcely reach the Tropic of Cancer,[198] though their language has far overshot this line both in the Deccan and the Ganges Delta. One spore of Aryan stock, in about 450 B.C., moved by sea from the Bay of Cambay to Ceylon; mingling there with the Tamil natives, they became the progenitors of the Singhalese, forming a hybrid tropical offshoot.

Europe, except for its small sub-arctic area, has received immigrants, according to the testimony of history and ethnology, only from the temperate parts of Asia and Africa, with the one exception of the Saracens of Arabia, whose original home lay wholly within the hot climate belt of 20 deg.C. (68 deg.F.). Saracen expansion, in covering Persia, Syria, and Egypt, still kept to this hot belt; only in the Barbary Coast of Africa and in Spain did it protrude into the temperate belt. Though this last territory was extra-tropical, it was essentially semi-arid and sub-tropical in temperature, like the dry trade-wind belt whence the Saracens had sprung.



[Sidenote: Range of movements in Africa.]

The Semitic folk of Arabia and the desert Hamites of northern Africa, bred by their hot, dry environment to a nomadic life, have been drawn southward over the Sahara across the Tropic into the grasslands of the Sudan, permeating a wide zone of negro folk with the political control, religion, civilization and blood of the Mediterranean north. Here similar though better conditions of life, a climate hotter though less arid, attracted Hamitic invasion, while the relatively dense native population in a lower stage of economic development presented to the commercial Semites the attraction of lucrative trade. South of the equator the native Bantu Kaffirs, essentially a tropical people, spread beyond their zonal border to the south coast of Africa at 33 deg. S.L., and displaced the yellow Hottentots[199] before the arrival of the Dutch in 1602; while in the early nineteenth century we hear of the Makololo, a division of this same Kaffir stock, leaving their native seats near the southern sources of the Vaal River at 28 deg. S.L. and moving some nine hundred miles northward to the Barotse territory on the upper Zambesi at 15 deg. S.L.[200] This again was a movement of a pastoral people across a tropic to other grasslands, to climatic conditions scarcely different from those which they had left.

[Sidenote: Colonization and latitude.]

The modern colonial movements which have been genuine race expansions have shown a tendency not only to adhere to their zone, but to follow parallels of latitude or isotherms. The stratification of European peoples in the Americas, excepting Spanish and Portuguese, coincides with heat zones. Internal colonization in the United States reveals the same principle.[201] Russian settlements in Asia stretch across Siberia chiefly between the fiftieth and fifty-fifth parallels; these same lines include the ancient Slav territory in Germany between the Vistula and Weser. The great efflux of home-seekers, as opposed to the smaller contingent of mere conquerors and exploiters, which has poured forth from Europe since the fifteenth century, has found its destinations largely in the temperate parts of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Even the Spanish overlords in Mexico and Peru domiciled themselves chiefly in the highlands, where altitude in part counteracts tropical latitude. European immigration into South America to-day greatly predominates in the temperate portions,—in Argentine, Uruguay, Paraguay, southern Brazil and southern Chile. While Argentine's population includes over one million white foreigners, who comprise twenty per cent. of the total,[202] Venezuela has no genuine white immigration. Its population, which comprises only one per cent. of pure whites, consists chiefly of negroes, mulattoes, and Sambos, hybrids of negro and Indian race. In British Guiana, negroes and East Indian coolies, both importations from other tropical lands, comprise eighty-one per cent. of the population.[203]

The movement of Europeans into the tropical regions of Asia, Australasia, Africa and America, like the American advance into the Philippines, represents commercial and political, not genuine ethnic expansion. Except where it resorts to hybridization, it seeks not new homesteads, but the profits of tropical trade and the markets for European manufactures found in retarded populations. These it secures either by a small but permanently domiciled ruling class, as formerly in Spanish and Portuguese America, or by a body of European officials, clerks, agents and soldiers, sent out for a term of years. Such are the seventy-six thousand Britishers who manage the affairs of commerce and state in British India, and the smaller number of Dutch who perform the same functions in the Dutch East India islands. The basis of this system is exploitation. It represents neither a high economic, ethical, nor social ideal, and therefore lacks the stamp of geographic finality.

[Sidenote: Movement to like geographic conditions.]

A migrating or expanding people, when free to choose, is prone to seek a new home with like geographic conditions to the old. Hence the stamp once given by an environment tends to perpetuate itself. All people, especially those in the lower stages of culture, are conservative in their fundamental activities. Agriculture is intolerable to pastoral nomads, hunting has little attraction for a genuine fisher folk. Therefore such peoples in expansion seek an environment in which the national aptitudes, slowly evolved in their native seats, find a ready field. Thus arise natural provinces of distribution, whose location, climate, physical features, and size reflect the social and economic adaptation of the inhabitants to a certain type of environment. A shepherd folk, when breaking off from its parent stock like Abraham's family from their Mesopotamian kinsmen, seeks a land rich in open pastures and large enough to support its wasteful nomadic economy. A seafaring people absorb an ever longer strip of seaboard, like the Eskimo of Arctic America, or throw out their settlements from inlet to inlet or island to island, as did Malays and Polynesians in the Pacific, ancient Greeks and Phoenicians in the subtropical Mediterranean, and the Norse in the northern seas. The Dutch, bred to the national profession of diking and draining, appear in their element in the water-logged coast of Sumatra and Guiana,[204] where they cultivate lands reclaimed from the sea; or as colonists in the Vistula lowlands, whither Prussia imported them to do their ancestral task, just as the English employed their Dutch prisoners after the wars with Holland in the seventeenth century to dike and drain the fens of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Moreover, the commercial talent of the Dutch, trained by their advantageous situation on the North Sea about the Rhine mouths, guided their early traders to similar locations elsewhere, like the Hudson and Delaware Rivers, or planted them on islands either furnishing or commanding extensive trade, such as Ceylon, Mauritius, the East Indies, or the Dutch holdings in the Antilles.

Much farther down in the cultural scale we find the fisher tribes of Central Africa extending their villages from point to point along the equatorial streams, and the river Indians of South America gradually spreading from headwaters to estuary, and thence to the related environment of the coast. The Tupis, essentially a water race, have left traces of their occupation only where river or coast enabled them to live by their inherited aptitudes.[205] The distribution of the ancient mounds in North America shows their builders to have sought with few exceptions protected sites near alluvial lowlands, commanding rich soil for cultivation and the fish supply from the nearby river. Mountaineer folk often move from one upland district to another, as did the Lombards of Alpine Pannonia in their conquest of Lombardy and Apennine Italy, where all their four duchies were restricted to the highlands of the peninsula.[206] The conquests of the ancient Incas and the spread of their race covered one Andean valley after another for a stretch of one thousand five hundred miles, wherever climatic and physical conditions were favorable to their irrigated tillage and highland herds of llamas. They found it easier to climb pass after pass and mount to ever higher altitudes, rather than descend to the suffocating coasts where neither man nor beast could long survive, though they pushed the political boundary finally to the seaboard. [Map page 101.]

[Sidenote: Movement to better geographic conditions.]

The search for better land, milder climate, and easier conditions of living starts many a movement of peoples which, in view of their purpose, necessarily leads them into an environment sharply contrasted to their original habitat. Such has been the radial outflow of the Mongoloid tribes down from the rugged highlands of central Asia to the fertile river lowlands of the peripheral lands; the descent of the Iran pastors upon the agricultural folk of the Indus, Ganges and Mesopotamian valleys, and the swoop of desert-born conquerors upon the unresisting tillers of well-watered fields in all times, from the ancient Hyksos of the Nile to the modern Fulbe of the Niger Valley.

[Sidenote: Southward and westward drifts in the northern hemisphere.]

The attraction of a milder climate has caused in the northern hemisphere a constantly recurring migration from north to south. In primitive North America, along the whole broad Atlantic slope, the predominant direction of Indian migrations was from north to south, accompanied by a drift from west to east.[207] On the Pacific side of the continent also the trend was southward. This is generally conceded regardless of theory as to whether the Indians first found entrance to the continent at its northeast or northwest corner. It was a movement toward milder climates.[208] Study of the Voelkerwanderungen in Europe reveals two currents or drifts in varied combination, one from north to south and the other from east to west, but both of them aimed at regions of better climate; for the milder temperature and more abundant rainfall of western Europe made a country as alluring to the Goths, Huns, Alans, Slavs, Bulgars and Tartars of Asiatic deserts and Russian steppes, as were the sunny Mediterranean peninsulas to the dwellers of the bleak Baltic coasts. This is one geographic fact back of the conspicuous westward movement formulated into an historical principle: "Westward the star of empire takes its course." The establishment of European colonies on the western side of the Atlantic, their extension thence to the Pacific and ever westward, till European culture was transplanted to the Philippines by Spain and more recently by the United States, constitute the most remarkable sustained movement made by any one race.

[Sidenote: Eastward movements.]

But westward movements are not the only ones. On the Pacific slope of Asia the star has moved eastward. From highland Mongolia issued the throng which originally populated the lowlands of China; and ever since, one nomad conqueror after the other has descended thence to rule the fruitful plains of Chili and the teeming populations of the Yangtze Valley.[209] Russia, blocked in its hoped for expansion to the west by the strong powers of central Europe, stretched its dominion eastward to the Pacific and for a short time over to Alaska. The chief expansion of the German people and the German Empire in historical times has also been from west to east; but this eastward advance is probably only retracing the steps taken by many primitive Teutonic tribes as they drifted Rhineward from an earlier habitat along the Vistula.

[Sidenote: Return movements.]

Since the world is small, it frequently happens that a people after an interval of generations, armed with a higher civilization, will reenter a region which it once left when too crude and untutored to develop the possibilities of the land, but which its better equipment later enables it to exploit. Thus we find a backward expansion of the Chinese westward to the foot of the Pamir, and an internal colonization of the empire to the Ili feeder of Lake Balkash. The expansion of the Japanese into Korea and Saghalin is undoubtedly such a return current, after an interval long enough to work a complete transformation in the primitive Mongolians who found their way to that island home. Sometimes the return represents the ebbing of the tide, rather than the back water of a stream in flood. Such was the retreat of the Moors from Spain to the Berber districts of North Africa, whither they carried echoes of the brilliant Saracen civilization in the Iberian Peninsula. Such has been the gradual withdrawal of the Turks from Europe back to their native Asia, and slow expulsion of the Tartar tribes from Russia to the barren Asiatic limits of their former territory. [See map page 225.]

[Sidenote: Regions of attraction and repulsion.]

Voluntary historical movements, seeking congenial or choice regions of the earth, have left its less favored spots undisturbed. Paucity of resources and isolation have generally insured to a region a peaceful history; natural wealth has always brought the conqueror. In ancient Greece the fruitful plains of Thessaly, Boeotia, Elis and Laconia had a fatal attraction for every migrating horde; Attica's rugged surface, poor soil, and side-tracked location off the main line of travel between Hellas and the Peloponnesus saved it from many a rough visitant,[210] and hence left the Athenians, according to Thucydides, an indigenous race. The fertility of the Rhine Valley has always attracted invasion, the barren Black Forest range has repelled and obstructed it.

The security of such unproductive highlands lies more in their failure to attract than in their power to resist conquest. When to abundant natural resources, a single spot adds a reputation for wealth, magnificence, an exceptional position for the control of territory or commerce, it becomes a geographical magnet. Such was Delphi for the Gauls of the Balkan Peninsula in the third century, Rome for the Germanic and Hunnish tribes of the Voelkerwanderung, Constantinople for the Normans, Turks and Russians, Venice for land-locked Austria, the Mississippi highway and the outlet at New Orleans for our Trans-Allegheny pioneers.

[Sidenote: Psychical influences in certain movements.]

Sometimes the goal is fabulous or mythical, but potent to lure, like the land of El Dorado, abounding in gold and jewels, which for two centuries spurred on Spanish exploration in America. Other than purely material motives may initiate or maintain such a movement, an ideal or a dream of good, like the fountain of eternal youth which brought Ponce de Leon to Florida, the search for the Islands of the Blessed, or the spirit of religious propaganda which stimulated the spread of the Spanish in Mexico and the French in Canada, or the hope of religious toleration which has drawn Quaker, Puritan, Huguenot, and Jew to America. It was an idea of purely spiritual import which directed the century-long movement of the Crusades toward Jerusalem, half Latinized the Levant, and widened the intellectual horizon of Europe. A national or racial sentiment which enhaloes a certain spot may be pregnant with historical results, because at any moment it may start some band of enthusiasts on a path of migration or conquest. The Zionist agitation for the return of oppressed Jews to Palestine, and the establishment of the Liberian Republic for the negroes in Africa rest upon such a sentiment. The reverence of the Christian world for Rome as a goal of pilgrimages materially enhanced the influence of Italy as a school of culture during the Middle Ages. The spiritual and ethnic association of the Mohammedan world with Mecca is always fraught with possible political results. The dominant tribes of the Sudan, followers of Islam, who proudly trace back a fictitious line of ancestry to the Arabs of Yemen, are readily incited to support a new prophet sprung from the race of Mecca.[211] The pilgrimages which the Buddhists of the Asiatic highlands make to the sacred city of Lhassa ensure China's control over the restless nomads through the instrumentality of the Grand Lama of Tibet.

[Sidenote: Results of historical movement.]

Historical movements are varied as to motive, direction, numerical strength, and character, but their final results are two, differentiation and assimilation. Both are important phases of the process of evolution, but the latter gains force with the progress of history and the increase of the world's population.

[Sidenote: Differentiation and area.]

A people or race which, in its process of numerical growth, spreads over a large territory subjects itself to a widening range of geographic conditions, and therefore of differentiation. The broad expansion of the Teutonic race in Europe, America, Australia and South Africa has brought it into every variety of habitat. If the territory has a monotonous relief like Russia, nevertheless, its mere extent involves diversity of climate and location. The diversity of climate incident to large area involves in turn different animal and plant life, different crops, different economic activities. Even in lowlands the relief, geologic structure, and soil are prone to vary over wide districts. The monotonous surface of Holland shows such contrasts. So do the North German lowlands; here the sandy barren flats of the "geest" alternate with stretches of fertile silt deposited by the rivers or the sea,[212] and support different types of communities, which have been admirably described by Gustav Frenssen in his great novel of Joen Uhl. The flat surface of southern Illinois shows in small compass the teeming fertility of the famous "American bottom," the poor clay soil of "Egypt" with its backward population, and the rich prairie land just to the north with its prosperous and progressive farmer class.

When the relief includes mountains, the character not only of the land but of the climate changes, and therewith the type of community. Hence neighboring districts may produce strongly contrasted types of society. Madison County of Kentucky, lying on the eastern margin of the Bluegrass region, contains the rich landed estates, negro laboring class and aristocratic society characteristic of the "planter" communities of the old South; and only twenty miles southeast of Richmond, the center of this wealth and refinement, it includes also the rough barren hill country of the Cumberland Plateau, where are found one-room cabins, moonshine stills, feuds, and a backward population sprung from the same pure English stock as the Bluegrass people.

[Sidenote: Contrasted environments.]

Here is differentiation due to the immediate influences of environment. The phenomenon reappears in every part of the world, in every race and every age. The contrast between the ancient Greeks of the mountains, coasts and alluvial valleys shows the power of environment to direct economic activities and to modify culture and social organization. So does the differences between the coast, steppe, and forest Indians of Guiana,[213] the Kirghis of the Pamir pastures and the Irtysh River valley, the agricultural Berbers of the Atlas Mountains and the Berber nomads of the Sahara, the Swiss of the high, lonely Engadine and those of the crowded Aar valley.

Contrasted environments effect a natural selection in another way and thereby greatly stimulate differentiation, whenever an intruding people contest the ownership of the territory with the inhabitants. The struggle for land means a struggle also for the best land, which therefore falls to the share of the strongest peoples. Weaklings must content themselves with poor soils, inaccessible regions of mountain, swamp or desert. There they deteriorate, or at best strike a slower pace of increase or progress. The difference between the people of the highlands and plains of Great Britain or of France is therefore in part a distinction of race due to this geographical selection,[214] in part a distinction of economic development and culture due to geographic influences. Therefore the piedmont belts of the world, except in arid lands, are cultural, ethnic and often political lines of cleavage, showing marked differentiation on either side. Isotherms are other such cleavage lines, marking the limits beyond which an aggressive people did not desire to expand because of an uncongenial climate. The distinction between Anglo-Saxon and Latin America is one of zone as well as race. Everywhere in North America the English stock has dominated or displaced French and Spanish competitors down to the Mexican frontier.