[77] A.R. Colquhoun, Africander Land, pp. 200-201. New York, 1906.

[78] _Ibid._, pp. 140-145. James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, p.

398. New York, 1897.

CHAPTER III

SOCIETY AND STATE IN RELATION TO THE LAND

[Sidenote: People and land.]

Every clan, tribe, state or nation includes two ideas, a people and its

land, the first unthinkable without the other. History, sociology,

ethnology touch only the inhabited areas of the earth. These areas gain

their final significance because of the people who occupy them; their

local conditions of climate, soil, natural resources, physical features

and geographic situation are important primarily as factors in the

development of actual or possible inhabitants. A land is fully

comprehended only when studied in the light of its influence upon its

people, and a people cannot be understood apart from the field of its

activities. More than this, human activities are fully intelligible only

in relation to the various geographic conditions which have stimulated

them in different parts of the world. The principles of the evolution of

navigation, of agriculture, of trade, as also the theory of population,

can never reach their correct and final statement, unless the data for

the conclusions are drawn from every part of the world, and each fact

interpreted in the light of the local conditions whence it sprang.

Therefore anthropology, sociology and history should be permeated by

geography.

[Sidenote: Political geography and history.]

In history, the question of territory,--by which is meant mere area in

contrast to specific geographic conditions--has constantly come to the

front, because a state obviously involved land and boundaries, and

assumed as its chief function the defence and extension of these.

Therefore political geography developed early as an offshoot of history.

Political science has often formulated its principles without regard to

the geographic conditions of states, but as a matter of fact, the most

fruitful political policies of nations have almost invariably had a

geographic core. Witness the colonial policy of Holland, England, France

and Portugal, the free-trade policy of England, the militantism of

Germany, the whole complex question of European balance of power and the

Bosporus, and the Monroe Doctrine of the United States. Dividing lines

between political parties tend to follow approximately geographic lines

of cleavage; and these make themselves apparent at recurring intervals

of national upheaval, perhaps with, centuries between, like a submarine

volcanic rift. In England the southeastern plain and the northwestern

uplands have been repeatedly arrayed against each other, from the Roman

conquest which embraced the lowlands up to about the 500-foot contour

line,[79] through the War of the Roses and the Civil War,[80] to the

struggle for the repeal of the Corn Laws and the great Reform Bill of

1832.[81] Though the boundary lines have been only roughly the same and

each district has contained opponents of the dominant local party,

nevertheless the geographic core has been plain enough.

[Sidenote: Political versus social geography.]

The land is a more conspicuous factor in the history of states than in

the history of society, but not more necessary and potent. Wars, which

constitute so large a part of political history, have usually aimed more

or less directly at acquisition or retention of territory; they have

made every petty quarrel the pretext for mulcting the weaker nation of

part of its land. Political maps are therefore subject to sudden and

radical alterations, as when France's name was wiped off the North

American continent in 1763, or when recently Spain's sovereignty in the

Western Hemisphere was obliterated. But the race stocks, languages,

customs, and institutions of both France and Spain remained after the

flags had departed. The reason is that society is far more deeply rooted

in the land than is a state, does not expand or contract its area so

readily. Society is always, in a sense, _adscripta glebae_; an expanding

state which incorporates a new piece of territory inevitably

incorporates its inhabitants, unless it exterminates or expels them. Yet

because racial and social geography changes slowly, quietly and

imperceptibly, like all those fundamental processes which we call

growth, it is not so easy and obvious a task to formulate a natural law

for the territorial relations of the various hunter, pastoral nomadic,

agricultural, and industrial types of society as for those of the

growing state.

[Sidenote: Land basis of society.]

Most systems of sociology treat man as if he were in some way detached

from the earth's surface; they ignore the land basis of society. The

anthropo-geographer recognizes the various social forces, economic and

psychologic, which sociologists regard as the cement of societies; but

he has something to add. He sees in the land occupied by a primitive

tribe or a highly organized state the underlying material bond holding

society together, the ultimate basis of their fundamental social

activities, which are therefore derivatives from the land. He sees the

common territory exercising an integrating force,--weak in primitive

communities where the group has established only a few slight and

temporary relations with its soil, so that this low social complex

breaks up readily like its organic counterpart, the low animal organism

found in an amoeba; he sees it growing stronger with every advance in

civilization involving more complex relations to the land,--with settled

habitations, with increased density of population, with a discriminating

and highly differentiated use of the soil, with the exploitation of

mineral resources, and finally with that far-reaching exchange of

commodities and ideas which means the establishment of varied

extra-territorial relations. Finally, the modern society or state has

grown into every foot of its own soil, exploited its every geographic

advantage, utilized its geographic location to enrich itself by

international trade, and when possible, to absorb outlying territories

by means of colonies. The broader this geographic base, the richer, more

varied its resources, and the more favorable its climate to their

exploitation, the more numerous and complex are the connections which

the members of a social group can establish with it, and through it with

each other; or in other words, the greater may be its ultimate

historical significance. The polar regions and the subtropical deserts,

on the other hand, permit man to form only few and intermittent

relations with any one spot, restrict economic methods to the lower

stages of development, produce only the small, weak, loosely organized

horde, which never evolves into a state so long as it remains in that

retarding environment.

[Sidenote: Morgan's Societas.]

Man in his larger activities, as opposed to his mere physiological or

psychological processes, cannot be studied apart from the land which he

inhabits. Whether we consider him singly or in a group--family, clan,

tribe or state--we must always consider him or his group in relation to

a piece of land. The ancient Irish sept, Highland clan, Russian mir,

Cherokee hill-town, Bedouin tribe, and the ancient Helvetian canton,

like the political state of history, have meant always a group of people

and a bit of land. The first presupposes the second. In all cases the

form and size of the social group, the nature of its activities, the

trend and limit of its development will be strongly influenced by the

size and nature of its habitat. The land basis is always present, in

spite of Morgan's artificial distinction between a theoretically

landless _societas_, held together only by the bond of common blood, and

the political _civitas_ based upon land.[82] Though primitive society

found its conscious bond in common blood, nevertheless the land bond was

always there, and it gradually asserted its fundamental character with

the evolution of society.

The savage and barbarous groups which in Morgan's classification would

fall under the head of _societas_ have nevertheless a clear conception

of their ownership of the tribal lands which they use in common. This

idea is probably of very primitive origin, arising from the association

of a group with its habitat, whose food supply they regard as a

monopoly.[83] This is true even of migratory hunting tribes. They claim a

certain area whose boundaries, however, are often ill-defined and

subject to fluctuations, because the lands are not held by permanent

occupancy and cultivation. An exceptional case is that of the Shoshone

Indians, inhabiting the barren Utah basin and the upper valleys of the

Snake and Salmon Rivers, who are accredited with no sense of ownership

of the soil. In their natural state they roved about in small, totally

unorganized bands or single families, and changed their locations so

widely, that they seemed to lay no claim to any particular portion. The

hopeless sterility of the region and its poverty of game kept its

destitute inhabitants constantly on the move to gather in the meager

food supply, and often restricted the social group to the family.[84]

Here the bond between land and tribe, and hence between the members of

the tribe, was the weakest possible.

[Sidenote: Land bond in hunter tribes.]

The usual type of tribal ownership was presented by the Comanches,

nomadic horse Indians who occupied the grassy plains of northern Texas.

They held their territory and the game upon it as the common property of

the tribe, and jealously guarded the integrity of their domain.[85] The

chief Algonquin tribes, who occupied the territory between the Ohio

River and the Great Lakes, had each its separate domain, within which it

shifted its villages every few years; but its size depended upon the

power of the tribe to repel encroachment upon its hunting grounds.

Relying mainly on the chase and fishing, little on agriculture, for

their subsistence, their relations to their soil were superficial and

transitory, their tribal organization in a high degree unstable.[86]

Students of American ethnology generally agree that most of the Indian

tribes east of the Mississippi were occupying definite areas at the time

of the discovery, and were to a considerable extent sedentary and

agricultural. Though nomadic within the tribal territory, as they moved

with the season in pursuit of game, they returned to their villages,

which were shifted only at relatively long intervals.[87]

The political organization of the native Australians, low as they were

in the social scale, seems to have been based chiefly on the claim of

each wretched wandering tribe to a definite territory.[88] In north

central Australia, where even a very sparse population has sufficed to

saturate the sterile soil, tribal boundaries have become fixed and

inviolable, so that even war brings no transfer of territory. Land and

people are identified. The bond is cemented by their primitive religion,

for the tribe's spirit ancestors occupied this special territory.[89] In

a like manner a very definite conception of tribal ownership of land

prevails among the Bushmen and Bechuanas of South Africa; and to the

pastoral Hereros the alienation of their land is inconceivable.[90] [See

map page 105.]

A tribe of hunters can never be more than a small horde, because the

simple, monotonous savage economy permits no concentration of

population, no division of labor except that between the sexes, and

hence no evolution of classes. The common economic level of all is

reflected in the simple social organization,[91] which necessarily has

little cohesion, because the group must be prepared to break up and

scatter in smaller divisions, when its members increase or its savage

supplies decrease even a little. Such primitive groups cannot grow into

larger units, because these would demand more roots sent down into the

sustaining soil; but they multiply by fission, like the infusorial

monads, and thereafter lead independent existences remote from each

other. This is the explanation of multiplication of dialects among

savage tribes.

[Sidenote: Land bond in fisher tribes.]

Fishing tribes have their chief occupation determined by their habitats,

which are found along well stocked rivers, lakes, or coastal fishing

grounds. Conditions here encourage an early adoption of sedentary life,

discourage wandering except for short periods, and facilitate the

introduction of agriculture wherever conditions of climate and soil

permit. Hence these fisher folk develop relatively large and permanent

social groups, as testified by the ancient lake-villages of Switzerland,

based upon a concentrated food-supply resulting from a systematic and

often varied exploitation of the local resources. The coöperation and

submission to a leader necessary in pelagic fishing often gives the

preliminary training for higher political organization.[92] All the

primitive stocks of the Brazilian Indians, except the mountain Ges, are

fishermen and agriculturists; hence their annual migrations are kept

within narrow limits. Each linguistic group occupies a fixed and

relatively well defined district.[93] Stanley found along the Congo

large permanent villages of the natives, who were engaged in fishing and

tilling the fruitful soil, but knew little about the country ten miles

back from the river. These two generous means of subsistence are

everywhere combined in Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia: there they

are associated with dense populations and often with advanced political

organization, as we find it in the feudal monarchy of Tonga and the

savage Fiji Islands.[94] Fisher tribes, therefore, get an early impulse

forward in civilization;[95] and even where conditions do not permit the

upward step to agriculture, these tribes have permanent relations with

their land, form stable social groups, and often utilize their location

on a natural highway to develop systematic trade. For instance, on the

northwest coast of British Columbia and Southern Alaska, the Haida,

Tlingit and Tsimshean Indians have portioned out all the land about

their seaboard villages among the separate families or households as

hunting, fishing, and berrying grounds. These are regarded as private

property and are handed down from generation to generation. If they are

used by anyone other than the owner, the privilege must be paid for.

Every salmon stream has its proprietor, whose summer camp can be seen

set up at the point where the run of the fish is greatest. Combined with

this private property in land there is a brisk trade up and down the

coast, and a tendency toward feudalism in the village communities, owing

to the association of power and social distinction with wealth and

property in land.[96]

[Sidenote: Land bond in pastoral societies.]

Among pastoral nomads, among whom a systematic use of their territory

begins to appear, and therefore a more definite relation between land

and people, we find a more distinct notion than among wandering hunters

of territorial ownership, the right of communal use, and the distinct

obligation of common defense. Hence the social bond is drawn closer. The

nomad identifies himself with a certain district, which belongs to his

tribe by tradition or conquest, and has its clearly defined boundaries.

Here he roams between its summer and winter pastures, possibly one

hundred and fifty miles apart, visits its small arable patches in the

spring for his limited agricultural ventures, and returns to them in the

fall to reap their meager harvest. Its springs, streams, or wells assume

enhanced value, are things to be fought for, owing to the prevailing

aridity of summer; while ownership of a certain tract of desert or

grassland carries with it a certain right in the bordering settled

district as an area of plunder.[97]

The Kara-Kirghis stock, who have been located since the sixteenth

century on Lake Issik-Kul, long ago portioned out the land among the

separate families, and determined their limits by natural features of

the landscape.[98] Sven Hedin found on the Tarim River poles set up to

mark the boundary between the Shah-yar and Kuchar tribal pastures.[99]

John de Plano Carpini, traveling over southern Russia in 1246,

immediately after the Tartar conquest, found that the Dnieper, Don,

Volga and Ural rivers were all boundaries between domains of the various

millionaries or thousands, into which the Tartar horde was

organized.[100] The population of this vast country was distributed

according to the different degrees of fertility and the size of the

pastoral groups.[101] Volney observed the same distinction in the

distribution of the Bedouins of Syria. He found the barren cantons held

by small, widely scattered tribes, as in the Desert of Suez; but the

cultivable cantons, like the Hauran and the Pachalic of Aleppo, closely

dotted by the encampments of the pastoral owners.[102]

The large range of territory held by a nomadic tribe is all successively

occupied in the course of a year, but each part only for a short period

of time. A pastoral use of even a good district necessitates a move of

five or ten miles every few weeks. The whole, large as it may be, is

absolutely necessary for the annual support of the tribe. Hence any

outside encroachment upon their territory calls for the united

resistance of the tribe. This joint or social action is dictated by

their common interest in pastures and herds. The social administration

embodied in the apportionment of pastures among the families or clans

grows out of the systematic use of their territory, which represents a

closer relation between land and people than is found among purely

hunting tribes. Overcrowding by men or livestock, on the other hand,

puts a strain upon the social bond. When Abraham and Lot, typical

nomads, returned from Egypt to Canaan with their large flocks and herds,

rivalry for the pastures occasioned conflicts among their shepherds, so

the two sheiks decided to separate. Abraham took the hill pastures of

Judea, and Lot the plains of Jordan near the settled district of

Sodom.[103]

[Sidenote: Geographical mark of low-type societies.]

The larger the amount of territory necessary for the support of a given

number of people, whether the proportion be due to permanent poverty of

natural resources as in the Eskimo country, or to retarded economic

development as among the Indians of primitive America or the present

Sudanese, the looser is the connection between land and people, and the

lower the type of social organization. For such groups the organic

theory of society finds an apt description. To quote Spencer, "The

original clusters, animal and social, are not only small, but they lack

density. Creatures of low type occupy large spaces considering the small

quantity of animal substance they contain; and low-type societies spread

over areas that are wide relatively to the number of their component

individuals."[104] In common language this means small tribes or even

detached families sparsely scattered over wide areas, living in

temporary huts or encampments of tepees and tents shifted from place to

place, making no effort to modify the surface of the land beyond

scratching the soil to raise a niggardly crop of grain or tubers, and no

investment of labor that might attach to one spot the sparse and migrant

population. [See density maps pages 8 and 9.]

[Sidenote: Land and state.]

The superiority over this social type of the civilized state lies in the

highly organized utilization of its whole geographic basis by the mature

community, and in the development of government that has followed the

increasing density of population and multiplication of activities

growing out of this manifold use of the land. Sedentary agriculture,

which forms its initial economic basis, is followed by industrialism and

commerce. The migratory life presents only limited accumulation of

capital, and restricts narrowly its forms. Permanent settlement

encourages accumulation in every form, and under growing pressure of

population slowly reveals the possibilities of every foot of ground, of

every geographic advantage. These are the fibers of the land which

become woven into the whole fabric of the nation's life. These are the

geographic elements constituting the soil in which empires are rooted;

they rise in the sap of the nation.

[Sidenote: Strength of the land bond in the state.]

The geographic basis of a state embodies a whole complex of physical

conditions which may influence its historical development. The most

potent of these are its size and zonal location; its situation, whether

continental or insular, inland or maritime, on the open ocean or an

enclosed sea; its boundaries, whether drawn by sea, mountain, desert or

the faint demarking line of a river; its forested mountains, grassy

plains, and arable lowlands; its climate and drainage system; finally

its equipment with plant and animal life, whether indigenous or

imported, and its mineral resources. When a state has taken advantage

of all its natural conditions, the land becomes a constituent part of

the state,[105] modifying the people which inhabit it, modified by them

in turn, till the connection between the two becomes so strong by

reciprocal interaction, that the people cannot be understood apart from

their land. Any attempt to divide them theoretically reduces the social

or political body to a cadaver, valuable for the study of structural

anatomy after the method of Herbert Spencer, but throwing little light

upon the vital processes.

[Sidenote: Weak land tenure of hunting and pastoral tribes.]

A people who makes only a transitory or superficial use of its land has

upon it no permanent or secure hold. The power to hold is measured by

the power to use; hence the weak tenure of hunting and pastoral tribes.

Between their scattered encampments at any given time are wide

interstices, inviting occupation by any settlers who know how to make

better use of the soil. This explains the easy intrusion of the English

colonists into the sparsely tenanted territory of the Indians, of the

agricultural Chinese into the pasture lands of the Mongols beyond the

Great Wall, of the American pioneers into the hunting grounds of the

Hudson Bay Company in the disputed Oregon country.[106] The frail bonds

which unite these lower societies to their soil are easily ruptured and

the people themselves dislodged, while their land is appropriated by the

intruder. But who could ever conceive of dislodging the Chinese or the

close-packed millions of India? A modern state with a given population

on a wide area is more vulnerable than another of like population more

closely distributed; but the former has the advantage of a reserve

territory for future growth.[107] This was the case of Kursachsen and

Brandenburg in the sixteenth century, and of the United States

throughout its history. But beside the danger of inherent weakness

before attack, a condition of relative underpopulation always threatens

a retardation of development. Easy-going man needs the prod of a

pressing population. [Compare maps pages 8 and 103 for examples.]

[Sidenote: Land and food supply.]

Food is the urgent and recurrent need of individuals and of society. It

dictates their activities in relation to their land at every stage of

economic development, fixes the locality of the encampment or village,

and determines the size of the territory from which sustenance is

drawn. The length of residence in one place depends upon whether the

springs of its food supply are perennial or intermittent, while the

abundance of their flow determines how large a population a given piece

of land can support.

[Sidenote: Advance from natural to artificial basis of subsistence.]

Hunter and fisher folk, relying almost exclusively upon what their land

produces of itself, need a large area and derive from it only an

irregular food supply, which in winter diminishes to the verge of

famine. The transition to the pastoral stage has meant the substitution

of an artificial for a natural basis of subsistence, and therewith a

change which more than any other one thing has inaugurated the advance

from savagery to civilization.[108] From the standpoint of economics, the

forward stride has consisted in the application of capital in the form

of flocks and herds to the task of feeding the wandering horde;[109] from

the standpoint of alimentation, in the guarantee of a more reliable and

generally more nutritious food supply, which enables population to grow

more steadily and rapidly; from the standpoint of geography, in the

marked reduction in the per capita amount of land necessary to yield an

adequate and stable food supply. Pastoral nomadism can support in a

given district of average quality from ten to twenty times as many souls

as can the chase; but in this respect is surpassed from twenty to

thirty-fold by the more productive agriculture. While the subsistence of

a nomad requires 100 to 200 acres of land, for that of a skillful farmer

from 1 to 2 acres suffice.[110] In contrast, the land of the Indians

living in the Hudson Bay Territory in 1857 averaged 10 square miles per

capita; that of the Indians in the United States in 1825, subsidized

moreover by the government, 1-1/4 square miles.[111]

[Sidenote: Land in relation to agriculture.]

With transition to the sedentary life of agriculture, society makes a

further gain over nomadism in the closer integration of its social

units, due to permanent residence in larger and more complex groups; in

the continuous release of labor from the task of mere food-getting for

higher activities, resulting especially in the rapid evolution of the

home; and finally in the more elaborate organization in the use of the

land, leading to economic differentiation of different localities and

to a rapid increase in the population supported by a given area, so that

the land becomes the dominant cohesive force in society. [See maps pages

8 and 9.]

[Sidenote: Migratory agriculture]

Agriculture is adopted at first on a small scale as an adjunct to the

chase or herding. It tends therefore to partake of the same extensive

and nomadic character[112] as these other methods of gaining subsistence,

and only gradually becomes sedentary and intensive. Such was the

superficial, migratory tillage of most American Indians, shifting with

the village in the wake of the retreating game or in search of fresh

unexhausted soil. Such is the agriculture of the primitive Korkus in the

Mahadeo Hills in Central India. They clear a forested slope by burning;

rake over the ashes in which they sow their grain, and reap a fairly

good crop in the fertilized soil. The second year the clearing yields a

reduced product and the third year is abandoned. When the hamlet of five

or six families has exhausted all the land about it, it moves to a new

spot to repeat the process.[113]

The same superficial, extensive tillage, with abandonment of fields

every few years, prevails in the Tartar districts of the Russian

steppes, as it did among the cattle-raising Germans at the beginning of

their history. Tacitus says of them, _Arva per annos mutant et superest

ager_,[114] commenting at the same time upon their abundance of land and

their reluctance to till. Where nomadism is made imperative by aridity,

the agriculture which accompanies it tends to become fixed, owing to the

few localities blessed with an irrigating stream to moisten the soil.

These spots, generally selected for the winter residence, have their

soil enriched, moreover, by the long stay of the herd and thus avoid

exhaustion.[115] Often, however, in enclosed basins the salinity of the

irrigating streams in their lower course ruins the fields after one or

two crops, and necessitates a constant shifting of the cultivated

patches; hence agriculture remains subsidiary to the yield of the

pastures. This condition and effect is conspicuous along the termini of

the streams draining the northern slope of the Kuen Lun into the Tarim

basin.[116]

[Sidenote: Geographic checks to progress.]

The desultory, intermittent, extensive use of the land practised by

hunters and nomads tends, under the growing pressure of population, to

pass into the systematic, continuous, intensive use practised by the

farmer, except where nature presents positive checks to the transition.

The most obvious check consists in adverse conditions of climate and

soil. Where agriculture meets insurmountable obstacles, like the intense

cold of Arctic Siberia and Lapland, or the alkaline soils of Nevada and

the Caspian Depression, or the inadequate rainfall of Mongolia and

Central Arabia, the land can produce no higher economic and social

groups than pastoral hordes. Hence shepherd folk are found in their

purest types in deserts and steppes, where conditions early crystallized

the social form and checked development. [Rainfall map chap. XIV.]

[Sidenote: Native animal and plant life as factors.]

Adverse conditions of climate and soil are not the only factors in this

retardation. The very unequal native equipment of the several continents

with plant and animal forms likely to accelerate the advance to nomadism

and agriculture also enters into the equation. In Australia, the lack of

a single indigenous mammal fit for domestication and of all cereals

blocked from the start the pastoral and agricultural development of the

natives. Hence at the arrival of the Europeans, Australia presented the

unique spectacle of a whole continent with its population still held in

the vise of nature. The Americas had a limited variety of animals

susceptible of domestication, but were more meagerly equipped than the

Old World. Yet the Eskimo failed to tame and herd the reindeer, though

their precarious food-supply furnished a motive for the transition.

Moreover, an abundance of grass and reindeer moss (_Cladonia

rangiferina_), and congenial climatic conditions favored it especially

for the Alaskan Eskimo, who had, besides, the nearby example of the

Siberian Chukches as reindeer herders.[117] The buffalo, whose

domesticability has been proved, was never utilized in this way by the

Indians, though the Spaniard Gomara writes of one tribe, living in the

sixteenth century in the southwestern part of what is now United States

territory, whose chief wealth consisted in herds of tame buffalo.[118]

North America, at the time of the discovery, saw only the dog hanging

about the lodges of the Indians; but in South America the llama and

alpaca, confined to the higher levels of the Andes (10,000 to 15,000

feet elevation) were used in domestic herds only in the mountain-rimmed

valleys of ancient Peru, where, owing to the restricted areas of these

intermontane basins, stock-raising early became stationary,[119] as we

find it in the Alps. Moreover, the high ridges of the Andes supported a

species of grass called _ichu_, growing up to the snowline from the

equator to the southern extremity of Patagonia. Its geographical

distribution coincided with that of the llama and alpaca, whose chief

pasturage it furnished.[120] In contrast, the absence of any wild fodder

plants in Japan, and the exclusion of all foreign forms by the

successful competition of the native bamboo grass have together

eliminated pastoral life from the economic history of the island.

The Old World, on the other hand, furnished an abundant supply of

indigenous animals susceptible of domestication, and especially those

fitted for nomadic life, such as the camel, horse, ass, sheep and goat.

Hence it produced in the widespread grasslands and deserts of Europe,

Asia, and Africa the most perfect types of pastoral development in its

natural or nomadic form. Moreover, the early history of the civilized

agricultural peoples of these three continents reveals their previous

pastoral mode of life.

North and South America offered over most of their area conditions of

climate and soil highly favorable to agriculture, and a fair list of

indigenous cereals, tubers, and pulses yielding goodly crops even to

superficial tillage. Maize especially was admirably suited for a race of

semi-migratory hunters. It could be sown without plowing, ripened in a

warm season even in ninety days, could be harvested without a sickle and

at the pleasure of the cultivator, and needed no preparation beyond

roasting before it was ready for food.[121] The beans and pumpkins which

the Indians raised also needed only a short season. Hence many Indian

tribes, while showing no trace of pastoral development, combined with

the chase a semi-nomadic agriculture; and in a few districts where

geographic conditions had applied peculiar pressure, they had

accomplished the transition to sedentary agriculture.

[Sidenote: Land per capita under various cultural and geographic

conditions.]

Every advance to a higher state of civilization has meant a progressive

decrease in the amount of land necessary for the support of the

individual, and a progressive increase in the relations between man and

his habitat. The stage of social development remaining the same, the per

capita amount of land decreases also from poorer to better endowed

geographical districts, and with every invention which brings into use

some natural resource. The following classification[122] illustrates the

relation of density of population to various geographic and

socio-economic conditions.

Hunter tribes on the outskirts of the habitable area, as in Arctic

America and Siberia, require from 70 to 200 square miles per capita; in

arid lands, like the Kalahari Desert and Patagonia, 40 to 200 square

miles per capita; in choice districts and combining with the chase some

primitive agriculture, as did the Cherokee, Shawnee and Iroquois

Indians, the Dyaks of Borneo and the Papuans of New Guinea, 1/2 to 2

square miles per capita.

Pastoral nomads show a density of from 2 to 5 to the square mile;

practicing some agriculture, as in Kordofan and Sennar districts of

eastern Sudan, 10 to 15 to the square mile. Agriculture, undeveloped but

combined with some trade and industry as in Equatorial Africa, Borneo

and most of the Central American states, supports 5 to 15 to the square

mile; practised with European methods in young or colonial lands, as in

Arkansas, Texas, Minnesota, Hawaii, Canada and Argentine, or in European

lands with unfavorable climate, up to 25 to the square mile.

Pure agricultural lands of central Europe support 100 to the square

mile, and those of southern Europe, 200; when combining some industry,

from 250 to 300. But these figures rise to 500 or more in lowland India

and China. Industrial districts of modern Europe, such as England,

Belgium, Saxony, Departments Nord and Rhone in France, show a density of

500 to 800 to the square mile. [See maps pages 8 and 9.]

[Sidenote: Density of population and government.]

With every increase of the population inhabiting a given area, and with

the consequent multiplication and constriction of the bonds uniting

society with its land, comes a growing necessity for a more highly

organized government, both to reduce friction within and to secure to

the people the land on which and by which they live. Therefore

protection becomes a prime function of the state. It wards off outside

attack which may aim at acquisition of its territory, or an invasion of

its rights, or curtailment of its geographic sphere of activity. The

modern industrial state, furthermore, with the purpose of strengthening

the nation, assists or itself undertakes the construction of highways,

canals, and railroads, and the maintenance of steamship lines. These

encourage the development of natural resources and of commerce, and

hence lay the foundation for an increased population, by multiplying the

relations between land and people.

[Sidenote: Territorial expansion of the state.]

A like object is attained by territorial expansion, which often follows

in the wake of commercial expansion. This strengthens the nation

positively by enlarging its geographic base, and negatively by forcing

back the boundaries of its neighbors. The expansion of the Thirteen

Colonies from the Atlantic slope to the Mississippi River and the Great

Lakes by the treaty concluding the Revolution was a strong guarantee of

the survival of the young Republic against future aggressions either of

England or Spain, though it exchanged the scientific or protecting

boundary of the Appalachian Mountains for the unscientific and exposed

boundary of a river. The expansion to the Rocky Mountains by the

Louisiana purchase not only gave wider play to national energies,

stimulated natural increase of population, and attracted immigration,

but it eliminated a dangerous neighbor in the French, and placed a wide

buffer of untenanted land between the United States and the petty

aggressions of the Spanish in Mexico. Rome's expansion into the valley

of the Po, as later into Trans-Alpine Gaul and Germany, had for its

purpose the protection of the peninsula against barbarian inroads.

Japan's recent aggression against the Russians in the Far East was

actuated by the realization that she had to expand into Korea at the

cost of Muscovite ascendency, or contract later at the cost of her own

independence.

[Sidenote: Checks to population.]

If a state lacks the energy and national purpose, like Italy, or the

possibility, like Switzerland, for territorial expansion, and accepts

its boundaries as final, the natural increase of population upon a fixed

area produces an increased density, unless certain social forces

counteract it. Without these forces, the relation of men to the land

would have tended to modify everywhere in the same way. Increase in

numbers would have been attended by a corresponding decrease in the

amount of land at the disposal of each individual. Those states which,

like Norway and Switzerland, cannot expand and which have exploited

their natural resources to the utmost, must resign themselves to the

emigration of their redundant population. But those which have remained

within their own boundaries and have adopted a policy of isolation, like

China, feudal Japan during its two and a half centuries of seclusion,

and numerous Polynesian islands, have been forced to war with nature

itself by checking the operation of the law of natural increase. All the

repulsive devices contributing to this end, whether infanticide,

abortion, cannibalism, the sanctioned murder of the aged and infirm,

honorable suicide, polyandry or persistent war, are the social

deformities consequent upon suppressed growth. Such artificial checks

upon population are more conspicuous in natural regions with sharply

defined boundaries, like islands and oases, as Malthus observed;[123] but

they are visible also among savage tribes whose boundaries are fixed not

by natural features but by the mutual repulsion and rivalry

characterizing the stage of development, and whose limit of population

is reduced by their low economic status.

[Sidenote: Extra-territorial relations.]

There is a great difference between those states whose inhabitants

subsist exclusively from the products of their own country and those

which rely more or less upon other lands. Great industrial states, like

England and Germany, which derive only a portion of their food and raw

material from their own territory, supply their dense populations

through international trade. Interruption of such foreign commerce is

disastrous to the population at home; hence the state by a navy protects

the lines of communication with those far-away lands of wheat fields and

cattle ranch. This is no purely modern development. Athens in the time

of Pericles used her navy not only to secure her political domination in

the Aegean, but also her connections with the colonial wheat lands

about the Euxine.

The modern state strives to render this circle of trade both large and

permanent by means of commercial treaties, customs-unions, trading-posts

and colonies. Thus while society at home is multiplying its relations

with its own land, the state is enabling it to multiply also its

relations with the whole producing world. While at home the nation is

becoming more closely knit together through the common bond of the

fatherland, in the world at large humanity is evolving a brotherhood of

man by the union of each with all through the common growing bond of the

earth. Hence we cannot avoid the question: Are we in process of evolving

a social idea vaster than that underlying nationality? Do the Socialists

hint to us the geographic basis of this new development, when they

describe themselves as an international political party?

[Sidenote: Geography in the philosophy of history.]

It is natural that the old philosophy of history should have fixed its

attention upon the geographic basis of historical events. Searching for

the permanent and common in the outwardly mutable, it found always at

the bottom of changing events the same solid earth. Biology has had the

same experience. The history of the life forms of the world leads always

back to the land on which that life arose, spread, and struggled for

existence. The philosophy of history was superior to early sociology, in

that its method was one of historical comparison, which inevitably

guided it back to the land as the material for the first generalization.

Thus it happens that the importance of the land factor in history was

approached first from the philosophical side. Montesquieu and Herder had

no intention of solving sociological and geographical problems, when

they considered the relation of peoples and states to their soil; they

wished to understand the purpose and destiny of man as an inhabitant of

the earth.

[Sidenote: Theory of progress from the standpoint of geography.]

The study of history is always, from one standpoint, a study of

progress. Yet after all the century-long investigation of the history of

every people working out its destiny in its given environment,

struggling against the difficulties of its habitat, progressing when it

overcame them and retrograding when it failed, advancing when it made

the most of its opportunities and declining when it made less or

succumbed to an invader armed with better economic or political methods

to exploit the land, it is amazing how little the land, in which all

activities finally root, has been taken into account in the discussion

of progress. Nevertheless, for a theory of progress it offers a solid

basis. From the standpoint of the land social and political

organizations, in successive stages of development, embrace ever

increasing areas, and make them support ever denser populations; and in

this concentration of population and intensification of economic

development they assume ever higher forms. It does not suffice that a

people, in order to progress, should extend and multiply only its local

relations to its land. This would eventuate in arrested development,

such as Japan showed at the time of Perry's visit. The ideal basis of

progress is the expansion of the world relations of a people, the

extension of its field of activity and sphere of influence far beyond

the limits of its own territory, by which it exchanges commodities and

ideas with various countries of the world. Universal history shows us

that, as the geographical horizon of the known world has widened from

gray antiquity to the present, societies and states have expanded their

territorial and economic scope; that they have grown not only in the

number of their square miles and in the geographical range of their

international intercourse, but in national efficiency, power, and

permanence, and especially in that intellectual force which feeds upon

the nutritious food of wide comparisons. Every great movement which has

widened the geographical outlook of a people, such as the Crusades in

the Middle Ages, or the colonization of the Americas, has applied an

intellectual and economic stimulus. The expanding field of advancing

history has therefore been an essential concomitant and at the same time

a driving force in the progress of every people and of the world.

[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 coöperation, 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 Völkerstämme

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.

_Bevölkerung_, 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

Völkerwanderung. 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 _Völkerwanderung_ 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 rôle 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. Cæsar'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, mediæval

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

Moçambique. 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

_Völkerwanderungen_, 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 Cæsar 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 _Völkerwanderung_, 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 Cæsar, 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 preëminence 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 Græcia_ 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.