Popular Science Monthly/Volume 53/August 1898/The Evolution of Colonies: Emigration II
| THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES. |
By JAMES COLLIER.
II—EMIGRATION.
EMIGRATION is a continual regenesis of colonies, and in its latest stages exhibits all the phenomena that belong to the beginnings of societies. It answers closely to the genesis of the individual organism in particulars not previously mentioned. It is a mere extension of the migrations of animals, which project light on it, as it reflects light on them. And it recapitulates the movements that peopled the countries whence it proceeds. Guided by this triple clew, let us explore its myriad facts. They may be conveniently distributed under the principal Aristotelian categories. Whence, by whom, and of what sort, when, why, how, and whither has emigration taken place? Which are the emigrating races? At what point in its history does a nation throw off a colony? What are the characteristics of the emigrating type? What are the classes, religions, and professions, and which chiefly the sex, that swell the stream? What are their motives for leaving the old and seeking a new country? Under what circumstances and by what agencies is emigration carried out, and in what direction does it move?—these are the questions to be answered.
I. It is the brilliant generalization of Weismann (with which his view of the intransmissibleness of acquired characters seems to have no necessary connection) that the substance of every species consists of a web of germinal protoplasm that is continuous from one generation to another—a warp whereon the lives of individuals are as patterns woven. We might similarly conceive the migrating (destined, when they reach the sea, to become the emigrating) races as forming a continuous emigrating chain or cable, unbroken from the departure of the first migratory band to the sailing of the last emigrant ship, splitting on this side and that into independent strands, but each containing the ferment of the movement that has carried civilization round the globe. The Carthaginians inherited a double portion of the Phœnician colonizing spirit. The Greek colonies gave birth to others which, like Massalia, Syracuse, Sybaris, Corcyra, and Andros, were more colonizing than themselves. England, the progenitor of a hundred peoples, is a Teutonic and Scandinavian colony. Massachusetts was the mother of a cluster of New England States, and Virginia of many of the Southern States. Two great colonies have sprung from the loins of New South Wales; two others from two New Zealand settlements; and both countries stretch out their hands toward New Guinea and the South Sea islands, while they flood distant newly discovered gold fields with immigrants.
It is the masculine races that emigrate. The earliest of the great colonizing peoples, the Phœnicians and Carthaginians, in addition to the "strenuous ferocity" that marked the Semites, possessed an "individual impulse and energy" which (in Grote's opinion) put them greatly above the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Hindus. The Greeks were flexible and many-sided, and, being fractured into a hundred independent communities, had a self-organizing faculty which promoted emigration in many directions and diversified colonization. The manliest of ancient races, the Romans, overflowed equally in colonization and conquest. The now emasculated Spaniards and Portuguese were, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the most robust of European nations. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the French were aggressive and conquering. The long struggle with Spain made Holland a nation of heroes. The English, Germans, and Scandinavians are Bismarck's masculine peoples. The Celtic Irish, the Italians, and other feminine nationalities have emigrated in profusion since emigration has been made easy.
The emigrating impulse is by no means diffused equally over the emigrating races; there are emigrating sections of these races. The migrating Aryans, whether starting from "somewhere in Asia" (as Max Müller still maintains) or from southern Russia (as Schrader contends), spread into every European country, and forming a fringe along the coast, where they remained as sea rovers, or crowding to its centers, where they became its rulers and its aristocracy, were the progenitors of the migrating bands which left these countries in after years or are leaving them now. "The cells in which the original germ plasm most predominates become the reproductive cells." Thus the early colonies of Spain and Portugal were settled by Biscayan and Guipuzcoan mariners and by the flower of chivalry at the seats of military enterprise at Cadiz and Seville. Breton and Norman seamen and merchants of Saint-Malo planted the first French colonies. Devonshire gentlemen and sailors led and manned the buccaneering and exploring expeditions that were the parents of the American colonies; Devonshire and the adjacent counties contributed one sixth to the Puritan exodus and, only half a century ago, founded a colony in the South Seas. Two thirds of that exodus were made up of the descendants of Norse sea rovers on the Lincolnshire seaboard. It points likewise in the direction of a continuous migrating element in stationary masses that emigrants are drawn unequally from the different races of the mother country. Thus the masterful Scottish nationality, once so vagabond, has left a "broad and permanent impress" on the middle belt of the United States; has more than its share of population and power in Canada, where it pioneered the Northwest; in Australia, where the Queensland sugar planters and most of the large landholders are said to be Scots; and in South Africa.
II. The masculine races colonize and emigrate at a point of time after the attainment of national manhood. National puberty manifests itself in the feverish excitement of provincial rivalries and civil wars. National manhood shows itself in a nation's becoming master in its own house. Spain expelled the alien, unassimilable races of Jews and Moors. The French monarchy subjugated the provinces. The English brought the civil wars to an end. The Dutch threw off the Spanish yoke. Germany annexed the German portion of Denmark, extruded the heterogeneous Austrian domination, and, emerging victor from the struggle with France, unified the empire. Aggressive action ensues, as when a new professional man measures himself with rivals; if a nation can invent a new weapon, as a young business man a new process, the chances of success are multiplied. The Phocæans, the boldest of Greek mariners, conducted their trading voyages in armed penteconters, and, gaining a naval victory over the Carthaginians, established the colony of Massalia in what might almost be termed Carthaginian waters. The Corinthians invented the trireme and colonized. Their own colonists, the Corcyreans, were soon able to cope with the mother city on the sea, and then they colonized. The Greeks supplanted the Carthaginians. The Romans swept both from the sea, and recolonized the colonies they had abandoned. The Dutch, Spaniards, and French have lost many colonies to victorious rivals.
The surplus energy of a young nation will overflow in conquest or colonization, according to the time. It was after the struggle with the Moors, when Spanish chivalry was set free for new exploits, that Spanish ardor poured itself upon distant colonies. Surplus soldiers in England under the pacific James I, in Scotland after the plundering Borderers found their occupation gone with the Union, and in the same country after 1745, became colonists.
Colonization is precipitated by the maritime character of a country. Phœnicia, Greece, and England are notable examples. Colbert estimated that in 1669 the Dutch possessed a commercial fleet of fifteen or sixteen thousand sail, while populous France had five or six hundred ships at the most. The English and Dutch had a larger naval experience and markets over sea which they had frequented for a century. The Germans have few ports, and till lately have had neither merchant ships nor navy; Germans have accordingly emigrated in English vessels, and there are still few German colonies. There must be surplus capital, as there was in Holland in the seventeenth century. Scotland had to strip itself of half its savings to equip the Darien expedition. Colonies that arise from the outflow of masculine vigor in these several forms might be called energy colonies.
Stud cattle are kept rather under condition, lean women have most children, and the number of the offspring depends mainly on the fertility of the female. As the feminine elements in a country reach maturity, as there are order within and peace without, the size of families increases, and the population presses on the means of subsistence. Hence statistics show that emigration is greatest in least prosperous years. Periodically, the pressure reaches the point of famine, due to the failure of a crop, or to devastation, or war, or changes in the mode of cultivation. The Greek colonies of Cyrene and Rhegium, those of the Sicilian Mamertines, of Virginia, and of the (English) Cape of Good Hope had this origin, and might be called distress colonies. The emigration after the Thirty Years' War, the long European war of 1793 to 1815, the Irish famine of 1845, and the Sutherlandizing of parts of Scotland, was distress emigration. Normal emigration is determined by the surplus birth rate. With one hundred and seventy-one births to one hundred deaths the United Kingdom is the most emigrating of all peoples, past or present; Germany, with a surplus of sixty-one, has been long the chief emigrant nation of the European continent; while poor France, with her one surplus birth, is in no position to colonize the territories she feverishly annexes. If the foundation of colonies is a consequence of military or naval power, the settlement of them is, therefore, a "function" of the excess of population.
The power to reproduce itself declines in a nation with age, as it does in an individual. Were there space enough, it would be easy to show how all the other signs of old age are traceable in the senile peoples that have ceased to colonize.
III. The type of successful emigrant repeats that of the mother country at an earlier stage. In the trappers, hunters, and traders of old Canada and new Oregon—often coarse, audacious, unscrupulous, but possessing endurance, courage, sagacity, and resource—Parkman finds realized "that wild and daring spirit. . . which marked our barbarous ancestors of Germany and Norway." The same type, its good and evil qualities softened by time and a less harsh environment, is still to be met with in colonies of recent foundation. 1. The emigrant must be physically robust. It is the brute forces that are most required when the resistance encountered is often that of Nature herself. Sometimes it is recorded on a tombstone that he who lies below was originally of "iron constitution," broken by the toils of a pioneer existence, and many a silent heroine, the worthy mate of such a settler, has sunk under its privations. 2. The moral attribute most needed is forcefulness of character. Determination and tenacity, often rising (as lately in Rhodesia) into "splendid self-reliance" and devotedness, are the notes of the successful colonist now as ever. Will and not intellect is his differentia. 3. Yet high intellect always springs up to meet the demand when new molds of social life are to be framed, and disappears or flows into other channels when the necessity for it vanishes. The group of statesmen who drafted the Constitution of the United States, and the politicians who nursed the Australasian colonies through the perils of infancy, have had few equals.
IV. A polyp will reproduce itself, however small the fragment, if it have within it samples of all the different kinds of cells. A nation, in order to be fully reproduced, must likewise send out representatives of all its essential classes. 1. Many princes have migrated to ascend a throne, and two have emigrated—a Braganza to Brazil and a Hapsburg to Mexico. 2. Miltiades colonized Thrace, and one of the Bacchiadæ colonized Ortygia. Counts of the empire settled Davos and other mountain districts in German Switzerland. Hidalgos and other members of the royal household joined the second expedition of Columbus, and many of the members of the third colony sent out in his time belonged to the best families in the kingdom. Rich nobles sold their estates, as their ancestors had done in the time of the Crusades, to follow Cortez to Mexico and Pizarro to Peru. These two waves spent, the inferior nobility alone henceforward emigrated. Representatives of the lesser French nobility, like the Barons Poutrincourt and Castin, with Gascon and Norman cadets, were leading or degenerate colonists in Canada, where also many noble ladies contributed their fortunes or spent their lives in mission work among the Indians. In the seventeenth century a Scottish nobleman (the Earl of Stirling) endeavored to colonize Nova Scotia, and early in the nineteenth another (the Earl of Selkirk) led a colony of fur traders to Red River, having previously made a settlement in Prince Edward Island. Sir T. Temple ruined himself by generous efforts to build up a colony in Nova Scotia, and the story of the gentlemen adventurers in Acadia is long and interesting. Some of them, like La Tour, remained in the colony and left descendants. The so-called "nobility" of Carolina toward the end of the seventeenth century was a mere upper class. Even the Virginians, who have boasted of being descendants of the Cavaliers, are stated by Bancroft to have belonged to the middle class. Yet many of the loyal nobility fled from England after the execution of Charles, and these settled in the Southern States. Penn and Baltimore for a time personally administered the colonies they led. When a genuine enthusiasm excites a whole people, the nobles share in it, and three hundred of the twelve hundred who formed the first expedition to Darien were of the best Scottish families, while some members of the second were Highland chieftains. Several baronets and sons of peers took part in colonizing New Zealand, and a baronet led the Jamieson raid. Only a few years ago an ancient English earldom threatened to become extinct in South Africa through miscegenation. 3. The great middle class, seat of the solid qualities in every country, was long the chief fountain of emigration. It alone, or it chiefly, had the means to emigrate, and the intellectual and moral energy to make the emigrant's life a success. "The immense majority of American families," Bancroft tells us, in both New England and the South, belonged to this class. Far the larger proportion of unassisted emigrants to British colonies during the present century has had the same origin. 4. Now that emigration is comparatively easy, the greater number of emigrants are artisans, laborers, and domestic servants, who thus assimilate colonies to the ratios of the mother countries.
V. Priestcraft did not emigrate, says Bancroft of the North American colonies generally. Yet, when a colonizing enthusiasm takes possession of a community, especially if the settlement is to be formed on church principles, clergymen often make great sacrifices to participate. The colonies of New England, Canterbury, and Otago were well supplied. A minister was sent out with the Darien colonists. In ordinary emigrations they are apt to be in defect. A bounty was offered in Virginia to immigrating clergymen. The hard country, the poor pay, the cavalier treatment, and the rough life deter even a "stickit minister." Those who succeed as emigrants are therefore of tough fiber, and possess the hardihood of character needed to hold their own with an untender race. As the colony develops, the more average members of the profession find their way out, and to a late stage in its history the majority in all the professions are of home birth or education.
The author of the Scarlet Letter ascribes the lack of physicians in New England to the undoubted materialism of the profession, which prevented them from sharing the impulse to emigrate. But the scarcity was not peculiar to the medical profession, nor was it confined to New England. Surgeons were as rare in French Canada, where "there was not a man who could set a bone." They are equally lacking in young colonies at the present day. The colonists are too few, too scattered, too poor, and too healthy to require or to Le able to pay for them. Many a colonial township has starved out a succession of would-be medical residents. Those who thrive are of the rough-and-ready type still to be met with in English country districts—men who have picked up their knowledge in the course of practice, and are better qualified to treat the diseases prevalent in simple than in more advanced communities.
VI. The " male cells are always more anarchic, usually mature before the female elements, and even in plants, and in such passive animals as a sponge or a hydra, burst from the organism, while the female cells remain in situ"[1] It is in accordance with all organic evolution that the male leads and the female follows. Male birds earlier migrate. The first Greek emigrations were exclusively of the male sex. Even the organized colonization of Cyrene was womenless. The northern invaders, having fighting to do, were solely men. No women went out with the first expeditions to!New Spain. There were few women in early Virginia. There were few in New France for long, nuns excepted. The two colonies sent out to Darien consisted respectively of twelve hundred and thirteen hundred men. It is males that are wanted in a new country. Only men could fight the battle the early colonists have to fight; hampered by women, they would fight it worse or not at all. Heroines like the wives of La Tour, Dupleix, and many an unknown settler are equal to men, but women of a softer stamp suffer greatly and eventually succumb.!Nor are they imperatively required; there are native women for the first immigrants, who are not as a rule squeamish. As the conditions assimilate to those of older countries, the proportions change. In a newly settled pastoral country the males are as ten to one. In older pastoral countries complicated with newly discovered mines, like West Australia, they are still as two to one. The emigration to New South Wales in 1831-'37 was of one hundred males to thirty females. The emigration from Great Britain at this day continues predominantly male, but only in the proportion of ten to seven.
VII. The age of the reproductive cells must be left in the obscurity in which it lies. Parent birds migrate before the young, but it is probably the more active and the less old of these that are the first to leave. The law remains operative to the last. The first emigrants are fighting or toiling men at their best. As colonial life grows easier, older and younger members of families join the stream. In rare cases an aged father and mother are brought out by a son who has thriven. Still (if observation may be trusted), nine tenths of emigrants are under forty-five, and two thirds of them are under thirty-five. Manhood in its prime and womanhood in its bloom form the core of all emigration. White heads are singular in youthful communities.
VIII. The dominant religion of emigrants is that of young and aggressive sects. Heretical Paulicians and Waldenses, independent Puritans, self-illuminated Quakers, spiritually minded Moravians, rebel Huguenots and Covenanters, disrupting Free-Church Presbyterians, and High Churchmen advancing to the conquest of the Church of England, have been the successful colonizers. The story of individual emigration has the same purport. Two thirds of the population of Carolina were Dissenters. The Methodists and Presbyterians, and these probably the last hived-off sects of the one and the schismatic denominations of the other, have each emigrated to Canada more numerously than the Anglicans. Australia is predominantly Anglican and (thanks to recklessly administered state aid) largely Catholic, but the Presbyterians and Methodists, Congregationalists and Baptists have all emigrated in higher proportions than exist in England. Of the United States it is needless to write. Within the last fifty years there has indeed been a copious immigration of the oldest of churches, but that from Ireland has been motived by political rebellion and that from Italy by social discontent; while there is probably not a European sect, community, or craze that has not sought a home in the wide, free spaces of the West.
IX. "Hunger is a dominant characteristic of living matter," and the lifelong hunger of the individual protoplasm is repeated in the social protoplasm. Birds and quadrupeds migrate for food, sunshine, and warmth. In a troop of horses or wild cattle a young stallion or bull gathers together a few heifers or young mares, possibly fights a battle with the old chief, then leaves the herd and seeks new pastures. The same thing is said of apes, and might probably be said of all polygamous animals. Monogamous groups drift apart by the mere law of growth. Finally, animals may be driven from their habitats by persecution or violence. All motives of human migrations and emigrations are reducible to these five—hunger, cold, lust of dominion, love of freedom, and public or private oppression.
1. Persons of all degrees of competence, from the capitalist who disembarks at Hobart with £25,000 to the quarryman who lands at Brisbane with fivepence, are continually seeking to better themselves. The craving is seen in its crudest form in the gold hunger. "I have come not to till the soil," said Cortez in Mexico, where he was offered a tract of land, "but to find gold." It is more reputable, but is not a whit more honorable, in high financial circles: the Grotes and Goschens, Barings and Rothschilds, who migrate from Holland and Germany to England, are governed by precisely the same motive as the gold digger. The earth hunger ought to be a shade less repellent, and yet the land sharks who infest young colonies are at once less honest and more avaricious. Higher wages and more continuous employment will at any time attract emigrants. The less successful members of the professions naturally look to new emigration fields. Just fifty years ago a young engineer who was crowded out of his profession had resolved to settle in New Zealand, but, receiving a small apppointment, stayed on in England to become the most eminent philosopher of his age. An ex-Lord Chancellor relates that he and another briefless barrister, the present Speaker of the House of Commons, were at one time on the point of emigrating to "the colonies." Some have their career prepared for them before they start: bishops, professors, certain officials and experts generally, the flower of a nation's culture and of late growth, are regularly exported from England to her colonies, and even to the United States.
2. Human beings are less free to travel than swallows or lemmings, and they can temper a northern winter by warmer clothing, shelter, and fire. But even so there are many English families and still more individuals who regularly or occasionally hibernate in the Riviera, Algiers, and Egypt. Others expatriate themselves for a time or for life. The Brownings made a home in Florence till the lady's death, and Aristophanic Frere endured lifelong banishment in sunbaked Malta. It is usually to warmer latitudes that migrants move who are "ordered south," but Symonds found health in the snowclad solitudes of the Engadine. Those who emigrate from such motives are more remarkable for quality than number. The statesmanlike organizer of a New Zealand province was a consumptive. Consumption sent Richard Proctor to observe the "larger constellations burning" in the "happy skies" of Florida, and thither also bilingual Edmund Montgomery; to Queensland it dispatched Clement Wragge to found Australasian meteorology. The literary worker whose strength has given way rejoices to have escaped from the fogs and darkness, the cold and wet of a London winter, and feels his sense of well-being heightened in the light air and unfailing sunshine of New South Wales. Not invalids only, but almost all, gain by southing. The Sutherlandizing of the north and west of Scotland excited indignation, and the inflamed imagination of the sentimentalist saw "the heather on fire"; but the Highland crofter who barters his miserable patch in the rainy Hebrides for a farm in Natal or Otago makes a blessed exchange. Whole peoples move southward with the slow, resistless motion of the glacier. The pine tree longs for the palm tree, in Heine's song, and the Russian advance toward Constantinople is doubtless accelerated by the snow and ice of the declivity.
3. Ambition is an old motive for emigration. The Andræemon or Androclus who led a Greek colony to the shores of Asia Minor intended to remain as its tyrannus; and so have most of the leaders of modern colonies, from Columbus to Cargill. Even "celestial minds" are sometimes governed bj the primary passion of the male animal in its most spiritual form. Pythagoras, unable to gain bearers or found a school in Samos, emigrated to Croton, where he established the Jesuit order of the ancient world. Xenophanes emigrated from Colophon and finally settled at Elea, which thence gave its name to the loftiest of Greek philosophic sects. The motive is operative everywhere and everywhen. It impelled Aquinas and Scotus from Italy and England to France; urged Niebuhr, Bernstorff, and Moltke from Denmark to Prussia; attracted Rossi, Scherer, and Cherbuliez from Geneva to Paris; and led Boyesen to New York. The fact that an immigrant to the United States may rise to any position save that of President is known to be in the minds of young Germans who seek a freer country than their own. The consciousness or the conceit of ability makes many a youth restless in the narrow environment of a Scottish or English country town, and, learning that push and volubility, as well as genuine talent, may carry a man to high political office in a British colony, he emigrates to become (what some have been styled) a "colonial Gambetta."
4. Freedom is as alluring as power. The artisan who is constantly being involved in strikes of which he disapproves emigrates to a country where trades-unionism is in its infancy. The independence of the colonial workman excites the envy of his English rivals. Staid elderly men look back with regret on the free life of the gold fields. Protestant Irish farmers, of Scottish extraction, emigrated last century to become freeholders in the United States. Frenchmen who have returned to France go back to New Zealand, unable to bear the constraint of overcivilization. The same passion for freedom in higher things carried Puritan and Moravian, Puseyite and Free-Churchman oversea for liberty to worship God in their own way. Enthusiasm for political liberty took Forster, Paine, and a crowd of dupes to France after 1789. The same feeling sometimes makes men retire from the world. Ulysses hoped to "touch the Happy Isles." Hamilcar Barca longed to escape from the turmoil of Carthage and sail for the fabled islands of Atlantis. Shelley, Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, and many plainer folk have cherished the same lotus-eater's dream. The disillusioned ex-governor who returns to spend the evening of his days in a Pacific paradise within the waters of the colony he once ruled is a type of the few who realize it. Do they always find the peace they seek?
5. Public and private oppression has made many migrate or emigrate. The Ionians and Syracusans who were driven westward by subjugation or sedition had no choice. The conquest of their country before and after the fall of Byzantium in 1453 scattered educated Greeks over Italy and so cross-fertilized modern Europe. "The vices of European governments colonized North America." The revolutions of 1848 sent Follen to the United States and Foscolo to England. The coup d'etat of 1851 had similar effects. "The great silence of the empire," as Zola calls it, which made it hard for liberals to earn a living, diverted Jules Simon into publicism and politics, and drove another eclectic, his friend Amédée Jacques, to seek death in South America. The conscious oppressiveness of an aristocratic system of government made Goldwin Smith a Canadian. Private persecution, which pursued Byron to Venice, chased the younger Arago to South America. Disappointment sent an unappreciated poet, Charles Wells, to lifelong exile in France, took George Brandes to Berlin, and has taken many to the colonies. Defeated men used to retire to the cloister. They now migrate or emigrate.
X. The earliest mode of emigration—that of roving adventurers on the seas—might be assimilated to the spawning of fish or the effusion of the male element generally. It is exclusively masculine, and retains this quality to the last in the person of every emigrant who embarks for a new country at his own expense, there to make a living in ways of his own. It soon takes on a partially assisted character in the equipping of the ship by home merchants. These develop into commercial or colonizing companies, which acquire (or seize) colonial lands from the natives, and then send out emigrants who buy land from the company, together with artisans and laborers whose passages are paid for them. Such emigration might be described as mixed masculine and feminine, and this form long continues. There is a third stage where (as in England after 1830) philanthropic associations dispatch pauper or partially assisted emigrants. The third is supplemented or superseded by a fourth stage, when a colony sends for immigrants, wholly or partly defrays their passage, and provides for them on their arrival. This least independent method of emigration, as the antithesis of the earliest masculine mode, may be considered exclusively feminine.
Emigration, like the migrations of animals, is collective. Though the vast Aryan migrations, so ingeniously charted by Pictet, may prove mythical as well as legendary, authenticated mass movements occur all through history. The earliest emigrations were of small accidental aggregations without adhesion. The next were great organized bodies. The emigration in our own days, of individuals and families who go out to kindred or friends, is really group movement of a highly organized character.
Like the lower migrations, emigration is rhythmical. The burst of Greek colonizing activity which peopled Italy and Sicily was followed by a pause of forty years. After the Puritan exodus there was no emigration to New England for nearly a century. The rush to the Australian gold fields more than doubled the population in ten years, and then fell permanently to half. An eloquent propaganda sent a tidal wave of emigration to New South Wales in 1861-'63, only to sink in just the same space of time to its former level.
Migration and emigration are alike periodic. Swiss cowherd and Lapland deerherd, French workman and British invalid migrate only for the season. Fishermen emigrate for the season. Most of the first emigrants to new colonies intended to return, and many of them did and do return, but ever fewer with successive years. They compensate for this ascent above the animals by being migratory within their new area. Americans and Australians, New-Zealanders and South Africans have no homes.
There is a heightened temperature in plants before flowering, in lower organisms before budding or fission, in the lower animals at pairing, and in human beings during courtship. So is there among peoples at great colonizing periods. A "fever of emigration" partially depopulated Spain after the discoveries of Columbus and again of Balboa. The settlement of New England and Pennsylvania was preceded by growing and widespread, if subdued, excitement. Three successive waves of colonizing enthusiasm swept over England and Scotland in the forties. The gold rushes to California and Australia in 1847-'51, and the milder sensations of Kimberley and the Transvaal, Coolgardie, and Klondike, partook of the same character. And still, in some remote Swedish village, an emigrant to the United States or Australia will create a "fever" by the tidings he sends home of success or better days. Then it gets into the blood, and they can not stay. A "colonizing fever" is admitted by observers like the Due de Broglie to reign at present in France, and is alleged to exist with equal intensity in Germany and Italy, while it is said to be redoubled in England, where it is normal and in the temperament.
At efflorescence, fission, budding, and parturition there is a "disruptive climax." So is there in colonization and emigration. Esquiros has given a pathetic account of a visit to an emigrant ship at the London docks. William Black has described, and some artist has painted, the departing Highland emigrants as they sing Lochaber No More. As the white or the dark cliffs fade, the lump rises in the throat, the eyes fill with unwonted tears, and those who are gifted that way break into verse. Byron's wild Good Night!, Edward Bliss Emerson's melancholy Last Farewell, Hugo's vicarious Sea Song of the Exiles, and Australian Gordon's Exile's Farewell give moving expression to universal feelings. It is, in truth, a "terrific wrench." To leave (forever, as it may seem) the happy scenes of childhood and youth, associated with all the sentiments of the prime—its golden dreams and first love, the growing passion for knowledge, the dawn of religious faith, visions of wider horizons, the stirrings of ambition and the hopes of future usefulness—and to settle in a new, strange land, perhaps half inhabited by savages and but partially cleared, with incredible wooden houses and many things still in the rough, is a unique experience. The psychologist in search of fresh material for his much too impersonal science might be (but is not) advised to cultivate the sensations of the immigrant who lands at the antipodes and doubts whether he is rightly perpendicular. A cry of joy leaps from him as he first hears and then sees the skylark mount, and feels that, after all, he can not be far from home. But it is long ere he is thoroughly acclimatized, and if he has emigrated late there is to the last a consciousness of "something wanting."
XI. Animal and human migrants follow the southing sun. Swallow, lemming, bear, and wolf are forerunners of the Auvergnese, Switzer, and Laplander who descend from mountain to plain as winter approaches, and of the invalid who seeks the sunny Riviera or the rainless Nile. The first Spanish and Portuguese colonies were planted on the same southerly slope. Then Europe spread its wings for a bolder flight, and the drift of emigration has since, as it mainly had ever, been toward the setting sun. Yet the direction is by no means uniform. The Hellenic migrations poured downward through Greece and, overflowing into the Ægæan islands, colonized Asia Minor. The Hellenization of Asia by Alexander was a movement toward the east and south. The Gauls marched eastward to Galatia. A regression of the Teutonic race under Charlemagne in the eighth century founded the two great German dynasties of the present day. The Crusaders, Venetians, and Genoese conquered and colonized eastward. The largest wave after the American has taken a southeasterly course to Australia. Smaller streams of French, Italians, and Spaniards flow to Algeria and Tunis, and a mixture of nationalities to Madagascar, while East Indians pursue nearly the orthodox line to Guiana and Mauritius, or diverge to the Straits Settlements and Fiji. An increasing volume of emigration is being directed south and southeast to South Africa or due east to China. But these will prove only eddies and backwaters in the steadily westing current. It will be by America that the European nations will return to their fabled birthplace.
While the drift is apparently overmastering, the exact direction is often, as with birds, a matter of accident. Tyrians were driven to Cadiz, and Greeks to Libya and Sicily, by stress of weather. Columbus struck Hispaniola on his imagined way to India. Hudson embarked on a Saul's voyage in search of a northwest passage and found New York. Fishermen were blown south to the Canaries and west to Newfoundland. The settling of Plymouth was an accident of the weather, and of Virginia and Botany Bay an accident of discovery.
Yet accident plays its Darwinian game within narrow limits. Deep affinities and irresistible magnetisms mark out the paths of emigration. 1. Colonization follows discovery at unequal intervals. It followed that of South America instantaneously; more or less successful attempts at it in North America were at no great distance. The Cape of Good Hope was colonized by its discoverers, the Portuguese. Dampier discovered Australia in 1688, but it had to be rediscovered and explored by Cook eighty years afterward before it was settled in 1788. The colonization of New Zealand took place half a century after its discovery. 2. Distance is the primary factor in determining the order of colonization. That South America was settled before New England was partly an accident of discovery, but, once it began, the stream of emigration flowed and still flows in far greater volume to the nearer colonies. Out-of-the-way South Africa has not until lately allured emigrants, and the remoteness of Australia and New Zealand has all along deterred them. 3. Attractions and repulsions, the grosser they are, govern the quantity of emigration and, as they rise in the scale, determine its quality. (1) The precious metals have been the loadstone of more immigrants than all other causes put together, and the attraction is independent of climate, distance, or accessibility. (2) The virgin soil of one colony, which yields eighty bushels of wheat to the acre, is a potent inducement to the solid agricultural class, while the infertile land and almost rainless skies of another have barred settlement. (3) The aspect and climate of Delaware were painted to the Scandinavian imagination as a "terrestrial Canaan," and this is still a stock-topic with emigration lecturers. (4) The savagery of the indigenes long checked emigration to North America and South Africa, and dispersed one New Zealand colony. (5) Leaders like Cortez and Rhodes draw crowds, and Puritan congregations followed their ministers across the Atlantic. (6) Cruel laws made Virginia unpopular in the eighteenth century, feudal exactions drove immigrants from New York, and the "peculiar institution" has at all times repelled them from the Southern States. (7) Personal, political, and religious liberties invite the best and the worst—Roger Williams and Hayraddin Maugrabin. (8) The prosperity of a colony and (9) the greatness of a country, like that achieved by the United States in the War of 1812, constrain immigration. 4. Not accident, but deep affinities, have guided the northern Europeans to North America, Australasia, and South Africa, the southern Europeans to South America and North Africa. In these officinæ gentium new types will be generated by the fusion of allied varieties. And, finally, it may be that, in the primeval seats of mankind (if such there were), these new types will be themselves reblended into the one original race from which they sprang, but now immeasurably stronger, wiser, happier, and better.
Emigration is thus at first exclusively, and to the last predominantly, masculine in all its aspects. It is conducted by the heroic strand of humanity, the manlier races and their most vigorous sections; by these at the emergence of national manhood; by individuals of a strenuous type by the masculine classes and professions, aggressive religions, the male sex, and at the age of maturity; they are long actuated by the motives that govern the male animal; the earliest agencies are the spiritualization of the male mode of propagation, and the direction is at the beginning that of greatest attractiveness (as of a bride) and latterly the line of least resistance (as if toward a bridegroom). The feminine races, ranks, professions, sects, and sex—feminine elements along the whole sociological scale—join one by one in the fugue, and make at length of each colony a complete reproduction, yet with new attributes, of the mother country.
- ↑ Geddes and Thomson. Evolution of Sex, p. 241.