THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES. 455 



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 ele- 

 ments in a country reach maturity, as there are order within 

 and peace without, the size of families increases, and the popula- 

 tion 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 Mamer- 

 tines, 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 environ- 

 ment, 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 



