568 MIGRATIONS OF EACES OF MEN CONSIDERED HISTORICALLY. 



tbey bring wealth to some regions and leave others neglected ; they mark 

 out the routes of commerce and affect the economic relations of differ- 

 ent countries. 



No line of historical inquiry sets before us more clearly at every stage 

 the connection between man as an associative being — toiling, trading, 

 warring, ruling, legislating — and that physical environment whose influ- 

 ence over bis development is none the less potent and constant because 

 he has learned in obeying it to rule it and to make it yield to him con- 

 stantly increasing benefits. The topic is so large and branches off into 

 so many other cognate inquiries that you will not expect me, within 

 the narrow limits of an address, to do more than draw its outlines, 

 enumerate the principal causes whose action it sets before us, touch 

 upon the successive epochs which its history presents, and refer to a 

 few out of the many problems its consideration raises. The migrations 

 of peoples have been among the most potent factors in making the 

 world of to-day different from the world of thirty centuries ago. If 

 they continue th ey will be scarcely less potent in their influence on the 

 future of the race; if they pass into new phases, those phases will be 

 the expression of new conditions of society; if they cease, that cessa- 

 tion will itself be a fjict of the highest economic and social significance. 



I. — FORMS OF DIFFUSION. 



At the outset it is convenient to distinguish the different forms which 

 movements of population have taken. These forms may be grouped 

 under three heads, which I propose to call by the names of Transfer- 

 ence, Dispersion, and Permeation — names which need a few words of 

 illustration. 



1. By Transference I mean that form of migration in which the whole, 

 or a large majority, of a race or tribe quits its ancient seats in a 

 body and moves into some other region. Such migrations seldom occur 

 except in the case of nomad peoples who are little attached to any par- 

 ticular piece of soil; but we may almost class among the nomads tribes 

 who, like our own remote Teutonic ancestors, although they cultivate the 

 soil, put no capital into it in the way of permanent improvements, and 

 build no dwellings of brick or stone. The prehistoric migrations usu- 

 ally belonged to this form, and so did that great series of movements 

 which brought the northern races into the Roman Empire in the fifth 

 and sixth centuries of our era. In modern times we find few instances 

 of Transference, because such nomad races as remain are now shut up 

 within narrow limits by the settled States that surround them, which 

 have possessed, since the invention of gnni^owder and of standing 

 armies, enormously superior defensive strength.* We should however 

 have had an interesting case to point to had the Dutch, when pressed 

 by the power of Philip 1 1, embraced the offer that came to them from 



* In 1771 a great Kalraiik horde inoveil en masse from the steppes of the Caspian 

 to the frontiers of China, hising mf)re than half its unmbers on the ^vay. 



