'migrations of races of men considered historically. 573 



emigration to America, it is worth iiotiug- that diiriug the hist thirty 

 years it has been steadily exteudiug", not only eastward toward the 

 inland i)arts of Europe, but also downward in the scale of civilization, 

 tapping, so to speak, lower and lower strata. Between 1840 and 1850 

 the flow toward America was chiefly from the British Isles. From 1849 

 onward, it began to be considerable from Germany also, and very 

 shortly afterward from Scandinavia, reaching a figure of hundreds of 

 thousands from the European continent in each year. From Germany 

 the migratory tendency spread into Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, and the 

 other Slavonic regions of the. Austro-Hungariau monarchy, as well as 

 into Italy. To-day the people of the United States, who had welcomed 

 industrious Germans and hardy Scandinavians because both made good 

 citizens, become daily more restive under the ignorant and semi-civil- 

 ized masses whom Central Europe flings upon their shores. At the 

 other end of the world, the vast emigration from China is partly attrib- 

 utable to the need ot food; but to this I shall recur ijresently when wt 

 come to speak of labor. 



2. The second of our causes is war. In early times, or among the ruae 

 peoples, it is rather to be called plunder, for most of their wars were 

 undertaken less for permanent conquest than for booty. The invasions 

 of Britain by the English, of Gaul by the Franks, of P^ngland and Scot- 

 land by the Norsemen and Danes, all began with mere piratical or raid- 

 ing expeditious, though ending in considerable transfers of population. 

 The same may be said of the conquest of Pegu and Arakan by the Bur- 

 mese in the last century, and (to a smaller extent) of that southward 

 movement of the wild Chin and Kachin tribes whom our j)resent rulers 

 of Burmah find so troublesome. It was in war raids that the movement 

 of the Bantu races to the southernmost parts of South Africa, where they 

 have so largely displaced the yellowish Hottentot race, seems to have 

 begun. So the conquests of Egypt and Persia by the first successors 

 of the Prophet, so the conquests of Mexico and Peru by the Spaniards, 

 though tinged with religious propagandism, were primarily expeditions 

 in search of plunder. This character, indeed, belongs all through to 

 the Spanish migrations to the JSTew World. Apparently few people went 

 from Spain meaning, like our colonists a century later, to make a living 

 by their own labor from the soil or from commerce, which, indeed, the 

 climate of Central and South America would have rendered a more dif- 

 ficult task. They went to enrich themselves by robbing the natives or 

 by getting the precious metals from the toil of natives in the mines, a 

 form of commercial enteriirise whose methods made it scarcely distin- 

 guishable from rapine. In modern times the discovery of the precious 

 metals has he]])ed to swell the stream of immigration, as when gold 

 was discovered in California in 1846 and in Australia a little later; but 

 in these instances, though enrichment is the object, rapine is no longer 

 the means. There are, however, other senses in which we may call war 

 a source of movements of races. It was military policy which planted 

 the Saxons in Transylvania and the French in Lower Canada, and the 



