MIGRATIONS OF RACES OF MEN CONSIDERED HISTORICALLY. 575 



tioii goes on steadily; and it seems not inn)r()bable that in time this 

 element may be the prevailing one in the wliole of the Iiido-China and 

 the adjoining islands, for the Chinese are not only a more prolific but 

 altogether a stronger and hardier stock than either their relatives the 

 Shans, Burmese, and Annamese, or their less immediate neighbors the 

 Malays. If in the distant future there comes to be a time in which 

 the weaker races having been trodden down or absorbed by the more 

 vigorous, few are left to strive for the mastery of the world, the Chinese 

 will be one of those few. None has a greater tenacity of life. 



Xot unlike these Chinese migrations, but on a smaller scale, is that 

 of Sauthals to Assam, and of South Indian coolies to Ceylon (where the 

 native population was comparatively indolent), and latterly to the isles 

 and coasts of the Carribbean Sea. Here there has been a deliberate 

 importation of laborers by those who needed their labor; and, although 

 the laborers have intended to return home after a few years' service, 

 and are indeed under British regulations, supplied with return passage 

 tickets, permanent settlements are likely to result, for the planters of 

 Guiana, for instance, have little prospect of supjilying themselves in 

 any other way with the means of working their estates. The coolies 

 would doubtless be brought to tropical Australia also, but for the dis- 

 like of the colonists to the regul ations insisted on by the Indian Govern- 

 ment; so instead of them we see that importation of Pacific islandersinto 

 North Queensland which is now a matter of so much controversy. Under 

 very different conditions we find the more spontaneous immigration of 

 French Canadians into the northern United States, where they obtain 

 employment in the factories, and are now becoming permanently resi- 

 dent. At first they came only to work till they had earned something 

 wherewith to live better at home; but it constantly happens that such 

 temporary migration is the prelude to permanent occupation. So the 

 Irish reapers used to come to England and Scotland before the migra- 

 tion from Ireland to the English and Scottish towns swelled to great pro- 

 portions in 1847. The Italians who now go to the Argentine Kepnblic 

 less frequently return than did their predecessors of twenty years ago. 



In all these instances the transfer of jwpulation due to a demand for 

 labor has been, or at least has purported to be, a voluntary transfer. 

 But by far the largest of all such transfers, nowhappily atauend, was 

 involuntary — I mean that of Africans carried to America to cultivate 

 the soil there for the benefit of white proprietors.* From early in the 



* I do not dwell on the slave trade in ancient times, because wo have no trust- 

 worthy data as to its extent; but there can be no doubt that vast numbers of bar- 

 barians from the west, north, and east of Italy and Greece were brought in during 

 tive or six centuries, and they must have sensibly changed the character of the 

 ])opulation of the countries round the Adriatic and ^gean. Here of course there 

 was no question of climate, but slaves were caught because their captors did not 

 wish to work themselves. The slave trade practiced by the merchants of Bristol 

 before the Norman Conquest and that practiced by the Turkoman, recently, resem- 

 ble these ancient forms of the practice. 



