524 MIGRATION AND THE FOOD QUEST. 



The law of tlie circle of employments and of permanent migration 

 may be called the maxima and minima of effort — that is, men have 

 always bestirred themselves the year round and moved about the world 

 on lines and to places where there seemed to be promise of the great- 

 est comfort and security for the least effort on their part. 



In this paper especial attention will be paid to this maxima and 

 minima in relation to the food quest, though it will be seen that follow- 

 ing this line conducts also to the best results in the other activities 

 mentioned and to the supply of other needs. 



Migration is caused not by one motive, but by all possible motives. 

 Collect all the inHueuces and wants that have actuated individuals in 

 going about. These same, acting on a family, a set of men, a horde, a 

 clan, a people, have caused migration. They have acted by compulsion 

 and by attraction, from within and from without, through nature and 

 through man. 



Taking these motives for change of habitation all in all, they may be 

 sharply divided into two classes, the attractive and the repulsive forces. 

 Some migrants are drawn, allured, enticed to move. They go because 

 they want to; nobody compels them. They have in themselves the 

 energy, the ambition, the vigor, the desire to go, and these are the 

 peoples that have dominated the earth. 



Other migrants are crowded, driven, compelled to move. They are 

 afraid or too weak to stay where they are. Such i^eople are cowardly 

 or unfortunate, retrogressive, dying out. They shrink into the suburbs 

 of the world. 



Uniting these concepts of attraction and repulsion with the notion 

 of subjective and objective causes of struggle, we have a quadruple set 

 of migratory forces working together or apart: 



A. Subjective motives, vis ab infra. 



1. Desire, hope, appetite, ambition, energy. 



2. Weakness, fear, aversion, cowardice. 



B. Objective motives, vis ab extra. 



3. Advantages, suj^plies, comforts, satisfactions, acting a fronte 



or a tergo. 



4. Discomforts, compulsions, failure of resources, a fronte or a 



tergo. 



Accidents, sui)erstition, calamities play their part with substantial 

 causes in this composite set of motives. 



According to the laws of mechanics, bodies move in the lines of least 

 resistance, with momentum proportioned to the vis a tergo. They have 

 no souls, no desires; they do not move, but are moved. 



With animals and men the case is different. They move in a paral- 

 lelogram of forces. 



1. In the lines of least resistance in front. 



2. In the lines of greatest pressure behind. 



3. In the lines of greatest desire within. 



