Ethnology reveals an east and west stratification of linguistic groups in Europe, a north and south stratification of races, and another stratification by altitude, which reappears in all parts of the world, and shows certain invading dominant races occupying the lowlands and other displaced ones the highlands. This definite arrangement points to successive arrivals, a crowding forward, an intrusion of the strong into fertile, accessible valleys and plains, and a dislodgment of the weak into the rough but safe keeping of mountain range or barren peninsula, where they are brought to bay. Ethnic fragments, linguistic survivals, or merely place names, dropped like discarded baggage along the march of a retreating army, bear witness everywhere to tragic recessionals.
The name Historical Movement.
Every country whose history we examine proves the recipient of successive streams of humanity. Even sea-girt England has received various intruding peoples from the Roman occupation to the recent influx of Russian Jews. In prehistoric times it combined several elements in its population, as the discovery of the "long barrow" men and "round barrow" men by archaeologists, and the identification of a surviving Iberian or Mediterranean strain by ethnologists go to prove.[126] Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India tell the same story, whether in their recorded or unrecorded history. Tropical Africa lacks a history; but all that has been pieced together by ethnologists and anthropologists, in an effort to reconstruct its past, shows incessant movement,—growth, expansion and short-lived conquest, followed by shrinkage, expulsion or absorption by another invader.[127] To this constant shifting of races and peoples the name of historical movement has been given, because it underlies most of written history, and constitutes the major part of unwritten history, especially that of savage and nomadic tribes. Two things are vital in the history of every people, its ethnic composition and the wars it wages in defense or extension of its boundaries. Both rest upon historical movements,—intrusions, whether peaceful or hostile, into its own land, and encroachments upon neighboring territory necessitated by growth. Back of all such movements is natural increase of population beyond local means of subsistence, and the development of the war spirit in the effort to secure more abundant subsistence either by raid or conquest of territory.
Evolution of the Historical Movement.
Among primitive peoples this movement is simple and monotonous. It involves all members of the tribe, either in pursuit of game, or following the herd over the tribal territory, or in migrations seeking more and better land. Among civilized peoples it assumes various forms, and especially is differentiated for different members of the social group. The civilized state develops specialized frontiersmen, armies, explorers, maritime traders, colonists, and missionaries, who keep a part of the people constantly moving and directing external expansion, while the mass of the population converts the force once expended in the migrant food-quest into internal activity. Here we come upon a paradox. The nation as a whole, with the development of sedentary life, increases its population and therewith its need for external movements; it widens its national area and its circle of contact with other lands, enlarges its geographical horizon, and improves its internal communication over a growing territory; it evolves a greater mobility within and without, which attaches, however, to certain classes of society, not to the entire social group. This mobility becomes the outward expression of a whole complex of economic wants, intellectual needs, and political ambitions. It is embodied in the conquests which build up empires, in the colonization which develops new lands, in the world-wide exchange of commodities and ideas which lifts the level of civilization, till this movement of peoples becomes a fundamental fact of history.
Nature of primitive movements.
This movement is and has been universal and varied. When most unobtrusive in its operation, it has produced its greatest effects. To seize upon a few conspicuous migrations, like the Völkerwanderung and the irruption of the Turks into Europe, made dramatic by their relation to the declining empires of Rome and Constantinople, and to ignore the vast sum of lesser but more normal movements which by slow increments produce greater and more lasting results, leads to wrong conclusions both in ethnology and history. Here, as in geology, great effects do not necessarily presuppose vast forces, but rather the steady operation of small ones. It is often assumed that the world was peopled by a series of migrations; whereas everything indicates that humanity spread over the earth little by little, much as the imported gypsy moth is gradually occupying New England or the water hyacinth the rivers of Florida. Louis Agassiz observed in 1853 that "the boundaries within which the different natural combinations of animals are known to be circumscribed upon the surface of the earth, coincide with the natural range of distinct types of man."[128] The close parallelism between Australian race and flora, Eskimo race and Arctic fauna, points to a similar manner of dispersion. Wallace, in describing how the Russian frontier of settlement slowly creeps forward along the Volga, encroaching upon the Finnish and Tartar areas, and permeating them with Slav blood and civilization, adds that this is probably the normal method of expansion.[129] Thucydides describes the same process of encroachment, displacement, and migration in ancient Hellas.[130] Strabo quotes Posidonius as saying that the emigration of the Cimbrians and other kindred tribes from their native seats was gradual and by no means sudden.[131] The traditions of the Delaware Indians show their advance from their early home in central Canada southward to the Delaware River and Chesapeake Bay to have been a slow zigzag movement, interrupted by frequent long halts, leaving behind one laggard group here and sending out an offshoot there, who formed new tribes and thereby diversified the stock.[132] It was an aimless wandering, without destination and purpose other than to find a pleasanter habitat. The Vandals appear first as "a loose aggregation of restless tribes who must not be too definitely assigned to any precise district on the map," somewhere in central or eastern Prussia.[133] Far-reaching migrations aiming at a distant goal, like the Gothic and Hunnish conquests of Italy, demand both a geographical knowledge and an organization too high for primitive peoples, and therefore belong to a later period of development.[134]