2. Migration and Segregation[189]
All prehistoric investigation, as far as it relates to the phenomena of the animate world, necessarily rests upon the hypothesis of migration. The distribution of plants, of the lower animals, and of men over the surface of the earth; the relationships existing between the different languages, religious conceptions, myths and legends, customs and social institutions—all these seem in this one assumption to find their common explanation.
Each fresh advance in culture commences, so to speak, with a new period of wandering. The most primitive agriculture is nomadic, with a yearly abandonment of the cultivated area; the earliest trade is migratory trade; the first industries that free themselves from the household husbandry and become the special occupations of separate individuals are carried on itinerantly. The great founders of religion, the earliest poets and philosophers, the musicians and actors of past epochs, are all great wanderers. Even today, do not the inventor, the preacher of a new doctrine, and the virtuoso travel from place to place in search of adherents and admirers—notwithstanding the immense recent development in the means of communicating information?
As civilization grows older, settlement becomes more permanent. The Greek was more settled than the Phoenician, the Roman than the Greek, because one was always the inheritor of the culture of the other. Conditions have not changed. The German is more migratory than the Latin, the Slav than the German. The Frenchman cleaves to his native soil; the Russian leaves it with a light heart to seek in other parts of his broad fatherland more favorable conditions of living. Even the factory workman is but a periodically wandering peasant.
To all that can be adduced from experience in support of the statement that in the course of history mankind has been ever growing more settled, there comes a general consideration of a twofold nature. In the first place, the extent of fixed capital grows with advancing culture; the producer becomes stationary with his means of production. The itinerant smith of the southern Slav countries and the Westphalian iron works, the pack-horses of the Middle Ages and the great warehouses of our cities, the Thespian carts and the resident theater mark the starting and the terminal points of this evolution. In the second place, the modern machinery of transportation has in a far higher degree facilitated the transport of goods than of persons. The distribution of labor determined by locality thereby attains greater importance than the natural distribution of the means of production; the latter in many cases draws the former after it, where previously the reverse occurred.
The migrations occurring at the opening of the history of European peoples are migrations of whole tribes, a pushing and pressing of collective units from east to west, which lasted for centuries. The migrations of the Middle Ages ever affect individual classes alone; the knights in the crusades, the merchants, the wage-craftsmen, the journeymen hand-workers, the jugglers and minstrels, the villeins seeking protection within the walls of a town. Modern migrations, on the contrary, are generally a matter of private concern, the individuals being led by the most varied motives. They are almost invariably without organization. The process repeating itself daily a thousand times is united only through the one characteristic, that it is everywhere a question of change of locality by persons seeking more favorable conditions of life.
Among all the phenomena of masses in social life suited to statistical treatment, there is without doubt scarcely one that appears to fall of itself so completely under the general law of causality as migrations; and likewise hardly one concerning whose real cause such misty conceptions prevail.
The whole department of migrations has never yet undergone systematic statistical observation; exclusive attention has hitherto been centered upon remarkable individual occurrences of such phenomena. Even a rational classification of migrations in accord with the demand of social science is at the present moment lacking.
Such a classification would have to take as its starting-point the result of migrations from the point of view of population. On this basis they would fall into these groups: (1) migrations with continuous change of locality; (2) migrations with temporary change of settlement; (3) migrations with permanent settlement.
To the first group belong gypsy life, peddling, the carrying on of itinerant trades, tramp life; to the second, the wandering of journeymen craftsmen, domestic servants, tradesmen seeking the most favorable spots for temporary undertakings, officials to whom a definite office is for a time entrusted, scholars attending foreign institutions of learning; to the third, migration from place to place within the same country or province and to foreign parts, especially across the ocean.