6. It does not follow by any means that a people, once settled, never stirred from its adopted country. The migratory or wandering instinct never quite died out—our own love of travelling sufficiently proves that—and it was no unfrequent occurrence in very ancient times for large tribes, even portions of nations, to start off again in search of new homes and to found new cities, compelled thereto either by the gradual overcrowding of the old country, or by intestine discords, or by the invasion of new nomadic tribes of a different race who drove the old settlers before them to take possession of their settlements, massacred them if they resisted and reduced those who remained to an irksome subjection. Such invasions, of course, might also be perpetrated with the same results by regular armies, led by kings and generals from some other settled and organized country. The alternative between bondage and emigration must have been frequently offered, and the choice in favor of the latter was helped not a little by the spirit of adventure inborn in man, tempted by so many unexplored regions as there were in those remote ages.
7. Such have been the beginnings of all nations. There can be no other. And there is one more observation which will scarcely ever prove wrong. It is that, however far we may go back into the past, the people whom we find inhabiting any country at the very dawn of tradition, can always be shown to have come from somewhere else, and not to have been the first either. Every swarm of nomads or adventurers who either pass through a country or stop and settle there, always find it occupied already. Now the older population was hardly ever entirely destroyed or dislodged by the newcomers. A portion at least remained, as an inferior or subject race, but in time came to mix with them, mostly in the way of intermarriage. Then again, if the newcomers were peaceable and there was room enough—which there generally was in very early times—they would frequently be suffered to form separate settlements, and dwell in the land; when they would either remain in a subordinate condition, or, if they were the finer and better gifted race, they would quickly take the upper hand, teach the old settlers their own arts and ideas, their manners and their laws. If the new settlement was effected by conquest, the arrangement was short and simple: the conquerors, though less numerous, at once established themselves as masters and formed a ruling nobility, an aristocracy, while the old owners of the land, those at least that did not choose to emigrate, became what may be called "the common people," bound to do service and pay tribute or taxes to their self-instituted masters. Every country has generally experienced, at various times, all these modes of invasion, so that each nation may be said to have been formed gradually, in successive layers, as it were, and often of very different elements, which either finally amalgamated or kept apart, according to circumstances.
The early history of Chaldea is a particularly good illustration of all that has just been said.
FOOTNOTES:
[Y] Genesis, xiii. 7-11.
[Z] Genesis, xxxvi. 6-7.
