“The Revelations of Devout
and Learn’d
Who rose before us, and as Prophets
Burn’d,
Are all but stories,
which, awoke from Sleep,
They told their comrades, and to
Sleep return’d.”
The history of civilisation is a history of wandering,
sword in hand, in search of food. In the misty
younger world we catch glimpses of phantom races,
rising, slaying, finding food, building rude civilisations,
decaying, falling under the swords of stronger hands,
and passing utterly away. Man, like any other
animal, has roved over the earth seeking what he might
devour; and not romance and adventure, but the hunger-need,
has urged him on his vast adventures. Whether
a bankrupt gentleman sailing to colonise Virginia
or a lean Cantonese contracting to labour on the sugar
plantations of Hawaii, in each case, gentleman and
coolie, it is a desperate attempt to get something
to eat, to get more to eat than he can get at home.
It has always been so, from the time of the first
pre-human anthropoid crossing a mountain-divide in
quest of better berry-bushes beyond, down to the latest
Slovak, arriving on our shores to-day, to go to work
in the coal-mines of Pennsylvania. These migratory
movements of peoples have been called drifts, and
the word is apposite. Unplanned, blind, automatic,
spurred on by the pain of hunger, man has literally
drifted his way around the planet. There have
been drifts in the past, innumerable and forgotten,
and so remote that no records have been left, or composed
of such low-typed humans or pre-humans that they made
no scratchings on stone or bone and left no monuments
to show that they had been.
These early drifts we conjecture and know must have
occurred, just as we know that the first upright-walking
brutes were descended from some kin of the quadrumana
through having developed “a pair of great toes
out of two opposable thumbs.” Dominated
by fear, and by their very fear accelerating their
development, these early ancestors of ours, suffering
hunger-pangs very like the ones we experience to-day,
drifted on, hunting and being hunted, eating and being
eaten, wandering through thousand-year-long odysseys
of screaming primordial savagery, until they left their
skeletons in glacial gravels, some of them, and their
bone-scratchings in cave-men’s lairs.
There have been drifts from east to west and west
to east, from north to south and back again, drifts
that have criss-crossed one another, and drifts colliding
and recoiling and caroming off in new directions.
From Central Europe the Aryans have drifted into
Asia, and from Central Asia the Turanians have drifted
across Europe. Asia has thrown forth great waves
of hungry humans from the prehistoric “round-barrow”
“broad-heads” who overran Europe and penetrated
to Scandinavia and England, down through the hordes
of Attila and Tamerlane, to the present immigration
