Chapter IV: The Movements of Peoples in Their Geographical Significance (2)

Every staple place and trading station is a center of geographical information; it therefore gives an impulse to expansion by widening the geographical horizon. The Lewis and Clark Expedition found the Mandan villages at the northern bend of the Missouri River the center of a trade which extended west to the Pacific, through the agency of the Crow and Paunch Indians of the upper Yellowstone, and far north to the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Rivers. Here in conversation with British and French fur-traders of the Northwest Company's posts, they secured information about the western country they were to explore.[187] Similarly the trade of the early Jesuit missions at La Pointe near the west end of Lake Superior annually drew the Indians from a wide circle sweeping from Green Bay and the Fox River in the south, across the Mississippi around to the Lake of the Woods and far north of Lake Superior.[188] Here Marquette first heard of the great river destined to carry French dominion to the Gulf of Mexico.

[Sidenote: Movements due to religion.]

Trade often finds in religion an associate and coadjutor in directing and stimulating the historical movement. China regards modern Christian missions as effective European agencies for the spread of commercial and political power. Jesuit and fur-trader plunged together into the wilds of colonial Canada; Spanish priest and gold-seeker into Mexico and Peru. American missionary pressed close upon the heels of fur-trader into the Oregon country. Jason Lee, having established a Methodist mission on the Willamette in 1834, himself experienced sudden conversion from religionist to colonizer. He undertook a temporary mission back to the settled States, where he preached a stirring propaganda for the settlement and appropriation of the disputed Oregon country, before the British should fasten their grip upon it. The United States owes Hawaii to the expansionist spirit of American missionaries. Thirty years after their arrival in the islands, they held all the important offices under the native government, and had secured valuable tracts of lands, laying the foundation of the landed aristocracy of planters established there to-day. Their sons and grandsons took the lead in the Revolution of 1893, and in the movement for annexation to the United States. Thus sometimes do the meek inherit the earth.

[Sidenote: Religious pilgrimages.]

The famous pilgrimages of the world, in which the commercial element has been more or less conspicuous,[189] have contributed greatly to the circulation of peoples and ideas, especially as they involve multitudes and draw from a large circle of lands. Their economic, intellectual and political effects rank them as one phase of the historical movement. Herodotus tells of seven hundred thousand Egyptians flocking to the city of Bubastis from all parts of Egypt for the festival of Diana.[190] The worship of Ashtoreth in Bambyce in Syria drew votaries from all the Semitic peoples except the Jews. As early as 386 A.D. Christian pilgrims flocked to Jerusalem from Armenia, Persia, India, Ethiopia, and even from Gaul and Britain. Jerusalem gave rise to those armed pilgrimages, the Crusades, with all their far-reaching results. The pilgrimages to Rome, which in the Jubilee of 1300 brought two hundred thousand worshipers to the sacred city, did much to consolidate papal supremacy over Latin Christendom.[191] As the roads to Rome took the pious wayfarers through Milan, Venice, Genoa, Florence, Bologna, and other great cities of Italy, they were so many channels for the distribution of Italian art and culture over the more untutored lands of western Europe.

Though Mecca is visited annually by only seventy or eighty thousand pilgrims, it puts into motion a far greater number over the whole Mohammedan world, from westernmost Africa to Chinese Turkestan.[192] Yearly a great pilgrimage, numbering in 1905 eighty thousand souls, moves across Africa eastward through the Sudan on its way to the Red Sea and Mecca. Many traders join the caravans of the devout both for protection and profit, and the devout themselves travel with herds of cattle to trade in on the way. The merchants are prone to drop out and settle in any attractive country, and few get beyond the populous markets of Wadai. The British and French governments in the Sudan aid and protect these pilgrimages; they recognize them as a political force, because they spread the story of the security and order of European rule.[193] The markets of western Tibet, recently opened to Indian merchants by the British expedition to Lhassa, promote intercourse between the two countries especially because of the sacred lakes and mountains in their vicinity, which are goals of pilgrimage alike to Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist. They offer an opportunity to acquire merit and profit at the same time, an irresistible combination to the needy, pious Hindu. Therefore across the rugged passes of the Himalayas he drives his yaks laden with English merchandise, an unconscious instrument for the spread of English influence, English civilization and the extension of the English market, as the Colonial Office well understands.[194]

[Sidenote: Historical movement and race distribution.]

The forms which have been assumed by the historical movement are varied, but all have contributed to the spread of man over the habitable globe. The yellow, white and red races have become adapted to every zone; the black race, whether in Africa, Australia or Melanesia, is confined chiefly to the Tropics. A like conservatism as to habitat tends to characterize all sub-races, peoples, and tribes of the human family. The fact which strikes one in studying the migrations of these smaller groups is their adherence each to a certain zone or heat belt defined by certain isothermal lines (see map chap. XVII.), their reluctance to protrude beyond its limits, and the restricted range and small numerical strength of such protrusions as occur. This seems to be the conservatism of the mature race type, which has lost some of its plasticity and shuns or succumbs to the ordeal of adaptation to contrasted climatic conditions, except when civilization enables it partially to neutralize their effects.

[Sidenote: Migrations in relation to zones and heat belts.]

In South America, Caribs and Arawaks showed a strictly tropical distribution from Hayti to the southern watershed of the Amazon. The Tupis, moving down the Parana-La Plata system, made a short excursion beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, though not beyond the hot belt, then turned equator-ward again along the coast.[195] In North America we find some exceptions to the rule. For instance, though the main area of the Athapascan stock is found in the frigid belt of Canada and Alaska, north of the annual isotherm of 0 deg.C. (32 deg.F.) small residual fragments of these people are scattered also along the Pacific coast of Oregon and California, marking the old line of march of a large group which drifted southward into Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and the northern part of Mexico. The Shoshone stock, which originally occupied the Great Basin and western intermontane plateau up to the borders of Canada, sent out offshoots which developed into the ancient civilized tribes of tropical Mexico and Central America. Both these emigrations to more southern zones were part of the great southward trend characterizing all movements on the Pacific side of the continent, probably from an original ethnic port of entry near Bering Strait; and part also of the general southward drift in search of more genial climate, which landed the van of northern Siouan, Algonquin and Iroquoian stocks in the present area of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, while the base of their territory stretched out to its greatest width in southern Canada and contiguous parts of the United States. [See map page 54.][196]

[Sidenote: Range of movements in Asia.]

If we turn to the eastern hemisphere, we find the Malays and Malayo-Polynesians, differentiated offshoots of the Mongolian stock, restricted to the Tropics, except where Polynesians have spread to outlying New Zealand. The Chinese draw their political boundary nearly along the Tropic of Cancer, but they have freely lapped over this frontier into Indo-China as far as Singapore.[197] Combined with this expansion was the early infiltration of the Chinese into the Philippines, Borneo, and the western Sunda Isles, all distinctly tropical. The fact that the Chinese show a physical capacity for acclimatization found in no other race explains in part their presence into the Tropics. In contrast, the Aryan folk of India, whether in their pure type as found in the Punjab and Rajputana Desert, or mingled with the earlier Dravidian races belong to the hot belt but scarcely reach the Tropic of Cancer,[198] though their language has far overshot this line both in the Deccan and the Ganges Delta. One spore of Aryan stock, in about 450 B.C., moved by sea from the Bay of Cambay to Ceylon; mingling there with the Tamil natives, they became the progenitors of the Singhalese, forming a hybrid tropical offshoot.

Europe, except for its small sub-arctic area, has received immigrants, according to the testimony of history and ethnology, only from the temperate parts of Asia and Africa, with the one exception of the Saracens of Arabia, whose original home lay wholly within the hot climate belt of 20 deg.C. (68 deg.F.). Saracen expansion, in covering Persia, Syria, and Egypt, still kept to this hot belt; only in the Barbary Coast of Africa and in Spain did it protrude into the temperate belt. Though this last territory was extra-tropical, it was essentially semi-arid and sub-tropical in temperature, like the dry trade-wind belt whence the Saracens had sprung.

[Sidenote: Range of movements in Africa.]

The Semitic folk of Arabia and the desert Hamites of northern Africa, bred by their hot, dry environment to a nomadic life, have been drawn southward over the Sahara across the Tropic into the grasslands of the Sudan, permeating a wide zone of negro folk with the political control, religion, civilization and blood of the Mediterranean north. Here similar though better conditions of life, a climate hotter though less arid, attracted Hamitic invasion, while the relatively dense native population in a lower stage of economic development presented to the commercial Semites the attraction of lucrative trade. South of the equator the native Bantu Kaffirs, essentially a tropical people, spread beyond their zonal border to the south coast of Africa at 33 deg. S.L., and displaced the yellow Hottentots[199] before the arrival of the Dutch in 1602; while in the early nineteenth century we hear of the Makololo, a division of this same Kaffir stock, leaving their native seats near the southern sources of the Vaal River at 28 deg. S.L. and moving some nine hundred miles northward to the Barotse territory on the upper Zambesi at 15 deg. S.L.[200] This again was a movement of a pastoral people across a tropic to other grasslands, to climatic conditions scarcely different from those which they had left.

[Sidenote: Colonization and latitude.]

The modern colonial movements which have been genuine race expansions have shown a tendency not only to adhere to their zone, but to follow parallels of latitude or isotherms. The stratification of European peoples in the Americas, excepting Spanish and Portuguese, coincides with heat zones. Internal colonization in the United States reveals the same principle.[201] Russian settlements in Asia stretch across Siberia chiefly between the fiftieth and fifty-fifth parallels; these same lines include the ancient Slav territory in Germany between the Vistula and Weser. The great efflux of home-seekers, as opposed to the smaller contingent of mere conquerors and exploiters, which has poured forth from Europe since the fifteenth century, has found its destinations largely in the temperate parts of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Even the Spanish overlords in Mexico and Peru domiciled themselves chiefly in the highlands, where altitude in part counteracts tropical latitude. European immigration into South America to-day greatly predominates in the temperate portions,--in Argentine, Uruguay, Paraguay, southern Brazil and southern Chile. While Argentine's population includes over one million white foreigners, who comprise twenty per cent. of the total,[202] Venezuela has no genuine white immigration. Its population, which comprises only one per cent. of pure whites, consists chiefly of negroes, mulattoes, and Sambos, hybrids of negro and Indian race. In British Guiana, negroes and East Indian coolies, both importations from other tropical lands, comprise eighty-one per cent. of the population.[203]

The movement of Europeans into the tropical regions of Asia, Australasia, Africa and America, like the American advance into the Philippines, represents commercial and political, not genuine ethnic expansion. Except where it resorts to hybridization, it seeks not new homesteads, but the profits of tropical trade and the markets for European manufactures found in retarded populations. These it secures either by a small but permanently domiciled ruling class, as formerly in Spanish and Portuguese America, or by a body of European officials, clerks, agents and soldiers, sent out for a term of years. Such are the seventy-six thousand Britishers who manage the affairs of commerce and state in British India, and the smaller number of Dutch who perform the same functions in the Dutch East India islands. The basis of this system is exploitation. It represents neither a high economic, ethical, nor social ideal, and therefore lacks the stamp of geographic finality.

[Sidenote: Movement to like geographic conditions.]

A migrating or expanding people, when free to choose, is prone to seek a new home with like geographic conditions to the old. Hence the stamp once given by an environment tends to perpetuate itself. All people, especially those in the lower stages of culture, are conservative in their fundamental activities. Agriculture is intolerable to pastoral nomads, hunting has little attraction for a genuine fisher folk. Therefore such peoples in expansion seek an environment in which the national aptitudes, slowly evolved in their native seats, find a ready field. Thus arise natural provinces of distribution, whose location, climate, physical features, and size reflect the social and economic adaptation of the inhabitants to a certain type of environment. A shepherd folk, when breaking off from its parent stock like Abraham's family from their Mesopotamian kinsmen, seeks a land rich in open pastures and large enough to support its wasteful nomadic economy. A seafaring people absorb an ever longer strip of seaboard, like the Eskimo of Arctic America, or throw out their settlements from inlet to inlet or island to island, as did Malays and Polynesians in the Pacific, ancient Greeks and Phoenicians in the subtropical Mediterranean, and the Norse in the northern seas. The Dutch, bred to the national profession of diking and draining, appear in their element in the water-logged coast of Sumatra and Guiana,[204] where they cultivate lands reclaimed from the sea; or as colonists in the Vistula lowlands, whither Prussia imported them to do their ancestral task, just as the English employed their Dutch prisoners after the wars with Holland in the seventeenth century to dike and drain the fens of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Moreover, the commercial talent of the Dutch, trained by their advantageous situation on the North Sea about the Rhine mouths, guided their early traders to similar locations elsewhere, like the Hudson and Delaware Rivers, or planted them on islands either furnishing or commanding extensive trade, such as Ceylon, Mauritius, the East Indies, or the Dutch holdings in the Antilles.

Much farther down in the cultural scale we find the fisher tribes of Central Africa extending their villages from point to point along the equatorial streams, and the river Indians of South America gradually spreading from headwaters to estuary, and thence to the related environment of the coast. The Tupis, essentially a water race, have left traces of their occupation only where river or coast enabled them to live by their inherited aptitudes.[205] The distribution of the ancient mounds in North America shows their builders to have sought with few exceptions protected sites near alluvial lowlands, commanding rich soil for cultivation and the fish supply from the nearby river. Mountaineer folk often move from one upland district to another, as did the Lombards of Alpine Pannonia in their conquest of Lombardy and Apennine Italy, where all their four duchies were restricted to the highlands of the peninsula.[206] The conquests of the ancient Incas and the spread of their race covered one Andean valley after another for a stretch of one thousand five hundred miles, wherever climatic and physical conditions were favorable to their irrigated tillage and highland herds of llamas. They found it easier to climb pass after pass and mount to ever higher altitudes, rather than descend to the suffocating coasts where neither man nor beast could long survive, though they pushed the political boundary finally to the seaboard. [Map page 101.]

[Sidenote: Movement to better geographic conditions.]

The search for better land, milder climate, and easier conditions of living starts many a movement of peoples which, in view of their purpose, necessarily leads them into an environment sharply contrasted to their original habitat. Such has been the radial outflow of the Mongoloid tribes down from the rugged highlands of central Asia to the fertile river lowlands of the peripheral lands; the descent of the Iran pastors upon the agricultural folk of the Indus, Ganges and Mesopotamian valleys, and the swoop of desert-born conquerors upon the unresisting tillers of well-watered fields in all times, from the ancient Hyksos of the Nile to the modern Fulbe of the Niger Valley.

[Sidenote: Southward and westward drifts in the northern hemisphere.]

The attraction of a milder climate has caused in the northern hemisphere a constantly recurring migration from north to south. In primitive North America, along the whole broad Atlantic slope, the predominant direction of Indian migrations was from north to south, accompanied by a drift from west to east.[207] On the Pacific side of the continent also the trend was southward. This is generally conceded regardless of theory as to whether the Indians first found entrance to the continent at its northeast or northwest corner. It was a movement toward milder climates.[208] Study of the _Voelkerwanderungen_ in Europe reveals two currents or drifts in varied combination, one from north to south and the other from east to west, but both of them aimed at regions of better climate; for the milder temperature and more abundant rainfall of western Europe made a country as alluring to the Goths, Huns, Alans, Slavs, Bulgars and Tartars of Asiatic deserts and Russian steppes, as were the sunny Mediterranean peninsulas to the dwellers of the bleak Baltic coasts. This is one geographic fact back of the conspicuous westward movement formulated into an historical principle: "Westward the star of empire takes its course." The establishment of European colonies on the western side of the Atlantic, their extension thence to the Pacific and ever westward, till European culture was transplanted to the Philippines by Spain and more recently by the United States, constitute the most remarkable sustained movement made by any one race.

[Sidenote: Eastward movements.]

But westward movements are not the only ones. On the Pacific slope of Asia the star has moved eastward. From highland Mongolia issued the throng which originally populated the lowlands of China; and ever since, one nomad conqueror after the other has descended thence to rule the fruitful plains of Chili and the teeming populations of the Yangtze Valley.[209] Russia, blocked in its hoped for expansion to the west by the strong powers of central Europe, stretched its dominion eastward to the Pacific and for a short time over to Alaska. The chief expansion of the German people and the German Empire in historical times has also been from west to east; but this eastward advance is probably only retracing the steps taken by many primitive Teutonic tribes as they drifted Rhineward from an earlier habitat along the Vistula.

[Sidenote: Return movements.]

Since the world is small, it frequently happens that a people after an interval of generations, armed with a higher civilization, will reenter a region which it once left when too crude and untutored to develop the possibilities of the land, but which its better equipment later enables it to exploit. Thus we find a backward expansion of the Chinese westward to the foot of the Pamir, and an internal colonization of the empire to the Ili feeder of Lake Balkash. The expansion of the Japanese into Korea and Saghalin is undoubtedly such a return current, after an interval long enough to work a complete transformation in the primitive Mongolians who found their way to that island home. Sometimes the return represents the ebbing of the tide, rather than the back water of a stream in flood. Such was the retreat of the Moors from Spain to the Berber districts of North Africa, whither they carried echoes of the brilliant Saracen civilization in the Iberian Peninsula. Such has been the gradual withdrawal of the Turks from Europe back to their native Asia, and slow expulsion of the Tartar tribes from Russia to the barren Asiatic limits of their former territory. [See map page 225.]

[Sidenote: Regions of attraction and repulsion.]

Voluntary historical movements, seeking congenial or choice regions of the earth, have left its less favored spots undisturbed. Paucity of resources and isolation have generally insured to a region a peaceful history; natural wealth has always brought the conqueror. In ancient Greece the fruitful plains of Thessaly, Boeotia, Elis and Laconia had a fatal attraction for every migrating horde; Attica's rugged surface, poor soil, and side-tracked location off the main line of travel between Hellas and the Peloponnesus saved it from many a rough visitant,[210] and hence left the Athenians, according to Thucydides, an indigenous race. The fertility of the Rhine Valley has always attracted invasion, the barren Black Forest range has repelled and obstructed it.

The security of such unproductive highlands lies more in their failure to attract than in their power to resist conquest. When to abundant natural resources, a single spot adds a reputation for wealth, magnificence, an exceptional position for the control of territory or commerce, it becomes a geographical magnet. Such was Delphi for the Gauls of the Balkan Peninsula in the third century, Rome for the Germanic and Hunnish tribes of the _Voelkerwanderung_, Constantinople for the Normans, Turks and Russians, Venice for land-locked Austria, the Mississippi highway and the outlet at New Orleans for our Trans-Allegheny pioneers.

[Sidenote: Psychical influences in certain movements.]

Sometimes the goal is fabulous or mythical, but potent to lure, like the land of El Dorado, abounding in gold and jewels, which for two centuries spurred on Spanish exploration in America. Other than purely material motives may initiate or maintain such a movement, an ideal or a dream of good, like the fountain of eternal youth which brought Ponce de Leon to Florida, the search for the Islands of the Blessed, or the spirit of religious propaganda which stimulated the spread of the Spanish in Mexico and the French in Canada, or the hope of religious toleration which has drawn Quaker, Puritan, Huguenot, and Jew to America. It was an idea of purely spiritual import which directed the century-long movement of the Crusades toward Jerusalem, half Latinized the Levant, and widened the intellectual horizon of Europe. A national or racial sentiment which enhaloes a certain spot may be pregnant with historical results, because at any moment it may start some band of enthusiasts on a path of migration or conquest. The Zionist agitation for the return of oppressed Jews to Palestine, and the establishment of the Liberian Republic for the negroes in Africa rest upon such a sentiment. The reverence of the Christian world for Rome as a goal of pilgrimages materially enhanced the influence of Italy as a school of culture during the Middle Ages. The spiritual and ethnic association of the Mohammedan world with Mecca is always fraught with possible political results. The dominant tribes of the Sudan, followers of Islam, who proudly trace back a fictitious line of ancestry to the Arabs of Yemen, are readily incited to support a new prophet sprung from the race of Mecca.[211] The pilgrimages which the Buddhists of the Asiatic highlands make to the sacred city of Lhassa ensure China's control over the restless nomads through the instrumentality of the Grand Lama of Tibet.

[Sidenote: Results of historical movement.]

Historical movements are varied as to motive, direction, numerical strength, and character, but their final results are two, differentiation and assimilation. Both are important phases of the process of evolution, but the latter gains force with the progress of history and the increase of the world's population.

[Sidenote: Differentiation and area.]

A people or race which, in its process of numerical growth, spreads over a large territory subjects itself to a widening range of geographic conditions, and therefore of differentiation. The broad expansion of the Teutonic race in Europe, America, Australia and South Africa has brought it into every variety of habitat. If the territory has a monotonous relief like Russia, nevertheless, its mere extent involves diversity of climate and location. The diversity of climate incident to large area involves in turn different animal and plant life, different crops, different economic activities. Even in lowlands the relief, geologic structure, and soil are prone to vary over wide districts. The monotonous surface of Holland shows such contrasts. So do the North German lowlands; here the sandy barren flats of the "geest" alternate with stretches of fertile silt deposited by the rivers or the sea,[212] and support different types of communities, which have been admirably described by Gustav Frenssen in his great novel of Joen Uhl. The flat surface of southern Illinois shows in small compass the teeming fertility of the famous "American bottom," the poor clay soil of "Egypt" with its backward population, and the rich prairie land just to the north with its prosperous and progressive farmer class.

When the relief includes mountains, the character not only of the land but of the climate changes, and therewith the type of community. Hence neighboring districts may produce strongly contrasted types of society. Madison County of Kentucky, lying on the eastern margin of the Bluegrass region, contains the rich landed estates, negro laboring class and aristocratic society characteristic of the "planter" communities of the old South; and only twenty miles southeast of Richmond, the center of this wealth and refinement, it includes also the rough barren hill country of the Cumberland Plateau, where are found one-room cabins, moonshine stills, feuds, and a backward population sprung from the same pure English stock as the Bluegrass people.

[Sidenote: Contrasted environments.]

Here is differentiation due to the immediate influences of environment. The phenomenon reappears in every part of the world, in every race and every age. The contrast between the ancient Greeks of the mountains, coasts and alluvial valleys shows the power of environment to direct economic activities and to modify culture and social organization. So does the differences between the coast, steppe, and forest Indians of Guiana,[213] the Kirghis of the Pamir pastures and the Irtysh River valley, the agricultural Berbers of the Atlas Mountains and the Berber nomads of the Sahara, the Swiss of the high, lonely Engadine and those of the crowded Aar valley.

Contrasted environments effect a natural selection in another way and thereby greatly stimulate differentiation, whenever an intruding people contest the ownership of the territory with the inhabitants. The struggle for land means a struggle also for the best land, which therefore falls to the share of the strongest peoples. Weaklings must content themselves with poor soils, inaccessible regions of mountain, swamp or desert. There they deteriorate, or at best strike a slower pace of increase or progress. The difference between the people of the highlands and plains of Great Britain or of France is therefore in part a distinction of race due to this geographical selection,[214] in part a distinction of economic development and culture due to geographic influences. Therefore the piedmont belts of the world, except in arid lands, are cultural, ethnic and often political lines of cleavage, showing marked differentiation on either side. Isotherms are other such cleavage lines, marking the limits beyond which an aggressive people did not desire to expand because of an uncongenial climate. The distinction between Anglo-Saxon and Latin America is one of zone as well as race. Everywhere in North America the English stock has dominated or displaced French and Spanish competitors down to the Mexican frontier.

As the great process of European colonization has permeated the earth and multiplied its population, not only the best land but the amount of this has commenced to differentiate the history of various European nations, and that in a way whose end cannot yet be definitely predicted. The best lands have fallen to the first-comers strong enough to hold them. People who early develop powers of expansion, like the English, or who, like the French and Russians, formulate and execute vast territorial policies, secure for their future growth a wide base which will for all time distinguish them from late-comers into the colonial field, like Germany and Italy. These countries see the fecundity of their people redounding to the benefit of alien colonial lands, which have been acquired by enterprising rivals in the choice sections of the temperate zone. German and Italian colonies in torrid, unhealthy, or barren tropical lands, fail to attract emigrants from the mother country, and therefore to enhance national growth.

[Sidenote: Two-type populations.]

When colonizers or conquerors appropriate the land of a lower race, we find a territory occupied at least for a time by two types of population, constituting an ethnic, social and often economic differentiation. The separation may be made geographical also. The Indians in the United States have been confined to reservations, like the Hottentots to the twenty or more "locations" in Cape Colony. This is the simplest arrangement. Whether the second or lower type survives depends upon their economic and social utility, into which again geographic conditions enter. The Indians of Canada are a distinct economic factor in that country as trappers for the Hudson Bay Company, and they will so remain till the hunting grounds of the far north are exhausted. The native agriculturists in the Tropics are indispensable to the unacclimated whites. The negroes of the South, introduced for an economic purpose, find their natural habitat in the Black Belt. Here we have an ethnic division of labor for geographical reasons. Castes or social classes, often distinguished by shades of color as in Brahman India, survive as differentiations indicating old lines of race cleavage. There is abundant evidence that the upper classes in Germany, France, Austria, and the British Isles are distinctly lighter of hair and eyes than the peasantry.[215] The high-class Japanese are taller and fairer than the masses. Nearly all the African tribes of the Sudan and bordering Sahara include two distinct classes, one of lighter and one of darker shade. Many Fulbe tribes distinguish these classes by the names of "Blacks" and "Whites."[216] The two-type people are the result of historical movements.

[Sidenote: Differentiation and isolation.]

Differentiation results not only from contrasted geographic conditions, but also from segregation. A moving or expanding throng in search of more and better lands drops off one group to occupy a fertile valley or plain, while the main body goes on its way, till it reaches a satisfactory destination or destinations. The tendency to split and divide, characteristic of primitive peoples, is thus stimulated by migration and expansion. Each offshoot, detached from the main body, tends to diverge from the stock type. If it reaches a naturally isolated region, where its contact without is practically cut off, it grows from its own loins, emphasizes its group characteristic by close in-breeding, and tends to show a development related to biological divergence under conditions of isolation. Since man is essentially a gregarious animal, the size of every such migrating band will always prevent the evolution of any sharply defined variety, according to the standard of biology. Nevertheless, the divergent types of men and societies developed in segregated regions are an echo of the formation of new species under conditions of isolation which is now generally acknowledged by biological science. Isolation was recognized by Darwin as an occasional factor in the origin of species and especially of divergence; in combination with migration it was made the basis of a theory of evolution by Moritz Wagner in 1873;[217] and in recent years has come to be regarded as an essential in the explanation of divergence of types, as opposed to differentiation.[218]

[Sidenote: Differentiation and digression.]

The traditions of the Delaware Indians and Sioux in the north of the United States territory, and of the Creeks in the south, commence with each stock group as a united body, which, as it migrates, splits into tribes and sends out offshoots developing different dialects. Here was tribal differentiation after entry into the general stock area, the process going on during migration as well as after the tribes had become established in their respective habitats. Culture, however, made little progress till after they became sedentary and took up agriculture to supplement the chase.[219] Tribes sometimes wander far beyond the limits of their stock, like the Iroquoian Cherokees of East Tennessee and North Carolina or the Athapascan Navajos and Apaches of arid New Mexico and Arizona, who had placed twenty or thirty degrees of latitude between themselves and their brethren in the basins of the Yukon and Mackenzie rivers. Such inevitably come into contrasted climatic conditions, which further modify the immigrants. [See map page 54.]

Wide digressions differentiate them still further from the parent stock by landing them amid different ethnic and social groups, by contact with whom they are inevitably modified. The Namaqua Hottentots, living on the southern margin of the Hottentot country near the frontier of the European settlements in Cape Colony, acquired some elements of civilization, together with a strain of Boer and English blood, and in some cases even the Dutch vernacular. They were therefore differentiated from their nomadic and warlike kinsmen in the grasslands north of the Orange River, which formed the center of the Hottentot area.[220] A view of the ancient Germans during the first five or six centuries after Christ reveals differentiation by various contacts in process along all the ragged borders of the Germanic area. The offshoots who pushed westward across the Rhine into Belgian Gaul were rapidly Celticized, abandoning their semi-nomadic life for sedentary agriculture, assimilating the superior civilization which they found there, and steadily merging with the native population. They became _Belgae_, though still conscious of their Teutonic origin.[221] The Batavians, an offshoot of the ancient Chatti living near the Thuringian Forest, appropriated the river island between the Rhine and the Waal. There in the seclusion of their swamps, they became a distinct national unit, retaining their backward German culture and primitive type of German speech, which the Chatti themselves lost by contact with the High Germans.[222] Far away on the southeastern margin of the Teutonic area the same process of assimilation to a foreign civilization went on a little later when the Visigoths, after a century of residence on the lower Danube in contact with the Eastern Empire, adopted the Arian form of Christianity which had arisen in the Greek peninsula.[223] The border regions of the world show the typical results of the historical movement--differentiation from the core or central group through assimilation to a new group which meets and blends with it along the frontier.

[Sidenote: Geographic conditions of heterogeneity and homogeneity.]

Entrance into a naturally isolated district, from which subsequent incursions are debarred, gives conditions for divergence and the creation of a new type. On the other hand, where few physical barriers are present to form these natural pockets, the process of assimilation goes on over a wide field. Europe is peculiar among the family of continents for its "much divided" geography, commented upon by Strabo. Hence its islands, peninsulas and mountain-rimmed basins have produced a variegated assemblage of peoples, languages and culture. Only where it runs off into the monotonous immensity of Russia do we find a people who in their physical traits, language, and civilization reflect the uniformity of their environment.[224]

Africa's smooth outline, its plateau surface rimmed with mountains which enclose but fail to divide, and its monotonous configuration have produced a racial and cultural uniformity as striking as Europe's heterogeneity. Constant movements and commixture, migration and conquest, have been the history of the black races, varied by victorious incursions of the Hamitic and Semitic whites from the north, which, however, have resulted in the amalgamation of the two races after conquest.[225] Constant fusion has leveled also the social and political relations of the people to one type; it has eliminated primordial groups, except where the dwarf hunters have taken refuge in the equatorial forests and the Bushmen in the southwestern deserts, just as it has thwarted the development of higher social groups by failure to segregate and protect. It has sown the Bantu speech broadcast over the immense area of Central Africa, and is disseminating the Hausa language through the agency of a highly mixed commercial folk over a wide tract of the western Sudan. The long east-and-west stretch of the Sudan grasslands presents an unobstructed zone between the thousand-mile belt of desert to the north and the dense equatorial forests to the south, between hunger and thirst on one side, heat and fever and impenetrable forests on the other. Hence the Sudan in all history has been the crowded Broadway of Africa. Here pass commercial caravans, hybrid merchant tribes like the Hausa, throngs of pilgrims, streams of peoples, herds of cattle moving to busy markets, rude incursive shoppers or looters from the desert, coming to buy or rob or rule in this highway belt. [See map page 105.]

[Sidenote: Differentiation versus assimilation.]

Historical development advances by means of differentiation and assimilation. A change of environment stimulates variation. Primitive culture is loath to change; its inertia is deep-seated. Only a sharp prod will start it moving or accelerate its speed; such a prod is found in new geographic conditions or new social contacts. Divergence in a segregated spot may be overdone. Progress crawls among a people too long isolated, though incipient civilization thrives for a time in seclusion. But in general, accessibility, exposure to some measure of ethnic amalgamation and social contact is essential to sustained progress.[226] As the world has become more closely populated and means of communication have improved, geographical segregation is increasingly rare. The earth has lost its "corners." All parts are being drawn into the circle of intercourse. Therefore differentiation, the first effect of the historical movement, abates; the second effect, assimilation, takes the lead.

[Sidenote: Elimination by historical movement.]

The ceaseless human movements making for new combinations have stimulated development. They have lifted the level of culture, and worked towards homogeneity of race and civilization on a higher plane. Since the period of the great discoveries inaugurated by Columbus enabled the historical movement to compass the world, whole continents, like North America and Australia, have been reclaimed to civilization by colonization. The process of assimilation is often ruthless in its method. Hence it has been attended by a marked reduction in the number of different ethnic stocks, tribes, languages, dialects, social and cultural types through wide-spread elimination of the weak, backward or unfit.[227] These have been wiped out, either by extermination or the slower process of absorption. The Indian linguistic stocks in the United States have been reduced from fifty-three to thirty-two; and of those thirty-two, many survive as a single tribe or the shrinking remnant of one.[228] In Africa the slave trade has caused the annihilation of many small tribes.[229] The history of the Hottentots, who have been passive before the active advance of the English, Dutch and Kaffirs about them, shows a race undergoing a widespread process of hybridization[230] and extermination.[231]

Strong peoples, like the English, French, Russians and Chinese, occupy ever larger areas. Where an adverse climate precludes genuine colonization, as it did for the Spanish in Central and South America, and for the English and Dutch in the Indies, they make their civilization, if not their race, permeate the acquired territory, and gradually impose on it their language and economic methods. The Poles, who once boasted a large and distinguished nationality, are being Germanized and Russified to their final national extinction. The Finns, whose Scandinavian offshoot has been almost absorbed in Sweden,[232] are being forcibly dissolved in the Muscovite dominion by powerful reaegents, by Russian schoolmasters, a Russian priesthood, Russian military service.

[Sidenote: No new ethnic types.]

No new types of races have been developed either by amalgamation or by transfer to new climatic and economic conditions in historic times. Contrasted geographic conditions long ago lost their power to work radical physical changes in the race type, because man even with the beginnings of civilization learned to protect himself against extremes of climate. He therefore preserved his race type, which consequently in the course of ages lost much of its plasticity and therewith its capacity to evolve new varieties.[233] Where ethnic amalgamations on a large scale have occurred as a result of the historical movement, as in Mexico, the Sudan and Central Africa, the local race, being numerically stronger than the intruders and better adapted to the environment, has succeeded in maintaining its type, though slightly modified, side by side with the intruders. The great historical movements of modern times, however, have been the expansion of European peoples over the retarded regions of the world. These peoples, coming into contact with inferior races, and armed generally with a race pride which was antagonistic to hybrid marriages, preserved their blood from extensive intermixture. Hybridism, where it existed, was an ephemeral feature restricted to pioneer days, when white women were scarce, or to regions of extreme heat or cold, where white women and children could with difficulty survive. Even in Spanish America, where ethnic blendings were most extensive, something of the old Spanish pride of race has reasserted itself.

[Sidenote: Checks to differentiation.]

Improved communication maintains or increases the ranks of the intruders from the home supply. The negroes in North America, imported as they were _en masse_, then steadily recruited by two centuries of the slave trade, while their race integrity was somewhat protected by social ostracism, have not been seriously modified physically by several generations of residence in a temperate land. Their changes have been chiefly cultural. The Englishman has altered only superficially in the various British colonial lands. Constant intercourse and the progress of inventions have enabled him to maintain in diverse regions approximate uniformity of physical well-being, similar social and political ideals. The changed environment modifies him in details of thought, manner, and speech, but not in fundamentals.

Moreover, civilized man spreading everywhere and turning all parts of the earth's surface to his uses, has succeeded to some extent in reducing its physical differences. The earth as modified by human action is a conspicuous fact of historical development.[234] Irrigation, drainage, fertilization of soils, terrace agriculture, denudation of forests and forestration of prairies have all combined to diminish the contrasts between diverse environments, while the acclimatization of plants, animals and men works even more plainly to the same end of uniformity. The unity of the human race, varied only by superficial differences, reflects the unity of the spherical earth, whose diversities of geographical feature nowhere depart greatly from the mean except in point of climate. Differentiation due to geography, therefore, early reached its limits. For assimilation no limit can be forseen.

[Sidenote: Geographical origins.]

In view of this constant differentiation on the one hand, and assimilation on the other, the historical movement has made it difficult to trace race types to their origin; and yet this is a task in which geography must have a hand. Borrowed civilizations and purloined languages are often so many disguises which conceal the truth of ethnic relationships. A long migration to a radically different habitat, into an outskirt or detached location protected from the swamping effects of cross-breeding, results eventually in a divergence great enough to obliterate almost every cue to the ancient kinship. The long-headed Teutonic race of northern Europe is regarded now by ethnologists as an offshoot of the long-headed brunette Mediterranean race of African origin, which became bleached out under the pale suns of Scandinavian skies. The present distribution of the various Teutonic stocks is a geographical fact; their supposed cradle in the Mediterranean basin is a geographical hypothesis. The connecting links must also be geographical. They must prove the former presence of the migrating folk in the intervening territory. A dolichocephalic substratum of population, with a negroid type of skull, has in fact been traced by archaeologists all over Europe through the early and late Stone Ages. The remains of these aboriginal inhabitants are marked in France, even in sparsely tenanted districts like the Auvergne Plateau, which is now occupied by the broad-headed Alpine race; and they are found to underlie, in point of time, other brachycephalic areas, like the Po Valley, Bavaria and Russia.[235]

The origin of a people can be investigated and stated only in terms of geography. The problem of origin can be solved only by tracing a people from its present habitat, through the country over which it has migrated, back to its original seat. Here are three geographical entities which can be laid down upon a map, though seldom with sharply defined boundaries. They represent three successive geographic locations, all embodying geographic conditions potent to influence the people and their movement. Hence the geographical element emerges in every investigation as to origins; whether in ethnology, history, philology, mythology or religion. The transit land, the course between start and finish, is of supreme importance. Especially is this true for religion, which is transformed by travel. Christianity did not conquer the world in the form in which it issued from the cramped and isolated environment of Palestine, but only after it had been remodelled in Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece and Rome, and cosmopolized in the wide contact of the Mediterranean basin. The Roman speech and civilization, which spread through the Romance speaking peoples of Europe, were variously diluted and alloyed before being transplanted by French, Spaniard and Portuguese to American shores, there to be further transformed.

[Sidenote: Large centers of dispersion.]

In view of the countless springs and tributaries that combine to swell the current of every historical movement, anthropo-geography looks for the origin of a people not in a narrowly defined area, but in a broad, ill-defined center of dispersion, from which many streams simultaneously and successively flow out as from a low-rimmed basin, and which has been filled from many remoter sources. Autochthones, aborigines are therefore merely scientific tropes, indicating the limit beyond which the movement of people cannot be traced in the gray light of an uncertain dawn. The vaguer and more complex these movements on account of their historical remoteness, the wider their probable range. The question as to the geographical origin of the Aryan linguistic family of peoples brings us to speculative sources, more or less scientifically based, reaching from Scandinavia and Lithuania to the Hindu Kush Mountains and northern Africa.[236] The sum total of all these conjectural cradles, amounting to a large geographical area, would more nearly approximate the truth as to Aryan origins. For the study of the historical movement makes it clear that a large, highly differentiated ethnic or linguistic family presupposes a big center end a long period of dispersion, protracted wanderings, and a diversified area both for their migrations and successive settlements.

[Sidenote: Small centers.]

The slighter the inner differences in an ethnic stock, whether in culture, language or physical traits, the smaller was their center of distribution and the more rapid their dispersal. The small initial habitat restricts the chances of variation through isolation and contrasted geographic conditions, as does also the short duration of their subsequent separation. The amazing uniformity of the Eskimo type from Bering Strait to eastern Greenland can only thus be explained, even after making allowance for the monotony of their geographic conditions and remoteness from outside influences. The distribution of the Bantu dialects over so wide a region in Central Africa and with such slight divergences presupposes narrow limits both of space and time for their origin, and a short period since their dispersal.[237]

Small centers of dispersion are generally natural districts with fixed boundaries, favored by their geographical location or natural resources or by both for the development of a relatively dense population. When this increases beyond the local limits of subsistence, there follows an emigration in point of number and duration out of all proportion to the small area whence it issues. Ancient Phoenicia, Crete, Samos, mediaeval Norway, Venice, Yemen, modern Malta, Gilbert Islands, England and Japan furnish examples. Such small favored areas, when they embody also strong political power, may get the start in the occupation of colonial lands. This gives them a permanent advantage, if their colonies are chosen with a view to settlement in congenial climates, as were those of the English, rather than the more ephemeral advantage of trade, as were those of the Dutch and Portuguese in the Tropics. It seems also essential to these centers of dispersion, that, to be effective, they must command the wide choice of outlet and destination afforded by the mighty common of the sea. Only the Inca Empire in South America gives us an example of the extensive political expansion of a small mountain state.

[Sidenote: Tests of origin.]

The question arises whether any single rule can as yet be formulated for identifying the original seats of existing peoples. By some ethnologists and historians such homes have been sought where the people are distributed in the largest area, as the Athapascan and Algonquin Indians are assigned to a northern source, because their territories attained their greatest continuous extent in Canada, but were intermittent or attenuated farther south. The fact that colonial peoples often multiply inordinately in new lands, and there occupy a territory vastly greater than that of the mother country, points to the danger in such a generalization. Of the ten millions of Jews in the world, only a handful remain in the ancient center of dispersion in Palestine, while about eight millions are found in Poland and the contiguous territories of western Russia, Roumania, Austria-Hungary and eastern Germany. Moreover, history and the German element in the "Yiddish" speech of the Russian Jews point to a secondary center of dispersion in the Rhine cities and Franconia, whither the Jews were drawn by the trade route up the Rhone Valley in the third century.[238]

A more scientific procedure is to look for the early home of a race in the locality around which its people or family of peoples centers in modern times. Therefore we place the cradle of the negro race in Africa, rather than Melanesia. Density often supplies a test, because colonial lands are generally more sparsely inhabited than the mother country. But even this conclusion fails always to apply, as in the case of Samos, which has a population vastly more dense than any section of the Grecian mainland. The largest compact area including at once the greatest density of population and the greatest purity of race would more nearly indicate the center of dispersion; because purity of race is incompatible with long migrations, as we have seen, though in the native seat it may be affected by intrusive elements. When this purity of race is combined with archaic forms of language and culture, as among the Lithuanians of Aryan speech among the Baltic swamps, it may indicate that the locality formed a segregated corner of the early center of dispersion. It seems essential to such an original seat that, whether large or small, it should be marked by some degree of isolation, as the condition for the development of specific racial characteristics.

The complexity of this question of ethnic origins is typical of anthropo-geographic problems, typical also in the warning which it gives against any rigidly systematic method of solution. The whole science of anthropo-geography is as yet too young for hard-and-fast rules, and its subject matter too complex for formulas.

NOTES TO CHAPTER IV

[126] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 179-187. London, 1904. W.Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, pp. 306-310, 319-326. New York, 1899.

[127] Compare observations of Georg Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, Vol. I, pp. 312-313. London, 1873.

[128] Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, p. lvii. Philadelphia, 1868.

[129] D.M. Wallace, Russia, pp. 151-155. New York, 1904.

[130] Thucydides, Book I, chap. II.

[131] Strabo, Book II, chap. III, 7.

[132] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 408-414, Vol. XIX of _History of North America_, edited by T.N. Thorpe. Philadelphia, 1905.

[133] Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. II, p. 214. Oxford, 1892.

[134] Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, p. 587. New York, 1872.

[135] D.G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 116-119. Philadelphia, 1901.

[136] O.T. Mason, Primitive Travel and Transportation, pp. 249-250. _Smithsonian Report_, Washington, 1896.

[137] Thucydides, Book I, chap. II.

[138] Edward A. Boss, Foundations of Sociology, pp. 359-363, 386-389. New York, 1905.

[139] D.G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 73-75. Philadelphia, 1901.

[140] John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, pp. 9-11, 45-46, 52-54, 57, 62. London, 1904.

[141] James Bryce, The Migration of the Races of Men Considered Historically, _Scottish Geographical Magazine_, Vol. VIII, pp. 400-421, and _Smithsonian Report_ for 1893, pp. 567-588.

[142] Caesar, _De Bello Gallico_, Book II, chap. 29.

[143] Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, Vol. I, p. 5. New York, 1883.

[144] John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, p. 46. London, 1904.

[145] Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. V, pp. 99-101. Oxford, 1895.

[146] _Ibid._, Vol. V, pp. 156-157.

[147] Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, Vol. II, pp. 107, 195. Oxford, 1892.

[148] _Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 219-223, 230.

[149] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 276-277. New York, 1899.