Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/274

 258 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

land, to let them run there a new course, and to develop a new social type.

The new point of view was, in reality, as familiar to Darwin as to his critics. To him the struggle for existence is a struggle "for the production of new and modified descendants." When one group conquers another and reduces its numbers, it thus lessens " its chance of further variation and improvement." It will at the same time lessen the power of that group, and increase its own power, to fill unoccupied places in nature, to create new places, and thus to generate an improved species. Could a biological philoso- phy be less egotist? And the philosophy of a colonization legiti- mately founded on it bears the same stamp of idealism. When a community colonizes a new country, it is not for gold, or glory, or territory, or even for freedom and justice to its own, that the work is undertaken. These may be the lures or the pretexts ; one or another of them may be the motive. The infant colony is striving to produce future new generations of a higher type and with a grander civilization. Schopenhauer would have said that t it was the unborn generation that was struggling to come into existence. Colonization is thus raised to being an expression of high altruism the higher that it often means, like parturition generally, the sacrifice of the present generation to the future one.

For it is in the new peoples formed by colonization that new institutions, new arts, new ethical sentiments, new religions and philosophies, and new literary forms are found to arise. Under brighter or it may be, still sterner skies, but at all events in a changed social environment, the germs of variation whose growth would have been checked in the old country have free scope for expansion. The Greek colonies are in this respect by far the most notable. Picturesque and inspiring as is the history of ancient Greece, even it might pale before the splendors of Hellenic colo- nial history in Asia Minor, Magna Graecia, and Sicily, did we know it better. Of Greater Greece the grander part lay outside of Greece proper. Hellenic civilization there spread its wings for a freer flight, and in these favored lands it produced forms more dazzling than even in Athens or Corinth. Perhaps no city in Greece could vie with Ephesus or Miletus, Agrigentum or