Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/471

Rh stretch out their hands toward New Guinea and the South Sea islands, while they flood distant newly discovered gold fields with immigrants.

It is the masculine races that emigrate. The earliest of the great colonizing peoples, the Phœnicians and Carthaginians, in addition to the "strenuous ferocity" that marked the Semites, possessed an "individual impulse and energy" which (in Grote's opinion) put them greatly above the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Hindus. The Greeks were flexible and many-sided, and, being fractured into a hundred independent communities, had a self-organizing faculty which promoted emigration in many directions and diversified colonization. The manliest of ancient races, the Romans, overflowed equally in colonization and conquest. The now emasculated Spaniards and Portuguese were, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the most robust of European nations. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the French were aggressive and conquering. The long struggle with Spain made Holland a nation of heroes. The English, Germans, and Scandinavians are Bismarck's masculine peoples. The Celtic Irish, the Italians, and other feminine nationalities have emigrated in profusion since emigration has been made easy.

The emigrating impulse is by no means diffused equally over the emigrating races; there are emigrating sections of these races. The migrating Aryans, whether starting from "somewhere in Asia" (as Max Müller still maintains) or from southern Russia (as Schrader contends), spread into every European country, and forming a fringe along the coast, where they remained as sea rovers, or crowding to its centers, where they became its rulers and its aristocracy, were the progenitors of the migrating bands which left these countries in after years or are leaving them now. "The cells in which the original germ plasm most predominates become the reproductive cells." Thus the early colonies of Spain and Portugal were settled by Biscayan and Guipuzcoan mariners and by the flower of chivalry at the seats of military enterprise at Cadiz and Seville. Breton and Norman seamen and merchants of Saint-Malo planted the first French colonies. Devonshire gentlemen and sailors led and manned the buccaneering and exploring expeditions that were the parents of the American colonies; Devonshire and the adjacent counties contributed one sixth to the Puritan exodus and, only half a century ago, founded a colony in the South Seas. Two thirds of that exodus were made up of the descendants of Norse sea rovers on the Lincolnshire seaboard. It points likewise in the direction of a continuous migrating element in stationary masses that emigrants are drawn unequally from the different races of the mother country. Thus the masterful Scottish nationality, once so vagabond, has left a