Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/472

454 "broad and permanent impress" on the middle belt of the United States; has more than its share of population and power in Canada, where it pioneered the Northwest; in Australia, where the Queensland sugar planters and most of the large landholders are said to be Scots; and in South Africa.

II. The masculine races colonize and emigrate at a point of time after the attainment of national manhood. National puberty manifests itself in the feverish excitement of provincial rivalries and civil wars. National manhood shows itself in a nation's becoming master in its own house. Spain expelled the alien, unassimilable races of Jews and Moors. The French monarchy subjugated the provinces. The English brought the civil wars to an end. The Dutch threw off the Spanish yoke. Germany annexed the German portion of Denmark, extruded the heterogeneous Austrian domination, and, emerging victor from the struggle with France, unified the empire. Aggressive action ensues, as when a new professional man measures himself with rivals; if a nation can invent a new weapon, as a young business man a new process, the chances of success are multiplied. The Phocæans, the boldest of Greek mariners, conducted their trading voyages in armed penteconters, and, gaining a naval victory over the Carthaginians, established the colony of Massalia in what might almost be termed Carthaginian waters. The Corinthians invented the trireme and colonized. Their own colonists, the Corcyreans, were soon able to cope with the mother city on the sea, and then they colonized. The Greeks supplanted the Carthaginians. The Romans swept both from the sea, and recolonized the colonies they had abandoned. The Dutch, Spaniards, and French have lost many colonies to victorious rivals.

The surplus energy of a young nation will overflow in conquest or colonization, according to the time. It was after the struggle with the Moors, when Spanish chivalry was set free for new exploits, that Spanish ardor poured itself upon distant colonies. Surplus soldiers in England under the pacific James I, in Scotland after the plundering Borderers found their occupation gone with the Union, and in the same country after 1745, became colonists.

Colonization is precipitated by the maritime character of a country. Phœnicia, Greece, and England are notable examples. Colbert estimated that in 1669 the Dutch possessed a commercial fleet of fifteen or sixteen thousand sail, while populous France had five or six hundred ships at the most. The English and Dutch had a larger naval experience and markets over sea which they had frequented for a century. The Germans have few ports, and till lately have had neither merchant ships nor navy; Germans have accordingly emigrated in English vessels, and there are still few