Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/473

Rh German colonies. There must be surplus capital, as there was in Holland in the seventeenth century. Scotland had to strip itself of half its savings to equip the Darien expedition. Colonies that arise from the outflow of masculine vigor in these several forms might be called energy colonies.

Stud cattle are kept rather under condition, lean women have most children, and the number of the offspring depends mainly on the fertility of the female. As the feminine elements in a country reach maturity, as there are order within and peace without, the size of families increases, and the population presses on the means of subsistence. Hence statistics show that emigration is greatest in least prosperous years. Periodically, the pressure reaches the point of famine, due to the failure of a crop, or to devastation, or war, or changes in the mode of cultivation. The Greek colonies of Cyrene and Rhegium, those of the Sicilian Mamertines, of Virginia, and of the (English) Cape of Good Hope had this origin, and might be called distress colonies. The emigration after the Thirty Years' War, the long European war of 1793 to 1815, the Irish famine of 1845, and the Sutherlandizing of parts of Scotland, was distress emigration. Normal emigration is determined by the surplus birth rate. With one hundred and seventy-one births to one hundred deaths the United Kingdom is the most emigrating of all peoples, past or present; Germany, with a surplus of sixty-one, has been long the chief emigrant nation of the European continent; while poor France, with her one surplus birth, is in no position to colonize the territories she feverishly annexes. If the foundation of colonies is a consequence of military or naval power, the settlement of them is, therefore, a "function" of the excess of population.

The power to reproduce itself declines in a nation with age, as it does in an individual. Were there space enough, it would be easy to show how all the other signs of old age are traceable in the senile peoples that have ceased to colonize.

III. The type of successful emigrant repeats that of the mother country at an earlier stage. In the trappers, hunters, and traders of old Canada and new Oregon—often coarse, audacious, unscrupulous, but possessing endurance, courage, sagacity, and resource—Parkman finds realized "that wild and daring spirit. . . which marked our barbarous ancestors of Germany and Norway." The same type, its good and evil qualities softened by time and a less harsh environment, is still to be met with in colonies of recent foundation. 1. The emigrant must be physically robust. It is the brute forces that are most required when the resistance encountered is often that of Nature herself. Sometimes it is recorded on a tombstone that he who lies below was originally of "iron constitution," broken by the toils