Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/319

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES.
303

Ionian cities of Asia Minor, after their subjugation by the Lydians and Persians. A collective Pan-Ionian emigration to Sardinia was proposed, but a series of sovereign states was too disunited for such heroic action, and it took place piecemeal. The whole of the Phocæans, taking with them their wives and children, their furniture, and the decorations of the temples, sailed for Sardinia, but more than half of them lost heart and returned to the subject city which they had sworn never to behold again. The inhabitants of Teos emigrated to Thrace and founded Abdera, to the Bosporus and settled Phanagoria. Many of the Samians fled to the promised land of Cyrene and some to Sicily. Other cities were almost depopulated. After the captivity, and still more after the conquest of Jerusalem, Jewish colonies were similarly dispersed over the greater part of the Greek and Roman world. The Albanians of Scanderbeg, who so bravely resisted the Ottomans, took refuge in Apulia. The Salzburgers described in Hermann und Dorothea, and the noble émigrés of the Revolution, with their headquarters at Coblenz, are recent examples of the collective migration of political colonies. Many Greek colonies were the offspring of internal dissensions in the parent state: Theræan Cyrene is doubtfully said to be one; Syracusan Himera is another. Roman colonies of the same origin were often organized by popular leaders as a safety valve, like those of Carthage and Narbonne by Caius Gracchus. The loyalists, who to the number of forty thousand emigrated to Canada and there settled Ontario after the Declaration of Independence, are a striking example of purely political colonization. But it is rebellion oftener than loyalty that founds colonies. The discontented New-Zealanders who, some fifty years ago, projected an independent republic somewhere in Oceania, anticipated (in imagination only) the Queensland journalist who, to escape from the tyranny of British ideas, emigrated a few years ago with a band of sympathizers to the wilds of Paraguay, there to found, amid impossible surroundings, the Utopia that is now struggling for existence.

4. It may seem a more refinement to distinguish imperial from political colonies. Yet there comes a time in the history of great nations when a spirit of proselytism takes possession of them, and they are irresistibly moved to stamp their institutions and ideas on only half-reluctant peoples. The Athenian colonies planted by Cimon and Pericles, when the queenly city was at the height of her power, were to some extent of this description. More truly propagandist were the five hundred urban communities, with the imperial cities of Alexandria, Antioch, and Thessalonica at their head, founded by conquering Alexander and his victorious generals. Nothing less than the Hellenization of the known world was their