Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/480

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462
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

country before and after the fall of Byzantium in 1453 scattered educated Greeks over Italy and so cross-fertilized modern Europe. "The vices of European governments colonized North America." The revolutions of 1848 sent Follen to the United States and Foscolo to England. The coup d'etat of 1851 had similar effects. "The great silence of the empire," as Zola calls it, which made it hard for liberals to earn a living, diverted Jules Simon into publicism and politics, and drove another eclectic, his friend Amédée Jacques, to seek death in South America. The conscious oppressiveness of an aristocratic system of government made Goldwin Smith a Canadian. Private persecution, which pursued Byron to Venice, chased the younger Arago to South America. Disappointment sent an unappreciated poet, Charles Wells, to lifelong exile in France, took George Brandes to Berlin, and has taken many to the colonies. Defeated men used to retire to the cloister. They now migrate or emigrate.

X. The earliest mode of emigration—that of roving adventurers on the seas—might be assimilated to the spawning of fish or the effusion of the male element generally. It is exclusively masculine, and retains this quality to the last in the person of every emigrant who embarks for a new country at his own expense, there to make a living in ways of his own. It soon takes on a partially assisted character in the equipping of the ship by home merchants. These develop into commercial or colonizing companies, which acquire (or seize) colonial lands from the natives, and then send out emigrants who buy land from the company, together with artisans and laborers whose passages are paid for them. Such emigration might be described as mixed masculine and feminine, and this form long continues. There is a third stage where (as in England after 1830) philanthropic associations dispatch pauper or partially assisted emigrants. The third is supplemented or superseded by a fourth stage, when a colony sends for immigrants, wholly or partly defrays their passage, and provides for them on their arrival. This least independent method of emigration, as the antithesis of the earliest masculine mode, may be considered exclusively feminine.

Emigration, like the migrations of animals, is collective. Though the vast Aryan migrations, so ingeniously charted by Pictet, may prove mythical as well as legendary, authenticated mass movements occur all through history. The earliest emigrations were of small accidental aggregations without adhesion. The next were great organized bodies. The emigration in our own days, of individuals and families who go out to kindred or friends, is really group movement of a highly organized character.

Like the lower migrations, emigration is rhythmical. The