Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE CAUSES OF IMMIGRATION A. IN GENERAL History, from one standpoint, may be considered the story of race migration and its effects. The Tartar invasion of Europe, the Roman invasion and conquest of a considerable part of three continents, the Germanic invasion of the Roman Empire, the invasion of America by the Spaniards and afterwards by the English, as well as the peaceful immigration of recent times on an enormous scale, are facts of the greatest magnitude. It has been said by a leading biologist1 that all organic evolution is sympodial. This means that, when growth has taken place in a certain way for a time, it takes a new direction, carrying the chief vigor of the organism with it, so that the new growth becomes more important than the old, the latter perhaps dying out entirely. From this point of view a race may be likened to a strawberry plant, which after growing upward and increasing, sends out runners and establishes new colonies in adjoining soil, with the result that, in time, the new plants become more vigorous than the old, and in turn send out their runners. According to this theory, the " offshoots " of a race are indeed not metaphorical, but examples of a general law of growth. In general, emigration has always taken a westerly direction. This is a curious phenomenon which has 1 Lester F. Ward, Pure Sociology, (1903). never been satisfactorily explained. Exceptions have sometimes occurred for special reasons, as when the northern tribes were attracted by the wealth and power of Rome, and when a large British emigration was drawn by the gold of Australia, and the wealth of India inspired conquest. But in the case of the Manchus, Persians, Tartars, Turks, Hebrews, Spaniards, English, and many other races, the general direction has been ... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.