to find their common
explanation.

Each fresh advance in culture commences, so to speak, with a new period
of wandering. The most primitive agriculture is nomadic, with a yearly
abandonment of the cultivated area; the earliest trade is migratory
trade; the first industries that free themselves from the household
husbandry and become the special occupations of separate individuals are
carried on itinerantly. The great founders of religion, the earliest
poets and philosophers, the musicians and actors of past epochs, are all
great wanderers. Even today, do not the inventor, the preacher of a new
doctrine, and the virtuoso travel from place to place in search of
adherents and admirers--notwithstanding the immense recent development
in the means of communicating information?

As civilization grows older, settlement becomes more permanent. The
Greek was more settled than the Phoenician, the Roman than the Greek,
because one was always the inheritor of the culture of the other.
Conditions have not changed. The German is more migratory than the
Latin, the Slav than the German. The Frenchman cleaves to his native
soil; the Russian leaves it with a light heart to seek in other parts of
his broad fatherland more favorable conditions of living. Even the
factory workman is but a periodically wandering peasant.

To all that can be adduced from experience in support of the statement
that in the course of history mankind has been ever growing more
settled, there comes a general consideration of a twofold nature. In the
first place, the extent of fixed capital grows with advancing culture;
the producer becomes stationary with his means of production. The
itinerant smith of the southern Slav countries and the Westphalian iron
works, the pack-horses of the Middle Ages and the great warehouses of
our cities, the Thespian carts and the resident theater mark the
starting and the terminal points of this evolution. In the second place,
the modern machinery of transportation has in a far higher degree
facilitated the transport of goods than of persons. The distribution of
labor determined by locality thereby attains greater importance than the
natural distribution of the means of production; the latter in many
cases draws the former after it, where previously the reverse occurred.

The migrations occurring at the opening of the history of European
peoples are migrations of whole tribes, a pushing and pressing of
collective units from east