had no
freedom, were less favorable to it than the larger communities and
states of the modern world, with their encouragement to individual
competition.

4. Mobility and the Movement of Peoples[127]

Every country whose history we examine proves the recipient of
successive streams of humanity. Even sea-girt England has received
various intruding peoples, from the Roman occupation to the recent
influx of Russian Jews. In prehistoric times it combined several
elements in its population, as the discovery of the "long barrow" men
and "round barrow" men by archaeologists and the identification of a
surviving Iberian or Mediterranean strain by ethnologists go to prove.
Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India tell the same story, whether in their
recorded or unrecorded history. Tropical Africa lacks a history; but all
that has been pieced together by ethnologists and anthropologists, in an
effort to reconstruct its past, shows incessant movement--growth,
expansion, and short-lived conquest, followed by shrinkage, expulsion,
or absorption by another invader. To this constant shifting of races and
peoples the name of historical movement has been given, because it
underlies most of written history and constitutes the major part of
unwritten history, especially that of savage and nomadic tribes.

Among primitive peoples this movement is simple and monotonous. It
involves all members of the tribe, either in pursuit of game or
following the herd over the tribal territory, or in migrations seeking
more and better land. Among civilized peoples it assumes various forms
and especially is differentiated for different members of the social
group. The civilized state develops specialized frontiers--men, armies,
explorers, maritime traders, colonists, and missionaries, who keep a
part of the people constantly moving and directing external expansion,
while the mass of the population converts the force once expended in the
migrant food-quest into internal activity. Here we come upon a paradox.
The nation as a whole, with the development of sedentary life, increases
its population and therewith its need for external movements; it widens
its national area and its circle of contact with other lands, enlarges
its geographical horizon, and improves its internal communication over a
growing territory; it evolves a greater mobility within and without,
which attaches, however, to certain classes of society, not to the
entire social group. This mobility b