«The Human Drift» на английском языке

The history of civilisation is a history of wandering, sword in hand,in search of food. In the misty younger world we catch glimpsesof phantom races, rising, slaying, finding food, building rude civilisations,decaying, falling under the swords of stronger hands, and passing utterlyaway. Man, like any other animal, has roved over the earth seekingwhat he might devour; and not romance and adventure, but the hunger-need,has urged him on his vast adventures. Whether a bankrupt gentlemansailing to colonise Virginia or a lean Cantonese contracting to labouron the sugar plantations of Hawaii, in each case, gentleman and coolie,it is a desperate attempt to get something to eat, to get more to eatthan he can get at home.

It has always been so, from the time of the first pre-human anthropoidcrossing a mountain-divide in quest of better berry-bushes beyond, downto the latest Slovak, arriving on our shores to-day, to go to work inthe coal-mines of Pennsylvania. These migratory movements of peopleshave been called drifts, and the word is apposite. Unplanned,blind, automatic, spurred on by the pain of hunger, man has literallydrifted his way around the planet. There have been drifts in thepast, innumerable and forgotten, and so remote that no records havebeen left, or composed of such low-typed humans or pre-humans that theymade no scratchings on stone or bone and left no monuments to show thatthey had been.

These early drifts we conjecture and know must have occurred, justas we know that the first upright-walking brutes were descended fromsome kin of the quadrumana through having developed “a pair ofgreat toes out of two opposable thumbs.” Dominated by fear,and by their very fear accelerating their development, these early ancestorsof ours, suffering hunger-pangs very like the ones we experience to-day,drifted on, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, wanderingthrough thousand-year-long odysseys of screaming primordial savagery,until they left their skeletons in glacial gravels, some of them, andtheir bone-scratchings in cave-men’s lairs.

There have been drifts from east to west and west to east, from northto south and back again, drifts that have criss-crossed one another,and drifts colliding and recoiling and caroming off in new directions. From Central Europe the Aryans have drifted into Asia, and from CentralAsia the Turanians have drifted across Europe. Asia has thrownforth great waves of hungry humans from the prehistoric “round-barrow”“broad-heads” who overran Europe and penetrated to Scandinaviaand England, down through the hordes of Attila and Tamerlane, to thepresent immigration of Chinese and Japanese that threatens America. The Phoenicians and the Greeks, with unremembered drifts behind them,colonised the Mediterranean. Rome was engulfed in the torrentof Germanic tribes drifting down from the north before a flood of driftingAsiatics. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, after having driftedwhence no man knows, poured into Britain, and the English have carriedthis drift on around the world. Retreating before stronger breeds,hungry and voracious, the Eskimo has drifted to the inhospitable polarregions, the Pigmy to the fever-rotten jungles of Africa. Andin this day the drift of the races continues, whether it be of Chineseinto the Philippines and the Malay Peninsula, of Europeans to the UnitedStates or of Americans to the wheat-lands of Manitoba and the Northwest.