Transmigration

“ Rhys Davids has fully insisted upon the ethical importance of the transmigration theory. "One of the latest speculations now being put forward among ourselves would seek to explain each man's character, and even his outward condition in life, by the character he inherited from his ancestors, a character gradually formed during a practically endless series of past existences, modified only by the conditions into which he was born, those very conditions being also, in like manner, the last result of a practically endless series of past causes. ”

“ Humanity was the limit of the degraded transmigrations. All the changes above humanity produced felicity. Humanity is the scene of the contest; and after man has traversed every state of animated existence, and can remember all that he has passed through, that consummation follows which he attains in the circle of felicity. It is on this system of transmigration that Taliessin, the Welsh bard, who wrote in the sixth century, gives a recital of his pretended transmigrations. ”

“ OUR TRANSMIGRATION Previous chapters explained only how the emigration scheme might be carried out without creating any economic disturbance. But so great a movement cannot take place without inevitably rousing many deep and powerful feelings. There are old customs, old memories that attach us to our homes. ”

“ Respecting their idea of a future life, the belief was, that preceding the state of happiness after death, there was a series of incarnations or purifications of the soul, which successive transmigrations took place in a cluster of one and fifty islands, on which were sheltered the souls of the dead. In those beautiful isles departed spirits enjoyed perpetual youth. ”

“ In the first place, it is altogether unlikely that in the case of a great migration all should have migrated rigidly in one direction. It is only [xi] natural to expect they should have poured themselves out every way, and to look for the original home in a locality which should have formed a central base of operations. ”

“ In the first place, no migration is ever simple; it involves a number of secondary movements, each of which in turn occasions a new combination of tribal or racial elements. The transference of a whole people from its native or adopted seat to a new habitat, as in the Völkerwanderungen, empties the original district, which then becomes a catchment basin for various streams of people about its rim; and in the new territory it dislodges a few or all of the occupants, and thereby starts up a fresh movement as the original one comes to rest. ”

“ The existence of spindle-whorls in distant and widely separated countries affords a certain amount of presumptive evidence of migrations of peoples from one country to another, or of contact or communication between them. If the people did not themselves migrate and settle the new country, taking the spindle-whorls and other objects with them, then the spindle-whorl itself, or the knowledge of how to make and use it, must in some other way have gotten over to the new country. ”

“ The Huns, for example, came into Europe as a nation, but the immigration into the United States at the present time is wholly an individual movement. The causes of migration are more or less universal, but corresponding to the difference in ancient and modern migrations we find the causes varying somewhat in ancient and modern times. The causes of ancient migrations and the primary causes of all migrations seem to be: (1) lack of food; (2) lack of territory for an expanding population; (3) war. In modern times we find other causes operating, like, (4) the labor market ”

“ Ancient records tell us that a forced inter-migration has frequently taken place. The conquerors of old, desirous of making one nation out of the many peoples they subdued by their valiant sword, would transplant large numbers of individuals from one province to another distant one, giving their land and their possessions in exchange to settlers, whom they drew 489from some other country. Their scheme, however, rarely succeeded, because the difficulties of a long journey made it impossible for them to transplant a sufficiently large number of people ”

“ Under external migration are comprised emigration and immigration, denoting simply direction from and to. The emigrants are at the same time the immigrants; that is, the material of the movement is the same, but the effect upon the country giving up and the country receiving the migrant requires separate treatment. Hence it is proper to separate emigration from immigration. Temporary migration, or travel for purposes of business, enterprise or pleasure, will be considered only incidentally, and because in some cases it is difficult to distinguish between such movements and permanent migration. ”

“ In analyzing the facts of distribution we shall do well to begin with the causes and effects of migration. Primitive man is in no small degree a wanderer. His small resources often require him to explore large tracts. As population increases the food quest becomes more intense, and thus there come about repeated emigrations which increase the food supply, extend its variety, and draw the pioneers at last into contact with neighboring groups. The farther back we go in the history of the race the clearer it becomes that migrations lie at the root of much of human development. ”

“ To transplant the civilization of one distant country to another, requires either the simultaneous migration of a large body of the people, or a long and regular intercourse, a constant immigration from the parent race. ”

“ The immigration problem, which I have been discussing in previous numbers of The Arena, cannot be unravelled without considering one important thread which adds to the entanglement. I shall apply to it the term "Inter-migration," a word not found in the dictionary, because it is freshly coined for the purpose. Let me try to define its meaning.
A person is said to migrate when he leaves his native land, seeking a new home in some other country. Around the word emigrant or immigrant hovers always the idea of an exchange of habits, customs, and language of one country with those of another. ”

“ Any investigation of migration to be exact must confine itself to fixed forms. For these the degree of perfection shown by dissemination contrivances corresponds almost exactly to the degree of mobility. Because of the difficulty of ascertaining the effect of ecesis, it is impossible to determine the actual effectiveness in nature of different modifications, and the best that can be done at present is to regard mobility, together with the occurrence and forcefulness of distributive agents, as an approximate measure of migration. ”

“ In those cases the birthplace may have been the original home, before the migratory habit was acquired, and scarcity of food the reason why it was acquired; and 'the influence of scarcity in causing migration is well shown by the occasional or irregular migrations of certain prolific animals which do not ordinarily leave their birthplaces, although, when these become overstocked, migrations take place, just as human colonists go out from thickly settled countries to find new room for growth in foreign lands. ”

“ Dear Sir,—You are, I know, no great friend to migration; and the well-attested accounts from various parts of the kingdom seem to justify you in your suspicions, that at least many of the swallow kind do not leave us in the winter, but lay themselves up like insects and bats in a torpid state, and slumber away the more uncomfortable months till the return of the sun and fine weather awakens them.
But then we must not, I think, deny migration in general; because migration certainly does subsist in some places, as my brother in Andalusia has fully informed me. ”

“ All these forms of forced migration are evidently different in principle and in most of their characteristics from the great types of migration which have been mentioned. Their study is a subject by itself. ”

“ Not ships, for we will not take them and are ambitious to carry away all our products ourselves. Certainly this is the most remarkable absurdity into which we have been led by forgetting that trade is an exchange. Neither can any one well expect that all mankind are to come and live here. The conditions of a large migration do, however, seem to exist. A migration of population is still a very unpopular idea in all the older states. The prejudice against it is apparent amongst Liberals and Tories, economists and sentimentalists. ”

“ Herein lies the great difference between migration in empty or sparsely inhabited regions, such as predominated when the world was young, and in the densely populated countries of our era. As the earth grew old and humanity multiplied, peoples themselves became the greatest barriers to any massive migrations, till in certain countries of Europe and Asia the historical movement has been reduced to a continual pressure, resulting in compression of population here, repression there. ”

“ Great weight has been placed upon the use of land-bridges and the hereditary habit of crossing seas where these land-bridges once existed but have been submerged during the great geological changes in the earth's surface. Many have insisted that wherever migrants cross the see they do so along submerged coastlines or over submerged land-bridges, arguing that the gradual evolution which has made the advantageous adoption of a habit of migration possible was unable to eliminate the hereditary tendency to follow the exact route by which their ancestors passed from place to place. ”

“ Acceptance of this hypothesis requires abandonment of the belief that the development of migration was the result of useful ends that were served thereby, and in its place, to give approval to the idea that migration was merely "the natural consequence of an inherent behavior pattern responding to the drifting of continental masses." ”

“ The movement cannot yet be thoroughly studied, but what information is available indicates that the migration has been almost exclusively to the northern and western industrial districts. Whether it is a temporary dislocation of population due to war-time conditions or a persistent drift cannot yet be foreseen. ”

“ The presence of a considerable population thus giving a greatly additional value to the soil, it is obvious that a migration of population on any considerable scale to any particular area will be certainly attended with a corresponding rise in the value of the land so settled upon, and it is also obvious that such increment of value may, with some foresight and pre-arrangement, become the property of the migrating people. ”

“ In reality, it is a slow and intricate process—nothing less than the gradual interchange of all the population of two countrysides and all the means of feeding and clothing them—a wave of immigration and emigration affecting more than 120,000 people, and this has to be carried out with the minimum of disturbance, since the inhabitants of the two areas must be ready to man the trenches and fight a battle at any stage in the process of change. ”

“ No space is left for a mysterious agency; migration is purely natural, and acts for the general preservation. Try to put yourself in a bird's place, and you will see that migration is very natural indeed. If at some future period of the world's history men should acquire the art of flying, there can be no doubt that migration would become the custom, and whole nations would change their localities. Man has, indeed, been always a migratory animal. ”

“ Most scholars suppose that there were different migrations, and that each movement westward was accomplished slowly, centuries intervening between their departure from Central Asia and their permanent settlement in Europe. The earliest migration was probably that of the tribes who took possession of [Pg 2] Greece and Italy; who first acquired, and for more than a thousand years maintained, their ascendency over all other branches of their common family; who, in fact, laid the basis for the civilization of the world. ”

“ We might similarly conceive the migrating (destined, when they reach the sea, to become the emigrating) races as forming a continuous emigrating chain or cable, unbroken from the departure of the first migratory band to the sailing of the last emigrant ship, splitting on this side and that into independent strands, but each containing the ferment of the movement that has carried civilization round the globe. ”

“ In all these cases the migration is certainly of recent date, and it is quite possible that, when a longer time has elapsed, some variations will take place in the new home, but in any case these instances prove that an immigrant species can spread over its new area without immediately varying. ”

“ First migration of peoples to the southwest, then adaptation of the number of people to the small space by emigration. In the last years, adaptation of the people to insufficient space, by reducing the number of births. ”

“ The effect of migration is uniform here, and alternation arises in consequence of the selective power of ecesis. It is evident that migration does not have an even indirect effect, when the disseminules are carried into none but unfavorable situations. Where the movement is into favorable places alone, alternation is the immediate result. ”

“ The inhabitants of the country immediately surrounding a town of rapid growth flock into it; the gaps thus left in the rural population are filled up by migrants from more remote districts, until the attractive force of one of the rapidly-growing cities makes its influence felt, step by step, to the most remote corner of the land. Migrants enumerated in a certain centre of absorption will consequently grow less with the distance, proportionately to the native population which furnishes them. ”

“ Each tribe that has become in some degree fixed in its locality, goes on increasing, 330till under the pressures of unsatisfied desires, there results migration of some part of it to a new region—a process repeated at intervals. From such excesses of population, and such successive waves of migration, come conflicts with other tribes; which are also increasing and tending to diffuse themselves. This antagonism, like all others, results not in an uniform motion, but in an intermittent one. ”