The history of civilisation is a history of wandering, sword in hand, in search offood. In the misty younger world we catch glimpses of phantom races, rising, slaying, finding food, building rude civilisations, decaying, falling under the swordsof stronger hands, and passing utterly away. Man, like any other animal, has rovedover the earth seeking what he might devour; and not romance and adventure, butthe hunger-need, has urged him on his vast adventures. Whether a bankruptgentleman sailing to colonise Virginia or a lean Cantonese contracting to labour onthe sugar plantations of Hawaii, in each case, gentleman and coolie, it is a desperateattempt to get something to eat, to get more to eat than he can get at home.It has always been so, from the time of the first pre-human anthropoid crossing amountain-divide in quest of better berry-bushes beyond, down to the latest Slovak, arriving on our shores to-day, to go to work in the coal-mines of Pennsylvania.These migratory movements of peoples have been called drifts, and the word isapposite. Unplanned, blind, automatic, spurred on by the pain of hunger, man hasliterally drifted his way around the planet. There have been drifts in the past, innumerable and forgotten, and so remote that no records have been left, orcomposed of such low-typed humans or pre-humans that they made noscratchings on stone or bone and left no monuments to show that they had been.These early drifts we conjecture and know must have occurred, just as we knowthat the first upright-walking brutes were descended from some kin of thequadrumana through having developed "a pair of great toes out of two opposablethumbs." Dominated by fear, and by their very fear accelerating their development, these early ancestors of ours, suffering hunger-pangs very like the ones weexperience to-day, drifted on, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, wandering through thousand-year-long odysseys of screaming primordialsavagery, until they left their skeletons in glacial gravels, some of them, and theirbone-scratchings in cave-men's lairs.There have been drifts from east to west and west to east, from north to south andback again, drifts that have criss-crossed one another, and drifts colliding andrecoiling and caroming off in new directions. From Central Europe the Aryans have 4drifted into Asia, and from Central Asia the Turanians have drifted across Europe.Asia has thrown forth great waves of hungry humans from the prehistoric "roundbarrow" "broad-heads" who overran Europe and penetrated to Scandinavia andEngland, down through the hordes of Attila and Tamerlane, to the presentimmigration of Chinese and Japanese that threatens America. The Phoenicians andthe Greeks, with unremembered drifts behind them, colonised the Mediterranean.Rome was engulfed in the torrent of Germanic tribes drifting down from the northbefore a flood of drifting Asiatics. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, after having driftedwhence no man knows, poured into Britain, and the English have carried this drifton around the world. Retreating before stronger breeds, hungry and voracious, theEskimo has drifted to the inhospitable polar regions, the Pigmy to the fever-rottenjungles of Africa. And in this day the drift of the races continues, whether it be ofChinese into the Philippines and the Malay Peninsula, of Europeans to the UnitedStates or of Americans to the wheat-lands of Manitoba and the North