Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/483

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THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES.
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to Cadiz, and Greeks to Libya and Sicily, by stress of weather. Columbus struck Hispaniola on his imagined way to India. Hudson embarked on a Saul's voyage in search of a northwest passage and found New York. Fishermen were blown south to the Canaries and west to Newfoundland. The settling of Plymouth was an accident of the weather, and of Virginia and Botany Bay an accident of discovery.

Yet accident plays its Darwinian game within narrow limits. Deep affinities and irresistible magnetisms mark out the paths of emigration. 1. Colonization follows discovery at unequal intervals. It followed that of South America instantaneously; more or less successful attempts at it in North America were at no great distance. The Cape of Good Hope was colonized by its discoverers, the Portuguese. Dampier discovered Australia in 1688, but it had to be rediscovered and explored by Cook eighty years afterward before it was settled in 1788. The colonization of New Zealand took place half a century after its discovery. 2. Distance is the primary factor in determining the order of colonization. That South America was settled before New England was partly an accident of discovery, but, once it began, the stream of emigration flowed and still flows in far greater volume to the nearer colonies. Out-of-the-way South Africa has not until lately allured emigrants, and the remoteness of Australia and New Zealand has all along deterred them. 3. Attractions and repulsions, the grosser they are, govern the quantity of emigration and, as they rise in the scale, determine its quality. (1) The precious metals have been the loadstone of more immigrants than all other causes put together, and the attraction is independent of climate, distance, or accessibility. (2) The virgin soil of one colony, which yields eighty bushels of wheat to the acre, is a potent inducement to the solid agricultural class, while the infertile land and almost rainless skies of another have barred settlement. (3) The aspect and climate of Delaware were painted to the Scandinavian imagination as a "terrestrial Canaan," and this is still a stock-topic with emigration lecturers. (4) The savagery of the indigenes long checked emigration to North America and South Africa, and dispersed one New Zealand colony. (5) Leaders like Cortez and Rhodes draw crowds, and Puritan congregations followed their ministers across the Atlantic. (6) Cruel laws made Virginia unpopular in the eighteenth century, feudal exactions drove immigrants from New York, and the "peculiar institution" has at all times repelled them from the Southern States. (7) Personal, political, and religious liberties invite the best and the worst—Roger Williams and Hayraddin Maugrabin. (8) The prosperity of a colony and (9) the greatness of a country, like that achieved by the United States in