Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/21

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
ENGLAND'S COLONIAL SECRET
9

populations at home, but others sprang from domestic unrest and from the ambitions of leaders. Moreover, the Greeks went far beyond mere ruling and exploiting; they often peopled colonies with their own racial stocks, reproducing the culture of their homeland, and sometimes even improving on their inheritance. It was in outlying provinces that two of the greatest Greek philosophers, Thales and Pythagoras, 'set up their schools and it is on the ruins of tiny cities in lands remote from Athens that some of the noblest monuments of Greek taste are found to-day—mute testimony to a faithful reproduction of Hellenic culture.

Not even the German migrations into the Roman empire were purely economic in origin. They have been attributed by some writers merely to overpopulation; but the records that have come down to us do not bear out that simple thesis. The causes were varied, including the pressure of invaders driving Germans from their own lands, internecine quarrels ending in the flight of the vanquished over the borders into Rome, countless tribal wars springing from lust and ambition, and finally the lure of Roman luxury and peace. It was only in the final stages of the German invasions into Rome that direction of the process was taken by the organized war band rather than by the moving clan with flocks, herds, and household goods—the war band that conquered and settled down upon subject populations. Though the Spanish migrations which later carried Iberic civilization out into a new Latin empire eventually encircling the globe were an extension of the predatory operation, the heroic deeds of Catholic missionaries, daring for religion's sake torture and death, bore witness to a new force in the making of world dominion.

Into the English migration to America also entered other factors besides trade and conquest. Undoubtedly the political motive, though perhaps even it had economic roots, was a potent element in the colonization of the Atlantic seaboard, transferring the dynastic and national rivalries of the Old World to the New. Grudges and ambitions