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Page 1
These early drifts we conjecture and know must have occurred, just as we
know that the first upright-walking brutes were descended from some kin
of the quadrumana through having developed "a pair of great toes out of
two opposable thumbs." Dominated by fear, and by their very fear
accelerating their development, these early ancestors of ours, suffering
hunger-pangs very like the ones we experience to-day, drifted on, hunting
and being hunted, eating and being eaten, wandering through thousand-year-
long odysseys of screaming primordial savagery, until they left their
skeletons in glacial gravels, some of them, and their bone-scratchings in
cave-men's lairs.
There have been drifts from east to west and west to east, from north to
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 Central Asia
the Turanians have drifted across Europe. Asia has thrown forth great
waves of hungry humans from the prehistoric "round-barrow" "broad-heads"
who overran Europe and penetrated to Scandinavia and England, down
through the hordes of Attila and Tamerlane, to the present 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 torrent of Germanic tribes
drifting down from the north before a flood of drifting Asiatics. The
Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, after having drifted whence no man knows,
poured into Britain, and the English have carried this drift on around
the world. Retreating before stronger breeds, hungry and voracious, the
Eskimo has drifted to the inhospitable polar regions, the Pigmy to the
fever-rotten jungles of Africa. And in this day the drift of the races
continues, whether it be of Chinese into the Philippines and the Malay
Peninsula, of Europeans to the United States or of Americans to the wheat-
lands of Manitoba and the Northwest.
Perhaps most amazing has been the South Sea Drift. Blind, fortuitous,
precarious as no other drift has been, nevertheless the islands in that
waste of ocean have received drift after drift of the races. Down from
the mainland of Asia poured an Aryan drift that built civilisations in
Ceylon, Java, and Sumatra. Only the monuments of these Aryans remain.
They themselves have perished utterly, though not until after leaving
evidences of their drift clear across the great South Pacific to far
Easter Island. And on that drift they encountered races who had
accomplished the drift before them, and they, the Aryans, passed, in
turn, before the drift of other and subsequent races whom we to-day call
the Polynesian and the Melanesian.
Man early discovered death. As soon as his evolution permitted, he made
himself better devices for killing than the old natural ones of fang and
claw. He devoted himself to the invention of killing devices before he
discovered fire or manufactured for himself religion. And to this day,
his finest creative energy and technical skill are devoted to the same
old task of making better and ever better killing weapons. All his days,
down all the past, have been spent in killing. And from the
fear-stricken, jungle-lurking, cave-haunting creature of long ago, he won
to empery over the whole animal world because he developed into the most
terrible and awful killer of all the animals. He found himself crowded.
He killed to make room, and as he made room ever he increased and found
himself crowded, and ever he went on killing to make more room. Like a
settler clearing land of its weeds and forest bushes in order to plant
corn, so man was compelled to clear all manner of life away in order to
plant himself. And, sword in hand, he has literally hewn his way through
the vast masses of life that occupied the earth space he coveted for
himself. And ever he has carried the battle wider and wider, until to-
day not only is he a far more capable killer of men and animals than ever
before, but he has pressed the battle home to the infinite and invisible
hosts of menacing lives in the world of micro-organisms.
It is true, that they that rose by the sword perished by the sword. And
yet, not only did they not all perish, but more rose by the sword than
perished by it, else man would not to-day be over-running the world in
such huge swarms. Also, it must not be forgotten that they who did not
rise by the sword did not rise at all. They were not. In view of this,
there is something wrong with Doctor Jordan's war-theory, which is to the
effect that the best being sent out to war, only the second best, the men
who are left, remain to breed a second-best race, and that, therefore,
the human race deteriorates under war. If this be so, if we have sent
forth the best we bred and gone on breeding from the men who were left,
and since we have done this for ten thousand millenniums and are what we
splendidly are to-day, then what unthinkably splendid and god-like beings
must have been our forebears those ten thousand millenniums ago!
Unfortunately for Doctor Jordan's theory, those ancient forebears cannot
live up to this fine reputation. We know them for what they were, and
before the monkey cage of any menagerie we catch truer glimpses and hints
and resemblances of what our ancestors really were long and long ago. And
by killing, incessant killing, by making a shambles of the planet, those
ape-like creatures have developed even into you and me. As Henley has
said in "The Song of the Sword":
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