The history of civilisation
        is a history of wandering,
           sword in hand,
         in search of food.

    In the misty younger world
         we catch glimpses
               of phantom races,
           rising,
         slaying,
           finding food,
         building rude civilisations,
           decaying,
         falling under the swords
               of stronger hands,
           and passing utterly away.

    Man,
           like any other animal,
         has roved
               over the earth seeking
             what he might devour;
        and not romance and adventure,
           but the hunger-need,
         has urged him
               on his vast adventures.

    Whether a bankrupt gentleman
          sailing to colonise Virginia
              or a
          lean Cantonese
              contracting to labour
                   on the sugar plantations
                       of Hawaii,
           in each case,
         gentleman and coolie,
           it is a desperate attempt
              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 a mountain-divide
                   in quest
                       of better berrybushes 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 is apposite.

    Unplanned,
           blind,
         automatic,
           spurred on
               by the pain of hunger,
         man has literally
              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,
           or composed of
               such low-typed humans
              or pre-humans
             that they made
                   no scratchings 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 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 cavemen'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