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 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 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
cave-men's lairs.