THE HUMAN DRIFT(人类的漂流)

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THE HUMAN DRIFT

by Jack London

THE HUMAN DRIFT

"The Revelations of Devout and Learn'd Who rose before us, and as

Prophets Burn'd, Are all but stories, which, awoke from Sleep, They told

their comrades, and to Sleep return'd."

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 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

THE HUMAN DRIFT

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

THE HUMAN DRIFT

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!

THE HUMAN DRIFT

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":

"The Sword Singing -

Driving the darkness, Even as the banners And spear of the Morning;

Sifting the nations, The Slag from the metal, The waste and the weak

From the fit and the strong; Fighting the brute, The abysmal Fecundity;

Checking the gross Multitudinous blunders, The groping, the purblind

Excesses in service Of the Womb universal, The absolute drudge."

As time passed and man increased, he drifted ever farther afield in

search of room. He encountered other drifts of men, and the killing of

men became prodigious. The weak and the decadent fell under the sword.

Nations that faltered, that waxed prosperous in fat valleys and rich river

deltas, were swept away by the drifts of stronger men who were nourished

on the hardships of deserts and mountains and who were more capable

with the sword. Unknown and unnumbered billions of men have been so

destroyed in prehistoric times. Draper says that in the twenty years of the

Gothic war, Italy lost 15,000,000 of her population; "and that the wars,

famines, and pestilences of the reign of Justinian diminished the human

species by the almost incredible number of 100,000,000." Germany, in the

Thirty Years' War, lost 6,000,000 inhabitants. The record of our own

American Civil War need scarcely be recalled.

And man has been destroyed in other ways than by the sword. Flood,

famine, pestilence and murder are potent factors in reducing population--

in making room. As Mr. Charles Woodruff, in his "Expansion of Races,"

has instanced: In 1886, when the dikes of the Yellow River burst,

7,000,000 people were drowned. The failure of crops in Ireland, in 1848,

caused 1,000,000 deaths. The famines in India of 1896-7 and 1899-1900

lessened the population by 21,000,000. The T'ai'ping rebellion and the

Mohammedan rebellion, combined with the famine of 1877-78, destroyed

THE HUMAN DRIFT

scores of millions of Chinese. Europe has been swept repeatedly by

great plagues. In India, for the period of 1903 to 1907, the plague deaths

averaged between one and two millions a year. Mr. Woodruff is

responsible for the assertion that 10,000,000 persons now living in the

United States are doomed to die of tuberculosis. And in this same

country ten thousand persons a year are directly murdered. In China,

between three and six millions of infants are annually destroyed, while the

total infanticide record of the whole world is appalling. In Africa, now,

human beings are dying by millions of the sleeping sickness.

More destructive of life than war, is industry. In all civilised

countries great masses of people are crowded into slums and labour-

ghettos, where disease festers, vice corrodes, and famine is chronic, and

where they die more swiftly and in greater numbers than do the soldiers in

our modern wars. The very infant mortality of a slum parish in the East

End of London is three times that of a middle-class parish in the West End.

In the United States, in the last fourteen years, a total of coal-miners,

greater than our entire standing army, has been killed and injured. The

United States Bureau of Labour states that during the year 1908, there

were between 30,000 and 35,000 deaths of workers by accidents, while

200,000 more were injured. In fact, the safest place for a working-man is

in the army. And even if that army be at the front, fighting in Cuba or

South Africa, the soldier in the ranks has a better chance for life than the

working-man at home.

And yet, despite this terrible roll of death, despite the enormous killing

of the past and the enormous killing of the present, there are to-day alive

on the planet a billion and three quarters of human beings. Our

immediate conclusion is that man is exceedingly fecund and very tough.

Never before have there been so many people in the world. In the past

centuries the world's population has been smaller; in the future centuries it

is destined to be larger. And this brings us to that old bugbear that has

been so frequently laughed away and that still persists in raising its grisly

head--namely, the doctrine of Malthus. While man's increasing

efficiency of food-production, combined with colonisation of whole virgin

continents, has for generations given the apparent lie to Malthus'

THE HUMAN DRIFT

mathematical statement of the Law of Population, nevertheless the

essential significance of his doctrine remains and cannot be challenged.

Population DOES press against subsistence. And no matter how rapidly

subsistence increases, population is certain to catch up with it.

When man was in the hunting stage of development, wide areas were

necessary for the maintenance of scant populations. With the shepherd

stages, the means of subsistence being increased, a larger population was

supported on the same territory. The agricultural stage gave support to a

still larger population; and, to-day, with the increased food-getting

efficiency of a machine civilisation, an even larger population is made

possible. Nor is this theoretical. The population is here, a billion and

three quarters of men, women, and children, and this vast population is

increasing on itself by leaps and bounds.

A heavy European drift to the New World has gone on and is going on;

yet Europe, whose population a century ago was 170,000,000, has to-day

500,000,000. At this rate of increase, provided that subsistence is not

overtaken, a century from now the population of Europe will be

1,500,000,000. And be it noted of the present rate of increase in the

United States that only one-third is due to immigration, while two-thirds is

due to excess of births over deaths. And at this present rate of increase,

the population of the United States will be 500,000,000 in less than a

century from now.

Man, the hungry one, the killer, has always suffered for lack of room.

The world has been chronically overcrowded. Belgium with her 572

persons to the square mile is no more crowded than was Denmark when it

supported only 500 palaeolithic people. According to Mr. Woodruff,

cultivated land will produce 1600 times as much food as hunting land.

From the time of the Norman Conquest, for centuries Europe could

support no more than 25 to the square mile. To-day Europe supports 81 to

the square mile. The explanation of this is that for the several centuries

after the Norman Conquest her population was saturated. Then, with the

development of trading and capitalism, of exploration and exploitation of

new lands, and with the invention of labour-saving machinery and the

discovery and application of scientific principles, was brought about a

THE HUMAN DRIFT

tremendous increase in Europe's food-getting efficiency. And immediately

her population sprang up.

According to the census of Ireland, of 1659, that country had a

population of 500,000. One hundred and fifty years later, her population

was 8,000,000. For many centuries the population of Japan was

stationary. There seemed no way of increasing her food- getting

efficiency. Then, sixty years ago, came Commodore Perry, knocking

down her doors and letting in the knowledge and machinery of the

superior food-getting efficiency of the Western world. Immediately upon

this rise in subsistence began the rise of population; and it is only the other

day that Japan, finding her population once again pressing against

subsistence, embarked, sword in hand, on a westward drift in search of

more room. And, sword in hand, killing and being killed, she has carved

out for herself Formosa and Korea, and driven the vanguard of her drift far

into the rich interior of Manchuria.

For an immense period of time China's population has remained at

400,000,000--the saturation point. The only reason that the Yellow River

periodically drowns millions of Chinese is that there is no other land for

those millions to farm. And after every such catastrophe the wave of

human life rolls up and now millions flood out upon that precarious

territory. They are driven to it, because they are pressed remorselessly

against subsistence. It is inevitable that China, sooner or later, like Japan,

will learn and put into application our own superior food-getting

efficiency. And when that time comes, it is likewise inevitable that her

population will increase by unguessed millions until it again reaches the

saturation point. And then, inoculated with Western ideas, may she not,

like Japan, take sword in hand and start forth colossally on a drift of her

own for more room? This is another reputed bogie--the Yellow Peril; yet

the men of China are only men, like any other race of men, and all men,

down all history, have drifted hungrily, here, there and everywhere over

the planet, seeking for something to eat. What other men do, may not the

Chinese do?

But a change has long been coming in the affairs of man. The more

recent drifts of the stronger races, carving their way through the lesser

THE HUMAN DRIFT

breeds to more earth-space, has led to peace, ever to wider and more

lasting peace. The lesser breeds, under penalty of being killed, have been

compelled to lay down their weapons and cease killing among themselves.

The scalp-talking Indian and the head- hunting Melanesian have been

either destroyed or converted to a belief in the superior efficacy of civil

suits and criminal prosecutions. The planet is being subdued. The wild

and the hurtful are either tamed or eliminated. From the beasts of prey

and the cannibal humans down to the death-dealing microbes, no quarter is

given; and daily, wider and wider areas of hostile territory, whether of a

warring desert-tribe in Africa or a pestilential fever-hole like Panama, are

made peaceable and habitable for mankind. As for the great mass of

stay-at-home folk, what percentage of the present generation in the United

States, England, or Germany, has seen war or knows anything of war at

first hand? There was never so much peace in the world as there is to-

day.

War itself, the old red anarch, is passing. It is safer to be a soldier

than a working-man. The chance for life is greater in an active campaign

than in a factory or a coal-mine. In the matter of killing, war is growing

impotent, and this in face of the fact that the machinery of war was never

so expensive in the past nor so dreadful. War-equipment to-day, in time

of peace, is more expensive than of old in time of war. A standing army

costs more to maintain than it used to cost to conquer an empire. It is

more expensive to be ready to kill, than it used to be to do the killing.

The price of a Dreadnought would furnish the whole army of Xerxes with

killing weapons. And, in spite of its magnificent equipment, war no

longer kills as it used to when its methods were simpler. A bombardment

by a modern fleet has been known to result in the killing of one mule.

The casualties of a twentieth century war between two world-powers are

such as to make a worker in an iron-foundry turn green with envy. War

has become a joke. Men have made for themselves monsters of battle

which they cannot face in battle. Subsistence is generous these days, life

is not cheap, and it is not in the nature of flesh and blood to indulge in the

carnage made possible by present-day machinery. This is not theoretical,

as will be shown by a comparison of deaths in battle and men involved, in

THE HUMAN DRIFT

the South African War and the Spanish- American War on the one hand,

and the Civil War or the Napoleonic Wars on the other.

Not only has war, by its own evolution, rendered itself futile, but man

himself, with greater wisdom and higher ethics, is opposed to war. He

has learned too much. War is repugnant to his common sense. He

conceives it to be wrong, to be absurd, and to be very expensive. For the

damage wrought and the results accomplished, it is not worth the price.

Just as in the disputes of individuals the arbitration of a civil court instead

of a blood feud is more practical, so, man decides, is arbitration more

practical in the disputes of nations.

War is passing, disease is being conquered, and man's food-getting

efficiency is increasing. It is because of these factors that there are a

billion and three quarters of people alive to-day instead of a billion, or

three-quarters of a billion. And it is because of these factors that the

world's population will very soon be two billions and climbing rapidly

toward three billions. The lifetime of the generation is increasing steadily.

Men live longer these days. Life is not so precarious. The newborn

infant has a greater chance for survival than at any time in the past.

Surgery and sanitation reduce the fatalities that accompany the mischances

of life and the ravages of disease. Men and women, with deficiencies

and weaknesses that in the past would have effected their rapid extinction,

live to-day and father and mother a numerous progeny. And high as the

food-getting efficiency may soar, population is bound to soar after it.

"The abysmal fecundity" of life has not altered. Given the food, and life

will increase. A small percentage of the billion and three-quarters that

live to-day may hush the clamour of life to be born, but it is only a small

percentage. In this particular, the life in the man-animal is very like the

life in the other animals.

And still another change is coming in human affairs. Though

politicians gnash their teeth and cry anathema, and man, whose superficial

book-learning is vitiated by crystallised prejudice, assures us that

civilisation will go to smash, the trend of society, to-day, the world over, is

toward socialism. The old individualism is passing. The state interferes

more and more in affairs that hitherto have been considered sacredly

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THEHUMANDRIFT1THEHUMANDRIFTbyJackLondonTHEHUMANDRIFT2THEHUMANDRIFT"TheRevelationsofDevoutandLearn'dWhorosebeforeus,andasProphetsBurn'd,Areallbutstories,which,awokefromSleep,Theytoldtheircomrades,andtoSleepreturn'd."Thehistoryofcivilisationisahistoryofwandering,swordinhand,insearchoffood.Inthemistyyo...

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