[Sidenote:  Emigration and colonization.]

Advance to a completely sedentary life, as we see it among modern civilized nations, prohibits the migration of whole peoples, or even of large groups when maintaining their political organization.  On the other hand, however, sedentary life and advanced civilization bring rapid increase of population, improved methods of communication, and an enlarged geographical horizon.  These conditions encourage and facilitate emigration and colonization, forms of historical movement which have characterized the great commercial peoples of antiquity and the overcrowded nations of modern times.  These forms do not involve a whole people, but only individuals and small groups, though in time the total result may represent a considerable proportion of the original population.  The United States in 1890 contained 980,938 immigrants from Canada and Newfoundland,[177] or just one-fifth the total population of the Dominion in that same year.  Germany since 1820 has contributed at least five million citizens to non-European lands.  Ireland since 1841 has seen nearly four millions of its inhabitants drawn off to other countries,[178] an amount only little less than its present population.  It is estimated that since 1851 emigration has carried off from County Clare and Kerry seventy-two per cent. of the average population; and yet those counties are still crowded.[179] Among those who abandon their homes in search of easier conditions of living, certain ages and certain social and industrial classes predominate.  A typical emigrant group to America represents largely the lower walks of life, includes an abnormal proportion of men and adults, and about three-fourths of it are unskilled laborers and agriculturists.[180]

Colonization, the most potent instrument of organized expansion, has in recent centuries changed the relative significance of the great colonial nations of Europe.  It raised England from a small insular country to the center of a world power.  It gave sudden though temporary preeminence to Spain and Portugal, a new lease of life to little Holland, and ominous importance to Russia.  Germany, who entered the colonial field only in 1880, found little desirable land left; and yet it was especially Germany who needed an outlet for her redundant population.  With all these states, as with ancient Phoenicia, Greece and Yemen, the initial purpose was commerce or in some form the exploitation of the new territory.  Colonies were originally trading stations established as safe termini for trade routes.[181] Colonial government, as administered by the mother country, originally had an eye single for the profits of trade:  witness the experience of the Thirteen Colonies with Great Britain.  Colonial wars have largely meant the rivalry of competing nations seeking the same markets, as the history of the Portuguese and Dutch in the East Indies, and the English and French in America prove.  The first Punic War had a like commercial origin—­rivalry for the trade of Magna Graecia between Rome and Carthage, the dominant colonial powers of the western Mediterranean.  Such wars result in expansion for the victor.