MODERN NOMADS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—In your very interesting article of a few weeks ago on the strange social phenomenon which you call " The Invasion of Oklahoma," you suggest, without, I think, expressly stating, its true nature. It is a survival, or perhaps rather a revival, of the migratory tendency which must have been strong in the tribes of Northern and Central Europe two thousand years ago. In so far as civilisation consists in the eradication of this tendency,— " Into the peace of the homestead fixing
Lawless bosom and shifting tent,"
civilisation is of comparatively recent origin among the races to which we and the Americans belong. You express a kind of wonder and pity at the social conditions of the South- Western States of the American Union which make the invasion of Oklahoma possible. It would be as reasonable to express pity, though I avow that I feel a sort of wonder, at Lord Lansdowne leaving the comfort and luxury of his English home and enduring the hardships of winter in the wildest regions of North America, in pursuit of big game. The * Ps. exiii., 6. English love of sport is a survival from the time when men were hunters ; the American love of migration is a revival of the time when men were nomads. It would be the very pharisaism of civilisation to pity or to condemn either. The latter, though the less familiar of the two, is also the less wonderful. It is the most natural thing possible that the migratory propensities of the Germanic tribes of two thousand years ago should reappear under such favourable circum- stances as those now existing in the Valley of the Mississippi.
According to our ideas the iInvLils. T0-117gatrari,-.iv'fferi me ,t. caused by wars, is "tine to pressure of population. There is a sense in which tliitis is mainly true, but pressure of population does not by aly means depend altogether on density. Russia is many e'Aturies nearer to nomadic barbarism than Western Euror21: and every Russian peasant, according to Sir Donald 34"1 Skenzie Wallace, complains that he has not laud enough. N- n. English farmer who knows his business, on the contrary, has no wish for more land than he has the means of cultivating properly. I have somewhere met with the statement, which is very probably true, that Scotland was more overpeopled in the seventeenth century than in the beginning of the nineteenth, though it contained fewer people.—I am Sir, &c.,
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