Jack London (1876–1916)
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 native of the Canton region of Southern China contracting to labour on the sugar plantations of Hawaii, in each case, gentleman and cooliearchaic term for enslaved persons from China, 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-humanWhen describing the origins of civilization, why does London begin with "pre-human anthropoids"? anthropoid any primate from the Pongidae family, comprised of gorilla, chimpanzee, orangutan, gibbon and siamang species crossing a mountain-divide in quest of better berry-bushes beyond, down to the latestWhen describing the origins of civilization, why does London begin with "pre-human anthropoids"? Slovak person from Slovakia, arriving on our shores to-day, to go to work in the coal-mines of Pennsylvania. When describing the origins of civilization, why does London begin with "pre-human anthropoids"? These migratory movements of peoples have been called drifts, and the word is apposite. relevant, applicable 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 creation or statement of opinion and know must have occurred, just as we know that the first upright-walking brutes were descended from some kin of the quadrumanaobsolete term for a primate with four hands, such as orangutans 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.
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 caromingbouncing, rebounding off in new directions. From Central Europe the Aryanspeople from the Aryan mountain region have drifted into Asia, and from Central Asia the Turaniansarchaic Persian term for someone from Central Asia have drifted across Europe. Asia has thrown forth great waves of hungry humans from the prehistoric "round-barrow" "broad-heads" Neanderthals who overran Europe and penetrated to Scandinavia and England, down through the hordes of Attila Atilla the Hun, 5th-century Eurasian conqueror and Tamerlane, 4th-century Asian conqueror and founder of the Timurid Empire and dynasty to the present immigration of Chinese and Japanese that threatens America. The Phoenicians Person from Phoenicia, an ancient kingdom that existed along the Mediterranean, covering Syria, Israel, and Lebanon 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, two Germanic tribes that instituted the post-Roman Anglo-Saxon establishment of England and Jutes,Germanic tribe originating in Jutland, now known as Denmark 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 extreme appetite for or consumption, often referring to food, the Eskimo has drifted to the inhospitable polar regions, the Pigmya term for a people whose male population grows to a height of less than 4 feet, 11 inches 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,location of Malaysia and Singapore of Europeans to the United States or of Americans to the wheat-lands of ManitobaCanadian province and theCanadian territory Northwest. London lists more than a dozen different peoples and locations in this paragraph. What is the purpose of this listing?
Perhaps most amazing has been the South Sea Drift. Blind, fortuitous, happening by chance or accident precarious1. uncertain, unstable 2. dangerous, risky 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,Sri Lanka Java, and Sumatra.islands of Indonesia 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 Melanesian. someone from the Melanesia region of Oceania
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 hewnsevered by brute force 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 today 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 microorganisms.
"…just as we know that the first upright-walking brutes were descended from some kin of the quadrumana."
It is true, that they that rose by the sword perished by the sword. Matthew 26:52. "Put your sword back in its place," Jesus said to him, "for all who draw the sword will die 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 today 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’sDr. David Starr Jordan, eugenicist and author of War and the Breed 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 ancestors those ten thousand millenniums ago! 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 menageriean exhibition of wild or unusual animals we catch truer glimpses and hints and resemblances of what our ancestors really were long and long ago. And by killing, incessant ceaseless, unending killing, by making a shambles of the planet, those ape-like creatures have developed even into you and me. As Henley William Ernest Henley, 19th-century English poet has said in “The Song of the Sword”:
"The Sword Singing-- from "The Song of the Sword--to Rudyard Kipling" by William Ernest Henley Driving the darkness, Even as the banners And spear of the Morning; Sifting the nations, The Slagglassy by-product of reducing ores to their base metals from the metal, The waste and the weak From the fit and the strong; Fighting the brute, The abysmal extremely bad or hopeless Fecundity fertility ; Checking the gross Multitudinous blunders, The groping, the purblind mostly blind 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.unusual in size, extent, degree, force, or other measurable facet The weak and the decadent fell under the sword. Nations that faltered, that waxed prosperousbecame wealthy 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 Dr. John William Draper, scientist, philosopher, historian, and author of The History of Intellectual Development in Europe, one of the first applications of Darwinian theory to political and social science says that in the twenty years of the Gothic war,one of three major conflicts between the Roman Empire and the Goths, a Germanic tribe from Scandinavia, spanning the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries Italy lost 15,000,000 of her population; “and that the wars, famines, and pestilences of the reign of Justinian6th-century Roman emperor and leader of the Roman forces in the third and last Gothic war 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.Based on London’s main argument, what type of statement is this? As Mr. Charles Woodruff, Colonel Charles E. Woodruff, anthropologist, and author of Expansion of Races, an expanded layman’s version of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in his “Expansion of Races,” has instanced: In 1886, when the dikes of the Yellow Riversecond-longest river in China and sixth-longest river in the world 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’pingItu Aba Island, the largest island in the South China Sea, part of Taiwan, and governed by the People’s Republic of China rebellion and the Mohammedan rebellion,the Indian Rebellion of 1857, or India’s First War for Independence combined with the famine of 1877-78, destroyed 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. a highly infectious and dangerous respiratory disease 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 sicknessHuman African trypanosomiasis .
More destructive of life than war, is industry.What perspective is London exhibiting here? In all civilised countries great masses of people are crowded into slums and labour-ghettos, where disease festers, vice corrodes, eat away at, deteriorate, usually by chemical reaction 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 bugbearan object that causes imaginary or needless fear that has been so frequently laughed away and that still persists in raising its grisly head--namely, the doctrine of Malthus. Thomas Robert Malthus, author of An Essay on the Principle of Population, one of the influences on Darwin’s On the Origin of Species While man’s increasing efficiency of food-production, combined with colonisation of whole virgin continents, has for generations given the apparent lie to Malthus’ mathematical statement of the Law of Population,a population will increase exponentially (doubled at a consistent interval) nevertheless the essential significance of his doctrine remains and cannot be challenged. Population does press against subsistence. the means for sustaining life; sustenance 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 palæolithic people.people who lived during the Pleistocene epochs, c. 2,000,000–10,000 BCE 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 conquests of Italy, England, Wales, and Ireland by the people of Normandy, spanning 999–1203 CE 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 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, Commodore Matthew Perry, American naval officer who negotiated the opening of Japan, thus ending Japan’s isolationist policy 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 Taiwan and Korea, and driven the vanguard of her drift far into the rich interior of Manchuria.archaic land division comprising of large parts of Northern China and a section of east Russia
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. Although London lays out a logical argument for this idea, he was ultimately incorrect. In what way does his argument fail? And then, inoculated infuse with ideas 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 phantom, undefined object of fear --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…”