文档介绍：THE HUMAN DRIFT
THE HUMAN DRIFT
by Jack London
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THE HUMAN DRIFT

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
rades, 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 . There have been drifts in the past, innumerable
and forgotten, and so remote that no records have been left, posed
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 fea