om the parent-stock and instructed to explore fresh
regions and to gain happier seats for themselves by their swords. 'The
world was all before them where to choose.' Restless from present
distress, flushed with the hope of fairer prospects, and animated with
the spirit of hardy enterprise, these daring adventurers were likely to
become formidable adversaries to all who opposed them. The peaceful
inhabitants of the countries on which they rushed could not long
withstand the energy of men acting under such powerful motives of
exertion. And when they fell in with any tribes like their own, the
contest was a struggle for existence, and they fought with a desperate
courage, inspired by the rejection that death was the punishment of
defeat and life the prize of victory.

In these savage contests many tribes must have been utterly
exterminated. Some, probably, perished by hardship and famine. Others,
whose leading star had given them a happier direction, became great and
powerful tribes, and, in their turns, sent off fresh adventurers in
search of still more fertile seats. The prodigious waste of human life
occasioned by this perpetual struggle for room and food was more than
supplied by the mighty power of population, acting, in some degree,
unshackled from the consent habit of emigration. The tribes that
migrated towards the South, though they won these more fruitful regions
by continual battles, rapidly increased in number and power, from the
increased means of subsistence. Till at length the whole territory,
from the confines of China to the shores of the Baltic, was peopled by
a various race of Barbarians, brave, robust, and enterprising, inured
to hardship, and delighting in war. Some tribes maintained their
independence. Others ranged themselves under the standard of some
barbaric chieftain who led them to victory after victory, and what was
of more importance, to regions abounding in corn, wine, and oil, the
long wished for consummation, and great reward of their labours. An
Alaric, an Attila, or a Zingis Khan, and the chiefs around them, might
fight for glory, for the fame of extensive conquests, but the true
cause that set in motion the great tide of northern emigration, and
that continued to propel it till it rolled at different periods against
China, Persia, Italy, and even Egypt, was a scarcity of food, a
population extended beyond the means of supporting it.

The absolute population at any one period, in propor