After the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jews were scattered over the earth, the debris of a nation.

The religious wars of France during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries caused Huguenots to flee to Switzerland, Germany, Holland, England, and South Carolina; they even tried to establish a colony on the coast of Brazil.

Everywhere they contributed a valuable element to the economic and social life of the community which they joined.

The great schism in the Russian Church became an agent of emigration and colonization.

It helped to spread the Russian nationality over remote frontier regions of the empire which previously had been almost exclusively Asiatic; and distributed groups of dissenters in the neighboring provinces of Turkey, Roumania, Austria, Poland and Prussia.[171] [Sidenote: Natural regions of retreat.] The hope of safety from pursuit drives fugitive peoples into isolated and barren places that are scarcely accessible or habitable, and thereby extends the inhabited area of the earth long before mere pressure of population would have stretched it to such limits.