From what is very commonly known of the state of North America, it need not be said how often and to what distance several of the nations on that continent are used to migrate, who, though thinly scattered, occupy an immense extent of country.

Nor are the causes of it less obvious,--their hunting life, and their inhuman wars.
Such migrations, sometimes by choice, more frequently from necessity, were common in the ancient world.

Frequent necessities introduced a fashion which subsisted after the original causes.

For how could it happen, but from some universally established public prejudice, which always overrules and stifles the private sense of men, that a whole nation should deliberately think it a wise measure to quit their country in a body, that they might obtain in a foreign land a settlement which must wholly depend upon the chance of war?
Yet this resolution was taken and actually pursued by the entire nation of the Helvetii, as it is minutely related by Caesar.

The method of reasoning which led them to it must appear to us at this day utterly inconceivable.