MONGOLS—HISTORICAL NOTES.
A peculiar interest surrounds these wandering tribes of the desert. In them we see the living representatives of the ancient Huns, and of the yet more ancient Scythians. Of them came Attila, "the Scourge of God," who with his barbarian hordes shook the foundations of Europe in the fifth century, and accelerated the downfall of the old Roman empire; of them came also the redoubtable warriors who desolated Asia and Europe six hundred years ago.
The Mongol tribes are exceedingly conservative in their habits; their fashions never change. A description of their manners in the time of Genghis, or even of Attila, is equally applicable now. Everything goes to show that in the form of their tents, in their dress, their social customs, and their mode of life, the Mongols of to-day have changed but little since they first became known to history.
The early history of the Huns is involved in obscurity. They appear to have existed as a pastoral people, inhabiting the east of the desert of Gobi from about 1200 B.C., during which time they were frequently at war with the Chinese. The first authentic accounts of them date from about the year 200 B.C., when they greatly extended their empire, and became very formidable neighbours to China. It was in the third century before the Christian era that the Chinese built the famous wall as a protection from the inroads of the warlike Huns, who, notwithstanding, laid China under tribute.
Vouti, of the Han dynasty (died 87 B.C.), gained a bloody victory over the Huns, and was the first to break their power in China. He followed up his military success by the application of the craft for which his race was, even at that early date, distinguished. By diligently promoting dissension among the tribes he succeeded in severing many of them from their allegiance to the Tanjou, the title then adopted by the kings of the Huns. The Tanjou himself became afterwards a vassal to the Chinese emperors, and was fain to lick the dust for a dependent kingship.
About 100 years after the birth of Christ, the Huns were broken up and scattered. The Huns of the South, who had previously seceded from the main body, and had established their dynasty in alliance with China, held together till the year 216 A.D. The Northern Huns, being distressed by a great famine, were attacked by the tribes whom they had so long oppressed, and were compelled to seek safety in flight. From that era we must date the migrations of the Hunnish tribes. They were again subdivided. One branch wandered to the coast of the Caspian Sea, where they settled, and became modified in their character under the influence of a more genial climate; their nomad habits were gradually abandoned; and they became civilised. These were called the White Huns.
Another branch migrated in a north-westerly direction, and in their march had to contend with a more rigorous climate. Exasperated by their struggles with the elements and with many enemies, they retained all their savageness in their new settlement on the Volga. These restless warriors had barely secured their own existence in the west, when they began to attack their neighbours. After conquering the Alani, a nation only a little less barbarous than themselves, and adding to their own forces those of the vanquished tribes, the Huns became the terror of the Goths, and these also fell a prey to the invaders before the end of the fourth century of the Christian era.
But the power of these wandering tribes was always liable to be paralysed by the jealousies of rival chiefs. Their notions of government were crude; hereditary succession was held of little account among them. The Huns were only formidable to their neighbours when they were under the leadership of chiefs who possessed sufficient vigour to rise pre-eminent over all others, and the talent or the craft to secure to themselves absolute power.
Attila was one of these. The Huns were already in the ascendant when he came to the throne; but his genius, energy, and insatiable ambition soon rendered them the terror of all Europe, and himself the greatest barbarian that ever wielded the sceptre. Attila had a body-guard of subject kings. His effective force has been variously estimated at half-a-million and at seven hundred thousand men. He enriched himself with the spoils of all nations; yet in the height of his barbaric pride he retained in camp the simple habits of his ancestors. Having subdued every hostile tribe within his reach, and incorporated their armies with his own, he threw the whole weight of his forces on the corrupt and degenerate Roman Empire, which was brought to the feet of the conqueror and compelled to accept conditions of peace the most degrading that the insolence of the invader could dictate.
Desolation everywhere followed the march of Attila, for destruction was ever the glory of the barbarians. As the old Huns lived by predatory warfare, so the hosts of Attila were actuated, only in a higher degree, by the savage instincts of wild beasts. But their power only held together while there was food for pillage, and a master mind to direct their enterprise. And thus their reign of terror in Europe was of brief duration. A heavy debauch cut short the career of Attila, and he died an inglorious death in his own bed from the bursting of an artery. The empire of his creation collapsed after his death amid contending factions; and in A.D. 468, just fifteen years after the death of Attila, the empire of the Huns was utterly destroyed, and their name disappeared from history.
The shepherds tended their flocks in the steppes of Tartary, and 700 years passed away before another chief arose to summon the scattered tribes to his standard. During that period sundry insignificant dynasties succeeded each other on the outskirts of the Chinese dominions. The Turks also appeared in the interval, and established a formidable power, which lasted from the sixth to the eighth century. They issued from the Altai mountains, where they had served the Geougen Tartars who had overwhelmed the Huns after the death of Attila. The Turks, or Turki, reduced the Geougen, and, it is said, almost extirpated them. These Turks have been supposed to have been identical in race with the Huns who preceded, and the Mongols who followed, them.[10] But there is much reason to doubt their consanguinity.[11] The great skill in iron working for which the original Turks were distinguished, seems sufficient to mark a difference between them and the ancestors of the pure Mongols. They shaved the beard also in token of grief, and were considered by the Persians handsome men.[12] The Huns and Mongols had almost no beard, and in the eyes of all writers who have thought it worth while to describe their persons, they were remarkable for their deformity.
It would, however, be a hopeless task to unravel the descent of the various races miscalled Tartars. The old Chinese records have preserved little more than the catalogue of kings and battles, and of the rise and fell of dynasties. The Tartar powers that have successively risen up in Asia have never been composed of a homogeneous race. Their names, even have generally been taken from some small tribe or family which accident rendered prominent; and the names Tartar, Turk, and Mongol, have been perpetuated and misapplied to armies and confederations of mixed races. The wanderings of these mixed tribes, the dissolution of empires which arose among them, and the reconstruction of these empires under new combinations, have constantly tended to the amalgamation in blood and language of races distinct in origin, but following the same nomadic habits. Their mode also of dealing with prisoners of war, and the conditions which they imposed on conquered nations, conduced still more to the fusion and confusion of races. It was unusual with the Huns or Mongols to spare their prisoners, unless they could employ them either as slaves or soldiers, or make profit by their ransom. The men were massacred, and the eligible women were appropriated by the conquerors. A supply of women was exacted as tribute from subject states. This gross indignity was ruthlessly imposed on the Chinese; and "a select band of the fairest maidens of China was annually devoted to the rude embraces of the Huns."[13] These practices must have tended greatly to enhance the perplexity of ethnologists in attempting to analyse the masses of men who, by the vicissitudes of war, were from time to time assembled under one standard, and received the name of the dominant family.
When the Huns appeared in Europe, however, they were portrayed by the Goths and Romans in graphic but distorted terms. Through the haze of these hideous caricatures,[14] and the fabulous origin which fear and hatred attributed to the Huns, we cannot fail to identify in them the form and features of the modern Mongols. Whatever be the descent of the numerous Turki tribes, and whatever changes may have been brought about by intermixture, change of climate, &c., in the pastoral peoples, the great race of the Mongols has in the main preserved its manners and its characteristics through all its revolutions and migrations, and has proved its unity in blood with the Huns of Attila. The Mongols are certainly far from being a handsome people, but the Romans, themselves models of symmetry, greatly exaggerated their deformity. The barbarians were esteemed so fiendish in their aspect, that the Goths, to account for the phenomenon, were obliged to invent the fable of the descent of the Huns from the unholy union of Scythian witches with infernal spirits. They were inhumanly ugly. Attila himself was hideous. Yet that did not deter the young Princess Honoria from betraying, or feigning, a passion for him. That spirited lady, with a courage worthy of a better cause, found means of secretly communicating with the king of the Huns, and urged him to claim her as his bride.
In the thirteenth century, Genghis became Khan[15] of all the Mongols, who under him were once more the terror of the world. Genghis had already conquered the Naimans, a powerful people in their day; and invaded Tangout. When he had assembled under his standard the tribes of his own people and of the nations whom he had conquered, he was impelled by his restless ambition to keep them in motion. The lust of conquest became his ruling passion, and every new trophy added fuel to its flame. He first invaded Kitai, or northern China, overran the territories of the then powerful Kin, desolated their cities and villages, and massacred their people, and then retired to the river Tolla to recruit, having added to his army many Chinese of all ranks. The seven years' campaign in the west followed shortly after, during which Genghis conquered Persia and Bukhara, destroyed many populous cities, and put to the sword prodigious numbers of human beings. His lieutenants extended their ravages still further westward, while Genghis himself returned to his head-quarters at Kara-Korum. Kitai was again invaded, and Tangout subjugated. On the death of Genghis, in 1227, the succession to the Khanate fell to his son Oktai, who followed up the conquest of China according to instructions delivered by Genghis on his death-bed. But the empire had become so unwieldy, and the distances that separated the divisions of it so vast, that it could no longer subsist in its integrity. It was soon split up into sections, which were parcelled out to the descendants of Genghis. Some reigned in Persia, and some in Kapchak, a territory stretching from the Caspian Sea to Kazan, and covering a large portion of the steppe of the Kirghis. The little dynasty of the Nogai Tartars was also founded in Europe by a descendant of Genghis. The Tartar kingdoms of Kazan and the Crimea were both offshoots from the khans of Kapchak. Batou, Khan of Kapchak, or the Golden Horde, took Moscow and wasted the Russian provinces. Kublai, who succeeded to China, was the greatest of them all. In addition to that country, he possessed Pegu, Thibet, and the whole of Tartary; while Cochin China, Tonquin, and Corea paid him tribute. He was, moreover, acknowledged by all the other khans as their chief. But the whole continent of Asia lay between him and his vassals, and his suzerainty soon became a name only, and in course of time the form also was discontinued.
The Mongols were, however, incapable of maintaining a settled government. The expeditions to subjugate Japan having proved fruitless, there was no other country left for them to conquer; this quiescent state was unnatural to them, and Chinese culture demoralised them in less than a hundred years.
Russia was held by a tenure more suitable to the nomad habits of the Mongols. Armies had to be maintained, and the khans of the Golden Horde found occupation in keeping down the Russian princes. They therefore held their supremacy in Europe, until they did the work of their enemies by quarrelling amongst themselves, but their yoke was not finally shaken off till the fifteenth century.
Before the empires founded by the family of Genghis had been wholly broken up, another great Mongol conqueror appeared in the person of Timour, or Tamerlane. Born under happier auspices, and brought up in contact with more civilised people, Timour added to the native ferocity and the ambition of universal empire of his ancestors, the arts and some of the refinements of education. He was, moreover, a zealous Mahommedan, and drew from the Koran encouragements in his career of conquest, and excellent moral maxims which seemed in strange contrast with his life. In a military point of view, Timour's life was a brilliant success. Before his death he placed twenty-seven crowns on his head; he conquered India, and boasted that he had penetrated northwards to the region of perpetual day. His conquests outstripped those of Alexander. "On the eastern bank of the Hyphasis, on the edge of the Desert, the Macedonian hero halted and wept; the Mogul entered the desert, reduced the fortress of Batnir, and stood in arms before Delhi."[16] He captured Delhi, and "purified his soldiers in the blood of the idolaters." Timour, when he was seventy years old, resolved to re-conquer China, from which country the family of Genghis had been recently expelled. He despatched his armies from Samarcand for the expedition, but he himself died on the way, in 1405, and his empire fell to pieces through the incapacity of his sons.
Timour had perhaps the honour of shedding more blood than any of his predecessors; but, like them, he was incapable of governing what he had conquered. His boast that a child might carry a purse of gold from the east to the west, could be justified only on the supposition that he had pacified Asia by making it a solitude.
He was considered a usurper by the Mongols of his day. He made war on his own people because they were idolaters; yet the modern Mongols worship him, beguiling their long evenings in their tents by chanting invocations to his memory.
The next great Mongol who left his mark on the world was Timour's great-grandson Baber, who conquered Delhi in 1528, and founded there the dynasty of the Great Mogul. But Baber was ashamed of his descent, and despised the Mongol character. It was probably to his throwing off the barbarism of his ancestors, that his family owed the permanence of their Indian empire. The last scion of this royal house died in misery at Rangoon, in 1862.
On the disruption of the Mongol empire, founded by Genghis, and built on by his successors, the tribes who composed it were dispersed far and wide over Europe and Asia, from the Great Wall of China to the Volga and the Black Sea. Their dynastic divisions were numerous, but the Mongol blood was soon lost in many of these. The Khans were often followed into conquered territories by a small proportion only of their own race, sometimes by a few families, and sometimes by a few individuals only, their armies being mainly composed of alien elements. These handfuls of men soon lost their national characteristics under the influence of a settled life, and contact with races better trained in the arts of peace. The numerical superiority of the people among whom they lived, must necessarily have absorbed them; and it would be hard now to trace the Mongol blood in the descendants of the Tartars of the Crimea, of Kazan, of Nogai, or of Kapchak.
The homogeneous race of the Mongols may now be divided into the Kalkas, the Kalmuks, and the Bouriats. The Kalkas, who take their name from a small river rising in the Siolki mountains in Manchuria, are a numerous people, occupying the north of the Great Desert. They may be called the Mongols proper, if any are entitled to that name.
The Kalmuks, so nicknamed by the Mahommedan Tartars, inhabit the Russian province of Astrakhan. A remarkable exodus of these people took place in 1770-71, on which occasion half a million of the Kalmuks of the Volga fled from the tyranny of Catherine II., and directed their march eastward by the route by which their ancestors had so often travelled to Europe. During their eight months' pilgrimage they were goaded to despair by hunger, weariness, and savage enemies; and when they at last found shelter in the dominions of the Emperor of China, they had been reduced to half their number. The Emperor Kienloong allotted to them a settlement in the province of Dsungaria, on the north-west of the desert. The Eleuths on the south-east of the desert are also of the race of the Kalmuks. The black Kalmuks are settled near the sources of the river Obi, north of the Altai mountains.
The Bouriats in the Siberian province of Trans-baikal, although of true Mongol origin, do not appear to have been much mixed up in the military movements of the other tribes. They were nevertheless a warlike people, were subdued by the family of Genghis in the thirteenth century, and made a respectable stand against the Russians in the seventeenth.
There are other tribes of Mongols within the modern limits of China proper, though north of the Great Wall. Some of these till the ground, but they are principally kept up as the reserve army of China.
From the earliest times, these wandering tribes, when not united in a crusade against the human race at large, were constantly at war with each other. These feuds were continued with varying results for several centuries after their empire was broken up; but the adroitness of the Chinese on the one side, and the brute force of Russia on the other, have subdued the turbulent spirit of the Mongol hordes, who for the last hundred years have been quiet subjects of these two empires.
The Mongols, Kalmuks, and Bouriats are all Bhuddists, while the other Tartar tribes, with whom the Mongols have been associated in their wars, are almost all Mahommedans.
The history of the wars of the Huns and Mongols exhibits some curious psychical phenomena. First, we see these barbarous tribes, living in the most primitive condition, ignorant of everything beyond the range of animal instinct, vanquishing in fair fight the most warlike and civilised nations that then existed. By the weight of their masses, and the impetuosity of their onslaught, stimulated by the ferocity of fanaticism, the barbarians broke in on the old empires, which they overwhelmed like a flood. Civilisation bowed the neck to barbarism: matter triumphed over mind.
And yet the materials of which these formidable hosts were composed were in themselves feeble and innocuous. When we see the descendants of the Huns quietly feeding their sheep in their native deserts, harmless and kind-hearted, simple and contented, it is hard to conceive that out of such a race could have come the conquerors of the world. Their power indeed was a matter of pure accident, that is to say, it lay dormant until accident raised up men with ability to use it. The shepherds have little power of reasoning, and no notions of self-government; but they are willing machines in the hands of a man of strong intellect, who can exact from them the worship due to a divinity. Under such a leader they can be handled like a pack of hounds, with which they have a close affinity in the instinct of obedience and unreasoning courage: animal qualities which are invaluable to the schemes of the master-mind.
The heroes of the Mongol tribes have been few and far between. The marvel is that such a people could produce heroes at all. Their great conquerors were not men of ordinary ability, but of vast genius, rendered all the more conspicuous by their untutored barbarism. None but great minds could have controlled and directed the movements of such multitudes. The words of the khan were inexorable laws; without the ruling spirit nothing could be done. China was saved from a second conquest by the accident of the death of Timour; and it has been said that the fate of Europe at one time depended on the digestion of a barbarian under the Great Wall of China. Nor were the Mongol leaders animated by blind ferocity. They had an object in their wars, which was nothing less than the sovereignty of the world. Their courage was high, and they occasionally fought desperate battles. But that was not their usual custom. Attila, and Genghis, and Timour, all showed remarkable caution. They calculated the chances of a battle or a campaign with the deliberation of experienced generals, and declined engagements against heavy odds when they could effect a retreat without discouraging their troops. Attila, the rudest of them all, was a skilful diplomatist. He penetrated into Gaul, not so much by force of arms as by the craft he displayed in playing off one faction against another, and so distracting the counsels of his enemies.
The secret of the ascendency of the Mongol chiefs lay mainly in the skill with which they used the potent instrument of superstition. The shepherds, illiterate and brutish, had a blind awe of the supernatural, which it was the policy of their leaders to encourage. Attila became miraculously possessed of the sword of the Scythian Mars, and thenceforth bore a sacred character which was confirmed to him by his early successes. A divine origin was attributed to the ancestors of Genghis. He was styled the son of God, and was popularly believed to have been born of a virgin.[17] The Turks traced their descent from a youth who was nursed by a she-wolf, a fable probably borrowed from that of Romulus and Remus.
The kings of the Huns and Mongols excited the enthusiasm of their armies by the use of omens. When unfavourable to their plans, the omens were either disregarded or explained away by the chiefs, who were probably incredulous, but at all events possessed the resolution to rise superior to the oracles. Thus when Attila had raised the siege of Orleans, and was pressed in his retreat by a powerful army of Goths and Romans, the auguries were against him, and his troops were dispirited. But Attila, considering that a defeat would be less disastrous to him than flight, rallied the sinking courage of the Huns by an eloquent oration, in which, with consummate ingenuity, he turned the very advantages of the enemy into encouragements to himself. Their well-chosen posts, their strict alliance and close order, he affected to attribute to fear alone. He plied his people also with arguments from the doctrine of fate, and persuaded them that they were as safe in the thick of the fight as in their own tents. In the desperate battle which ensued, Attila outdid himself in personal valour, and the Huns fought furiously; the slaughter on both sides was prodigious; but when night came Attila was fain to retire within his camp. The result of the action was nevertheless creditable to his sagacity, for he was still so formidable in defeat that his enemies compared him to a lion at bay, and they dared not renew the attack.
Timour, who lived in a more enlightened age, or rather among a more enlightened people, and was himself educated in Mohammedanism, rose to a higher flight in the use and contempt of auguries. Instead of examining the entrails of animals, he consulted the planets and the Koran. When marching on Delhi his astrologers could not educe any favourable indication from the stars, but Timour refused to hamper his plans by such considerations, telling his astrologers that fortune does not depend on the stars, but on the Creator of them.
The Huns and Mongols were distinguished from other men, chiefly by their waste of human life. They may be said to have depopulated Asia. The flourishing cities that once existed in the deserts of Tartary have been utterly destroyed; the history of many of them has been lost; and where large populations cultivated arts and industry, one may now see only the tent of a herdsman in the vast solitude. The savages boasted that grass never grew where the feet of their horses had trod, and that a horse might run without stumbling over the places where the great cities had stood. The conquerors built towers and pyramids of the heads of their enemies, that is, their prisoners—not soldiers only—but whole populations whom they massacred in cold blood.
But yet, though ferocious, the barbarians were not, strictly speaking, cruel. Their systematic slaughter must be otherwise accounted for, and in a way even more humiliating to human nature. The morality of the kings, khans or emperors may be assumed to have been on a par with that of the people; it was in intellect only that they were pre-eminent. Attila, in the midst of his sins against mankind, was accessible to pity. His own people loved him. Genghis aspired to the honour of a wise legislator, and primitive though his code was, his motives for devising it were honourable. He encouraged trade so far as he knew how; patronised the sciences, and favoured the missionaries of all persuasions. He was both just and generous, and if he had but governed, instead of killing, the people he conquered, it is possible that he might have been a benefactor to mankind. Yet, in three cities alone, Genghis caused more than four millions of people to be slaughtered.
But the strange paradox comes out in more vivid colours in the character of Timour, who, compared with his predecessors, was civilised and humane. Amongst his exploits was the massacre of one hundred thousand people at Delhi. He exacted from Ispahan a contribution of seventy thousand, and from Bagdad of ninety thousand human heads to build towers with. Although a Mahommedan he did not spare his co-religionists, but slew indiscriminately all who seemed to stand in his way. When he grew old, and was satiated with blood and glory, he repented. But his repentance was the most curious episode in the monster's history. He planned a pious mission to China, and in announcing his resolve to his council, he told them that the conquests he had made were not obtained without some violence, which had occasioned the death of a great number of God's creatures. To atone for past crimes he determined to perform some good action, namely, to exterminate the idolaters of China.[18]
By what law or standard of ethics can such an abuse of the moral faculties be judged? And how can such antagonistic traits of character be reconciled?
The Mongols did not practise the cruelties that have so often disgraced more refined peoples. Tortures were exceptional among them, perhaps because their invention had not risen to such a pitch. Noble captives were paraded in chains, but that was done rather to glorify the victor than to punish the victim. The Mongol massacres seem to have been dictated less by positive than negative considerations. Their low estimate of the value of human life lay at the bottom of it all. The slaughter of the population of a great city was no more in their eyes than the destruction of so many vermin. Their towers of human heads were to the primitive barbarians what the trophies of the chace are to sportsmen. Being guided by animal instincts alone, they were unconscious of any wrong. So low is the moral condition of uncultivated races, "the children of nature," that human feelings can only grow in them after ages of gradual education. The social virtues, and even the natural affections, are only developed in their full force by means of artificial or civilised life, just as the perfectability of plants is only attained by the aid which art gives to nature. So, then, the artificial state is in a sense more natural to man than the natural or primitive condition of savages. His moral nature needs culture as much as his intellect does; and artificial life alone can bring out man's natural qualities. The affections of the Huns and Mongols were little more than such as they possessed in common with the lower animals. They loved their children after a fashion, and sometimes they loved a favourite wife. But if we desire to test the quality of the paternal affection of such people, let us look at the half-tamed barbarian Peter the Great, who condemned and executed his own son, after inviting him to surrender under the promise of a full pardon.
The theory has been advanced that the exclusively animal diet of the shepherds rendered them ferocious,[19] and that their familiarity with the blood of their sheep excited their passion for the blood of their fellow-creatures. But neither of these hypotheses is founded on fact. The elaborate cruelties of the vegetarians of China and Japan supply a sufficient answer to the first. The Chinese have racked their ingenuity to multiply tortures, and a fat rice-eater will sip up his tea and fan himself with perfect sang-froid, while he causes the nails of a victim to be pulled out. When their blood is up the Chinese are as savage as the Mongols, and by so much the more cruel as their superior intellects supply to them varieties in the enjoyment of their blood-thirstiness.
To the second observation it may be replied that the professional butchers are not the least humane class of civilised society; their occupation does not impair their human sympathies. A wild beast may be excited by the taste of blood, but it is merely from the instinct that impels him to seek his natural food.
The brutalising influence of war itself is well known. To this rule there are few exceptions. Even among Christian nations, in whom the degrading tendency is counteracted by education and social culture, the hero of many battles is but too apt to value his men at so much per head. Barbarians, with no controlling power to check the natural bent of their passions, exhibit the full dehumanising effects of war. They glory in the mere shedding of blood, as a hunter delights in the death of his game. Yet this savage passion is far removed from simple cruelty, and may be quite compatible with a low form of goodness of heart.
Although at first sight the simple life of pastoral peoples does not seem likely to produce a race of warriors, yet the very simplicity of their habits peculiarly adapts them for warlike enterprises. The incentives to war would not be wanting to wandering tribes with no fixed boundary; for they would be constantly invading each others' pasture grounds. Hence, the habits of predatory warfare would be induced. Their hardiness and endurance would enable them to sustain the fatigue of long marches, privations and exposure. Such a community needs no commissariat. Their food is the flesh of their cattle or horses, which, being accustomed to eat grass only, can always feed themselves on the way. Their tents might even be dispensed with, and the ground would serve them for a camp. Their indifference to life renders unnecessary any provision for the care of the sick or the wounded. They are not hampered in their movements by any tie to localities. The whole world is alike to them. Their life in war, involving the long marches and countermarches which wear out other troops, was little different from their ordinary habits in peace. Their enthusiasm made them formidable. Their ignorance rendered them unscrupulous. They destroyed the noblest monuments of learning and industry with the same wantonness that prompts a child to pull to pieces the finest piece of mechanism. They set no value on anything, and it was a pleasant recreation for them to destroy what they could neither appreciate nor understand. The spoils of civilisation allured them to new conquests. Victory inflated their fanaticism. Defeat subdued their spirit for the time, but they had always a retreat open in the deserts of Asia where they were at least safe from the retaliation of the civilised nations whom they had oppressed. In their career of devastation they were often stimulated by necessity. When their earlier successes had attracted great numbers to the victorious standard, it was impossible to maintain the vast multitude stationary. First, their pastures would soon become exhausted; and, secondly, their leaders could only maintain their own character and their ascendency over their followers by active operations. The alien troops, who entered largely into the composition of their armies, were always ready to secede from their forced allegiance. Any symptom of weakness or incapacity in the chief would be the signal for a general disruption. Out of this necessity for perpetual motion doubtless arose the Mongol vision of universal empire.
The military enthusiasm in the Mongols is only dormant, not dead. We have seen, four or five years ago, with what alacrity Sang-ko-lin-sin, himself a Kalka Mongol, and one of the forty-eight kings, brought a force into the field to bar our entrance into Peking, and with what zeal and energy the Mongol troops acquitted themselves. Given a sufficient motive, and a man to lead them, and the shepherds could soon be put in motion again. By nature they are faithful to their chiefs, and their head lama has but to hold up his finger to stir up the sleeping prowess of the shepherds. Nor is it likely that the sanguinary passions, common to barbarians, have been eradicated in the Mongols. Quiet and peaceful as they are among their flocks, they would be as fierce in war as in the bloodiest days of their history.