622 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Nor should we forget to distinguish the primitive rustics of the 

 inland provinces from the vice-worn population of the coast plains. 

 Degeneration has not left its marks far above tide-water, and has hardly 

 begun to affect the natives of the highlands, the Yunan hunting tribes, 

 for instance, who, though South Mongols, have renounced the tenets of 

 Buddha and adopted those of militant Mohammed. 



Their chieftains welcomed war for its own sake, while the lowland 

 conscripts were in the predicament of desert dwellers, caught in the 

 flood of a sudden cloudburst. Thousands at first succumbed almost 

 without a struggle; the levies drilled to oppose the Japanese invasion 

 stood to be slaughtered like sheep, being, moreover, morally handi- 

 capped by a misgiving that the war with the champions of the north 

 had been wantonly provoked. 



Discipline has begun to break the spell of that apathy, but the 

 desperate valor that surprised the veterans of the allies at Taku and 

 Yangtsun had a very different significance. Fury supplied the de- 

 fects of military training; the listless life-renouncers had at last been 

 goaded into a frenzy of nationalistic resentment. It was the same de- 

 lirium of retributive wrath that rallied a million Frenchmen around 

 the standards of the invaded Eepublic, and hurled a horde of Eussian 

 volunteers into the bullet-storm of Borodino. 



'A united nation of fifteen millions is not vincible', wrote Jean 

 Jacques Rousseau, in reply to an appeal of the Polish patriots. South 

 Mongols were supposed to be hardly worth an expedition of Caucasian 

 regulars, but even a world coalition might find use for intrenchments if 

 the vendetta rage of a war for national existence should arouse a land 

 of 385,000,000 inhabitants. 



Whether that storm will purify the social atmosphere of the vast 

 empire or subside into the calm of exhaustion, is a different question. 

 It would even be premature to accept the appearance of a few able 

 leaders as a propitious omen of regeneration. In a land ten times the 

 size of France the crisis of a fearful peril will always evolve a Carnot, 

 a Danton and a Dumouriez, if not a storm-compelling Bonaparte. 



The days of the West Mongol Empire, the dominion of the tur- 

 baned Turk, are undoubtedly numbered, but not as a result of national 

 decrepitude. The successor of Sultan Bajazet will succumb, not as a 

 'sick man', but as a cripple; an invalid worn out in a fight against hope- 

 less odds. Within the last hundred years the stadtholders of the 

 Prophet had to defend their throne against Russian, Austrian, Greek, 

 French and British attacks, and more than once against a West- 

 European alliance, backed by African and Asiatic insurgents. Within 

 that period 3,000,000 Mongol Mussulmans have perished on the battle- 

 field, a million for every generation of an impoverished and not specially 

 reproductive race. Their empire will collapse, but its defenders are 



