45 
The Influence of the East on European History 
in bye-gone times. 
By R. T. ROBINSON, M.A., B.So. 
ReaD BEFORE THE Sociery Fepruary 207Tx, 1908. 
The events of the recent Kusso-Japanese war have made us 
reconsider our estimate of the inhabitants of Asia. In the forgotten 
past Asia has profoundly affected Europe. Very few of us realise 
that all our moral teaching, in fact all the higher religious teaching 
of the world comes from Asia. ‘The old pagan religion of the Greeks 
and Romans is stone dead, and so is that of the old Scandinavian and 
German peoples. The cnly religion which Europe has given birth to 
and which still lives is the worship of wealth. Our own easy conquest 
of India and the silent absorption of North and a great part of Central 
Asia by Russia have given us a feeling almost of contempt for the 
Asiatic, at least for his military qualities. This feeling is quite 
unjustified ; even in India soldiers of the very best type are recruited 
from the North Western tribes, from the Ghurkas (of Tartar or 
Mongol type) and from the Sikhs. The superiority of Europe over 
Asia has been due to the great advances made in practical science by 
Europeans especially in those sciences which relate to war and 
commerce, and also to bad government—no form of government 
other than the government of a despot being known in Asia. We forget 
that in former times the Saracen conquests included Spain, which 
was for centuries under Arab or Moorish rule, that a considerable 
part of modern Russia was ruled for years by the vassels of a Tartar 
or Mongol Khan, that the Magyars of Hungary and the Bulgarians 
were originally Asiatic people and that a dwindling portion of South 
Eastern Europe is still in the possession of a people who came from 
somewhere near the region of the Altai mountains. 
