HISTORY OF ASIA GENERAL SURVEY 105 



to remain indifferent to the fate of Eastern Asia. We see just the 

 reverse of what happened in the course of the fifth and thirteenth 

 centuries when we witnessed the movement, the delayed ebb tide 

 of a wave rolled from the depths of Asia, which will resume its old 

 course in the near future if we may believe in the predictions of 

 ominous prophets. 



The laws which regulate the existence of peoples are similar to 

 those which govern the lives of individuals. Man is born, lives, dies ; 

 nations have their periods of growth, climax, transformation, decline, 

 and disappearance; this disappearance is not nothingness, which is 

 meaningless; it is no more total in a nation than in the individual, 

 as, according to Lavoisier's celebrated formula, "In nature nothing 

 is created, nothing is lost"; the scattered elements go toward the 

 constitution of new nationalities. 



The adult age of a nation, that is. to say the highest pitch it has 

 reached, is the period when it has completed its complete unity for 

 which it struggled during the time of its growth. This period of 

 highest prosperity can last a shorter or longer lapse of time, but 

 all bodies which carry in themselves the germs of their development 

 contain also the elements of their decay, which appear sooner or 

 later according to circumstances. 



China has known brilliant periods in her history, such as that of 

 the T'ang Dynasty from the seventh to the ninth centuries, a time 

 which the Chinese people still remember gratefully; such as that of 

 the Mongol supremacy in the thirteenth century, when the power of 

 the Great Khans extended from the Chinese Sea to the right banks 

 of the Volga. 



China has even known a period of splendor under the first sovereigns 

 of the present Manchu Dynasty, the great emperors, K'ang-hi and 

 K'ien-lung; from the River of the Black Dragon to Indo-China, 

 from the Oriental Sea to the Celestial Mountains and the mysterious 

 capital of the Dalai-lama, the name of the Son of Heaven was feared 

 and respected; then shone upon the Flowery Kingdom an incom- 

 parable eclat ignored by the contemporary Westerners, similar in 

 this respect to the Chinese of to-day who do not know the real force 

 of occidental nations. 



. Immobility, as is the case with China, when all the others are pro- 

 gressing, is not stability; it is retrogression; rivals and competitors 

 are advancing without any rest. Woe to-day on the people who in 

 the scramble of nations tries to stop; it is drawn forcibly along, 

 uprooted like the proud tree carried in its mad race by the tumultuous 

 flood. 



Has the decline of China, which began with the nineteenth century, 

 and had increased from reign to reign, reached now the last period 

 of the crisis? I believe it; but we are witnessing an evolution, not 



