Part 20
The preservation of the country from the nether chaos is, however, a mightier problem. Before the ship of state rides safe in the harbor of true representative government there must come a critical period when the administrative powers are not firmly clasped by the hand of either autocracy or duma. This hiatus-time, when iron repression ceases and sober self-rule begins, is yet to come. Those who must tide the nation over it are such as those pathetically few Octobrists, unpopular because of their bending, craven-seeming policy, and because of the unfree elections that gave them place. Will such a group, when the crucial hour strikes, be allowed peaceably to pilot the vessel? Or will red-handed revolution wrench from their grip the tiller, bereft of the guidance of autocracy? Is it to be evolution or revolution?
One cannot deny that a free election to-day would throw out the toiling Octobrists and put in a membership like that of the first Duma. These constructive, unvisionary men are not loved, nor is their progress likely to make them so. They exist as the ruling factor only by virtue of election manipulations and legal interpretations. With this essentially temporary support taken away, the group would be powerless, for every indication shows that the people would not support them or their policies.
Even Moscow, their former stronghold, fell away in the 1909 elections. There is throughout the country an undercurrent of fierce demand for an immediate millennium, with Liberty as the guiding grace and some particular party as its escort. A song that has become almost an anthem, “Spurn with us that ancient tyrant,” chanted softly by the school-boys to the tune of the _Marseillaise_,--this tells the tale of what is in the air, and in the blood of the people. The most poorly-suppressed desire is insatiate to hack away with one blow the abuses that have, through the centuries, rooted themselves deep in Russian society. The experience of the various revolutionary and terrorist movements proves that their votaries are capable of daring any death for their creeds, and of swimming to their imaged goal in a sea of blood. Let the conservative Octobrist group once succeed in concentrating power in the Duma, and then let a free election substitute for them such men as were in the first Duma, and the Russian Revolution has become a fact.
It is a commonplace to compare the situation with that of France in 1790. There is, however, one fundamental difference. France possessed a numerous and economically powerful bourgeoisie, from whom political rights had been withheld. This class included many strong men moved to a unity of political desire. They were able in the first place to work up into a place of dominance. After the interval of supplanting terrorism, they retook by their own efforts the power which, save for the periods of despotic militarism, they have since maintained. In Russia the conservative middle-class is numerically very weak, and its representatives are unable to seize and hold control themselves. They possess it now only precariously, by the external propping of weakening absolutism. Will Russia’s Octobrists, after performing the function of filching power from the autocracy, meet, at the hands of a new Robespierre, the fate of the high-idealed Gironde?
One cannot yet answer. But whatever the harvest, the work of the third and fourth Dumas, carried out in harmony with the Imperial Ministers, has shown that the last dread arbitrament of social war need not come. Revolution is the final recourse, to be undertaken only if a political and social situation is so desperate that all other means must fail. Such is not the case in Russia. There are administrative abuses there. But governmental restrictions press rather less than one might imagine upon the plain workaday people; and compared to those of other nations, they are not exceptional save in degree. It is the educated and so-called upper classes who complain. Taxes elsewhere than in Russia are burdensome and sure as death. Emigration to Siberia will give any peasant the legal privilege of escaping taxation, which in America is the prerogative of her absentee plutocracy alone. The exile system, dwindling for years past, has now been in effect abolished by the refusal of the Duma to make an appropriation for its continuance. The press-censorship is only the open operation of influences tacitly accepted elsewhere--such as in the United States left the Tweed Ring so long uncriticised. The much-condemned passport is actually of no more inconvenience than showing a railway ticket, and it does not come within “forty _sagenes_” of the custom-house inquisition which faces every American citizen on his return home.
It is not an error to say that in many matters of individual liberty the Slav enjoys more than the American. In the treatment of subject nations, reliable and neutral witnesses declare that Russia does not approach the rigor of the Prussian bureaucracy in Alsace. Many of the Empire’s restrictions are those which obtained throughout Europe fifty years ago--abuses common to a certain stage of civilization, and of public opinion. These melt away in newer customs, for time is curing much. Once the chariot of progress is started, many evils right themselves in the natural and inevitable upward pressure, and many slough off unnoted. It is not so many years back that in America a black man could be deported to malarial lowlands more deadly than Siberia’s steppes; not so long ago that the English Parliament passed an act requiring all railway-trains to be preceded by a man carrying a red flag. Like the seignorial rights of Germany’s feudal states, anachronisms become outgrown, and fall away.
In Russia, unfortunately, the onslaught against iniquitous human laws is overcarried into a blind charge against Nature’s laws, which no revolution can repeal. The protest against dire artificial abuses is mixed with a rebellion against the curse of Adam. It is the fearful fact of life that the destiny of the majority is anxiety, dependence for daily bread on other men, grinding incessant toil remunerated by a bare livelihood, a barring-back from the fullest personal capacity and possibilities through poverty, parentage, environment, and lack of opportunity. The forces of Nature and primal competition put so many limitations upon every one’s action that it is hard to say which are due to the tyranny of men, which are the handicaps born of the nature of things. The cry for deliverance is rising equally in the workhouses of Scotland, in France, where thirty-five per cent of the land is owned by great proprietors, in the slums of New York City, and in the rice-fields of Japan. A government under the present system can but do its best to develop men’s capacities, and to give them a fair deal. All that the best of modern societies has succeeded yet in securing to the mass of mankind is the chance to get their sons the education which will enable them to vanquish some of the limitations, security for the person, and protection from robbery of the cruder sort.
Capacity and opportunity can come but by slow degrees. When one sees the numbers and the types in the villages, men of latent capacities undoubtedly, but swamped by the spirit of _nietchevo_ and with all their enterprise sapped in the stagnant communism of the Mir, he realizes the futility of a sudden change and the hopelessness of germinating by political pellet the leaven of progress in the hundred and forty millions.
Rulers may be changed by revolution. But the real quickening of the people to their great future must come and is coming by the slow, sure way of evolution.
VIII
THE STORY OF THE HORDES
Among people so peaceful and subdued as are the latter-day Mongols, it is hard to realize that the race has had a past which in tradition at least goes back to the infancy of history. According to legend, the Chinese, the first reputed offspring of the Mongols, preceded by three hundred years Egypt’s earliest dynasty. They antedate Abraham’s assigned epoch by twenty-six generations. They claim to have continued before Marathon a longer time than has elapsed from the foundation of Rome to our own era. Yet they yield not even to the Romans preëminence of arms, for they won and ruled an empire in extent and population the greatest that has ever existed. Mongols have led the world’s mightiest armies; their hosts have carried the ox-hide banners over every great European state but Spain and England, and into every Asian country except Japan.
That the march of Mongols down the long way of history has been so little appreciated is the sword’s obeisance to the pen. Save for the mendacious memoirs of Tamerlane, and a few Ouighour inscriptions in Central Asia, chronicles there are virtually none. So story has found a peg for the clipped tails of Alcibiades’ dogs, but scarcely a word for the deeds of those who won the world from the Yellow Sea to the Baltic, from the Persian Gulf to the Arctic. Only where the annals of the race have been written in the blood of the peoples they conquered are the events to be traced; only by assembling the alien and hostile evidences of the encircling nations can one shape the outline of Mongolia’s mighty past. History takes from the Confucian Book of Records the story of the earliest emigration to the east; from Herodotus the descent upon Mesopotamia and the struggle with Persia on the west. It gleans from the Chinese archives the doings of the Hiung-nu--the Huns; from the documents of the Byzantine Empire the descent on Europe of the same Mongolian “Scourge of God.” It culls from Arab historiographs the facts of the southern conquests of Genghis Khan; from Russian monasteries the tale of the northward march of his lieutenant Batui.
The outlines of Mongolia’s career are patched and gathered from her frontier lands, yet silhouetted against the far recesses of time they grow steadily clearer and more colossal.
In the year given by most as 2852 B.C., a tribe, whose earliest folk-lore and traditions point to an origin in the cradle of the Hordes near Urga, was pushing seaward down the valley of the Yellow River. Like the children of Israel, they were in constant conflict with the “barbarian” aborigines. This tribe became in due time the Chinese nation.
Through fifteen hundred years the descendants of the invaders wrought out a dimly comprehended civilization on the banks of the Hoang-ho. Behind the imposing national legend, hallowed by the mist of centuries and focused by images of their five Hero Kings, one may see the fact of strong, brave rulers striving for their people’s advance. A real statesman was the original of the demigod Shinnung, “holy husbandman,” the introducer of agriculture, in whose honor every spring a furrow is ploughed in the soil of his temple courtyard by the Emperor of China. A father in the flesh was that “Nest-builder” who watched the birds construct their homes, and on that model taught his people to make the wattled and plastered huts one sees to-day. The mystic queller of disastrous inundations, Ta-yu, founder of the house of Hia, was the first hydraulic engineer, the dykes of whose successors embank the treacherous Yellow River. He it was who hung at his door a bell which any of his subjects might ring, to obtain immediate attention, and who would leave his rice to answer a call to secure justice. Kie likewise wears human lineaments, he who made a mountain of meat and a tank of wine, and then, to please a frail companion, had his courtiers eat and drink of them on all fours like cows. There is an historic background to the rising against the tyrant under Shang, who later offered himself as a human sacrifice for rain in time of famine, and a kindred note in the story of Chou-siu, sold to misfortunes by a woman whom he loved and immolating himself in his royal robes when the rebellious vassals were closing in around him.
As the years pass, the histories become clearer and more direct, and the legendary aspect of exploits falls away. The Commentaries of Confucius deal with events as tangible and exact as Luther’s Reformation: they give the records of kings, and their daily doings two thousand years before our era.
In 1122 B.C., with Wu-wang of the dynasty of Chu, the Chinese nation emerged as a civilized state. It was organized on a feudal system, not dissimilar to that built up by Japan’s powerful Daimios. Under this single dynasty the Celestial Kingdom began a period of 873 years of development, marked by the writings of the great sages. Lao-tse, founder of the Taoist religion, with its watchword of “Tao” (reason), but its quick degeneracy to forms and idol-worship, was the first of the Chinese philosophers in point of time. He was at the zenith of his repute around 530 B.C. He had a young disciple struggling through poverty to an education, “Master Kung,” known to us under the Latinized nomenclature of Jesuit missionaries as Confucius.
The youth eagerly conned and meditated upon Lao-tse’s abstract speculations; but, unsatisfied, he began the studies and compilations from the ancients which to this day constitute the foundations of Chinese literature, etiquette, religion, ceremonial, and policy of government.
Confucius was at once the world’s greatest college professor and its most influential editor. His school instructed three thousand pupils in ethics and etiquette. His writings have influenced more minds than those of any other human individual, and his supremacy is the triumph of uninspired work. His moral tone is lofty,--as witness his “Do not unto another what you would not have done to yourself,”--but his life brought no great new message.
“I am a commentator, not an originator,” he said of himself.
Mang-tse, “Master Mang,” whom we know as Mencius, followed “Master Kung” by one hundred years, applying, as a practical reformer, to the society of the day, the maxims of his enlightened philosophy, rebuking princes and giving to the Chinese world the last of its classics.
In the glories of the Chu Dynasty, China, the earliest offshoot of the Mongol race, reached its literary and philosophic climax.
In Turan, now called Turkestan, and in Mesopotamia, a western division of the Mongols appears about 640 B.C. It is making an incursion into the declining Empire of Assyria, over which Nebuchadnezzar is soon to rule. Nothing of detail remains, only the record of the devastating inroad over the mountain; but it locates at this date the southwestern frontier of Mongol dominion.
Scythia, north of the Black Sea, reveals them next. The sketch is drawn by the master-pen of the Greek father of history in his description of the expedition of Darius, 506 B.C. “Having neither cities nor forts, they carry their dwellings with them wherever they go,” Herodotus writes, describing the nomad foes of the Great King. He relates that they are “accustomed, moreover, one and all of them, to shoot from horseback and to live not by husbandry, but on their cattle.”
This was the enemy against whom Darius planned a campaign, whose object was to free from the menace of the Scythians north of the line of advance his prospective expedition for the conquest of Greece. From the bridge of boats over the Hellespont, beside which Miltiades watched, the great Persian marched to the Don River, the nomads always retreating. Darius finally challenged the Scythian king to stand and fight, or to accept him as suzerain. To this message Idonthyrsus replied: “This is my way, Persian. I never fear men or fly from them, nor do I now fly from thee. I only follow my common mode of life in peaceful years. We Scythians have neither towns nor cultivated lands, which might induce us, through fear of being taken or ravaged, to be in any hurry to fight with you. In return for thy calling thyself my lord, I say to thee, ‘Go weep!’”
All the Asian steppes were open to the ever-retreating nomads: Darius was obliged to halt. Hereupon, the Scythian prince, understanding how matters stood, dispatched a herald to the Persian camp with presents for the king. They were “a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows.”
Darius was at liberty to deduce whatever explanation he chose. He retreated, the Scythians hounding his army on. He found his bridge over the Bosphorus safe, and returned to Persia to prepare the Athenian expedition that ended at Marathon. The Scythians remained: they were left leading their flocks as of old over the unconquerable steppes.
By these echoes of clashings with other nations, the first-known streams of Mongol outflow are dimly followed to the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea on the south and west, bounding Scythia; to the Hoang-ho Valley, in which were living the metamorphosed Chinese.
But the rolling hills south of Lake Baikal, the source of the race-stream, still poured out fresh hordes, which periodically overflowed in roving nomad bands, harrying the plainsmen. While the feudal states of China struggled and fought among themselves, now coalescing under the “Wu-pa,” the five dictators, now uniting under a Prince Hwan of Shan-tung into a temporary Chinese Shogunate, there came down upon the fertile lands and populous cities wild horsemen, sparing none, burning, looting, riding away. “The Hiung-nu descended on us,” appears again and again in the history.
At length, about 246 B.C., arose the short but glorious dynasty of Ts’in, under China’s king, Shi-hwang-ti. He was a man of action. He compacted a centralized monarchy from the many princedoms, drove back the nomad Hiung-nu beyond the Yellow River, built the Great Wall, and by his glorious exploits blazoned into Europe’s vocabulary, the word China--Ts’in.
In Sz-ma Ts’ien’s history, a striking incident, revealing the Great Emperor’s limitations, is graphically told.
“Li-se, the councillor, said, ‘Of old, the Empire was divided and troubled. There was nobody who could unite it. Therefore did many lords reign at a time. For this, the readers of books speak of old times to cry down these. They encourage the people to forge calumnies. Your subject proposes that all the official histories be burned. The books not proscribed shall be those of medicine, of divination, of agriculture. If any want to study laws, let them take the office-holders as masters.’”
The decree was “approved.” The old books of annals, the Confucian Commentaries, the Odes and the Rituals, to the suppressed execration of the learned, fed the flames. The literati who protested were warmed, themselves, over the same fires.
But despite Shi-hwang-ti’s signal defeat of the five coalescing tribes, and the eighty-two thousand severed heads; despite the victories in 214 B.C., the Hiung-nu Empire grew in power, until it extended from Corea to Tibet.
The Chinese “Han” Dynasty, even under the peasant-founder, Lin-pang, who had proven himself a thorough soldier, was constantly harried. The loss of the old literature continued to be mourned, which argues some plane of general appreciation. The Minister urged the recall of the Ts’in philosophers and the reproduction of the burned books.
“Why have books?” said the Emperor. “I won the Empire on horseback.”
“Can you keep it on horseback?” the Minister asked.
The literati were eventually recalled. Their support was secured for the throne, and the Hiung-nu were kept back by art as well as by arms.
At the Emperor’s death, his widow, the Dowager Empress Lu, of Borgian repute, was still harder pressed by the nomads. Meteh, the khan of the invading hordes outside the Wall, ventured to send to her a proposal of marriage and tariff-treaty couched in Rabelaisian poetry. “I wish to change what I have for what I have not.” He followed the verses with gifts of camels and carts and steppe ponies. In return his messengers insisted on a tribute of wadded and silk clothes, precious metals and embroidery, grain and yeast, as well as the intoxicating _samshu_. These royal presents and tribute were really a trading of goods, a barter, and citizens of lower rank, in the fairs beside the Wall, were carrying on an equivalent.
More and more oppressive became the demands of the Mongols. A band of beautiful maidens, a very toll of the Minotaur, was exacted yearly. In one of the ancient Chinese poems a princess laments the fate that condemns her to a barbarian husband, a desolate land where raw flesh is to be her food, sour milk her drink, and the felt hut her palace.
In 200 B.C., Sin, King of Han, marched against the Hiung-nu, only to retreat after heavy losses, with a third of his soldiers fingerless from the cold. Again, in 177 B.C., the Hiung-nu broke a treaty and raided across the Wall. A speech of the Emperor, in 162 B.C., is quoted in the Chinese chronicles: “These later times for several years the Hiung-nu have come in a crowd to exercise their ravages on our frontiers.”
In 141 B.C., Nu-ti, the fifth of the House of Han, assembled a great army of one hundred and forty thousand Chinese, and marched against the Confederacy. This army, like that of Darius, penetrated far up into the nomad’s territory. Scarcely a quarter of them returned. But the invasion was not fruitless: the Hiung-nu gave allegiance to China. Later, in 138 B.C., largely to turn the left flank of the Horde, the Chinese advanced into Corea. In 119 B.C. another march to the district north of Tibet turned the nomads’ right flank. At length, in 100 A.D., a more northerly Tatar clan, the Sien-pi, came down on the broken remnants of the Hiung-nu. After thirteen hundred years of power this tribe was destroyed. Of the scattered nomads some remained to unite with their victorious conquerors; some went south to Turkestan; a third group trekked north, and went over the great steppe. Subsequent to 100 A.D., they are found on the east bank of the Volga, where during two centuries they temporarily disappear from history.
The great Empire of China now existed unmolested by the Hordes, and after a few hard fights ruled Asia as far as the borders of Persia. Its outposts almost met those of the Empire of Rome. Both realms were, about this date, in peace and prosperity. There is even a record of trade between them, the Chinese annals telling of an expedition of King An-tun, or Antoninus, in 166 A.D., to Burmah, from which his factors reached the Middle Kingdom; and of glass, drugs, metals, and game obtained overland by way of Parthia from Ta-ts’in, the Great Empire. Pliny writes of silk, iron, furs, and skins, caravan-brought from China. So moved the two empires until 376 A.D., when Valens the Irresolute reigned in Byzantium. To him came messengers bringing word of great alarm from the Danube. The whole nation of Goths were on the bank, begging a refuge in Roman territory.
“Wild enemies, from where we know not, are upon us!” they cried.
The Goths, who were to subvert the declining empire, were escaping from before the western division of the old Hiung-nu. Valens had the Goths ferried over the Danube, and the Huns established themselves in the vacated places of what is now Austria.
Amid those hordes arose a leader destined to leave a memory in the sagas of the Scandinavian bards, in the Niebelungenlied of the Teutons, and a lurid trail in the annals of the Cæsars. He called himself a descendant of the great Nimrod, “nurtured in Engaddi, by the grace of God, King of the Huns, the Goths, the Danes, the Medes; the Dread of the World,”--Attila.