nd the vices of their new subjects, growing ever more graceful and more
enfeebled, until they too are overthrown by a new and hardier race, the
Persians, an Aryan folk.

[Footnote 5: See _Rise and Fall of Assyria_, page 105.]

Before turning to this last and most prominent family of humankind, let
us look for a moment at the other, darker races, seen vaguely as they
come in contact with the whites. The negroes, set sharply by themselves
in Africa, never seem to have created any progressive civilization of
their own, never seem to have advanced further than we find the wild
tribes in the interior of the country to-day. But the yellow or Turanian
races, the Chinese and Japanese, the Turks and the Tartars, did not
linger so helplessly behind. The Chinese, at least, established a social
world of their own, widely different from that of the whites, in some
respects perhaps superior to it. But the fatal weakness of the yellow
civilization was that it was not ennobling like the Egyptian, not
scientific like the Babylonian, not adventurous and progressive as we
shall find the Aryan.

This, of course, is speaking in general terms. Something somewhat
ennobling there may be in the contemplations of Confucius;[6] but no man
can favorably compare the Chinese character to-day with the European,
whether we regard either intensity of feeling, or variety, range,
subtlety, and beauty of emotion. So, also, the Chinese made scientific
discoveries--but knew not how to apply them or improve them. So also
they made conquests--and abandoned them; toiled--and sank back into
inertia.

[Footnote 6: See _Rise of Confucius_, page 270.]

The Japanese present a separate problem, as yet little understood in its
earlier stages.[7] As to the Tartars, wild and hardy horsemen roaming
over Northern Asia, they kept for ages their independent animal strength
and fierceness. They appear and disappear like flashes. They seem to
seek no civilization of their own; they threaten again and again to
destroy that of all the other races of the globe. Fitly, indeed, was
their leader Attila once termed "the Scourge of God."

[Footnote 7: See _Prince Jimmu_, page 140.]

THE ARYANS

Of our own progressive Aryan race, we have no monuments nor inscriptions
so old as those of the Hamites and the Semites. What comparative
philology tells is this: An early, if not the original, home of the
Aryans was in Asia, to the eastward of the Semites, probably in the
mount