nd
uniform success that can only be compared to the triumphant march of
Alexander, but he was far more than a conqueror. Alexander, Napoleon,
and Timur were all more or less his equals in the art of war. But the
colossal powers they created were merely hills of sand, that crumbled
to pieces as soon as they were dead.

With Genghis Khan matters were very different: he organized the empire
which he had conquered so that it long survived and greatly thrived
after he was gone. In every detail of social and political economy he
was a creator; his laws and his administrative rules are equally
admirable and astounding to the student. Justice, tolerance,
discipline--virtues that make up the modern ideal of a state--were
taught and practised at his court. And when we remember that he was
born and educated in the desert, and that he had neither the sages of
Greece nor of Rome to instruct him, that unlike Charlemagne and Alfred
he could not draw his lessons from a past whose evening glow was still
visible in the horizon, we are tempted to treat as exaggerated the
history of his times, and to be sceptical of so much political insight
having been born of such unpromising materials.

It is not creditable to English literature that no satisfactory
account of Genghis Khan exists in the language. Baron D'Ohsson in
French, and Erdmann in German, have both written minute and detailed
accounts of him, but none such exists in English, although the subject
has an epic grandeur about it that might well tempt some well-grounded
scholar to try his hand upon it.

Genghis Khan received the name of Temudjin. According to the
vocabulary attached to the history of the Yuen dynasty, translated
from the Chinese by Hyacinthe, _temudjin_ means the best iron or
steel. The name has been confounded with _temurdji_, which means a
smith, in Turkish. This accounts for the tradition related by
Pachymeres, Novairi, William of Ruysbrok, the Armenian Haiton, and
others, that Genghis Khan was originally a smith.

The Chinese historians and Ssanang Setzen place his birth in 1162;
Raschid and the Persians in 1155. The latter date is accommodated to
the fact that they make him seventy-two years old at his death in
1227, but the historian of the Yuen dynasty, the Kangmu, and Ssanang
Setzen are all agreed that he died at the age of sixty-six, and they
are much more likely to be right. Mailla says he had a piece of
clotted blood in his fist when born--no bad omen,