teresting aspect of the question. How did these civilisations develop
in Asia, and how is it that they have remained stagnant for ages, while
Europe advanced? The origin of the Asiatic civilisations is obscure.
The common idea of their vast antiquity has no serious ground. The
civilisation of Japan cannot be traced back beyond about the eighth
century B.C. Even then the population was probably a mixed flotsam from
neighbouring lands--Ainus, Koreans, Chinese, and Malays. What was the
character of the primitive civilisation resulting from the mixture
of these different cultures we do not know. But the chief elements
of Japanese civilisation came later from China. Japan had no written
language of any kind until it received one from China about the sixth
century of the Christian Era.

The civilisation of China itself goes back at least to about 2300
B.C., but we cannot carry it further back with any confidence. The
authorities, endeavouring to pick their steps carefully among old
Chinese legends, are now generally agreed that the primitive Chinese
were a nomadic tribe which slowly wandered across Asia from about the
shores of the Caspian Sea. In other words, they started from a region
close to the cradle of western civilisation. Some students, in
fact, make them akin to the Akkadians, who founded civilisation in
Mesopotamia. At all events, they seem to have conveyed a higher culture
to the isolated inhabitants of Western Asia, and a long era of progress
followed their settlement in a new environment. For more than two
thousand years, however, they have been enclosed in their walls and
mountains and seas, while the nations of the remote west clashed
unceasingly against each other. We need no other explanation of their
stagnation. To speak of the "unprogressiveness" of the Chinese is pure
mysticism. The next generation will see.

The civilisation of India is also far later than the civilisation of the
west, and seems to be more clearly due to borrowing from the west. The
primitive peoples who live on the hills about India, or in the jungles,
are fragments, apparently, of the Stone Age inhabitants of India, or
their descendants. Their culture may have degenerated under the adverse
conditions of dislodgement from their home, but we may fairly conclude
that it was never high. On these primitive inhabitants of the plains
of India there fell, somewhere about or before 1000 B.C., the Asiatic
branch of the Aryan race.

A very rec