estminster, he is said to have observed that there had
been only two in his own dominions, and he had hung one of them.

5.

Now I have thrown the various inhabitants of the Asiatic plain together,
under one description, not as if I overlooked, or undervalued, the
distinction of races, but because I have no intention of committing
myself to any statements on so intricate and interminable a subject as
ethnology. In spite of the controversy about skulls, and skins, and
languages, by means of which man is to be traced up to his primitive
condition, I consider place and climate to be a sufficiently real aspect
under which he may be regarded, and with this I shall content myself. I
am speaking of the inhabitants of those extended plains, whether
Scythians, Massagetae, Sarmatians, Huns, Moguls, Tartars, Turks, or
anything else; and whether or no any of them or all of them are
identical with each other in their pedigree and antiquities. Position
and climate create habits; and, since the country is called Tartary, I
shall call them Tartar habits, and the populations which have inhabited
it and exhibited them, Tartars, for convenience-sake, whatever be their
family descent. From the circumstances of their situation, these
populations have in all ages been shepherds, mounted on horseback,
roaming through trackless spaces, easily incited to war, easily formed
into masses, easily dissolved again into their component parts, suddenly
sweeping across continents, suddenly descending on the south or west,
suddenly extinguishing the civilization of ages, suddenly forming
empires, suddenly vanishing, no one knows how, into their native north.

Such is the fearful provision for havoc and devastation, when the Divine
Word goes forth for judgment upon the civilized world, which the North
has ever had in store; and the regions on which it has principally
expended its fury, are those, whose fatal beauty, or richness of soil,
or perfection of cultivation, or exquisiteness of produce, or amenity of
climate, makes them objects of desire to the barbarian. Such are China,
Hindostan, Persia, Syria, and Anatolia or the Levant, in Asia; Greece,
Italy, Sicily, and Spain, in Europe; and the northern coast of Africa.

These regions, on the contrary, have neither the inducement nor the
means to retaliate upon their ferocious invaders. The relative position
of the combatants must always be the same, while the combat lasts. The
South has nothing to win