ed; but I have
thought it necessary, in order to your taking a just view of them, that
you should survey them first of all in their original condition. When
they first appear in history they are Huns or Tartars, and nothing else;
they are indeed in no unimportant respects Tartars even now; but, had
they never been made something more than Tartars, they never would have
had much to do with the history of the world. In that case, they would
have had only the fortunes of Attila and Zingis; they might have swept
over the face of the earth, and scourged the human race, powerful to
destroy, helpless to construct, and in consequence ephemeral; but this
would have been all. But this has not been all, as regards the Turks;
for, in spite of their intimate resemblance or relationship to the
Tartar tribes, in spite of their essential barbarism to this day, still
they, or at least great portions of the race, have been put under
education; they have been submitted to a slow course of change, with a
long history and a profitable discipline and fortunes of a peculiar
kind; and thus they have gained those qualities of mind, which alone
enable a nation to wield and to consolidate imperial power.

1.

I have said that, when first they distinctly appear on the scene of
history, they are indistinguishable from Tartars. Mount Altai, the high
metropolis of Tartary, is surrounded by a hilly district, rich not only
in the useful, but in the precious metals. Gold is said to abound there;
but it is still more fertile in veins of iron, which indeed is said to
be the most plentiful in the world. There have been iron works there
from time immemorial, and at the time that the Huns descended on the
Roman Empire (in the fifth century of the Christian era), we find the
Turks nothing more than a family of slaves, employed as workers of the
ore and as blacksmiths by the dominant tribe. Suddenly in the course of
fifty years, soon after the fall of the Hunnish power in Europe, with
the sudden development peculiar to Tartars, we find these Turks spread
from East to West, and lords of a territory so extensive, that they were
connected, by relations of peace or war, at once with the Chinese, the
Persians, and the Romans. They had reached Kamtchatka on the North, the
Caspian on the West, and perhaps even the mouth of the Indus on the
South. Here then we have an intermediate empire of Tartars, placed
between the eras of Attila and Zingis; but in this sketch i