made him overthrow every barrier that must intervene between the chief of a small barbarous tribe of an obscure race and the throne of Asia, and this with a rapidity and 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, if true, of his future career.  According to De Guignes, Karachar Nevian was named his tutor.

Ssanang Setzen has a story that his father set out one day to find him a partner among the relatives of his wife, the Olchonods, and that on the way he was met by Dai Setzen, the chief of the Kunkurats, who thus addressed him:  “Descendant of the Kiyots and of the race of the Bordshigs, whither hiest thou?”