centuries more, came together and was great again.  Fifteen hundred years after Ts’in Shi Hwangti had founded China, her manvantara then having ended, and her whole creative cycle run through, she fell to the Mongols.  Fifteen hundred years after Julius Caesar had founded his empire, the last wretched remnant of it fell to the Turks.  But China first compelled her conquerors to behave like Chinamen, and then, after a century, turned them out.  The Turks never became Greek or Roman, and so far have not quite been turned out.  The roman empire disappeared, and never reunited;—­that is what has been the matter with Europe ever since.  Europe, in her manvantara, has wasted three parts of her creative force in wars and disunion.  But China, even in her pralaya, became a strong, united power again under the Mings (1368-1644)—­the first of them—­a native dynasty.  Conquered again, now by the Manchus, she mader her conquerors behave like Chinamen,—­imposed on them her culture;—­and went forth under their banners to conquer.  The European pralaya (630-1240) was a time barren of creation in art and literature, and in life uttterly squalid and lightless The Chinese pralaya, after the Mongol Conquest, took a very long time to sink into squalidity.  The arts, which had died in Europe long before Rome fell, lived on in China, though with ever-waning energy, through the Mongol and well into the Ming time:  the national stability, the force of custom, was there to carry them on.  What light, what life, what vigor was there in Rome or Constantinople a century and a half after Alaric or Heraclius?  But Ming Yunglo, a century and a half after the fall of Sung, reigned in great splendor; sent his armies conquering to the Caspian, and his navies to the conquest of Ceylon, the discovery of Africa, the gathering in of the tribute of the Archipelago and the shores of the Indian Ocean.  Until the end of the eighteenth century the minor arts and crafts—­pottery and bronzes—­of which there was nothing to speak of in Europe in the corresponding European age—­were flourishing wonderfully; and in the seventeenth and eighteeenth centuries, under Kanghi and Kienlung, China was once more a great military power.  She chased and whipped the Goorkhas down through the Himalays and into India, only twenty years before England fought difficult and doubtful campaigns with those fierce little mountaineers.  You may even say she has been better off in her pralaya, in many ways, and until recently, than most of Europe has been in most of her manvantara.  In Kienlung’s reign, for example (1735-1795) there were higher standards of life, more security, law, and order, than in the Europe of Catherine of Russia, Frederick the Great, Louis XV and the Revolution, and the English Georges.  There was far less ferment of the Spirit, true; less possibility of progress;—­but that is merely to say that China was in pralaya, Europe in high manvantara.  The explanation is that a stability had been imparted to that Far Eastern civilization,