Rarely is a polyglot mountain population able to work out its own political salvation, as the Swiss have done.  More often political union must be forced upon them from without.  Oftener still, when the highlanders are primitive survivals, ill-matched against the superior invaders from the plain, they are doomed to a process of constriction of territory and deterioration of numbers, which proceeds slowly or rapidly according to the inaccessibility of their environment and the energy of the intruders.  Deliberate, unenterprising nations, like the Chinese, Turks and Indo-Aryans long tolerate the presence of alien mountain tribes, who remain like enemies brought to bay in their isolated fortresses.  The conquerors throw around them at their leisure a cordon of settlement, which, slowly ascending the piedmont, draws closer and closer about the mountaineers.  The situation of many mountain tribes reminds one of a besieged stronghold.  Russian wars against the Caucasus have rightly been described as protracted sieges.  The heroic history of Switzerland in relation to its neighbors has been that of a skillfully conducted defense, both military and diplomatic.  The territory of China is dotted over with detached groups of aborigines, who have survived wherever a friendly mountain has offered them an asylum.  Variously known as Lolos, Mantze or Miaotse, they have preserved everywhere a semi-independence in pathless mountains, whither Chinese troops do not dare to follow them;[1402] but the more numerous and patient Chinese agriculturalists are in many sections slowly encroaching upon their territories, driving them farther and farther into the recesses of their highlands.  The same process goes on in Formosa, where the Chinese have gradually forced the native Malays into mountain fastnesses among the peaks which rise to 14,000 feet (4500 meters).  There, split up by internecine feuds into numberless clans and tribes, ignorant of one another’s languages, raiding each other’s territories and the coastal plains tilled by Chinese colonists, they await their doom, while the piedmont zone between has already given birth to a typical border race of halfbreeds, more Chinese than Malay.[1403]

[Sidenote:  Isolation and retardation of mountain regions.]

“To have and to hold” is the motto of the mountains.  Like remote islands, they are often museums of social antiquities.  Antiquated races and languages abound.  The mountaineers of the Southern Appalachians speak to-day an eighteenth century English.  Their literature is the ballad poetry of old England and Scotland, handed down from parent to child.  Clan feuds settle questions of justice, as in the Caucasus and the Apennines.  Religion is orthodox to the last degree, sectarianism is rigid, and Joshua’s power over the sun remains in some lonely valleys undiscounted.[1404] These are all the marks of isolation and retardation which appear in similar environments elsewhere.  Especially religious dogmas tend to show in mountains a tenacity