[Footnote 5:  See Rise and Fall of Assyria, page 105.]

Before turning to this last and most prominent family of humankind, let us look for a moment at the other, darker races, seen vaguely as they come in contact with the whites.  The negroes, set sharply by themselves in Africa, never seem to have created any progressive civilization of their own, never seem to have advanced further than we find the wild tribes in the interior of the country to-day.  But the yellow or Turanian races, the Chinese and Japanese, the Turks and the Tartars, did not linger so helplessly behind.  The Chinese, at least, established a social world of their own, widely different from that of the whites, in some respects perhaps superior to it.  But the fatal weakness of the yellow civilization was that it was not ennobling like the Egyptian, not scientific like the Babylonian, not adventurous and progressive as we shall find the Aryan.

This, of course, is speaking in general terms.  Something somewhat ennobling there may be in the contemplations of Confucius;[6] but no man can favorably compare the Chinese character to-day with the European, whether we regard either intensity of feeling, or variety, range, subtlety, and beauty of emotion.  So, also, the Chinese made scientific discoveries—­but knew not how to apply them or improve them.  So also they made conquests—­and abandoned them; toiled—­and sank back into inertia.

[Footnote 6:  See Rise of Confucius, page 270.]

The Japanese present a separate problem, as yet little understood in its earlier stages.[7] As to the Tartars, wild and hardy horsemen roaming over Northern Asia, they kept for ages their independent animal strength and fierceness.  They appear and disappear like flashes.  They seem to seek no civilization of their own; they threaten again and again to destroy that of all the other races of the globe.  Fitly, indeed, was their leader Attila once termed “the Scourge of God.”

[Footnote 7:  See Prince Jimmu, page 140.]

THE ARYANS

Of our own progressive Aryan race, we have no monuments nor inscriptions so old as those of the Hamites and the Semites.  What comparative philology tells is this:  An early, if not the original, home of the Aryans was in Asia, to the eastward of the Semites, probably in the mountain district back of modern Persia.  That is, they were not, like the other whites, a people of the marsh lands and river valleys.  They lived in a higher, hardier, and more bracing atmosphere.  Perhaps it was here that their minds took a freer bent, their spirits caught a bolder tone.  Wherever they moved they came as conquerors among other races.

In their primeval home and probably before the year B.C. 3000, they had already acquired a fair degree of civilization.  They built houses, ploughed the land, and ground grain into flour for their baking.  The family relations were established among them; they had some social organization and simple form of government; they had learned to worship a god, and to see in him a counterpart of their tribal ruler.