THE TARTAR AND THE TURK

You may think I have been very long in coming to the Turks, and indeed I have been longer than I could have wished; but I have thought it necessary 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 tbeir 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.

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 but 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 developement peculiar to Tartars, we find them 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.