class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 4]"/> the continent and the wilderness, he draws the domestic animals about him, and constitutes himself the head of a sort of brute polity. He becomes a king and father of the beasts, and by the economical arrangements which this pretension involves, advances a first step, though a low one, in civilization, which the hunter or the fisher does not attain.

And here, beyond other animals, the horse is the instrument of that civilization. It enables him to govern and to guide his sheep and cattle; it carries him to the chase, when he is tempted to it; it transports him and his from place to place; while his very locomotion and shifting location and independence of the soil define the idea, and secure the existence, both of a household and of personal property. Nor is this all which the horse does for him; it is food both in its life and in its death;—when dead, it nourishes him with its flesh, and, while alive, it supplies its milk for an intoxicating liquor which, under the name of koumiss, has from time immemorial served the Tartar instead of wine or spirits. The horse then is his friend under all circumstances, and inseparable from him; he may be even said to live on horseback, he eats and sleeps without dismounting, till the fable has been current that he has a centaur's nature, half man and half beast. Hence it was that the ancient Saxons had a horse for their ensign in war; thus it is that the Ottoman ordinances are, I believe, to this day dated from "the imperial stirrup," and the display of horsetails at the gate of the palace is the Ottoman signal of war. Thus too, as the Catholic ritual measures intervals by "a Miserere," and St Ignatius in his Exercises by "a Pater Noster," so the Turcomans and the Usbeks speak familiarly of the time of a gallop. But as to houses, on the other hand, the Tartars contemptuously called them the sepulchres of the living, and, when abroad, could hardly be persuaded to cross a threshold. Their women, indeed, and children could not live on horseback; them some kind of locomotive dwelling must receive, and a less noble animal must draw. The old historians and poets of Greece and Rome describe it, and the travellers of the middle ages repeat and enlarge the classical description of it The strangers from Europe gazed with astonishment on huge wattled houses set on wheels, and drawn by no less than twenty-two oxen.

3.

From the age of Job, the horse has been the emblem of battle; a mounted shepherd is but one remove from a knight-errant, except in the object of his excursions; and the discipline of a pastoral station from the nature of the case is not very different from that of a camp. There can be no community without order, and a community in motion demands a special kind of organization. Provision must be made for the separation, the protection, and the sustenance of men, women, and children, horses, flocks, and cattle. To march without straggling, to halt without confusion, to make good their ground, to reconnoitre neighbourhoods, to ascertain the character and capabilities of places in the distance, and to determine their future route, is to be versed in some of the most important duties of the military art. Such pastoral tribes are already an army in the field, if not as yet against any human foe, at least against the elements. They have to subdue, or to check, or to circumvent, or to endure the opposition of earth, water, and wind, in their pursuits of the mere necessaries of life. The war with wild beasts naturally follows, and then the war on their own kind. Thus when they are at length provoked or allured to direct their fury against the inhabitants of other regions, they are ready-made soldiers. They have a soldier's qualifications in their independence of soil, freedom from local ties, and practice in discipline; nay, in one respect they are superior to any troops which civilized countries can produce. One of the problems of warfare is how to feed the vast masses which its operations require; and hence it is commonly said, that a well-managed commissariat is a chief condition of victory. Few people can fight without eating;—Englishmen as little as any. I have heard of a work of a foreign officer, who took a survey of the European armies previously to the revolutionary war; in which he praised our troops highly, but said they would not be effective till they were supported by a better commissariat. Moreover, one commonly hears, that the supply of this deficiency is one of the very merits of the great Duke of Wellington. So it is with civilized races; but the Tartars, as is evident from what I have already observed, have in their wars no need of any commissariat at all; and that, not merely from the unscrupulousness of their foraging, but because they find in the instruments of their conquests the staple of their food. "Corn is a bulky and perishable commodity," says an historian;[3] "and the large magazines, which are indispensably necessary for the subsistence of civilized troops, are difficult and slow of transport." But, not to say that even their flocks and herds were fitted for rapid movement, like the nimble sheep of Wales and the wild cattle of North Britain, the Tartars could even dispense with these altogether. If straitened for provisions, they ate the chargers which carried them to battle; indeed they seemed to account their flesh a delicacy, above the reach of the poor, and in consequence were enjoying a banquet in circumstances when civilized troops would be staving off starvation. And with a view to such accidents, they have been accustomed to carry with them in their expeditions a number of supernumerary horses, which they might either ride or eat, according to the occasion. It was an additional advantage to them in their warlike movements, that they were little particular whether their food had been killed for the purpose, or had died of disease. Nor is this all: their horses' hides were made into tents and clothing, perhaps into bottles and coracles; and their intestines into bowstrings.[4]

Trained then as they are, to habits which in themselves invite to war, the inclemency of their native climate has been a constant motive for them to seek out settlements and places of sojournment elsewhere. The spacious plains, over which they roam, are either monotonous grazing lands, or inhospitable deserts, relieved with green valleys or recesses. The cold is intense in a degree of which we have no experience in England, though we lie to the north of them.[5] This arises in a measure from their distance from the sea, and again from their elevation of level, and further from the saltpetre with which their soil or their atmosphere is impregnated. The sole influence then of their fatherland, if I may apply to it such a term, is to drive its inhabitants from it to the West or to the South.

4

I have said that the geographical features of their country carry them forward in those two directions, the South and the West; not to say that the ocean forbids them going eastward, and the North does but hold out to them a climate more inclement than their own. Leaving the district of Mongolia in the furthermost East, high above the north of China, and passing through the long and broad valleys