The region occupied by the Slavi, from the Volga, along the Don (or Tanais) and the Danube, was the highway of the various branches of the Mongolian, Finnic, Uralian, Scythic, or Turanian family, in their invasions. All these old and classic denominations for the inhabitants of Asia, north of Baktria and the Himalayan mountains, are now merged in that of Tartars. So, in remote antiquity, Tartar Scythians, mixed with Slavi, dwelt on the Tanais, north of the Danube, and very likely on the plains east of the Dnieper. Other invasions of Asiatic Tartars, as Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Maghyars, Petschenegues, Polovtzy, Ugri, Turks and Tartars proper--doubtless early familiarized the primitive agricultural Slavi with the horrors of war, oppression and enslavement. And among the slaves which, under the name of Scythians, the Phenicians and Greeks trafficked in, there were doubtless some of Slavic origin. It was very late when the Slavic race began to take part in the European or Western movement. Neither in the remotest times, nor in the great Western impulse during the early part of the Christian era, do the Slavi appear as invaders or conquerors on their own account. For many centuries, the Slavi in their relations with other races and nations, must rather be considered a passive or recipient than an expanding or creative race. For these reasons slavery does not seem to have been indigenous in those parts of the Slavic family which constituted independent groups, at the time when the race first dawns upon the horizon of history. The Emperor Mauritius, in the sixth century, in giving an account of the defensive warfare of the Slavi, says that when they made prisoners in war, they kept them as such for a year, and afterward left it to their own choice either to settle among them or return to their native country. Thus, at an epoch when perpetual war raged all over the world, when from time immemorial prisoners of war everywhere formed the bulk of the slaves for domestic labor and for traffic, the Slavi alone were humane toward their captives. The Slavi, however, became diseased by slavery, partly from external infection--partly from the internal development of events similar in character to those pointed out in other nations as the origin of slavery; and having once taken hold of the nation, it worked in a similar way as in other lands. For here again we see the ever recurring analogy between the origin, nature, and workings of social and bodily diseases--the same everywhere, under the equator as around the pole.