From the series of dry facts just given, we arrive at the following definition of China and its civilization: As the Roman Empire was a great temporary aggregation of matured Caucasian humanity, surrounded by and shading off into Caucasian barbarism, so China, a country more extensive than all Europe, and inhabited by a population of more than 300,000,000, is an aggregation of matured Mongolian humanity surrounded by Mongolian barbarism. The difference is this, that while the Roman Empire was only one of several successive aggregations of the Caucasian race, each on an entirely different basis, the Chinese empire has been one permanent exhibition of the only form of civilization possible among the Mongolians. The Jew, the Greek, the Roman, the Frenchman, the German, the Englishman――these are all types of the matured Caucasian character; but a fully-developed Mongolian has but one type――the Chinese. Chinese history does not exhibit a progress of the Mongolian man through a series of stages; it exhibits only a uniform duration of one great civilized Mongolian empire, sometimes expanding so as to extend itself into the surrounding Mongolian barbarism, sometimes contracted by the pressure of that barbarism, sometimes disturbed by infusions of the barbaric element, sometimes shattered within itself by the operation of individual Chinese ambition, but always retaining its essential character. True, in such a vast empire, difference of climate, etc., must give rise to specific differences, so that a Chinese of the north-east is not the same as a Chinese of the south-west; true, also, the Japanese civilization seems to exist as an alternative between which and the Chinese, Providence might share the Mongolian part of our species, were it to remain unmixed; still the general remark remains undeniable, that from the extremest antiquity to the present day, Mongolian humanity has been able to cast itself but into one essential civilized type. It is an object of peculiar interest, therefore, to us who belong to the multiform and progressive Caucasian race, to obtain a distinct idea of the nature of that permanent form of civilization out of which our Mongolian brothers have never issued, and apparently never wish to issue. Each of our readers being a civilized Caucasian, may be supposed to ask, ‘What sort of a human being is a civilized Mongolian?’ A study of the Chinese civilization would answer this question. Not so easy would it be for a Chinese to return the compliment, confused as he would be by the multiplicity of the types which the Caucasian man has assumed――from the ancient Arab to the modern Anglo-American.