the littleness of man), and a lack of originality which hindered the construction of freely-borrowed ideas into new forms of higher relation. In general, therefore, the foundations of the national character of the Ottomans were laid in the early days, in a body of ideas which was passed down continuously from man to man, not so much through blood-relationship as through willing acceptance or enforced adoption. The nature of a Tatar nation in the steppe lands, manifesting many of the elements mentioned above, is extremely significant as foreshadowing some features of the Ottoman government. A Tatar nation was a voluntary association, independent of kinship, formed about a promising leader, and interested in war and conquest; thus it might grow with extreme rapidity until the geographical extent of its dominion would be marvellous. The empire of the _Tu-kiu_, for example, gathered in about twenty-five years after its foundation territories which reached from China proper to the confines of the Byzantine Empire. The leader of such a nation maintained his control by the right voluntarily given him to punish treason and conspiracy by death;[23] when his controlling hand grew weak, the nation went to pieces. “A Turkish tribe could maintain a political organization and a compact grouping only by war; without benefits from pillage and tributes, it would be obliged to dissolve and to disperse by clans, whose fractions would group themselves anew, and form another nation about the strongest man.... In regard to empires like those of the Huns, or the Turks, military associations without ethnic bonds, one cannot say that they dissolve; they disband. Reversing the custom of other peoples, with the Turks it is the king who feeds his people, who clothes them, who pays them.”[24] Add to this system a loyalty to a hereditary leader which makes the bonds of union permanent, and the description would apply fairly well to the growing Ottoman nation. A passage from the _Kudatku Bilik_ applies yet more closely, since it shows a military government in the midst of a subject population:[25]— “In order to hold a land one needs troops and men; In order to keep troops one must divide out property; In order to have property one needs a rich people; Only laws create the riches of a people: If one of these be lacking all four are lacking; Where all four are lacking, the dominion goes to pieces.”