In Russia, unfortunately, the onslaught against iniquitous human laws is overcarried into a blind charge against Nature’s laws, which no revolution can repeal. The protest against dire artificial abuses is mixed with a rebellion against the curse of Adam. It is the fearful fact of life that the destiny of the majority is anxiety, dependence for daily bread on other men, grinding incessant toil remunerated by a bare livelihood, a barring-back from the fullest personal capacity and possibilities through poverty, parentage, environment, and lack of opportunity. The forces of Nature and primal competition put so many limitations upon every one’s action that it is hard to say which are due to the tyranny of men, which are the handicaps born of the nature of things. The cry for deliverance is rising equally in the workhouses of Scotland, in France, where thirty-five per cent of the land is owned by great proprietors, in the slums of New York City, and in the rice-fields of Japan. A government under the present system can but do its best to develop men’s capacities, and to give them a fair deal. All that the best of modern societies has succeeded yet in securing to the mass of mankind is the chance to get their sons the education which will enable them to vanquish some of the limitations, security for the person, and protection from robbery of the cruder sort. Capacity and opportunity can come but by slow degrees. When one sees the numbers and the types in the villages, men of latent capacities undoubtedly, but swamped by the spirit of _nietchevo_ and with all their enterprise sapped in the stagnant communism of the Mir, he realizes the futility of a sudden change and the hopelessness of germinating by political pellet the leaven of progress in the hundred and forty millions. Rulers may be changed by revolution. But the real quickening of the people to their great future must come and is coming by the slow, sure way of evolution. VIII THE STORY OF THE HORDES Among people so peaceful and subdued as are the latter-day Mongols, it is hard to realize that the race has had a past which in tradition at least goes back to the infancy of history. According to legend, the Chinese, the first reputed offspring of the Mongols, preceded by three hundred years Egypt’s earliest dynasty. They antedate Abraham’s assigned epoch by twenty-six generations. They claim to have continued before Marathon a longer time than has elapsed from the foundation of Rome to our own era. Yet they yield not even to the Romans preëminence of arms, for they won and ruled an empire in extent and population the greatest that has ever existed. Mongols have led the world’s mightiest armies; their hosts have carried the ox-hide banners over every great European state but Spain and England, and into every Asian country except Japan.