but they were of practically only one
form of activity; and although usually this set in motion other kinds
of activities, such was not always the case. The great religious
movements have been the pre-eminent examples of this type. But they
are not the only ones. Such peoples as the Mongols and the
Phoenicians, at almost opposite poles of cultivation, have represented
movements in which one element, military or commercial, so
overshadowed all other elements that the movement died out chiefly
because it was one-sided. The extraordinary outburst of activity among
the Mongols of the thirteenth century was almost purely a military
movement, without even any great administrative side; and it was
therefore well-nigh purely a movement of destruction. The individual
prowess and hardihood of the Mongols, and the perfection of their
military organization, rendered their armies incomparably superior to
those of any European, or any other Asiatic, power of that day. They
conquered from the Yellow Sea to the Persian Gulf and the Adriatic;
they seized the Imperial throne of China; they slew the Caliph in
Bagdad; they founded dynasties in India. The fanaticism of
Christianity and the fanaticism of Mohammedanism were alike powerless
against them. The valor of the bravest fighting men in Europe was
impotent to check them. They trampled Russia into bloody mire beneath
the hoofs of their horses; they drew red furrows of destruction across
Poland and Hungary; they overthrew with ease any force from western
Europe that dared encounter them. Yet they had no root of permanence;
their work was mere evil while it lasted, and it did not last long;
and when they vanished they left hardly a trace behind them. So the
extraordinary Phoenician civilization was almost purely a mercantile,
a business civilization, and though it left an impress on the life
that came after, this impress was faint indeed compared to that left,
for instance, by the Greeks with their many-sided development. Yet the
Greek civilization itself fell, because this many-sided development
became too exclusively one of intellect, at the expense of character,
at the expense of the fundamental qualities which fit men to govern
both themselves and others. When the Greek lost the sterner virtues,
when his soldiers lost the fighting edge, and his statesmen grew
corrupt, while the people became a faction-torn and pleasure-loving
rabble, then the doom of Greece was at hand, and not all th