against the Caucasus
have rightly been described as protracted sieges. The heroic history of
Switzerland in relation to its neighbors has been that of a skillfully
conducted defense, both military and diplomatic. The territory of China
is dotted over with detached groups of aborigines, who have survived
wherever a friendly mountain has offered them an asylum. Variously known
as Lolos, Mantze or Miaotse, they have preserved everywhere a
semi-independence in pathless mountains, whither Chinese troops do not
dare to follow them;[1402] but the more numerous and patient Chinese
agriculturalists are in many sections slowly encroaching upon their
territories, driving them farther and farther into the recesses of their
highlands. The same process goes on in Formosa, where the Chinese have
gradually forced the native Malays into mountain fastnesses among the
peaks which rise to 14,000 feet (4500 meters). There, split up by
internecine feuds into numberless clans and tribes, ignorant of one
another's languages, raiding each other's territories and the coastal
plains tilled by Chinese colonists, they await their doom, while the
piedmont zone between has already given birth to a typical border race
of halfbreeds, more Chinese than Malay.[1403]

[Sidenote: Isolation and retardation of mountain regions.]

"To have and to hold" is the motto of the mountains. Like remote
islands, they are often museums of social antiquities. Antiquated races
and languages abound. The mountaineers of the Southern Appalachians
speak to-day an eighteenth century English. Their literature is the
ballad poetry of old England and Scotland, handed down from parent to
child. Clan feuds settle questions of justice, as in the Caucasus and
the Apennines. Religion is orthodox to the last degree, sectarianism is
rigid, and Joshua's power over the sun remains in some lonely valleys
undiscounted.[1404] These are all the marks of isolation and retardation
which appear in similar environments elsewhere. Especially religious
dogmas tend to show in mountains a tenacity of life impossible in the
plains. The Kafirs, inhabiting the high Hindu Kush Mountains of
Badakshan, and apparently of Pelasgic, early Greek, or Persian origin,
have a religion blended of paganism, Zoroastrianism and Brahmanism.[1405]
One intruding faith has been unable to dislodge the previous incumbent,
so the three have combined. The great historical destiny of the small,
barren, isolated Judean platea