d to the
soil. They still had the staple of barbarism in them, but so polished
were they for children of a Tartar stock, that they are called in
history the White Huns of Sogdiana. They took to commerce, they took to
literature; and when, at the end of a few centuries, the Turks, as I
have already described, spread abroad from the iron works and forges of
Mount Altai to Kamtchatka, the Volga, and the Indus, and overran these
White Huns in the course of their victories, they could find no parties
more fitted than them to act as their diplomatists and correspondents in
their negotiations with the Romans.

Such was the influence of Sogdiana on the Huns; is it wonderful that it
exerted some influence on the Turks, when they in turn got possession of
it? History justifies the anticipation; as the Huns of the second or
third centuries settled around the Aral, so the Turks in the course of
the sixth or seventh centuries overran them, and descended down to the
modern Affghanistan and the Indus; and as the fair region and its
inhabitants, which they crossed and occupied, had begun at the former
era the civilization of the first race of Tartars, so did it at the
latter era begin the education of the second.

7.

2. But a more direct and effective instrument of social education was
accorded to the Turks on their occupation of Sogdiana. You may recollect
I spoke of their first empire as lasting for only 200 years,[33] about
90 of which measures the period of that occupation. Their power then
came to an end; what was the consequence of their fall? were they driven
out of Sogdiana again? were they massacred? did they take refuge in the
mountains or deserts? were they reduced to slavery? Thus we are
introduced to a famous passage of history: the case was as follows:--At
the very date at which Heraclius called the Turcomans into Georgia, at
the very date when their Eastern brethren crossed the northern border of
Sogdiana, an event of most momentous import had occurred in the South. A
new religion had arisen in Arabia. The impostor Mahomet, announcing
himself the Prophet of God, was writing the pages of that book, and
moulding the faith of that people, which was to subdue half the known
world. The Turks passed the Jaxartes southward in A.D. 626; just four
years before Mahomet had assumed the royal dignity, and just six years
after, on his death, his followers began the conquest of the Persian
Empire. In the course of 20 years they