to
the Scythians," he says, "not only no European nation, but not even any
Asiatic, would be able to measure itself with them, nation with nation,
were they but of one mind." Such was the safeguard of civilization in
ancient times; in modern unhappily it has disappeared. Not unfrequently,
since the Christian era, the powers of the North have been under one
sovereign, sometimes even for a series of years; and have in consequence
been brought into combined action against the South; nay, as time has
gone on, they have been thrown into more and more formidable
combinations, with more and more disastrous consequences to its
prosperity. Of these northern coalitions or Empires, there have been
three, nay five, which demand our especial attention both from their
size and their historical importance.

The first of these is the Empire of the Huns, under the sovereignty of
Attila, at the termination of the Roman Empire; and it began and ended
in himself. The second is in the time of the Crusades, when the Moguls
spread themselves over Europe and Asia under Zingis Khan, whose power
continued to the third generation, nay, for two centuries, in the
northern parts of Europe. The third outbreak was under Timour or
Tamerlane, a century and more before the rise of Protestantism, when the
Mahometan Tartars, starting from the basin of the Aral and the fertile
region of the present Bukharia, swept over nearly the whole of Asia
round about, and at length seated themselves in Delhi in Hindostan,
where they remained in imperial power till they succumbed to the English
in the last century. Then come the Turks, a multiform and reproductive
race, varied in its fortunes, complicated in its history, falling to
rise again, receding here to expand there, and harassing and oppressing
the world for at least a long 800 years. And lastly comes the Russian
Empire, in which the Tartar element is prominent, whether in its pure
blood or in the Slavonian approximation, and which comprises a
population of many millions, gradually moulded into one in the course of
centuries, ever growing, never wavering, looking eagerly to the South
and to an unfulfilled destiny, and possessing both the energy of
barbarism in its subjects and the subtlety of civilization in its
rulers. The two former of these five empires were Pagan, the two next
Mahometan, the last Christian, but schismatic; all have been persecutors
of the Church, or, at least, instruments of evil against her