CHINA AND ROME  THE SEE-SAW (CONTINUED)


During the time of Chinese weakness Central Asia had relapsed
from the control the great Han Wuti had imposed on it, and that
Han Suenti had maintained by his name for justice; and the Huns
had recovered their power. One wonders what these people were;
of whom we first catch sight in the reign of the Yellow Emperor,
nearly 3000 B.C.; and who do not disappear from history until
after the death of Attila. During all those three millenniums
odd they were predatory nomads, never civilized: a curse to
their betters, and nothing more. And their betters were, you may
say, every race they contacted.

It seems as if, as in the human blood, so among the races of
mankind, there were builders and destroyers. I speculate as to
the beginnings of the latter: they cannot be . . . races apart,
of some special creation;--made by demons, where it was the Gods
made men. . . . "To the Huns," says Gibbon, "a fabulous origin
was assigned worthy of their form and manners,--that the witches
of Scythia, who for their foul and deadly practices had been
driven from society, had united in the desert with infernal
spirits, and that the Huns were the offspring of this execrable
conjunction." But it seems to me that it is in times of
intensive civilization, and in the slums of great cities, that
Nature--or anti-Nature--originates noxious human species. I
wonder if their forefathers were, once on a time, the hooligans
and yeggmen of some very ancient Babylon Bowery or the East End
of some pre-Nimrodic Nineveh? Babylon was a great city,--or
there were great cities in the neighborhood of Babylon, before
the Yellow Emperor was born. One of these may have had, God
knows when, its glorious freedom-establishing revolution, its
up-fountaining of sansculottes,--patriots whose predatory
proclivities had erstwhile been checked of their free brilliance
by busy-body tyrannical police;--and then this revolution may
have been put down, and the men of the underworld who made turned
out now from their city haunts, driven into the wilderness and
the mountains,--may have taken,--would certainly have taken, one
would say,--not to any industry, (they knew none but such as are
wrought by night unlawfully in other men's houses); not to
agriculture, which has ever had, for your free spirit, something
of degradation in it;--but to pure patriotism, freedom and
liberty, as their nature was: first to cracking such desultory
cribs as offered,--knocking down defenseless wayfarers and the
like: then to bolder raidings and excursions;--until presently,
lo, they are a great people; they have ridden over all Asia like
a scirocco; they have thundered rudely at the doors of proud
princes,--troubling even the peace of the Yellow Emperor on
his throne.

Well,--but isn't the stature stunted, physical, as well as mental
and moral, when life is forced to reproduce itself, generation
after generation, among the unnatural conditions of slums and
industrialism? . . . Can you nourish men upon poisons century by
century, and expect them to retain the semblance of men?

They had bothered Han Kwang-wuti; who could do little more than
hold his own against them, and leave them to his successor to
deal with as Karma might decree. Karma, having as you might
say one watchful eye on Rome and Europe, and what need of
chastisement should arise after awhile at that western end of the
world, provided Han Mingti with this Pan Chow; who, being a
soldier of promise, was sent upon the Hun war-path forthwith.
Then the miracles began to happen. Pan Chow strolled through
Central Asia as if upon his morning's constitutional: no fuss;
no hurry; little fighting,--but what there was, remarkably
effective, one gathers. Presently he found himself on the
Caspian shore; and if he had left any Huns behind him, they were
hardly enough to do more than pick an occasional pocket. He
started out when the Roman provinces were rising to make an end
of Nero; in the last year of Domitian, from his Caspian
headquarters he determined to discover Rome; and to that end
sent an emissary down through Parthia to take ship at the port of
Babylon for the unknown West. The Parthians (who were all
against the two great empires becoming acquainted, because they
are making a good thing of it as middle-men in the Roman-Chinese
caravan trade), knew better, probably, than to oppose Pan Chow's
designs openly; but their agents haunted the quays at Babylon,
tampered with west-going skippers, and persuaded the Chinese
envoy to go no farther. But I wonder whether some impulse
achieved flowing across the world from east to west at that
time, even though its physical link or channel was thus left
incomplete? It was in that very year that Nerva re-established
constitutionalism and good government in Rome.

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