impetus
from the continent. About that time, too, Siam rose to power; and
soon afterwards T'ang Taitsong imposed civilization on Tibet.--So
there you have the 'Altaic' Race; Altaic, as Mr. Dooley is
Anglo-Saxon. To speak of them as 'Mongolian' or 'Mongoloid,' as
is often done, is about as sensible as to speak of Europeans and
Americans as 'Hunnoid,' because the Huns once conquered part of
Europe. It conveys derogation--which Altaic does not.
I have compared their achievement with that of the West: we have
one whole manvantara and a pralaya of theirs to judge by, as
against two fragments of western manvantaras with the pralaya
intervening. It is not much; and we should remember that there
are cycles and epicycles; and that Japan, or old China herself,
within our own lifetime, may give the lie to everything.
But from the evidence at hand one is inclined to draw this
conclusion: That in the Far East you have a great section of
humanity in reserve;--in a sense, in a backwater of evolution:
nearer the Spirit, farther from the hot press and conflict of the
material world;--even in its times of highest activity, not in
the van of the down-rush of Spirit into matter, as the western
races have been in theirs;--but held apart to perform a different
function. As if the Crest-Wave of Evolution needed what we might
call Devachanic cycles of incarnation, and found them there
during the Altaic manvantaras of manifestation. Not that their
history has been empty of tragedies; it has been very full of
them; and wars--some eight or nine Napoleons in their day have
sat on the Dragon Throne. But still, the worlds of poetry,
delight, wonder, have been nearer and more accessible to the
Chinaman, in his great ages, than to us in ours; as they have
been, and probably are now, nearer to the Japanese. And I do
not know how that should be, unless the Law had taken those
Atlanteans away, kept them apart from the main stream--not
fighting the main battle, but in reserve--for purposes that the
long m