have done—and thus the checkered history of Central Asia and India has been written for to ! these many centuries.'
Again we rumble over black sands, leaving the gardens and groves of Bokhara behind us. We have seen the city as Alexander saw it, save that it was larger, I think, in his day, and perhaps there were no cotton-fields round about. Now we shall see Samarcand—glorious from Tamerlane's day--notable indeed when, as Marcando, it was destroyed by his great Greek predecessor. A little farther he marched north-eastward, but Samarcand may fairly be said to be the proper monument of Alexander's extremest reach in this direction, and only the Czar's recent conquests have ever carried European arms farther into Asia's heart. Here also may be marked the western verge of China's power, whose long arm once reached—only to be withdrawn—toward the great monuments which Tamerlane had left. This conqueror, who was of the Mongolian, virile strain,
The vast development of irrigation work now progressing in the far Western States of America will inexorably produce, generations hence, a type far less hardy in mental constitution than that which we now present. Were it not that these new regions are part of a vast country chiefly filled with people who must fight uncertainties, and were it not that no great neighbour lies close to their irrigated field, we might well hesitate to produce the conditions which shall, in turn, be the source of enormous wealth and little virility. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Bengal, Middle China, Mexico ! Since the first ditch was dug in your yielding soils—how many billions of slaves have been engendered, fed, and reclaimed in death by your thirsting sands ! How many fretting tyrants have come down, with the fresh mountain dews upon their brows, to riot in your slave-breeding plains, and fatally to breed a later race of slaves, whose necks have also bent to later mountain men!
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