arts, it seems the mother of virtues. Buddhism, powerful for a time in the land of its birth, was powerless to uplift the old Ganges valley, full of fixed tradition, sacred literature and established arts. So, in the great middle plains of China, it became but a quiet partner with Confucianism to steady, not to revolutionise the spirits of a race which had already lived and died and written and built and sowed and reaped through the centuries. But in the newly colonised Ceylon, in Burmah, in rough Western China, in lost Tibet—here it became a passion, a propelling force, formative of societies in their pliant youth. Assuming merely a • substance of human nature, in the way of rough mountain-men, grazing their flocks and tilling their difficult, terraced fields, we view this force with its powerful adjunct force, knowledge of the arts, acting to produce what may be taken almost as the birth of a people. In these cases the creed, which immediately has its votaries organised as such, thus obtaining interested spokesmen, is proclaimed as the sole flame of inspiration ; yet, truly, it may often be seen that the spirit of wild men cannot accept peace doctrines ; they burn with zeal for the personality involved in the creed, their intellects are tremendously stimulated by the excitement of "conversion," and, above all, by the mental food contained in the newly acquired arts; but the inconsiderate selfishness of youth is still in their hearts. Hence they may be seen—Goths in Europe, Tibetans in Asia, crying out the names of the two great Compassionate Ones, Christ and Buddha, while they rush to battle, while they split the heads of children, while in blood they cement
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