Kin-whom, by the by, the Celestials had ridiculed and despised as northern barbarians-to destroy the declining Kitan power of the Pohai Kingdom.

This was not the first time the foxy method of Chinese diplomacy played such tricks. It was one of the barefaced examples of it, however. Long before this the Chinese had entered into the intimate alliance of brother states with the Kitan under blood oath. It was due to this alliance with the Kitan that China had escaped invasion from the northwest and otherwise had gained a great deal of prestige and actual advantage. Now dastardly betrayal of the brother state did not seem to weigh heavily on the Sung Dynasty.

The Chinese secret understanding with the Kin was that they would co-operate in destroying the Kitan. The bargain was that China was to get the seventeen prefectures in the Liao valley, but under no condition were the Kin to push their conquering march south of the Eternal Wall. Because the Chinese exacted this promise from the Kin not to march south of the Wall, the Chinese on their part agreed to take the southern capital of the Kitan state. But a battlefield is not always as smooth as a Chinese diplomat's tongue. When the Kin forces made good their part of the bargain the Chinese were found powerless to take the southern capital of the Kitans according to promise.

The Chinese, therefore, had to break their part of the bargain and ask, demand hysterically, the immediate aid of the Kin, who marched south to assist the Chinese in taking the southern capital city. In other words, the Chinese were forced to invite the Kin to make the southern entry which it was particularly stipulated that the northern barbarians should never do. The Chinese, not for the first time, became the victims of their own double-crossing cleverness.

In an incredibly short time the Kin forces drove every

thing before them in their southern descent. They captured the capital of the Sung emperor and made their victorious way across the great Yangtze River into Kiangning and Hanchow. The Kin were the masters of the northern half of the Chinese Empire. The Kin capital was moved from near the present city of Harbin south to Peking.

Here was the first chapter in the "barbarization" of the Central Bloom. Here out in the Far East the Kin warriors were tracing the same historic trail which the Visigoths and the Vandals had tread into the Eternal City some seven hundred years before them. In the China of the Sung Dynasty the continental culture of Asia had come to its apogee. Last year I wandered through the rooms of the Palace in the Forbidden City of Peking where the art treasures of the Imperial collection were displayed. There were many works of art from the Sung Dynasty there. The perfection achieved by them was nothing short of miraculous. It was difficult indeed to conceive how the ablest artists of these our boasted days can come within a hundred miles of the pictorial and the glyptic art attained by the craftsmen of the Sung period whose handiwork was before us.

But did the Kin "barbarize" the Sung culture?

Here History has a curious and happy surprise: it was the Sung culture of China which conquered the conquerors. Within less than thirty-eight years, it was said, the Kin conquerors actually forgot even their own primitive language. They surrendered body and soul to the soft lure and the glittering magic of the Chinese culture. The ease and luxury of the Sung civilization softened the hardy warriors of the victor race with astounding rapidity. In little more than ten years after the founding of the Kingdom of Kin they had brought the northern half of China under their banners. And almost in as short a time they were completely overwhelmed by the deadly

effects of the soft silks, the rich foods, and the excesses of the Sung culture; so much so that when Genghis Khan and his rugged hordes rose in the up-country of the . Onon River, the once sturdy ranks of Kin warriors were laid down as a ripened field.

It was once more the slimy, double-crossing diplomacy of the Chinese that brought about the destruction of the Kingdom of Kin. The Chinese entered again into a secret alliance, this time with Genghis Khan against the Kin, precisely as they had joined the Kin to stab the Pohai in the back. The advance of the Mongol conqueror swept Manchuria and crushed the Kingdom of Kin in the dust. That did not help the Chinese much, however. The same Mongol hordes trampled China under the same old iron heels quite as thoroughly as they trampled Manchuria. When Kublai Khan established himself at Peking in 1264, the far-sung Dynasty of Sung was no more. It had gone its way to join the memory of the Kingdom of Kin in the common grave of dead empires.

The Mongols gave the Chinese the first foreign dynasty in their history-the Yuan Dynasty. The Mongol Empire of the Great Kublai Khan was the nearest approach to a World Empire known to human memory. It turned the most ambitious achievements of European empire merchants, such as Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon, into a collection of childish laughs by comparison. But it, too, like all other human bubbles, went rather quickly. A young bonze-that is to say, a priest -poor and plebeian, drove the Mongols out of China and put it once more under a Chinese dynasty, the Ming.

The greatest of all conquerors defeated, subjugated, trampled down the men of the Kin; but the Manchu tribesmen were never annihilated. In the days of the Ming Dynasty in China the posterity of the men who had carried the name of Kin over the northern half