Machine summary:
But those among their tribes who did not perish in the course of their migrations, those who, after an excessively hard and cruel life, succeeded in opening for themselves an access to more habitable regions, whether in China or India, Persia: Asia Minor, or Europe, such as the Hungarians and the Finns, trans• formed themselves into civilized nations and produced great men, great thinkers, great artists, and great organizers.
For centuries the Turco-Mongolian tribes had ridden across the steppes of Central Asia in search of pasture land, tearing each other to pieces, over• turning states and peoples on their road, lending an absent ear to the preaching of Buddhist missionaries who came to convert Turkistan, or to the N estorians bringing their Asiatic form of Christianity, who had almost succeeded in triumphing in Central Asia, when Islam appeared upon the world-stage.
national consciousness existed only in a primitive form, among the Turco-Monogolian tribes who venerated the Grey Wolf and the Hind of Light as the legend of their common origin, among those ignorant races accustomed to a hard life in which individuals did not count, but perished by hundreds of thousands in virtue of a decree of Nature,-for in Asia, Nature is sometimes harsher than man,-among those starving mountaineers who descended from the Altai and the high tableland of Pamir to escape from death by famine, twelve centuries after Buddha, the voice of human frater• nity was raised by Islam, crying : " This only is the road to salvation.