be and can only be. I feel that something will come--I even know it. I
have been talking vaguely about this and about that; have begun
preparing colours, as it were, in the usual careless fashion without
explanations or digressions--until you possibly wonder what it is all
about. For you have not yet seen the barbaric frame which will hedge
in the whole--the barbaric frame in all truth, since it is gradually
closing in on us on every side until, like some mediaeval torture-room,
we may have the very life crushed out of us by a cruel pressure. But
enough of fine phrases; while there is time let me write something.

Peking is at least two thousand years old. Several hundred years
before Christ, they say a Chinese kingdom made the present site the
capital, and began building the outer walls; but the Chinese, the
gentler Chinese who had all military spirit crushed out of them five
thousand years before by having to tramp from Mesopotamia to where
they now are in the eighteen provinces, these Chinese, I say, never
had in Peking anything but a temporary trysting-place. For Peking
stands for a sort of blatant barbarianism, mounted on sturdy ponies,
pouring in from the far North; and the history of Peking can only be
said to begin when Mongol-Tartars, who have always been freebooters
and robbers, forced their way in and imposed their militarism on a
nation of shopkeepers and collectors of taxes.

Even before the Christian era, the Chinese chronicles tell of the
pressure of these fierce barbarians from the North being so much felt
and their raids so constant, that Chi Huang-ti, the ruler of the
powerful Chinese feudatory state which laid the foundations of the
present Empire of China, began to build the Great Wall of China and to
fortify old Peking as the only means of stopping these living waves.
The Great Wall took ages to build, for the Northern barbarians always