kept cunningly slipping round the uncompleted ends, and the Mings, the
last purely Chinese sovereigns to reign in Peking, actually added
three hundred miles to this colossal structure in the year 1547, or
nearly two thousand years after the first bricks had been cemented.
That shows you what people they were, and what the contest was.

For hundreds of years the war with the semi-nomadic hordes of the
North continued. Sometimes isolated bands of Tartars broke through the
Chinese defence and enslaved the people, but never for very long;
instinctively by the use of every stratagem the cleverer Chinese
compassed their destruction. While Attila and his Huns were ravaging
Europe in the fifth century, other _Hwingnoo_, or Huns, veritable
scourges of God, forced their way into China. In this fashion, while
China itself was passing through a dozen different forms of
government, and had a dozen capitals--sometimes owning allegiance to a
single Emperor such as those of the T'ang dynasty who added Canton and
the Cantonese to the Empire, sometimes split into petty kingdoms such
as the "Ten States"--this curious frontier war continued and was
handed down from father to son. Chinese industrialism and socialism,
content to accept whatever form of government Chinese strong men
succeeded in imposing, instinctively kept up an iron resistance to
these Northern invaders. Such was the fear inspired, that a proverb
coined thousands of years ago is still current. "Do not fear the cock
from the South, but the wolf from the North," it says. Everybody is
always quoting this saying. I have heard it twice to-day.

It was not until the tenth century that the Tartars finally broke
through and established themselves definitively on Chinese soil. The
Khitans, a Manchu-Tartar people, springing from Central Manchuria,
then captured Peking and made it their capital. The Khitans were a