reviews and the physical exercises of the soldiers as "an impropriety," it
will be allowed that Taitsong showed great moral courage and surmounted
some peculiar difficulties in carrying out his scheme for forming a
regular army. He overcame all obstacles, and gathered under his banner an
army formidable by reason of its efficiency and equipment, as well as for
its numerical strength.

Having acquired what he deemed the means to settle it, Taitsong resolved
to grapple boldly with the ever-recurring danger from the Tartars, Under
different names, but ever with the same object, the tribes of the vast
region from Corea to Koko Nor had been a trouble to the Chinese
agriculturist and government from time immemorial. Their sole ambition and
object in life had been to harry the lands of the Chinese, and to bear
back to their camps the spoils of cities. The Huns had disappeared, but in
their place had sprung up the great power of the Toukinei or Turks, who
were probably the ancestors of the Ottomans. With these turbulent
neighbors, and with others of different race but of the same disposition
on the southern frontier, Taitsong was engaged in a bitter and arduous
struggle during the whole of his life; and there can be little or no doubt
that he owed his success to the care he bestowed on his army. The Great
Wall of Tsin Hwangti had been one barrier in the path of these enemies,
but, held by a weak and cowardly garrison, it had proved inadequate for
its purpose. Taitsong supplied another and a better defense in a
consistent and energetic policy, and in the provision of a formidable and
confident army.

The necessity for this military reform was clearly shown by the experience
of his first campaign with these implacable enemies, when, in the year of
his accession and before his organization had been completed, a horde of
these barbarians broke into the empire and carried all before them, almost