Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 3 (1897).djvu/104

 84 THE DECLINE AND FALL [ZenghlB] Decline and fall of the Hung submitted to a more permanent disj^ace. They too hastily confessed the insufficiency of arms and fortifications. They were too easily convinced that, while the blazing signals announced on every side the approach of the Huns, the Chinese troops, who slept with the helmet on their head and the cuirass on their back, were destroyed by the incessant labour of ineffectual marches.2^ ^ regular payment of money and silk was stipulated as the condition of a temporary and precarious peace ; and the wretched expedient of disguising a real tribute under the names of a gift or a subsidy wjis practised by the emperors of China, as well as by those of Rome. But there still remained a more disgraceful article of tribute, which violated the sacred feelings of humanity and nature. The hardships of the savage life, which destroy in their infoncy the children who are bom with a less healthy and robust constitution, introduce a re- markable disproportion between the numbers of the two sexes. The Tartars are an ugly, and even deformed race ; and, while they consider their own women as the instruments of domestic labour, their desires, or rather their appetites, are directed to the enjoyment of more elegant beauty. A select band of the fairest rriaidens of China was annually devoted to the rude em- braces of the Huns ; 3>i and the alliance of the haughty Tanjous was secured by their marriage with the genuine, or adopted, daughters of the Imperial family, which vainly attempted to escape the sacrilegious pollution. The situation of these un- happy victims is described in the verses of a Chinese princess, who laments that she had been condemned by her parents to a distant exile, under a Barbarian husband ; who complains that sour milk was her only drink, raw flesh her only food, a tent her only palace ; and who" expresses, in a strain of pathetic simplicity, the natural wish that she were transformed into a bird, to fly back to her dear country ; the object of her tender and perpetual regret. ^'^ The conquest of China has been twice achieved by the pastoral tribes of the North : the forces of the Huns were not MSee a free and ample memorial presented by a Mandarin to the e Venti f Wen Ti] (before Christ 180-157) in Duhalde (toni. 11. p. 412-456); emperor Venti I wen iijioeiore v_ iinsi loo-iy/; m i^u..ci.v^v- j>v..... ... f. ~f.-^ — i}i^°">^ collection of State papers marked with the red pencil by Kanihi himself (p. 384- 612). Another memorial from the minister of war (Kang Mou, t. 11. p. 555) supplies some curious circumstances of the manners of the Huns. «5 A supply of women is mentioned as a customary article of treaty and tribute (Hist, de la conquCte de la Chine par les Tartares Mantcheoux, torn. 1. p. 186, 187, with the note of the editor). 37 De Guignes, Hist, des Huns, torn. ii. p. 62.