THE BARBARIAN WORLD 57 camp and grazing area. A number of these camps to- gether formed a cjan, and there might be further union into tribes and peoples. Occasionally some great conqueror, called a khagan or khan, would arise at the head of a vast horde made up of various tribes and peoples. The life of the wife or wives of the nomad was very hard, and he was cruel to his slaves or to the wretched communi- ties of subject serfs whom he forced to cultivate for him the few fertile spots that existed in the region over which he wandered. Family life was not nearly so pure as among the Germans. Nor was cleanliness at all esteemed. The new- born babe, it is true, was washed daily in the open air for the space of six weeks regardless of whether it was summer or winter; but these forty-two baths had to last it for the rest of its life. The smoke in the tent, however, served as a disinfectant; and the life that the nomad led soon trained him to endure hunger, thirst, and almost any hardship. His horses were even tougher than himself. Had this disgusting race, which Jacked any legal or political institutions as well as any vestiges of culture, re- mained in its own unattractive region, we might A stan( ji n g well pass it by. But the nomads did not limit menace to themselves to stealing one another's herds or fighting among themselves for the best pasturage and winter camping-stations. They were continually plundering and devastating the adjoining regions, or enslaving the neigh- boring peoples and reducing them, too, to a low state of civilization. On their swift and hardy horses they could cover hundreds of miles in a few days, and either take the enemy by surprise, or overwhelm him by the fury of their onslaught, or evade him and reduce to a wilderness the country he was trying to defend. It was as difficult to stand against them as to fly before them. Moreover, at intervals in the course of history, owing either to changes of climate that lessened their pasturage and decimated their herds, or to overpopulation, or to defeat incurred in their struggles among themselves, a great horde would entirely detach itself from its native habitat and sweep onward in a wild
