Note 393 — Chapter VII · —Geographical Boundaries

China has fringed her western boundaries with quasi-independent tribes whose autonomy is assured and whose love of freedom is a guarantee of guerilla warfare against any invader from Central Asia. The Mantze tribes in the mountain borders of Sze-Chuan province have their own rulers and customs, and only pay tribute to China.393 The highlands of Kansu are sprinkled with such independent tribes. Sometimes a definite bargain is entered into—a self-governing military organization and a yearly sum of money in return for defence of the frontier. The Mongol tribes of the Charkar country or "Borderland" just outside the Great Wall northwest of Pekin constitute a paid army of the Emperor to guard the frontier against the Khalkhas of northern Mongolia, the tribe of Genghis Khan.394 Similarly, semi-independent military communities for centuries made a continuous line of barriers against the raids of the steppe nomads along the southern and southeastern frontiers of Russia, from the Dnieper to the Ural rivers. There were the "Free Cossacks," located on the debatable ground between the fortified frontier of the agricultural steppe and marauding Crimean Tartars. Nominally subjects of the Czar, they obeyed him when it suited them, and on provocation rose in open revolt. The Cossacks of the Dnieper, who to the middle of the seventeenth century formed Poland's border defence against Tartar invasion, were jealous of any interference with their freedom. They lent their services on occasions to the Sultan of Turkey, and even to the Crimean Khan; and finally, in 1681, attached themselves and their territory to Russia.395 Here speaks that spirit of defection which is the natural product of the remoteness and independence of frontier life. The Russians also attached to themselves the Kalmucks located between the lower Volga and Don, and used them as a frontier defence against their Tartar and Kirghis neighbors.396 In this case, as in that of the Cossacks and the Charkars of eastern Mongolia, we have a large body of men living in the same arid grassland, leading the same pastoral life, and carrying on the same kind of warfare as the nomadic marauders whose pillaging, cattle-lifting raids they aim to suppress. The imperial orders to the Charkars limit them strictly to the life of herdmen, with the purpose of maintaining their mobility and military efficiency. So in olden times, for the Don Cossacks agriculture was prohibited on pain of death, lest they should lose their taste for the live-stock booty of a punitive raid. A still earlier instance of this utilization of border nomads is found in the first century after Christ, when the Romans made the Arabian tribe of Beni Jafre, dwelling on the frontier of Syria, the warders of the eastern marches of the Empire.397