It would be a great error, however, to suppose that this vast empire is now stooping irretrievably to a fall. The whole tenor of its past history forbids the supposition. Again and again has it reformed itself;—again and again has it passed through the purifying furnace of suffering and convulsion, and re-emerged firm as before. Its periodic convulsions are the healthy efforts of nature to throw off the corruptions which ease engenders in the system; and however much temporary suffering may attend the present, like every other of its score of preceding revolutions, the resultant good will ultimately atone for all. China will never fall. Its homogeneousness, and the unconquerable vastness of its population, endow it with an earthly immortality. We have said that it lacks the variety of Europe; but in that variety, be it noted, there lurks political weakness, as much as intellectual strength. Every unit of Chinese society is homogeneous. The whole population are _one_—in blood, sentiments, and language;—and hence it contains none of those discordant elements, those unwillingly-yoked parts, which proved the destruction of the old “universal empires,” and which are destined ere long to annihilate the present territorial system of Europe. China, in fact, has ever been, and is, what European Germany and Slavonia, and every other great State of the future will be—a _Race-Empire_;—and therefore indestructible. The Monguls may reign in it for eighty years, or the Mantchoos for two hundred,—and even then only by adopting the political and social institutions of the natives. But as time runs on, the wheel ever turns; one after another the foreign hosts are chased from the land, and a native dynasty is destined still to wield the sceptre of the Flowery Land.