The grand results of all these magnificent changes have accrued to the benefit of nations as such. All the revolutions of the past have resulted in the building of empires and the dethroning of kings. The grandeur of the Roman Empire consisted in its power, centered in and expressed by its rulers. The glory of France under the great Napoleon was the result of his capacity to use the people. We have no histories making nations famous by the greatness of their peoples. Centralization of power at the head of the government has been the source of all national honor. Under this system grades and castes of people have built themselves, the stronger upon the weaker, and the people as individuals have never appeared upon the surface. Government has gone through various and important evolutions and changes. First we learn of it as residing in the head of the family, there being no other organization. Next, families aggregated into tribes, with an acknowledged head. Again, tribes united into nations, occupying specified limits, and having an absolute ruler. Then began a double process, which is even now unfinished—the consolidation of nations into races, and the redistribution of power to the people. That which was once absolute in the head of the family, the tribe and the nation, is now shared by the head with the most powerful among the people. These two processes will continue until both are complete—until all nations are merged into races, and all races into one government; and until the power is completely and equally returned to all the people, who will no longer be denominated as belonging to this or that country or government, but as citizens of the world—as members of a common humanity. “God loves from whole to parts: but human soul Must rise from individual to the whole.” It is at once one of the most interesting as well as instructive of studies, to trace the march which civilization has described. Beginning in Asia, it traversed westward by and through the rise and decay of the Assyrian, Egyptian, Persian, Grecian and Roman Empires, each one of which built successively upon the ruins of the preceding, and all culminating in the downfall of the last, whose civilization was disseminated to impregnate that portion of the world then unknown. Modern Europe rose, and when at its height of power, civilization still undeviatingly marching westward, crossed the stormy Atlantic, and implanted itself in the virgin soil of America.