We are sometimes asked to think imperially: it would be better to think universally. Illimitable as is the universe, it appears in all its parts to obey the same laws. Its suns may be told by millions; but matter and force compose and rule them all. Carlyle spoke of the contrast between heaven and Vauxhall; but Vauxhall is in the heavens, by virtue of the same law that there holds Canopus and the Pleiades. We think of the dawn-star as of something heavenly pure, and of the earth as grey in sorrow and sin; but the earth is a star--a planet, bright and beautiful as Venus in a purple evening sky. We gaze with wondering awe at the loveliness and mystery of the Galaxy, that bent beam of glory whose motes are suns, that luminous path of dreams whose jewels are alive; but we forget that Whitechapel, and Oldham, and Chicago, and the Black Country, are in the Milky Way. In that awful ocean of Space are many islands; but they are all akin. In the "roaring loom of time." howsoever the colours may change, the pattern vary, the piece is all one piece; it is knit together, thread to thread. All men are brothers. From the age beyond the Aryans the threads are woven and joined together. _All_ of us had ancestors with tails. All the myriads of human creatures, since the first ape stood erect, have been like leaves upon one tree, nourished by the same sap, fed from the same root, warmed by the same sun, washed by the same rains. All our polities, philosophies, and religions, grow out of each other. We can never fully understand any one of them until we know the whole. Comparative anatomy, comparative philology, comparative mythology, all comparative sciences, tell us the same story of growth, of evolution, of kinship. Babylon and Egypt, India and Persia, Greece and Rome, Gothland and Scandinavia, Britain and Gaul; Osiris, Krishna, Confucius, Brahma, Zoroaster, Buddha, Christ, Mahomet: all are parts of one whole, all parts related each to other. The oldest nations speak in our languages to-day, the oldest savages survive in our bodies, the oldest gods have part in our religious forms and ceremonies, the oldest superstitions and faults and follies, still obscure our minds and impede our action. We cannot thrust the dead aside and stand alone: the dead are part of us. We cannot take a man and isolate him, and judge and understand him, as though he were a new and special creation. He is of kin to all the living and the dead. He stands one figure in the great human pageant, and cannot be taken out of the picture: cannot be cut out from the background--that background of a thousand ages, and of innumerable women and men. He belongs to the great human family: he, also, is in the Milky Way. Old families, and noble families are made of parchment or paper: there is but one real family of flesh and blood, and that reaches back to the clot of jelly in the sea, and we all belong to it.