I have seen a sketch of the history of some Central American country--Guatemala, I think--which showed 130 revolutions in less than a hundred years. Some rascal gets together a gang, and seizes the government and plunders its revenue. When he has plundered too much, some other rascal stirs up the people, and gets together another gang. Such "revolutions" we regard as subjects for comic opera, and for the Richard Harding Davis type of fiction; but we do not consider them as having any relationship to progress. We describe them as "palace" revolutions. But compare with this the various English revolutions. We write learned histories about them, and describe England as "the Mother of Parliaments." The reason for this is that when there was political discontent in England, the protesting persons proceeded to organize themselves, and to understand their trouble and to remedy it. They had the brain power to do this; they maintained their right to do it, and when by violence or threats of violence they forced the ruling class to give way, they brought about a wider extension of liberty, a wider distribution of power. Tennyson has pictured England as a state "where freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent." We today, reading its history, are inclined to put a sarcastic emphasis on the word "slowly"; but Tennyson would answer that it is better for a community to move forward slowly than to move forward rapidly and then move backward nearly as far. We have pointed out several times the important fact of biology that change does not necessarily mean progress from any rational or moral point of view. Degeneration is just as real a fact as progress, and it does not at all follow that because things change they are changing for the better. It is worth while to repeat this in discussing human society, for it is just as true of governments and morals as of living species. A nation may pile up wealth, and multiply a hundredfold the machinery of wealth production, and only be increasing luxury and wantonness and graft. A nation may change its governmental forms, its laws and social conventions, and boast noisily of these changes in the name of progress, while as a matter of fact it is following swiftly the road to ruin which all the empires of history have traced. So far as I can discover, there is one test, and only one, by which you can judge, and that is the test already indicated: Is the actual, effective power of the state wielded by a larger or a smaller percentage of the population than before the change took place?