Government, standing forth prominently as the grandest of all human conceptions and realizations, has in all times been the representative of civilization, and the principal means of its diffusion. Bearing this impress of importance, it may be well to examine the real significance of the term, or to find the relations it sustains to society. One fact meets us wherever we may search in the past—the fact of government Though it is one of the universal necessities and accompaniments of existence, it is extremely doubtful if its composition is realized to any considerable extent. Government means control—implies power. No people can create government because they cannot create power. An existing power may be organized into form by a people, and this becomes their government. This power is not in the individuals who exercise it, they are simply its servants. It is not the people who organize or consent to it; they are simply represented by it. It is above individuals, and is independent of peoples, though its channels of operation may be modified by individuals and peoples. Thus come all governments, while revolutions are the results of the outworking of principles, through peoples, who are their representatives. When analyzed, it thus appears that governments are independent of peoples, and always exist in some form while peoples come and pass away. It is problematically true, that China was the first nation that arrived at a system of government at all removed from brute, individual force, and historically so, that there always was a westward tendency to empire. After China, India; then Assyria, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, general Europe and America. Each one of these nations, to Rome, was the result of the course of events, begun in China, to the course of which each succeeding one added its experiences. The progress of this course of events has encircled the world. It can go no further westward without crossing the Pacific and beginning again in China. What is the significance of this fact, or has it no special indications? It is evident that the old order of nature has completed a cycle, and that a new order will be commenced, and that, the new order is to spring from this country, and consequently, that we are its representatives. This is made doubly plain, when we refer to the fact that Asiatic tendencies are now eastward, and that John Chinaman is the new competition our laboring classes have to encounter.