What follows, is not a prophecy in any sense, astrological or other; it is simply a series of deductions from principles perhaps as yet only in part understood; an attempt to apply laws of human life studied by the sages of Chaldea and Egypt, but long since fallen into oblivion among the newer races of men.
A year of the gods, said the sages, is a hundred years of mortals. This cycle of a hundred years has its months and seasons, its seed-time and its harvest; but the fields of its sowing are the lives of nations and of men. We are now at the winter solstice, the new year of the cycle of the gods. For the last quarter-century the seed-time of ideas and aspirations, of new ambitions and dimly visioned goals has filled the fields with seed, and as the great year turns, the seed stirring with the new year’s tide begins to move and gather into itself the life-force. As in the harvesting of the fields, much that sprang up in the late autumn is now buried under snow, or frozen hard in the ground, to await the season of the year’s awakening, the new spring-time of the gods.
The seed which has been sown is the idea of growth; growth from within outwards, from above downwards, from the Eternal to the spirit, from the spirit to the soul, from the soul downwards to the body, and so out to the natural world. This seems a very abstract and remote key-word for the Cycle; but consider a moment, and you will see that it carries within it the promise of a mighty revolution, of a whole series of revolutions, covering every work of man, and even man himself. Let us divide the matter into three parts, not because they are really separate, but for convenience in regarding them. Let us consider how the word of the New Cycle will affect mankind in the three regions of politics, economics and religion.
Beginning with politics, we see at once that the idea of growth from within outwards, from above downwards, carries with it the highest ideal of human liberty; for it makes of every man a self-sustained world, drawing the impulses of his life from within himself, answering a higher law interpreted by his own heart and mind, and, therefore, superseding every law laid upon him from without, whether by tradition, authority, or the wills of other men. Taken in a yet wider sense, it is the ideal of nationality. Every group of men of the same race type, with the same purposes, imaginations, aspirations and ideals, forms a separate life; and for each such group, whether tribe, nation or race, the New Cycle decrees freedom; the irresistible impulse of liberty, flowing from within, and breaking down all outward barriers set up whether by custom or opposing wills of men. Every man, every nation, to have the right and power to grow according to their own genius, from within outwards, freely following their own ideals, and owning allegiance to no other man, no other nation, no other law.
Simple enough in thought, and almost vague in its abstractness, this ideal becomes suddenly concrete when we begin to put it into application. For as the world now stands, we are very far from realizing, very far even from accepting that ideal; and there are many nations, a majority of the whole world’s population, who do in fact owe allegiance to other races; do in fact obey laws wholly repugnant to their national genius; do in fact live lives which violate every principle of liberty as we find it everywhere through the uncorrupted realms of Nature, and as we find it written on the tablets of the heart of man.
Let us begin our analysis with the largest power in the world, the most extensive, in all probability, that the world has ever seen. The British Empire covers nearly twelve million square miles, almost a quarter of the whole land surface of the globe. It represents, throughout its whole length and breadth, the principle of domination which is the very antithesis of liberty, which stands to freedom as Ahriman did to Ormuzd: a black and malignant shadow, turning all good to ends of evil, and crushing every free life back to the realms of death. If we take Scotland and Wales as wholly acquiescing in the English ideal of imperial domination, then we have an island of some ninety thousand square miles, peopled by only thirty-two millions, dominating the greatest world-empire upon earth. The moment we go beyond this island, we find the principle of liberty set at naught. We are in presence of a most fragrant instance of this at this very moment in South Africa. It is suggested, by people who are doubtless sincere in their suggestion, that England intervened in the South African Republic in defence of the principle of liberty; the principle that there should be no taxation without representation; and this is boldly called a righteous cause. If it be, then what are we to say of the three hundred millions who inhabit India, who are ruled by an armed despotism, who are taxed to the starvation-point, who are bled white as veal, so that at this very moment when the Cycle turns, there are five millions dying of starvation, and probably fifty millions face to face with famine?
If “no taxation without representation” justify the attempted invasion of the Dutch Republics in South Africa, then what are we to say of India? Who will invade India, to guarantee and champion her rights to democratic freedom? It is said again that the South African Republics are an oligarchy, and therefore repugnant to modem ideals; but if an oligarchy is the free expression of the national genius, then for the Boers an oligarchy is freedom. How well they are satisfied with their form of government is shown by the appearance of the whole male population of age to bear arms, in the battle-field fighting for that very form of government. And who brings this charge, that the Boers are an oligarchy, and therefore England’s legitimate prey? This charge is brought by England, which has been for centuries, and is at this moment, the strongest and most exclusive oligarchy on earth. In no land is the chasm between the “born” and the “unborn” so impassable as in England; in no country on earth are the “common people” so heartily despised by their “betters,” and, what is far worse, in no country on earth do the common people so wholly acquiesce in this contempt. Only in England can the “born,” the hereditary legislators, block all popular legislation, restore medieval abuses, and check the tide of progress. And this is the nation, itself dominating the three hundred millions of India, which accuses the South African Republics of being an oligarchy, and therefore condemns them to be swept from the indignant earth.
It would seem, then, as if the word of the New Cycle had a message of special significance for England; a message for that little nation of arrogant islanders who roam through the waste places of the earth, and among the feeble and backward peoples, bringing domination, and drawing from the subject races whatever they possess that can contribute to the aggrandizement of their conquerors. But we need not go to India to find England violating the very alphabet of freedom. Five-sixths of the population of Ireland are governed along lines wholly contrary to their national genius, and in direct violation of the expressed will of their representatives. What of “no taxation without representation” here? What of that finding of the British Commission, that for one hundred years, since the corrupt Act of Union, the stronger island has drawn from the weaker an annual excess sum of nearly fifteen millions, raised by taxes in manifest violation of the first principles of justice? Here again, the cyclic time is full; the British Empire is weighed in the balance and found wanting.
After the empire dominated by England, the next greatest empire upon earth is that of Russia, and here, too, we find much that must pass through cyclic change. It is not the Tsars who represent the principle of domination in Russia, but the class of “nobles” who were, until 1861, the owners of the rest of the population as their predial serfs, sold with their land as cattle are sold. There is no more striking instance of human delusion and wrong in the whole history of the world than the phrase which was common in well-born Russian mouths at the beginning of this century, that his Excellency So-and-so lost or won at cards so many thousand ”souls.” But for forty years that huge abuse has been passing away, and change still hurries forward through the wide dominions of the Tsars, gradually bringing back the old social ideal of common ownership inborn in the blood of the Slavs, and the source and model of all Socialisms whatever. The Slav ideal is the family, with the village as a larger family; the principle of brotherhood introduced through the whole structure of industrial and agricultural life. These social families of the Slavs carry within themselves their own safeguards for justice and honesty, of charity for the needy, of help for the weak. For where all own all things in common, what need has any one to steal or beg, and who need go hungry, ill-clad or destitute? But here, too, grim famine threatens whole populations. And the reason, as in India, is over-taxation of the producers in the interests of the dominant class, and to pay their salaries. The polity of Russia is composite, having as its basis the most humane and unselfish people on the globe, whose ideals are even too unworldly for their well-being; these are the peasants, the producers, the tillers of the soil. Above them is a dominant class, largely of German or Teutonic blood, who live by the expropriation of the peasants. And yet in the privileged class in Russia there is far more feeling for the masses than in any similar class the world over. At the emancipation of the serfs, in 1861, the landlords of whole districts vied with each other in their zeal to transfer their land to the cultivators, often beggaring themselves in the process, and forming a very marked contrast to the landlord class in Ireland, equally alien in blood, but who, broadly speaking, set their interests in direct opposition to that of the peasants, to such good purpose that what was a population of nearly nine millions fifty years ago has now dwindled to something over four millions, and is decreasing still.
Thus Russia, too, is doubtless destined to suffer cyclic change, but such change as will leave the body of the empire untouched, and with it that form of paternal government which has grown up with the Russian nation, and is the expression of its vital genius. The undivided family owning the empire as a whole, and forming a unity under its patriarchal head; this is Russia’s ideal, and Russia will doubtless adhere to it, and even strengthen it in years to come, so that between the Tsar and the people there will be less and less of that barrier of bureaucratic obstruction which bears so many abuses easy to point to, but very hard to set right.
Third among the great states in area, and first in population, comes China, with over four hundred millions of quiet, industrious and gifted inhabitants. Politically, the Celestial Empire is under a cloud, and has been since the days of Tartar conquest. The Manchus still rule, a group of aliens in the midst of the Chinese, and there is no sense of national unity and very little feeling of national loyalty among these almost countless millions. The last of the Manchu line, the reigning sovereign, is a feeble idealist, dreaming millenniums, and accomplishing nothing. But whether through the weakening of the Manchu dynasty, or through the realized dreams of this last scion of the Hordes, it is certain that China, too, will shortly see a change. The genius of that great and wonderful people will assert itself, awaking after a lethargy of centuries to a second youth, renewed like the eagle. Then the nations of Europe and America who were in such hot haste to see the door opened into China, and yet who constantly kept their own doors shut in the face of the Chinese, will wish that they had gone a little slower, and let the Eastern giant sleep on. For what, in the last analysis, is the genius of the Chinese? It is industrial and economic, gifted for intelligent toil above all nations under heaven, and with an endurance, artistic insight, and sense of the fit use of materials which no Western nation can rival.
Many a shudder has gone over the manufacturers of the West at the thought of Japanese competition. And with great justice, for the deft folk of the kingdom of flowers, competing in open market, can undersell the work of any white nation, especially under those conditions of double profits which rise from the capitalist system. But what is dreaded from the Japanese is a mole-hill to a mountain, compared with what these openers of Eastern doors have to fear from China. China is immensely more richly endowed with just those natural products which go to build up the commerce of a modern industrial nation than is Japan; China has an intensely industrious, orderly and, broadly speaking, marvelously moral population of four hundred millions, able to live on what to us would seem a pittance, able to toil for hours that to us would seem destructive, and keeping through it all a gay serenity which is the essence of successful and excellent work. What will be the result to the Expansionist nations, and openers of doors, when the cycle of Manchu domination has run full circle, and the great Celestial nation awakes from its dream? There will be a new and revised version of the struggle for the markets of the world. This is how the evil of domination over “subject” races carries its own curse. The justice of the gods may seem to linger, but their writs are always served, and their warrants of distress never fail of execution.
This carries us naturally to the next great world-power, the United States, with its over three million square miles of territory, as against nearly twelve for England, eight for Russia, and four for China. But as the politics of the United States are almost wholly laid on economic lines, we shall speak of them later, passing on to the Continent of Europe. In France, the fifth great world-power in area, the economic problem outweighs all else. The bankers, the great owners of capital, especially the Jews, find arrayed against them two very strong forces: the army, which carries on the traditions of the old Noblesse, with much of the idealism, and unhappily with much of the corruption, which gave the old Noblesse its romantic interest. With the army, and against the bankers, stands the Catholic Church, especially that part of it dominated by the Society of Jesus. These two showed something of their bitter rivalry, in the famous Dreyfus trial, but unhappily that fierce outburst has fanned the flames of hostility, and not relieved them. It is the interest of the army to provoke a war, in order to bring themselves into the ascendant; it is the policy of the Jesuits to support the army, relying on the support of the army in return, and with the hope of building up once more a Catholic kingdom of France.
Therefore there are three powers in France, each aiming at domination, each depending for its wealth and consequence on the expropriation of the producers; the financial power making for peace as being best for commerce, while the others, in sheer opposition, make for war. It will be very wonderful if France escapes a revolution, which could hardly fail to bring about a wholesomer and purer epoch of national life.
Germany also has her great party of domination, the old feudal fabric, with the Emperor at its head. Already the epoch of transition is bearing very heavily on the feudal nobles, who are coming under the iron heel of the Law. This is how their punishment comes home to them: for centuries they have enjoyed the right of living without working, on the work of others, endowed with that right to tax the produce of agriculture which is called the ownership of land. They have formed a hundred habits of luxury, wrought into the fabric of their nerves a hundred tastes for very unnecessary things: habits which it is real and acute misery to break, and the loss bf which seems to them the loss of consideration and honor among men. The payment for all this came from the peasants, who got nothing in return except the privilege of serving in the feuds of their lords and of having their lords as leaders against marauding nobles from other districts or other lands. In this way nearly all the land in Europe has to pay two profits: one for the actual cultivator, who lives a little better than his own cattle, and another for the feudal lord, who enjoys the good things of Providence in much more ample measure, the higher reward going to him who idles, not to him who works. But no land can pay this double profit when forced to compete with land owned by its cultivators, farmed with scientific skill, and full of fresh vigor and natural fertility. In concrete terms, the estates of Germany, like those of England, cannot pay their peasants and their nobles, and at the same time compete with the grain-producing countries of the New World: California, Minnesota, Argentina, Manitoba and the rest. Therefore the feudal nobility of Germany, and the whole system bound up with it, is doomed, and the New Cycle will see it swept away.
With the passing of the Teutonic nobles in Germany, will close that great Germanic epoch which finds its most splendid exemplar in the imperial House of Hapsburg, than which no human family has ever shed more human blood or caused more human tears. The last of the line, stricken, destitute, afflicted, awaits impatiently the hour that will bring him peace and his empire dissolution. Here, too, the genius of the Slavs will once more break through, after ages of oppression and contempt, and it may well be that the old Slav commonwealths with their shared ownership and shared profits will be able here, as in Russia and Eastern Germany, to bring the produce of their land once more into successful competition in the markets of the world. The social idea, throughout the whole of central Europe, will displace the feudal, and as the social idea is wholly Slavonic, all this means Europe dominated by the Slavs. The centre of gravity of the whole eastern hemisphere will soon lie within the boundaries of Russia and it must be remembered here that Russia and China are and always have been the best of friends; they may be counted as warm allies in any great struggle between East and West. And from all great struggles of the future the British Empire must be counted out.
The three peninsulas of southern Europe—Spain, Italy, and Turkey with its largely Christian population—have long been drinking the cup of human misery; they will soon drain the dregs, and with the last bitter drop will come the dawn of better days. Here, more than in any other lands, the cruel expropriation of the producers and tillers of the soil has reached its acme and climax. There are almost no limits to the degradation of the peasants, and to their quite unmerited sufferings, if we judge by any human law. But under the law of the divine, they are the ore tried in the furnace, to be purged of its dross, and soon to be poured forth purified and bright, to form the material of a new and better era of European life. Something like justice will be done for these oppressed and disinherited ones; it will be very well for those who have lived on their life-blood if the change comes in peace, and not in the red terror of bloodshed. Here, too, the axe is laid at the root of the tree. So far the politics of the world. The fall of British domination, and the liberation of India and Ireland; the weakening of Russia’s bureaucratic power, after rendering one great service to the world; the passing of feudalism in Germany and Austria; the upheaval of the workers in Spain and Italy, and the last trace of Turkish outrage gone from the neck of the Macedonians; this is the New Cycle’s message.
When we turn to Economics, we come back to the New World. And here we find much of the darkest shadow; much that will soon bear very bitter fruit. For we find all the most robust minds of a great nation gone crazed over a wholly false ideal of life, and believing that a man’s wealth lies in his possessions and not in his powers; finding the purpose of life in the heaping up of contemptible dollars, instead of in the cultivation of the genius in them, which should master Nature, which should make them at one with man, and open to them the treasure-house of the Eternal. The true ideal is something more than nobleness; it is immortal might; it is that true humanity which finds a friend and lover in every human heart, so that each enters into the life of all; it is that opening of the soul to the immortal sea which confers present divinity, and transforms the whole man into oneness with the eternal power that wove the worlds. Instead of such an ideal as this, we see a whole nation running after a mirage, and remorselessly, relentlessly crushing each other down in the struggle to overtake a dream. For what men seek in riches is nine parts envy to one part enjoyment; and even in every enjoyment nine parts of the ten are the desire to be envied. Yet envy makes no man happy, nor ever will; it rather breeds hate and fear, and contempt for him whose possessions are coveted. Therefore the strongest, and those who should be the noblest, in the whole nation are sowing broadcast the seeds of hate, and what a reaping there will be, when the crop is ripe!
In this insane heaping up of dollars, there are two chief instruments, each more evil than the other, but both depending on one motive power. In feudal days, the “noble”—the man with the horse and coat of mail—fixed his power upon the producer by the very simple expedient of threatening to kill him if he refused to give up a part of the fruits of his toil. At the sword’s point, every aristocracy in Europe was established. At the sword’s point, they are upheld today. Bad as the principle used in the modem pursuit of wealth is, it is not so bad as that. For the nobles demanded something for nothing, while the merchant always offers something, however little, in return. The vitiating principle is this: he fixes the rate of wages by taking advantage of the worker’s necessity; in other words, by the tacit threat of letting him starve to death, unless he consents to the offered terms. And that is where the injustice lies. Into the production of all commodities, there enter two elements: the fruits of past work, and the skill and energy to be applied to these. The fruit of past work is capital, whether it be in knowledge, in that command over materials which is called money, or in manual skill. Therefore the workers supply a capital which is indispensable, and are in a very real sense capitalists, quite as much as the man who provides the money for an enterprise. If we suppose that he also supplies skill and knowledge in the matter of distribution, then all parties, workers and manager alike, are giving both elements: capital and work. Then both ought to enjoy the profit. If the industry be well managed, if it was well conceived at the outset, then a steady increase of wealth should result, and this should profit every man in the enterprise in due proportion, letting each grow slowly richer under nature’s law of steady increase, so that all who take part in an industrial enterprise should be certain of a greater profit year by year.
But what really occurs is this: the manager who supplies the money so manipulates matters that, when it comes to the time for dividing profits, all the surplus goes to him. He has managed so well that it is possible for him to grow suddenly rich, while the workers remain as poor as before. But they have consented to his doing this? Yes, under the tacit threat of starvation. That is the bad principle which runs through it all, like a rotten thread disfiguring some costly fabric. Unfair division of the profits arising from joint capital and labor: that is the first vice of modern industry. The second is much worse, for like the feudal system of old, it constantly asks something while giving nothing in exchange. This is the principle of usury, which runs through almost the whole of modern commercial life. Let us illustrate exactly what we mean. Suppose a borrower gets a loan of one hundred dollars, at five per cent. In twenty years he has paid one hundred dollars, and still owes one hundred dollars. In forty years he has paid two hundred dollars, and still owes the original hundred. In sixty years he has paid his debt thrice over, and owes it still. Will any sophistry prevent that from being a manifest injustice? How is it that any man will sell his soul into bondage to a system like this? The answer, as before, is that he is goaded by necessity. The lender takes advantage of his necessity to make what is in fact a dishonest bargain; and, if he has a sufficient sum to begin with, he may very well do without working for the rest of his life, getting something for nothing, every day until he dies, and passing on the magical charm to his heirs and their heirs forever. It is the instinctive sense of this evil which lends the bitterness to the great Anti-Semitic movement, the movement against the Jews as introducers of usury, and still its arch-patrons. And how fierce in its bitterness that movement is, events in Paris and Vienna may any moment show.
But the serious matter for us is that the principle of evil is at work here, too. More than this, it runs through and through the whole economic system of the country. Every municipality hastens to put itself into the hands of the usurers, by issuing interest-bearing bonds under which even bonds redeemable in twenty years are paid for just twice over, while those of longer term are paid for three and four times, or run on forever, never paid at all.
We must remember that these manifest evils carry within themselves the suggestion of their cure, and if that cure be accepted, then the body politic may come slowly back to health. The cure of the first evil is the ownership of tools and materials by the workers themselves, under systems of co-operation which have already been carried to such a high development, and with such excellent results, especially in England. This cuts at the root of unfair division, and therefore makes impossible the first evil road to wealth. The second remedy is not less simple; it is never to spend money until you have it; never to count your chickens until they are hatched. So simple a thing as this will bankrupt every usurer on the globe, and set them all to honest work—a consummation surely to be devoutly wished for. The sense of responsibility which joint ownership of industrial plant will bring will lead rising communities to reflect before burdening themselves with usury-bearing debts, and the more humane and gentle spirit, which everywhere comes with co-operation, will make men ready to lend their surplus money without interest, and then Shylock’s occupation, like Othello’s, will be gone.
But we must expect two things: indeed we are already in presence of them both. We must expect those who profit by unfair division of the fruit of joint work, and those who live without working through the principle of usury, to fight to the death with every means in their power against the liberation of the workers. All the vast resources they have managed to gather into their grasp while the workers dreamed, will be bent against the workers, in the attempt to break them, to reduce them once more to slavery, just as the feudal nobles resist to the death the discontinuance of their privilege of private taxation. This, first, and as an added element of bitterness, the competition of industrial producers who do not pay a second profit; producers who are not subject to unfair division, and who have no usury to pay. We have seen that the competition of American wheat-growing lands which practically pay no rent is beggaring the feudal landlords of Europe. We shall presently see the feudal lords of industry in America beggared by the same cause. The competition of the vast Chinese nation may confidently be looked to, in the next generation, to undermine the sand castles of our millionaires, and this will be the distress warrant of the gods, sent in when the time is full, to pay for the domination over “lower” races. Many lovers of freedom have been stirred with indignation at the shooting of the Filipinos in sight of their own homes by the soldiers of a nation whose watchword is freedom. The Filipinos will be avenged. If their islands become, as it is evident they will, the landing-place of America in an industrial crusade against China, then those same islands will be the first to see the tide flow back; to see the output of a nation of four hundred millions of the best workers on the globe steadily sweep before it the produce of western lands, and finally return the visit of the American door-openers with a crushing competition as fatal to our feudal lords of industry as the competition of Californian wheat is to the feudal lords of Pomerania or Gallicia.
Therefore justice will come home to the economic world, bringing the liberation of the worker, the only man on earth who deserves the name of noble. Whatever work is creative, whatever adds to the wealth of man, is man’s best privilege; and thus we come by natural steps to our last division: The Religion of the New Cycle will be Salvation by Work.
The Eternal, the great Life has instilled one secret into the immortal spirit of every man. From the spirit, that secret comes forth winged with will into the man’s soul, there to be clothed in images or words. His soul tells the secret to the natural man, who shall straightway go forth into the world and carry out the message. Every good work is such a secret of the gods, wrought out. It is whispered into the soul that man shall live forever. This instinct of eternalness sets him casting forward into the future, and laying up provision against the time to come. From this instinct comes agriculture, the provisioning for the future out of nature’s bounty now. Then the soul whispers to man that there is a safe refuge from the storms and mutability of things, where he may withstand every shock from all the realms of chaos and dark night, where he may inherit present immortality. His animal self catches up the secret, and sets him building houses and homes for himself, which dimly shadow that great ideal. Then the soul shows him the vision of beauty, God’s dream of creation perfected, and man, having conceived wealth, conceives art also, and sets himself to transform the brute things of nature, colored clays, and white stones, and senseless logs, into things radiant with a beauty that shall endure among men even after man, their maker, has drawn back again into the Eternal. Then to man the soul whispers of the wisdom of the Eternal, the great secret of things, and what they are, and to what end, and he conceives a science which shall be to him an image of that immortal thought and highest wisdom.
Whatever man does, in carrying out one of these ends, with a pure heart and unblemished will, is excellent and makes for immortality. It is the service of his genius, the obedience of mortal man to his immortal brother. While he does this, it is well with him, and he is full of happiness and strength. If he does these things for love of another, and with a warm and generous sense of another’s life, it is doubly well. And here we come to the secret of our humanity. We are not alone, for the spirit of every one of all the children of man is with us always, in darkness as in light, hidden or seen, within the holy of holies in our hearts. For we are all the one Life, therefore nothing can really divide us from each other, however much we seem to be divided. It follows that whatever unites us, adds to our strength; that whatever divides us, weakens us. But envy and hate divide us, and the pursuit of wealth is based on envy and hate; therefore the pursuit of wealth brings a great and growing sense of weakness, so that he who has much must have more, and so on eternally. There are no such cowards as the possessors of great wealth; none so really poor, none in truth so little to be envied. For at the root of their endeavor lies the heresy of separation; they divide themselves from the others, where they should seek unity and the splendid strength it brings. They would find instant alleviation and happiness, and a strength never dreamed of by them, if they would but throw open their hearts’ doors and let the tide of life flow in; if they would but use their gifts to the end of giving, rather than of receiving.
The wholesomeness of creative work is the first part of the new religion. Our unity with others, and the strength we can gain from them, is the second part. There remains this last: the faithful service of our genius, who gives us the heart and inspiration of work, who opens to us the hearts of our other selves, and who at the last will open for us the golden door that leads to our immortality. Present immortals, inhabiting eternity, freely availing ourselves of the creative power of the divine, as we already avail ourselves freely of great Nature’s powers; present immortals rejoicing in our immortality: surely that is a better idea than the lust of wealth.
When an Indian city by some secret decree of fate is left behind and forgotten, its inhabitants trooping to some other place more favored by the times, the jungle, the advance army of great Nature, swiftly comes upon that abandoned city and makes it its own. Softly, under the breath of impalpable winds, seeds fall upon the roofs of the houses, in the chinks of the walls, on door-sill and window-ledge. Then the tropical rains wet them, the strong Indian sun swells them, and the vital spark within them stirs. Soon green forest holds its sway. full of nature’s living things, where were the dwelling-places of men, and the stir of the market-places is forgotten. Thus shall it be with the new seeds of life that great Time has sown; they will germinate; they will grow, putting forth buds and leaflets in their season, till the transformation is consummated. Blessed in that day beyond all blessings shall they be who have worked heartily with the creative Law. Pitiful beyond all help of pity they who have withstood the Law, vainly trying to disobey, helplessly striving to conquer the invincible. Thus shall time go full circle, till once more the year of the gods is fulfilled.