well make the Russian government see in the central powers, allies and bulwarks rather than enemies. As for Belgium, she of all nations on earth had most to lose by war, and least to gain by it, and it is inconceivable that she would enter any but a defensive agreement with any power.

The theory that the allied nations had conspired to ruin Germany and divide her possessions falls of its own weight. All the evidence which is advanced to support it can be far better explained as the reaction of fear to German threats and German aggressions, while the evidence against it is conclusive.

The real diplomacy of the world is hand-to-mouth; with kaleidoscopic shifting of alliances and incessant emergence and subsidence of rivalries and enmities. It is rarely inspired by ideals or marked by diabolical cunning. As compared with the arm-chair Weltpolitik of the professors and journalists, its chief virtue is moderation, and its commonest vice is myopia. The diplomatic world imagined by the average laymen full of the memoirs of Talleyrand and the maxims of Machiavelli, is a far more interesting place. An intricate web of conspiracies connects together all the public acts of any nation. Secret documents containing the most far-reaching plans for the partition of Asia lie in the pigeon holes of every statesman's desk. Superhumanly clever spies, sometimes waiters but more frequently beautiful women, are on the track of these important documents. Alliances are consummated on waste heaths or in obscure inns at midnight, while the participants are supposed to be touring the South Sea in their yachts or playing at Monte Carlo. And yet the plans of world conquest which are hidden with such care are, if we are to believe all we are told, open to the inspection of everyone who can buy a copy of Bernhardi.

This is fascinating, but it suffers from the disadvantage of not being true. Perhaps the natural human tendency

to find in every coincidence a conspiracy, can never be wholly eradicated; perhaps it is a permanent flaw in the mind of the race. But educated men should do what they can to preach sanity, to moderate panic, and to dispel illusory fears, if only that real perils may be the more clearly seen. Above all, we should cease to call all who dabble in world politics by the name of "statesmen"; which implies foresight, resolution, and skill in the handling of men. The average ruler or cabinet minister is only a politician, even if his sphere of action be an international congress instead of a ward caucus.

SOME NEW LIGHT ON THE FUTURE

IN

LIFE?

N Sir Oliver Lodge's Raymond, or Life and Death with whose salient features many readers are already familiar, there are some less salient ones well worth considering which bear on the nature of the future life. We assume that there is such a life, and in the present state of our knowledge we can only assume it; but we can only assume that tomorrow's sun will rise. We have what purport to be communications from that life, but so far, their genuineness can be verified only by the testimony of witnesses in the present life, and this admits the possibility of unconscious telepathy or teloteropathy* between the witness and the medium. This reduces the question, so far, of the future life, to one of probabilities. Which is the more probable, spiritism or teloteropathy? Telepathy is an accepted fact, and teloteropathy is very like unto it. Neither necessarily excludes spiritism, but possibly may. Each person must judge for "thonself". To most of those who have studied most, the probabilities seem to incline toward the future life, and assuming it, we will proceed to some light thrown upon it by Sir Oliver's book. For convenience, at least, we will quote the alleged utterances as if they were what they purport to be, and we defy anybody to quote much of them without falling, for the time at least, into that assumption.

There are two features of Sir Oliver's book which seem to point more clearly than anything else we remember reading, toward some very interesting and important conclusions, but we will consider them later, alluding to them here merely to help the reader's patience while we go over a few minor matters for the sake of whatever Farther-feeling as distinct from far-feeling, i. e., from a distance instead of from the sitter.

confirmation they may give to some points in previous records.

Each of the ostensible personages appearing through the mediums quoted by the Society for Psychical Research or by Sir Oliver Lodge may reasonably be said to manifest the same individuality through all the mediums. This would be the case if the mediums got their knowledge telepathically or teloteropathically from the living persons who knew the ostensible postcarnate communicator, or from the communicator's surviving self, the argument for its being the surviving self of course increasing as time diminishes the number of surviving acquaintances and the vividness of their recollections.

Now Frederic W. H. Myers was an ostensible communicator through Mesdames Piper, Thompson, Verrall, Holland, and possibly one or two others quoted up to the last two or three years, by the S. P. R., and with all of them he was the same Myers, being specially distinguished for cryptic references to passages of classical poetry, in which he was deeply versed in life. These passages, on being hunted up, have been found to have some significant relations to each other or to circumstances connecting Myers with the sitter or with some other friend to whom Myers wanted the reference sent. The alleged communicator claims to take this roundabout way through means not possibly known to the medium, in order to prove his own identity.

Now through two or three new mediums in Sir Oliver's book, the same old Myers turns up in the same old way. This may have some little cumulative value for the spiritistic hypothesis, but at first it seems to have little evidential force: for the literature is full of Myers, and the later mediums could easily have "got onto" him there. But where do they get onto the fresh classical allusions?

The principal one in this book is a message to Sir Oliver telling him to take the part of the poet, and he, Myers, would be Faunus. The Latin flavor of this led Sir

Oliver to send it to Mrs. Verrall, a profound Latin scholar (and, incidentally, an involuntary writer), at Cambridge, and she referred him to a passage in Horace where the poet thanks Faunus, a god of poets, for fending off the force of the blow of a falling tree which had struck Horace on the head. Sir Oliver inferred this to mean that some blow was about to fall on him, and that Myers would mitigate its effects. In a few days Sir Oliver's son Raymond was killed in battle, and in a few more, Sir Oliver was ostensibly told by the boy, through mediums, that he was well and happy in the other life, under the care of Myers, who of course was playing the part of "Faunus." The details as given in the book add much to the aspect of genuineness.

The alleged testimony regarding the other life given in this book by the ostensible Raymond and one or two friends tallies on the whole with that given by previous alleged communicators, and so adds to the argument that it is all real testimony to actual fact.

The alleged new arrivals in the other life are reported, as usual in the earlier records, coming in a state of exhaustion from the stress of separation from the body; and, as usual hitherto, a sort of spiritual umbilical cord is stated to be the last thing separated (see below). Farther alleged concurrent details are: the rare use of the terms life and death; the usual, and identical expressions are "in the body," for this life, and "passing over" for what we call "death." They claim new bodies (see below) and freedom from the ills of the old ones, they depict a life much like this one, but with wider opportunities, which they cannot explain, partly because we could understand, only in limited degree. In general they indicate superiority to space and time; they can summon each other instantly, and really seem to do it, and they see each other at any stage of their existence as children who have left earth, or as the same persons matured by intervening time. And most important of all,