Passports, railway-service, post, telephone, currency--all these may fittingly be considered as aspects of one vital matter, namely, circulation. All living organic unity is dependent on circulation. As the health of the human body is dependent on an unobstructed circulation of the blood, of the lymph, of the air, so the health of a nation or a state or a group of states is dependent on the free circulation of peoples, goods, opinions, money, and what not. A bad circulation results in "pins and needles," and we Europeans have so inverted common sense as to indulge habitually in a policy of pin-pricks. A bad circulation results in cold feet, in local stagnation, in lethargy. No circulation results in death. It means to die, and go we know not where, To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot. It may almost be said that Shakespeare's formula for death describes Europe--she goes she knows not where, she lies in cold obstruction and she rots. In reality it is not quite so bad as that. Though there is local paralysis of an alarming kind, there is also a sluggish circulation. How impeded that circulation is let the traveller judge. In January, 1921, I took a general passport for Europe. The British passport office facilitated my struggles. For I am a well-known struggler there and am now excused the preliminary heats. I spent a week getting visas in London. I remembered his Excellency of Greece had changed his address. When the taxi-driver had located his new office in Great Tower Street we found that he was having a holiday, celebrating New Year's Day in orthodox Greek style about the fourteenth of the month. I returned in a few days' time and his Excellency was celebrating Epiphany. Next time I resolved to take a precautionary twenty minutes at the telephone and find out whether there were any other festivals on. The Poles, I remember, asked for answers to questions on two sheets of foolscap and charged thirty shillings for a visa that went out of date before I could get to their country. His Excellency of Bulgaria I made several trips to Kensington to find, and I gave him up as apparently non-existent. With the representatives of Latvia I had a troublous conversation and finally obtained another useless visa for forty shillings. The Germans would not give a visa as I was entering Germany from the other side of Europe. I spent about ten pounds in London merely for the application of rubber stamps and Consuls' signatures. In the course of my travels that passport became an appalling wilderness of visas and remarks climbing out of their legitimate spaces to get mixed up with wife's signature and the colour of the hair. The most flattering of these remarks is no doubt that affixed at Sofia station--"Not dangerous to society." But I had to show that passport not only to the police and the military of all nations, but also before entering the gambling halls of Monte Carlo on