It has come at last--that great Storm foretold by national weather prophets--it has come with all the devastating force of a fury long suppressed; and the black cloud has gathered over our heads while yet we drowsed in a dream of sunshine. With a sudden thunderous rush, as though a god or a demon should tread the spaces of the air, heaven has let loose the whirlwind--the whirlwind of War, and far more than War--the whirlwind of Destiny. It has come because it was bound to come, by the Unwritten Law and Code Invisible. Men of the world who form governments, make civilisations, and build up empires are always forgetting this Unwritten Law--the Hand behind the scenes--the inexorable and eternal forward movement of the Cosmos, which in its pre-determined progress overrides their best laid plans and makes chaotic havoc of their most sagacious intentions. Yet it is a perfectly straight and simple Law after all--one that has existed from the beginning of things, and that will ever exist--the law of Nature, visibly expressing the Mind of God, and immutably set against the predominance of evil. It is an output of the Divine Will, resolving itself easily into common, even domestic forms, adapted to the needs of individuals and nations alike. Nature often conducts herself like a practical housewife bent on spring cleaning. “Where there is dirt,” she says, “it shall be removed; where there is confusion there shall be order.” And her “cleaning-up” day is invariably a frightful thing. The noise of her sweeping and scouring resounds like thunder through the world. It occurs periodically, marking epochs of history, and we read of its results in the past with placid incredulity, setting down much to exaggeration and more to deliberate lying, idly amused meanwhile at the ridiculous notion, suggested by certain fools, that any such uproar and disaster should ever be experienced by Ourselves who have, so we consider, “advanced” in civilisation and wisdom, and thereby in self-control--Ourselves whose “culture” seems to our own judgment a finer and more perfect attainment than divine justice. The tornado of the French Revolution, the pitiless ravages of the Napoleonic wars have appeared to us like a tale that is told, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”--and we have lazed the time away, getting and spending, in the peaceful high noon of national prosperity and contentment, feeling confident that we should never in our day be shaken from our centre-poise of complacent self-satisfaction by anything of larger disturbance than occasional family quarrels gotten up more for the sake of varying the monotony of peace than with any serious intent. And now, lo!--the bolt falls--the vials of wrath and judgment are opened and poured forth over land and sea--the whirlwind is upon us, and we who slept are awakened by its sweeping rage, its rattling rain, its lightning flashing against our windows of security,