No study of witchcraft--however slight--could be considered complete did it ignore its importance in the world of to-day. Dispossessed though she may be, in a small intellectual district of the Western World, the witch still queens it over the imagination of the vast majority of mankind. What is more, as I have tried to show in an earlier chapter, there are many indications that her reconquest of her lost territories cannot be long delayed. With the close of the nineteenth century--in which the cult of neo-materialism reached its widest sway--the reaction against the great conspiracy may already have begun. The Russo-Japanese war, with its defeat of an Occidental, or semi-Occidental, Power at the hands of the Orient, may also be held to typify the approaching victory of witchcraft over science. It is true that the true Russian--the moujik, as apart from the germanised, official class-has always preserved his faith in magic; true also that the Japanese victories were won by a free adaptation of European methods. But this can only obscure, without changing, the great underlying phenomenon--that the lethargic East, the great home of witchcraft and witch-lore, has at last aroused itself from its long trance, and, by whatever methods chastised the fussy West that sought, professedly for its own good, to change its lotus-dreams to nightmares. It only remains for China to rise up and chastise the inconstant Japanese for their treachery to a common ideal, to make the certainty of the witch's victory more certain.