Friends: I am to speak to you to-night on a subject which is a little outside our ordinary theosophical lectures. The Theosophist, as a rule, studies and talks about causes more than effects, concerning himself more with the getting rid of the causes of misery than with the effects that grow out of those causes and show themselves as particular forms of misery. Because of that he is sometimes called unpractical. But that is a misuse of words; for to understand the causes of misery and to remove them is far more practical than cutting off the tops of the weeds while you allow the roots to remain underground to reproduce new weeds to-morrow. To say that study with the discussion which grows out of it is unpractical is very much as though you declared that it was a practical thing to send out nurses and doctors to a field of battle to cut off limbs that had been shattered and to nurse the cripples back to health, and denied that to try to remove the causes of war was practical. Now, I admit that sending out nurses and doctors is a practical thing, but I allege that to work for the substitution of arbitration for war is a great deal more practical. So with the particular things with which I am to deal to-night. I am dealing with effects, but only with a view to lead you on to the study of causes, and to the fundamental changes that will have to be made in the building up of a greater and nobler civilisation. Part of the way to turn men’s minds in that direction, and to give them the necessary impulse of working for the higher and the greater, is to show them the intolerable nature of conditions among which we are living to-day. In doing that, I am by no means going astray from the teaching and the example of that great and misunderstood woman to whom I owe all that is happiest and best in my life, H. P. Blavatsky. Some of you who are students of Theosophy may remember that in her _Key to Theosophy_ she speaks about the misery of the East End of London, and utters words of praise for the attempts which were being made to change it. She did a good deal more than speak words of praise; for one day, after I had been telling her of some of the piteous sights that I was seeing day by day as member of the London School Board, as it was then, for the East End of London, I had on the following morning a little characteristic note, in which she enclosed a couple of sovereigns, saying: “You know I am only a pauper, but give these to the little children who asked you yesterday for a flower.” Similarly, that quick sympathy with human suffering came out in an instance in which very few of us, perhaps, would be prepared to follow her example. She was going to America, and only had just money enough to buy her ticket across; she bought it, and on the wharf she saw a crying woman with some little children. She asked why they were distressed, and the woman told how she had bought bogus tickets from some