Anyone, watching what was going on in the life of peoples and of States during the last 30 or 40 years from a point of view such as given in these pages, could see how the State-structures that had been built up in the course of history, with their blending of spiritual life, "rights" and industrial economy, were becoming involved in international relations that were heading for catastrophe. At the same time, it was equally plain, that the opposite forces at work within mankind's unconscious impulses were tending towards the threefold order. Here lies the remedy for those convulsions that have been brought about by the mania for unification. The way of life among the "leaders of mankind" was not however of the kind to enable them to see what had been for years past slowly working up. In the spring and summer of 1914, one still found "statesmen" saying, that, thanks to the governments' exertions, the peace of Europe was, so far as could be humanly foreseen, assured. These "statesmen" simply had not the faintest notion, that all that they were doing and saying had absolutely lost touch with the course of real events. Yet these were the people who were looked up to as "practical"; and people were regarded as little better than "cranks" at that time, who had been forming other views during all those years, which differed from those of the "statesmen";--such views, for instance, as those expressed by the present writer months before the war-catastrophe, when addressing a small audience in Vienna,--(a large audience would certainly have laughed him down.) He then spoke of the danger menacing, in more or less these words:--"The tendencies prevalent in the life of the present day will continue to gather strength, until they end by annihilating themselves. And if one reads social life with the eyes of the spirit, one can perceive everywhere the ghastly signs of social tumours forming. Here is the great menace to our civilisation, manifest to anyone able to read below the surface of existence. It is this that is so appalling, so overpowering, that--even if one could otherwise repress all zeal on behalf of a science in which spiritual knowledge is made instrumental to the knowledge of life's events,--these things alone would impell one to speak, to proclaim the remedy, to hurl one's words as it were in the face of the world. If the body social follows the same line of evolution as hitherto, it will become full of sores--sores of civilisation that will be for it what cancers are for man's natural body."--Such were the foundations upon which life rested, and which the ruling circles neither could nor would see. But their special view of life led them to find in such conditions a pretext for measures that would have been better left undone, but for none that were of a sort to establish confidence between the different communities of mankind.--Whoever is under the belief that the social necessities of the time played no part amongst the immediate causes of