the present world-catastrophe, should ask himself this question:--What direction would political impulses have taken in the States that were rushing into mutual war, if the "statesmen" had recognised the social needs of the times, and embodied these in their aims? And how much that was done would have been left undone, if their efforts had thus been directed to something more substantial than piling up inflammable material, that was bound sooner or later to lead to an explosion? As one watched the relations between the States during recent years, and the cancer creeping on in them, owing to the form that social life had taken amongst the leading sections of mankind, one could understand how a man of broadly human spiritual interests, such as Hermann Grimm, was led to speak as he did, so early in 1888, when discussing the form that social aims had taken amongst the leading circles:--"The end they set before them, is the ultimate formation of mankind into a commonwealth of brothers, who ever afterwards shall go forward hand-in-hand, actuated only by the noblest impulses. Merely to follow history on the map of Europe, one would imagine that a general internecine massacre were the next step imminent." Only the thought, that a "road must be found" to the true riches of human life, this thought alone can keep alive a sense of human worth. It is a thought "which hardly seems compatible with the gigantic preparations for war that we and our neighbours too are making. And yet, I believe in it. And in the light of this thought we must live; unless indeed it were better to put an end to human existence altogether by common consent, and appoint an official day of universal suicide" (Herman Grimm: "The Last Five Years,"--Pub. 1888.)--What were these "preparations for war," save steps taken by men who were bent upon preserving their old State constructions in one and undivided form, despite the fact that the evolution of the new age had made this onefold form incompatible with the very essence of healthy relations between the peoples. Health can, nevertheless, be brought into the common life of the peoples, by that form of social order that takes its shape from the requirements of the times.