your own purity, and so let the whole nation be pure and educated and healthy and well-fed. And of this be sure--it is written in a Christian Scripture, and is written hundreds of times in your own--"God has made of one blood all the Nations of the earth." Is there one man among you who has not the right to lift up his eyes and say to Brahman: "I am Thou"? Is there one man to whom we can deny the glory of the indwelling Divinity of Spirit? If that be so, and you know it is so, then as your body may have all the life-blood poisoned if a snake sheds his venom into the lowest part of the body; if that poison circles in the blood through all your body, your head and your limbs begin to be paralysed, and your whole body suffers; presently your body will die, though the wound was only in the foot. So it is with the Nation. If the poison is in the foot, in the lowest part of the National body, it spreads through the whole of the Nation, and no part of it is strong. If one man be poor, no rich man is perfectly happy in the enjoyment of his wealth. If one man be ignorant, no wise man can rise to the highest of his mental faculties. If one man be diseased, the health of the whole Nation is lowered. Oh! Nature is always teaching it to you. Plague begins in a filthy quarter of the town, but it spreads to a palace. In London, in the miserable dwelling of the seamstress, when she makes a ball-dress for a Court Ball, she at times stitches into it her fever, which is the outcome of starvation; and the ball-dress carries it down to the house of a noble, and so it catches the fair daughter of the family. She catches typhoid, and she perishes of the fever generated in the London slum. You cannot separate yourselves; you are brothers whether you will or not. You change your bodies; not one of you will go out of this hall with exactly the same body as you had when you entered it; some particles of your neighbour's body have come into yours. Some of yours have come to me. If you are diseased, you infect others; if you are healthy, your health infects others; if you are drunken, you communicate the poison of drink; if you are plague-stricken, the plague germs run from you to the healthy man. God has so bound us together that we cannot break the chain. Bound as brothers in suffering we must be, if we will not be brothers in love, in health, and in compassion. And so, to you, my brothers, I say: Take heed to yourselves; you stand with the greatest opportunity opening before you, mighty possibilities lie in the near future, which are yours if your hands are pure and your hearts are clean. No Nation has lived, where its poor were despised. The fragments of the past warn you of the dangers of your present. Live the Law of Brotherhood; rescue the miserable; teach the ignorant; feed the starving; nurse the diseased; and, on our India, on her future, the Ḍeva of India shall pour out His blessing, when she lives the law that she has always recognised in theory.