You draw back a little with the thought that you could not have placed yourself in a position where the world for its own protection would be obliged to range itself against you. But are you sure? By entering the consciousness of that nation you _are_ placing yourself in such a position, and I tell you to do it temporarily, in order that you may be a centre, a beginning, an infinitesimal part of that international comprehension and pardon which must become general to a degree before the long-heralded and always misunderstood Universal Brotherhood can even begin to find room for itself in this unbrotherly world. If all those aggregations of people who have long believed that they stood for this ideal would now try to make peace with one another, if they would acknowledge the ideals of one another, however much the working-plans of those ideals may differ, a force could even now be set in motion that would shorten this war and lessen the number of those who must die for their conflicting ideals of national honor and loyalty. In the reaction from hate to love, in the reaction from criticism to understanding that will follow a formal declaration of peace, all these quarrelling spiritual organizations _may_ if they will, begin to work harmoniously. If their members cannot bring themselves, because of their narrow pride and the memory of all the harsh things which they have said against one another in the past--if they are too meanly afraid of eating their words, publicly to acknowledge one another as brethren, let them begin to feel thus in their hearts. Perhaps in time the greater courage will come, and some daring leader will say to his flock that those with whom they once worked, with trust and the profession of love, _may_ be trying, according to their lights, to serve the ideal. I do not know that any further elaboration of this idea would make it any clearer to you, and these remarks are only an interlude, a relief, in the tension of the story which I have to tell. _March 13._ LETTER V ASTRAL MONSTERS DID you know that I was near you when you crossed the North Sea more than two weeks before war was declared, crossed to England under an irresistible, an overwhelming impulse to _get away_ from the continent of Europe and back to the people of your own blood? I was near you. But I did not remain when you were safe with your friends. I returned to the centre of war determinism, went back to that land which, despite all protestations to the contrary, hatched out the egg which an irresponsible bird had laid in the region farther south.