When you have thus understood and forgiven all your personal enemies, enter the souls of the warring nations. Understand them also by sympathy, and soften their hearts. Though this is a much easier thing to _attempt_ than the other, the results may seem incommensurable with the effort. But, small and great, you are all part of the Whole. And this brings me to the idea of race spirits, race entities, for every race has its guardian being--a composite being, yet self-conscious as separate, in a way you could hardly understand. Have you not noticed the effect on yourself of passing from country to country? Have your feelings--has your consciousness not changed almost at the frontier? Do you remember the shock you once had on setting foot for the first time in a certain foreign land? The race spirits seem no larger to themselves and among themselves than you humans do among your friends and acquaintances. Size is relative. Heretofore I have spoken of the races as organs in the body of humanity. In speaking of them now as separate beings I am not contradicting myself. What reason have you for assuming that the organs of your body may not each be animated by a more or less separate consciousness? Your cells exist in your organs, your organs exist in your body, you exist in your race, your race exists in the body of humanity on earth, the entity of the earth exists in the democracy of planetary spirits in the solar system, the solar system exists as one in the company of its fellows in the greater democracy of the Cosmos. A small blood-clot on the brain could seriously hamper the working of your cosmos. So you see there is nothing preposterous in my saying that you can hasten _infinitesimally_ the peace between the race spirits by forgiving and making peace with your personal enemies, especially if they belong to races on the other side of this war. The small is not so unimportant and the great is not so important as you have the habit of supposing. Yes, you personally--and all of you--can hasten the coming of peace. _April 16._ LETTER XXIII THE MYSTERY OF DESIRE I HAVE written about the hunger and thirst of disembodied men in the astral world, and I have written about the evil astral beings who brought about this war to satisfy their malice. They too are hungry beings and the war has given them food. Do you know what they live on? They _may_ live long on blood and the exhalations of slaughter. I have seen them by myriads hovering over a battlefield, gorging themselves on the blood that dripped from the wounds of suffering men and from dead men. The leaving of the dead unburied has also satisfied their hunger. Vampire entities came up from Hungary and from other countries and fed on the living. The awful weariness of war opened a door through which they might pass to the life forces they craved.