for the persecution of the “unorthodox,” and an itch for oppressive legislation.

This is a condensed yet comprehensive picture of self-evident facts. In no particular is it overdrawn or exaggerated. Yet it is a picture of effects only. The causes are not so obvious, nor so easily discerned. For the ordinary man those causes are hidden, or rather, he fails to perceive them. They are not to be found in the speeches of politicians, nor in the featured articles in the Sunday newspapers. The people and their leaders are blind; so blind that even when causes are uncovered, this people will deny them, will argue, and controvert. “Away with the alarmists. Let us continue on the broad and easy descent, without unpleasant reminders that the road must have an end.”

But there are some who are accustomed to seek for what lies beneath the surface, a few who have at least an elementary knowledge of worlds that surround and interpenetrate this plane of material existence. It is in the super-sensible worlds that we must seek for the causes of the misery and madness of our own age, and to those who have some knowledge of their nature and effects an explanation may be offered.

THE causes of the conditions we have briefly outlined are not physical. They have their origin in the astral worlds. These are dangerous times, and the present generation is living over a sort of astral powder-magazine. At any moment the weak and ill-balanced may be surprised into sudden and unpremeditated crime, into wild excesses or self-destruction. This is the result of an abnormal pressing outwards of the forces of the astral world into the physical—a psychic extrusion. While it is abnornormal, it is not necessarily a unique condition, or one without