ation assume dominance and reign severely. To the world this system
of thought, because it is consecutive, is known as Logic, but Eternity
has written it down in the Book of Errors as Mechanism: for life may not
be consecutive, but explosive and variable, else it is a shackled and
timorous slave.

One of the great troubles of life is that Reason has taken charge of the
administration of Justice, and by mere identification it has achieved
the crown and sceptre of its master. But the imperceptible usurpation
was recorded, and discriminating minds understand the chasm which still
divides the pretender Law from the exiled King. In a like manner, and
with feigned humility, the Cold Demon advanced to serve Religion, and by
guile and violence usurped her throne; but the pure in heart still fly
from the spectre Theology to dance in ecstasy before the starry and
eternal goddess. Statecraft, also, that tender Shepherd of the Flocks,
has been despoiled of his crook and bell, and wanders in unknown
desolation while, beneath the banner of Politics, Reason sits howling
over an intellectual chaos.

Justice is the maintaining of equilibrium. The blood of Cain must cry,
not from the lips of the Avenger, but from the aggrieved Earth herself
who demands that atonement shall be made for a disturbance of her
consciousness. All justice is, therefore, readjustment. A thwarted
consciousness has every right to clamour for assistance, but not for
punishment. This latter can only be sought by timorous and egotistic
Intellect, which sees the Earth from which it has emerged and into which
it must return again in its own despite, and so, being self-centred and
envious and a renegade from life, Reason is more cruelly unjust, and
more timorous than any other manifestation of the divinely erratic
energy--erratic, because, as has been said, "the crooked roads are the
roads of genius." Nature grants to all her creatures an unrestricted
liberty, quickened by competitive appetite, to succeed or to fail; save
only to Reason, her Demon of Order, which can do neither, and
whose wings she has clipped for some reason with which I am not yet
acquainted. It may be that an unrestricted mentality would endanger
her own intuitive perceptions by shackling all her other organs of
perception, or annoy her by vexatious efforts at creative rivalry.

It will, therefore, be understood that when the Leprecauns of Gort
na Cloca Mora acted in the manner about to be recorded