human life's vicissitudes--the interruptions of
its would-be harmonies--which take the forms, all too common in these
times of stress, of physical disturbance and of mental strain which
come to us in the combined and threatening guise of suffering and
disease.

That these forms are more pronounced, more virulent today than ever
before in the records of the race, is surely great Nature's manner,
crude and masterful, of pressing her mandate home--right home upon the
plastic film of evanescent shadows and ephemeral shades we proudly call
our consciousness.

How many, let me ask, how many of us, in the absorbing round of life's
futilities, have paused to really recognize the sinister "hand writing
on the wall?"

The phase of the world's history through which we pass complacently is
of no light portent, its happenings no casual concern, but, in point of
crucial fact, a virtual "rending of the sphere"--a cosmic upheaval such
as never yet before has racked the tense life sinews of the world,
confounding the wisdom of the wise and wrecking in one fell climax of
contempt the moral precepts of two thousand years.

The greatest human struggle the world has ever known synchronizes
strangely, yet logically with the world's greatest pestilence which has
swept successive millions to their doom without exacting from the
residue even the sentimental tribute of a tear.

The official brains of the entire globe are leagued in self-protective
unison "to make the world safe for democracy;" but Demos dies, by
violence and disease, ere yet salvation comes. It appeals to its
old-time standards for relief,--they are gone; to its pastors--they are
mute; to its masters--they are impotent; to its doctors--they are
baffled, helpless and aghast, whilst vainly searching earth and air for
some frail pretext of unreal enlightenment, some fragile figment of
belief. And yet in hypnotized complacency the masses stand; for
meanwhile commerce reaps its costly gains and labour draws in enhanced
increment the wages of the living and the dead.

Less serious visitations have, in former times, left their eternal
imprint on the age. They served to point the moral of widespread
reform--to emphasize the practice of hygiene and sanity. For all such
scourges are but signs of Nature's trust betrayed, her sacred laws
defied in the wild rush for gain, oblivious of the Law of Compensation's
cost, with its inevitable reckoning.

Thus, to the discoverer of the los