that posterity should face, would have found its definite solution, once and for all, in a happiness which now perhaps even our sons and grandsons will not realize.  We know that the disappearance of two or three million young existences, cut down when they were on the point of bearing fruit, will leave in history a void that will not be easily filled, even as we know that among those dead were mighty intellects, treasures of genius which will not come back again and which contained inventions and discoveries that will now perhaps be lost to us for centuries.  We know that we shall never grasp the consequences of this thrusting back of progress and of this unprecedented devastation.  But, granting all this, it is a good thing to recover our balance and stand upon our feet.  There is no irreparable loss.  Everything is transformed, nothing perishes and that which seems to be hurled into destruction is not destroyed at all.  Our moral world, even as our physical world, is a vast but hermetically sealed sphere, whence naught can issue, whence naught can fall, to be dissolved in space.  All that exists, all that comes into being upon this earth remains there and bears fruit; and the most appalling wastage is but material or spiritual riches flung away for an instant, to fall to the ground again in a new form.  There is no escape or leakage, no filtering through cracks, no missing the mark, not even waste or neglect.  All this heroism poured out on every side does not leave our planet; and the reason why the courage of our fighters seems so general and yet so extraordinary is that all the might of the dead has passed into the survivors.  All those forces of wisdom, patience, honour and self-sacrifice which increase day by day and which we ourselves, who are far from the field of danger, feel rising within us without knowing whence they come are nothing but the souls of the heroes gathered and absorbed by our own souls.

3

It is well at times to contemplate invisible things as though we saw them with our eyes.  This was the aim of all the great religions, when they represented under forms appropriate to the civilization of their day, the latent, deep, instinctive, general and essential truths which are the guiding principles of mankind.  All have felt and recognized that loftiest of all truths, the communion of the living and the dead, and have given it various names designating the same mysterious verity:  the Christians know it as revival of merit, the Buddhists as reincarnation, or transmigration of souls, and the Japanese as Shintoism, or ancestor-worship.  The last are more fully convinced than any other nation that the dead do not cease to live and that they direct all our actions, are exalted by our virtues and become gods.

Lafcadio Hearn, the writer who has most closely studied and understood that wonderful ancestor-worship, says: