The Karma of a nation is made up of the collective Karma of the individuals composing it, so far as their thoughts and acts have to do with the national spirit and acts.  Nations as nations cease to exist, but the souls of the individuals composing them still live on and make their influence felt in new races, scenes and environments.  The ancient Egyptians, Persians, Medes, Chaldeans, Romans, Grecians and many other ancient races have disappeared, but their reincarnating souls are with us to-day.  The modern revival of Occultism is caused by an influx of the souls of these old peoples pouring in on the Western worlds.

The following quotation from The Secret Doctrine, that remarkable piece of occult literature, will be interesting at this point: 

“Nor would the ways of Karma be inscrutable were men to work in union and harmony instead of disunion and strife.  For our ignorance of those ways—­which one portion of mankind calls the ways of Providence, dark and intricate, while another sees in them the action of blind fatalism, and a third simple Chance with neither gods nor devils to guide them—­would surely disappear if we would but attribute all these to their correct cause.  With right knowledge, or at any rate with a confident conviction that our neighbors will no more work harm to us than we would think of harming them, two-thirds of the world’s evil would vanish into thin air.  Were no man to hurt his brother, Karma-Nemesis would have neither cause to work for, nor weapons to act through ...  We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal road of respectability and duty, and then complain of those ways being so intricate and so dark.  We stand bewildered before the mystery of our own making and the riddles of life that we will not solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us.  But verily there is not an accident in our lives, not a misshapen day or a misfortune, that could not be traced back to our own doings in this or another life ...  Knowledge of Karma gives the conviction that if—­

          ’Virtue in distress and vice in triumph
          Makes atheists of Mankind,’

it is only because that mankind has ever shut its eyes to the great truth that man is himself his own savior as his own destroyer; that he need not accuse heaven, and the gods, fates and providence, of the apparent injustice that reigns in the midst of humanity.  But let him rather remember that bit of Grecian wisdom which warns man to forbear accusing THAT which ’Just though mysterious, leads us on unerring Through ways unmarked from guilt to punishment’—­which are now the ways and the high road on which move onward the great European nations.  The Western Aryans have every nation and tribe like their eastern brethren of the fifth race, their Golden and their Iron ages, their period of comparative irresponsibility,