depends for its efficacy on mosquitos.  Great men simply will not incarnate in malarial territory; because they would have no chance whatever of doing anything, with that oppression and enervation sapping them.  Greece has been malarial; Rome, too, to some extent; the Roman Campagna terribly; as if the disease were (as no doubt it is) a Karma fallen on the sites of old-time tremendous cultural energies; where the energies were presently wrecked, drowned and sodden in vice.  Here then is a pretty little problem in the workings of Karma:  on what plane, through what superphysical links or channels, do the vices of an effete civilization transform themselves into that poor familiar singer in the night-time, the mosquito?  Greece and Rome, in their heyday, were not malarial; if they had been, no genius and no power would have shone in them.

In the Middle Ages, before people knew much about sanitary science and antiseptics and the like, a great war quickly translated itself into a great pestilence.  Then we made advances and discovered Listerian remedies and things, and said:  Come now; we shall fight this one; we shall have slaughtered millions lying about as we please, and get no plague out of it; we are wise and mighty, and Karma is a fool to us; we are the children of MODERN CIVILIZATION; what have Nature and its laws to do with us?  Our inventions and discoveries have certainly put them out of commission.—­And sure enough, the mere foulness of the battlefield, the stench of decay, bred no pest; our Science had circumvented the old methods through which Natural Law (which is only another way of saying Karma) worked; we had cut the physical links, and blocked the material channels through which wrong-doing flowed into its own punishment.—­Whereupon Nature, wrathful, withdrew a little; took thought for her astral and inner planes; found new links and channels there; passed through these the causes we had provided, and emptied them out again on the physical plane in the guise of a new thing, Spanish Influenza;—­and spread it over three continents, with greater scope and reach than had ever her old-fashioned stench-bred plagues that served her well enough when we were less scientific.  Whereof the moral is:  He laughs loudest who laughs last; and just now, and for some time to come, the laugh is with Karma.  Say until the end of the Maha-Manvantara; until the end of manifested Time.  When shall we stop imagining that any possible inventions or discoveries will enable us to circumvent the fundamental laws of Nature?  Not the printing-press, nor steam, nor electricity, nor aerial navigation, nor vril itself when we come to it, will serve to keep civilizations alive that have worn themselves out by wrong-doing—­or even that have come to old age and the natural time when they must die.  But their passings need not be ghastly and disastrous, or anything but honorable and beneficial, if in the prime and vigor of their lifetimes they would learn decently to live.