In the matter immediately under review, however, the world-wide pandemic of “Spanish Influenza,” there can remain no shadow of doubt in the mind of any unbiased observer who follows the question fairly along the lines of electro-chemical biology, but that the general emotional disturbances incident upon the war conditions of the world, combined with the chaotic dietetic position with its anxieties and privations under strenuous and unwonted physical demands, do undoubtedly afford a sound and reasonable explanation of the cataclysmal outbreak which has recently fallen upon the nations.

The brazen blast of war, in 1914, with all its ruthless wreck and carnage, shook the universal fabric of the sphere.  Fear, fraud and famine were met together, duplicity and greed had kissed each other.  Short rations and with some, starvation, were soon the order of the day.  The corners of the earth were swept of stale forgotten stores and profiteers waxed fat and prices soared, whilst the vitals of the working world were vastly underfed.  The ranks of labour, depleted of its men, were filled by females uninured to toil and dangerous nerve racking environments.  Relentless time brings its revenges fast; but still they worked and suffered while malnutrition sapped the life-blood of the race.  In the homes of the fighting men fear reigned supreme—­ever the sword of Damocles suspended at the hearth.  And then the death lists came and the world was wet with human tears and all the furies flew the earth—­grief, hatred, revenge, love, pity and remorse, but the wail of mourning was throughout all lands in all the “sable panoply of woe” attending fast lowering vitality, bred by force of pain and hope deferred.  Pliny well said:  “Dolendi modus, non est timendi”—­Pain has its limits, apprehension none—­and now as in his day, the latter bore the palm.

Such was the position when two years ago the world first felt the impact of the pestilence and millions withered up like blighted corn.

The Vagus nerve with which we have been dealing, is concerned with the expression of emotions such as these; and being so, was burned up rapidly with fervent heat—­the flames of sorrow still with fasting fed.  In the majority of human lives such was the case, while the sources of nutritive reserve force were depleted by lack of things of universal use and foreign substitutes for normal food.  Small wonder then the once steady nerves soon buckled with the strain; that sickness followed swiftly with disaster in its train and that the death rate rose enormously, beyond recorded precedent.  And then when seeming good succeeds the storm of ills a plethora of new-born cares arose and worse, more fatal still, reaction from the strain which with relaxing energy demands its deadly share.  Here in America we meet our troubles with serener front, unawed by State-fed sacerdotal superstitions; but in England how the scourge has wrung from dire depression its full toll of death.