It would be of value at this time to indicate three of the functions of this New Group so that there may be a clear [669] picture of the work that must be accomplished during the next few years. This work is intended:

1. To produce a balancing of the forces present in the world today and responsible for the widespread unrest and chaos, so that it will be possible for the race to swing back to a point of equilibrium.
2. To act as the interpreters of the new attitudes and the new activities which must eventually govern men in the coming New Age.
3. To bring about the eventual synthesis and unification of the men of good will and of understanding into one coherent body. The many who are working in isolated fashion in the various fields of human endeavor (political, religious, scientific and economic), must be brought into touch with each other, and thus made to realize their essential unity.

At present, such is the distress of mind, so great is the economic suffering, and so deep seated is the widespread illusion, that there is no opportunity to precipitate that which is imminent. It is not possible for the new ideas, which constitute the coming ideals of the race, to make any real headway. As yet, these ideas are only sensed and appreciated by a few intuitives and thinkers, the masses remain unaware of the implications of the new order. These thinkers may be oriented towards [670] unity and good will, but the majority seize upon the ideals presented to them, bend them to their own ambitions, and distort and misapply them to their own selfish ends. They enforce drastic measures upon the people in order to bring about the acceptance of these ideas by an ignorant and dissatisfied public opinion.

In every country in the world today, men of good will and of true understanding are to be found. Many thousands of them are known. They are however, either ridden by fear or by a feeling of futility, and by the realization that the work to be done is so stupendous that their little isolated efforts are utterly useless to break down the barriers of hate and separation everywhere to be found. They realize that there is apparently no systematized spread of the principles which seem to hold the solution of the world problem; they have no conception of the numerical strength of those who may be thinking as they do, and they are consequently rendered impotent [671] through their loneliness, their lack of unity, and the dead weight of the surrounding inertia. The powerful thinker or the ambitious demagogue, and the man with a true love of his country (but with his own selected ideas as to the right solution of that country's problem) are today availing themselves of the general inertia and of the world crisis and depression in order to impose (if need be, by force) those systems of governments and of control which will materialize their interpretations of the ideal. These the masses have to accept, and because they normally take the line of least resistance without thinking, they are easily regimented into compliance.

Attack by one party upon another party in public, national or political life, or of one group of thinkers (advocating their peculiar ideas) upon another group of thinkers with differing ideas, has long been the custom. In this process the more powerful obliterate the weaker, and the masses are exploited and told what to do and to think, with no real effort to bring them into a condition of right understanding. It is the same in the religious field, but the religious differences of the race are [672] of such old standing that there is no need to enumerate them here. Militarists and pacifists in their many groups, Communists and conservatives, socialists and Nazis, republicans and Fascists, democrats and progressives, labor and capital, Catholics and Protestants, agnostics and fanatics, politicians and idealists, criminals and the enforcers of the misinterpreted law, ignorant masses and the intelligent few, plus the class distinctions, the racial differences, and the religious feuds in both hemispheres, have reduced the world to turmoil and complete disunion and feebleness.