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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12085 ***
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by H.S. Mendelssohn, 27, Cathcart
+Road, South Kensington, London._ ANNIE BESANT. 1885]
+
+
+
+
+ANNIE BESANT
+
+AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+LONDON
+
+SECOND EDITION
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+It is a difficult thing to tell the story of a life, and yet more
+difficult when that life is one's own. At the best, the telling has a
+savour of vanity, and the only excuse for the proceeding is that the
+life, being an average one, reflects many others, and in troublous
+times like ours may give the experience of many rather than of one.
+And so the autobiographer does his work because he thinks that, at the
+cost of some unpleasantness to himself, he may throw light on some of
+the typical problems that are vexing the souls of his contemporaries,
+and perchance may stretch out a helping hand to some brother who is
+struggling in the darkness, and so bring him cheer when despair has
+him in its grip. Since all of us, men and women of this restless and
+eager generation--surrounded by forces we dimly see but cannot as yet
+understand, discontented with old ideas and half afraid of new, greedy
+for the material results of the knowledge brought us by Science but
+looking askance at her agnosticism as regards the soul, fearful of
+superstition but still more fearful of atheism, turning from the husks
+of outgrown creeds but filled with desperate hunger for spiritual
+ideals--since all of us have the same anxieties, the same griefs, the
+same yearning hopes, the same passionate desire for knowledge, it may
+well be that the story of one may help all, and that the tale of one
+should that went out alone into the darkness and on the other side
+found light, that struggled through the Storm and on the other side
+found Peace, may bring some ray of light and of peace into the
+darkness and the storm of other lives.
+
+ANNIE BESANT.
+
+THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY,
+
+17 & 19, AVENUE ROAD, REGENT'S PARK, LONDON.
+
+_August_, 1893.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+CHAP.
+
+I.    "OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE"
+
+II.   EARLY CHILDHOOD
+
+III.  GIRLHOOD
+
+IV.   MARRIAGE
+
+V.    THE STORM OF DOUBT
+
+VI.   CHARLES BRADLAUGH
+
+VII.  ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT
+
+VIII. AT WORK
+
+IX.   THE KNOWLTON PAMPHLET
+
+X.    AT WAR ALL ROUND
+
+XI.   MR. BRADLAUGH'S STRUGGLE
+
+XII.  STILL FIGHTING
+
+XIII. SOCIALISM
+
+XIV.  THROUGH STORM TO PEACE
+
+LIST OF BOOKS QUOTED
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+
+ANNIE BESANT, 1885                          _Frontispiece_
+
+HOROSCOPE OF ANNIE BESANT                   _Page_ 12
+
+ANNIE BESANT, 1869                          _Facing page_ 86
+
+THOMAS SCOTT                                _Facing page_ 112
+
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH, M.P.                     _Facing page_ 212
+
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH AND HENRY LABOUCHERE      _Facing page_ 254
+
+NORWICH BRANCH OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE      _Facing page_ 314
+
+STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION  _Facing page_ 336
+
+MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION           _Facing page_ 338
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+"OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE."
+
+
+On October 1, 1847, I am credibly informed, my baby eyes opened to the
+light(?) of a London afternoon at 5.39.
+
+A friendly astrologer has drawn for me the following chart, showing the
+position of the planets at this, to me fateful, moment; but I know
+nothing of astrology, so feel no wiser as I gaze upon my horoscope.
+
+Keeping in view the way in which sun, moon, and planets influence the
+physical condition of the earth, there is nothing incongruous with the
+orderly course of nature in the view that they also influence the
+physical bodies of men, these being part of the physical earth, and
+largely moulded by its conditions. Any one who knows the
+characteristics ascribed to those who are born under the several signs
+of the Zodiac, may very easily pick out the different types among his
+own acquaintances, and he may then get them to go to some astrologer
+and find out under what signs they were severally born. He will very
+quickly discover that two men of completely opposed types are not born
+under the same sign, and the invariability of the concurrence will
+convince him that law, and not chance, is at work. We are born into
+earthly life under certain conditions, just as we were physically
+affected by them pre-natally, and these will have their bearing on our
+subsequent physical evolution. At the most, astrology, as it is now
+practised, can only calculate the interaction between these physical
+conditions at any given moment, and the conditions brought to them by a
+given person whose general constitution and natal condition are known.
+It cannot say what the person will do, nor what will happen to him, but
+only what will be the physical district, so to speak, in which he will
+find himself, and the impulses that will play upon him from external
+nature and from his own body. Even on those matters modern astrology is
+not quite reliable--judging from the many blunders made--or else its
+professors are very badly instructed; but that there is a real science
+of astrology I have no doubt, and there are some men who are past
+masters in it.
+
+[Illustration: Horoscope of Annie Besant.]
+
+It has always been somewhat of a grievance to me that I was born in
+London, "within the sound of Bow Bells," when three-quarters of my
+blood and all my heart are Irish. My dear mother was of purest Irish
+descent, and my father was Irish on his mother's side, though belonging
+to the Devonshire Woods on his father's. The Woods were yeomen of the
+sturdy English type, farming their own land in honest, independent
+fashion. Of late years they seem to have developed more in the
+direction of brains, from the time, in fact, that Matthew Wood became
+Mayor of London town, fought Queen Caroline's battles against her most
+religious and gracious royal husband, aided the Duke of Kent with no
+niggard hand, and received a baronetcy for his services from the Duke
+of Kent's royal daughter. Since then they have given England a Lord
+Chancellor in the person of the gentle-hearted and pure-living Lord
+Hatherley, while others have distinguished themselves in various ways
+in the service of their country. But I feel playfully inclined to
+grudge the English blood they put into my father's veins, with his
+Irish mother, his Galway birth, and his Trinity College, Dublin,
+education. For the Irish tongue is musical in my ear, and the Irish
+nature dear to my heart. Only in Ireland is it that if you stop to ask
+a worn-out ragged woman the way to some old monument, she will say:
+"Sure, then, my darlin', it's just up the hill and round the corner,
+and then any one will tell you the way. And it's there you'll see the
+place where the blessed Saint Patrick set his foot, and his blessing be
+on yer." Old women as poor as she in other nations would never be as
+bright and as friendly and as garrulous. And where, out of Ireland,
+will you see a whole town crowd into a station to say good-bye to half
+a dozen emigrants, till the platform is a heaving mass of men and
+women, struggling, climbing over each other for a last kiss, crying,
+keening, laughing, all in a breath, till all the air is throbbing and
+there's a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes as the train
+steams out? Where, out of Ireland, will you be bumping along the
+streets on an outside car, beside a taciturn Jarvey, who, on suddenly
+discovering that you are shadowed by "Castle" spies, becomes
+loquaciously friendly, and points out everything that he thinks will
+interest you? Blessings on the quick tongues and warm hearts, on the
+people so easy to lead, so hard to drive. And blessings on the ancient
+land once inhabited by mighty men of wisdom, that in later times became
+the Island of Saints, and shall once again be the Island of Sages, when
+the Wheel turns round.
+
+My maternal grandfather was a typical Irishman, much admired by me and
+somewhat feared also, in the childish days. He belonged to a decayed
+Irish family, the Maurices, and in a gay youth, with a beautiful wife
+as light-hearted as himself, he had merrily run through what remained
+to him in the way of fortune. In his old age, with abundant snow-white
+hair, he still showed the hot Irish blood on the lightest provocation,
+stormily angry for a moment and easily appeased. My mother was the
+second daughter in a large family, in a family that grew more numerous
+as pounds grew fewer, and she was adopted by a maiden aunt, a quaint
+memory of whom came through my mother's childhood into mine, and had
+its moulding effect on both our characters. This maiden aunt was, as
+are most Irish folk of decayed families, very proud of her family tree
+with its roots in the inevitable "kings." Her particular kings were the
+"seven kings of France"--the "Milesian kings"--and the tree grew up a
+parchment, in all its impressive majesty, over the mantelpiece of their
+descendant's modest drawing-room. This heraldic monster was regarded
+with deep respect by child Emily, a respect in no wise deserved, I
+venture to suppose, by the disreputable royalties of whom she was a
+fortunately distant twig. Chased out of France, doubtless for cause
+shown, they had come over the sea to Ireland, and there continued their
+reckless plundering lives. But so strangely turns the wheel of time
+that these ill-doing and barbarous scamps became a kind of moral
+thermometer in the home of the gentle Irish lady in the early half of
+the present century. For my mother has told me that when she had
+committed some act of childish naughtiness, her aunt would say, looking
+gravely over her spectacles at the small culprit, "Emily, your conduct
+is unworthy of the descendant of the seven kings of France." And Emily,
+with her sweet grey Irish eyes and her curling masses of raven black
+hair, would cry in penitent shame over her unworthiness, with some
+vague idea that those royal, and to her very real, ancestors would
+despise her small, sweet, rosebud self, so wholly unworthy of their
+disreputable majesties.
+
+Thus those shadowy forms influenced her in childhood, and exercised
+over her a power that made her shrink from aught that was unworthy,
+petty or mean. To her the lightest breath of dishonour was to be
+avoided at any cost of pain, and she wrought into me, her only
+daughter, that same proud and passionate horror at any taint of shame
+or merited disgrace. To the world always a brave front was to be kept,
+and a stainless reputation, for suffering might be borne but dishonour
+never. A gentlewoman might starve, but she must not run in debt; she
+might break her heart, but it must be with a smile on her face. I have
+often thought that the training in this reticence and pride of honour
+was a strange preparation for my stormy, public, much attacked and
+slandered life; and certain it is that this inwrought shrinking from
+all criticism that touched personal purity and personal honour added a
+keenness of suffering to the fronting of public odium that none can
+appreciate who has not been trained in some similar school of dignified
+self-respect. And yet perhaps there was another result from it that in
+value outweighed the added pain: it was the stubbornly resistant
+feeling that rose and inwardly asserted its own purity in face of
+foulest lie, and turning scornful face against the foe, too proud
+either to justify itself or to defend, said to itself in its own heart,
+when condemnation was loudest: "I am not what you think me, and your
+verdict does not change my own self. You cannot make me vile whatever
+you think of me, and I will never, in my own eyes, be that which you
+deem me to be now." And the very pride became a shield against
+degradation, for, however lost my public reputation, I could never bear
+to become sullied in my own sight--and that is a thing not without its
+use to a woman cut off, as I was at one time, from home, and friends,
+and Society. So peace to the maiden aunt's ashes, and to those of her
+absurd kings, for I owe them something after all. And I keep grateful
+memory of that unknown grand-aunt, for what she did in training my dear
+mother, the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest of women. It is well
+to be able to look back to a mother who served as ideal of all that was
+noblest and dearest during childhood and girlhood, whose face made the
+beauty of home, and whose love was both sun and shield. No other
+experience in life could quite make up for missing the perfect tie
+between mother and child--a tie that in our case never relaxed and
+never weakened. Though her grief at my change of faith and consequent
+social ostracism did much to hasten her death-hour, it never brought a
+cloud between our hearts; though her pleading was the hardest of all to
+face in later days, and brought the bitterest agony, it made no gulf
+between us, it cast no chill upon our mutual love. And I look back at
+her to-day with the same loving gratitude as ever encircled her to me
+in her earthly life. I have never met a woman more selflessly devoted
+to those she loved, more passionately contemptuous of all that was mean
+or base, more keenly sensitive on every question of honour, more iron
+in will, more sweet in tenderness, than the mother who made my girlhood
+sunny as dreamland, who guarded me, until my marriage, from every touch
+of pain that she could ward off or bear for me, who suffered more in
+every trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself, and who
+died in the little house I had taken for our new home in Norwood, worn
+out, ere old age touched her, by sorrow, poverty, and pain, in May,
+1874.
+
+My earliest personal recollections are of a house and garden that we
+lived in when I was three and four years of age, situated in Grove
+Road, St. John's Wood. I can remember my mother hovering round the
+dinner-table to see that all was bright for the home-coming husband; my
+brother--two years older than myself--and I watching "for papa"; the
+loving welcome, the game of romps that always preceded the dinner of
+the elder folks. I can remember on the 1st of October, 1851, jumping up
+in my little cot, and shouting out triumphantly: "Papa! mamma! I am
+four years old!" and the grave demand of my brother, conscious of
+superior age, at dinner-time: "May not Annie have a knife to-day, as
+she is four years old?"
+
+It was a sore grievance during that same year, 1851, that I was not
+judged old enough to go to the Great Exhibition, and I have a faint
+memory of my brother consolingly bringing me home one of those folding
+pictured strips that are sold in the streets, on which were imaged
+glories that I longed only the more to see. Far-away, dusky, trivial
+memories, these. What a pity it is that a baby cannot notice, cannot
+observe, cannot remember, and so throw light on the fashion of the
+dawning of the external world on the human consciousness. If only we
+could remember how things looked when they were first imaged on the
+retinae; what we felt when first we became conscious of the outer world;
+what the feeling was as faces of father and mother grew out of the
+surrounding chaos and became familiar things, greeted with a smile,
+lost with a cry; if only memory would not become a mist when in later
+years we strive to throw our glances backward into the darkness of our
+infancy, what lessons we might learn to help our stumbling psychology,
+how many questions might be solved whose answers we are groping for in
+the West in vain.
+
+The next scene that stands out clearly against the background of the
+past is that of my father's death-bed. The events which led to his
+death I know from my dear mother. He had never lost his fondness for
+the profession for which he had been trained, and having many medical
+friends, he would now and then accompany them on their hospital rounds,
+or share with them the labours of the dissecting-room. It chanced that
+during the dissection of the body of a person who had died of rapid
+consumption, my father cut his finger against the edge of the
+breast-bone. The cut did not heal easily, and the finger became swollen
+and inflamed. "I would have that finger off, Wood, if I were you," said
+one of the surgeons, a day or two afterwards, on seeing the state of
+the wound. But the others laughed at the suggestion, and my father, at
+first inclined to submit to the amputation, was persuaded to "leave
+Nature alone."
+
+About the middle of August, 1852, he got wet through, riding on the top
+of an omnibus, and the wetting resulted in a severe cold, which
+"settled on his chest." One of the most eminent doctors of the day, as
+able as he was rough in manner, was called to see him. He examined him
+carefully, sounded his lungs, and left the room followed by my mother.
+"Well?" she asked, scarcely anxious as to the answer, save as it might
+worry her husband to be kept idly at home. "You must keep up his
+spirits," was the thoughtless answer. "He is in a galloping
+consumption; you will not have him with you six weeks longer." The wife
+staggered back, and fell like a stone on the floor. But love triumphed
+over agony, and half an hour later she was again at her husband's side,
+never to leave it again for ten minutes at a time, night or day, till
+he was lying with closed eyes asleep in death.
+
+I was lifted on to the bed to "say good-bye to dear papa" on the day
+before his death, and I remember being frightened at his eyes which
+looked so large, and his voice which sounded so strange, as he made me
+promise always to be "a very good girl to darling mamma, as papa was
+going right away." I remember insisting that "papa should kiss Cherry,"
+a doll given me on my birthday, three days before, by his direction,
+and being removed, crying and struggling, from the room. He died on the
+following day, October 5th, and I do not think that my elder brother
+and I--who were staying at our maternal grandfather's--went to the
+house again until the day of the funeral. With the death, my mother
+broke down, and when all was over they carried her senseless from the
+room. I remember hearing afterwards how, when she recovered her senses,
+she passionately insisted on being left alone, and locked herself into
+her room for the night; and how on the following morning her mother, at
+last persuading her to open the door, started back at the face she saw
+with the cry: "Good God, Emily! your hair is white!" It was even so;
+her hair, black, glossy and abundant, which, contrasting with her large
+grey eyes, had made her face so strangely attractive, had turned grey
+in that night of agony, and to me my mother's face is ever framed in
+exquisite silver bands of hair as white as the driven unsullied snow.
+
+I have heard that the love between my father and mother was a very
+beautiful thing, and it most certainly stamped her character for life.
+He was keenly intellectual and splendidly educated; a mathematician and
+a good classical scholar, thoroughly master of French, German, Italian,
+Spanish, and Portuguese, with a smattering of Hebrew and Gaelic, the
+treasures of ancient and of modern literature were his daily household
+delight. Nothing pleased him so well as to sit with his wife, reading
+aloud to her while she worked; now translating from some foreign poet,
+now rolling forth melodiously the exquisite cadences of "Queen Mab."
+Student of philosophy as he was, he was deeply and steadily sceptical;
+and a very religious relative has told me that he often drove her from
+the room by his light, playful mockery of the tenets of the Christian
+faith. His mother and sister were strict Roman Catholics, and near the
+end forced a priest into his room, but the priest was promptly ejected
+by the wrath of the dying man, and by the almost fierce resolve of the
+wife that no messenger of the creed he detested should trouble her
+darling at the last.
+
+Deeply read in philosophy, he had outgrown the orthodox beliefs of his
+day, and his wife, who loved him too much to criticise, was wont to
+reconcile her own piety and his scepticism by holding that "women ought
+to be religious," while men had a right to read everything and think as
+they would, provided that they were upright and honourable in their
+lives. But the result of his liberal and unorthodox thought was to
+insensibly modify and partially rationalise her own beliefs, and she
+put on one side as errors the doctrines of eternal punishment, the
+vicarious atonement, the infallibility of the Bible, the equality of
+the Son with the Father in the Trinity, and other orthodox beliefs, and
+rejoiced in her later years in the writings of such men as Jowett,
+Colenso, and Stanley. The last named, indeed, was her ideal Christian
+gentleman, suave, polished, broad-minded, devout in a stately way. The
+baldness of a typical Evangelical service outraged her taste as much as
+the crudity of Evangelical dogmas outraged her intellect; she liked to
+feel herself a Christian in a dignified and artistic manner, and to be
+surrounded by solemn music and splendid architecture when she "attended
+Divine service." Familiarity with celestial personages was detestable
+to her, and she did her duty of saluting them in a courtly and reverent
+fashion. Westminster Abbey was her favourite church, with its dim light
+and shadowy distances; there in a carven stall, with choristers
+chanting in solemn rhythm, with the many-coloured glories of the
+painted windows repeating themselves on upspringing arch and clustering
+pillars, with the rich harmonies of the pealing organ throbbing up
+against screen and monument, with the ashes of the mighty dead around,
+and all the stately memories of the past inwrought into the very
+masonry, there Religion appeared to her to be intellectually dignified
+and emotionally satisfactory.
+
+To me, who took my religion in strenuous fashion, this dainty and
+well-bred piety seemed perilously like Laodicean lukewarmness, while
+my headlong vigour of conviction and practice often jarred on her as
+alien from the delicate balance and absence of extremes that should
+characterise the gentlewoman. She was of the old _régime_; I of the
+stuff from which fanatics are made: and I have often thought, in
+looking back, that she must have had on her lips many a time unspoken
+a phrase that dropped from them when she lay a-dying: "My little one,
+you have never made me sad or sorry except for your own sake; you have
+always been too religious." And then she murmured to herself: "Yes,
+it has been darling Annie's only fault; she has always been too
+religious." Methinks that, as the world judges, the dying voice spake
+truly, and the dying eyes saw with a real insight. For though I was
+then kneeling beside her bed, heretic and outcast, the heart of me was
+religious in its very fervour of repudiation of a religion, and in its
+rebellious uprising against dogmas that crushed the reason and did not
+satisfy the soul. I went out into the darkness alone, not because
+religion was too good for me, but because it was not good enough; it
+was too meagre, too commonplace, too little exacting, too bound up
+with earthly interests, too calculating in its accommodations to
+social conventionalities. The Roman Catholic Church, had it captured
+me, as it nearly did, would have sent me on some mission of danger and
+sacrifice and utilised me as a martyr; the Church established by law
+transformed me into an unbeliever and an antagonist.
+
+For as a child I was mystical and imaginative religious to the very
+finger-tips, and with a certain faculty for seeing visions and
+dreaming dreams. This faculty is not uncommon with the Keltic races,
+and makes them seem "superstitious" to more solidly-built peoples.
+Thus, on the day of my father's funeral, my mother sat with vacant
+eyes and fixed pallid face--the picture comes back to me yet, it so
+impressed my childish imagination--following the funeral service,
+stage after stage, and suddenly, with the words, "It is all over!"
+fell back fainting. She said afterwards that she had followed the
+hearse, had attended the service, had walked behind the coffin to the
+grave. Certain it is that a few weeks later she determined to go to
+the Kensal Green Cemetery, where the body of her husband had been
+laid, and went thither with a relative; he failed to find the grave,
+and while another of the party went in search of an official to
+identify the spot, my mother said, "If you will take me to the chapel
+where the first part of the service was read, I will find the grave."
+The idea seemed to her friend, of course, to be absurd; but he would
+not cross the newly-made widow, so took her to the chapel. She looked
+round, left the chapel door, and followed the path along which the
+corpse had been borne till she reached the grave, where she was
+quietly standing when the caretaker arrived to point it out. The grave
+is at some distance from the chapel, and is not on one of the main
+roads; it had nothing on it to mark it, save the wooden peg with the
+number, and this would be no help to identification at a distance
+since all the graves are thus marked, and at a little way off these
+pegs are not visible. How she found the grave remained a mystery in
+the family, as no one believed her straightforward story that she had
+been present at the funeral. With my present knowledge the matter is
+simple enough, for I now know that the consciousness can leave the
+body, take part in events going on at a distance, and, returning,
+impress on the physical brain what it has experienced. The very fact
+that she asked to be taken to the chapel is significant, showing that
+she was picking up a memory of a previous going from that spot to the
+grave; she could only find the grave if she started from _the place
+from which she had started before_. Another proof of this
+ultra-physical capacity was given a few months later, when her infant
+son, who had been pining himself ill for "papa," was lying one night
+in her arms. On the next morning she said to her sister: "Alf is going
+to die." The child had no definite disease, but was wasting away, and
+it was argued to her that the returning spring would restore the
+health lost during the winter. "No," was her answer. "He was lying
+asleep in my arms last night, and William" (her husband) "came to me
+and said that he wanted Alf with him, but that I might keep the other
+two." In vain she was assured that she had been dreaming, that it was
+quite natural that she should dream about her husband, and that her
+anxiety for the child had given the dream its shape. Nothing would
+persuade her that she had not seen her husband, or that the
+information he had given her was not true. So it was no matter of
+surprise to her when in the following March her arms were empty, and a
+waxen form lay lifeless in the baby's cot.
+
+My brother and I were allowed to see him just before he was placed in
+his coffin; I can see him still, so white and beautiful, with a black
+spot in the middle of the fair, waxen forehead, and I remember the
+deadly cold which startled me when I was told to kiss my little
+brother. It was the first time that I had touched Death. That black
+spot made a curious impression on me, and long afterwards, asking what
+had caused it, I was told that at the moment after his death my mother
+had passionately kissed the baby brow. Pathetic thought, that the
+mother's kiss of farewell should have been marked by the first sign of
+corruption on the child's face!
+
+I do not mention these stories because they are in any fashion
+remarkable or out of the way, but only to show that the sensitiveness
+to impressions other than physical ones, that was a marked feature in
+my own childhood, was present also in the family to which I belonged.
+For the physical nature is inherited from parents, and sensitiveness
+to psychic impressions is a property of the physical body; in our
+family, as in so many Irish ones, belief in "ghosts" of all
+descriptions was general, and my mother has told me of the banshee
+that she had heard wailing when the death-hour of one of the family
+was near. To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were
+very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself
+a child. Punch and Judy were living entities, and the tragedy in which
+they bore part cost me many an agony of tears; to this day I can
+remember running away when I heard the squawk of the coming Punch, and
+burying my head in the pillows that I might shut out the sound of the
+blows and the cry of the ill-used baby. All the objects about me were
+to me alive, the flowers that I kissed as much as the kitten I petted,
+and I used to have a splendid time "making believe" and living out all
+sorts of lovely stories among my treasured and so-called inanimate
+playthings. But there was a more serious side to this dreamful fancy
+when it joined hands with religion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+EARLY CHILDHOOD.
+
+
+And now began my mother's time of struggle and of anxiety. Hitherto,
+since her marriage, she had known no money troubles, for her husband
+was earning a good income; he was apparently vigorous and well: no
+thought of anxiety clouded their future. When he died, he believed
+that he left his wife and children safe, at least, from pecuniary
+distress. It was not so. I know nothing of the details, but the
+outcome of all was that nothing was left for the widow and children,
+save a trifle of ready money. The resolve to which my mother came was
+characteristic. Two of her husband's relatives, Western and Sir
+William Wood, offered to educate her son at a good city school, and to
+start him in commercial life, using their great city influence to push
+him forward. But the young lad's father and mother had talked of a
+different future for their eldest boy; he was to go to a public
+school, and then to the University, and was to enter one of the
+"learned professions"--to take orders, the mother wished; to go to the
+Bar, the father hoped. On his death-bed there was nothing more
+earnestly urged by my father than that Harry should receive the best
+possible education, and the widow was resolute to fulfil that last
+wish. In her eyes, a city school was not "the best possible
+education," and the Irish pride rebelled against the idea of her son
+not being "a University man." Many were the lectures poured out on the
+young widow's head about her "foolish pride," especially by the female
+members of the Wood family; and her persistence in her own way caused
+a considerable alienation between herself and them. But Western and
+William, though half-disapproving, remained her friends, and lent many
+a helping hand to her in her first difficult struggles. After much
+cogitation, she resolved that the boy should be educated at Harrow,
+where the fees are comparatively low to lads living in the town, and
+that he should go thence to Cambridge or to Oxford, as his tastes
+should direct. A bold scheme for a penniless widow, but carried out to
+the letter; for never dwelt in a delicate body a more resolute mind
+and will than that of my dear mother.
+
+In a few months' time--during which we lived, poorly enough, in
+Richmond Terrace, Clapham, close to her father and mother--to Harrow,
+then, she betook herself, into lodgings over a grocer's shop, and set
+herself to look for a house. This grocer was a very pompous man, fond
+of long words, and patronised the young widow exceedingly, and one day
+my mother related with much amusement how he had told her that she was
+sure to get on if she worked hard. "Look at me!" he said, swelling
+visibly with importance; "I was once a poor boy, without a penny of my
+own, and now I am a comfortable man, and have my submarine villa to go
+to every evening." That "submarine villa" was an object of amusement
+when we passed it in our walks for many a long day.
+
+"There is Mr. ----'s submarine villa," some one would say, laughing:
+and I, too, used to laugh merrily, because my elders did, though my
+understanding of the difference between suburban and submarine was on
+a par with that of the honest grocer.
+
+My mother had fortunately found a boy, whose parents were glad to place
+him in her charge, of about the age of her own son, to educate with
+him; and by this means she was able to pay for a tutor, to prepare the
+two boys for school. The tutor had a cork leg, which was a source of
+serious trouble to me, for it stuck out straight behind when we knelt
+down to family prayers--conduct which struck me as irreverent and
+unbecoming, but which I always felt a desire to imitate. After about a
+year my mother found a house which she thought would suit her scheme,
+namely, to obtain permission from Dr. Vaughan, the then head-master of
+Harrow, to take some boys into her house, and so gain means of
+education for her own son. Dr. Vaughan, who must have been won by the
+gentle, strong, little woman, from that time forth became her earnest
+friend and helper; and to the counsel and active assistance both of
+himself and of his wife, was due much of the success that crowned her
+toil. He made only one condition in granting the permission she asked,
+and that was, that she should also have in her house one of the masters
+of the school, so that the boys should not suffer from the want of a
+house-tutor. This condition, of course, she readily accepted, and the
+arrangement lasted for ten years, until after her son had left school
+for Cambridge.
+
+The house she took is now, I am sorry to say, pulled down, and
+replaced by a hideous red-brick structure. It was very old and
+rambling, rose-covered in front, ivy-covered behind; it stood on the
+top of Harrow Hill, between the church and the school, and had once
+been the vicarage of the parish, but the vicar had left it because it
+was so far removed from the part of the village where all his work
+lay. The drawing-room opened by an old-fashioned half-window,
+half-door--which proved a constant source of grief to me, for whenever
+I had on a new frock I always tore it on the bolt as I flew
+through--into a large garden which sloped down one side of the hill,
+and was filled with the most delightful old trees, fir and laurel,
+may, mulberry, hazel, apple, pear, and damson, not to mention currant
+and gooseberry bushes innumerable, and large strawberry beds spreading
+down the sunny slopes. There was not a tree there that I did not
+climb, and one, a widespreading Portugal laurel, was my private
+country house. I had there my bedroom and my sitting-rooms, my study,
+and my larder. The larder was supplied by the fruit-trees, from which
+I was free to pick as I would, and in the study I would sit for hours
+with some favourite book--Milton's "Paradise Lost" the chief favourite
+of all. The birds must often have felt startled, when from the small
+swinging form perching on a branch, came out in childish tones the
+"Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers," of Milton's
+stately and sonorous verse. I liked to personify Satan, and to declaim
+the grand speeches of the hero-rebel, and many a happy hour did I pass
+in Milton's heaven and hell, with for companions Satan and "the Son,"
+Gabriel and Abdiel. Then there was a terrace running by the side of
+the churchyard, always dry in the wettest weather, and bordered by an
+old wooden fence, over which clambered roses of every shade; never was
+such a garden for roses as that of the Old Vicarage. At the end of the
+terrace was a little summer-house, and in this a trap-door in the
+fence, which swung open and displayed one of the fairest views in
+England. Sheer from your feet downwards went the hill, and then far
+below stretched the wooded country till your eye reached the towers of
+Windsor Castle, far away on the horizon. It was the view at which
+Byron was never tired of gazing, as he lay on the flat tombstone close
+by--Byron's tomb, as it is still called--of which he wrote:--
+
+  "Again I behold where for hours I have pondered,
+     As reclining, at eve, on yon tombstone I lay,
+  Or round the steep brow of the churchyard I wandered,
+     To catch the last gleam of the sun's setting ray."
+
+Reader mine, if ever you go to Harrow, ask permission to enter the old
+garden, and try the effect of that sudden burst of beauty, as you
+swing back the small trap-door at the terrace end.
+
+Into this house we moved on my eighth birthday, and for eleven years it
+was "home" to me, left always with regret, returned to always with joy.
+
+Almost immediately afterwards I left my mother for the first time; for
+one day, visiting a family who lived close by, I found a stranger
+sitting in the drawing-room, a lame lady with a strong face, which
+softened marvellously as she smiled at the child who came dancing in;
+she called me to her presently, and took me on her lap and talked to
+me, and on the following day our friend came to see my mother, to ask
+if she would let me go away and be educated with this lady's niece,
+coming home for the holidays regularly, but leaving my education in
+her hands. At first my mother would not hear of it, for she and I
+scarcely ever left each other; my love for her was an idolatry, hers
+for me a devotion. (A foolish little story, about which I was
+unmercifully teased for years, marked that absolute idolatry of her,
+which has not yet faded from my heart. In tenderest rallying one day
+of the child who trotted after her everywhere, content to sit, or
+stand, or wait, if only she might touch hand or dress of "mamma," she
+said: "Little one" (the name by which she always called me), "if you
+cling to mamma in this way, I must really get a string and tie you to
+my apron, and how will you like that?" "O mamma, darling," came the
+fervent answer, "do let it be in a knot." And, indeed, the tie of love
+between us was so tightly knotted that nothing ever loosened it till
+the sword of Death cut that which pain and trouble never availed to
+slacken in the slightest degree.) But it was urged upon her that the
+advantages of education offered were such as no money could purchase
+for me; that it would be a disadvantage for me to grow up in a
+houseful of boys--and, in truth, I was as good a cricketer and climber
+as the best of them--that my mother would soon be obliged to send me
+to school, unless she accepted an offer which gave me every advantage
+of school without its disadvantages. At last she yielded, and it was
+decided that Miss Marryat, on returning home, should take me with her.
+
+Miss Marryat--the favourite sister of Captain Marryat, the famous
+novelist--was a maiden lady of large means. She had nursed her brother
+through the illness that ended in his death, and had been living with
+her mother at Wimbledon Park. On her mother's death she looked round
+for work which would make her useful in the world, and finding that one
+of her brothers had a large family of girls, she offered to take charge
+of one of them, and to educate her thoroughly. Chancing to come to
+Harrow, my good fortune threw me in her way, and she took a fancy to
+me and thought she would like to teach two little girls rather than
+one. Hence her offer to my mother.
+
+Miss Marryat had a perfect genius for teaching, and took in it the
+greatest delight. From time to time she added another child to our
+party, sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl. At first, with Amy Marryat
+and myself, there was a little boy, Walter Powys, son of a clergyman
+with a large family, and him she trained for some years, and then sent
+him on to school admirably prepared. She chose "her children"--as she
+loved to call us--in very definite fashion. Each must be gently born
+and gently trained, but in such position that the education freely
+given should be a relief and aid to a slender parental purse. It was
+her delight to seek out and aid those on whom poverty presses most
+heavily, when the need for education for the children weighs on the
+proud and the poor. "Auntie" we all called her, for she thought "Miss
+Marryat" seemed too cold and stiff. She taught us everything herself
+except music, and for this she had a master, practising us in
+composition, in recitation, in reading aloud English and French, and
+later, German, devoting herself to training us in the soundest, most
+thorough fashion. No words of mine can tell how much I owe her, not
+only of knowledge, but of that love of knowledge which has remained
+with me ever since as a constant spur to study.
+
+Her method of teaching may be of interest to some, who desire to train
+children with least pain, and the most enjoyment to the little ones
+themselves. First, we never used a spelling-book--that torment of the
+small child--nor an English grammar. But we wrote letters, telling of
+the things we had seen in our walks, or told again some story we had
+read; these childish compositions she would read over with us,
+correcting all faults of spelling, of grammar, of style, of cadence; a
+clumsy sentence would be read aloud, that we might hear how unmusical
+it sounded, an error in observation or expression pointed out. Then, as
+the letters recorded what we had seen the day before, the faculty of
+observation was drawn out and trained. "Oh, dear! I have nothing to
+say!" would come from a small child, hanging over a slate. "Did you not
+go out for a walk yesterday?" Auntie would question. "Yes," would be
+sighed out; "but there's nothing to say about it." "Nothing to say! And
+you walked in the lanes for an hour and saw nothing, little No-eyes?
+You must use your eyes better to-day." Then there was a very favourite
+"lesson," which proved an excellent way of teaching spelling. We used
+to write out lists of all the words we could think of which sounded the
+same but were differently spelt. Thus: "key, quay," "knight, night,"
+and so on, and great was the glory of the child who found the largest
+number. Our French lessons--as the German later--included reading from
+the very first. On the day on which we began German we began reading
+Schiller's "Wilhelm Tell," and the verbs given to us to copy out were
+those that had occurred in the reading. We learned much by heart, but
+always things that in themselves were worthy to be learned. We were
+never given the dry questions and answers which lazy teachers so much
+affect. We were taught history by one reading aloud while the others
+worked--the boys as well as the girls learning the use of the needle.
+"It's like a girl to sew," said a little fellow, indignantly, one day.
+"It is like a baby to have to run after a girl if you want a button
+sewn on," quoth Auntie. Geography was learned by painting skeleton
+maps--an exercise much delighted in by small fingers--and by putting
+together puzzle maps, in which countries in the map of a continent, or
+counties in the map of a country, were always cut out in their proper
+shapes. I liked big empires in those days; there was a solid
+satisfaction in putting down Russia, and seeing what a large part of
+the map was filled up thereby.
+
+The only grammar that we ever learned as grammar was the Latin, and
+that not until composition had made us familiar with the use of the
+rules therein given. Auntie had a great horror of children learning by
+rote things they did not understand, and then fancying they knew them.
+"What do you mean by that expression, Annie?" she would ask me. After
+feeble attempts to explain, I would answer: "Indeed, Auntie, I know in
+my own head, but I can't explain." "Then, indeed, Annie, you do not
+know in your own head, or you could explain, so that I might know in my
+own head." And so a healthy habit was fostered of clearness of thought
+and of expression. The Latin grammar was used because it was more
+perfect than the modern grammars, and served as a solid foundation for
+modern languages.
+
+Miss Marryat took a beautiful place, Fern Hill, near Charmouth, in
+Dorsetshire, on the borders of Devon, and there she lived for some five
+years, a centre of beneficence in the district. She started a Sunday
+School, and a Bible Class after awhile for the lads too old for the
+school, who clamoured for admission to her class in it. She visited the
+poor, taking help wherever she went, and sending food from her own
+table to the sick. It was characteristic of her that she would never
+give "scraps" to the poor, but would have a basin brought in at dinner,
+and would cut the best slice to tempt the invalid appetite. Money she
+rarely, if ever, gave, but she would find a day's work, or busy herself
+to seek permanent employment for any one seeking aid. Stern in
+rectitude herself, and iron to the fawning or the dishonest, her
+influence, whether she was feared or loved, was always for good. Of the
+strictest sect of the Evangelicals, she was an Evangelical. On the
+Sunday no books were allowed save the Bible or the "Sunday at Home";
+but she would try to make the day bright by various little devices; by
+a walk with her in the garden; by the singing of hymns, always
+attractive to children; by telling us wonderful missionary stories of
+Moffat and Livingstone, whose adventures with savages and wild beasts
+were as exciting as any tale of Mayne Reid's. We used to learn passages
+from the Bible and hymns for repetition; a favourite amusement was a
+"Bible puzzle," such as a description of some Bible scene, which was to
+be recognised by the description. Then we taught in the Sunday School,
+for Auntie would tell us that it was useless for us to learn if we did
+not try to help those who had no one to teach them. The Sunday-school
+lessons had to be carefully prepared on the Saturday, for we were
+always taught that work given to the poor should be work that cost
+something to the giver. This principle, regarded by her as an
+illustration of the text, "Shall I give unto the Lord my God that which
+has cost me nothing?" ran through all her precept and her practice.
+When in some public distress we children went to her crying, and asking
+whether we could not help the little children who were starving, her
+prompt reply was, "What will you give up for them?" And then she said
+that if we liked to give up the use of sugar, we might thus each save
+sixpence a week to give away. I doubt if a healthier lesson can be
+given to children than that of personal self-denial for the good of
+others.
+
+Daily, when our lessons were over, we had plenty of fun; long walks and
+rides, rides on a lovely pony, who found small children most amusing,
+and on which the coachman taught us to stick firmly, whatever his
+eccentricities of the moment; delightful all-day picnics in the lovely
+country round Charmouth, Auntie our merriest playfellow. Never was a
+healthier home, physically and mentally, made for young things than in
+that quiet village. And then the delight of the holidays! The pride of
+my mother at the good report of her darling's progress, and the renewal
+of acquaintance with every nook and corner in the dear old house and
+garden.
+
+The dreamy tendency in the child, that on its worldly side is fancy,
+imagination, on its religious side is the germ of mysticism, and I
+believe it to be far more common than many people think. But the
+remorseless materialism of the day--not the philosophic materialism of
+the few, but the religious materialism of the many--crushes out all the
+delicate buddings forth of the childish thought, and bandages the eyes
+that might otherwise see. At first the child does not distinguish
+between what it "sees" and what it "fancies"; the one is as real, as
+objective, to it as the other, and it will talk to and play with its
+dream-comrades as merrily as with children like itself. As a child, I
+myself very much preferred the former, and never knew what it was to be
+lonely. But clumsy grown-ups come along and tramp right through the
+dream-garden, and crush the dream-flowers, and push the dream-children
+aside, and then say, in their loud, harsh voices--not soft and singable
+like the dream-voices--"You must not tell such naughty stories, Miss
+Annie; you give me the shivers, and your mamma will be very vexed with
+you." But this tendency in me was too strong to be stifled, and it
+found its food in the fairy tales I loved, and in the religious
+allegories that I found yet more entrancing. How or when I learned to
+read, I do not know, for I cannot remember the time when a book was not
+a delight. At five years of age I must have read easily, for I remember
+being often unswathed from a delightful curtain, in which I used to
+roll myself with a book, and told to "go and play," while I was still a
+five-years'-old dot. And I had a habit of losing myself so completely
+in the book that my name might be called in the room where I was, and I
+never hear it, so that I used to be blamed for wilfully hiding myself,
+when I had simply been away in fairyland, or lying trembling beneath
+some friendly cabbage-leaf as a giant went by.
+
+I was between seven and eight years of age when I first came across
+some children's allegories of a religious kind, and a very little
+later came "Pilgrim's Progress," and Milton's "Paradise Lost."
+Thenceforth my busy fancies carried me ever into the fascinating world
+where boy-soldiers kept some outpost for their absent Prince, bearing
+a shield with his sign of a red cross on it; where devils shaped as
+dragons came swooping down on the pilgrim, but were driven away
+defeated after hard struggle; where angels came and talked with little
+children, and gave them some talisman which warned them of coming
+danger, and lost its light if they were leaving the right path. What a
+dull, tire-some world it was that I had to live in, I used to think to
+myself, when I was told to be a good child, and not to lose my temper,
+and to be tidy, and not mess my pinafore at dinner. How much easier to
+be a Christian if one could have a red-cross shield and a white
+banner, and have a real devil to fight with, and a beautiful Divine
+Prince to smile at you when the battle was over. How much more
+exciting to struggle with a winged and clawed dragon, that you knew
+meant mischief, than to look after your temper, that you never
+remembered you ought to keep until you had lost it. If I had been Eve
+in the garden, that old serpent would never have got the better of me;
+but how was a little girl to know that she might not pick out the
+rosiest, prettiest apple from a tree that had no serpent to show it
+was a forbidden one? And as I grew older the dreams and fancies grew
+less fantastic, but more tinged with real enthusiasm. I read tales of
+the early Christian martyrs, and passionately regretted I was born so
+late when no suffering for religion was practicable; I would spend
+many an hour in daydreams, in which I stood before Roman judges,
+before Dominican Inquisitors, was flung to lions, tortured on the
+rack, burned at the stake; one day I saw myself preaching some great
+new faith to a vast crowd of people, and they listened and were
+converted, and I became a great religious leader. But always, with a
+shock, I was brought back to earth, where there were no heroic deeds
+to do, no lions to face, no judges to defy, but only some dull duty to
+be performed. And I used to fret that I was born so late, when all the
+grand things had been done, and when there was no chance of preaching
+and suffering for a new religion.
+
+From the age of eight my education accented the religious side of my
+character. Under Miss Marryat's training my religious feeling received
+a strongly Evangelical bent, but it was a subject of some distress to
+me that I could never look back to an hour of "conversion"; when
+others gave their experiences, and spoke of the sudden change they had
+felt, I used to be sadly conscious that no such change had occurred in
+me, and I felt that my dreamy longings were very poor things compared
+with the vigorous "sense of sin" spoken of by the preachers, and used
+dolefully to wonder if I were "saved." Then I had an uneasy sense that
+I was often praised for my piety when emulation and vanity were more
+to the front than religion; as when I learned by heart the Epistle of
+James, far more to distinguish myself for my good memory than from any
+love of the text itself; the sonorous cadences of many parts of the
+Old and New Testaments pleased my ear, and I took a dreamy pleasure in
+repeating them aloud, just as I would recite for my own amusement
+hundreds of lines of Milton's "Paradise Lost," as I sat swinging on
+some branch of a tree, lying back often on some swaying bough and
+gazing into the unfathomable blue of the sky, till I lost myself in an
+ecstasy of sound and colour, half chanting the melodious sentences and
+peopling all the blue with misty forms. This facility of learning by
+heart, and the habit of dreamy recitation, made me very familiar with
+the Bible and very apt with its phrases. This stood me in good stead
+at the prayer-meetings dear to the Evangelical, in which we all took
+part; in turn we were called on to pray aloud--a terrible ordeal to
+me, for I was painfully shy when attention was called to me; I used to
+suffer agonies while I waited for the dreaded words, "Now, Annie dear,
+will you speak to our Lord." But when my trembling lips had forced
+themselves into speech, all the nervousness used to vanish and I was
+swept away by an enthusiasm that readily clothed itself in balanced
+sentences, and alack! at the end, I too often hoped that God and
+Auntie had noticed that I prayed very nicely--a vanity certainly not
+intended to be fostered by the pious exercise. On the whole, the
+somewhat Calvinistic teaching tended, I think, to make me a little
+morbid, especially as I always fretted silently after my mother. I
+remember she was surprised on one of my home-comings, when Miss
+Marryat noted "cheerfulness" as a want in my character, for at home I
+was ever the blithest of children, despite my love of solitude; but
+away, there was always an aching for home, and the stern religion cast
+somewhat of a shadow over me, though, strangely enough, hell never
+came into my dreamings except in the interesting shape it took in
+"Paradise Lost." After reading that, the devil was to me no horned and
+hoofed horror, but the beautiful shadowed archangel, and I always
+hoped that Jesus, my ideal Prince, would save him in the end. The
+things that really frightened me were vague, misty presences that I
+felt were near, but could not see; they were so real that I knew just
+where they were in the room, and the peculiar terror they excited lay
+largely in the feeling that I was just going to see them. If by chance
+I came across a ghost story it haunted me for months, for I saw
+whatever unpleasant spectre was described; and there was one horrid
+old woman in a tale by Sir Walter Scott, who glided up to the foot of
+your bed and sprang on it in some eerie fashion and glared at you, and
+who made my going to bed a terror to me for many weeks. I can still
+recall the feeling so vividly that it almost frightens me now!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+GIRLHOOD.
+
+
+In the spring of 1861 Miss Marryat announced her intention of going
+abroad, and asked my dear mother to let me accompany her. A little
+nephew whom she had adopted was suffering from cataract, and she
+desired to place him under the care of the famous DĂ¼sseldorf oculist.
+Amy Marryat had been recalled home soon after the death of her mother,
+who had died in giving birth to the child adopted by Miss Marryat, and
+named at her desire after her favourite brother Frederick (Captain
+Marryat). Her place had been taken by a girl a few months older than
+myself, Emma Mann, one of the daughters of a clergyman, who had
+married Miss Stanley, closely related, indeed, if I remember rightly,
+a sister of the Miss Mary Stanley who did such noble work in nursing
+in the Crimea.
+
+For some months we had been diligently studying German, for Miss
+Marryat thought it wise that we should know a language fairly well
+before we visited the country of which it was the native tongue. We
+had been trained also to talk French daily during dinner, so we were
+not quite "helpless foreigners" when we steamed away from St.
+Catherine's Docks, and found ourselves on the following day in
+Antwerp, amid what seemed to us a very Babel of conflicting tongues.
+Alas for our carefully spoken French, articulated laboriously! We were
+lost in that swirl of disputing luggage-porters, and could not
+understand a word! But Miss Marryat was quite equal to the occasion,
+being by no means new to travelling, and her French stood the test
+triumphantly, and steered us safely to a hotel. On the morrow we
+started again through Aix-la-Chapelle to Bonn, the town which lies on
+the borders of the exquisite scenery of which the Siebengebirge and
+Rolandseck serve as the magic portal. Our experiences in Bonn were not
+wholly satisfactory. Dear Auntie was a maiden lady, looking on all
+young men as wolves to be kept far from her growing lambs. Bonn was a
+university town, and there was a mania just then prevailing there for
+all things English. Emma was a plump, rosy, fair-haired typical
+English maiden, full of frolic and harmless fun; I a very slight,
+pale, black-haired girl, alternating between wild fun and extreme
+pensiveness. In the boarding-house to which we went at first--the
+"ChĂ¢teau du Rhin," a beautiful place overhanging the broad, blue
+Rhine--there chanced to be staying the two sons of the late Duke of
+Hamilton, the Marquis of Douglas and Lord Charles, with their tutor.
+They had the whole drawing-room floor: we a sitting-room on the ground
+floor and bedrooms above. The lads discovered that Miss Marryat did
+not like her "children" to be on speaking terms with any of the "male
+sect."
+
+Here was a fine source of amusement. They would make their horses
+caracole on the gravel in front of our window; they would be just
+starting for their ride as we went for walk or drive, and would salute
+us with doffed hat and low bow; they would waylay us on our way
+downstairs with demure "Good morning"; they would go to church and
+post themselves so that they could survey our pew, and Lord
+Charles--who possessed the power of moving at will the whole skin of
+the scalp--would wriggle his hair up and down till we were choking
+with laughter, to our own imminent risk. After a month of this Auntie
+was literally driven out of the pretty chĂ¢teau, and took refuge in a
+girls' school, much to our disgust; but still she was not allowed to
+be at rest. Mischievous students would pursue us wherever we went;
+sentimental Germans, with gashed cheeks, would whisper complimentary
+phrases as we passed; mere boyish nonsense of most harmless kind, but
+the rather stern English lady thought it "not proper," and after three
+months of Bonn we were sent home for the holidays, somewhat in
+disgrace. But we had some lovely excursions during those months; such
+clambering up mountains, such rows on the swift-flowing Rhine, such
+wanderings in exquisite valleys. I have a long picture-gallery to
+retire into when I want to think of something fair, in recalling the
+moon as it silvered the Rhine at the foot of Drachenfels, or the soft,
+mist-veiled island where dwelt the lady who is consecrated for ever by
+Roland's love.
+
+A couple of months later we rejoined Miss Marryat in Paris, where we
+spent seven happy, workful months. On Wednesdays and Saturdays we were
+free from lessons, and many a long afternoon was passed in the
+galleries of the Louvre, till we became familiar with the masterpieces
+of art gathered there from all lands. I doubt if there was a beautiful
+church in Paris that we did not visit during those weekly wanderings;
+that of St. Germain de l'Auxerrois was my favourite--the church whose
+bell gave the signal for the massacre of St. Bartholomew--for it
+contained such marvellous stained glass, deepest, purest glory of
+colour that I had ever seen. The solemn beauty of Notre Dame, the
+somewhat gaudy magnificence of La Sainte Chapelle, the stateliness of
+La Madeleine, the impressive gloom of St. Roch, were all familiar to
+us. Other delights were found in mingling with the bright crowds which
+passed along the Champs Elysees and sauntered in the Bois de Boulogne,
+in strolling in the garden of the Tuileries, in climbing to the top of
+every monument whence view of Paris could be gained. The Empire was
+then in its heyday of glitter, and we much enjoyed seeing the
+brilliant escort of the imperial carriage, with plumes and gold and
+silver dancing and glistening in the sunlight, while in the carriage
+sat the exquisitely lovely empress, with the little boy beside her,
+touching his cap shyly, but with something of her own grace, in answer
+to a greeting--the boy who was thought to be born to an imperial
+crown, but whose brief career was to find an ending from the spears of
+savages in a quarrel in which he had no concern.
+
+In the spring of 1862 it chanced that the Bishop of Ohio visited
+Paris, and Mr. Forbes, then English chaplain at the Church of the Rue
+d'Aguesseau, arranged to have a confirmation. As said above, I was
+under deep "religious impressions," and, in fact, with the exception
+of that little aberration in Germany, I was decidedly a pious girl. I
+looked on theatres (never having been to one) as traps set by Satan
+for the destruction of foolish souls; I was quite determined never to
+go to a ball, and was prepared to "suffer for conscience' sake
+"--little prig that I was--if I was desired to go to one. I was
+consequently quite prepared to take upon myself the vows made in my
+name at my baptism, and to renounce the world, the flesh, and the
+devil, with a heartiness and sincerity only equalled by my profound
+ignorance of the things I so readily resigned. That confirmation was
+to me a very solemn matter; the careful preparation, the prolonged
+prayers, the wondering awe as to the "seven-fold gifts of the Spirit,"
+which were to be given by "the laying on of hands," all tended to
+excitement. I could scarcely control myself as I knelt at the altar
+rails, and felt as though the gentle touch of the aged bishop, which
+fluttered for an instant on my bowed head, were the very touch of the
+wing of that "Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove," whose presence had been so
+earnestly invoked. Is there anything easier, I wonder, than to make a
+young and sensitive girl "intensely religious"? This stay in Paris
+roused into activity an aspect of my religious nature that had
+hitherto been latent. I discovered the sensuous enjoyment that lay in
+introducing colour and fragrance and pomp into religious services, so
+that the gratification of the aesthetic emotions became dignified with
+the garb of piety. The picture-galleries of the Louvre, crowded with
+Madonnas and saints, the Roman Catholic churches with their
+incense-laden air and exquisite music, brought a new joy into my life,
+a more vivid colour to my dreams. Insensibly, the colder, cruder
+Evangelicalism that I had never thoroughly assimilated, grew warmer
+and more brilliant, and the ideal Divine Prince of my childhood took
+on the more pathetic lineaments of the Man of Sorrows, the deeper
+attractiveness of the suffering Saviour of Men. Keble's "Christian
+Year" took the place of "Paradise Lost," and as my girlhood began to
+bud towards womanhood, all its deeper currents set in the direction of
+religious devotion. My mother did not allow me to read love stories,
+and my daydreams of the future were scarcely touched by any of the
+ordinary hopes and fears of a girl lifting her eyes towards the world
+she is shortly to enter. They were filled with broodings over the days
+when girl-martyrs were blessed with visions of the King of Martyrs,
+when sweet St. Agnes saw her celestial Bridegroom, and angels stooped
+to whisper melodies in St. Cecilia's raptured ear. "Why then and not
+now?" my heart would question, and I would lose myself in these
+fancies, never happier than when alone.
+
+The summer of 1862 was spent with Miss Marryat at Sidmouth, and, wise
+woman that she was, she now carefully directed our studies with a view
+to our coming enfranchisement from the "schoolroom." More and more
+were we trained to work alone; our leading-strings were slackened, so
+that we never felt them save when we blundered; and I remember that
+when I once complained, in loving fashion, that she was "teaching me
+so little," she told me that I was getting old enough to be trusted to
+work by myself, and that I must not expect to "have Auntie for a
+crutch all through life." And I venture to say that this gentle
+withdrawal of constant supervision and teaching was one of the wisest
+and kindest things that this noble-hearted woman ever did for us. It
+is the usual custom to keep girls in the schoolroom until they "come
+out"; then, suddenly, they are left to their own devices, and,
+bewildered by their unaccustomed freedom, they waste time that might
+be priceless for their intellectual growth. Lately, the opening of
+universities to women has removed this danger for the more ambitious;
+but at the time of which I am writing no one dreamed of the changes
+soon to be made in the direction of the "higher education of women."
+
+During the winter of 1862-63 Miss Marryat was in London, and for a few
+months I remained there with her, attending the admirable French
+classes of M. Roche. In the spring I returned home to Harrow, going up
+each week to the classes; and when these were over, Auntie told me
+that she thought all she could usefully do was done, and that it was
+time that I should try my wings alone. So well, however, had she
+succeeded in her aims, that my emancipation from the schoolroom was
+but the starting-point of more eager study, though now the study
+turned into the lines of thought towards which my personal tendencies
+most attracted me. German I continued to read with a master, and
+music, under the marvellously able teaching of Mr. John Farmer,
+musical director of Harrow School, took up much of my time. My dear
+mother had a passion for music, and Beethoven and Bach were her
+favourite composers. There was scarcely a sonata of Beethoven's that I
+did not learn, scarcely a fugue of Bach's that I did not master.
+Mendelssohn's "Lieder" gave a lighter recreation, and many a happy
+evening did we spend, my mother and I, over the stately strains of the
+blind Titan, and the sweet melodies of the German wordless orator.
+Musical "At Homes," too, were favourite amusements at Harrow, and at
+these my facile fingers made me a welcome guest.
+
+Thus set free from the schoolroom at 16½, an only daughter, I could do
+with my time as I would, save for the couple of hours a day given to
+music, for the satisfaction of my mother. From then till I became
+engaged, just before I was 19, my life flowed on smoothly, one current
+visible to all and dancing in the sunlight, the other running
+underground, but full and deep and strong. As regards my outer life,
+no girl had a brighter, happier life than mine; studying all the
+mornings and most of the afternoons in my own way, and spending the
+latter part of the day in games and walks and rides--varied with
+parties at which I was one of the merriest of guests. I practised
+archery so zealously that I carried up triumphantly as prize for the
+best score the first ring I ever possessed, while croquet found me a
+most eager devotee. My darling mother certainly "spoiled" me, so far
+as were concerned all the small roughnesses of life. She never allowed
+a trouble of any kind to touch me, and cared only that all worries
+should fall on her, all joys on me. I know now what I never dreamed
+then, that her life was one of serious anxiety. The heavy burden of my
+brother's school and college life pressed on her constantly, and her
+need of money was often serious. A lawyer whom she trusted absolutely
+cheated her systematically, using for his own purposes the remittances
+she made for payment of liabilities, thus keeping upon her a constant
+drain. Yet for me all that was wanted was ever there. Was it a ball to
+which we were going? I need never think of what I would wear till the
+time for dressing arrived, and there laid out ready for me was all I
+wanted, every detail complete from top to toe. No hand but hers must
+dress my hair, which, loosed, fell in dense curly masses nearly to my
+knees; no hand but hers must fasten dress and deck with flowers, and
+if I sometimes would coaxingly ask if I might not help by sewing in
+laces, or by doing some trifle in aid, she would kiss me and bid me
+run to my books or my play, telling me that her only pleasure in life
+was caring for her "treasure." Alas! how lightly we take the
+self-denying labour that makes life so easy, ere yet we have known
+what life means when the protecting motherwing is withdrawn. So
+guarded and shielded had been my childhood and youth from every touch
+of pain and anxiety that love could bear for me, that I never dreamed
+that life might be a heavy burden, save as I saw it in the poor I was
+sent to help; all the joy of those happy years I took, not
+ungratefully I hope, but certainly with as glad unconsciousness of
+anything rare in it as I took the sunlight. Passionate love, indeed, I
+gave to my darling, but I never knew all I owed her till I passed out
+of her tender guardianship, till I left my mother's home. Is such
+training wise? I am not sure. It makes the ordinary roughnesses of
+life come with so stunning a shock, when one goes out into the world,
+that one is apt to question whether some earlier initiation into
+life's sterner mysteries would not be wiser for the young. Yet it is a
+fair thing to have that joyous youth to look back upon, and at least
+it is a treasury of memory that no thief can steal in the struggles of
+later life. "Sunshine" they called me in those bright days of merry
+play and earnest study. But that study showed the bent of my thought
+and linked itself to the hidden life; for the Fathers of the early
+Christian Church now became my chief companions, and I pored over the
+Shepherd of Hernias, the Epistles of Polycarp, Barnabas, Ignatius, and
+Clement, the commentaries of Chrysostom, the confessions of Augustine.
+With these I studied the writings of Pusey, Liddon, and Keble, with
+many another smaller light, joying in the great conception of a
+Catholic Church, lasting through the centuries, built on the
+foundations of apostles and of martyrs, stretching from the days of
+Christ Himself down to our own--"One Lord, one Faith one Baptism," and
+I myself a child of that Holy Church. The hidden life grew stronger,
+constantly fed by these streams of study; weekly communion became the
+centre round which my devotional life revolved, with its ecstatic
+meditation, its growing intensity of conscious contact with the
+Divine; I fasted, according to the ordinances of the Church;
+occasionally flagellated myself to see if I could bear physical pain,
+should I be fortunate enough ever to tread the pathway trodden by the
+saints; and ever the Christ was the figure round which clustered all
+my hopes and longings, till I often felt that the very passion of, my
+devotion would draw Him down from His throne in heaven, present
+visibly in form as I felt Him invisibly in spirit. To serve Him
+through His Church became more and more a definite ideal in my life,
+and my thoughts began to turn towards some kind of "religious life,"
+in which I might prove my love by sacrifice and turn my passionate
+gratitude into active service.
+
+Looking back to-day over my life, I see that its keynote--through all
+the blunders, and the blind mistakes, and clumsy follies--has been
+this longing for sacrifice to something felt as greater than the self.
+It has been so strong and so persistent that I recognise it now as a
+tendency brought over from a previous life and dominating the present
+one; and this is shown by the fact that to follow it is not the act of
+a deliberate and conscious will, forcing self into submission and
+giving up with pain something the heart desires, but the following it
+is a joyous springing forward along the easiest path, the "sacrifice"
+being the supremely attractive thing, not to make which would be to
+deny the deepest longings of the soul, and to feel oneself polluted
+and dishonoured. And it is here that the misjudgment comes in of many
+generous hearts who have spoken sometimes lately so strongly in my
+praise. For the efforts to serve have not been painful acts of
+self-denial, but the yielding to an overmastering desire. We do not
+praise the mother who, impelled by her protecting love, feeds her
+crying infant and stills its wailings at her breast; rather should we
+blame her if she turned aside from its weeping to play with some toy.
+And so with all those whose ears are opened to the wailings of the
+great orphan Humanity; they are less to be praised for helping than
+they would be to be blamed if they stood aside. I now know that it is
+those wailings that have stirred my heart through life, and that I
+brought with me the ears open to hear them from previous lives of
+service paid to men. It was those lives that drew for the child the
+alluring pictures of martyrdom, breathed into the girl the passion of
+devotion, sent the woman out to face scoff and odium, and drove her
+finally into the Theosophy that rationalises sacrifice, while opening
+up possibilities of service beside which all other hopes grow pale.
+
+The Easter of 1866 was a memorable date in my life. I was introduced
+to the clergyman I married, and I met and conquered my first religious
+doubt. A little mission church had been opened the preceding Christmas
+in a very poor district of Clapham. My grandfather's house was near at
+hand, in Albert Square, and a favourite aunt and myself devoted
+ourselves a good deal to this little church, as enthusiastic girls and
+women will. At Easter we decorated it with spring flowers, with dewy
+primroses and fragrant violets, and with the yellow bells of the wild
+daffodil, to the huge delight of the poor who crowded in, and of the
+little London children who had, many of them, never seen a flower.
+Here I met the Rev. Frank Besant, a young Cambridge man, who had just
+taken orders, and was serving the little mission church as deacon;
+strange that at the same time I should meet the man I was to marry,
+and the doubts which were to break the marriage tie. For in the Holy
+Week preceding that Easter Eve, I had been--as English and Roman
+Catholics are wont to do--trying to throw the mind back to the time
+when the commemorated events occurred, and to follow, step by step,
+the last days of the Son of Man, living, as it were, through those
+last hours, so that I might be ready to kneel before the cross on Good
+Friday, to stand beside the sepulchre on Easter Day. In order to
+facilitate the realisation of those last sacred days of God incarnate
+on earth, working out man's salvation, I resolved to write a brief
+history of that week, compiled from the Four Gospels, meaning them to
+try and realise each day the occurrences that had happened on the
+corresponding date in A.D. 33, and so to follow those "blessed feet"
+step by step, till they were
+
+"... nailed for our advantage to the bitter cross."
+
+With the fearlessness which springs from ignorance I sat down to my
+task. My method was as follows:--
+
+    MATTHEW.         |    MARK.     |    LUKE.      |    JOHN.
+                     |              |               |
+  PALM SUNDAY.       | PALM SUNDAY. | PALM SUNDAY.  | PALM SUNDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Rode into          | Rode into    | Rode into     | Rode into
+  Jerusalem.         | Jerusalem.   | Jerusalem.    | Jerusalem.
+  Purified the       | Returned to  | Purified the  | Spoke in
+  Temple. Returned   | Bethany.     | Temple.       | the Temple.
+  to Bethany.        |              | Note: "Taught |
+                     |              | daily in the  |
+                     |              | temple."      |
+                     |              |               |
+    MONDAY.          |    MONDAY.   |    MONDAY.    |    MONDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Cursed the         | Cursed the   | Like Matthew. |    ----
+  fig-tree.          | fig-tree.    |               |
+  Taught in the      | Purified the |               |
+  Temple, and spake  | Temple. Went |               |
+  many parables.     | out of city. |               |
+  No breaks shown,   |              |               |
+  but the fig-tree   |              |               |
+  (xxi.19) did not   |              |               |
+  wither till        |              |               |
+  Tuesday (see       |              |               |
+  Mark).             |              |               |
+                     |              |               |
+    TUESDAY.         |    TUESDAY.  |   TUESDAY.    |   TUESDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  All chaps. xxi.    | Saw fig-tree | Discourses    |   ----
+  20, xxii.-xxv.,    | withered up. | No date       |
+  spoken on          | Then .       | shown.        |
+  Tuesday, for xxvi. | discourses   |               |
+  2 gives Passover   |              |               |
+  as "after two      |              |               |
+  days."             |              |               |
+                     |              |               |
+  WEDNESDAY.         |   WEDNESDAY. |  WEDNESDAY.   |  WEDNESDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Blank.             |   ----       |   ----        |  ----
+  (Possibly remained in Bethany; the alabaster box of oinment.)
+                     |              |               |
+  THURSDAY.          |   THURSDAY.  |   THURSDAY.   |   THURSDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Preparation of     | Same as Matt.| Same as Matt. | Discourses
+  Passover. Eating   |              |               | with disciples,
+  of Passover, and   |              |               | but _before_ the
+  institution of the |              |               | Passover. Washes
+  Holy Eucharist.    |              |               | the disciples'
+  Gethsemane.        |              |               | feet. Nothing
+  Betrayal by Judas. |              |               | said of Holy
+  Led captive to     |              |               | Eucharist, nor
+  Caiaphas. Denied   |              |               | of agony in
+  by St. Peter.      |              |               | Gethsemane.
+                     |              |               | Malchus' ear.
+                     |              |               | Led captive to
+                     |              |               | Annas first.
+                     |              |               | Then to Caiaphas.
+                     |              |               | Denied
+                     |              |               | by St. Peter.
+                     |              |               |
+  FRIDAY.            |   FRIDAY.    |   FRIDAY.     |   FRIDAY
+                     |              |               |
+  Led to Pilate.     | As Matthew,  | Led to        | Taken to
+  Judas hangs        | but hour of  | Pilate. Sent  | Pilate. Jews
+  himself. Tried.    | crucifixion  | to Herod.     | would not enter,
+  Condemned to       | given,       | Sent back to  | that they
+  death. Scourged    | 9 a.m.       | Pilate. Rest  | might eat
+  and mocked. Led    |              | as in         | the Passover.
+  to crucifixion.    |              | Matthew; but  | Scourged by
+  Darkness from 12   |              | _one_         | Pilate before
+  to 3. Died at 3.   |              | malefactor    | condemnation,
+                     |              | repents.      | and mocked. Shown
+                     |              |               | by Pilate to
+                     |              |               | Jews at 12.
+
+I became uneasy as I proceeded with my task, for discrepancies leaped
+at me from my four columns; the uneasiness grew as the contradictions
+increased, until I saw with a shock of horror that my "harmony" was a
+discord, and a doubt of the veracity of the story sprang up like a
+serpent hissing in my face. It was struck down in a moment, for to me
+to doubt was sin, and to have doubted on the very eve of the Passion
+was an added crime. Quickly I assured myself that these apparent
+contradictions were necessary as tests of faith, and I forced myself
+to repeat Tertullian's famous "Credo quia impossible," till, from a
+wooden recital, it became a triumphant affirmation. I reminded myself
+that St. Peter had said of the Pauline Epistles that in them were
+"some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and
+unstable wrest ... unto their own destruction." I shudderingly
+recognised that I must be very unlearned and unstable to find discord
+among the Holy Evangelists, and imposed on myself an extra fast as
+penance for my ignorance and lack of firmness in the faith. For my
+mental position was one to which doubt was one of the worst of sins. I
+knew that there were people like Colenso, who questioned the
+infallibility of the Bible, but I remembered how the Apostle John had
+fled from the Baths when Cerinthus entered them, lest the roof should
+fall on the heretic, and crush any one in his neighbourhood, and I
+looked on all heretics with holy horror. Pusey had indoctrinated me
+with his stern hatred of all heresy, and I was content to rest with
+him on that faith, "which must be old because it is eternal, and must
+be unchangeable because it is true." I would not even read the works
+of my mothers favourite Stanley, because he was "unsound," and because
+Pusey had condemned his "variegated use of words which destroys all
+definiteness of meaning"--a clever and pointed description, be it said
+in passing, of the Dean's exquisite phrases, capable of so many
+readings. It can then be imagined with what a stab of pain this first
+doubt struck me, and with what haste I smothered it up, buried it, and
+smoothed the turf over its grave. _But it had been there_, and it left
+its mark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+MARRIAGE.
+
+
+The last year of my girlish freedom was drawing to its close; how shall
+I hope to make commonsense readers understand how I became betrothed
+maiden ere yet nineteen, girl-wife when twenty years had struck?
+Looking back over twenty-five years, I feel a profound pity for the
+girl standing at that critical point of life, so utterly, hopelessly
+ignorant of all that marriage meant, so filled with impossible dreams,
+so unfitted for the _rĂ´le_ of wife. As I have said, my day-dreams held
+little place for love, partly from the absence of love novels from my
+reading, partly from the mystic fancies that twined themselves round
+the figure of the Christ. Catholic books of devotion--English or Roman,
+it matters not, for to a large extent they are translations of the same
+hymns and prayers--are exceedingly glowing in their language, and the
+dawning feelings of womanhood unconsciously lend to them a passionate
+fervour. I longed to spend my time in worshipping Jesus, and was, as
+far as my inner life was concerned, absorbed in that passionate love of
+"the Saviour" which, among emotional Catholics, really is the human
+passion of love transferred to an ideal--for women to Jesus, for men to
+the Virgin Mary. In order to show that I am not here exaggerating, I
+subjoin a few of the prayers in which I found daily delight, and I do
+this in order to show how an emotional girl may be attracted by these
+so-called devotional exercises:--
+
+"O crucified Love, raise in me fresh ardours of love and consolation,
+that it may henceforth be the greatest torment I can endure ever to
+offend Thee; that it may be my greatest delight to please Thee."
+
+"Let the remembrance of Thy death, O Lord Jesu, make me to desire and
+pant after Thee, that I may delight in Thy gracious presence."
+
+"O most sweet Jesu Christ, I, unworthy sinner, yet redeemed by Thy
+precious blood.... Thine I am and will be, in life and in death."
+
+"O Jesu, beloved, fairer than the sons of men, draw me after Thee with
+the cords of Thy love."
+
+"Blessed are Thou, O most merciful God, who didst vouchsafe to espouse
+me to the heavenly Bridegroom in the waters of baptism, and hast
+imparted Thy body and blood as a new gift of espousal and the meet
+consummation of Thy love."
+
+"O most sweet Lord Jesu, transfix the affections of my inmost soul with
+that most joyous and most healthful wound of Thy love, with true,
+serene, most holy, apostolical charity; that my soul may ever languish
+and melt with entire love and longing for Thee. Let it desire Thee and
+faint for Thy courts; long to be dissolved and be with Thee."
+
+"Oh, that I could embrace Thee with that most burning love of angels."
+
+"Let Him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth; for Thy love is better
+than wine. Draw me, we will run after Thee. The king hath brought me
+into his chambers.... Let my soul, O Lord, feel the sweetness of Thy
+presence. May it taste how sweet Thou art.... May the sweet and burning
+power of Thy love, I beseech Thee, absorb my soul."
+
+All girls have in them the germ of passion, and the line of its
+development depends on the character brought into the world, and the
+surrounding influences of education. I had but two ideals in my
+childhood and youth, round whom twined these budding tendrils of
+passion; they were my mother and the Christ. I know this may seem
+strange, but I am trying to state things as they were in this
+life-story, and not give mere conventionalisms, and so it was. I had
+men friends, but no lovers--at least, to my knowledge, for I have since
+heard that my mother received two or three offers of marriage for me,
+but declined them on account of my youth and my childishness--friends
+with whom I liked to talk, because they knew more than I did; but they
+had no place in my day-dreams. These were more and more filled with the
+one Ideal Man, and my hopes turned towards the life of the Sister of
+Mercy, who ever worships the Christ, and devotes her life to the
+service of His poor. I knew my dear mother would set herself against
+this idea, but it nestled warm at my heart, for ever that idea of
+escaping from the humdrum of ordinary life by some complete sacrifice
+lured me onwards with its overmastering fascination.
+
+Now one unlucky result of this view of religion is the idealisation of
+the clergyman, the special messenger and chosen servant of the Lord.
+Far more lofty than any title bestowed by earthly monarch is that
+patent of nobility straight from the hand of the "King of kings," that
+seems to give to the mortal something of the authority of the immortal,
+and to crown the head of the priest with the diadem that belongs to
+those who are "kings and priests unto God." Viewed in this way, the
+position of the priest's wife seems second only to that of the nun, and
+has, therefore, a wonderful attractiveness, an attractiveness in which
+the particular clergyman affected plays a very subordinate part; it is
+the "sacred office," the nearness to "holy things," the consecration
+which seems to include the wife--it is these things that shed a glamour
+over the clerical life which attracts most those who are most apt to
+self-devotion, most swayed by imagination. And the saddest pity of all
+this is that the glamour is most over those whose brains are quick,
+whose hearts are pure, who are responsive to all forms of noble
+emotions, all suggestions of personal self-sacrifice; if such in later
+life rise to the higher emotions whose shadows have attracted them, and
+to that higher self-sacrifice whose whispers reached them in their
+early youth, then the false prophet's veil is raised, the poverty of
+the conception seen, and the life is either wrecked, or through
+storm-wind and surge of battling billows, with loss of mast and sail,
+is steered by firm hand into the port of a nobler faith.
+
+That summer of 1866 saw me engaged to the young clergyman I had met at
+the mission church in the spring, our knowledge of each other being an
+almost negligeable quantity. We were thrown together for a week, the
+only two young ones in a small party of holiday-makers, and in our
+walks, rides, and drives we were naturally companions; an hour or two
+before he left he asked me to marry him, taking my consent for granted
+as I had allowed him such full companionship--a perfectly fair
+assumption with girls accustomed to look on all men as possible
+husbands, but wholly mistaken as regarded myself, whose thoughts were
+in quite other directions. Startled, and my sensitive pride touched by
+what seemed to my strict views an assumption that I had been flirting,
+I hesitated, did not follow my first impulse of refusal, but took
+refuge in silence; my suitor had to catch his train, and bound me
+over to silence till he could himself speak to my mother, urging
+authoritatively that it would be dishonourable of me to break his
+confidence, and left me--the most upset and distressed little person
+on the Sussex coast. The fortnight that followed was the first unhappy
+one of my life, for I had a secret from my mother, a secret which I
+passionately longed to tell her, but dared not speak at the risk of
+doing a dishonourable thing. On meeting my suitor on our return to
+town I positively refused to keep silence any longer, and then out
+of sheer weakness and fear of inflicting pain I drifted into an
+engagement with a man I did not pretend to love. "Drifted" is the
+right word, for two or three months passed, on the ground that I was
+so much of a child, before my mother would consent to a definite
+engagement; my dislike of the thought of marriage faded before the
+idea of becoming the wife of a priest, working ever in the Church and
+among the poor. I had no outlet for my growing desire for usefulness
+in my happy and peaceful home-life, where all religious enthusiasm was
+regarded as unbalanced and unbecoming; all that was deepest and truest
+in my nature chafed against my easy, useless days, longed for work,
+yearned to devote itself, as I had read women saints had done, to the
+service of the Church and of the poor, to the battling against sin and
+misery--what empty names sin and misery then were to me! "You will
+have more opportunities for doing good as a clergyman's wife than as
+anything else," was one of the pleas urged on my reluctance.
+
+In the autumn I was definitely betrothed, and I married fourteen months
+later. Once, in the interval, I tried to break the engagement, but, on
+my broaching the subject to my mother, all her pride rose up in revolt.
+Would I, her daughter, break my word, would I dishonour myself by
+jilting a man I had pledged myself to marry? She could be stern where
+honour was involved, that sweet mother of mine, and I yielded to her
+wish as I had been ever wont to do, for a look or a word from her had
+ever been my law, save where religion was concerned. So I married in
+the winter of 1867 with no more idea of the marriage relation than if I
+had been four years old instead of twenty. My dreamy life, into which
+no knowledge of evil had been allowed to penetrate, in which I had been
+guarded from all pain, shielded from all anxiety, kept, innocent on all
+questions of sex, was no preparation for married existence, and left me
+defenceless to face a rude awakening. Looking back on it all, I
+deliberately say that no more fatal blunder can be made than to train a
+girl to womanhood in ignorance of all life's duties and burdens, and
+then to let her face them for the first time away from all the old
+associations, the old helps, the old refuge on the mother's breast.
+That "perfect innocence" may be very beautiful, but it is a perilous
+possession, and Eve should have the knowledge of good and evil ere she
+wanders forth from the paradise of a mother's love. Many an unhappy
+marriage dates from its very beginning, from the terrible shock to a
+young girl's sensitive modesty and pride, her helpless bewilderment and
+fear. Men, with their public school and college education, or the
+knowledge that comes by living in the outside world, may find it hard
+to realise the possibility of such infantile ignorance in many girls.
+None the less, such ignorance is a fact in the case of some girls at
+least, and no mother should let her daughter, blindfold, slip her neck
+under the marriage yoke.
+
+Before leaving the harbourage of girlhood to set sail on the troublous
+sea of life, there is an occurrence of which I must make mention, as
+it marks my first awakening of interest in the outer world of
+political struggle. In the autumn of 1867 my mother and I were staying
+with some dear friends of ours, the Robertses, at Pendleton, near
+Manchester. Mr. Roberts was "the poor man's lawyer," in the
+affectionate phrase used of him by many a hundred men. He was a close
+friend of Ernest Jones, and was always ready to fight a poor man's
+battle without fee. He worked hard in the agitation which saved women
+from working in the mines, and I have heard him tell how he had seen
+them toiling, naked to the waist, with short petticoats barely
+reaching to their knees, rough, foul-tongued, brutalised out of all
+womanly decency and grace; and how he had seen little children working
+there too, babies of three and four set to watch a door, and falling
+asleep at their work to be roused by curse and kick to the unfair
+toil. The old man's eye would begin to flash and his voice to rise as
+he told of these horrors, and then his face would soften as he added
+that, after it was all over and the slavery was put an end to, as he
+went through a coal district the women standing at their doors would
+lift up their children to see "Lawyer Roberts" go by, and would bid
+"God bless him" for what he had done. This dear old man was my first
+tutor in Radicalism, and I was an apt pupil. I had taken no interest
+in politics, but had unconsciously reflected more or less the decorous
+Whiggism which had always surrounded me. I regarded "the poor" as folk
+to be educated, looked after, charitably dealt with, and always
+treated with most perfect courtesy, the courtesy being due from me, as
+a lady, to all equally, whether they were rich or poor. But to Mr.
+Roberts "the poor" were the working-bees, the wealth producers, with a
+right to self-rule not to looking after, with a right to justice, not
+to charity, and he preached his doctrines to me in season and out of
+season. I was a pet of his, and used often to drive him to his office
+in the morning, glorying much in the fact that my skill was trusted in
+guiding a horse through the crowded Manchester streets. During these
+drives, and on all other available occasions, Mr. Roberts would preach
+to me the cause of the people. "What do you think of John Bright?" he
+demanded suddenly one day, looking at me with fiery eyes from under
+heavy brows. "I have never thought of him at all," was the careless
+answer. "Isn't he a rather rough sort of man, who goes about making
+rows?" "There, I thought so!" he thundered at me fiercely. "That's
+just what I say. I believe some of you fine ladies would not go to
+heaven if you had to rub shoulders with John Bright, the noblest man
+God ever gave to the cause of the poor."
+
+This was the hot-tempered and lovable "demagogue," as he was called,
+with whom we were staying when Colonel Kelly and Captain Deasy, two
+Fenian leaders, were arrested in Manchester and put on their trial. The
+whole Irish population became seething with excitement, and on
+September 18th the police van carrying them to Salford Gaol was stopped
+at the Bellevue Railway Arch by the sudden fall of one of the horses,
+shot from the side of the road. In a moment the van was surrounded, and
+crowbars were wrenching at the van door. It resisted; a body of police
+was rapidly approaching, and if the rescue was to be effective the door
+must be opened. The rescuers shouted to Brett, the constable inside, to
+pass out his keys; he refused, and some one exclaimed, "Blow off the
+lock!" In a moment the muzzle of a revolver was against the lock, and
+it was blown off; but Brett, stooping down to look through the keyhole,
+received the bullet in his head, and fell dying as the door flew open.
+Another moment, and Allen, a lad of seventeen, had wrenched open the
+doors of the compartments occupied by Kelly and Deasy, dragged them
+out, and while two or three hurried them off to a place of safety, the
+others threw themselves between the fugitives and the police, and with
+levelled revolvers guarded their flight. The Fenian leaders once safe,
+they scattered, and young William Allen, whose one thought had been for
+his chiefs, seeing them safe, fired his revolver in the air, for he
+would not shed blood in his own defence. Disarmed by his own act, he
+was set on by the police, brutally struck down, kicked and stoned, and
+was dragged off to gaol, faint and bleeding, to meet there some of his
+comrades in much the same plight as himself. Then Manchester went mad,
+and race-passions flared up into flame; no Irish workman was safe in a
+crowd of Englishmen, no Englishman safe in the Irish quarter. The
+friends of the prisoners besieged "Lawyer Roberts's" house, praying his
+aid, and he threw his whole fiery soul into their defence. The man who
+had fired the accidentally fatal shot was safely out of the way, and
+none of the others had hurt a human being. A Special Commission was
+issued, with Mr. Justice Blackburn at its head--"the hanging judge,"
+groaned Mr. Roberts--and it was soon in Manchester, for all Mr.
+Roberts's efforts to get the venue of the trial changed were futile,
+though of fair trial then in Manchester there was no chance. On October
+25th the prisoners were actually brought up before the magistrates in
+irons, and Mr. Ernest Jones, their counsel, failing in his protest
+against this outrage, threw down his brief and left the court. So great
+was the haste with which the trial was hurried on that on the 29th
+Allen, Larkin, Gould (O'Brien), Maguire, and Condon were standing in
+the dock before the Commission charged with murder.
+
+My first experience of an angry crowd was on that day as we drove to
+the court; the streets were barricaded, the soldiers were under arms,
+every approach to the court crowded with surging throngs. At last our
+carriage was stopped as we were passing at a foot's pace through an
+Irish section of the crowd, and various vehement fists came through the
+window, with hearty curses at the "d----d English who were going to see
+the boys murdered." The situation was critical, for we were two women
+and three girls, when I bethought myself that we were unknown, and
+gently touched the nearest fist: "Friends, these are Mr. Roberts' wife
+and daughters." "Roberts! Lawyer Roberts! God bless Roberts! Let his
+carriage through." And all the scowling faces became smile-wreathen,
+and curses changed to cheers, as a road to the court steps was cleared
+for us.
+
+Alas! if there was passion on behalf of the prisoners outside, there
+was passion against them within, and the very opening of the trial
+showed the spirit that animated the prosecution and the bench. Digby
+Seymour, Q.C., and Ernest Jones, were briefed for the defence, and Mr.
+Roberts did not think that they exercised sufficiently their right of
+challenge; he knew, as we all did, that many on the panel had loudly
+proclaimed their hostility to the Irish, and Mr. Roberts persisted in
+challenging them as his counsel would not. In vain Judge Blackburn
+threatened to commit the rebellious solicitor: "These men's lives are
+at stake, my lord," was his indignant plea. "Remove that man!" cried
+the angry judge, but as the officers of the court came forward very
+slowly--for all poor men loved and honoured the sturdy fighter--he
+changed his mind and let him stay. Despite all his efforts, the jury
+contained a man who had declared that he "didn't care what the evidence
+was, he would hang every d----d Irishman of the lot." And the result
+showed that he was not alone in his view, for evidence of the most
+disreputable kind was admitted; women of the lowest type were put into
+the box as witnesses, and their word taken as unchallengeable; thus was
+destroyed an _alibi_ for Maguire, afterwards accepted by the Crown, a
+free pardon being issued on the strength of it. Nothing could save the
+doomed men from the determined verdict, and I could see from where I
+was sitting into a little room behind the bench, where an official was
+quietly preparing the black caps before the verdict had been delivered.
+The foregone "Guilty" was duly repeated as verdict on each of the five
+cases, and the prisoners asked if they had anything to say why sentence
+of death should not be passed on them. Allen, boy as he was, made a
+very brave and manly speech; he had not fired, save in the air--if he
+had done so he might have escaped; he had helped to free Kelly and
+Deasy, and did not regret it; he was willing to die for Ireland.
+Maguire and Condon (he also was reprieved) declared they were not
+present, but, like Allen, were ready to die for their country. Sentence
+of death was passed, and, as echo to the sardonic "The Lord have mercy
+on your souls," rang back from the dock in five clear voices, with
+never a quiver of fear in them, "God save Ireland!" and the men passed
+one by one from the sight of my tear-dimmed eyes.
+
+It was a sorrowful time that followed; the despair of the heart-broken
+girl who was Allen's sweetheart, and who cried to us on her knees,
+"Save my William!" was hard to see; nothing we or any one could do
+availed to avert the doom, and on November 23rd Allen, Larkin, and
+O'Brien were hanged outside Salford Gaol. Had they striven for freedom
+in Italy England would have honoured them; here she buried them as
+common murderers in quicklime in the prison yard.
+
+I have found, with a keen sense of pleasure, that Mr. Bradlaugh and
+myself were in 1867 to some extent co-workers, although we knew not of
+each other's existence, and although he was doing much, and I only
+giving such poor sympathy as a young girl might, who was only just
+awakening to the duty of political work. I read in the _National
+Reformer_ for November 24, 1867, that in the preceding week he was
+pleading on Clerkenwell Green for these men's lives:--"According to
+the evidence at the trial, Deasy and Kelly were illegally arrested.
+They had been arrested for vagrancy of which no evidence was given, and
+apparently remanded for felony without a shadow of justification. He
+had yet to learn that in England the same state of things existed as in
+Ireland; he had yet to learn that an illegal arrest was sufficient
+ground to detain any of the citizens of any country in the prisons of
+this one. If he were illegally held, he was justified in using enough
+force to procure his release. Wearing a policeman's coat gave no
+authority when the officer exceeded his jurisdiction. He had argued
+this before Lord Chief Justice Erie in the Court of Common Pleas, and
+that learned judge did not venture to contradict the argument which he
+submitted. There was another reason why they should spare these men,
+although he hardly expected the Government to listen, because the
+Government sent down one of the judges who was predetermined to convict
+the prisoners; it was that the offence was purely a political one. The
+death of Brett was a sad mischance, but no one who read the evidence
+could regard the killing of Brett as an intentional murder. Legally, it
+was murder; morally, it was homicide in the rescue of a political
+captive. If it were a question of the rescue of the political captives
+of Varignano, or of political captives in Bourbon, in Naples, or in
+Poland, or in Paris, even earls might be found so to argue. Wherein is
+our sister Ireland less than these? In executing these men, they would
+throw down the gauntlet for terrible reprisals. It was a grave and
+solemn question. It had been said by a previous speaker that they were
+prepared to go to any lengths to save these Irishmen. They were not. He
+wished they were. If they were, if the men of England, from one end to
+the other, were prepared to say, 'These men shall not be executed,'
+they would not be. He was afraid they had not pluck enough for that.
+Their moral courage was not equal to their physical strength. Therefore
+he would not say that they were prepared to do so. They must plead _ad
+misericordiam_. He appealed to the press, which represented the power
+of England; to that press which in its panic-stricken moments had done
+much harm, and which ought now to save these four doomed men. If the
+press demanded it, no Government would be mad enough to resist. The
+memory of the blood which was shed in 1798 rose up like a bloody ghost
+against them to-day. He only feared that what they said upon the
+subject might do the poor men more harm than good. If it were not so,
+he would coin words that should speak in words of fire. As it was, he
+could only say to the Government: You are strong to-day; you hold these
+men's lives in your hands; but if you want to reconcile their country
+to you, if you want to win back Ireland, if you want to make her
+children love you--then do not embitter their hearts still more by
+taking the lives of these men. Temper your strength with mercy; do not
+use the sword of justice like one of vengeance, for the day may come
+when it shall be broken in your hands, and you yourselves brained by
+the hilt of the weapon you have so wickedly wielded." In October he
+had printed a plea for Ireland, strong and earnest, asking:--
+
+"Where is our boasted English freedom when you cross to Kingstown pier?
+Where has it been for near two years? The Habeas Corpus Act suspended,
+the gaols crowded, the steamers searched, spies listening at shebeen
+shops for sedition, and the end of it a Fenian panic in England. Oh,
+before it be too late, before more blood stain the pages of our present
+history, before we exasperate and arouse bitter animosities, let us try
+and do justice to our sister land. Abolish once and for all the land
+laws, which in their iniquitous operation have ruined her peasantry.
+Sweep away the leech-like Church which has sucked her vitality, and has
+given her back no word even of comfort in her degradation. Turn her
+barracks into flax mills, encourage a spirit of independence in her
+citizens, restore to her people the protection of the law, so that they
+may speak without fear of arrest, and beg them to plainly and boldly
+state their grievances. Let a commission of the best and wisest amongst
+Irishmen, with some of our highest English judges added, sit solemnly
+to hear all complaints, and then let us honestly legislate, not for the
+punishment of the discontented, but to remove the causes of the
+discontent. It is not the Fenians who have depopulated Ireland's
+strength and increased her misery. It is not the Fenians who have
+evicted tenants by the score. It is not the Fenians who have checked
+cultivation. Those who have caused the wrong at least should frame the
+remedy."
+
+In December, 1867, I sailed out of the safe harbour of my happy and
+peaceful girlhood on to the wide sea of life, and the waves broke
+roughly as soon as the bar was crossed. We were an ill-matched pair, my
+husband and I, from the very outset; he, with very high ideas of a
+husband's authority and a wife's submission, holding strongly to the
+"master-in-my-own-house theory," thinking much of the details of home
+arrangements, precise, methodical, easily angered and with difficulty
+appeased. I, accustomed to freedom, indifferent to home details,
+impulsive, very hot-tempered, and proud as Lucifer. I had never had a
+harsh word spoken to me, never been ordered to do anything, had had my
+way smoothed for my feet, and never a worry had touched me. Harshness
+roused first incredulous wonder, then a storm of indignant tears, and
+after a time a proud, defiant resistance, cold and hard as iron. The
+easy-going, sunshiny, enthusiastic girl changed--and changed pretty
+rapidly--into a grave, proud, reticent woman, burying deep in her own
+heart all her hopes, her fears, and her disillusions. I must have been
+a very unsatisfactory wife from the beginning, though I think other
+treatment might gradually have turned me into a fair imitation of the
+proper conventional article. Beginning with the ignorance before
+alluded to, and so scared and outraged at heart from the very first;
+knowing nothing of household management or economical use of money--I
+had never had an allowance or even bought myself a pair of
+gloves--though eager to perform my new duties creditably; unwilling to
+potter over little things, and liking to do swiftly what I had to do,
+and then turn to my beloved books; at heart fretting for my mother but
+rarely speaking of her, as I found my longing for her presence raised
+jealous vexation; with strangers about me with whom I had no sympathy;
+visited by ladies who talked to me only about babies and
+servants--troubles of which I knew nothing and which bored me
+unutterably--and who were as uninterested in all that had filled my
+life, in theology, in politics, in science, as I was uninterested in
+the discussions on the housemaid's young man and on the cook's
+extravagance in using "butter, when dripping would have done perfectly
+well, my dear"; was it wonderful that I became timid, dull, and
+depressed?
+
+All my eager, passionate enthusiasm, so attractive to men in a young
+girl, were doubtless incompatible with "the solid comfort of a wife,"
+and I must have been inexpressibly tiring to the Rev. Frank Besant.
+And, in truth, I ought never to have married, for under the soft,
+loving, pliable girl there lay hidden, as much unknown to herself as to
+her surroundings, a woman of strong dominant will, strength that panted
+for expression and rebelled against restraint, fiery and passionate
+emotions that were seething under compression--a most undesirable
+partner to sit in the lady's arm-chair on the domestic rug before the
+fire. [_Que le diable faisait-elle dans cette galère,_] I have often
+thought, looking back at my past self, and asking, Why did that foolish
+girl make her bed so foolishly? But self-analysis shows the
+contradictories in my nature that led me into so mistaken a course. I
+have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have
+paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to suffer tortures of
+shyness, and if my shoe-lace was untied would feel shamefacedly that
+every eye was fixed on the unlucky string; as a girl I would shrink
+away from strangers and think myself unwanted and unliked, so that I
+was full of eager gratitude to any one who noticed me kindly; as the
+young mistress of a house, I was afraid of my servants, and would let
+careless work pass rather than bear the pain of reproving the ill-doer;
+when I have been lecturing and debating with no lack of spirit on the
+platform, I have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel
+rather than to ring and make the waiter fetch it; combative on the
+platform in defence of any cause I cared for, I shrink from quarrel or
+disapproval in the home, and am a coward at heart in private while a
+good fighter in public. How often have I passed unhappy quarters of an
+hour screwing up my courage to find fault with some subordinate whom my
+duty compelled me to reprove, and how often have I jeered at myself for
+a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming
+some lad or lass for doing their work badly! An unkind look or word has
+availed to make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while
+on the platform opposition makes me speak my best. So I slid into
+marriage blindly and stupidly, fearing to give pain; fretted my heart
+out for a year; then, roused by harshness and injustice, stiffened and
+hardened, and lived with a wall of ice round me within which I waged
+mental conflicts that nearly killed me; and learned at last how to live
+and work in armour that turned the edge of the weapons that struck it,
+and left the flesh beneath unwounded, armour laid aside, but in the
+presence of a very few.
+
+My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up
+two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of
+a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character,
+"The Lives of the Black Letter Saints." For the sake of the
+unecclesiastically trained it may be as well to mention that in the
+Calendar of the Church of England there are a number of Saints' Days;
+some of these are printed in red, and are Red Letter Days, for which
+services are appointed by the Church; others are printed in black, and
+are Black Letter Days, and have no special services fixed for them. It
+seemed to me that it would be interesting to take each of these days
+and write a sketch of the life of the saint belonging to it, and
+accordingly I set to work to do so, and gathered various books of
+history and legend where-from to collect my "facts." I do not in the
+least know what became of that valuable book; I tried Macmillans with
+it, and it was sent on by them to some one who was preparing a series
+of Church books for the young; later I had a letter from a Church
+brotherhood offering to publish it, if I would give it as "an act of
+piety" to their order; its ultimate fate is to me unknown.
+
+The short stories were more fortunate. I sent the first to the _Family
+Herald_, and some weeks afterwards received a letter from which dropped
+a cheque as I opened it. Dear me! I have earned a good deal of money
+since by my pen, but never any that gave me the intense delight of that
+first thirty shillings. It was the first money I had ever earned, and
+the pride of the earning was added to the pride of authorship. In my
+childish delight and practical religion, I went down on my knees and
+thanked God for sending it to me, and I saw myself earning heaps of
+golden guineas, and becoming quite a support of the household. Besides,
+it was "my very own," I thought, and a delightful sense of independence
+came over me. I had not then realised the beauty of the English law,
+and the dignified position in which it placed the married woman; I did
+not understand that all a married woman earned by law belonged to her
+owner, and that she could have nothing that belonged to her of
+right.[1] I did not want the money: I was only so glad to have
+something of my own to give, and it was rather a shock to learn that it
+was not really mine at all.
+
+From time to time after that I earned a few pounds for stories in the
+same journal; and the _Family Herald_, let me say, has one peculiarity
+which should render it beloved by poor authors; it pays its contributor
+when it accepts the paper, whether it prints it immediately or not;
+thus my first story was not printed for some weeks after I received the
+cheque, and it was the same with all the others accepted by the same
+journal. Encouraged by these small successes, I began writing a novel!
+It took a long time to do, but was at last finished, and sent off to
+the _Family Herald_. The poor thing came back, but with a kind note,
+telling me that it was too political for their pages, but that if I
+would write one of "purely domestic interest," and up to the same
+level, it would probably be accepted. But by that time I was in the
+full struggle of theological doubt, and that novel of "purely domestic
+interest" never got itself written.
+
+I contributed further to the literature of my country a theological
+pamphlet, of which I forget the exact title, but it dealt with the duty
+of fasting incumbent on all faithful Christians, and was very patristic
+in its tone.
+
+In January, 1869, my little son was born, and as I was very ill for
+some months before, and was far too much interested in the tiny
+creature afterwards, to devote myself to pen and paper, my literary
+career was checked for a while. The baby gave a new interest and a new
+pleasure to life, and as we could not afford a nurse I had plenty to do
+in looking after his small majesty. My energy in reading became less
+feverish when it was done by the side of the baby's cradle, and the
+little one's presence almost healed the abiding pain of my mother's
+loss.
+
+I may pass very quickly over the next two years. In August, 1870, a
+little sister was born to my son, and the recovery was slow and
+tedious, for my general health had been failing for some time.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by Dighton's Art Studio, Cheltenham_.
+ANNIE BESANT 1869.]
+
+The boy was a bright, healthy little fellow, but the girl was delicate
+from birth, suffering from her mother's unhappiness, and born somewhat
+prematurely in consequence of a shock. When, in the spring of 1871, the
+two children caught the whooping cough, my Mabel's delicacy made the
+ordeal well-nigh fatal to her. She was very young for so trying a
+disease, and after a while bronchitis set in and was followed by
+congestion of the lungs. For weeks she lay in hourly peril of death We
+arranged a screen round the fire like a tent, and kept it full of steam
+to ease the panting breath; and there I sat, day and night, all through
+those weary weeks, the tortured baby on my knees. I loved my little
+ones passionately, for their clinging love soothed the aching at my
+heart, and their baby eyes could not critically scan the unhappiness
+that grew deeper month by month; and that steam-filled tent became my
+world, and there, alone, I fought with Death for my child. The doctor
+said that recovery was impossible, and that in one of the paroxysms of
+coughing she must die; the most distressing thing was that, at last,
+even a drop or two of milk would bring on the terrible convulsive
+choking, and it seemed cruel to add to the pain of the apparently dying
+child. At length, one morning the doctor said she could not last
+through the day; I had sent for him hurriedly, for the body had
+suddenly swollen up as a result of the perforation of one of the
+pleurae, and the consequent escape of air into the cavity of the chest.
+While he was there one of the fits of coughing came on, and it seemed
+as though it must be the last. He took a small bottle of chloroform out
+of his pocket, and putting a drop on a handkerchief held it near the
+child's face, till the drug soothed the convulsive struggle. "It can't
+do any harm at this stage," he said, "and it checks the suffering." He
+went away, saying that he feared he would never see the child alive
+again. One of the kindest friends I had in my married life was that
+same doctor, Mr. Lauriston Winterbotham; he was as good as he was
+clever, and, like so many of his noble profession, he had the merits of
+discretion and silence. He never breathed a word as to my unhappiness,
+until in 1878 he came up to town to give evidence as to cruelty
+which--had the deed of separation not been held as condonation--would
+have secured me a divorce _a mensa et thoro._
+
+The child, however, recovered, and her recovery was due, I think, to
+that chance thought of Mr. Winterbotham's about the chloroform, for I
+used it whenever the first sign of a fit of coughing appeared, and so
+warded off the convulsive attack and the profound exhaustion that
+followed, in which a mere flicker of breath at the top of the throat
+was the only sign of life, and sometimes even that disappeared, and I
+thought her gone. For years the child remained ailing and delicate,
+requiring the tenderest care, but those weeks of anguish left a deeper
+trace on mother than on child. Once she was out of danger I collapsed
+physically, and lay in bed for a week unmoving, and then rose to face a
+struggle which lasted for three years and two months, and nearly cost
+me my life, the struggle which transformed me from a Christian into an
+Atheist. The agony of the struggle was in the first nineteen months--a
+time to be looked back upon with shrinking, as it was a hell to live
+through at the time. For no one who has not felt it knows the fearful
+anguish inflicted by doubt on the earnestly religious soul. There is in
+life no other pain so horrible, so keen in its torture, so crushing in
+its weight. It seems to shipwreck everything, to destroy the one steady
+gleam of happiness "on the other side" that no earthly storm could
+obscure; to make all life gloomy with a horror of despair, a darkness
+that verily may be felt. Nothing but an imperious intellectual and
+moral necessity can drive into doubt a religious mind, for it is as
+though an earthquake shook the foundations of the soul, and the very
+being quivers and sways under the shock. No life in the empty sky; no
+gleam in the blackness of the night; no voice to break the deadly
+silence; no hand outstretched to save. Empty-brained triflers who have
+never tried to think, who take their creed as they take their fashions,
+speak of Atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious desires. In
+their shallow heartlessness and shallower thought they cannot even
+dimly imagine the anguish of entering the mere penumbra of the Eclipse
+of Faith, much less the horror of that great darkness in which the
+orphaned soul cries out into the infinite emptiness: "Is it a Devil
+that has made the world? Is the echo, 'Children, ye have no Father,'
+true? Is all blind chance, is all the clash of unconscious forces, or
+are we the sentient toys of an Almighty Power that sports with our
+agony, whose peals of awful mockery of laughter ring back answer to the
+wailings of our despair?"
+
+How true are the noble words of Mrs. Hamilton King:--
+
+  "For some may follow Truth from dawn to dark,
+  As a child follows by his mother's hand,
+  Knowing no fear, rejoicing all the way;
+  And unto some her face is as a Star
+  Set through an avenue of thorns and fires,
+  And waving branches black without a leaf;
+  And still It draws them, though the feet must bleed,
+  Though garments must be rent, and eyes be scorched:
+  And if the valley of the shadow of death
+  Be passed, and to the level road they come,
+  Still with their faces to the polar star,
+  It is not with the same looks, the same limbs,
+  But halt, and maimed, and of infirmity.
+  And for the rest of the way they have to go
+  It is not day but night, and oftentimes
+  A night of clouds wherein the stars are lost."[2]
+
+Aye! but never lost is the Star of Truth to which the face is set, and
+while that shines all lesser lights may go. It was the long months of
+suffering through which I had been passing, with the seemingly
+purposeless torturing of my little one as a climax, that struck the
+first stunning blow at my belief in God as a merciful Father of men. I
+had been visiting the poor a good deal, and had marked the patient
+suffering of their lives; my idolised mother had been defrauded by a
+lawyer she had trusted, and was plunged into debt by his non-payment of
+the sums that should have passed through his hands to others; my own
+bright life had been enshrouded by pain and rendered to me degraded by
+an intolerable sense of bondage; and here was my helpless, sinless babe
+tortured for weeks and left frail and suffering. The smooth brightness
+of my previous life made all the disillusionment more startling, and
+the sudden plunge into conditions so new and so unfavourable dazed and
+stunned me. My religious past became the worst enemy of the suffering
+present. All my personal belief in Christ, all my intense faith in His
+constant direction of affairs, all my habit of continual prayer and of
+realisation of His Presence--all were against me now. The very height
+of my trust was the measure of the shock when the trust gave way. To me
+He was no abstract idea, but a living reality, and all my heart rose up
+against this Person in whom I believed, and whose individual finger I
+saw in my baby's agony, my own misery, the breaking of my mother's
+proud heart under a load of debt, and all the bitter suffering of the
+poor. The presence of pain and evil in a world made by a good God; the
+pain falling on the innocent, as on my seven months' old babe; the pain
+begun here reaching on into eternity unhealed; a sorrow-laden world; a
+lurid, hopeless hell; all these, while I still believed, drove me
+desperate, and instead of like the devils believing and trembling, I
+believed and hated. All the hitherto dormant and unsuspected strength
+of my nature rose up in rebellion; I did not yet dream of denial, but I
+would no longer kneel.
+
+As the first stirrings of this hot rebellion moved in my heart I met a
+clergyman of a very noble type, who did much to help me by his ready
+and wise sympathy. Mr. Besant brought him to see me during the crisis
+of the child's illness; he said little, but on the following day I
+received from him the following note:--
+
+"_April_ 21, 1871.
+
+"My Dear Mrs. Besant,--I am painfully conscious that I gave you but
+little help in your trouble yesterday. It is needless to say that it
+was not from want of sympathy. Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to
+say that it was from excess of sympathy. I shrink intensely from
+meddling with the sorrow of any one whom I feel to be of a sensitive
+nature. 'The heart hath its own bitterness, and the stranger meddleth
+not therewith.' It is to me a positively fearful thought that I might
+awaken such a reflection as
+
+  "'And common was the commonplace,
+  And vacant chaff well meant for grain.'
+
+Conventional consolations, conventional verses out of the Bible, and
+conventional prayers are, it seems to me, an intolerable aggravation of
+suffering. And so I acted on a principle that I mentioned to your
+husband that 'there is no power so great as that of one human faith
+looking upon another human faith.' The promises of God, the love of
+Christ for little children, and all that has been given to us of hope
+and comfort, are as deeply planted in your heart as in mine, and I did
+not care to quote them. But when I talk face to face with one who is in
+sore need of them, my faith in them suddenly becomes so vast and
+heart-stirring that I think I must help most by talking naturally, and
+letting the faith find its own way from soul to soul. Indeed, I could
+not find words for it if I tried. And yet I am compelled, as a
+messenger of the glad tidings of God, to solemnly assure you that all
+is well. We have no key to the 'mystery of pain' excepting the Cross of
+Christ. But there is another and a deeper solution in the hands of our
+Father; and it will be ours when we can understand it. There is--in the
+place to which we travelsome blessed explanation of your baby's pain
+and your grief, which will fill with light the darkest heart. Now you
+must believe without having seen; that is true faith. You must
+
+  "'Reach a hand through time to catch
+  The far-off interest of tears.'
+
+That you may have strength so to do is part of your share in the
+prayers of
+
+"Yours very faithfully,
+
+"W. D----."
+
+A noble letter, but the storm was beating too fiercely to be stilled,
+and one night in that summer of 1871 stands out clearly before me. Mr.
+Besant was away, and there had been a fierce quarrel before he left. I
+was outraged, desperate, with no door of escape from a life that,
+losing its hope in God, had not yet learned to live for hope for man.
+No door of escape? The thought came like a flash: "There is one!" And
+before me there swung open, with lure of peace and of safety, the
+gateway into silence and security, the gateway of the tomb. I was
+standing by the drawing-room window, staring hopelessly at the evening
+sky; with the thought came the remembrance that the means was at
+hand--the chloroform that had soothed my baby's pain, and that I had
+locked away upstairs. I ran up to my room, took out the bottle, and
+carried it downstairs, standing again at the window in the summer
+twilight, glad that the struggle was over and peace at hand. I uncorked
+the bottle, and was raising it to my lips, when, as though the words
+were spoken softly and clearly, I heard: "O coward, coward, who used to
+dream of martyrdom, and cannot bear a few short years of pain!" A rush
+of shame swept over me, and I flung the bottle far away among the
+shrubs in the garden at my feet, and for a moment I felt strong as for
+a struggle, and then fell fainting on the floor. Only once again in all
+the strifes of my career did the thought of suicide recur, and then it
+was but for a moment, to be put aside as unworthy a strong soul.
+
+My new friend, Mr. D----, proved a very real help. The endless torture
+of hell, the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, the trustworthiness of
+revelation, doubts on all these hitherto accepted doctrines grew and
+heaped themselves on my bewildered soul. My questionings were neither
+shirked nor discouraged by Mr. D----; he was not horrified nor was he
+sanctimoniously rebukeful, but met them all with a wide comprehension
+inexpressibly soothing to one writhing in the first agonies of doubt.
+He left Cheltenham in the early autumn of 1871, but the following
+extracts from a letter written in November will show the kind of net in
+which I was struggling (I had been reading M'Leod Campbell's work "On
+the Atonement"):--
+
+"You forget one great principle--that God is impassive, cannot suffer.
+Christ, _quĂ¢_ God, did not suffer, but as Son of _Man_ and in His
+humanity. Still, it may be correctly stated that He felt to sin and
+sinners 'as God eternally feels'--_i.e., abhorrence of sin, and love of
+the sinner_. But to infer from that that the Father in His Godhead
+feels the sufferings which Christ experienced solely in humanity, and
+because incarnate is, I think, wrong.
+
+"(2) I felt strongly inclined to blow you up for the last part of your
+letter. You assume, I think quite gratuitously, that God condemns the
+major part of His children to objectless future suffering. You say that
+if He does not, He places a book in their hands which threatens what He
+does not mean to inflict. But how utterly this seems to me opposed to
+the gospel of Christ! All Christ's references to eternal punishment may
+be resolved into references to the Valley of Hinnom, by way of imagery;
+with the exception of the Dives parable, where is distinctly inferred a
+moral amendment beyond the grave. I speak of the unselfish desire of
+Dives to save his brothers. The more I see of the controversy, the more
+baseless does the eternal punishment theory appear. It seems then, to
+me, that instead of feeling aggrieved and shaken, you ought to feel
+encouraged and thankful that God is so much better than you were taught
+to believe Him. You will have discovered by this time in Maurice's
+'What is Revelation?' (I suppose you have the 'Sequel,' too?), that
+God's truth is our truth, and His love is our love, only more perfect
+and full. There is no position more utterly defeated in modern
+philosophy and theology than Dean Mansel's attempt to show that God's
+love, justice, &c., are different in kind from ours. Mill and Maurice,
+from totally alien points of view, have shown up the preposterous
+nature of the notion.
+
+"(3) A good deal of what you have thought is, I fancy, based on a
+strange forgetfulness of your former experience. If you have known
+Christ--(whom to know is eternal life)--and that you have known Him I
+am certain--can you really say that a few intellectual difficulties,
+nay, a few moral difficulties if you will, are able at once to
+obliterate the testimony of that higher state of being?
+
+"Why, the keynote of all my theology is that Christ is lovable because,
+and _just_ because, He is the perfection of all that I know to be noble
+and generous, and loving, and tender, and true. If an angel from heaven
+brought me a gospel which contained doctrines that would not stand the
+test of such perfect lovableness--doctrines hard, or cruel, or
+unjust--I should reject him and his trumpery gospel with scorn, knowing
+that neither could be Christ's. Know Christ and judge religions by Him;
+don't judge Him by religions, and then complain because they find
+yourself looking at Him through a blood-coloured glass."
+
+"I am saturating myself with Maurice, who is the antidote given by God
+to this age against all dreary doublings and temptings of the devil to
+despair."
+
+Many a one, in this age of controversy over all things once held
+sacred, has found peace and new light on this line of thought, and has
+succeeded in thus reconciling theological doctrines with the demands of
+the conscience for love and justice in a world made by a just and
+loving God. I could not do so. The awakening to what the world was, to
+the facts of human misery, to the ruthless tramp of nature and of
+events over the human heart, making no difference between innocent and
+guilty--the shock had been too great for the equilibrium to be restored
+by arguments that appealed to the emotions and left the intellect
+unconvinced. Months of this long-drawn-out mental anguish wrought their
+natural effects on physical health, and at last I broke down
+completely, and lay for weeks helpless and prostrate, in raging and
+unceasing head-pain, unable to sleep, unable to bear the light, lying
+like a log on the bed, not unconscious, but indifferent to everything,
+consciousness centred, as it were, in the ceaseless pain. The doctor
+tried every form of relief, but, entrenched in its citadel, the pain
+defied his puny efforts. He covered my head with ice, he gave me
+opium--which only drove me mad--he did all that skill and kindness
+could do, but all in vain. Finally the pain wore itself out, and the
+moment he dared to do so, he tried mental diversion; he brought me
+books on anatomy, on science, and persuaded me to study them; and out
+of his busy life would steal an hour to explain to me knotty points on
+physiology. He saw that if I were to be brought back to reasonable
+life, it could only be by diverting thought from the channels in which
+the current had been running to a dangerous extent. I have often felt
+that I owed life and sanity to that good man, who felt for the
+helpless, bewildered child-woman, beaten down by the cyclone of doubt
+and misery.
+
+So it will easily be understood that my religious wretchedness only
+increased the unhappiness of homelife, for how absurd it was that any
+reasonable human being should be so tossed with anguish over
+intellectual and moral difficulties on religious matters, and should
+make herself ill over these unsubstantial troubles. Surely it was a
+woman's business to attend to her husband's comforts and to see after
+her children, and not to break her heart over misery here and hell
+hereafter, and distract her brain with questions that had puzzled the
+greatest thinkers and still remained unsolved! And, truly, women or men
+who get themselves concerned about the universe at large, would do well
+not to plunge hastily into marriage, for they do not run smoothly in
+the double-harness of that honourable estate. _Sturm und Drang_ should
+be faced alone, and the soul should go out alone into the wilderness to
+be tempted of the devil, and not bring his majesty and all his imps
+into the placid circle of the home. Unhappy they who go into marriage
+with the glamour of youth upon them and the destiny of conflict
+imprinted on their nature, for they make misery for their partner in
+marriage as well as for themselves. And if that partner, strong in
+traditional authority and conventional habits, seeks to "break in" the
+turbulent and storm-tossed creature--well, it comes to a mere trial of
+strength and endurance, whether that driven creature will fall panting
+and crushed, or whether it will turn in its despair, assert its Divine
+right to intellectual liberty, rend its fetters in pieces, and,
+discovering its own strength in its extremity, speak at all risks its
+"No" when bidden to live a lie.
+
+When that physical crisis was over I decided on my line of action. I
+resolved to take Christianity as it had been taught in the Churches,
+and carefully and thoroughly examine its dogmas one by one, so that I
+should never again say "I believe" where I had not proved, and that,
+however diminished my area of belief, what was left of it might at
+least be firm under my feet. I found that four chief problems were
+pressing for solution, and to these I addressed myself. How many are
+to-day the souls facing just these problems, and disputing every inch
+of their old ground of faith with the steadily advancing waves of
+historical and scientific criticism! Alas! for the many Canutes, as the
+waves wash over their feet. These problems were:--
+
+(1) The eternity of punishment after death.
+
+(2) The meaning of "goodness" and "love," as applied to a God who had
+made this world, with all its sin and misery.
+
+(3) The nature of the atonement of Christ, and the "justice" of God in
+accepting a vicarious suffering from Christ, and a vicarious
+righteousness from the sinner.
+
+(4) The meaning of "inspiration" as applied to the Bible, and the
+reconciliation of the perfections of the author with the blunders and
+immoralities of the work.
+
+It will be seen that the deeper problems of religion--the deity of
+Christ, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul--were not yet
+brought into question, and, looking back, I cannot but see how orderly
+was the progression of thought, how steady the growth, after that first
+terrible earthquake, and the first wild swirl of agony. The points that
+I set myself to study were those which would naturally be first faced
+by any one whose first rebellion against the dogmas of the Churches was
+a rebellion of the moral nature rather than of the intellectual, a
+protest of the conscience rather than of the brain. It was not a desire
+for moral licence which gave me the impulse that finally landed me in
+Atheism; it was the sense of outraged justice and insulted right. I was
+a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty
+and a proud self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me,
+and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of
+outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity.
+My education, my mother's example, my inner timidity and self-distrust,
+all fenced me in from temptations from without. It was the uprising of
+an outraged conscience that made me a rebel against the Churches and
+finally an unbeliever in God. And I place this on record, because the
+progress of Materialism will never be checked by diatribes against
+unbelievers, as though they became unbelievers from desire for vice and
+for licence to do evil. What Religion has to face in the controversies
+of to-day is not the unbelief of the sty, but the unbelief of the
+educated conscience and of the soaring intellect; and unless it can arm
+itself with a loftier ethic and a grander philosophy than its opponent,
+it will lose its hold over the purest and the strongest of the younger
+generation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE STORM OF DOUBT.
+
+
+My reading of heretical and Broad Church works on one side, and of
+orthodox ones on the other, now occupied a large part of my time, and
+our removal to Sibsey, in Lincolnshire, an agricultural village with a
+scattered population, increased my leisure. I read the works of
+Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Stanley, Greg, Matthew Arnold, Liddon,
+Mansel, and many another, and my scepticism grew deeper and deeper as
+I read. The Broad Church arguments appeared to me to be of the nature
+of special pleading, skilful evasions of difficulties rather than the
+real meeting and solving of them. For the problem was: Given a good
+God, how can He have created mankind, knowing beforehand that the vast
+majority of those whom He created were to be tortured for ever? Given
+a just God, how can He punish people for being sinful, when they have
+inherited a sinful nature without their own choice and of necessity?
+Given a righteous God, how can He allow sin to exist for ever, so that
+evil shall be as eternal as good, and Satan shall reign in hell as
+long as Christ in heaven? Worst of all puzzles, perhaps, was that of
+the existence of evil and of misery, and the racking doubt whether God
+_could_ be good, and yet look on the evil and the misery of the world
+unmoved and untouched. It seemed so impossible to believe that a
+Creator could be either cruel enough to be indifferent to the misery,
+or weak enough to be unable to stop it. The old dilemma faced me
+incessantly: "If He can prevent it and does not, He is not good; if He
+wishes to prevent it and cannot, He is not almighty." I racked my
+brains for an answer. I searched writings of believers for a clue, but
+I found no way of escape. Not yet had any doubt of the existence of
+God crossed my mind.
+
+Mr. D---- continued to write me, striving to guide me along the path
+which had led his own soul to contentment, but I can only find room
+here for two brief extracts, which will show how to himself he solved
+the problem. He thought me mistaken in my view
+
+"Of the nature of the _sin_ and _error_ which is supposed to grieve
+God. I take it that sin is an absolutely necessary factor in the
+production of the perfect man. It was foreseen and allowed as means to
+an end--as, in fact, an education. The view of all the sin and misery
+in the world cannot grieve God any more than it can grieve you to see
+Digby fail in his first attempt to build a card-castle or a
+rabbit-hutch. All is part of the training. God looks at the ideal man
+to which all tends.... "No, Mrs. Besant; I never feel at all inclined
+to give up the search, or to suppose that the other side may be right.
+I claim no merit for it, but I have an invincible faith in the
+morality of God and the moral order of the world. I have no more doubt
+about the falsehood of the popular theology than I have about the
+unreality of six robbers who attacked me three nights ago in a horrid
+dream. I exult and rejoice in the grandeur and freedom of the little
+bit of truth it has been given me to see. I am told that 'Present-day
+Papers,' by Bishop Ewing (edited), are a wonderful help, many of them,
+to puzzled people; I mean to get them. But I am sure you will find
+that the truth will (even so little as we may be able to find out)
+grow on you, make you free, light your path, and dispel, at no distant
+time, your _painful_ difficulties and doubts. I should say on no
+account give up your reading. I think with you that you could not do
+without it. It will be a wonderful source of help and peace to you.
+For there are struggles far more fearful than those of intellectual
+doubt. I am keenly alive to the gathered-up sadness of which your last
+two pages are an expression. I was sorrier than I can say to read
+them. They reminded me of a long and very dark time in my own life,
+when I thought the light never would come. Thank God it came, or I
+think I could not have held out much longer. But you have evidently
+strength to bear it now. The more dangerous time, I should fancy, has
+passed. You will have to mind that the fermentation leaves clear
+spiritual wine, and not (as too often) vinegar. I wish I could write
+something more helpful to you in this great matter. But as I sit in
+front of my large bay window and see the shadows on the grass and the
+sunlight on the leaves, and the soft glimmer of the rosebuds left by
+the storms, I can but believe that all will be very well. 'Trust in
+the Lord, wait patiently for Him'--they are trite words. But He made
+the grass, the leaves, the rosebuds, and the sunshine, and He is the
+Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And now the trite words have swelled
+into a mighty argument."
+
+I found more help in Theistic writers like Grey, and Agnostic like
+Arnold, than I did in the Broad Church teachers, but these, of course,
+served to make return to the old faith more and more impossible. The
+Church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was
+only a doubter, I kept my doubts to myself. It was possible, I felt,
+that all my difficulties might be cleared up, and I had no right to
+shake the faith of others while in uncertainty myself. Others had
+doubted and had afterwards recovered their faith; for the doubter
+silence was a duty; the blinded had better keep their misery to
+themselves.
+
+During these weary months of anxiety and torment I found some relief
+from the mental strain in practical parish work, nursing the sick,
+trying to brighten the lot of the poor. I learned then some of the
+lessons as to the agricultural labourer and the land that I was able
+in after-years to teach from the platform. The movement among the
+agricultural labourers, due to the energy and devotion of Joseph Arch,
+was beginning to be discussed in the fens, and my sympathies went
+strongly with the claims of the labourers, for I knew their
+life-conditions. In one cottage I had found four generations sleeping
+in one room--the great-grandfather and his wife, the unmarried
+grandmother, the unmarried mother, the little child; three men lodgers
+completed the tale of eight human beings crowded into that narrow,
+ill-ventilated garret. Other cottages were hovels, through the broken
+roofs of which poured the rain, and wherein rheumatism and ague lived
+with the human dwellers. How could I do aught but sympathise with any
+combination that aimed at the raising of these poor? But the
+Agricultural Labourers' Union was bitterly opposed by the farmers, and
+they would give no work to a "Union man." One example may serve for
+all. There was a young married man with two small children, who was
+sinful enough to go to a Union meeting and sinful enough to talk of it
+on his return home. No farmer would employ him in all the district
+round. He tramped about vainly looking for work, grew reckless, and
+took to drink. Visiting his cottage, consisting of one room and a
+"lean-to," I found his wife ill with fever, a fever-stricken babe in
+her arms, the second child lying dead on the bed. In answer to my
+soft-spoken questions: Yes, she was pining (starving), there was no
+work. Why did she leave the dead child on the bed? Because she had no
+other place for it till the coffin came. And at night the unhappy,
+driven man, the fever-stricken wife, the fever-stricken child, the
+dead child, all lay in the one bed. The farmers hated the Union
+because its success meant higher wages for the men, and it never
+struck them that they might well pay less rent to the absent landlord
+and higher wage to the men who tilled their fields. They had only
+civil words for the burden that crushed them, hard words for the
+mowers of their harvests and the builders-up of their ricks; they made
+common cause with their enemies instead of with their friends, and
+instead of leaguing themselves together with the labourers as forming
+together the true agricultural interest, they leagued themselves with
+the landlords against the labourers, and so made ruinous fratricidal
+strife instead of easy victory over the common foe. And, seeing all
+this, I learned some useful lessons, and the political education
+progressed while the theological strife went on within.
+
+In the early autumn a ray of light broke the darkness. I was in London
+with my mother, and wandered one Sunday morning into St. George's
+Hall, where the Rev. Charles Voysey was preaching. There to my delight
+I found, on listening to the sermon and buying some literature on sale
+in the ante-room, that there were people who had passed through my own
+difficulties, and had given up the dogmas that I found so revolting. I
+went again on the following Sunday, and when the service was over I
+noticed that the outgoing stream of people were passing by Mr. and
+Mrs. Voysey, and that many who were evidently strangers spoke a word
+of thanks to him as they went on. Moved by a strong desire, after the
+long months of lonely striving, to speak to one who had struggled out
+of Christian difficulties, I said to Mr. Voysey, as I passed in my
+turn, "I must thank you for very great help in what you said this
+morning," for in truth, never having yet doubted the existence of God,
+the teaching of Mr. Voysey that He was "loving unto _every_ man, and
+His tender mercy over _all_ His works," came like a gleam of light
+across the stormy sea of doubt and distress on which I had so long
+been tossing. The next Sunday saw me again at the Hall, and Mrs.
+Voysey gave me a cordial invitation to visit them in their Dulwich
+home. I found their Theism was free from the defects that had revolted
+me in Christianity, and they opened up to me new views of religion. I
+read Theodore Parker's "Discourse on Religion," Francis Newman's
+works, those of Miss Frances Power Cobbe, and of others; the anguish
+of the tension relaxed; the nightmare of an Almighty Evil passed away;
+my belief in God, not yet touched, was cleared from all the dark spots
+that had sullied it, and I no longer doubted whether the dogmas that
+had shocked my conscience were true or false. I shook them off, once
+for all, with all their pain and horror and darkness, and felt, with
+joy and relief inexpressible, that they were delusions of the
+ignorance of man, not the revelations of a God.
+
+But there was one belief that had not been definitely challenged, but
+of which the _rationale_ was gone with the orthodox dogmas now
+definitely renounced--the doctrine of the Deity of Christ. The whole
+teaching of the Broad Church school tends, of course, to emphasise the
+humanity of Christ at the expense of His Deity, and when eternal
+punishment and the substitutionary atonement had gone there seemed no
+reason remaining sufficient to account for so tremendous a miracle as
+the incarnation of the Deity. In the course of my reading I had become
+familiar with the idea of AvatĂ¢ras in Eastern creeds, and I saw that
+the incarnate God was put forward as a fact by all ancient religions,
+and thus the way was paved for challenging the especially Christian
+teaching, when the doctrines morally repulsive were cleared away. But
+I shrank from the thought of placing in the crucible a doctrine so
+dear from all the associations of the past; there was so much that was
+soothing and ennobling in the idea of a union between Man and God,
+between a perfect man and a Divine life, between a human heart and an
+almighty strength. Jesus as God was interwoven with all art and all
+beauty in religion; to break with the Deity of Jesus was to break with
+music, with painting, with literature; the Divine Babe in His Mother's
+arms; the Divine Man in His Passion and His Triumph; the Friend of Man
+encircled with the majesty of the Godhead. Did inexorable Truth demand
+that this ideal Figure, with all its pathos, its beauty, its human
+love, should pass away into the Pantheon of the dead Gods of the Past?
+
+Nor was this all. If I gave up belief in Christ as God, I must give up
+Christianity as creed. Once challenge the unique position of the
+Christ, and the name Christian seemed to me to be a hypocrisy, and its
+renouncement a duty binding on the upright mind. I was a clergyman's
+wife; what would be the effect of such a step? Hitherto mental pain
+alone had been the price demanded inexorably from the searcher after
+truth; but with the renouncing of Christ outer warfare would be added
+to the inner, and who might guess the result upon my life? The
+struggle was keen but short; I decided to carefully review the
+evidence for and against the Deity of Christ, with the result that
+that belief followed the others, and I stood, no longer Christian,
+face to face with a dim future in which I sensed the coming conflict.
+
+One effort I made to escape it; I appealed to Dr. Pusey, thinking that
+if he could not answer my questionings, no answer to them could be
+reasonably hoped for. I had a brief correspondence with him, but was
+referred only to lines of argument familiar to me--as those of Liddon
+in his "Bampton Lectures"--and finally, on his invitation, went down
+to Oxford to see him. I found a short, stout gentleman, dressed in a
+cassock, looking like a comfortable monk; but keen eyes, steadfastly
+gazing straight into mine, told of the force and subtlety enshrined in
+the fine, impressive head. But the learned doctor took the wrong line
+of treatment; he probably saw I was anxious, shy, and nervous, and he
+treated me as a penitent going to confession and seeking the advice of
+a director, instead of as an inquirer struggling after truth, and
+resolute to obtain some firm standing-ground in the sea of doubt. He
+would not deal with the question of the Deity of Jesus as a question
+for argument. "You are speaking of your Judge," he retorted sternly,
+when I pressed a difficulty. The mere suggestion of an imperfection in
+the character of Jesus made him shudder, and he checked me with raised
+hand. "You are blaspheming. The very thought is a terrible sin." Would
+he recommend me any books that might throw light on the subject? "No,
+no; you have read too much already. You must pray; you must pray."
+When I urged that I could not believe without proof, I was told,
+"Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed"; and my
+further questioning was checked by the murmur, "O my child, how
+undisciplined! how impatient!" Truly, he must have found in me--hot,
+eager, passionate in my determination to _know_, resolute not to
+profess belief while belief was absent--nothing of the meek,
+chastened, submissive spirit with which he was wont to deal in
+penitents seeking his counsel as their spiritual guide. In vain did he
+bid me pray as though I believed; in vain did he urge the duty of
+blind submission to the authority of the Church, of blind, unreasoning
+faith that questioned not. I had not trodden the thorny path of doubt
+to come to the point from which I had started; I needed, and would
+have, solid grounds ere I believed. He had no conception of the
+struggles of a sceptical spirit; he had evidently never felt the pangs
+of doubt; his own faith was solid as a rock, firm, satisfied,
+unshakable; he would as soon have committed suicide as have doubted of
+the infallibility of the "Universal Church."
+
+"It is not your duty to ascertain the truth," he told me, sternly. "It
+is your duty to accept and believe the truth as laid down by the
+Church. At your peril you reject it. The responsibility is not yours
+so long as you dutifully accept that which the Church has laid down
+for your acceptance. Did not the Lord promise that the presence of the
+Spirit should be ever with His Church, to guide her into all truth?"
+
+"But the fact of the promise and its value are just the very points on
+which I am doubtful," I answered.
+
+He shuddered. "Pray, pray," he said. "Father, forgive her, for she
+knows not what she says."
+
+It was in vain that I urged on him the sincerity of my seeking,
+pointing out that I had everything to gain by following his
+directions, everything to lose by going my own way, but that it seemed
+to me untruthful to pretend to accept what was not really believed.
+
+"Everything to lose? Yes, indeed. You will be lost for time and lost
+for eternity."
+
+"Lost or not," I rejoined, "I must and will try to find out what is
+true, and I will not believe till I am sure."
+
+"You have no right to make terms with God," he retorted, "as to what
+you will believe or what you will not believe. You are full of
+intellectual pride."
+
+I sighed hopelessly. Little feeling of pride was there in me just
+then, but only a despairful feeling that in this rigid, unyielding
+dogmatism there was no comprehension of my difficulties, no help for
+me in my strugglings. I rose, and, thanking him for his courtesy, said
+that I would not waste his time further, that I must go home and face
+the difficulties, openly leaving the Church and taking the
+consequences. Then for the first time his serenity was ruffled.
+
+"I forbid you to speak of your disbelief," he cried. "I forbid you to
+lead into your own lost state the souls for whom Christ died."
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS SCOTT.]
+
+Slowly and sadly I took my way back to the station, knowing that my
+last chance of escape had failed me. I recognised in this famous
+divine the spirit of priest-craft, that could be tender and pitiful to
+the sinner, repentant, humble, submissive; but that was iron to the
+doubter, the heretic, and would crush out all questionings of
+"revealed truth," silencing by force, not by argument, all challenge
+of the traditions of the Church. Out of such men were made the
+Inquisitors of the Middle Ages, perfectly conscientious, perfectly
+rigid, perfectly merciless to the heretic. To them heretics are
+centres of infectious disease, and charity to the heretic is "the
+worst cruelty to the souls of men." Certain that they hold, "by no
+merit of our own, but by the mercy of our God, the one truth which He
+has revealed," they can permit no questionings, they can accept nought
+but the most complete submission. But while man aspires after truth,
+while his mind yearns after knowledge, while his intellect soars
+upward into the empyrean of speculation and "beats the air with
+tireless wing," so long shall those who demand faith from him be met
+by challenge for proof, and those who would blind him shall be
+defeated by his resolve to gaze unblenching on the face of Truth, even
+though her eyes should turn him into stone. It was during this same
+autumn of 1872 that I first met Mr. and Mrs. Scott, introduced to them
+by Mr. Voysey. At that time Thomas Scott was an old man, with
+beautiful white hair, and eyes like those of a hawk gleaming from
+under shaggy eyebrows. He had been a man of magnificent physique, and,
+though his frame was then enfeebled, the splendid lion-like head kept
+its impressive strength and beauty, and told of a unique personality.
+Well born and wealthy, he had spent his earlier life in adventure in
+all parts of the world, and after his marriage he had settled down at
+Ramsgate, and had made his home a centre of heretical thought. His
+wife, "his right hand," as he justly called her, was young enough to
+be his daughter--a sweet, strong, gentle, noble woman, worthy of her
+husband, and than that no higher praise could be spoken. Mr. Scott for
+many years issued monthly a series of pamphlets, all heretical, though
+very varying in their shades of thought; all were well written,
+cultured, and polished in tone, and to this rule Mr. Scott made no
+exception; his writers might say what they liked, but they must have
+something to say, and must say it in good English. His correspondence
+was enormous, from Prime Ministers downwards. At his house met people
+of the most varied opinions; it was a veritable heretical _salon_.
+Colenso of Natal, Edward Maitland, E. Vansittart Neale, Charles Bray,
+Sarah Hennell, and hundreds more, clerics and laymen, scholars and
+thinkers, all coming to this one house, to which the _entrée_ was
+gained only by love of Truth and desire to spread Freedom among men.
+For Thomas Scott my first Freethought essay was written a few months
+after, "On the Deity of Jesus of Nazareth," by the wife of a benefited
+clergyman. My name was not mine to use, so it was agreed that any
+essays from my pen should be anonymous.
+
+And now came the return to Sibsey, and with it the need for definite
+steps as to the Church. For now I no longer doubted, I had rejected,
+and the time for silence was past. I was willing to attend the Church
+services, taking no part in any not directed to God Himself, but I
+could no longer attend the Holy Communion, for in that service, full
+of recognition of Jesus as Deity and of His atoning sacrifice, I could
+no longer take part without hypocrisy. This was agreed to, and well do
+I remember the pain and trembling wherewith on the first "Sacrament
+Sunday" after my return I rose and left the church. That the vicar's
+wife should "communicate" was as much a matter of course as that the
+vicar should "administer"; I had never done anything in public that
+would draw attention to me, and a feeling of deadly sickness nearly
+overcame me as I made my exit, conscious that every eye was on me, and
+that my non-participation would be the cause of unending comment. As a
+matter of fact, every one naturally thought I was taken suddenly ill,
+and I was overwhelmed with calls and inquiries. To any direct question
+I answered quietly that I was unable to take part in the profession of
+faith required by an honest communicant, but the statement was rarely
+necessary, as the idea of heresy in a vicar's wife is slow to suggest
+itself to the ordinary bucolic mind, and I proffered no information
+where no question was asked.
+
+It happened that, shortly after that (to me) memorable Christmas of
+1872, a sharp epidemic of typhoid fever broke out in the village of
+Sibsey. The drainage there was of the most primitive type, and the
+contagion spread rapidly. Naturally fond of nursing, I found in this
+epidemic work just fitted to my hand, and I was fortunate enough to be
+able to lend personal help that made me welcome in the homes of the
+stricken poor. The mothers who slept exhausted while I watched beside
+their darlings' bedsides will never, I like to fancy, think
+over-harshly of the heretic whose hand was as tender and often more
+skilful than their own. I think Mother Nature meant me for a nurse,
+for I take a sheer delight in nursing any one, provided only that
+there is peril in the sickness, so that there is the strange and
+solemn feeling of the struggle between the human skill one wields and
+the supreme enemy, Death. There is a strange fascination in fighting
+Death, step by step, and this is of course felt to the full where one
+fights for life as life, and not for a life one loves. When the
+patient is beloved the struggle is touched with agony, but where one
+fights with Death over the body of a stranger there is a weird
+enchantment in the contest without personal pain, and as one forces
+back the hated foe there is a curious triumph in the feeling which
+marks the death-grip yielding up its prey, as one snatches back to
+earth the life which had well-nigh perished.
+
+The spring of 1873 brought me knowledge of a power that was to mould
+much of my future life. I delivered my first lecture, but delivered it
+to rows of empty pews in Sibsey Church. A queer whim took me that I
+would like to know how "it felt" to preach, and vague fancies stirred
+in me that I could speak if I had the chance. I saw no platform in the
+distance, nor had any idea of possible speaking in the future dawned
+upon me. But the longing to find outlet in words came upon me, and I
+felt as though I had something to say and was able to say it. So
+locked alone in the great, silent church, whither I had gone to
+practise some organ exercises, I ascended the pulpit steps and
+delivered my first lecture on the Inspiration of the Bible. I shall
+never forget the feeling of power and delight--but especially of
+power--that came upon me as I sent my voice ringing down the aisles,
+and the passion in me broke into balanced sentences and never paused
+for musical cadence or for rhythmical expression. All I wanted then
+was to see the church full of upturned faces, alive with throbbing
+sympathy, instead of the dreary emptiness of silent pews. And as
+though in a dream the solitude was peopled, and I saw the listening
+faces and the eager eyes, and as the sentences flowed unbidden from my
+lips and my own tones echoed back to me from the pillars of the
+ancient church, I knew of a verity that the gift of speech was mine,
+and that if ever--and then it seemed so impossible!--if ever the
+chance came to me of public work, this power of melodious utterance
+should at least win hearing for any message I had to bring.
+
+But the knowledge remained a secret all to my own self for many a long
+month, for I quickly felt ashamed of that foolish speechifying in an
+empty church; but, foolish as it was, I note it here, as it was the
+first effort of that expression in spoken words which later became to
+me one of the deepest delights of life. And, indeed, none can know,
+save they who have felt it, what joy there is in the full rush of
+language that moves and sways; to feel a crowd respond to the lightest
+touch; to see the faces brighten or darken at your bidding; to know
+that the sources of human emotion and human passion gush forth at the
+word of the speaker as the stream from the riven rock; to feel that
+the thought which thrills through a thousand hearers has its impulse
+from you, and throbs back to you the fuller from a thousand
+heart-beats. Is there any emotional joy in life more brilliant than
+this, fuller of passionate triumph, and of the very essence of
+intellectual delight?
+
+In 1873 my marriage tie was broken. I took no new step, but my absence
+from the Communion led to some gossip, and a relative of Mr. Besant
+pressed on him highly-coloured views of the social and professional
+dangers which would accrue if my heresy became known. My health, never
+really restored since the autumn of 1871, grew worse and worse,
+serious heart trouble having arisen from the constant strain under
+which I lived. At last, in July or August, 1873, the crisis came. I
+was told that I must conform to the outward observances of the Church,
+and attend the Communion; I refused. Then came the distinct
+alternative; conformity or exclusion from home--in other words,
+hypocrisy or expulsion. I chose the latter.
+
+A bitterly sad time followed. My dear mother was heart-broken. To her,
+with her wide and vague form of Christianity, loosely held, the
+intensity of my feeling that where I did not believe I would not
+pretend belief, was incomprehensible. She recognised far more fully
+than I did all that a separation from my home meant for me, and the
+difficulties that would surround a young woman, not yet twenty-six,
+living alone. She knew how brutally the world judges, and how the mere
+fact that a woman was young and alone justified any coarseness of
+slander. Then I did not guess how cruel men and women could be, how
+venomous their tongues; now, knowing it, having faced slander and
+lived it down, I deliberately say that were the choice again before me
+I would choose as I chose then; I would rather go through it all again
+than live "in Society" under the burden of an acted lie.
+
+The hardest struggle was against my mother's tears and pleading; to
+cause her pain was tenfold pain to me. Against harshness I had been
+rigid as steel, but it was hard to remain steadfast when my darling
+mother, whom I loved as I loved nothing else on earth, threw herself
+on her knees before me, imploring me to yield. It seemed like a crime
+to bring such anguish on her; and I felt as a murderer as the snowy
+head was pressed against my knees. And yet--to live a lie? Not even
+for her was that shame possible; in that worst crisis of blinding
+agony my will clung fast to Truth. And it is true now as it ever was
+that he who loves father or mother better than Truth is not worthy of
+her, and the flint-strewn path of honesty is the way to Light and
+Peace.
+
+Then there were the children, the two little ones who worshipped me,
+who was to them mother, nurse, and playfellow. Were they, too,
+demanded at my hands? Not wholly--for a time. Facts which I need not
+touch on here enabled my brother to obtain for me a legal separation,
+and when everything was arranged, I found myself guardian of my little
+daughter, and possessor of a small monthly income sufficient for
+respectable starvation. With a great price I had obtained my freedom,
+but--I was free. Home, friends, social position, were the price
+demanded and paid, and, being free, I wondered what to do with my
+freedom. I could have had a home with my brother if I would give up my
+heretical friends and keep quiet, but I had no mind to put my limbs
+into fetters again, and in my youthful inexperience I determined to
+find something to do. The difficulty was the "something," and I spent
+various shillings in agencies, with a quite wonderful unanimity of
+failures. I tried fancy needle-work, offered to "ladies in reduced
+circumstances," and earned 4s. 6d. by some weeks of stitching. I
+experimented with a Birmingham firm, who generously offered every one
+the opportunity of adding to their incomes, and on sending the small
+fee demanded, received a pencil-case, with an explanation that I was
+to sell little articles of that description, going as far as
+cruet-stands, to my friends. I did not feel equal to springing
+pencil-cases and cruet-stands on my acquaintances, so did not enter on
+that line of business, and similar failures in numerous efforts made
+me feel, as so many others have found, that the world-oyster is hard
+to open. However, I was resolute to build a nest for my wee daughter,
+my mother, and myself, and the first thing to do was to save my
+monthly pittance to buy furniture. I found a tiny house in Colby Road,
+Upper Norwood, near the Scotts, who were more than good to me, and
+arranged to take it in the spring, and then accepted a loving
+invitation to Folkestone, where my grandmother and two aunts were
+living, to look for work there. And found it. The vicar wanted a
+governess, and one of my aunts suggested me as a stop-gap, and thither
+I went with my little Mabel, our board and lodging being payment for
+my work. I became head cook, governess, and nurse, glad enough to have
+found "something to do" that enabled me to save my little income. But
+I do not think I will ever take to cooking for a permanence; broiling
+and frying are all right, and making pie-crust is rather pleasant; but
+saucepans and kettles blister your hands. There is a charm in making a
+stew, to the unaccustomed cook, from the excitement of wondering what
+the result will be, and whether any flavour save that of onions will
+survive the competition in the mixture. On the whole, my cooking
+(strictly by cookery book) was a success, but my sweeping was bad, for
+I lacked muscle. This curious episode came to an abrupt end, for one
+of my little pupils fell ill with diphtheria, and I was transformed
+from cook to nurse. Mabel I despatched to her grandmother, who adored
+her with a love condescendingly returned by the little fairy of three,
+and never was there a prettier picture than the red-gold curls nestled
+against the white, the baby-grace in exquisite contrast with the worn
+stateliness of her tender nurse. Scarcely was my little patient out of
+danger when the youngest boy fell ill of scarlet fever; we decided to
+isolate him on the top floor, and I cleared away carpets and curtains,
+hung sheets over the doorways and kept them wet with chloride of lime,
+shut myself up there with the boy, having my meals left on the
+landing; and when all risk was over, proudly handed back my charge,
+the disease touching no one else in the house.
+
+And now the spring of 1874 had come, and in a few weeks my mother and
+I were to set up house together. How we had planned all, and had
+knitted on the new life together we anticipated to the old one we
+remembered! How we had discussed Mabel's education, and the share
+which should fall to each! Day-dreams; day-dreams! never to be
+realised.
+
+My mother went up to town, and in a week or two I received a telegram,
+saying she was dangerously ill, and as fast as express train would
+take me I was beside her. Dying, the doctor said; three days she might
+live--no more. I told her the death-sentence, but she said resolutely,
+"I do not feel that I am going to die just yet," and she was right.
+There was an attack of fearful prostration--the valves of the heart
+had failed--a very wrestling with Death, and then the grim shadow drew
+backwards. I nursed her day and night with a very desperation of
+tenderness, for now Fate had touched the thing dearest to me in life.
+A second horrible crisis came, and for the second time her tenacity
+and my love beat back the death-stroke. She did not wish to die, the
+love of life was strong in her; I would not let her die; between us we
+kept the foe at bay. Then dropsy supervened, and the end loomed slowly
+sure.
+
+It was then, after eighteen months' abstention, that I took the
+Sacrament for the last time. My mother had an intense longing to
+communicate before she died, but absolutely refused to do so unless I
+took it with her. "If it be necessary to salvation," she persisted,
+doggedly, "I will not take it if darling Annie is to be shut out. I
+would rather be lost with her than saved without her." I went to a
+clergyman I knew well, and laid the case before him; as I expected, he
+refused to allow me to communicate. I tried a second, with the same
+result. At last a thought struck me. There was Dean Stanley, my
+mother's favourite, a man known to be of the broadest school within
+the Church of England; suppose I asked him? I did not know him, and I
+felt the request would be an impertinence; but there was just the
+chance that he might consent, and what would I not do to make my
+darling's death-bed easier? I said nothing to any one, but set out to
+the Deanery, Westminster, timidly asked for the Dean, and followed the
+servant upstairs with a sinking heart. I was left for a moment alone
+in the library, and then the Dean came in. I don't think I ever in my
+life felt more intensely uncomfortable than I did in that minute's
+interval as he stood waiting for me to speak, his clear, grave,
+piercing eyes gazing questioningly into mine. Very falteringly--it
+must have been very clumsily--I preferred my request, stating boldly,
+with abrupt honesty, that I was not a Christian, that my mother was
+dying, that she was fretting to take the Sacrament, that she would not
+take it unless I took it with her, that two clergymen had refused to
+allow me to take part in the service, that I had come to him in
+despair, feeling how great was the intrusion, but--she was dying.
+
+His face changed to a great softness. "You were quite right to come to
+me," he answered, in that low, musical voice of his, his keen gaze
+having altered into one no less direct, but marvellously gentle. "Of
+course I will go and see your mother, and I have little doubt that, if
+you will not mind talking over your position with me, we may see our
+way clear to doing as your mother wishes."
+
+I could barely speak my thanks, so much did the kindly sympathy move
+me; the revulsion from the anxiety and fear of rebuff was strong
+enough to be almost pain. But Dean Stanley did more than I asked. He
+suggested that he should call that afternoon, and have a quiet chat
+with my mother, and then come again on the following day to administer
+the Sacrament.
+
+"A stranger's presence is always trying to a sick person," he said,
+with rare delicacy of thought, "and, joined to the excitement of the
+service, it might be too much for your dear mother. If I spend half an
+hour with her to-day, and administer the Sacrament to-morrow, it will,
+I think, be better for her."
+
+So Dean Stanley came that afternoon, all the way to Brompton, and
+remained talking with my mother for about half an hour, and then set
+himself to understand my own position. He finally told me that conduct
+was far more important than theory, and that he regarded all as
+"Christians" who recognised and tried to follow the moral law of
+Christ. On the question of the absolute Deity of Jesus he laid but
+little stress; Jesus was "in a special sense the Son of God," but it
+was folly to quarrel over words with only human meanings when dealing
+with the mystery of the Divine existence, and, above all, it was folly
+to make such words into dividing walls between earnest souls. The one
+important matter was the recognition of "duty to God and man," and all
+who were one in that recognition might rightfully join in an act of
+worship, the essence of which was not acceptance of dogma, but love of
+God and self-sacrifice for man. "The Holy Communion," he concluded, in
+his soft tones, "was never meant to divide from each other hearts that
+are searching after the one true God. It was meant by its founder as a
+symbol of unity, not of strife."
+
+On the following day Dean Stanley celebrated the Holy Communion by the
+bedside of my dear mother, and well was I repaid for the struggle it
+had cost me to ask so great a kindness from a stranger, when I saw the
+comfort that gentle, noble heart had given to her. He soothed away all
+her anxiety about my heresy with tactful wisdom, bidding her have no
+fear of differences of opinion where the heart was set on truth.
+"Remember," she told me he said to her--"remember that our God is the
+God of truth, and that therefore the honest search for truth can never
+be displeasing in His eyes." Once again after that he came, and after
+his visit to my mother we had another long talk. I ventured to ask
+him, the conversation having turned that way, how, with views so broad
+as his, he found it possible to remain in communion with the Church of
+England. "I think," he answered, gently, "that I am of more service to
+true religion by remaining in the Church and striving to widen its
+boundaries from within, than if I left it and worked from without."
+And he went on to explain how, as Dean of Westminster, he was in a
+rarely independent position, and could make the Abbey of a wider
+national service than would otherwise be possible. In all he said on
+this his love for and his pride in the glorious Abbey were manifest,
+and it was easy to see that old historical associations, love of
+music, of painting, of stately architecture, were the bonds that held
+him bound to the "old historic Church of England." His emotions, not
+his intellect, kept him Churchman, and he shrank, with the
+over-sensitiveness of the cultured scholar, from the idea of allowing
+the old traditions to be handled roughly by inartistic hands.
+Naturally of a refined and delicate nature, he had been rendered yet
+more exquisitely sensitive by the training of the college and the
+court; the polished courtesy of his manners was but the natural
+expression of a noble and lofty mind--a mind whose very gentleness
+sometimes veiled its strength. I have often heard Dean Stanley harshly
+spoken of, I have heard his honesty roughly challenged; but never has
+he been attacked in my presence that I have not uttered my protest
+against the injustice done him, and thus striven to repay some small
+fraction of that great debt of gratitude which I shall ever owe his
+memory.
+
+And now the end came swiftly. I had hurriedly furnished a couple of
+rooms in the little house, now ours, that I might take my mother into
+the purer air of Norwood, and permission was given to drive her down
+in an invalid carriage. The following evening she was suddenly taken
+worse; we lifted her into bed, and telegraphed for the doctor. But he
+could do nothing, and she herself felt that the hand of Death had
+gripped her. Selfless to the last, she thought but for my loneliness.
+"I am leaving you alone," she sighed from time to time; and truly I
+felt, with an anguish I did not dare to realise, that when she died I
+should indeed be alone on earth.
+
+For two days longer she was with me, my beloved, and I never left her
+side for five minutes. On May 10th the weakness passed into gentle
+delirium, but even then the faithful eyes followed me about the room,
+until at length they closed for ever, and as the sun sank low in the
+heavens, the breath came slower and slower, till the silence of Death
+came down upon us and she was gone.
+
+Stunned and dazed with the loss, I went mechanically through the next
+few days. I would have none touch my dead save myself and her
+favourite sister, who was with us at the last. Cold and dry-eyed I
+remained, even when they hid her from me with the coffin-lid, even all
+the dreary way to Kensal Green where her husband and her baby-son were
+sleeping, and when we left her alone in the chill earth, damp with the
+rains of spring. I could not believe that our day-dream was dead and
+buried, and the home in ruins ere yet it was fairly built. Truly, my
+"house was left unto me desolate," and the rooms, filled with sunshine
+but unlighted by her presence, seemed to echo from their bare walls,
+"You are all alone."
+
+But my little daughter was there, and her sweet face and dancing feet
+broke the solitude, while her imperious claims for love and tendance
+forced me into attention to the daily needs of life. And life was hard
+in those days of spring and summer, resources small, and work
+difficult to find. In truth, the two months after my mother's death
+were the dreariest my life has known, and they were months of
+tolerably hard struggle. The little house in Colby Road taxed my
+slender resources heavily, and the search for work was not yet
+successful. I do not know how I should have managed but for the help
+ever at hand, of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Scott. During this time I wrote
+for Mr. Scott pamphlets on Inspiration, Atonement, Mediation and
+Salvation, Eternal Torture, Religious Education of Children, Natural
+_v_. Revealed Religion, and the few guineas thus earned were very
+valuable. Their house, too, was always open to me, and this was no
+small help, for often in those days the little money I had was enough
+to buy food for two but not enough to buy it for three, and I would go
+out and study all day at the British Museum, so as to "have my dinner
+in town," the said dinner being conspicuous by its absence. If I was
+away for two evenings running from the hospitable house in the
+terrace, Mrs. Scott would come down to see what had happened, and many
+a time the supper there was of real physical value to me. Well might I
+write, in 1879, when Thomas Scott lay dead: "It was Thomas Scott whose
+house was open to me when my need was sorest, and he never knew, this
+generous, noble heart, how sometimes, when I went in, weary and
+overdone, from a long day's study in the British Museum, with scarce
+food to struggle through the day--he never knew how his genial, 'Well,
+little lady,' in welcoming tone, cheered the then utter loneliness of
+my life. To no living man--save one--do I owe the debt of gratitude
+that I owe to Thomas Scott."
+
+The small amount of jewellery I possessed, and all my superfluous
+clothes, were turned into more necessary articles, and the child, at
+least, never suffered a solitary touch of want. My servant Mary was a
+wonderful contriver, and kept house on the very slenderest funds that
+could be put into a servant's hands, and she also made the little
+place so bright and fresh-looking that it was always a pleasure to go
+into it. Recalling those days of "hard living," I can now look on them
+without regret. More, I am glad to have passed through them, for they
+have taught me how to sympathise with those who are struggling as I
+struggled then, and I never can hear the words fall from pale lips, "I
+am hungry," without remembering how painful a thing hunger is, and
+without curing that pain, at least for the moment.
+
+The presence of the child was good for me, keeping alive my aching,
+lonely heart: she would play contentedly for hours while I was
+working, a word now and again being enough for happiness; when I had
+to go out without her, she would run to the door with me, and the
+"good-bye" would come from down-curved lips; she was ever watching at
+the window for my return, and the sunny face was always the first to
+welcome me home. Many and many a time have I been coming home, weary,
+hungry, and heart-sick, and the glimpse of the little face watching
+has reminded me that I must not carry in a grave face to sadden my
+darling, and the effort to throw off the depression for her sake threw
+it off altogether, and brought back the sunshine. She was the
+sweetness and joy of my life, my curly-headed darling, with her
+red-gold hair and glorious eyes, and passionate, wilful, loving
+nature. The torn, bruised tendrils of my heart gradually twined round
+this little life; she gave something to love and to tend, and thus
+gratified one of the strongest impulses of my nature.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH.
+
+
+During all these months the intellectual life had not stood still; I
+was slowly, cautiously feeling my way onward. And in the intellectual
+and social side of my life I found a delight unknown in the old days
+of bondage. First, there was the joy of freedom, the joy of speaking
+out frankly and honestly each thought. Truly, I had a right to say:
+"With a great price obtained I this freedom," and having paid the
+price, I revelled in the liberty I had bought. Mr. Scott's valuable
+library was at my service; his keen brain challenged my opinions,
+probed my assertions, and suggested phases of thought hitherto
+untouched. I studied harder than ever, and the study now was unchecked
+by any fear of possible consequences. I had nothing left of the old
+faith save belief in "a God," and that began slowly to melt away. The
+Theistic axiom: "If there be a God at all He must be at least as good
+as His highest creature," began with an "if," and to that "if" I
+turned my attention. "Of all impossible things," writes Miss Frances
+Power Cobbe, "the most impossible must surely be that a man should
+dream something of the good and the noble, and that it should prove at
+last that his Creator was less good and less noble than he had
+dreamed." But, I questioned, are we sure that there is a Creator?
+Granted that, if there is, He must be above His highest creature,
+but--is there such a being? "The ground," says the Rev. Charles
+Voysey, "on which our belief in God rests is man. Man, parent of
+Bibles and Churches, inspirer of all good thoughts and good deeds.
+Man, the masterpiece of God's thought on earth. Man, the text-book of
+all spiritual knowledge. Neither miraculous nor infallible, man is
+nevertheless the only trustworthy record of the Divine mind in things
+pertaining to God. Man's reason, conscience, and affections are the
+only true revelation of his Maker." But what if God were only man's
+own image reflected in the mirror of man's mind? What if man were the
+creator, not the revelation of his God?
+
+It was inevitable that such thoughts should arise after the more
+palpably indefensible doctrines of Christianity had been discarded.
+Once encourage the human mind to think, and bounds to the thinking can
+never again be set by authority. Once challenge traditional beliefs,
+and the challenge will ring on every shield which is hanging in the
+intellectual arena. Around me was the atmosphere of conflict, and,
+freed from its long repression, my mind leapt up to share in the
+strife with a joy in the intellectual tumult, the intellectual strain.
+
+I often attended South Place Chapel, where Moncure D. Conway was then
+preaching, and discussion with him did something towards widening my
+views on the deeper religious problems; I re-read Dean Mansel's
+"Bampton Lectures," and they did much towards turning me in the
+direction of Atheism; I re-read Mill's "Examination of Sir William
+Hamilton's Philosophy," and studied carefully Comte's "Philosophie
+Positive." Gradually I recognised the limitations of human intelligence
+and its incapacity for understanding the nature of God, presented as
+infinite and absolute; I had given up the use of prayer as a
+blasphemous absurdity, since an all-wise God could not need my
+suggestions, nor an all-good God require my promptings. But God fades
+out of the daily life of those who never pray; a personal God who is
+not a Providence is a superfluity; when from the heaven does not smile
+a listening Father, it soon becomes an empty space, whence resounds no
+echo of man's cry. I could then reach no loftier conception of the
+Divine than that offered by the orthodox, and that broke hopelessly
+away as I analysed it.
+
+At last I said to Mr. Scott, "Mr. Scott, may I write a tract on the
+nature and existence of God?"
+
+He glanced at me keenly. "Ah, little lady, you are facing, then, that
+problem at last? I thought it must come. Write away."
+
+While this pamphlet was in MS. an event occurred which coloured all my
+succeeding life. I met Charles Bradlaugh. One day in the late spring,
+talking with Mrs. Conway--one of the sweetest and steadiest natures
+whom it has been my lot to meet, and to whom, as to her husband, I owe
+much for kindness generously shown when I was poor and had but few
+friends--she asked me if I had been to the Hall of Science, Old
+Street. I answered, with the stupid, ignorant reflection of other
+people's prejudices so sadly common, "No, I have never been there. Mr.
+Bradlaugh is rather a rough sort of speaker, is he not?"
+
+"He is the finest speaker of Saxon-English that I have ever heard,"
+she answered, "except, perhaps, John Bright, and his power over a
+crowd is something marvellous. Whether you agree with him or not, you
+should hear him."
+
+In the following July I went into the shop of Mr. Edward Truelove,
+256, High Holborn, in search of some Comtist publications, having come
+across his name as a publisher in the course of my study at the
+British Museum. On the counter was a copy of the _National Reformer_,
+and, attracted by the title, I bought it. I read it placidly in the
+omnibus on my way to Victoria Station, and found it excellent, and was
+sent into convulsions of inward merriment when, glancing up, I saw an
+old gentleman gazing at me, with horror speaking from every line of
+his countenance. To see a young woman, respectably dressed in crape,
+reading an Atheistic journal, had evidently upset his peace of mind,
+and he looked so hard at the paper that I was tempted to offer it to
+him, but repressed the mischievous inclination.
+
+This first copy of the paper with which I was to be so closely
+connected bore date July 19, 1874, and contained two long letters from
+a Mr. Arnold of Northampton, attacking Mr. Bradlaugh, and a brief and
+singularly self-restrained answer from the latter. There was also an
+article on the National Secular Society, which made me aware that
+there was an organisation devoted to the propagandism of Free Thought.
+I felt that if such a society existed, I ought to belong to it, and I
+consequently wrote a short note to the editor of the _National
+Reformer_, asking whether it was necessary for a person to profess
+Atheism before being admitted to the Society. The answer appeared in
+the _National Reformer_:--
+
+"S.E.--To be a member of the National Secular Society it is only
+necessary to be able honestly to accept the four principles, as given
+in the _National Reformer_ of June 14th. This any person may do
+without being required to avow himself an Atheist. Candidly, we can
+see no logical resting-place between the entire acceptance of
+authority, as in the Roman Catholic Church, and the most extreme
+Rationalism. If, on again looking to the Principles of the Society,
+you can accept them, we repeat to you our invitation."
+
+I sent my name in as an active member, and find it is recorded in the
+_National Reformer_ of August 9th. Having received an intimation that
+Londoners could receive their certificates at the Hall of Science from
+Mr. Bradlaugh on any Sunday evening, I betook myself thither, and it
+was on August 2, 1874, that I first set foot in a Freethought hall.
+The Hall was crowded to suffocation, and, at the very moment announced
+for the lecture, a roar of cheering burst forth, a tall figure passed
+swiftly up the Hall to the platform, and, with a slight bow in answer
+to the voluminous greeting, Charles Bradlaugh took his seat. I looked
+at him with interest, impressed and surprised. The grave, quiet,
+stern, strong face, the massive head, the keen eyes, the magnificent
+breadth and height of forehead--was this the man I had heard described
+as a blatant agitator, an ignorant demagogue?
+
+He began quietly and simply, tracing out the resemblances between the
+Krishna and the Christ myths, and as he went from point to point his
+voice grew in force and resonance, till it rang round the hall like a
+trumpet. Familiar with the subject, I could test the value of his
+treatment of it, and saw that his knowledge was as sound as his
+language was splendid. Eloquence, fire, sarcasm, pathos, passion, all
+in turn were bent against Christian superstition, till the great
+audience, carried away by the torrent of the orator's force, hung
+silent, breathing soft, as he went on, till the silence that followed
+a magnificent peroration broke the spell, and a hurricane of cheers
+relieved the tension.
+
+He came down the Hall with some certificates in his hand, glanced
+round, and handed me mine with a questioning "Mrs. Besant?" Then he
+said, referring to my question as to a profession of Atheism, that he
+would willingly talk over the subject of Atheism with me if I would
+make an appointment, and offered me a book he had been using in his
+lecture. Long afterwards I asked him how he knew me, whom he had never
+seen, that he came straight to me in such fashion. He laughed and said
+he did not know, but, glancing over the faces, he felt sure that I was
+Annie Besant.
+
+From that first meeting in the Hall of Science dated a friendship that
+lasted unbroken till Death severed the earthly bond, and that to me
+stretches through Death's gateway and links us together still. As
+friends, not as strangers, we met--swift recognition, as it were,
+leaping from eye to eye; and I know now that the instinctive
+friendliness was in very truth an outgrowth of strong friendship in
+other lives, and that on that August day we took up again an ancient
+tie, we did not begin a new one. And so in lives to come we shall meet
+again, and help each other as we helped each other in this. And let me
+here place on record, as I have done before, some word of what I owe
+him for his true friendship; though, indeed, how great is my debt to
+him I can never tell. Some of his wise phrases have ever remained in
+my memory. "You should never say you have an opinion on a subject
+until you have tried to study the strongest things said against the
+view to which you are inclined." "You must not think you know a
+subject until you are acquainted with all that the best minds have
+said about it." "No steady work can be done in public unless the
+worker study at home far more than he talks outside." "Be your own
+harshest judge, listen to your own speech and criticise it; read abuse
+of yourself and see what grains of truth are in it." "Do not waste
+time by reading opinions that are mere echoes of your own; read
+opinions you disagree with, and you will catch aspects of truth you do
+not readily see." Through our long comradeship he was my sternest as
+well as gentlest critic, pointing out to me that in a party like ours,
+where our own education and knowledge were above those whom we led, it
+was very easy to gain indiscriminate praise and unstinted admiration;
+on the other hand, we received from Christians equally indiscriminate
+abuse and hatred. It was, therefore, needful that we should be our own
+harshest judges, and that we should be sure that we knew thoroughly
+every subject that we taught. He saved me from the superficiality that
+my "fatal facility" of speech might so easily have induced; and when I
+began to taste the intoxication of easily won applause, his criticism
+of weak points, his challenge of weak arguments, his trained judgment,
+were of priceless service to me, and what of value there is in my work
+is very largely due to his influence, which at once stimulated and
+restrained.
+
+One very charming characteristic of his was his extreme courtesy in
+private life, especially to women. This outward polish, which sat so
+gracefully on his massive frame and stately presence, was foreign
+rather than English--for the English, as a rule, save such as go to
+Court, are a singularly unpolished people--and it gave his manner a
+peculiar charm. I asked him once where he had learned his gracious
+fashions that were so un-English--he would stand with uplifted hat as
+he asked a question of a maidservant, or handed a woman into a
+carriage--and he answered, with a half-smile, half-scoff, that it was
+only in England he was an outcast from society. In France, in Spain,
+in Italy, he was always welcomed among men and women of the highest
+social rank, and he supposed that he had unconsciously caught the
+foreign tricks of manner. Moreover, he was absolutely indifferent to
+all questions of social position; peer or artisan, it was to him
+exactly the same; he never seemed conscious of the distinctions of
+which men make so much.
+
+Our first conversation, after the meeting at the Hall of Science, took
+place a day or two later in his little study in 29, Turner Street,
+Commercial Road, a wee room overflowing with books, in which he looked
+singularly out of place. Later I learned that he had failed in
+business in consequence of Christian persecution, and, resolute to
+avoid bankruptcy, he had sold everything he possessed, save his books,
+had sent his wife and daughters to live in the country with his
+father-in-law, had taken two tiny rooms in Turner Street, where he
+could live for a mere trifle, and had bent himself to the task of
+paying off the liabilities he had incurred--incurred in consequence of
+his battling for political and religious liberty. I took with me my
+MS. essay "On the Nature and Existence of God," and it served as the
+basis for our conversation; we found there was little difference in
+our views. "You have thought yourself into Atheism without knowing
+it," he said, and all that I changed in the essay was the correction
+of the vulgar error that the Atheist says "there is no God," by the
+insertion of a passage disclaiming this position from an essay pointed
+out to me by Mr. Bradlaugh. And at this stage of my life-story, it is
+necessary to put very clearly the position I took up and held so many
+years as Atheist, because otherwise the further evolution into
+Theosophist will be wholly incomprehensible. It will lead me into
+metaphysics, and to some readers these are dry, but if any one would
+understand the evolution of a Soul he must be willing to face the
+questions which the Soul faces in its growth. And the position of the
+philosophic Atheist is so misunderstood that it is the more necessary
+to put it plainly, and Theosophists, at least, in reading it, will see
+how Theosophy stepped in finally as a further evolution towards
+knowledge, rendering rational, and therefore acceptable, the loftiest
+spirituality that the human mind can as yet conceive.
+
+In order that I may not colour my past thinkings by my present
+thought, I take my statements from pamphlets written when I adopted
+the Atheistic philosophy and while I continued an adherent thereof. No
+charge can then be made that I have softened my old opinions for the
+sake of reconciling them with those now held.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT.
+
+
+The first step which leaves behind the idea of a limited and personal
+God, an extra-cosmic Creator, and leads the student to the point
+whence Atheism and Pantheism diverge, is the recognition that a
+profound unity of substance underlies the infinite diversities of
+natural phenomena, the discernment of the One beneath the Many. This
+was the step I had taken ere my first meeting with Charles Bradlaugh,
+and I had written:--
+
+"It is manifest to all who will take the trouble to think steadily,
+that there can be only one eternal and underived substance, and that
+matter and spirit must, therefore, only be varying manifestations of
+this one substance. The distinction made between matter and spirit is,
+then, simply made for the sake of convenience and clearness, just as
+we may distinguish perception from judgment, both of which, however,
+are alike processes of thought. Matter is, in its constituent elements,
+the same as spirit; existence is _one_, however manifold in its
+phenomena; life is one, however multiform in its evolution. As the
+heat of the coal differs from the coal itself, so do memory,
+perception, judgment, emotion, and will differ from the brain which is
+the instrument of thought. But nevertheless they are all equally
+products of the one sole substance, varying only in their
+conditions.... I find myself, then, compelled to believe that one only
+substance exists in all around me; that the universe is eternal, or at
+least eternal so far as our faculties are concerned, since we cannot,
+as some one has quaintly put it, 'get to the outside of everywhere';
+that a Deity cannot be conceived of as apart from the universe; that
+the Worker and the Work are inextricably interwoven, and in some sense
+eternally and indissolubly combined. Having got so far, we will
+proceed to examine into the possibility of proving the existence of
+that one essence popularly called by the name of _God_, under the
+conditions strictly defined by the orthodox. Having demonstrated, as I
+hope to do, that the orthodox idea of God is unreasonable and absurd,
+we will endeavour to ascertain whether _any_ idea of God, worthy to be
+called an idea, is attainable in the present state of our faculties."
+"The Deity must of necessity be that one and only substance out of
+which all things are evolved, under the uncreated conditions and
+eternal laws of the universe; He must be, as Theodore Parker somewhat
+oddly puts it, 'the materiality of matter as well as the spirituality
+of spirit'--_i.e._, these must both be products of this one substance;
+a truth which is readily accepted as soon as spirit and matter are
+seen to be but different modes of one essence. Thus we identify
+substance with the all-comprehending and vivifying force of nature,
+and in so doing we simply reduce to a physical impossibility the
+existence of the Being described by the orthodox as a God possessing
+the attributes of personality. The Deity becomes identified with
+nature, co-extensive with the universe, but the _God_ of the orthodox
+no longer exists; we may change the signification of God, and use the
+word to express a different idea, but we can no longer mean by it a
+Personal Being in the orthodox sense, possessing an individuality
+which divides Him from the rest of the universe."[3]
+
+Proceeding to search whether _any_ idea of God was attainable, I came
+to the conclusion that evidence of the existence of a conscious Power
+was lacking, and that the ordinary proofs offered were inconclusive;
+that we could grasp phenomena and no more. "There appears, also, to
+be a possibility of a mind in nature, though we have seen that
+intelligence is, strictly speaking, impossible. There cannot be
+perception, memory, comparison, or judgment, but may there not be a
+perfect mind, unchanging, calm, and still? Our faculties fail us when
+we try to estimate the Deity, and we are betrayed into contradictions
+and absurdities; but does it therefore follow that He _is_ not? It
+seems to me that to deny His existence is to overstep the boundaries
+of our thought-power almost as much as to try and define it. We
+pretend to know the Unknown if we declare Him to be the Unknowable.
+Unknowable to us at present, yes! Unknowable for ever, in other
+possible stages of existence? We have reached a region into which we
+cannot penetrate; here all human faculties fail us; we bow our heads
+on 'the threshold of the unknown.'
+
+  "'And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see,
+  But if we could see and hear, this vision--were it not He?'
+
+Thus sings Alfred Tennyson, the poet of metaphysics: '_if_ we could
+see and hear.' Alas! it is always an 'if!'[4]
+
+This refusal to believe without evidence, and the declaration that
+anything "behind phenomena" is unknowable to man as at present
+constituted--these are the two chief planks of the Atheistic platform,
+as Atheism was held by Charles Bradlaugh and myself. In 1876 this
+position was clearly reaffirmed. "It is necessary to put briefly the
+Atheistic position, for no position is more continuously and more
+persistently misrepresented. Atheism is _without_ God. It does not
+assert _no_ God. 'The Atheist does not say "There is no God," but he
+says, "I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the
+word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation.
+I do not deny God, because I cannot deny that of which I have no
+conception, and the conception of which, by its affirmer, is so
+imperfect that he is unable to define it to me."' (Charles Bradlaugh,
+"Freethinker's Text-book," p. 118.) The Atheist neither affirms nor
+denies the possibility of phenomena differing from those recognised by
+human experience.... As his knowledge of the universe is extremely
+limited and very imperfect, the Atheist declines either to deny or to
+affirm anything with regard to modes of existence of which he knows
+nothing. Further, he refuses to believe anything concerning that of
+which he knows nothing, and affirms that that which can never be the
+subject of knowledge ought never to be the object of belief. While the
+Atheist, then, neither affirms nor denies the unknown, he _does_ deny
+all which conflicts with the knowledge to which he has already
+attained. For example, he _knows_ that one is one, and that three
+times one are three; he _denies_ that three times one are, or can be,
+one. The position of the Atheist is a clear and a reasonable one: I
+know nothing about 'God,' and therefore I do not believe in Him or in
+it; what you tell me about your God is self-contradictory, and is
+therefore incredible. I do not deny 'God,' which is an unknown tongue
+to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without
+God."[5] Up to 1887 I find myself writing on the same lines: "No man
+can rationally affirm 'There is no God,' until the word 'God' has for
+him a definite meaning, and until everything that exists is known to
+him, and known with what Leibnitz calls 'perfect knowledge.' The
+Atheist's denial of the Gods begins only when these Gods are defined
+or described. Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not
+palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been
+described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human
+thought--Nor is anything gained by the assertors of Deity when they
+allege that He is incomprehensible. If 'God' exists and is
+incomprehensible, His incomprehensibility is an admirable reason for
+being silent about Him, but can never justify the affirmation of
+self-contradictory propositions, and the threatening of people with
+damnation if they do not accept them."[6] "The belief of the Atheist
+stops where his evidence stops. He believes in the existence of the
+universe, judging the accessible proof thereof to be adequate, and he
+finds in this universe sufficient cause for the happening of all
+phenomena. He finds no intellectual satisfaction in placing a gigantic
+conundrum behind the universe, which only adds its own
+unintelligibility to the already sufficiently difficult problem of
+existence. Our lungs are not fitted to breathe beyond the atmosphere
+which surrounds our globe, and our faculties cannot breathe outside
+the atmosphere of the phenomenal."[7] And I summed up this essay with
+the words: "I do not believe in God. My mind finds no grounds on which
+to build up a reasonable faith. My heart revolts against the spectre
+of an Almighty Indifference to the pain of sentient beings. My
+conscience rebels against the injustice, the cruelty, the inequality,
+which surround me on every side. But I believe in Man. In man's
+redeeming power; in man's remoulding energy; in man's approaching
+triumph, through knowledge, love, and work."[8]
+
+These views of existence naturally colour all views of life and of the
+existence of the Soul. And here steps in the profound difference
+between Atheism and Pantheism; both posit an Existence at present
+inscrutable by human faculties, of which all phenomena are modes; but
+to the Atheist that Existence manifests as Force-Matter, unconscious,
+unintelligent, while to the Pantheist it manifests as Life-Matter,
+conscious, intelligent. To the one, life and consciousness are
+attributes, properties, dependent upon arrangements of matter; to the
+other they are fundamental, essential, and only limited in their
+manifestation by arrangements of matter. Despite the attraction held
+for me in Spinoza's luminous arguments, the over-mastering sway which
+Science was beginning to exercise over me drove me to seek for the
+explanation of all problems of life and mind at the hands of the
+biologist and the chemist. They had done so much, explained so much,
+could they not explain all? Surely, I thought, the one safe ground is
+that of experiment, and the remembered agony of doubt made me very
+slow to believe where I could not prove. So I was fain to regard life
+as an attribute, and this again strengthened the Atheistic position.
+"Scientifically regarded, life is not an entity but a property; it is
+not a mode of existence, but a characteristic of certain modes. Life
+is the result of an arrangement of matter, and when rearrangement
+occurs the former result can no longer be present; we call the result
+of the changed arrangement death. Life and death are two convenient
+words for expressing the general outcome of two arrangements of
+matter, one of which is always found to precede the other."[9] And
+then, having resorted to chemistry for one illustration, I took
+another from one of those striking and easily grasped analogies,
+facility for seeing and presenting which has ever been one of the
+secrets of my success as a propagandist. Like pictures, they impress
+the mind of the hearer with a vivid sense of reality. "Every one knows
+the exquisite iridiscence of mother-of-pearl, the tender, delicate
+hues which melt into each other, glowing with soft radiance. How
+different is the dull, dead surface of a piece of wax. Yet take that
+dull, black wax and mould it so closely to the surface of the
+mother-of-pearl that it shall take every delicate marking of the
+shell, and when you raise it the seven-hued glory shall smile at you
+from the erstwhile colourless surface. For, though it be to the naked
+eye imperceptible, all the surface of the mother-of-pearl is in
+delicate ridges and furrows, like the surface of a newly-ploughed
+field; and when the waves of light come dashing up against the ridged
+surface, they are broken like the waves on a shingly shore, and are
+flung backwards, so that they cross each other and the oncoming waves;
+and, as every ray of white light is made up of waves of seven colours,
+and these waves differ in length each from the others, the fairy
+ridges fling them backward separately, and each ray reaches the eye by
+itself; so that the colour of the mother-of-pearl is really the spray
+of the light waves, and comes from arrangement of matter once again.
+Give the dull, black wax the same ridges and furrows, and its glory
+shall differ in nothing from that of the shell. To apply our
+illustration: as the colour belongs to one arrangement of matter and
+the dead surface to another, so life belongs to some arrangements of
+matter and is their resultant, while the resultant of other
+arrangements is death."[10]
+
+The same line of reasoning naturally was applied to the existence of
+"spirit" in man, and it was argued that mental activity, the domain of
+the "spirit," was dependent on bodily organisation. "When the babe is
+born it shows no sign of mind. For a brief space hunger and repletion,
+cold and warmth are its only sensations. Slowly the specialised senses
+begin to function; still more slowly muscular movements, at first
+aimless and reflex, become co-ordinated and consciously directed.
+There is no sign here of an intelligent spirit controlling a
+mechanism; there is every sign of a learning and developing
+intelligence, developing _pari passu_ with the organism of which it is
+a function. As the body grows, the mind grows with it, and the
+childish mind of the child develops into the hasty, quickly-judging,
+half-informed, unbalanced youthful mind of the youth; with maturity of
+years comes maturity of mind, and body and mind are vigorous and in
+their prime. As old age comes on and the bodily functions decay, the
+mind decays also, until age passes into senility, and body and mind
+sink into second childhood. Has the immortal spirit decayed with the
+organisation, or is it dwelling in sorrow, bound in its 'house of
+clay'? If this be so, the 'spirit' must be unconscious, or else
+separate from the very individual whose essence it is supposed to be,
+for the old man does not suffer when his mind is senile, but is
+contented as a little child. And not only is this constant,
+simultaneous growth and decay of body and mind to be observed, but we
+know that mental functions are disordered and suspended by various
+physical conditions. Alcohol, many drugs, fever, disorder the mind; a
+blow on the cranium suspends its functions, and the 'spirit' returns
+with the surgeon's trepanning. Does the 'spirit' take part in dreams?
+Is it absent from the idiot, from the lunatic? Is it guilty of
+manslaughter when the madman murders, or does it helplessly watch its
+own instrument performing actions at which it shudders? If it can only
+work here through an organism, is its nature changed in its
+independent life, severed from all with which it was identified? Can
+it, in its 'disembodied state,' have anything in common with its
+past?"[11]
+
+It will be seen that my unbelief in the existence of the Soul or
+Spirit was a matter of cold, calm reasoning. As I wrote in 1885: "For
+many of us evidence must precede belief. I would gladly believe in a
+happy immortality for all, as I would gladly believe that all misery
+and crime and poverty will disappear in 1885--_if I could_. But I am
+unable to believe an improbable proposition unless convincing evidence
+is brought in support of it. Immortality is most improbable; no
+evidence is brought forward in its favour. I cannot believe only
+because I wish."[12] Such was the philosophy by which I lived from
+1874 to 1886, when first some researches that will be dealt with in
+their proper place, and which led me ultimately to the evidence I had
+before vainly demanded, began to shake my confidence in its adequacy.
+Amid outer storm and turmoil and conflict, I found it satisfy my
+intellect, while lofty ideals of morality fed my emotions. I called
+myself Atheist, and rightly so, for I was without God, and my horizon
+was bounded by life on earth; I gloried in the name then, as it is
+dear to my heart now, for all the associations with which it is
+connected. "Atheist is one of the grandest titles a man can wear; it
+is the Order of Merit of the world's heroes. Most great discoverers,
+most deep-thinking philosophers, most earnest reformers, most toiling
+pioneers of progress, have in their turn had flung at them the name of
+Atheist. It was howled over the grave of Copernicus; it was clamoured
+round the death-pile of Bruno; it was yelled at Vanini, at Spinoza, at
+Priestley, at Voltaire, at Paine; it has become the laurel-bay of the
+hero, the halo of the martyr; in the world's history it has meant the
+pioneer of progress, and where the cry of 'Atheist' is raised there
+may we be sure that another step is being taken towards the redemption
+of humanity. The saviours of the world are too often howled at as
+Atheists, and then worshipped as Deities. The Atheists are the
+vanguard of the army of Freethought, on whom falls the brunt of the
+battle, and are shivered the hardest of the blows; their feet trample
+down the thorns that others may tread unwounded; their bodies fill up
+the ditch that, by the bridge thus made, others may pass to victory.
+Honour to the pioneers of progress, honour to the vanguard of
+Liberty's army, honour to those who to improve earth have forgotten
+heaven, and who in their zeal for man have forgotten God."[13]
+
+This poor sketch of the conception of the universe, to which I had
+conquered my way at the cost of so much pain, and which was the inner
+centre round which my life revolved for twelve years, may perhaps show
+that the Atheistic Philosophy is misjudged sorely when it is scouted
+as vile or condemned as intellectually degraded. It has outgrown
+anthropomorphic deities, and it leaves us face to face with Nature,
+open to all her purifying, strengthening inspirations. "There is only
+one kind of prayer," it says, "which is reasonable, and that is the
+deep, silent adoration of the greatness and beauty and order around
+us, as revealed in the realms of non-rational life and in Humanity; as
+we bow our heads before the laws of the universe, and mould our lives
+into obedience to their voice, we find a strong, calm peace steal over
+our hearts, a perfect trust in the ultimate triumph of the right, a
+quiet determination to 'make our lives sublime.' Before our own high
+ideals, before those lives which show us 'how high the tides of Divine
+life have risen in the human world,' we stand with hushed voice and
+veiled face; from them we draw strength to emulate, and even dare
+struggle to excel. The contemplation of the ideal is true prayer; it
+inspires, it strengthens, it ennobles. The other part of prayer is
+work; from contemplation to labour, from the forest to the street.
+Study nature's laws, conform to them, work in harmony with them, and
+work becomes a prayer and a thanksgiving, an adoration of the
+universal wisdom, and a true obedience to the universal law."[14]
+
+To a woman of my temperament, filled with passionate desire for the
+bettering of the world, the elevation of humanity, a lofty system of
+ethics was of even more importance than a logical, intellectual
+conception of the universe; and the total loss of all faith in a
+righteous God only made me more strenuously assertive of the binding
+nature of duty and the overwhelming importance of conduct. In 1874
+this conviction found voice in a pamphlet on the "True Basis of
+Morality," and in all the years of my propaganda on the platform of
+the National Secular Society no subject was more frequently dealt with
+in my lectures than that of human ethical growth and the duty of man
+to man. No thought was more constantly in my mind than that of the
+importance of morals, and it was voiced at the very outset of my
+public career. Speaking of the danger lest "in these stirring times of
+inquiry," old sanctions of right conduct should be cast aside ere new
+ones were firmly established, I wrote: "It therefore becomes the duty
+of every one who fights in the ranks of Freethought, and who ventures
+to attack the dogmas of the Churches, and to strike down the
+superstitions which enslave men's intellect, to beware how he uproots
+sanctions of morality which he is too weak to replace, or how, before
+he is prepared with better ones, he removes the barriers which do yet,
+however poorly, to some extent check vice and repress crime.... That
+which touches morality touches the heart of society; a high and pure
+morality is the life-blood of humanity; mistakes in belief are
+inevitable, and are of little moment; mistakes in life destroy
+happiness, and their destructive consequences spread far and wide. It
+is, then, a very important question whether we, who are endeavouring
+to take away from the world the authority on which has hitherto been
+based all its morality, can offer a new and firm ground whereupon may
+safely be built up the fair edifice of a noble life."
+
+I then proceeded to analyse revelation and intuition as a basis for
+morals, and, discarding both, I asserted: "The true basis of morality
+is utility; that is, the adaptation of our actions to the promotion of
+the general welfare and happiness; the endeavour so to rule our lives
+that we may serve and bless mankind." And I argued for this basis,
+showing that the effort after virtue was implied in the search for
+happiness: "Virtue is an indispensable part of all true and solid
+happiness.... But it is, after all, only reasonable that happiness
+should be the ultimate test of right and wrong, if we live, as we do,
+in a realm of law. Obedience to law must necessarily result in
+harmony, and disobedience in discord. But if obedience to law result
+in harmony it must also result in happiness--all through nature
+obedience to law results in happiness, and through obedience each
+living thing fulfils the perfection of its being, and in that
+perfection finds its true happiness." It seemed to me most important
+to remove morality from the controversies about religion, and to give
+it a basis of its own: "As, then, the grave subject of the existence
+of Deity is a matter of dispute, it is evidently of deep importance to
+society that morality should not be dragged into this battlefield, to
+stand or totter with the various theories of the Divine nature which
+human thought creates and destroys. If we can found morality on a
+basis apart from theology, we shall do humanity a service which can
+scarcely be overestimated." A study of the facts of nature, of the
+consequences of man in society, seemed sufficient for such a basis.
+"Our faculties do not suffice to tell us about God; they do suffice to
+study phenomena, and to deduce laws from correlated facts. Surely,
+then, we should do wisely to concentrate our strength and our energies
+on the discovery of the attainable, instead of on the search after the
+unknowable. If we are told that morality consists in obedience to the
+supposed will of a supposed perfectly moral being, because in so doing
+we please God, then we are at once placed in a region where our
+faculties are useless to us, and where our judgment is at fault. But
+if we are told that we are to lead noble lives, because nobility of
+life is desirable for itself alone, because in so doing we are acting
+in harmony with the laws of Nature, because in so doing we spread
+happiness around our pathway and gladden our fellow-men--then, indeed,
+motives are appealed to which spring forward to meet the call, and
+chords are struck in our hearts which respond in music to the touch."
+It was to the establishment of this secure basis that I bent my
+energies, this that was to me of supreme moment. "Amid the fervid
+movement of society, with its wild theories and crude social reforms,
+with its righteous fury against oppression and its unconsidered
+notions of wider freedom and gladder life, it is of vital importance
+that morality should stand on a foundation unshakable; that so through
+all political and religious revolutions human life may grow purer and
+nobler, may rise upwards into settled freedom, and not sink downwards
+into anarchy. Only utility can afford us a sure basis, the
+reasonableness of which will be accepted alike by thoughtful student
+and hard-headed artisan. Utility appeals to all alike, and sets in
+action motives which are found equally in every human heart. Well
+shall it be for humanity that creeds and dogmas pass away, that
+superstition vanishes, and the clear light of freedom and science
+dawns on a regenerated earth--but well only if men draw tighter and
+closer the links of trustworthiness, of honour, and of truth. Equality
+before the law is necessary and just; liberty is the birthright of
+every man and woman; free individual development will elevate and
+glorify the race. But little worth these priceless jewels, little
+worth liberty and equality with all their promise for mankind, little
+worth even wider happiness, if that happiness be selfish, if true
+fraternity, true brotherhood, do not knit man to man, and heart to
+heart, in loyal service to the common need, and generous
+self-sacrifice to the common good."[15]
+
+To the forwarding of this moral growth of man, two things seemed to me
+necessary--an Ideal which should stir the emotions and impel to
+action, and a clear understanding of the sources of evil and of the
+methods by which they might be drained. Into the drawing of the first
+I threw all the passion of my nature, striving to paint the Ideal in
+colours which should enthral and fascinate, so that love and desire to
+realise might stir man to effort. If "morality touched by emotion" be
+religion, then truly was I the most religious of Atheists, finding in
+this dwelling on and glorifying of the Ideal full satisfaction for the
+loftiest emotions. To meet the fascination exercised over men's hearts
+by the Man of Sorrows, I raised the image of man triumphant, man
+perfected. "Rightly is the ideal Christian type of humanity a Man of
+Sorrows. Jesus, with worn and wasted body; with sad, thin lips, curved
+into a mournful droop of penitence for human sin; with weary eyes
+gazing up to heaven because despairing of earth; bowed down and aged
+with grief and pain, broken-hearted with long anguish, broken-spirited
+with unresisted ill-usage--such is the ideal man of the Christian
+creed. Beautiful with a certain pathetic beauty, telling of the long
+travail of earth, eloquent of the sufferings of humanity, but not the
+model type to which men should conform their lives, if they would make
+humanity glorious. And, therefore, in radiant contrast with this,
+stands out in the sunshine and under the blue summer sky, far from
+graveyards and torture of death agony, the fair ideal Humanity of the
+Atheist. In form strong and fair, perfect in physical development as
+the Hercules of Grecian art, radiant with love, glorious in
+self-reliant power; with lips bent firm to resist oppression, and
+melting into soft curves of passion and of pity; with deep, far-seeing
+eyes, gazing piercingly into the secrets of the unknown, and resting
+lovingly on the beauties around him; with hands strong to work in the
+present; with heart full of hope which the future shall realise;
+making earth glad with his labour and beautiful with his skill--this,
+this is the Ideal Man, enshrined in the Atheist's heart. The ideal
+humanity of the Christian is the humanity of the slave, poor, meek,
+broken-spirited, humble, submissive to authority, however oppressive
+and unjust; the ideal humanity of the Atheist is the humanity of the
+free man who knows no lord, who brooks no tyranny, who relies on his
+own strength, who makes his brother's quarrel his, proud,
+true-hearted, loyal, brave."[16]
+
+A one-sided view? Yes. But a very natural outcome of a sunny nature,
+for years held down by unhappiness and the harshness of an outgrown
+creed. It was the rebound of such a nature suddenly set free,
+rejoicing in its liberty and self-conscious strength, and it carried
+with it a great power of rousing the sympathetic enthusiasm of men and
+women, deeply conscious of their own restrictions and their own
+longings. It was the cry of the freed soul that had found articulate
+expression, and the many inarticulate and prisoned souls answered to
+it tumultously, with fluttering of caged wings. With hot insistence I
+battled for the inspiration to be drawn from the beauty and grandeur
+of which human life was capable. "Will any one exclaim, 'You are
+taking all beauty out of human life, all hope, all warmth, all
+inspiration; you give us cold duty for filial obedience, and
+inexorable law in the place of God'? All beauty from life? Is there,
+then, no beauty in the idea of forming part of the great life of the
+universe, no beauty in conscious harmony with Nature, no beauty in
+faithful service, no beauty in ideals of every virtue? 'All hope'?
+Why, I give you more than hope, I give you certainty; if I bid you
+labour for this world, it is with the knowledge that this world will
+repay you a, thousand-fold, because society will grow purer, freedom
+more settled, law more honoured, life more full and glad. What is your
+heaven? A heaven in the clouds! I point to a heaven attainable on
+earth. 'All warmth'? What! you serve warmly a God unknown and
+invisible, in a sense the projected shadow of your own imaginings, and
+can only serve coldly your brother whom you see at your side? There is
+no warmth in brightening the lot of the sad, in reforming abuses, in
+establishing equal justice for rich and poor? You find warmth in the
+church, but none in the home? Warmth in imagining the cloud glories of
+heaven, but none in creating substantial glories on earth?' All
+inspiration'? If you want inspiration to feeling, to sentiment,
+perhaps you had better keep to your Bible and your creeds; if you want
+inspiration to work, go and walk through the East of London, or the
+back streets of Manchester. You are inspired to tenderness as you gaze
+at the wounds of Jesus, dead in Judaea long ago, and find no
+inspiration in the wounds of men and women, dying in the England of
+to-day? You 'have tears to shed for Him,' but none for the sufferer at
+your doors? His passion arouses your sympathies, but you see no pathos
+in the passion of the poor? Duty is colder than 'filial obedience'?
+What do you mean by filial obedience? Obedience to your ideal of
+goodness and love--is it not so? Then how is duty cold? I offer you
+ideals for your homage: here is Truth for your Mistress, to whose
+exaltation you shall devote your intellect; here is Freedom for your
+General, for whose triumph you shall fight; here is Love for your
+Inspirer, who shall influence your every thought; here is Man for your
+Master--not in heaven, but on earth--to whose service you shall
+consecrate every faculty of your being. 'Inexorable law in the place
+of God'? Yes; a stern certainty that you shall not waste your life,
+yet gather a rich reward at the close; that you shall not sow misery,
+yet reap gladness; that you shall not be selfish, yet be crowned with
+love; nor shall you sin, yet find safety in repentance. True, our
+creed _is_ a stern one, stern with the beautiful sternness of Nature.
+But if we be in the right, look to yourselves; laws do not check their
+action for your ignorance; fire will not cease to scorch, because you
+'did not know.'"[17]
+
+With equal vigour did I maintain that "virtue was its own reward," and
+that payment on the other side of the grave was unnecessary as an
+incentive to right living. "What shall we say to Miss Cobbe's
+contention that duty will 'grow grey and cold' without God and
+immortality? Yes, for those with whom duty is a matter of selfish
+calculation, and who are virtuous only because they look for a 'golden
+crown' in payment on the other side the grave. Those of us who find
+joy in right-doing, who work because work is useful to our fellows,
+who live well because in such living we pay our contribution to the
+world's wealth, leaving earth richer than we found it--we need no
+paltry payment after death for our life's labour, for in that labour
+is its own 'exceeding great reward.'"[18] But did any one yearn for
+immortality, that "not all of me shall die"? "Is it true that Atheism
+has no immortality? What is true immortality? Is Beethoven's true
+immortality in his continued personal consciousness, or in his
+glorious music deathless while the world endures? Is Shelley's true
+life in his existence in some far-off heaven, or in the pulsing
+liberty his lyrics send through men's hearts, when they respond to the
+strains of his lyre? Music does not die, though one instrument be
+broken; thought does not die, though one brain be shivered; love does
+not die, though one heart's strings be rent; and no great thinker dies
+so long as his thought re-echoes through the ages, its melody the
+fuller-toned the more human brains send its music on. Not only to the
+hero and the sage is this immortality given; it belongs to each
+according to the measure of his deeds; world-wide life for world-wide
+service; straitened life for straitened work; each reaps as he sows,
+and the harvest is gathered by each in his rightful order."[19]
+
+This longing to leave behind a name that will live among men by right
+of service done them, this yearning for human love and approval that
+springs naturally from the practical and intense realisation of human
+brotherhood--these will be found as strong motives in the breasts of
+the most earnest men and women who have in our generation identified
+themselves with the Freethought cause. They shine through the written
+and spoken words of Charles Bradlaugh all through his life, and every
+friend of his knows how often he has expressed the longing that "when
+the grass grows green over my grave, men may love me a little for the
+work I tried to do."
+
+Needless to say that, in the many controversies in which I took part,
+it was often urged against me that such motives were insufficient,
+that they appealed only to natures already ethically developed, and
+left the average man, and, above all, the man below the average, with
+no sufficiently constraining motive for right conduct. I resolutely
+held to my faith in human nature, and the inherent response of the
+human heart when appealed to from the highest grounds; strange--I
+often think now--this instinctive certainty I had of man's innate
+grandeur, that governed all my thought, inconsistent as that certainty
+was with my belief in his purely animal ancestry. Pressed too hard, I
+would take refuge in a passionate disdain for all who did not hear the
+thrilling voice of Virtue and love her for her own sweet sake. "I have
+myself heard the question asked: 'Why should I seek for truth, and why
+should I lead a good life, if there be no immortality in which to reap
+a reward?' To this question the Freethinker has one clear and short
+answer: 'There is no reason why you should seek Truth, if to you the
+search has no attracting power. There is no reason why you should lead
+a noble life, if you find your happiness in leading a poor and a base
+one.' Friends, no one can enjoy a happiness which is too high for his
+capabilities; a book may be of intensest interest, but a dog will very
+much prefer being given a bone. To him whose highest interest is
+centred in his own miserable self, to him who cares only to gain his
+own ends, to him who seeks only his own individual comfort, to that
+man Freethought can have no attraction. Such a man may indeed be made
+religious by a bribe of heaven; he may be led to seek for truth,
+because he hopes to gain his reward hereafter by the search; but Truth
+disdains the service of the self-seeker; she cannot be grasped by a
+hand that itches for reward. If Truth is not loved for her own pure
+sake, if to lead a noble life, if to make men happier, if to spread
+brightness around us, if to leave the world better than we found
+it--if these aims have no attraction for us, if these thoughts do not
+inspire us, then we are not worthy to be Secularists, we have no right
+to the proud title of Freethinkers. If you want to be paid for your
+good lives by living for ever in a lazy and useless fashion in an idle
+heaven; if you want to be bribed into nobility of life; if, like silly
+children, you learn your lesson not to gain knowledge but to win
+sugar-plums, then you had better go back to your creeds and your
+churches; they are all you are fit for; you are not worthy to be free.
+But we--who, having caught a glimpse of the beauty of Truth, deem the
+possession of her worth more than all the world beside; who have made
+up our minds to do our work ungrudgingly, asking for no reward beyond
+the results which spring up from our labour--we will spread the Gospel
+of Freethought among men, until the sad minor melodies of Christianity
+have sobbed out their last mournful notes on the dying evening breeze,
+and on the fresh morning winds shall ring out the chorus of hope and
+joyfulness, from the glad lips of men whom the Truth has at last set
+free."[20]
+
+The intellectual comprehension of the sources of evil and the method
+of its extinction was the second great plank in my ethical platform.
+The study of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, of Huxley, BĂ¼chner and
+Haeckel, had not only convinced me of the truth of evolution, but,
+with help from W.H. Clifford, Lubbock, Buckle, Lecky, and many
+another, had led me to see in the evolution of the social instinct the
+explanation of the growth of conscience and of the strengthening of
+man's mental and moral nature. If man by study of the conditions
+surrounding him and by the application of intelligence to the subdual
+of external nature, had already accomplished so much, why should not
+further persistence along the same road lead to his complete
+emancipation? All the evil, anti-social side of his nature was an
+inheritance from his brute ancestry, and could be gradually
+eradicated; he could not only "let the ape and tiger die," but he
+could kill them out." It may be frankly acknowledged that man inherits
+from his brute progenitors various bestial tendencies which are in
+course of elimination. The wild-beast desire to fight is one of these,
+and this has been encouraged, not checked, by religion.... Another
+bestial tendency is the lust of the male for the female apart from
+love, duty, and loyalty; this again has been encouraged by religion,
+as witness the polygamy and concubinage of the Hebrews--as in Abraham,
+David, and Solomon, not to mention the precepts of the Mosaic
+laws--the bands of male and female prostitutes in connection with
+Pagan temples, and the curious outbursts of sexual passion in
+connection with religious revivals and missions. Another bestial
+tendency is greed, the strongest grabbing all he can and trampling
+down the weak, in the mad struggle for wealth; how and when has
+religion modified this tendency, sanctified as it is in our present
+civilisation? All these bestial tendencies will be eradicated only by
+the recognition of human duty, of the social bond. Religion has not
+eradicated them, but science, by tracing them to their source in our
+brute ancestry, has explained them and has shown them in their true
+light. As each recognises that the anti-social tendencies are the
+bestial tendencies in man, and that man in evolving further must
+evolve out of these, each also feels it part of his personal duty to
+curb these in himself, and so to rise further from the brute. This
+rational 'co-operation with Nature' distinguishes the scientific from
+the religious person, and this constraining sense of obligation is
+becoming stronger and stronger in all those who, in losing faith in
+God, have gained hope for man."[21]
+
+For this rational setting of oneself on the side of the forces working
+for evolution implied active co-operation by personal purity and
+nobility." To the Atheist it seems that the knowledge that the
+perfecting of the race is only possible by the improvement of the
+individual, supplies the most constraining motive which can be
+imagined for efforts after personal perfection. The Theist may desire
+personal perfection, but his desire is self-centred; each righteous
+individual is righteous, as it were, alone, and his righteousness does
+not benefit his fellows save as it may make him helpful and loving in
+his dealings with them. The Atheist desires personal perfection not
+only for his joy in it as beautiful in itself, but because science has
+taught him the unity of the race, and he knows that each fresh
+conquest of his over the baser parts of his nature, and each
+strengthening of the higher, is a gain for all, and not for himself
+alone."[22]
+
+Besides all this, the struggle against evil, regarded as transitory
+and as a necessary concomitant of evolution, loses its bitterness. "In
+dealing with evil, Atheism is full of hope instead of despair. To the
+Christian, evil is as everlasting as good; it exists by the permission
+of God, and, therefore, by the will of God. Our nature is corrupt,
+inclined to evil; the devil is ever near us, working all sin and all
+misery. What hope has the Christian face to face with a world's
+wickedness? what answer to the question, Whence comes sin? To the
+Atheist the terrible problem has in it no figure of despair. Evil
+comes from ignorance, we say; ignorance of physical and of moral
+facts. Primarily, from ignorance of physical order; parents who dwell
+in filthy, unventilated, unweathertight houses, who live on
+insufficient, innutritious, unwholesome food, will necessarily be
+unhealthy, will lack vitality, will probably have disease lurking in
+their veins; such parents will bring into the world ill-nurtured
+children, in whom the brain will generally be the least developed part
+of the body; such children, by their very formation, will incline to
+the animal rather than to the human, and by leading an animal, or
+natural, life will be deficient in those qualities which are necessary
+in social life. Their surroundings as they grow up, the home, the
+food, the associates, all are bad. They are trained into vice,
+educated into criminality; so surely as from the sown corn rises the
+wheat-ear, so from the sowing of misery, filth, and starvation shall
+arise crime. And the root of all is poverty and ignorance. Educate the
+children, and give them fair wage for fair work in their maturity, and
+crime will gradually diminish and ultimately disappear. Man is
+God-made, says Theism; man is circumstance-made, says Atheism. Man is
+the resultant of what his parents were, of what his surroundings have
+been and are, and of what they have made him; himself the result of
+the past he modifies the actual, and so the action and reaction go on,
+he himself the effect of what is past, and one of the causes of what
+is to come. Make the circumstances good and the results will be good,
+for healthy bodies and healthy brains may be built up, and from a
+State composed of such the disease of crime will have disappeared.
+Thus is our work full of hope; no terrible will of God have we to
+struggle against; no despairful future to look forward to, of a world
+growing more and more evil, until it is, at last, to burned up; but a
+glad, fair future of an ever-rising race, where more equal laws, more
+general education, more just division, shall eradicate pauperism,
+destroy ignorance, nourish independence, a future to be made the
+grander by our struggles, a future to be made the nearer by our
+toil."[23]
+
+This joyous, self-reliant facing of the world with the resolute
+determination to improve it is characteristic of the noblest Atheism
+of our day. And it is thus a distintly elevating factor in the midst
+of the selfishness, luxury, and greed of modern civilisation. It is a
+virile virtue in the midst of the calculating and slothful spirit
+which too ofter veils itself under the pretence or religion. It will
+have no putting off of justice to a far-off day of reckoning, and it
+is ever spurred on by the feeling, "The night cometh, when no man can
+work." Bereft of all hope of a personal future, it binds up its hopes
+with that of the race; unbelieving in any aid from Deity, it struggles
+the more strenuously to work out man's salvation by his own strength.
+"To us there is but small comfort in Miss Cobbe's assurance that
+'earth's wrongs and agonies' 'will be righted hereafter.' Granting for
+a moment that man survives death what certainty have we that 'the next
+world' will be any improvement on this? Miss Cobbe assures us that
+this is 'God's world'; whose world will the next be, if not also His?
+Will He be stronger there or better, that He should set right in that
+world the wrongs He has permitted here? Will He have changed His mind,
+or have become weary of the contemplation of suffering? To me the
+thought that the world was in the hands of a God who permitted all the
+present wrongs and pains to exist would be intolerable, maddening in
+its hopelessness. There is every hope of righting earth's wrongs and
+of curing earth's pains if the reason and skill of man which have
+already done so much are free to do the rest; but if they are to
+strive against omnipotence, hopeless indeed is the future of the
+world. It is in this sense that the Atheist looks on good as 'the
+final goal of ill,' and believing that that goal will be reached the
+sooner the more strenuous the efforts of each individual, he works in
+the glad certainty that he is aiding the world's progress thitherward.
+Not dreaming of a personal reward hereafter, not craving a personal
+payment from heavenly treasury, he works and loves, content that he is
+building a future fairer than his present, joyous that he is creating
+a new earth for a happier race."[24]
+
+Such was the creed and such the morality which governed my life and
+thoughts from 1874 to 1886, and with some misgivings to 1889, and from
+which I drew strength and happiness amid all outer struggles and
+distress. And I shall ever remain grateful for the intellectual and
+moral training it gave me, for the self-reliance it nurtured, for the
+altruism it inculcated, for the deep feeling of the unity of man that
+it fostered, for the inspiration to work that it lent. And perhaps the
+chief debt of gratitude I owe to Freethought is that it left the mind
+ever open to new truth, encouraged the most unshrinking questioning of
+Nature, and shrank from no new conclusions, however adverse to the
+old, that were based on solid evidence. I admit sorrowfully that all
+Freethinkers do not learn this lesson, but I worked side by side with
+Charles Bradlaugh, and the Freethought we strove to spread was
+strong-headed and broad-hearted.
+
+The antagonism which, as we shall see in a few moments, blazed out
+against me from the commencement of my platform work, was based partly
+on ignorance, was partly aroused by my direct attacks on Christianity,
+and by the combative spirit I myself showed in those attacks, and very
+largely by my extreme Radicalism in politics. I had against me all the
+conventional beliefs and traditions of society in general, and I
+attacked them, not with bated breath and abundant apologies, but
+joyously and defiantly, with sheer delight in the intellectual strife.
+I was fired, too, with passionate sympathy for the sufferings of the
+poor, for the overburdened, overdriven masses of the people, not only
+here but in every land, and wherever a blow was struck at Liberty or
+Justice my pen or tongue brake silence. It was a perpetual carrying of
+the fiery cross, and the comfortable did not thank me for shaking them
+out of their soft repose.
+
+The antagonism that grew out of ignorance regarded Atheism as implying
+degraded morality and bestial life, and they assailed my conduct not
+on evidence that it was evil, but on the presumption that an Atheist
+must be immoral. Thus a Christian opponent at Leicester assailed me as
+a teacher of free love, fathering on me views which were maintained in
+a book that I had not read, but which, before I had ever seen the
+_National Reformer_, had been reviewed in its columns--as it was
+reviewed in other London papers--and had been commended for its clear
+statement of the Malthusian position, but not for its contention as to
+free love, a theory to which Mr. Bradlaugh was very strongly opposed.
+Nor were the attacks confined to the ascription to me of theories
+which I did not hold, but agents of the Christian Evidence Society, in
+their street preaching, made the foulest accusations against me of
+personal immorality. Remonstrances addressed to the Rev. Mr. Engström,
+the secretary of the society, brought voluble protestations of
+disavowal and disapproval; but as the peccant agents were continued in
+their employment, the apologies were of small value. No accusation was
+too coarse, no slander too baseless, for circulation by these men; and
+for a long time these indignities caused me bitter suffering,
+outraging my pride, and soiling my good name. The time was to come
+when I should throw that good name to the winds for the sake of the
+miserable, but in those early days I had done nothing to merit, even
+ostensibly, such attacks. Even by educated writers, who should have
+known better, the most wanton accusations of violence and would-be
+destructiveness were brought against Atheists; thus Miss Frances Power
+Cobbe wrote in the _Contemporary Review_ that loss of faith in God
+would bring about the secularisation _or destruction_ of all
+cathedrals, churches, and chapels. "Why," I wrote in answer, "should
+cathedrals, churches, and chapels be destroyed? Atheism will utilise,
+not destroy, the beautiful edifices which, once wasted on God, shall
+hereafter be consecrated for man. Destroy Westminster Abbey, with its
+exquisite arches, its glorious tones of soft, rich colour, its
+stonework light as if of cloud, its dreamy, subdued twilight, soothing
+as the 'shadow of a great rock in a weary land'? Nay, but reconsecrate
+it to humanity. The fat cherubs who tumble over guns and banners on
+soldiers' graves will fitly be removed to some spot where their clumsy
+forms will no longer mar the upward-springing grace of lines of pillar
+and of arch; but the glorious building wherein now barbaric psalms are
+chanted and droning canons preach of Eastern follies, shall hereafter
+echo the majestic music of Wagner and Beethoven, and the teachers of
+the future shall there unveil to thronging multitudes the beauties and
+the wonders of the world. The 'towers and spires' will not be effaced,
+but they will no longer be symbols of a religion which sacrifices
+earth to heaven and Man to God."[25] Between the cultured and the
+uncultured burlesques of Atheism we came off pretty badly, being for
+the most part regarded, as the late Cardinal Manning termed us, as
+mere "cattle."
+
+The moral purity and elevation of Atheistic teaching were overlooked
+by many who heard only of my bitter attacks on Christian theology.
+Against the teachings of eternal torture, of the vicarious atonement,
+of the infallibility of the Bible, I levelled all the strength of my
+brain and tongue, and I exposed the history of the Christian Church
+with unsparing hand, its persecutions, its religious wars, its
+cruelties, its oppressions. Smarting under the suffering inflicted on
+myself, and wroth with the cruel pressure continually put on
+Freethinkers by Christian employers, speaking under constant threats
+of prosecution, identifying Christianity with the political and social
+tyrannies of Christendom, I used every weapon that history, science,
+criticism, scholarship could give me against the Churches; eloquence,
+sarcasm, mockery, all were called on to make breaches in the wall of
+traditional belief and crass superstition.
+
+To argument and reason I was ever ready to listen, but I turned a
+front of stubborn defiance to all attempts to compel assent to
+Christianity by appeals to force. "The threat and the enforcement of
+legal and social penalties against unbelief can never compel belief.
+Belief must be gained by demonstration; it can never be forced by
+punishment. Persecution makes the stronger among us bitter; the weaker
+among us hypocrites; it never has made and never can make an honest
+convert."[26]
+
+That men and women are now able to speak and think as openly as they
+do, that a broader spirit is visible in the Churches, that heresy is
+no longer regarded as morally disgraceful--these things are very
+largely due to the active and militant propaganda carried on under the
+leadership of Charles Bradlaugh, whose nearest and most trusted friend
+I was. That my tongue was in the early days bitterer than it should
+have been, I frankly acknowledge; that I ignored the services done by
+Christianity and threw light only on its crimes, thus committing
+injustice, I am ready to admit. But these faults were conquered long
+ere I left the Atheistic camp, and they were the faults of my
+personality, not of the Atheistic philosophy. And my main contentions
+were true, and needed to be made; from many a Christian pulpit to-day
+may be heard the echo of the Freethought teachings; men's minds have
+been awakened, their knowledge enlarged; and while I condemn the
+unnecessary harshness of some of my language, I rejoice that I played
+my part in that educating of England which has made impossible for
+evermore the crude superstitions of the past, and the repetition of
+the cruelties and injustices under which preceding heretics suffered.
+
+But my extreme political views had also much to do with the general
+feeling of hatred with which I was regarded. Politics, as such, I
+cared not for at all, for the necessary compromises of political life
+were intolerable to me; but wherever they touched on the life of the
+people they became to me of burning interest. The land question, the
+incidence of taxation, the cost of Royalty, the obstructive power of
+the House of Lords--these were the matters to which I put my hand; I
+was a Home Ruler, too, of course, and a passionate opponent of all
+injustice to nations weaker than ourselves, so that I found myself
+always in opposition to the Government of the day. Against our
+aggressive and oppressive policy in Ireland, in the Transvaal, in
+India, in Afghanistan, in Burmah, in Egypt, I lifted up my voice in
+all our great towns, trying to touch the consciences of the people,
+and to make them feel the immorality of a land-stealing, piratical
+policy. Against war, against capital punishment, against flogging,
+demanding national education instead of big guns, public libraries
+instead of warships--no wonder I was denounced as an agitator, a
+firebrand, and that all orthodox society turned up at me its most
+respectable nose.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+AT WORK.
+
+
+From this sketch of the inner sources of action let me turn to the
+actions themselves, and see how the outer life was led which fed
+itself at these springs.
+
+I have said that the friendship between Mr. Bradlaugh and myself dated
+from our first meeting, and a few days after our talk in Turner Street
+he came down to see me at Norwood. It was characteristic of the man
+that he refused my first invitation, and bade me to think well ere I
+asked him to my house. He told me that he was so hated by English
+society that any friend of his would be certain to suffer, and that I
+should pay heavily for any friendship extended to him. When, however,
+I wrote to him, repeating my invitation, and telling him that I had
+counted the cost, he came to see me. His words came true; my
+friendship for him alienated from me even many professed Freethinkers,
+but the strength and the happiness of it outweighed a thousand times
+the loss it brought, and never has a shadow of regret touched me that
+I clasped hands with him in 1874, and won the noblest friend that
+woman ever had. He never spoke to me a harsh word; where we differed,
+he never tried to override my judgment, nor force on me his views; we
+discussed all points of difference as equal friends; he guarded me
+from all suffering as far as friend might, and shared with me all the
+pain he could not turn aside; all the brightness of my stormy life
+came to me through him, from his tender thoughtfulness, his ever-ready
+sympathy, his generous love. He was the most unselfish man I ever
+knew, and as patient as he was strong. My quick, impulsive nature
+found in him the restful strength it needed, and learned from him the
+self-control it lacked.
+
+He was the merriest of companions in our rare hours of relaxation; for
+many years he was wont to come to my house in the morning, after the
+hours always set aside by him for receiving poor men who wanted advice
+on legal and other matters--for he was a veritable poor man's lawyer,
+always ready to help and counsel--and, bringing his books and papers,
+he would sit writing, hour after hour, I equally busy with my own
+work, now and then, perhaps, exchanging a word, breaking off just for
+lunch and dinner, and working on again in the evening till about ten
+o'clock--he always went early to bed when at home--he would take
+himself off again to his lodgings, about three-quarters of a mile
+away. Sometimes he would play cards for an hour, euchre being our
+favourite game. But while we were mostly busy and grave, we would make
+holiday sometimes, and then he was like a boy, brimming over with
+mirth, full of quaint turns of thought and speech; all the country
+round London has for me bright memories of our wanderings--Richmond,
+where we tramped across the park, and sat under its mighty trees;
+Windsor, with its groves of bracken; Kew, where we had tea in a funny
+little room, with watercress _ad libitum_; Hampton Court, with its
+dishevelled beauties; Maidenhead and Taplow, where the river was the
+attraction; and, above all, Broxbourne, where he delighted to spend
+the day with his fishing-rod, wandering along the river, of which he
+knew every eddy. For he was a great fisherman, and he taught me all
+the mysteries of the craft, mirthfully disdainful of my dislike of the
+fish when I had caught them. And in those days he would talk of all
+his hopes of the future, of his work, of his duty to the thousands who
+looked to him for guidance, of the time when he would sit in
+Parliament as member for Northampton, and help to pass into laws the
+projects of reform for which he was battling with pen and tongue. How
+often he would voice his love of England, his admiration of her
+Parliament, his pride in her history. Keenly alive to the blots upon
+it in her sinful wars of conquest, in the cruel wrongs inflicted upon
+subject peoples, he was yet an Englishman to the heart's core, but
+feeling above all the Englishman's duty, as one of a race that had
+gripped power and held it, to understand the needs of those he ruled,
+and to do justice willingly, since compulsion to justice there was
+none. His service to India in the latest years of his life was no
+suddenly accepted task. He had spoken for her, pleaded for her, for
+many a long year, through press and on platform, and his spurs as
+member for India were won long ere he was member of Parliament.
+
+A place on the staff of the _National Reformer_ was offered me by Mr.
+Bradlaugh a few days after our first meeting, and the small weekly
+salary thus earned--it was only a guinea, for national reformers are
+always poor--was a very welcome addition to my resources. My first
+contribution appeared in the number for August 30, 1874, over the
+signature of "Ajax," and I wrote in it regularly until Mr. Bradlaugh
+died; from 1877 until his death I sub-edited it, so as to free him
+from all the technical trouble and the weary reading of copy, and for
+part of this period was also co-editor. I wrote at first under a _nom
+de guerre_, because the work I was doing for Mr. Scott would have been
+prejudiced had my name appeared in the columns of the terrible
+_National Reformer_, and until this work--commenced and paid for--was
+concluded I did not feel at liberty to use my own name. Afterwards, I
+signed my _National Reformer_ articles, and the tracts written for Mr.
+Scott appeared anonymously.
+
+  The name was suggested by the famous statue of
+  "Ajax Crying for Light," a cast of which may be seen
+  in the centre walk by any visitor to the Crystal Palace,
+  Sydenham. The cry through the darkness for light,
+  even though light should bring destruction, was one
+  that awoke the keenest sympathy of response from my
+  heart:
+
+  "If our fate be death
+  Give light, and let us die!"
+
+To see, to know, to understand, even though the seeing blind, though
+the knowledge sadden, though the understanding shatter the dearest
+hopes--such has ever been the craving of the upward-striving mind in
+man. Some regard it as a weakness, as a folly, but I am sure that it
+exists most strongly in some of the noblest of our race; that from the
+lips of those who have done most in lifting the burden of ignorance
+from the overstrained and bowed shoulders of a stumbling world has
+gone out most often into the empty darkness the pleading, impassioned
+cry:
+
+"Give light!"
+
+The light may come with a blinding flash, but it is light none the
+less, and we can see.
+
+And now the time had come when I was to use that gift of speech which
+I had discovered in Sibsey Church that I possessed, and to use it to
+move hearts and brains all over the English land. In 1874, tentatively, and in 1875 definitely, I took up this keen weapon, and have used it ever
+since. My first attempt was at a garden party, in a brief informal
+debate, and I found that words came readily and smoothly: the second
+in a discussion at the Liberal Social Union on the opening of museums
+and art galleries on Sunday. My first lecture was given at the
+Co-operative Institute, 55, Castle Street, Oxford Street, on August
+25, 1874. Mr. Greening--then, I think, the secretary--had invited me
+to read a paper before the society, and had left me the choice of the
+subject. I resolved that my first public lecture should be on behalf
+of my own sex, so I selected for my theme, "The Political Status of
+Women," and wrote thereon a paper. But it was a very nervous person
+who presented herself at the Co-operative Institute on that August
+evening. When a visit to the dentist is made, and one stands on the
+steps outside, desiring to run away ere the neat little boy in buttons
+opens the door and beams on one with a smile of compassionate
+superiority and implike triumph, then the world seems dark and life is
+as a huge blunder. But all such feelings are poor and weak as compared
+with the sinking of the heart and the trembling of the knees which
+seize upon the unhappy lecturer as he advances towards his first
+audience, and as before his eyes rises a ghastly vision of a
+tongue-tied would-be lecturer, facing rows of listening faces,
+listening to--silence. But to my surprise all this miserable feeling
+vanished the moment I was on my feet and was looking at the faces
+before me. I felt no tremor of nervousness from the first word to the
+last, and as I heard my own voice ring out over the attentive
+listeners I was conscious of power and of pleasure, not of fear. And
+from that day to this my experience has been the same; before a
+lecture I am horribly nervous, wishing myself at the ends of the
+earth, heart beating violently, and sometimes overcome by deadly
+sickness. Once on my feet, I feel perfectly at my ease, ruler of the
+crowd, master of myself. I often jeer at myself mentally as I feel
+myself throbbing and fearful, knowing that when I stand up I shall be
+all right, and yet I cannot conquer the physical terror and trembling,
+illusory as I know them to be. People often say to me, "You look too
+ill to go on the platform." And I smile feebly and say I am all right,
+and I often fancy that the more miserably nervous I am in the
+ante-room, the better I speak when once on the platform. My second
+lecture was delivered on September 27th, at Mr. Moncure D. Conway's
+Chapel, in St. Paul's Road, Camden Town, and redelivered a few weeks
+later at a Unitarian Chapel, where the Rev. Peter Dean was minister.
+This was on the "True Basis of Morality," and was later printed as a
+pamphlet, which attained a wide circulation. This was all I did in the
+way of speaking in 1874, but I took silent part in an electioneering
+struggle at Northampton, where a seat for the House of Commons had
+fallen vacant by the death of Mr. Charles Gilpin. Mr. Bradlaugh had
+contested the borough as a Radical in 1868, obtaining 1,086 votes, and
+again in February, 1874, when he received 1,653; of these no less than
+1,060 were plumpers, while his four opponents had only 113, 64, 21 and
+12 plumpers respectively; this band formed the compact and personally
+loyal following which was to win the seat for its chief in 1880, after
+twelve years of steady struggle, and to return him over and over again
+to Parliament during the long contest which followed his election, and
+which ended in his final triumph. They never wavered in their
+allegiance to "our Charlie," but stood by him through evil report and
+good report, when he was outcast as when he was triumphant, loving him
+with a deep, passionate devotion, as honourable to them as it was
+precious to him. I have seen him cry like a child at evidences of
+their love for him, he whose courage no danger could daunt, and who
+was never seen to blench before hatred nor change his stern immobility
+in the face of his foes. Iron to enmity, he was soft as a woman to
+kindness; unbending as steel to pressure, he was ductile as wax to
+love. John Stuart Mill had the insight in 1868 to see his value, and
+the courage to recognise it. He strongly supported his candidature,
+and sent a donation to his election expenses. In his "Autobiography"
+he wrote (pp. 311, 312):--
+
+"He had the support of the working classes; having heard him speak I
+knew him to be a man of ability, and he had proved that he was the
+reverse of a demagogue by placing himself in strong opposition to the
+prevailing opinion of the Democratic party on two such important
+subjects as Malthusianism and Proportional Representation. Men of this
+sort, who, while sharing the democratic feeling of the working
+classes, judge political questions for themselves, and have the
+courage to assert their individual convictions against popular
+opposition, were needed, as it seemed to me, in Parliament; and I did
+not think that Mr. Bradlaugh's anti-religious opinions (even though he
+had been intemperate in the expression of them) ought to exclude him."
+
+It has been said that Mr. Mill's support of Mr. Bradlaugh's
+candidature at Northampton cost him his own seat at Westminster, and
+so bitter was bigotry at that time that the statement is very likely
+to be true. On this, Mr. Mill himself said: "It was the right thing to
+do, and if the election were yet to take place, I would do it again."
+
+At this election of September, 1874--the second in the year, for the
+general election had taken place in the February, and Mr. Bradlaugh
+had been put up and defeated during his absence in America--I went
+down to Northampton to report electioneering incidents for the
+_National Reformer_, and spent some days there in the whirl of the
+struggle. The Whig party was more bitter against Mr. Bradlaugh than
+was the Tory. Strenuous efforts were made to procure a Liberal
+candidate, who would be able at least to prevent Mr. Bradlaugh's
+return, and, by dividing the Liberal and Radical party, should let in
+a Tory rather than the detested Radical. Messrs. Bell and James and
+Dr. Pearce came on the scene only to disappear. Mr. Jacob Bright and
+Mr. Arnold Morley were vainly suggested. Mr. Ayrton's name was
+whispered. Major Lumley was recommended by Mr. Bernal Osborne. Dr.
+Kenealy proclaimed himself ready to come to the rescue of the Whigs.
+Mr. Tillett, of Norwich, Mr. Cox, of Belper, were invited, but neither
+would consent to oppose a good Radical who had fought two elections at
+Northampton and had been the chosen of the Radical workers for six
+years. At last Mr. William Fowler, a banker, accepted the task of
+handing over the representation of a Liberal and Radical borough to a
+Tory, and duly succeeded in giving the seat to Mr. Mereweather, a very
+reputable Tory lawyer. Mr. Bradlaugh polled 1,766, thus adding another
+133 voters to those who had polled for him in the previous February.
+
+That election gave me my first experience of anything in the nature of
+rioting. The violent abuse levelled against Mr. Bradlaugh by the
+Whigs, and the foul and wicked slanders circulated against him,
+assailing his private life and family relations, had angered almost to
+madness those who knew and loved him; and when it was found that the
+unscrupulous Whig devices had triumphed, had turned the election
+against him, and given over the borough to a Tory, the fury broke out
+into open violence. One illustration may be given as a type of these
+cruel slanders. It was known that Mr. Bradlaugh was separated from his
+wife, and it was alleged that being an Atheist, and, (therefore!) an
+opponent of marriage, he had deserted his wife and children, and left
+them to the workhouse. The cause of the separation was known to very
+few, for Mr. Bradlaugh was chivalrously honourable to women, and he
+would not shield his own good name at the cost of that of the wife of
+his youth and the mother of his children. But since his death his only
+remaining child has, in devotion to her father's memory, stated the
+melancholy truth: that Mrs. Bradlaugh gave way to drink; that for long
+years he bore with her and did all that man could do to save her; that
+finally, hopeless of cure, he broke up his home, and placed his wife
+in the care of her parents in the country, leaving her daughters with
+her, while he worked for their support. No man could have acted more
+generously and wisely under these cruel circumstances than he did, but
+it was, perhaps, going to an extreme of Quixotism, that he concealed
+the real state of the case, and let the public blame him as it would.
+His Northampton followers did not know the facts, but they knew him as
+an upright, noble man, and these brutal attacks on his personal
+character drove them wild. Stray fights had taken place during the
+election over these slanders, and, defeated by such foul weapons, the
+people lost control of their passions. As Mr. Bradlaugh was sitting
+well-nigh exhausted in the hotel, after the declaration of the poll,
+the landlord rushed in, crying to him to go out and try to stop the
+people, or there would be murder done at the "Palmerston," Mr.
+Fowler's headquarters; the crowd was charging the door, and the
+windows were being broken with showers of stones. Weary as he was, Mr.
+Bradlaugh sprang to his feet, and swiftly made his way to the rescue
+of those who had maligned and defeated him. Flinging himself before
+the doorway, from which the door had just been battered down, he
+knocked down one or two of the most violent, drove the crowd back,
+argued and scolded them into quietness, and finally dispersed them.
+But at nine o'clock he had to leave Northampton to catch the mail
+steamer for America at Queenstown, and after he had left, word went
+round that he had gone, and the riot he had quelled broke out afresh.
+The Riot Act was at last read, the soldiers were called out, stones
+flew freely, heads and windows were broken, but no very serious harm
+was done. The "Palmerston" and the printing-office of the _Mercury_,
+the Whig organ, were the principal sufferers; doors and windows
+disappearing somewhat completely. The day after the election I
+returned home, and soon after fell ill with a severe attack of
+congestion of the lungs. Soon after my recovery I left Norwood and
+settled in a house in Westbourne Terrace, Bayswater, where I remained
+till 1876.
+
+In the following January (1875), after much thought and self-analysis,
+I resolved to give myself wholly to propagandist work, as a
+Freethinker and a Social Reformer, and to use my tongue as well as my
+pen in the struggle. I counted the cost ere I determined on this step,
+for I knew that it would not only outrage the feelings of such new
+friends as I had already made, but would be likely to imperil my
+custody of my little girl. I knew that an Atheist was outside the law,
+obnoxious to its penalties, but deprived of its protection, and that
+the step I contemplated might carry me into conflicts in which
+everything might be lost and nothing could be gained. But the desire
+to spread liberty and truer thought among men, to war against bigotry
+and superstition, to make the world freer and better than I found
+it--all this impelled me with a force that would not be denied. I
+seemed to hear the voice of Truth ringing over the battlefield: "Who
+will go? Who will speak for me?" And I sprang forward with passionate
+enthusiasm, with resolute cry: "Here am I, send me!" Nor have I ever
+regretted for one hour that resolution, come to in solitude, carried
+out amid the surging life of men, to devote to that sacred cause every
+power of brain and tongue that I possessed. Very solemn to me is the
+responsibility of the public teacher, standing forth in Press and on
+platform to partly mould the thought of his time, swaying thousands of
+readers and hearers year after year. No weighter responsibility can
+any take, no more sacred charge. The written and the spoken word start
+forces none may measure, set working brain after brain, influence
+numbers unknown to the forthgiver of the word, work for good or for
+evil all down the stream of time. Feeling the greatness of the career,
+the solemnity of the duty, I pledged my word then to the cause I loved
+that no effort on my part should be wanted to render myself worthy of
+the privilege of service that I took; that I would read and study, and
+would train every faculty that I had; that I would polish my language,
+discipline my thought, widen my knowledge; and this, at least, I may
+say, that if I have written and spoken much, I have studied and
+thought more, and that I have not given to my mistress Truth that
+"which hath cost me nothing."
+
+This same year (1875) that saw me launched on the world as a public
+advocate of Freethought, saw also the founding of the Theosophical
+Society to which my Freethought was to lead me. I have often since
+thought with pleasure that at the very time I began lecturing in
+England, H.P. Blavatsky was at work in the United States, preparing
+the foundation on which in November, 1875, the Theosophical Society
+was to be raised. And with deeper pleasure yet have I found her
+writing of what she called the noble work against superstition done by
+Charles Bradlaugh and myself, rendering the propaganda of Theosophy
+far more practicable and safer than it would otherwise have been. The
+fight soon began, and with some queer little skirmishes. I was a
+member of the "Liberal Social Union," and one night a discussion arose
+as to the admissibility of Atheists to the Society. Dr. Zerffi
+declared that he would not remain a member if avowed Atheists were
+admitted. I promptly declared that I was an Atheist, and that the
+basis of the union was liberty of opinion. The result was that I found
+myself cold-shouldered, and those that had been warmly cordial to me
+merely as a non-Christian looked askance at me when I had avowed that
+my scepticism had advanced beyond their "limits of religious thought."
+The Liberal Social Union soon knew me no more, but in the wider field
+of work open before me, the narrow-mindedness of this petty clique
+troubled me not at all.
+
+I started my definite lecturing work at South Place Chapel in January,
+1875, Mr. Moncure D. Conway presiding for me, and I find in the
+_National Reformer_ for January 17th, the announcement that "Mrs.
+Annie Besant ('Ajax') will lecture at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, on
+'Civil and Religious Liberty.'" Thus I threw off my pseudonym, and
+rode into the field of battle with uplifted visor. The identification
+led to an odd little exhibition of bigotry. I had been invited by the
+Dialectical Society to read a paper, and had selected for subject,
+"The Existence of God." (It may be noted, in passing, that young
+students and speakers always select the most tremendous subjects for
+their discourses. One advances in modesty as one advances in
+knowledge, and after eighteen years of platform work, I am far more
+dubious than I was at their beginning as to my power of dealing in any
+sense adequately with the problems of life.) The Dialectical Society
+had for some years held their meetings in a room in Adam Street,
+rented from the Social Science Association. When the members gathered
+as usual on February 17th, the door was found to be locked, and they
+had to gather on the stairs; they found that "Ajax's" as yet
+undelivered paper was too much for Social Science nerves, and that
+entrance to their ordinary meeting-room was then and thenceforth
+denied them. So they, with "Ajax," found refuge at the Charing Cross
+Hotel, and speculated merrily on the eccentricities of religious
+bigotry.
+
+On February 12th I started on my first provincial lecturing tour, and
+after speaking at Birkenhead that evening went on by the night mail to
+Glasgow. Some races--dog races--I think, had been going on, and very
+unpleasant were many of the passengers waiting on the platform. Some
+Birkenhead friends had secured me a compartment, and watched over me
+till the train began to move. Then, after we had fairly started, the
+door was flung open by a porter, and a man was thrust in who half
+tumbled on to the seat. As he slowly recovered he stood up, and as his
+money rolled out of his hand on to the floor, and he gazed vaguely at
+it, I saw to my horror that he was drunk. The position was not
+pleasant, for the train was an express, and was not timed to stop for
+a considerable time. My odious fellow-passenger spent some time on the
+floor, hunting after his scattered coins; then he slowly gathered
+himself up and presently became conscious of my presence. He studied
+me for some time, and then proposed to shut the window. I assented
+quietly, not wanting to discuss a trifle and feeling in deadly
+terror--alone at night in an express with a man not drunk enough to be
+helpless, but too drunk to be controlled. Never before nor since have
+I felt so thoroughly frightened. I can see him still, swaying as he
+stood, with eyes bleared and pendulous lips--but I sat there quiet and
+outwardly unmoved, as is always my impulse in danger till I see some
+way of escape, only grasping a penknife in my pocket, with a desperate
+resolve to use my feeble weapon as soon as the need arose. The man
+came towards me with a fatuous leer, when a jarring noise was heard
+and the train began to slacken.
+
+"What is that?" stammered my drunken companion.
+
+"They are putting on the brakes to stop the train," I answered very
+slowly and distinctly, though a very passion of relief made it hard to
+say quietly the measured words.
+
+The man sat down stupidly, staring at me, and in a minute or two the
+train pulled up at a station--it had been stopped by signal. My
+immobility was gone. In a moment I was at the window, called the
+guard, and explained rapidly that I was a woman travelling alone, and
+that a half-drunken man was in the carriage. With the usual kindness
+of a railway official, he at once moved me and my baggage into another
+compartment, into which he locked me, and he kept a friendly watch
+over me at every station at which we stopped until he landed me safely
+at Glasgow.
+
+At Glasgow a room had been taken for me at a temperance hotel, and it
+seemed to me so new and lonely a thing to be "all on my own account"
+in a strange hotel in a strange city, that I wanted to sit down and
+cry. This feeling, to which I was too proud to yield, was probably
+partly due to the extreme greyness and grubbiness of my surroundings.
+Things are better now, but in those days temperance hotels were for
+the most part lacking in cleanliness. Abstinence from alcohol and a
+superfluity of "matter in the wrong place" do not seem necessary
+correlatives, yet I rarely went to a temperance hotel in which water
+was liberally used for other purposes than that of drinking. From
+Glasgow I went north to Aberdeen, where I found a very stern and
+critical audience. Not a sound broke the stillness as I walked up the
+hall; not a sound as I ascended the platform and faced the people; the
+canny Scot was not going to applaud a stranger at sight; he was going
+to see what she was like first. In grim silence they listened; I could
+not move them; they were granite like their own granite city, and I
+felt I would like to take off my head and throw it at them, if only to
+break that hard wall. After about twenty minutes, a fortunate phrase
+drew a hiss from some child of the Covenanters. I made a quick retort,
+there was a burst of cheering, and the granite vanished. Never after
+that did I have to complain of the coldness of an Aberdeen audience.
+Back to London from Aberdeen, and a long, weary journey it was, in a
+third-class carriage in the cold month of February; but the labour had
+in it a joy that outpaid all physical discomfort, and the feeling that
+I had found my work in the world gave a new happiness to life.
+
+On February 28th I stood for the first time on the platform of the
+Hall of Science, Old Street, St. Luke's, London, and was received with
+that warmth of greeting which Secularists are always so ready to
+extend to any who sacrifice aught to join their ranks. That hall is
+identified in my mind with many a bitter struggle, with both victory
+and defeat, but whether in victory or in defeat I found there always
+welcome; and the love and the courage wherewith Secularists stood by
+me have overpaid a thousandfold any poor services I was fortunate
+enough to render, while in their ranks, to the cause of Liberty, and
+wholly prevent any bitterness arising in my mind for any
+unfriendliness shown me by some, who have perhaps overstepped kindness
+and justice in their sorrowful wrath at my renunciation of Materialism
+and Atheism. So far as health was concerned, the lecturing acted as a
+tonic. My chest had always been a little delicate, and when I
+consulted a doctor on the possibility of my standing platform work, he
+answered, "It will either kill you or cure you." It entirely cured the
+lung weakness, and I grew strong and vigorous instead of being frail
+and delicate, as of old.
+
+It would be wearisome to go step by step over eighteen years of
+platform work, so I will only select here and there incidents
+illustrative of the whole. And here let me say that the frequent
+attacks made on myself and others, that we were attracted to
+Free-thought propaganda by the gains it offered, formed a somewhat
+grotesque contrast to the facts. On one occasion I spent eight days in
+Northumberland and Durham, gave twelve lectures, and made a deficit of
+eleven shillings on the whole. Of course such a thing could not happen
+in later years, when I had made my name by sheer hard work, but I
+fancy that every Secularist lecturer could tell of similar experiences
+in the early days of "winning his way." The fact is that from Mr.
+Bradlaugh downwards every one of us could have earned a competence
+with comparative ease in any other line of work, and could have earned
+it with public approval instead of amid popular reproach. Much of my
+early lecturing was done in Northumberland and Durham; the miners
+there are, as a rule, shrewd and hard-headed men, and very cordial is
+the greeting given by them to those they have reason to trust. At
+Seghill and at Bedlington I have slept in their cottages and have been
+welcomed to their tables, and I have a vivid memory of one evening at
+Seghill, after a lecture, when my host, himself a miner, invited about
+a dozen of his comrades to supper to meet me; the talk ran on
+politics, and I soon found that my companions knew more of English
+politics, had a far shrewder notion of political methods, and were,
+therefore, much better worth talking to, than most of the ordinary men
+met at dinner parties "in society." They were of the "uneducated"
+class despised by "gentlemen," and had not then the franchise, but
+politically they were far better educated than their social superiors,
+and were far better fitted to discharge the duties of citizenship. How
+well, too, do I remember a ten-mile drive in a butcher's cart, to give
+a lecture in an out-of-the-way spot, unapproached by railway. Such was
+the jolting as we rattled over rough roads and stony places, that I
+felt as though all my bones were broken, and as though I should
+collapse on the platform like a bag half-filled with stones. How kind
+they were to me, those genial, cordial miners, how careful for my
+comfort, and how motherly were the women! Ah! if opponents of my views
+who did not know me were often cruel and malignant, there was
+compensation in the love and honour in which good men and women all
+the country over held me, and their devotion outweighed the hatred,
+and many a time and often soothed a weary and aching heart.
+
+Lecturing in June, 1875, at Leicester, I came for the first time
+across a falsehood that brought sore trouble and cost me more pain
+than I care to tell. An irate Christian opponent, in the discussion
+that followed the lecture, declared that I was responsible for a book
+entitled, "The Elements of Social Science," which was, he averred,
+"The Bible of Secularists." I had never heard of the book, but as he
+stated that it was in favour of the abolition of marriage, and that
+Mr. Bradlaugh agreed with it, I promptly contradicted him; for while I
+knew nothing about the book, I knew a great deal about Mr. Bradlaugh,
+and I knew that on the marriage question he was conservative rather
+than revolutionary. He detested "Free Love" doctrines, and had thrown
+himself strongly on the side of the agitation led so heroically for
+many years by Mrs. Josephine Butler. On my return to London after the
+lecture I naturally made inquiry as to the volume and its contents,
+and I found that it had been written by a Doctor of Medicine some
+years before, and sent to the _National Reformer_ for review, as to
+other journals, in ordinary course of business. It consisted of three
+parts--the first advocated, from the standpoint of medical science,
+what is roughly known as "Free Love"; the second was entirely medical;
+the third consisted of a clear and able exposition of the law of
+population as laid down by the Rev. Mr. Malthus, and--following the
+lines of John Stuart Mill--insisted that it was the duty of married
+persons to voluntarily limit their families within their means of
+subsistence. Mr. Bradlaugh, in reviewing the book, said that it was
+written "with honest and pure intent and purpose," and recommended to
+working men the exposition of the law of population. His enemies took
+hold of this recommendation, declared that he shared the author's
+views on the impermanence of the marriage tie, and, despite his
+reiterated contradictions, they used extracts against marriage from
+the book as containing his views. Anything more meanly vile it would
+be difficult to conceive, but such were the weapons used against him
+all his life, and used often by men whose own lives contrasted most
+unfavourably with his own. Unable to find anything in his own writings
+to serve their purpose, they used this book to damage him with those
+who knew nothing at first-hand of his views. What his enemies feared
+were not his views on marriage--which, as I have said, was
+conservative--but his Radicalism and his Atheism. To discredit him as
+politician they maligned him socially, and the idea that a man desires
+"to abolish marriage and the home," is a most convenient poniard, and
+the one most certain to wound. This was the origin of his worst
+difficulties, to be intensified, ere long, by his defence of
+Malthusianism. On me also fell the same lash, and I found myself held
+up to hatred as upholder of views that I abhorred.
+
+I may add that far warmer praise than that bestowed on this book by
+Mr. Bradlaugh was given by other writers, who were never attacked in
+the same way.
+
+In the _Reasoner_, edited by Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, I find warmer
+praise of it than in the _National Reformer_; in the review the
+following passage appears:--
+
+"In some respects all books of this class are evils: but it would be
+weakness and criminal prudery--a prudery as criminal as vice
+itself--not to say that such a book as the one in question is not only
+a far lesser evil than the one that it combats, but in one sense a
+book which it is a mercy to issue and courage to publish."
+
+The _Examiner_, reviewing the same book, declared it to be--
+
+"A very valuable, though rather heterogeneous book.... This is, we
+believe, the only book that has fully, honestly, and in a scientific
+spirit recognised all the elements in the problem--How are mankind to
+triumph over poverty, with its train of attendant evils?--and
+fearlessly endeavoured to find a practical solution."
+
+The _British Journal of Homoeopathy_ wrote:--
+
+"Though quite out of the province of our journal, we cannot refrain
+from stating that this work is unquestionably the most remarkable one,
+in many respects, we have ever met with. Though we differ _toto coelo_
+from the author in his views of religion and morality, and hold some
+of his remedies to tend rather to a dissolution than a reconstruction
+of society, yet we are bound to admit the benevolence and philanthropy
+of his motives. The scope of the work is nothing less than the whole
+field of political economy."
+
+Ernest Jones and others wrote yet more strongly, but out of all these
+Charles Bradlaugh alone has been selected for reproach, and has had
+the peculiar views of the anonymous author fathered on himself.
+
+Some of the lecture work in those days was pretty rough. In Darwen,
+Lancashire, in June, 1875, stone-throwing was regarded as a fair
+argument addressed to the Atheist lecturer. At Swansea, in March,
+1876, the fear of violence was so great that a guarantee against
+damage to the hall was exacted by the proprietor, and no local friend
+had the courage to take the chair for me. In September, 1876, at
+Hoyland, thanks to the exertions of Mr. Hebblethwaite, a Primitive
+Methodist, and two Protestant missionaries, I found the hall packed
+with a crowd that yelled at me with great vigour, stood on forms,
+shook fists at me, and otherwise showed feelings more warm than
+friendly. Taking advantage of a lull in the noise, I began to speak,
+and the tumult sank into quietness; but as I was leaving the hall it
+broke out afresh, and I walked slowly through a crowd that yelled and
+swore and struck at me, but somehow those nearest always shrank back
+and let me pass. In the dark, outside the hall, they took to kicking,
+but only one kick reached me, and the attempts to overturn the cab
+were foiled by the driver, who put his horse at a gallop. Later in the
+same month Mr. Bradlaugh and I visited Congleton together, having been
+invited there by Mr. and Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy. Mr. Bradlaugh
+lectured on the first evening to an accompaniment of broken windows,
+and I, sitting with Mrs. Elmy facing the platform, received a rather
+heavy blow on the back of the head from a stone thrown by some one in
+the room. We had a mile and a half to walk from the hall to the house,
+and were accompanied all the way by a stone-throwing crowd, who sang
+hymns at the tops of their voices, with interludes of curses and foul
+words. On the following evening I lectured, and our stone-throwing
+admirers escorted us to the hall; in the middle of the lecture a man
+shouted, "Put her out!" and a well-known wrestler of the
+neighbourhood, named Burbery, who had come to the hall with some
+friends to break up the meeting, stood up as at a signal in front of
+the platform and loudly interrupted. Mr. Bradlaugh, who was in the
+chair, told him to sit down, and, as he persisted in interrupting,
+informed him that he must either be quiet or go out. "Put me out!"
+shouted Mr. Burbery, striking an attitude. Mr. Bradlaugh left the
+platform and walked up to the noisy swashbuckler, who at once grappled
+with him and tried to throw him. But Mr. Burbery had not reckoned on
+the massive strength of his opponent, and when the "throw" was
+complete Mr. Burbery was underneath. Amid much excitement Mr. Burbery
+was propelled towards the door, being gently used on the way as a
+battering-ram against his friends who rushed to the rescue, and at the
+door was handed over to the police. The chairman then resumed his
+normal duties, with a brief "Go on" to me, and I promptly went on,
+finishing the lecture in peace. But outside the hall there was plenty
+of stone-throwing, and Mrs. Elmy received a cut on the temple from a
+flint. This stormy work gradually lessened, and my experience of it
+was a mere trifle compared to that which my predecessors had faced.
+Mr. Bradlaugh's early experiences involved much serious rioting, and
+Mrs. Harriet Law, a woman of much courage and of strong natural
+ability, had many a rough meeting in her lecturing days.
+
+In September, 1875, Mr. Bradlaugh again sailed for America, still to
+earn money there to pay his debts. Unhappily he was struck down by
+typhoid fever, and all his hopes of freeing himself thus were
+destroyed. His life was well-nigh despaired of, but the admirable
+skill of physician and nurse pulled him through. Said the _Baltimore
+Advertiser_:--
+
+"This long and severe illness has disappointed the hopes and retarded
+the object for which he came to this country; but he is gentleness and
+patience itself in his sickness in this strange land, and has endeared
+himself greatly to his physicians and attendants by his gratitude and
+appreciation of the slightest attention."
+
+His fortitude in face of death was also much commented on, lying there
+as he did far from home and from all he loved best. Never a quiver of
+fear touched him as he walked down into the valley of the shadow of
+death; the Rev. Mr. Frothingham bore public and admiring testimony in
+his own church to Mr. Bradlaugh's noble serenity, at once fearless and
+unpretending, and, himself a Theist, gave willing witness to the
+Atheist's calm strength. He came back to us at the end of September,
+worn to a shadow, weak as a child, and for many a long month he bore
+the traces of his wrestle with death.
+
+One part of my autumn's work during his absence was the delivery and
+subsequent publication of six lectures on the French Revolution. That
+stormy time had for me an intense fascination. I brooded over it,
+dreamed over it, and longed to tell the story from the people's point
+of view. I consequently read a large amount of the current literature
+of the time, as well as Louis Blanc's monumental work and the
+histories of Michelet, Lamartine, and others. Fortunately for me, Mr.
+Bradlaugh had a splendid collection of books on the subject, and ere
+we left England he brought me two cabs-full of volumes, aristocratic,
+ecclesiastical, democratic, and I studied all these diligently, and
+lived in them, till the French Revolution became to me as a drama in
+which I had myself taken part, and the actors were to me as personal
+friends and foes. In this, again, as in so much of my public work, I
+have to thank Mr. Bradlaugh for the influence which led me to read
+fully all sides of a question, and to read most carefully those from
+which I differed most, ere I considered myself competent to write or
+to speak thereon. From 1875 onwards I held office as one of the
+vice-presidents of the National Secular Society--a society founded on
+a broad basis of liberty, with the inspiring motto, "We Search for
+Truth." Mr. Bradlaugh was president, and I held office under him till
+he resigned his post in February, 1890, nine months after I had joined
+the Theosophical Society. The N.S.S., under his judicious and
+far-sighted leadership, became a real force in the country,
+theologically and politically, embracing large numbers of men and
+women who were Freethinkers as well as Radicals, and forming a nucleus
+of earnest workers, able to gather round them still larger numbers of
+others, and thus to powerfully affect public opinion. Once a year the
+society met in conference, and many a strong and lasting friendship
+between men living far apart dated from these yearly gatherings, so
+that all over the country spread a net-work of comradeship between the
+staunch followers of "our Charlie." These were the men and women who
+paid his election expenses over and over again, supported him in his
+Parliamentary struggle, came up to London to swell the demonstrations
+in his favour. And round them grew up a huge party--"the largest
+personal following of any public man since Mr. Gladstone," it was once
+said by an eminent man--who differed from him in theology, but
+passionately supported him in politics; miners, cutlers, weavers,
+spinners, shoemakers, operatives of every trade, strong, sturdy,
+self-reliant men who loved him to the last.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE KNOWLTON PAMPHLET.
+
+
+The year 1877 dawned, and in its early days began a struggle which,
+ending in victory all along the line, brought with it pain and anguish
+that I scarcely care to recall. An American physician, Dr. Charles
+Knowlton, convinced of the truth of the teaching of the Rev. Mr.
+Malthus, and seeing that that teaching had either no practical value
+or tended to the great increase of prostitution, unless married
+people were taught to limit their families within their means of
+livelihood--wrote a pamphlet on the voluntary limitation of the
+family. It was published somewhere in the Thirties--about 1835, I
+think--and was sold unchallenged in England as well as in America for
+some forty years. Philosophers of the Bentham school, like John Stuart
+Mill, endorsed its teachings, and the bearing of population on poverty
+was an axiom in economic literature. Dr. Knowlton's work was a
+physiological treatise, advocating conjugal prudence and parental
+responsibility; it argued in favour of early marriage, with a view to
+the purity of social life; but as early marriage between persons of
+small means generally implies a large family, leading either to
+pauperism or to lack of necessary food, clothing, education, and fair
+start in life for the children, Dr. Knowlton advocated the restriction
+of the number of the family within the means of subsistence, and
+stated the methods by which this restriction could be carried out. The
+book was never challenged till a disreputable Bristol bookseller put
+some copies on sale to which he added some improper pictures, and he
+was prosecuted and convicted. The publisher of the _National Reformer_
+and of Mr. Bradlaugh's and my books and pamphlets had taken over a
+stock of Knowlton's pamphlets among other literature he bought, and he
+was prosecuted and, to our great dismay, pleaded guilty. We at once
+removed our publishing from his hands, and after careful deliberation
+we decided to publish the incriminated pamphlet in order to test the
+right of discussion on the population question, when, with the advice
+to limit the family, information was given as to how that advice could
+be followed. We took a little shop, printed the pamphlet, and sent
+notice to the police that we would commence the sale at a certain day
+and hour, and ourselves sell the pamphlet, so that no one else might
+be endangered by our action. We resigned our offices in the National
+Secular Society that we might not injure the society, but the
+executive first, and then the Annual Conference, refused to accept the
+resignations. Our position as regarded the pamphlet was simple and
+definite; had it been brought to us for publication, we stated, we
+should not have published it, for it was not a treatise of high merit;
+but, prosecuted as immoral because it advised the limitation of the
+family, it at once embodied the right of publication. In a preface to
+the republished edition, we wrote:--
+
+"We republish this pamphlet, honestly believing that on all questions
+affecting the happiness of the people, whether they be theological,
+political, or social, fullest right of free discussion ought to be
+maintained at all hazards. We do not personally endorse all that Dr.
+Knowlton says: his 'Philosophical Proem' seems to us full of
+philosophical mistakes, and--as we are neither of us doctors--we are
+not prepared to endorse his medical views; but since progress can only
+be made through discussion, and no discussion is possible where
+differing opinions are suppressed, we claim the right to publish all
+opinions, so that the public, enabled to see all sides of a question,
+may have the materials for forming a sound judgment."
+
+We were not blind to the danger to which this defiance of the
+authorities exposed us, but it was not the danger of failure, with the
+prison as penalty, that gave us pause. It was the horrible
+misconceptions that we saw might arise; the odious imputations on
+honour and purity that would follow. Could we, the teachers of a lofty
+morality, venture to face a prosecution for publishing what would be
+technically described as an obscene book, and risk the ruin of our
+future, dependent as that was on our fair fame? To Mr. Bradlaugh it
+meant, as he felt, the almost certain destruction of his Parliamentary
+position, the forging by his own hands of a weapon that in the hands
+of his foes would be well-nigh fatal. To me it meant the loss of the
+pure reputation I prized, the good name I had guarded--scandal the
+most terrible a woman could face. But I had seen the misery of the
+poor, of my sister-women with children crying for bread; the wages of
+the workmen were often sufficient for four, but eight or ten they
+could not maintain. Should I set my own safety, my own good name,
+against the helping of these? Did it matter that my reputation should
+be ruined, if its ruin helped to bring remedy to this otherwise
+hopeless wretchedness of thousands? What was worth all my talk about
+self-sacrifice and self-surrender, if, brought to the test, I failed?
+So, with heart aching but steady, I came to my resolution; and though
+I know now that I was wrong intellectually, and blundered in the
+remedy, I was right morally in the will to sacrifice all to help the
+poor, and I can rejoice that I faced a storm of obloquy fiercer and
+harder to bear than any other which can ever touch me again. I learned
+a lesson of stern indifference to all judgments from without that were
+not endorsed by condemnation from within. The long suffering that
+followed was a splendid school for the teaching of endurance.
+
+The day before the pamphlet was put on sale we ourselves delivered
+copies to the Chief Clerk of the Magistrates at Guildhall, to the
+officer in charge at the City Police Office in Old Jewry, and to the
+Solicitor for the City of London. With each pamphlet was a notice that
+we would attend and sell the book from 4 to 5 p.m. on the following
+day, Saturday, March 24th. This we accordingly did, and in order to
+save trouble we offered to attend daily at the shop from 10 to 11 a.m.
+to facilitate our arrest, should the authorities determine to
+prosecute. The offer was readily accepted, and after some little
+delay--during which a deputation from the Christian Evidence Society
+waited upon Mr. Cross to urge the Tory Government to prosecute
+us--warrants were issued against us and we were arrested on April 6th.
+Letters of approval and encouragement came from the most diverse
+quarters, including among their writers General Garibaldi, the
+well-known economist, Yves Guyot, the great French constitutional
+lawyer, Emile Acollas, together with letters literally by the hundred
+from poor men and women thanking and blessing us for the stand taken.
+Noticeable were the numbers of letters from clergymen's wives, and
+wives of ministers of all denominations.
+
+After our arrest we were taken to the police-station in Bridewell
+Place, and thence to the Guildhall, where Alderman Figgins was
+sitting, before whom we duly appeared, while in the back of the court
+waited what an official described as "a regular waggon-load of bail."
+We were quickly released, the preliminary investigation being fixed
+for ten days later--April 17th. At the close of the day the magistrate
+released us on our own recognisances, without bail; and it was so
+fully seen on all sides that we were fighting for a principle that no
+bail was asked for during the various stages of the trial. Two days
+later we were committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court, but
+Mr. Bradlaugh moved for a writ of _certiorari_ to remove the trial to
+the Court of Queen's Bench; Lord Chief Justice Cockburn said he would
+grant the writ if "upon looking at it (the book), we think its object
+is the legitimate one of promoting knowledge on a matter of human
+interest," but not if the science were only a cover for impurity, and
+he directed that copies of the book should be handed in for perusal by
+himself and Mr. Justice Mellor. Having read the book they granted the
+writ.
+
+The trial commenced on June 18th before the Lord Chief Justice of
+England and a special jury, Sir Hardinge Giffard, the
+Solicitor-General of the Tory Government, leading against us, and we
+defending ourselves. The Lord Chief Justice "summed up strongly for an
+acquittal," as a morning paper said; he declared that "a more
+ill-advised and more injudicious proceeding in the way of a
+prosecution was probably never brought into a court of justice," and
+described us as "two enthusiasts who have been actuated by a desire to
+do good in a particular department of society." He then went on to a
+splendid statement of the law of population, and ended by praising our
+straightforwardness and asserting Knowlton's honesty of intention.
+Every one in court thought that we had won our case, but they had not
+taken into account the religious and political hatred against us and
+the presence on the jury of such men as Mr. Walter, of the _Times_.
+After an hour and thirty-five minutes of delay the verdict was a
+compromise: "We are unanimously of opinion that the book in question
+is calculated to deprave public morals, but at the same time we
+entirely exonerate the defendants from any corrupt motive in
+publishing it." The Lord Chief Justice looked troubled, and said that
+he should have to translate the verdict into one of guilty, and on
+that some of the jury turned to leave the box, it having been
+agreed--we heard later from one of them--that if the verdict were not
+accepted in that form they should retire again, as six of the jury
+were against convicting us; but the foreman, who was bitterly hostile,
+jumped at the chance of snatching a conviction, and none of those in
+our favour had the courage to contradict him on the spur of the
+moment, so the foreman's "Guilty" passed, and the judge set us free,
+on Mr. Bradlaugh's recognisances to come up for judgment that day
+week.
+
+On that day we moved to quash the indictment and for a new trial,
+partly on a technical ground and partly on the ground that the
+verdict, having acquitted us of wrong motive, was in our favour, not
+against us. On this the Court did not agree with us, holding that the
+part of the indictment alleging corrupt motive was superfluous. Then
+came the question of sentence, and on this the Lord Chief Justice did
+his best to save us; we were acquitted of any intent to violate the
+law; would we submit to the verdict of the jury and promise not to
+sell the book? No, we would not; we claimed the right to sell, and
+meant to vindicate it. The judge pleaded, argued, finally got angry
+with us, and, at last, compelled to pass sentence, he stated that if
+we would have yielded he would have let us go free without penalty,
+but that as we would set ourselves against the law, break it and defy
+it--a sore offence from the judge's point of view--he could only pass
+a heavy sentence on each of six months' imprisonment, a fine of £200,
+and recognisances of £500 for two years, and this, as he again
+repeated, upon the assumption "that they do intend to set the law at
+defiance." Even despite this he made us first-class misdemeanants.
+Then, as Mr. Bradlaugh stated that we should move for a writ of error,
+he liberated us on Mr. Bradlaugh's recognisance for £100, the queerest
+comment on his view of the case and of our characters, since we were
+liable jointly to £1,400 under the sentence, to say nothing of the
+imprisonment. But prison and money penalties vanished into thin air,
+for the writ of error was granted, proved successful, and the verdict
+was quashed.
+
+Then ensued a somewhat anxious time. We were resolute to continue
+selling; were our opponents equally resolved to prosecute us? We could
+not tell. I wrote a pamphlet entitled "The Law of Population," giving
+the arguments which had convinced me of its truth, the terrible
+distress and degradation entailed on families by overcrowding and the
+lack of the necessaries of life, pleading for early marriages that
+prostitution might be destroyed, and limitation of the family that
+pauperism might be avoided; finally, giving the information which
+rendered early marriage without these evils possible. This pamphlet
+was put in circulation as representing our view of the subject, and we
+again took up the sale of Knowlton's. Mr. Bradlaugh carried the war
+into the enemy's country, and commenced an action against the police
+for the recovery of some pamphlets they had seized; he carried the
+action to a successful issue, recovered the pamphlets, bore them off
+in triumph, and we sold them all with an inscription across them,
+"Recovered from the police." We continued the sale of Knowlton's tract
+for some time, until we received an intimation that no further
+prosecution would be attempted, and on this we at once dropped its
+publication, substituting for it my "Law of Population."
+
+[Illustration: CHARLES BRADLAUGH M.P.]
+
+But the worst part of the fight, for me, was to come. Prosecution of
+the "Law of Population" was threatened, but never commenced; a worse
+weapon against me was in store. An attempt had been made in August,
+1875, to deprive me of the custody of my little girl by hiding her
+away when she went on her annual visit of one month to her father, but
+I had promptly recovered her by threatening to issue a writ of _habeas
+corpus._ Now it was felt that the Knowlton trial might be added to the
+charges of blasphemy that could be urged against me, and that this
+double-barrelled gun might be discharged with effect. I received
+notice in January, 1878, that an application was to be made to the
+High Court of Chancery to deprive me of the child, but the petition
+was not filed till the following April. Mabel was dangerously ill with
+scarlet fever at the time, and though this fact was communicated to
+her father I received a copy of the petition while sitting at her
+bedside. The petition alleged that, "The said Annie Besant is, by
+addresses, lectures, and writings, endeavouring to propagate the
+principles of Atheism, and has published a book entitled 'The Gospel
+of Atheism.' She has also associated herself with an infidel lecturer
+and author named Charles Bradlaugh in giving lectures and in
+publishing books and pamphlets, whereby the truth of the Christian
+religion is impeached, and disbelief in all religion inculcated."
+
+It further alleged against me the publication of the Knowlton
+pamphlet, and the writing of the "Law of Population." Unhappily, the
+petition came for hearing before the then Master of the Rolls, Sir
+George Jessel, a man animated by the old spirit of Hebrew bigotry, to
+which he had added the time-serving morality of a "man of the world,"
+sceptical as to all sincerity, and contemptuous of all devotion to an
+unpopular cause. The treatment I received at his hands on my first
+appearance in court told me what I had to expect. I had already had
+some experience of English judges, the stately kindness and gentleness
+of the Lord Chief Justice, the perfect impartiality and dignified
+courtesy of the Lords Justices of Appeal. My astonishment, then, can
+be imagined when, in answer to a statement by Mr. Ince, Q.C., that I
+appeared in person, I heard a harsh, loud voice exclaim:
+
+"Appear in person? A lady appear in person? Never heard of such a
+thing! Does the lady really appear in person?"
+
+As the London papers had been full of my appearing in person in the
+other courts and had contained the high compliments of the Lord Chief
+Justice on my conduct of my own case, Sir George Jessel's pretended
+astonishment seemed a little overdone. After a variety of similar
+remarks delivered in the most grating tones and in the roughest
+manner, Sir George Jessel tried to obtain his object by browbeating me
+directly. "Is this the lady?"
+
+"I am the respondent, my lord, Mrs. Besant."
+
+"Then I advise you, Mrs. Besant, to employ counsel to represent you,
+if you can afford it; and I suppose you can."
+
+"With all submission to your lordship, I am afraid I must claim my
+right of arguing my case in person."
+
+"You will do so if you please, of course, but I think you had much
+better appear by counsel. I give you notice that, if you do not, you
+must not expect to be shown any consideration. You will not be heard
+by me at any greater length than the case requires, nor allowed to go
+into irrelevant matter, as persons who argue their own cases usually
+do."
+
+"I trust I shall not do so, my lord; but in any case I shall be
+arguing under your lordship's complete control."
+
+This encouraging beginning may be taken as a sample of the case--it
+was one long fight against clever counsel, aided by a counsel instead
+of a judge on the bench. Only once did judge and counsel fall out. Mr.
+Ince and Mr. Bardswell had been arguing that my Atheism and
+Malthusianism made me an unfit guardian for my child; Mr. Ince
+declared that Mabel, educated by me, would "be helpless for good in
+this world," and "hopeless for good hereafter, outcast in this life
+and damned in the next." Mr. Bardswell implored the judge to consider
+that my custody of her "would be detrimental to the future prospects
+of the child in society, to say nothing of her eternal prospects." Had
+not the matter been to me of such heart-breaking importance, I could
+have laughed at the mixture of Mrs. Grundy, marriage establishment,
+and hell, presented as an argument for robbing a mother of her child.
+But Mr. Bardswell carelessly forgot that Sir George Jessel was a Jew,
+and lifting eyes to heaven in horrified appeal, he gasped out:
+
+"Your lordship, I think, will scarcely credit it, but Mrs. Besant
+says, in a later affidavit, that she took away the Testament from the
+child because it contained coarse passages unfit for a child to read."
+
+The opportunity was too tempting for a Jew to refrain from striking at
+a book written by apostate Jews, and Sir George Jessel answered
+sharply:
+
+"It is not true to say there are no passages unfit for a child's
+reading, because I think there are a great many."
+
+"I do not know of any passages that could fairly be called coarse."
+
+"I cannot quite assent to that."
+
+Barring this little episode judge and counsel showed a charming
+unanimity. I distinctly said I was an Atheist, that I had withdrawn
+the child from religious instruction at the day-school she attended,
+that I had written various anti-Christian books, and so on; but I
+claimed the child's custody on the ground that the deed of separation
+distinctly gave it to me, and had been executed by her father after I
+had left the Christian Church, and that my opinions were not
+sufficient to invalidate it. It was admitted on the other side that
+the child was admirably cared for, and there was no attempt at
+attacking my personal character. The judge stated that I had taken the
+greatest possible care of the child, but decided that the mere fact of
+my refusing to give the child religious instruction was sufficient
+ground for depriving me of her custody. Secular education he regarded
+as "not only reprehensible, but detestable, and likely to work utter
+ruin to the child, and I certainly should upon this ground alone
+decide that this child ought not to remain another day under the care
+of her mother."
+
+Sir George Jessel denounced also my Malthusian views in a fashion at
+once so brutal and so untruthful as to facts, that some years later
+another judge, the senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court of New
+South Wales, declared in a judgment delivered in his own court that
+there was "no language used by Lord Cockburn which justified the
+Master of the Rolls in assuming that Lord Cockburn regarded the book
+as obscene," and that "little weight is to be attached to his opinion
+on a point not submitted for his decision"; he went on to administer a
+sharp rebuke for the way in which Sir George Jessel travelled outside
+the case, and remarked that "abuse, however, of an unpopular opinion,
+whether indulged in by judges or other people, is not argument, nor
+can the vituperation of opponents in opinion prove them to be
+immoral." However, Sir George Jessel was all-powerful in his own
+court, and he deprived me of my child, refusing to stay the order even
+until the hearing of my appeal against his decision. A messenger from
+the father came to my house, and the little child was carried away by
+main force, shrieking and struggling, still weak from the fever, and
+nearly frantic with fear and passionate resistance. No access to her
+was given me, and I gave notice that if access were denied me, I would
+sue for a restitution of conjugal rights, merely that I might see my
+children. But the strain had been too great, and I nearly went mad,
+spending hours pacing up and down the empty rooms, striving to weary
+myself to exhaustion that I might forget. The loneliness and silence
+of the house, of which my darling had always been the sunshine and the
+music, weighed on me like an evil dream; I listened for the patter of
+the dancing feet, and merry, thrilling laughter that rang through the
+garden, the sweet music of the childish voice; during my sleepless
+nights I missed in the darkness the soft breathing of the little
+child; each morning I longed in vain for the clinging arms and soft,
+sweet kisses. At last health broke down, and fever struck me, and
+mercifully gave me the rest of pain and delirium instead of the agony
+of conscious loss. Through that terrible illness, day after day, Mr.
+Bradlaugh came to me, and sat writing beside me, feeding me with ice
+and milk, refused from all others, and behaving more like a tender
+mother than a man friend; he saved my life, though it seemed to me for
+awhile of little value, till the first months of lonely pain were
+over. When recovered, I took steps to set aside an order obtained by
+Mr. Besant during my illness, forbidding me to bring any suit against
+him, and even the Master of the Rolls, on hearing that all access had
+been denied to me, and the money due to me stopped, uttered words of
+strong condemnation of the way in which I had been treated. Finally
+the deed of separation executed in 1873 was held to be good as
+protecting Mr. Besant from any suit brought by me, whether for divorce
+or for restitution of conjugal rights, while the clauses giving me the
+custody of the child were set aside. The Court of Appeal in April,
+1879, upheld the decision, the absolute right of the father as against
+a married mother being upheld. This ignoring of all right to her
+children on the part of the married mother is a scandal and a wrong
+that has since been redressed by Parliament, and the husband has no
+longer in his grasp this instrument of torture, whose power to agonise
+depends on the tenderness and strength of the motherliness of the
+wife. In the days when the law took my child from me, it virtually
+said to all women: "Choose which of these two positions, as wife and
+mother, you will occupy. If you are legally your husband's wife, you
+can have no legal claim to your children; if legally you are your
+husband's mistress, your rights as mother are secure." That stigma on
+marriage is now removed.
+
+One thing I gained in the Court of Appeal. The Court expressed a
+strong view as to my right of access, and directed me to apply to Sir
+George Jessel for it, adding that it could not doubt he would grant
+it. Under cover of this I applied to the Master of the Rolls, and
+obtained liberal access to the children; but I found that my visits
+kept Mabel in a continual state of longing and fretting for me, while
+the ingenious forms of petty insult that were devised against me and
+used in the children's presence would soon become palpable to them and
+cause continual pain. So, after a painful struggle with myself, I
+resolved to give up the right of seeing them, feeling that thus only
+could I save them from constantly recurring conflict, destructive of
+all happiness and of all respect for one or the other parent.
+Resolutely I turned my back on them that I might spare them trouble,
+and determined that, robbed of my own, I would be a mother to all
+helpless children I could aid, and cure the pain at my own heart by
+soothing the pain of others.
+
+As far as regards this whole struggle over the Knowlton pamphlet,
+victory was finally won all along the line. Not only did we, as
+related, recover all our seized pamphlets, and continue the sale till
+all prosecution and threat of prosecution were definitely surrendered;
+but my own tract had an enormous sale, so that when I withdrew it from
+sale in June, 1891, I was offered a large sum for the copyright, an
+offer which I, of course, refused. Since that time not a copy has been
+sold with my knowledge or permission, but long ere that the pamphlet
+had received a very complete legal vindication. For while it
+circulated untouched in England, a prosecution was attempted against
+it in New South Wales, but was put an end to by an eloquent and
+luminous judgment by the senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court, Mr.
+Justice Windmeyer, in December, 1888. This judge, the most respected
+in the great Australian colony, spoke out plainly and strongly on the
+morality of such teaching. "Take the case," he said, "of a woman
+married to a drunken husband, steadily ruining his constitution and
+hastening to the drunkard's doom, loss of employment for himself,
+semi-starvation for his family, and finally death, without a shilling
+to leave those whom he has brought into the world, but armed with the
+authority of the law to treat his wife as his slave, ever brutally
+insisting on the indulgence of his marital rights. Where is the
+immorality, if, already broken in health from unresting maternity,
+having already a larger family than she can support when the miserable
+breadwinner has drunk himself to death, the woman avails herself of
+the information given in this book, and so averts the consequences of
+yielding to her husband's brutal insistence on his marital rights?
+Already weighted with a family that she is unable to decently bring
+up, the immorality, it seems to me, would be in the reckless and
+criminal disregard of precautions which would prevent her bringing
+into the world daughters whose future outlook as a career would be
+prostitution, or sons whose inherited taint of alcoholism would soon
+drag them down with their sisters to herd with the seething mass of
+degenerate and criminal humanity that constitutes the dangerous
+classes of great cities. In all these cases the appeal is from
+thoughtless, unreasoning prejudice to conscience, and, if listened to,
+its voice will be heard unmistakably indicating where the path of duty
+lies."
+
+The judge forcibly refused to be any party to the prohibition of such
+a pamphlet, regarding it as of high service to the community. He said:
+"So strong is the dread of the world's censure upon this topic that
+few have the courage openly to express their views upon it; and its
+nature is such that it is only amongst thinkers who discuss all
+subjects, or amongst intimate acquaintances, that community of thought
+upon the question is discovered. But let any one inquire amongst those
+who have sufficient education and ability to think for themselves, and
+who do not idly float, slaves to the current of conventional opinion,
+and he will discover that numbers of men and women of purest lives, of
+noblest aspirations, pious, cultivated, and refined, see no wrong in
+teaching the ignorant that it is wrong to bring into the world
+children to whom they cannot do justice, and who think it folly to
+stop short in telling them simply and plainly how to prevent it. A
+more robust view of morals teaches that it is puerile to ignore human
+passions and human physiology. A clearer perception of truth and the
+safety of trusting to it teaches that in law, as in religion, it is
+useless trying to limit the knowledge of mankind by any inquisitorial
+attempts to place upon a judicial Index Expurgatorius works written
+with an earnest purpose, and commending themselves to thinkers of
+well-balanced minds. I will be no party to any such attempt. I do not
+believe that it was ever meant that the Obscene Publication Act should
+apply to cases of this kind, but only to the publication of such
+matter as all good men would regard as lewd and filthy, to lewd and
+bawdy novels, pictures and exhibitions, evidently published and given
+for lucre's sake. It could never have been intended to stifle the
+expression of thought by the earnest-minded on a subject of
+transcendent national importance like the present, and I will not
+strain it for that purpose. As pointed out by Lord Cockburn in the
+case of the Queen v. Bradlaugh and Besant, all prosecutions of this
+kind should be regarded as mischievous, even by those who disapprove
+the opinions sought to be stifled, inasmuch as they only tend more
+widely to diffuse the teaching objected to. To those, on the other
+hand, who desire its promulgation, it must be a matter of
+congratulation that this, like all attempted persecutions of thinkers,
+will defeat its own object, and that truth, like a torch, 'the more
+it's shook it shines.'"
+
+The argument of Mr. Justice Windmeyer for the Neo-Malthusian position
+was (as any one may see who reads the full text of the judgment) one
+of the most luminous and cogent I have ever read. The judgment was
+spoken of at the time in the English press as a "brilliant triumph for
+Mrs. Besant," and so I suppose it was; but no legal judgment could
+undo the harm wrought on the public mind in England by malignant and
+persistent misrepresentation. What that trial and its results cost me
+in pain no one but myself will ever know; on the other hand, there was
+the passionate gratitude evidenced by letters from thousands of poor
+married women--many from the wives of country clergymen and
+curates--thanking and blessing me for showing them how to escape from
+the veritable hell in which they lived. The "upper classes" of society
+know nothing about the way in which the poor live; how their
+overcrowding destroys all sense of personal dignity, of modesty, of
+outward decency, till human life, as Bishop Fraser justly said, is
+"degraded below the level of the swine." To such, and among such I
+went, and I could not grudge the price that then seemed to me as the
+ransom for their redemption. To me, indeed, it meant the losing of all
+that made life dear, but for them it seemed to be the gaining of all
+that gave hope of a better future. So how could I hesitate--I whose
+heart had been fired by devotion to an ideal Humanity, inspired by
+that Materialism that is of love and not of hate?
+
+And now, in August, 1893, we find the _Christian World,_ the
+representative organ of orthodox Christian Protestantism, proclaiming
+the right and the duty of voluntary limitation of the family. In a
+leading article, after a number of letters had been inserted, it
+said:--
+
+"The conditions are assuredly wrong which bring one member of the
+married partnership into a bondage so cruel. It is no less evident
+that the cause of the bondage in such cases lies in the too rapid
+multiplication of the family. There was a time when any idea of
+voluntary limitation was regarded by pious people as interfering with
+Providence. We are beyond that now, and have become capable of
+recognising that Providence works through the common sense of
+individual brains. We limit population just as much by deferring
+marriage from prudential motives as by any action that may be taken
+after it.... Apart from certain methods of limitation, the morality of
+which is gravely questioned by many, there are certain
+easily-understood physiological laws of the subject, the failure to
+know and to observe which is inexcusable on the part either of men or
+women in these circumstances. It is worth noting in this connection
+that Dr. Billings, in his article in this month's _Forum_, on the
+diminishing birth-rate of the United States, gives as one of the
+reasons the greater diffusion of intelligence, by means of popular and
+school treatises on physiology, than formerly prevailed."
+
+Thus has opinion changed in sixteen years, and all the obloquy poured
+on us is seen to have been the outcome of ignorance and bigotry.
+
+As for the children, what was gained by their separation from me? The
+moment they were old enough to free themselves, they came back to me,
+my little girl's too brief stay with me being ended by her happy
+marriage, and I fancy the fears expressed for her eternal future will
+prove as groundless as the fears for her temporal ruin have proved to
+be! Not only so, but both are treading in my steps as regards their
+views of the nature and destiny of man, and have joined in their
+bright youth the Theosophical Society to which, after so many
+struggles, I won my way.
+
+The struggle on the right to discuss the prudential restraint of
+population did not, however, conclude without a martyr. Mr. Edward
+Truelove, alluded to above, was prosecuted for selling a treatise by
+Robert Dale Owen on "Moral Physiology," and a pamphlet entitled,
+"Individual, Family, and National Poverty." He was tried on February
+1, 1878, before the Lord Chief Justice in the Court of Queen's Bench,
+and was most ably defended by Professor W.A. Hunter. The jury spent
+two hours in considering their verdict, and returned into court and
+stated that they were unable to agree. The majority of the jury were
+ready to convict, if they felt sure that Mr. Truelove would not be
+punished, but one of them boldly declared in court: "As to the book,
+it is written in plain language for plain people, and I think that
+many more persons ought to know what the contents of the book are."
+The jury was discharged, in consequence of this one man's courage, but
+Mr. Truelove's persecutors--the Vice Society--were determined not to
+let their victim free. They proceeded to trial a second time, and
+wisely endeavoured to secure a special jury, feeling that as
+prudential restraint would raise wages by limiting the supply of
+labour, they would be more likely to obtain a verdict from a jury of
+"gentlemen" than from one composed of workers. This attempt was
+circumvented by Mr. Truelove's legal advisers, who let a _procedendo_
+go which sent back the trial to the Old Bailey. The second trial was
+held on May 16th at the Central Criminal Court before Baron Pollock
+and a common jury, Professor Hunter and Mr. J.M. Davidson appearing
+for the defence. The jury convicted, and the brave old man,
+sixty-eight years of age, was condemned to four months' imprisonment
+and £50 fine for selling a pamphlet which had been sold unchallenged,
+during a period of forty-five years, by James Watson, George Jacob
+Holyoake, Austin Holyoake, and Charles Watts. Mr. Grain, the counsel
+employed by the Vice Society, most unfairly used against Mr. Truelove
+my "Law of Population," a pamphlet which contained, Baron Pollock
+said, "the head and front of the offence in the other [the Knowlton]
+case." I find an indignant protest against this odious unfairness in
+the _National Reformer_ for May 19th: "My 'Law of Population' was used
+against Mr. Truelove as an aggravation of his offence, passing over
+the utter meanness--worthy only of Collette--of using against a
+prisoner a book whose author has never been attacked for writing
+it--does Mr. Collette, or do the authorities, imagine that the
+severity shown to Mr. Truelove will in any fashion deter me from
+continuing the Malthusian propaganda? Let me here assure them, one and
+all, that it will do nothing of the kind; I shall continue to sell the
+'Law of Population' and to advocate scientific checks to population,
+just as though Mr. Collette and his Vice Society were all dead and
+buried. In commonest justice they are bound to prosecute me, and if
+they get, and keep, a verdict against me, and succeed in sending me to
+prison, they will only make people more anxious to read my book, and
+make me more personally powerful as a teacher of the views which they
+attack."
+
+A persistent attempt was made to obtain a writ of error in Mr.
+Truelove's case, but the Tory Attorney-General, Sir John Holker,
+refused it, although the ground on which it was asked was one of the
+grounds on which a similar writ had been granted to Mr. Bradlaugh and
+myself. Mr. Truelove was therefore compelled to suffer his sentence,
+but memorials, signed by 11,000 persons, asking for his release, were
+sent to the Home Secretary from every part of the country, and a
+crowded meeting in St. James's Hall, London, demanded his liberation
+with only six dissentients. The whole agitation did not shorten Mr.
+Truelove's sentence by a single day, and he was not released from
+Coldbath Fields Prison until September 5th. On the 12th of the same
+month the Hall of Science was crowded with enthusiastic friends, who
+assembled to do him honour, and he was presented with a
+beautifully-illuminated address and a purse containing £177
+(subsequent subscriptions raised the amount to £197 16s. 6d.).
+
+It is scarcely necessary to say that one of the results of the
+prosecution was a great agitation throughout the country, and a wide
+popularisation of Malthusian views. Some huge demonstrations were held
+in favour of free discussion; on one occasion the Free Trade Hall,
+Manchester, was crowded to the doors; on another the Star Music Hall,
+Bradford, was crammed in every corner; on another the Town Hall,
+Birmingham, had not a seat or a bit of standing-room unoccupied.
+Wherever we went, separately or together, it was the same story, and
+not only were Malthusian lectures eagerly attended, and Malthusian
+literature eagerly bought, but curiosity brought many to listen to our
+Radical and Freethought lectures, and thousands heard for the first
+time what Secularism really meant. The Press, both London and
+provincial, agreed in branding the prosecution as foolish, and it was
+generally remarked that it resulted only in the wider circulation of
+the indicted book, and the increased popularity of those who had stood
+for the right of publication. The furious attacks since made upon us
+have been made chiefly by those who differ from us in theological
+creed, and who have found a misrepresentation of our prosecution
+served them as a convenient weapon of attack. During the last few
+years public opinion has been gradually coming round to our side, in
+consequence of the pressure of poverty resulting from widespread
+depression of trade, and during the sensation caused in 1884 by "The
+Bitter Cry of Outcast London," many writers in the _Daily
+News_--notably Mr. G.R. Sims--boldly alleged that the distress was to
+a great extent due to the large families of the poor, and mentioned
+that we had been prosecuted for giving the very knowledge which would
+bring salvation to the sufferers in our great cities.
+
+Among the useful results of the prosecution was the establishment of
+the Malthusian League, "to agitate for the abolition of all penalties
+on the public discussion of the population question," and "to spread
+among the people, by all practicable means, a knowledge of the law of
+population, of its consequences, and of its bearing upon human conduct
+and morals." The first general meeting of the League was held at the
+Hall of Science on July 26, 1877, and a council of twenty persons was
+elected, and this council on August 2nd elected Dr. C.R. Drysdale,
+M.D., President; Mr. Swaagman, Treasurer; Mrs. Besant, Secretary; Mr.
+Shearer, Assistant-Secretary; and Mr. Hember, Financial Secretary.
+Since 1877 the League, under the same indefatigable president, has
+worked hard to carry out its objects; it has issued a large number of
+leaflets and tracts; it supports a monthly journal, the _Malthusian;_
+numerous lectures have been delivered under its auspices in all parts
+of the country; and it has now a medical branch, into which none but
+duly qualified medical men and women are admitted, with members in all
+European countries.
+
+Another result of the prosecution was the accession of "D." to the
+staff of the _National Reformer_. This able and thoughtful writer came
+forward and joined our ranks as soon as he heard of the attack on us,
+and he further volunteered to conduct the journal during our expected
+imprisonment. From that time to this--a period of fifteen
+years--articles from his pen appeared in its columns week by week, and
+during all that time not one solitary difficulty arose between editors
+and contributor. In public a trustworthy colleague, in private a warm
+and sincere friend, "D." proved an unmixed benefit bestowed upon us by
+the prosecution.
+
+Nor was "D." the only friend brought to us by our foes. I cannot ever
+think of that time without remembering that the prosecution brought me
+first into close intimacy with Mrs. Annie Parris--the wife of Mr.
+Touzeau Parris, the Secretary of the Defence Committee throughout all
+the fight--a lady who, during that long struggle, and during the, for
+me, far worse struggle that succeeded it, over the custody of my
+daughter, proved to me the most loving and sisterly of friends. One or
+two other friendships which will, I hope, last my life, date from that
+same time of strife and anxiety.
+
+The amount of money subscribed by the public during the Knowlton and
+succeeding prosecutions gives some idea of the interest felt in the
+struggle. The Defence Fund Committee in March, 1878, presented a
+balance-sheet, showing subscriptions amounting to £1,292 5s. 4d., and
+total expenditure in the Queen v. Bradlaugh and Besant, the Queen v.
+Truelove, and the appeal against Mr. Vaughan's order (the last two up
+to date) of £1,274 10s. This account was then closed and the balance
+of £17 15s. 4d. passed on to a new fund for the defence of Mr.
+Truelove, the carrying on of the appeal against the destruction of the
+Knowlton pamphlet, and the bearing of the costs incident on the
+petition lodged against myself. In July this new fund had reached £196
+16s. 7d., and after paying the remainder of the costs in Mr.
+Truelove's case, a balance of £26 15s. 2d. was carried on. This again
+rose to £247 15s. 2-1/2d., and the fund bore the expenses of Mr.
+Bradlaugh's successful appeal on the Knowlton pamphlet, the petition
+and subsequent proceedings in which I was concerned in the Court of
+Chancery, and an appeal on Mr. Truelove's behalf, unfortunately
+unsuccessful, against an order for the destruction of the Dale Owen
+pamphlet. This last decision was given on February 21, 1880, and on
+this the Defence Fund was closed. On Mr. Truelove's release, as
+mentioned above, a testimonial to the amount of £197 16s. 6d. was
+presented to him, and after the close of the struggle some anonymous
+friend sent to me personally £200 as "thanks for the courage and
+ability shown." In addition to all this, the Malthusian League
+received no less than £455 11s. 9d. during the first year of its life,
+and started on its second year with a balance in hand of £77 5s. 8d.
+
+A somewhat similar prosecution in America, in which the bookseller,
+Mr. D.M. Bennett, sold a book with which he did not agree, and was
+imprisoned, led to our giving him a warm welcome when, after his
+release, he visited England. We entertained him at the Hall of Science
+at a crowded gathering, and I was deputed as spokesman to present him
+with a testimonial. This I did in the following speech, quoted here in
+order to show the spirit then animating me:--
+
+"Friends, Mr. Bradlaugh has spoken of the duty that calls us here
+to-night. It is pleasant to think that in our work that duty is one to
+which we are not unaccustomed. In our army there are more true
+soldiers than traitors, more that are faithful to the trust of keeping
+the truth than those who shrink when the hour of danger comes. And I
+would ask Mr. Bennett to-night not to measure English feeling towards
+him by the mere number of those present. They that are here are
+representatives of many thousands of our fellow-countrymen. Glance
+down this middle table, and you will see that it is not without some
+right that we claim to welcome you in the name of multitudes of the
+citizens of England. There are those who taunt us with want of
+loyalty, and with the name of infidels. In what church will they find
+men and women more loyal to truth and conscience? The name infidel is
+not for us so long as we are faithful to the truth we know. If I
+speak, as I have done, of national representation in this hall this
+evening, tell me, you who know those who sit here, who have watched
+some of them for years, others of them but for a brief time, do I not
+speak truth? Take them one by one. Your President but a little while
+ago in circumstances similar to those wherein our guest himself was
+placed, with the true lover's keenness that recognises the mistress
+under all disguise, beholding his mistress Liberty in danger, under
+circumstances that would have blinded less sure eyes, leapt to her
+rescue. He risked the ambition of his life rather than be disloyal to
+liberty. And next is seated a woman, who, student of a noble
+profession, thought that liberty had greater claim upon her than even
+her work. When we stood in worse peril than even loss of liberty, she
+risked her own good name for the truth's sake. One also is here who,
+eminent in his own profession, came with the weight of his position
+and his right to speak, and gave a kindred testimony. One step
+further, and you see one who, soldier to liberty, throughout a long
+and spotless life, when the task was far harder than it is to-day,
+when there were no greetings, no welcomes, when to serve was to peril
+name as well as liberty, never flinched from the first until now. He
+is crowned with the glory of the jail, that was his for no crime but
+for claiming the right to publish that wherein the noblest thought is
+uttered in the bravest words. And next to him is another who speaks
+for liberty, who has brought culture, university degree, position in
+men's sight, and many friends, and cast them all at her beloved feet.
+Sir, not alone the past and the present greet you to-night. The future
+also greets you with us. We have here also those who are training
+themselves to walk in the footsteps of the one most dear to them, who
+shall carry on, when we have passed away, the work which we shall have
+dropped from our hands. But he whom we delight to honour at this hour
+in truth honours us, in that he allows us to offer him the welcome
+that it is our glory and our pleasure to give. He has fought bravely.
+The Christian creed had in its beginning more traitors and less true
+hearts than the creed of to-day. We are happy to-day not only in the
+thought of what manner of men we have for leaders, but in the thought
+of what manner of men we have as soldiers in our army. Jesus had
+twelve apostles. One betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver; a
+second denied Him. They all forsook Him and fled. We can scarcely
+point to one who has thus deserted our sacred cause. The traditions of
+our party tell us of many who went to jail because they claimed for
+all that right of free speech which is the heritage of all. One of the
+most famous members of our body in England, Richard Carlile, turned
+bookseller to sell books that were prosecuted. This man became
+Free-thinker, driven thereto by the bigotry and wickedness of the
+Churches. He sold the books of Hone not because he agreed with them,
+but because Hone was prosecuted. He saw that the book in whose
+prosecution freedom was attacked was the book for the freeman to sell;
+and the story of our guest shows that in all this England and America
+are one. Those who gave Milton to the world can yet bring forth men of
+the same stamp in continents leagues asunder. Because our friend was
+loyal and true, prison had to him no dread. It was far, far less of
+dishonour to wear the garb of the convict than to wear that of the
+hypocrite. The society we represent, like his society in America,
+pleads for free thought, speaks for free speech, claims for every one,
+however antagonistic, the right to speak the thought he feels. It is
+better that this should be, even though the thought be wrong, for thus
+the sooner will its error be discovered--better if the thought be
+right, for then the sooner does the gladness of a new truth find place
+in the heart of man. As the mouthpiece, Sir, of our National Secular
+Society, and of its thousands of members, I speak to you now:--
+
+"'ADDRESS.
+
+"'_We seek for Truth_.'
+
+"'To D.M. Bennett.
+
+"'In asking you to accept at the hands of the National Secular Society
+of England this symbol of cordial sympathy and brotherly welcome, we
+are but putting into act the motto of our Society. "We seek for Truth"
+is our badge, and it is as Truthseeker that we do you homage to-night.
+Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free
+speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without free speech progress
+is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards the nobler
+life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of
+free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the
+denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race.
+
+"'In your own country you have pleaded for free speech, and when,
+under a wicked and an odious law, one of your fellow-citizens was
+imprisoned for the publication of his opinions, you, not sharing the
+opinions but faithful to liberty, sprang forward to defend in him the
+principle of free speech which you claimed for yourself, and sold his
+book while he lay in prison. For this act you were in turn arrested
+and sent to jail, and the country which won its freedom by the aid of
+Paine in the eighteenth century disgraced itself in the nineteenth by
+the imprisonment of a heretic. The Republic of the United States
+dishonoured herself, and not you, in Albany penitentiary. Two hundred
+thousand of your countrymen pleaded for your release, but bigotry was
+too strong. We sent you greeting in your captivity; we rejoiced when
+the time came for your release. We offer you to-night our thanks and
+our hope--thanks for the heroism which never flinched in the hour of
+battle, hope for a more peaceful future, in which the memory of a past
+pain may be a sacred heritage and not a regret.
+
+"'Charles Bradlaugh, _President_.'
+
+"Soldier of liberty, we give you this. Do in the future the same good
+service that you have done in the past, and your reward shall be in
+the love that true men shall bear to you."
+
+That, however, which no force could compel me to do, which I refused
+to threats of fine and prison, to separation from my children, to
+social ostracism, and to insults and ignominy worse to bear than
+death, I surrendered freely when all the struggle was over, and a
+great part of society and of public opinion had adopted the view that
+cost Mr. Bradlaugh and myself so dear. I may as well complete the
+story here, so as not to have to refer to it again. I gave up
+Neo-Malthusianism in April, 1891, its renunciation being part of the
+outcome of two years' instruction from Mdme. H.P. Blavatsky, who
+showed me that however justifiable Neo-Malthusianism might be while
+man was regarded only as the most perfect outcome of physical
+evolution, it was wholly incompatible with the view of man as a
+spiritual being, whose material form and environment were the results
+of his own mental activity. Why and how I embraced Theosophy, and
+accepted H.P. Blavatsky as teacher, will soon be told in its proper
+place. Here I am concerned only with the why and how of my
+renunciation of the Neo-Malthusian teaching, for which I had fought so
+hard and suffered so much.
+
+When I built my life on the basis of Materialism I judged all actions
+by their effect on human happiness in this world now and in future
+generations, regarding man as an organism that lived on earth and
+there perished, with activities confined to earth and limited by
+physical laws. The object of life was the ultimate building-up of a
+physically, mentally, morally perfect man by the cumulative effects of
+heredity--mental and moral tendencies being regarded as the outcome of
+material conditions, to be slowly but surely evolved by rational
+selection and the transmission to offspring of qualities carefully
+acquired by, and developed in, parents. The most characteristic note
+of this serious and lofty Materialism had been struck by Professor W.
+K. Clifford in his noble article on the "Ethics of Belief."
+
+Taking this view of human duty in regard to the rational co-operation
+with nature in the evolution of the human race, it became of the first
+importance to rescue the control of the generation of offspring from
+mere blind brute passion, and to transfer it to the reason and to the
+intelligence; to impress on parents the sacredness of the parental
+office, the tremendous responsibility of the exercise of the creative
+function. And since, further, one of the most pressing problems for
+solution in the older countries is that of poverty, the horrible slums
+and dens into which are crowded and in which are festering families of
+eight and ten children, whose parents are earning an uncertain 10s.,
+12s., 15s., and 20s. a week; since an immediate palliative is wanted,
+if popular risings impelled by starvation are to be avoided; since the
+lives of men and women of the poorer classes, and of the worst paid
+professional classes, are one long, heart-breaking struggle "to make
+both ends meet and keep respectable"; since in the middle class
+marriage is often avoided, or delayed till late in life, from the
+dread of the large family, and late marriage is followed by its
+shadow, the prevalence of vice and the moral and social ruin of
+thousands of women; for these, and many other reasons, the teaching of
+the duty of limiting the family within the means of subsistence is the
+logical outcome of Materialism linked with the scientific view of
+evolution, and with a knowledge of the physical law, by which
+evolution is accelerated or retarded. Seeking to improve the physical
+type, scientific Materialism, it seemed to me, must forbid parentage
+to any but healthy married couples; it must restrict childbearing
+within the limits consistent with the thorough health and physical
+well-being of the mother; it must impose it as a duty never to bring
+children into the world unless the conditions for their fair nurture
+and development are present. Regarding it as hopeless, as well as
+mischievous, to preach asceticism, and looking on the conjunction of
+nominal celibacy with widespread prostitution as inevitable, from the
+constitution of human nature, scientific Materialism--quite rationally
+and logically--advises deliberate restriction of the production of
+offspring, while sanctioning the exercise of the sexual instinct
+within the limits imposed by temperance, the highest physical and
+mental efficiency, the good order and dignity of society, and the
+self-respect of the individual.
+
+In all this there is nothing which for one moment implies approval of
+licentiousness, profligacy, unbridled self-indulgence. On the
+contrary, it is a well-considered and intellectually-defensible scheme
+of human evolution, regarding all natural instincts as matters for
+regulation, not for destruction, and seeking to develop the perfectly
+healthy and well-balanced physical body as the necessary basis for the
+healthy and well-balanced mind. If the premises of Materialism be
+true, there is no answer to the Neo-Malthusian conclusions; for even
+those Socialists who have bitterly opposed the promulgation of
+Neo-Malthusianism--regarding it as a "red herring intended to draw the
+attention of the proletariat away from the real cause of poverty, the
+monopoly of land and capital by a class"--admit that when society is
+built on the foundation of common property in all that is necessary
+for the production of wealth, the time will come for the consideration
+of the population question. Nor do I now see, any more than I saw
+then, how any Materialist can rationally avoid the Neo-Malthusian
+position. For if man be the outcome of purely physical causes, it is
+with these that we must deal in guiding his future evolution. If he be
+related but to terrestrial existence, he is but the loftiest organism
+of earth; and, failing to see his past and his future, how should my
+eyes not have been then blinded to the deep-lying causes of his
+present woe? I brought a material cure to a disease which appeared to
+me to be of material origin; but how when the evil came from a subtler
+source, and its causes lay not on the material plane? How if the
+remedy only set up new causes for a future evil, and, while
+immediately a palliative, strengthened the disease itself, and ensured
+its reappearance in the future? This was the view of the problem set
+before me by H.P. Blavatsky when she unrolled the story of man, told
+of his origin and his destiny, showed me the forces that went to the
+making of man, and the true relation between his past, his present,
+and his future.
+
+For what is man in the light of Theosophy? He is a spiritual
+intelligence, eternal and uncreate, treading a vast cycle of human
+experience, born and reborn on earth millennium after millennium,
+evolving slowly into the ideal man. He is not the product of matter,
+but is encased in matter, and the forms of matter with which he
+clothes himself are of his own making. For the intelligence and will
+of man are creative forces--not creative _ex nihilo_, but creative as
+is the brain of the painter--and these forces are exercised by man in
+every act of thought. Thus he is ever creating round him
+thought-forms, moulding subtlest matter into shape by these energies,
+forms which persist as tangible realities when the body of the thinker
+has long gone back to earth and air and water. When the time for
+rebirth into this earth-life comes for the soul these thought-forms,
+its own progeny, help to form the tenuous model into which the
+molecules of physical matter are builded for the making of the body,
+and matter is thus moulded for the new body in which the soul is to
+dwell, on the lines laid down by the intelligent and volitional life
+of the previous, or of many previous, incarnations. So does each man
+create for himself in verity the form wherein he functions, and what
+he is in his present is the inevitable outcome of his own creative
+energies in his past. Applying this to the Neo-Malthusian theory, we
+see in sexual love not only a passion which man has in common with the
+brute, and which forms, at the present stage of evolution, a necessary
+part of human nature, but an animal passion that may be trained and
+purified into a human emotion, which may be used as one of the levers
+in human progress, one of the factors in human growth. But, instead of
+this, man in the past has made his intellect the servant of his
+passions; the abnormal development of the sexual instinct in man--in
+whom it is far greater and more continuous than in any brute--is due
+to the mingling with it of the intellectual element, all sexual
+thoughts, desires, and imaginations having created thought-forms,
+which have been wrought into the human race, giving rise to a
+continual demand, far beyond nature, and in marked contrast with the
+temperance of normal animal life. Hence it has become one of the most
+fruitful sources of human misery and human degradation, and the
+satisfaction of its imperious cravings in civilised countries lies at
+the root of our worst social evils. This excessive development has to
+be fought against, and the instinct reduced within natural limits, and
+this will certainly never be done by easy-going self-indulgence within
+the marital relation any more than by self-indulgence outside it. By
+none other road than that of self-control and self-denial can men and
+women now set going the causes which will build for them brains and
+bodies of a higher type for their future return to earth-life. They
+have to hold this instinct in complete control, to transmute it from
+passion into tender and self-denying affection, to develop the
+intellectual at the expense of the animal, and thus to raise the whole
+man to the human stage, in which every intellectual and physical
+capacity shall subserve the purposes of the soul. From all this it
+follows that Theosophists should sound the note of self-restraint
+within marriage, and the gradual--for with the mass it cannot be
+sudden--restriction of the sexual relation to the perpetuation of the
+race.
+
+Such was the bearing of Theosophical teaching on Neo-Malthusianism, as
+laid before me by H.P. Blavatsky, and when I urged, out of my bitter
+knowledge of the miseries endured by the poor, that it surely might,
+for a time at least, be recommended as a palliative, as a defence in
+the hands of a woman against intolerable oppression and enforced
+suffering, she bade me look beyond the moment, and see how the
+suffering must come back and back with every generation, unless we
+sought to remove the roots of wrong. "I do not judge a woman," she
+said, "who has resort to such means of defence in the midst of
+circumstances so evil, and whose ignorance of the real causes of all
+this misery is her excuse for snatching at any relief. But it is not
+for you, an Occultist, to continue to teach a method which you now
+know must tend to the perpetuation of the sorrow." I felt that she was
+right, and though I shrank from the decision--for my heart somewhat
+failed me at withdrawing from the knowledge of the poor, so far as I
+could, a temporary palliative of evils which too often wreck their
+lives and bring many to an early grave, worn old before even middle
+age has touched them--yet the decision was made. I refused to reprint
+the "Law of Population," or to sell the copyright, giving pain, as I
+sadly knew, to all the brave and loyal friends who had so generously
+stood by me in that long and bitter struggle, and who saw the results
+of victory thrown away on grounds to them inadequate and mistaken!
+Will it always be, I wonder, in man's climbing upward, that every step
+must be set on his own heart and on the hearts of those he loves?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+AT WAR ALL ROUND.
+
+
+Coming back to my work after my long and dangerous illness, I took up
+again its thread, heartsick, but with courage unshaken, and I find
+myself in the _National Reformer_ for September 15, 1878, saying in a
+brief note of thanks that "neither the illness nor the trouble which
+produced it has in any fashion lessened my determination to work for
+the cause." In truth, I plunged into work with added vigour, for only
+in that did I find any solace, but the pamphlets written at this time
+against Christianity were marked with considerable bitterness, for it
+was Christianity that had robbed me of my child, and I struck
+mercilessly at it in return. In the political struggles of that time,
+when the Beaconsfield Government was in full swing, with its policy of
+annexation and aggression, I played my part with tongue and pen, and
+my articles in defence of an honest and liberty-loving policy in
+India, against the invasion of Afghanistan and other outrages, laid in
+many an Indian heart a foundation of affection for me, and seem to me
+now as a preparation for the work among Indians to which much of my
+time and thought to-day are given. In November of this same year
+(1878) I wrote a little book on "England, India, and Afghanistan" that
+has brought me many a warm letter of thanks, and with this, the
+carrying on of the suit against Mr. Besant before alluded to, two and
+often three lectures every Sunday, to say nothing of the editorial
+work on the _National Reformer_, the secretarial work on the
+Malthusian League, and stray lectures during the week, my time was
+fairly well filled. But I found that in my reading I developed a
+tendency to let my thoughts wander from the subject in hand, and that
+they would drift after my lost little one, so I resolved to fill up
+the gaps in my scientific education, and to amuse myself by reading up
+for some examinations; I thought it would serve as an absorbing form
+of recreation from my other work, and would at the same time, by
+making my knowledge exact, render me more useful as a speaker on
+behalf of the causes to which my life was given.
+
+At the opening of the new year (1879) I met for the first time a man
+to whom I subsequently owed much in this department of work--Edward B.
+Aveling, a D.Sc. of London University, and a marvellously able teacher
+of scientific subjects, the very ablest, in fact, that I have ever
+met. Clear and accurate in his knowledge, with a singular gift for
+lucid exposition, enthusiastic in his love of science, and taking
+vivid pleasure in imparting his knowledge to others, he was an ideal
+teacher. This young man, in January, 1879, began writing under
+initials for the _National Reformer_, and in February I became his
+pupil, with the view of matriculating in June at the London
+University, an object which was duly accomplished. And here let me say
+to any one in mental trouble, that they might find an immense relief
+in taking up some intellectual recreation of this kind; during that
+spring, in addition to my ordinary work of writing, lecturing, and
+editing--and the lecturing meant travelling from one end of England to
+the other--I translated a fair-sized French volume, and had the
+wear-and-tear of pleading my case for the custody of my daughter in
+the Court of Appeal, as well as the case before the Master of the
+Rolls; and I found it the very greatest relief to turn to algebra,
+geometry, and physics, and forget the harassing legal struggles in
+wrestling with formulae and problems. The full access I gained to my
+children marked a step in the long battle of Freethinkers against
+disabilities, for, as noted in the _National Reformer_ by Mr.
+Bradlaugh, it was "won with a pleading unequalled in any case on
+record for the boldness of its affirmation of Freethought," a pleading
+of which he generously said that it deserved well of the party as "the
+most powerful pleading for freedom of opinion to which it has ever
+been our good fortune to listen."
+
+In the London _Daily News_ some powerful letters of protest appeared,
+one from Lord Harberton, in which he declared that "the Inquisition
+acted on no other principle" than that applied to me; and a second
+from Mr. Band, in which he sarcastically observed that "this Christian
+community has for some time had the pleasure of seeing her Majesty's
+courts repeatedly springing engines of torture upon a young mother--a
+clergyman's wife who dared to disagree with his creed--and her evident
+anguish, her long and expensive struggles to save her child, have
+proved that so far as heretical mothers are concerned modern defenders
+of the faith need not envy the past those persuasive instruments which
+so long secured the unity of the Church. In making Mrs. Besant an
+example, the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice James have been
+careful not to allow any of the effect to be lost by confusion of the
+main point--the intellectual heresy--with side questions. There was a
+Malthusian matter in the case, but the judges were very clear in
+stating that without any reference whatever to that, they would
+simply, on the ground of Mrs. Besant's 'religious, or anti-religious,
+opinions,' take her child from her." The great provincial papers took
+a similar tone, the _Manchester Examiner_ going so far as to say of
+the ruling of the judges: "We do not say they have done so wrongly. We
+only say that the effect of their judgment is cruel, and it shows that
+the holding of unpopular opinions is, in the eye of the law, an
+offence which, despite all we had thought to the contrary, may be
+visited with the severest punishment a woman and a mother can be
+possibly called on to bear." The outcome of all this long struggle and
+of another case of sore injustice--in which Mrs. Agar-Ellis, a Roman
+Catholic, was separated from her children by a judicial decision
+obtained against her by her husband, a Protestant--was a change in the
+law which had vested all power over the children in the hands of the
+father, and from thenceforth the rights of the married mother were
+recognised to a limited extent. A small side-fight was with the
+National Sunday League, the president of which, Lord Thurlow, strongly
+objected to me as one of the vice-presidents. Mr. P.A. Taylor and
+others at once resigned their offices, and, on the calling of a
+general meeting, Lord Thurlow was rejected as president. Mr. P.A.
+Taylor was requested to assume the presidency, and the vice-presidents
+who had resigned were, with myself, re-elected. Little battles of this
+sort were a running accompaniment of graver struggles during all these
+battling years.
+
+And through all the struggles the organised strength of the
+Freethought party grew, 650 new members being enrolled in the National
+Secular Society in the year 1878-79, and in July, 1879, the public
+adhesion of Dr. Edward B. Aveling brought into the ranks a pen of rare
+force and power, and gave a strong impulse to the educational side of
+our movement. I presided for him at his first lecture at the Hall of
+Science on August 10, 1879, and he soon paid the penalty of his
+boldness, finding himself, a few months later, dismissed from the
+Chair of Comparative Anatomy at the London Hospital, though the Board
+admitted that all his duties were discharged with punctuality and
+ability. One of the first results of his adhesion was the
+establishment of two classes under the Science and Art Department at
+South Kensington, and these grew year after year, attended by numbers
+of young men and women, till in 1883 we had thirteen classes in full
+swing, as well as Latin, and London University Matriculation classes;
+all these were taught by Dr. Aveling and pupils that he had trained. I
+took advanced certificates, one in honours, and so became qualified as
+a science teacher in eight different sciences, and Alice and Hypatia
+Bradlaugh followed a similar course, so that winter after winter we
+kept these classes going from September to the following May, from
+1879 until the year 1888. In addition to these Miss Bradlaugh carried
+on a choral union.
+
+Personally I found that this study and teaching together with
+attendance at classes held for teachers at South Kensington, the study
+for passing the First B.Sc. and Prel. Sc. Examinations at London
+University, and the study for the B.Sc. degree at London, at which I
+failed in practical chemistry three times--a thing that puzzled me not
+a little at the time, as I had passed a far more difficult practical
+chemical examination for teachers at South Kensington--all this gave
+me a knowledge of science that has stood me in good stead in my public
+work. But even here theological and social hatred pursued me.
+
+When Miss Bradlaugh and myself applied for permission to attend the
+botany class at University College, we were refused, I for my sins,
+and she only for being her father's daughter; when I had qualified as
+teacher, I stood back from claiming recognition from the Department
+for a year in order not to prejudice the claims of Mr. Bradlaugh's
+daughters, and later, when I had been recognised, Sir Henry Tyler in
+the House of Commons attacked the Education Department for accepting
+me, and actually tried to prevent the Government grant being paid to
+the Hall of Science Schools because Dr. Aveling, the Misses Bradlaugh,
+and myself were unbelievers in Christianity. When I asked permission
+to go to the Botanical Gardens in Regent's Park the curator refused
+it, on the ground that his daughters studied there. On every side
+repulse and insult, hard to struggle against, bitter to bear. It was
+against difficulties of this kind on every side that we had to make
+our way, handicapped in every effort by our heresy. Let our work be as
+good as it might--and our Science School was exceptionally
+successful--the subtle fragrance of heresy was everywhere
+distinguishable, and when Mr. Bradlaugh and myself are blamed for
+bitterness in our anti-Christian advocacy, this constant gnawing
+annoyance and petty persecution should be taken into account. For him
+it was especially trying, for he saw his daughters--girls of ability
+and of high character, whose only crime was that they were
+his--insulted, sneered at, slandered, continually put at a
+disadvantage, because they were his children and loved and honoured
+him beyond all others.
+
+It was in October, 1879, that I first met Herbert Burrows, though I
+did not become intimately acquainted with him till the Socialist
+troubles of the autumn of 1887 drew us into a common stream of work.
+He came as a delegate from the Tower Hamlets Radical Association to a
+preliminary conference, called by Mr. Bradlaugh, at the Hall of
+Science, on October 11th, to consider the advisability of holding a
+great London Convention on Land Law Reform, to be attended by
+delegates from all parts of the kingdom. He was appointed on the
+Executive Committee with Mr. Bradlaugh, Mr. Mottershead, Mr. Nieass,
+and others. The Convention was successfully held, and an advanced
+platform of Land Law Reform adopted, used later by Mr. Bradlaugh as a
+basis for some of the proposals he laid before Parliament.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+MR. BRADLAUGH'S STRUGGLE.
+
+
+And now dawned the year 1880, the memorable year in which commenced
+Mr. Bradlaugh's long Parliamentary battle. After a long and bitter
+struggle he was elected, with Mr. Labouchere, as member for
+Northampton, at the general election, and so the prize so long fought
+for was won. Shall I ever forget that election day, April 2, 1880? How
+at four o'clock Mr. Bradlaugh came into the room at the "George",
+where his daughters and I were sitting, flung himself into a chair
+with, "There's nothing more to do; our last man is polled." Then the
+waiting for the declaration through the long, weary hours of suspense,
+till as the time drew near we knelt by the window listening--listening
+to the hoarse murmur of the crowd, knowing that presently there would
+be a roar of triumph or a howl of anger when the numbers were read out
+from the steps of the Town Hall. And now silence sank, and we knew the
+moment had come, and we held our breath, and then--a roar, a wild roar
+of joy and exultation, cheer after cheer, ringing, throbbing, pealing,
+and then the mighty surge of the crowd bringing him back, their member
+at last, waving hats, handkerchiefs, a very madness of tumultuous
+delight, and the shrill strains of "Bradlaugh for Northampton!" with a
+ring of triumph in them they had never had before. And he, very grave,
+somewhat shaken by the outpour of love and exultation, very silent,
+feeling the weight of new responsibility more than the gladness of
+victory. And then the next morning, as he left the town, the mass of
+men and women, one sea of heads from hotel to station, every window
+crowded, his colours waving everywhere, men fighting to get near him,
+to touch him, women sobbing, the cries, "Our Charlie, our Charlie;
+we've got you and we'll keep you." How they loved him, how they joyed
+in the triumph won after twelve years of strife. Ah me! we thought the
+struggle over, and it was only beginning; we thought our hero
+victorious, and a fiercer, crueller fight lay in front. True, he was
+to win that fight, but his life was to be the price of the winning;
+victory for him was to be final, complete, but the laurel-wreath was
+to fall upon a grave.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by T. Westley, 57, Vernon Street,
+Northampton._ CHARLES BRADLAUGH AND HENRY LABOUCHERE.]
+
+The outburst of anger from the more bigoted of the Christian community
+was as savage as the outburst of delight had been exultant, but we
+recked little of it. Was he not member, duly elected, without
+possibility of assailment in his legal right? Parliament was to meet
+on April 29th, the swearing-in beginning on the following day, and Mr.
+Bradlaugh had taken counsel with some other Freethinking members as to
+the right of Freethinkers to affirm. He held that under the Act 29 and
+30 Vict. c. 19, and the Evidence Amendment Acts 1869 and 1870, the
+right to substitute affirmation for oath was clear; he was willing to
+take the oath as a necessary form if obligatory, but, believing it to
+be optional, he preferred affirmation. On May 3rd he presented himself
+and, according to the evidence of Sir Erskine May, the Clerk of the
+House, given before the second Select Committee on his case, he "came
+to the table and delivered the following statement in writing to the
+Clerk: 'To the Right Honourable the Speaker of the House of Commons.
+I, the undersigned, Charles Bradlaugh, beg respectfully to claim to be
+allowed to affirm, as a person for the time being by law permitted to
+make a solemn affirmation or declaration, instead of taking an oath.
+(Signed) Charles Bradlaugh.' And being asked by the Clerk upon what
+grounds he claimed to make an affirmation, he answered: 'By virtue of
+the Evidence Amendment Acts, 1869 and 1870.' Whereupon the Clerk
+reported to Mr. Speaker" the claim, and Mr. Speaker told Mr. Bradlaugh
+that he might address the House on the matter. "Mr. Bradlaugh's
+observations were very short. He repeated that he relied upon the
+Evidence Further Amendment Act, 1869, and the Evidence Amendment Act,
+1870, adding: 'I have repeatedly, for nine years past, made an
+affirmation in the highest courts of jurisdiction in this realm. I am
+ready to make such a declaration or affirmation.' Substantially those
+were the words which he addressed to the Speaker." This was the
+simple, quiet, and dignified scene which took place in the House. Mr.
+Bradlaugh was directed to withdraw, and he withdrew, and, after
+debate, a Select Committee was appointed to consider whether he could
+make affirmation; that Committee decided against the claim, and gave
+in its report on May 20th. On the following day Mr. Bradlaugh
+presented himself at the table of the House to take the oath in the
+form prescribed by the law, and on the objection of Sir Henry Drummond
+Wolff, who submitted a motion that he should not be allowed to take
+the oath, another Committee was appointed.
+
+Before this Committee Mr. Bradlaugh stated his case, and pointed out
+that the legal obligation lay on him to take the oath, adding: "Any
+form that I went through, any oath that I took, I should regard as
+binding upon my conscience in the fullest degree. I would go through
+no form, I would take no oath, unless I meant it to be so binding." He
+wrote in the same sense to the _Times_, saying that he should regard
+himself "as bound, not by the letter of its words, but by the spirit
+which the affirmation would have conveyed, had I been permitted to use
+it." The Committee reported against him, and on June 23rd he was heard
+at the Bar of the House, and made a speech so self-restrained, so
+noble, so dignified, that the House, in defiance of all its own rules,
+broke out over and over again into applause. In the debate that
+preceded his speech, members had lost sight of the ordinary rules of
+decency, and had used expressions against myself wholly gratuitous in
+such a quarrel; the grave rebuke to him who "was wanting in chivalry,
+because, while I can answer for myself and am able to answer for
+myself, nothing justified the introduction of any other name beside my
+own to make prejudice against me," brought irrepressible cheers. His
+appeal was wholly to the law. "I have not yet used--I trust no passion
+may tempt me into using--any words that would seem to savour of even a
+desire to enter into conflict with this House. I have always taught,
+preached, and believed the supremacy of Parliament, and it is not
+because for a moment the judgment of one Chamber of Parliament should
+be hostile to me that I am going to deny the ideas I have always held;
+but I submit that one Chamber of Parliament--even its grandest
+Chamber, as I have always held this to be--had no right to override
+the law. The law gives me the right to sign that roll, to take and
+subscribe the oath, and to take my seat there [with a gesture towards
+the benches]. I admit that the moment I am in the House, without any
+reason but your own good will, you can send me away. That is your
+right. You have full control over your members. But you cannot send me
+away until I have been heard in my place, not a suppliant as I am now,
+but with the rightful audience that each member has always had.... I
+am ready to admit, if you please, for the sake of argument, that every
+opinion I hold is wrong and deserves punishment. Let the law punish
+it. If you say the law cannot, then you admit that you have no right,
+and I appeal to public opinion against the iniquity of a decision
+which overrides the law and denies me justice. I beg your pardon, sir,
+and that of the House too, if in this warmth there seems to lack
+respect for its dignity. And as I shall have, if your decision be
+against me, to come to that table when your decision is given, I beg
+you, before the step is taken in which we may both lose our
+dignity--mine is not much, but yours is that of the Commons of
+England--I beg you, before the gauntlet is fatally thrown, I beg you,
+not in any sort of menace, not in any sort of boast, but as one man
+against six hundred, to give me that justice which on the other side
+of this hall the judges would give me, were I pleading there before
+them."
+
+But no eloquence, no plea for justice, could stay the tide of Tory and
+religious bigotry, and the House voted that he should not be allowed
+to take the oath. Summoned to the table to hear the decision
+communicated by the Speaker, he answered that decision with the words
+firmly spoken: "I respectfully refuse to obey the order of the House,
+because that order was against the law." The Speaker appealed to the
+House for direction, and on a division--during which the Speaker and
+Charles Bradlaugh were left together in the chamber--the House ordered
+the enforcement of Mr. Bradlaugh's withdrawal. Once more the order is
+given, once more the refusal made, and then the Serjeant-at-Arms was
+bidden to remove him. Strange was the scene as little Captain Cosset
+walked up to the member of Herculean proportions, and men wondered how
+the order would be enforced; but Charles Bradlaugh was not the man to
+make a vulgar brawl, and the light touch on his shoulder was to him
+the touch of an authority he admitted and to which he bowed. So he
+gravely accompanied his small captor, and was lodged in the Clock
+Tower of the House as prisoner until the House should further consider
+what to do with him--the most awkward prisoner it had ever had, in
+that in his person it was imprisoning the law.
+
+In a special issue of the _National Reformer_, giving an account of
+the Committee's work and of Mr. Bradlaugh's committal to the Clock
+Tower, I find the following from my own pen: "The Tory party, beaten
+at the polls by the nation, has thus, for the moment, triumphed in the
+House of Commons. The man chosen by the Radicals of Northampton has
+been committed to prison on the motion of the Tory ex-Chancellor of
+the Exchequer, simply because he desires to discharge the duty laid
+upon him by his constituency and by the law of the land. As this paper
+goes to press, I go to Westminster to receive from him his directions
+as to the conduct of the struggle with the nation into which the House
+of Commons has so recklessly plunged." I found him busily writing,
+prepared for all events, ready for a long imprisonment. On the
+following day a leaflet from my pen, "Law Makers and Law Breakers,"
+appealed to the people; after reciting what had happened, it
+concluded: "Let the people speak. Gladstone and Bright are for
+Liberty, and the help denied them within the House must come to them
+from without. No time must be lost. While we remain idle, a
+representative of the people is illegally held in prison. Northampton
+is insulted, and in this great constituency every constituency is
+threatened. On freedom of election depends our liberty; on freedom of
+conscience depends our progress. Tory squires and lordlings have
+defied the people and measured their strength against the masses. Let
+the masses speak." But there was no need to make appeals, for the
+outrage itself caused so swiftly a growl of anger that on the very
+next day the prisoner was set free, and there came protest upon
+protest against the high-handed action of the House. In Westminster
+Hall 4,000 people gathered to cheer Mr. Bradlaugh when he came to the
+House on the day after his liberation. In less than a week 200
+meetings had thundered out their protest. Liberal associations, clubs,
+societies, sent up messages of anger and of demand for justice. In
+Trafalgar Square there gathered--so said the papers--the largest crowd
+ever seen there, and on the Thursday following--the meeting was held
+on Monday--the House of Commons rescinded its resolution, refusing to
+allow Mr. Bradlaugh to affirm, and admitted him on Friday, July 2nd,
+to take his seat after affirmation. "At last the bitter struggle is
+over," I wrote, "and law and right have triumphed. The House of
+Commons has, by rescinding the resolution passed by Tories and
+Ultramontanes, re-established its good name in the eyes of the world.
+The triumph is not one of Freethought over Christianity, nor is it
+over the House of Commons; it is the triumph of law, brought about by
+good men--of all shades of opinion, but of one faith in justice--over
+Tory contempt of law and Ultramontane bigotry. It is the reassertion
+of civil and religious liberty under the most difficult circumstances,
+the declaration that the House of Commons is the creation of the
+people, and not a club of the aristocracy with the right of
+blackballing in its own hands."
+
+The battle between Charles Bradlaugh and his persecutors was now
+transferred to the law courts. As soon as he had taken his seat he was
+served with a writ for having voted without having taken the oath, and
+this began the wearisome proceedings by which his defeated enemies
+boasted that they would make him bankrupt, and so vacate the seat he
+had so hardly gained. Rich men like Mr. Newdegate sued him, putting
+forward a man of straw as nominal plaintiff; for many a weary month
+Mr. Bradlaugh kept all his enemies at bay, fighting each case himself;
+defeated time after time, he fought on, finally carrying the cases to
+the House of Lords, and there winning them triumphantly. But they were
+won at such heavy cost of physical strength and of money, that they
+undermined his strength and burdened him heavily with debt. For all
+this time he had not only to fight in the law courts and to attend
+scrupulously to his Parliamentary duties, but he had to earn his
+living by lecturing and writing, so that his nights away from the
+House were spent in travelling and his days in incessant labour. Many
+of his defeated foes turned their weapons against me, hoping thus to
+give him pain; thus Admiral Sir John Hay, at Wigton, used language of
+me so coarse that the _Scotsman_ and _Glasgow Herald_ refused to print
+it, and the editor of the _Scotsman_ described it as "language so
+coarse that it could have hardly dropped from a yahoo." August 25th
+found me at Brussels, whither I went, with Miss Hypatia Bradlaugh, to
+represent the English Freethinkers at the International Freethought
+Conference. It was an interesting gathering, attended by men of
+world-wide reputation, including Dr. Ludwig BĂ¼chner, a man of noble
+and kindly nature. An International Federation of Freethinkers was
+there founded, which did something towards bringing together the
+Freethinkers of different countries, and held interesting congresses
+in the following years in London and Amsterdam; but beyond these
+meetings it did little, and lacked energy and vitality. In truth, the
+Freethought party in each country had so much to do in holding its own
+that little time and thought could be given to international
+organisation. For myself, my introduction to Dr. BĂ¼chner, led to much
+interesting correspondence, and I translated, with his approval, his
+"Mind in Animals," and the enlarged fourteenth edition of "Force and
+Matter," as well as one or two pamphlets. This autumn of 1880 found
+the so-called Liberal Government in full tilt against the Irish
+leaders, and I worked hard to raise English feeling in defence of
+Irish freedom even against attack by one so much honoured as was Mr.
+Gladstone. It was uphill work, for harsh language had been used
+against England and all things English, but I showed by definite
+figures--all up and down England--that life and property were far
+safer in Ireland than in England, that Ireland was singularly free
+from crime save in agrarian disputes, and I argued that these would
+disappear if the law should step in between landlord and tenant, and
+by stopping the crimes of rack-renting and most brutal eviction, put
+an end to the horrible retaliations that were born of despair and
+revenge. A striking point on these evictions I quoted from Mr. T.P.
+O'Connor, who, using Mr. Gladstone's words that a sentence of eviction
+was a sentence of starvation, told of 15,000 processes of eviction
+issued in that one year. The autumn's work was varied by the teaching
+of science classes, a debate with a clergyman of the Church of
+England, and an operation which kept me in bed for three weeks, but
+which, on the other hand, was useful, for I learned to write while
+lying on my back, and accomplished in this fashion a good part of the
+translation of "Mind in Animals."
+
+And here let me point a moral about hard work. Hard work kills no one.
+I find a note in the _National Reformer_ in 1880 from the pen of Mr.
+Bradlaugh: "It is, we fear, useless to add that, in the judgment of
+her best friends, Mrs. Besant has worked far too hard during the last
+two years." This is 1893, and the thirteen years' interval has been
+full of incessant work, and I am working harder than ever now, and in
+splendid health. Looking over the _National Reformer_ for all these
+years, it seems to me that it did really fine educational work; Mr.
+Bradlaugh's strenuous utterances on political and theological matters;
+Dr. Aveling's luminous and beautiful scientific teachings; and to my
+share fell much of the educative work on questions of political and
+national morality in our dealings with weaker nations. We put all our
+hearts into our work, and the influence exercised was distinctly in
+favour of pure living and high thinking.
+
+In the spring of 1881 the Court of Appeal decided against Mr.
+Bradlaugh's right to affirm as Member of Parliament, and his seat was
+declared vacant, but he was at once returned again by the borough of
+Northampton, despite the virulence of slander directed against him, so
+that he rightly described the election as "the most bitter I have ever
+fought." His work in the House had won him golden opinions in the
+country, and he was already recognised as a power there; so Tory fear
+was added to bigoted hatred, and the efforts to keep him out of the
+House were increased.
+
+He was introduced to the House as a new member to take his seat by Mr.
+Labouchere and Mr. Burt, but Sir Stafford Northcote intervened, and
+after a lengthy debate, which included a speech from Mr. Bradlaugh at
+the Bar, a majority of thirty-three refused to allow him to take the
+oath. After a prolonged scene, during which Mr. Bradlaugh declined to
+withdraw and the House hesitated to use force, the House adjourned,
+and finally the Government promised to bring in an Affirmation Bill,
+and Mr. Bradlaugh promised, with the consent of his constituents, to
+await the decision of the House on this Bill. Meantime, a League for
+the Defence of Constitutional Rights was formed, and the agitation in
+the country grew: wherever Mr. Bradlaugh went to speak vast crowds
+awaited him, and he travelled from one end of the country to the
+other, the people answering his appeal for justice with no uncertain
+voice. On July 2nd, in consequence of Tory obstruction, Mr. Gladstone
+wrote to Mr. Bradlaugh that the Government were going to drop the
+Affirmation Bill, and Mr. Bradlaugh thereupon determined to present
+himself once more in the House, and fixed on August 3rd as the date of
+such action, so that the Irish Land Bill might get through the House
+ere any delay in business was caused by him. The House was then
+closely guarded with police; the great gates were closed, reserves of
+police were packed in the law courts, and all through July this state
+of siege continued. On August 2nd there was a large meeting in
+Trafalgar Square, at which delegates were present from all parts of
+England, and from as far north as Edinburgh, and on Wednesday, August
+3rd, Mr. Bradlaugh went down to the House. His last words to me were:
+"The people know you better than they know any one, save myself;
+whatever happens, mind, whatever happens, let them do no violence; I
+trust to you to keep them quiet." He went to the House entrance with
+Dr. Aveling, and into the House alone. His daughters and I went
+together, and with some hundreds of others carrying petitions--ten
+only with each petition, and the ten rigidly counted and allowed to
+pass through the gate, sufficiently opened to let one through at a
+time--reached Westminster Hall, where we waited on the steps leading
+to the passage of the lobby.
+
+An inspector ordered us off. I gently intimated that we were within
+our rights. Dramatic order: "Four officers this way." Up they marched
+and looked at us, and we looked at them. "I think you had better
+consult Inspector Denning before you use violence," I remarked
+placidly. They thought they had, and in a few moments up came the
+inspector, and seeing that we were standing in a place where we had a
+right to be, and were doing no harm, he rebuked his over-zealous
+subordinates, and they retired and left us in peace. A man of much
+tact and discretion was Inspector Denning. Indeed, all through this,
+the House of Commons police behaved admirably well. Even in the attack
+they were ordered to make on Mr. Bradlaugh, the police used as little
+violence as they could. It was Mr. Erskine, the Deputy
+Serjeant-at-Arms, and his ushers, who showed the brutality; as Dr.
+Aveling wrote at the time: "The police disliked their work, and, as
+brave men, had a sympathy for a brave man. Their orders they obeyed
+rigidly. This done, they were kindness itself." Gradually the crowd of
+petitioners grew and grew; angry murmurs were heard, for no news came
+from the House, and they loved "Charlie," and were mostly north
+country men, sturdy and independent. They thought they had a right to
+go into the lobby, and suddenly, with the impulse that will sway a
+crowd to a single action there was a roar, "Petition, petition,
+justice, justice," and they surged up the steps, charging at the
+policemen who held the door. Flashed into my mind my chief's charge,
+his words, "I trust to you to keep them quiet," and as the police
+sprang forward to meet the crowd I threw myself between them, with all
+the advantage of the position of the top of the steps that I had
+chosen, so that every man in the charging crowd saw me, and as they
+checked themselves in surprise I bade them stop for his sake, and keep
+for him the peace which he had bade us should not be broken. I heard
+afterwards that as I sprang forward the police laughed--they must have
+thought me a fool to face the rush of the charging men; but I knew his
+friends would never trample me down, and as the crowd stopped the
+laugh died out, and they drew back and left me my own way.
+
+Sullenly the men drew back, mastering themselves with effort, reining
+in their wrath, still for his sake. Ah! had I known what was going on
+inside, would I have kept his trust unbroken! and, as many a man said
+to me afterwards in northern towns, "Oh! if you had let us go we would
+have carried him into the House up to the Speaker's chair." We heard a
+crash inside, and listened, and there was sound of breaking glass and
+splintering wood, and in a few minutes a messenger came to me: "He is
+in Palace Yard." And we went thither and saw him standing, still and
+white, face set like marble, coat torn, motionless, as though carved
+in stone, facing the members' door. Now we know the whole shameful
+story: how as that one man stood alone, on his way to claim his right,
+alone so that he could do no violence, fourteen men, said the Central
+News, police and ushers, flung themselves upon him, pushed and pulled
+him down the stairs, smashing in their violence the glass and wood of
+the passage door; how he struck no blow, but used only his great
+strength in passive resistance--" Of all I have ever seen, I never saw
+one man struggle with ten like that," said one of the chiefs, angrily
+disdainful of the wrong he was forced to do--till they flung him out
+into Palace Yard. An eye-witness thus reported the scene in the Press:
+"The strong, broad, heavy, powerful frame of Mr. Bradlaugh was hard to
+move, with its every nerve and muscle strained to resist the coercion.
+Bending and straining against the overpowering numbers, he held every
+inch with surprising tenacity, and only surrendered it after almost
+superhuman exertions to retain it. The sight--little of it as was seen
+from the outside--soon became sickening. The overborne man appeared
+almost at his last gasp. The face, in spite of the warmth of the
+struggle, had an ominous pallor. The limbs barely sustained him....
+The Trafalgar Square phrase that this man might be broken but not bent
+occurred to minds apprehensive at the present appearance of him."
+
+They flung him out, and swift, short words were there interchanged. "I
+nearly did wrong at the door," he said afterwards, "I was very angry.
+I said to Inspector Denning, 'I shall come again with force enough to
+overcome it,' He said, 'When?' I said, 'Within a minute if I raise my
+hand.'" He stood in Palace Yard, and there outside the gate was a vast
+sea of heads, the men who had journeyed from all parts of England for
+love of him, and in defence of the great right he represented of a
+constituency to send to Parliament the man of its choice. Ah! he was
+never greater than in that moment of outrage and of triumphant wrong;
+with all the passion of a proud man surging within him, insulted by
+physical violence, injured by the cruel wrenching of all his
+muscles--so that for weeks his arms had to be swathed in bandages--he
+was never greater than when he conquered his own wrath, crushed down
+his own longing for battle, stirred to flame by the bodily struggle,
+and the bodily injury, and with thousands waiting within sound of his
+voice, longing to leap to his side, he gave the word to tell them to
+meet him that evening away from the scene of conflict, and meanwhile
+to disperse quietly, "no riot, no disorder." But how he suffered
+mentally no words of mine may tell, and none can understand how it
+wrung his heart who does not know how he reverenced the great
+Parliament of England, how he honoured law, how he believed in justice
+being done; it was the breaking down of his national ideals, of his
+pride in his country, of his belief that faith would be kept with a
+foe by English gentlemen, who with all their faults, he thought,
+held honour and chivalry dear. "No man will sleep in gaol for me
+to-night," he said to me that day; "no woman can blame me for her
+husband killed or wounded, but--" A wave of agony swept over his face,
+and from that fatal day Charles Bradlaugh was never the same man.
+Some hold their ideals lightly, but his heart-strings were twined
+round his; some care little for their country--he was an Englishman,
+law-abiding, liberty-loving, to his heart's core, of the type of the
+seventeenth-century patriot, holding England's honour dear. It was the
+treachery that broke his heart; he had gone alone, believing in the
+honour of his foes, ready to submit to expulsion, to imprisonment, and
+it was the latter that he expected; but he never dreamed that, going
+alone amongst his foes, they would use brutal and cowardly violence,
+and shame every Parliamentary tradition by personal outrage on a
+duly-elected member, outrage more worthy of a slum pot-house than of
+the great Commons House, the House of Hampden and of Vane, the House
+that had guarded its own from Royal violence, and had maintained its
+privileges in the teeth of kings.
+
+These stormy scenes brought about a promise of Government aid; Mr.
+Bradlaugh failed to get any legal redress, as, indeed, he expected to
+fail, on the ground that the officials of the House were covered by
+the House's order, but the Government promised to support his claim to
+his seat during the next session, and thus prevented the campaign
+against them on which we had resolved. I had solely on my own
+responsibility organised a great band of people pledged to refrain
+from the use of all excisable articles after a certain date, and to
+withdraw all their moneys in the Savings Bank, thus seriously
+crippling the financial resources of the Government. The response from
+the workers to my appeal to "Stop the supplies" was great and
+touching. One man wrote that as he never drank nor smoked he would
+leave off tea; others that though tobacco was their one luxury, they
+would forego it; and so on. Somewhat reluctantly, I asked the people
+to lay aside this formidable weapon, as "we have no right to embarrass
+the Government financially save when they refuse to do the first duty
+of a Government to maintain law. They have now promised to do justice,
+and we must wait." Meanwhile the injuries inflicted on Mr. Bradlaugh,
+rupturing the sheaths of some of the muscles of the arm, laid him
+prostrate, and various small fights went on during the temporary truce
+in the great struggle. I turned up in the House two or three times,
+haled thither, though not in person, by the people who kept Mr.
+Bradlaugh out, and a speech of mine became the subject of a question
+by Mr. Ritchie, while Sir Henry Tyler waged war on the science
+classes. Another joy was added to life by the use of my name--which
+by all these struggles had gained a marketable value--as author of
+pamphlets I had never seen, and this forgery of my name by
+unscrupulous people in the colonies caused me a good deal of
+annoyance. In the strengthening of the constitutional agitation in the
+country, the holding of an International Congress of Freethinkers in
+London, the studying and teaching of science, the delivering of
+courses of scientific lectures in the Hall of Science, a sharp
+correspondence with the Bishop of Manchester, who had libelled
+Secularists, and which led to a fiery pamphlet, "God's Views on
+Marriage," as retort--in all these matters the autumn months sped
+rapidly away. One incident of that autumn I record with regret. I was
+misled by very partial knowledge of the nature of the experiments
+performed, and by my fear that if scientific men were forbidden to
+experiment on animals with drugs they would perforce experiment with
+them on the poor in hospitals, to write two articles, republished as a
+pamphlet, against Sir Eardley Wilmot's Bill for the "Total Suppression
+of Vivisection." I limited my approval to highly skilled men engaged
+in original investigations, and took the representations made of the
+character of the experiments without sufficient care to verify them.
+Hence the publication of the one thing I ever wrote for which I feel
+deep regret and shame, as against the whole trend and efforts of my
+life. I am thankful to say that Dr. Anna Kingsford answered my
+articles, and I readily inserted her replies in the paper in which
+mine had appeared--our _National Reformer_--and she touched that
+question of the moral sense to which my nature at once responded.
+Ultimately, I looked carefully into the subject, found that
+vivisection abroad was very different from vivisection in England, saw
+that it was in very truth the fiendishly cruel thing that its
+opponents alleged, and destroyed my partial defence of even its less
+brutal form.
+
+1882 saw no cessation of the struggles in which Mr. Bradlaugh and
+those who stood by him were involved. On February 7th he was heard for
+the third time at the Bar of the House of Commons, and closed his
+speech with an offer that, accepted, would have closed the contest. "I
+am ready to stand aside, say for four or five weeks, without coming to
+that table, if the House within that time, or within such time as its
+great needs might demand, would discuss whether an Affirmation Bill
+should pass or not. I want to obey the law, and I tell you how I might
+meet the House still further, if the House will pardon me for seeming
+to advise it. Hon. members have said that would be a Bradlaugh Relief
+Bill. Bradlaugh is more proud than you are. Let the Bill pass without
+applying to elections that have taken place previously, and I will
+undertake not to claim my seat, and when the Bill has passed I will
+apply for the Chiltern Hundreds. I have no fear. If I am not fit for
+my constituents, they shall dismiss me, but you never shall. The grave
+alone shall make me yield." But the House would do nothing. He had
+asked for 100,000 signatures in favour of his constitutional right,
+and on February 8th, 9th, and 10th 1,008 petitions, bearing 241,970
+signatures, were presented; the House treated them with contemptuous
+indifference. The House refused to declare his seat vacant, and also
+refused to allow him to fill it, thus half-disfranchising Northampton,
+while closing every avenue to legal redress. Mr. Labouchere--who did
+all a loyal colleague could do to assist his brother member--brought
+in an Affirmation Bill; it was blocked. Mr. Gladstone, appealed to
+support the law declared by his own Attorney-General, refused to do
+anything. An _impasse_ was created, and all the enemies of freedom
+rejoiced. Out of this position of what the _Globe_ called "quiet
+omnipotence" the House was shaken by an audacious defiance, for on
+February 21st the member it was trying to hold at arm's length took
+the oath in its startled face, went to his seat, and--waited events.
+The House then expelled him--and, indeed, it could scarcely do
+anything else after such defiance--and Mr. Labouchere moved for a new
+writ, declaring that Northampton was ready, its "candidate was Charles
+Bradlaugh, expelled this House." Northampton, ever steadfast, returned
+him for the third time--the vote in his favour showing an increase of
+359 over the second bye-election--and the triumph was received in all
+the great towns of England with wild enthusiasm. By the small majority
+of fifteen in a House of 599 members--and this due to the vacillation
+of the Government--he was again refused the right to take his seat.
+But now the whole Liberal Press took up his quarrel; the oath question
+became a test question for every candidate for Parliament, and the
+Government was warned that it was alienating its best friends. The
+_Pall Mall Gazette_ voiced the general feeling. "What is the evidence
+that an Oaths Bill would injure the Government in the country? Of one
+thing we may be sure, that if they shirk the Bill they will do no good
+to themselves at the elections. Nobody doubts that it will be made a
+test question, and any Liberal who declines to vote for such a Bill
+will certainly lose the support of the Northampton sort of Radicalism
+in every constituency. The Liberal Press throughout the country is
+absolutely unanimous. The political Non-conformists are for it. The
+local clubs are for it. All that is wanted is that the Government
+should pick up a little more moral courage, and recognise that even in
+practice honesty is the best policy." The Government did not think so,
+and they paid the penalty, for one of the causes that led to their
+defeat at the polls was the disgust felt at their vacillation and
+cowardice in regard to the rights of constituencies. Not untruly did I
+write, in May, 1882, that Charles Bradlaugh was a man "who by the
+infliction of a great wrong had become the incarnation of a great
+principle"; for the agitation in the country grew and grew, until,
+returned again to Parliament at the General Election, he took the oath
+and his seat, brought in and carried an Oaths Bill, not only giving
+Members of Parliament the right to affirm, but making Freethinkers
+competent as jurymen, and relieving witnesses from the insult hitherto
+put upon those who objected to swearing; he thus ended an
+unprecedented struggle by a complete victory, weaving his name for
+ever into the constitutional history of his country.
+
+In the House of Lords, Lord Redesdale brought in a Bill disqualifying
+Atheists from sitting in Parliament, but in face of the feeling
+aroused in the country, the Lords, with many pathetic expressions of
+regret, declined to pass it. But, meanwhile, Sir Henry Tyler in the
+Commons was calling out for prosecutions for blasphemy to be brought
+against Mr. Bradlaugh and his friends, while he carried on his crusade
+against Mr. Bradlaugh's daughters, Dr. Aveling, and myself, as science
+teachers. I summed up the position in the spring of 1882 in the
+following somewhat strong language: "This short-lived 'Parliamentary
+Declaration Bill' is but one of the many clouds which presage a storm
+of prosecution. The reiterated attempts in the House of Commons to
+force the Government into prosecuting heretics for blasphemy; the
+petty and vicious attacks on the science classes at the Hall; the
+odious and wicked efforts of Mr. Newdegate to drive Mr. Bradlaugh into
+the Bankruptcy Court; all these are but signs that the heterogeneous
+army of pious and bigoted Christians are gathering together their
+forces for a furious attack on those who have silenced them in
+argument, but whom they hope to conquer by main force, by sheer
+brutality. Let them come. Free-thinkers were never so strong, never so
+united, never so well organised as they are to-day. Strong in the
+goodness of our cause, in our faith in the ultimate triumph of Truth,
+in our willingness to give up all save fidelity to the sacred cause of
+liberty of human thought and human speech, we await gravely and
+fearlessly the successors of the men who burned Bruno, who imprisoned
+Galileo, who tortured Vanini--the men who have in their hands the
+blood-red cross of Jesus of Nazareth, and in their hearts the love of
+God and the hate of man."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+STILL FIGHTING.
+
+
+All this hot fighting on the religious field did not render me blind
+to the misery of the Irish land so dear to my heart, writhing in the
+cruel grip of Mr. Forster's Coercion Act. An article "Coercion in
+Ireland and its Results," exposing the wrongs done under the Act, was
+reprinted as a pamphlet and had a wide circulation.
+
+I pleaded against eviction--7,020 persons had been evicted during the
+quarter ending in March--for the trial of those imprisoned on
+suspicion, for indemnity for those who before the Land Act had striven
+against wrongs the Land Act had been carried to prevent, and I urged
+that "no chance is given for the healing measures to cure the sore of
+Irish disaffection until not only are the prisoners in Ireland set at
+liberty, but until the brave, unfortunate Michael Davitt stands once
+more a free man on Irish soil." At last the Government reconsidered
+its policy and resolved on juster dealings; it sent Lord Frederick
+Cavendish over to Ireland, carrying with him the release of the
+"suspects," and scarcely had he landed ere the knife of assassination
+struck him--a foul and cowardly murder of an innocent messenger of
+peace. I was at Blackburn, to lecture on "The Irish Question," and as
+I was walking towards the platform, my heart full of joy for the
+dawning hope of peace, a telegram announcing the assassination was
+placed in my hands. Never shall I forget the shock, the incredulous
+horror, the wave of despair. "It is not only two men they have
+killed," I wrote, a day or two later; "they have stabbed the new-born
+hope of friendship between two countries, and have reopened the gulf
+of hatred that was just beginning to close." Alas! the crime succeeded
+in its object, and hurried the Government into new wrong. Hastily a
+new Coercion Bill was brought in, and rushed through its stages in
+Parliament, and, facing the storm of public excitement, I pleaded
+still, "Force no remedy," despite the hardship of the task. "There is
+excessive difficulty in dealing with the Irish difficulty at the
+present moment. Tories are howling for revenge on a whole nation as
+answer to the crime committed by a few; Whigs are swelling the outcry;
+many Radicals are swept away by the current, and feeling that
+'something must be done,' they endorse the Government action,
+forgetting to ask whether the 'something' proposed is the wisest
+thing. A few stand firm, but they are very few--too few to prevent the
+new Coercion Bill from passing into law. But few though we be who lift
+up the voice of protest against the wrong which we are powerless to
+prevent, we may yet do much to make the new Act of brief duration, by
+so rousing public opinion as to bring about its early repeal. When the
+measure is understood by the public half the battle will be won; it is
+accepted at the moment from faith in the Government; it will be
+rejected when its true character is grasped. The murders which have
+given birth to this repressive measure came with a shock upon the
+country, which was the more terrible from the sudden change from
+gladness and hope to darkness and despair. The new policy was welcomed
+so joyfully; the messenger of the new policy was slain ere yet the pen
+was dry which had signed the orders of mercy and of liberty. Small
+wonder that cry of horror should be followed by measures of vengeance;
+but the murders were the work of a few criminals, while the measure of
+vengeance strikes the whole of the Irish people. I plead against the
+panic which confounds political agitation and political redressal of
+wrong with crime and its punishment; the Government measure gags every
+mouth in Ireland, and puts, as we shall see, all political effort at
+the mercy of the Lord-Lieutenant, the magistracy, and the police." I
+then sketched the misery of the peasants in the grip of absentee
+landlords, the turning out on the roadside to die of the mother with
+new-born babe at her breast, the loss of "all thought of the sanctity
+of human life when the lives of the dearest are reckoned as less worth
+than the shillings of overdue rack-rental." I analysed the new Act:
+"When this Act passes, trial by jury, right of public meeting, liberty
+of press, sanctity of house, will one and all be held at the will of
+the Lord-Lieutenant, the irresponsible autocrat of Ireland, while
+liberty of person will lie at the mercy of every constable. Such is
+England's way of governing Ireland in the year 1882. And this is
+supposed to be a Bill for the 'repression of crime.'" Bluntly, I put
+the bald truth: "The plain fact is that the murderers have succeeded.
+They saw in the new policy the reconciliation of England and Ireland;
+they knew that friendship would follow justice, and that the two
+countries, for the first time in history, would clasp hands. To
+prevent this they dug a new gulf, which they hoped the English nation
+would not span; they sent a river of blood across the road of
+friendship, and they flung two corpses to bar the newly-opened gate of
+reconciliation and peace. They have succeeded."
+
+Into this whirl of political and social strife came the first whisper
+to me of the Theosophical Society, in the shape of a statement of its
+principles, which conveyed, I remarked, "no very definite idea of the
+requirements for membership, beyond a dreamy, emotional, scholarly
+interest in the religio-philosophic fancies of the past." Also a
+report of an address by Colonel Olcott, which led me to suppose that
+the society held to "some strange theory of 'apparitions' of the dead,
+and to some existence outside the physical and apart from it." These
+came to me from some HindĂ» Freethinkers, who asked my opinion as to
+Secularists joining the Theosophical Society, and Theosophists being
+admitted to the National Secular Society. I replied, judging from
+these reports, that "while Secularists would have no right to refuse
+to enrol Theosophists, if they desired it, among their members, there
+is a radical difference between the mysticism of Theosophy and the
+scientific materialism of Secularism. The exclusive devotion to this
+world implied in the profession of Secularism leaves no room for
+other-worldism; and consistent members of our body cannot join a
+society which professes belief therein."[27]
+
+H.P. Blavatsky penned a brief article in the _Theosophist_ for
+August, 1882, in which she commented on my paragraph, remarking, in
+her generous way, that it must have been written "while labouring
+under entirely misconceived notions about the real nature of our
+society. For one so highly intellectual and keen as that renowned
+writer to dogmatise and issue autocratic ukases, after she has herself
+suffered so cruelly and undeservedly at the hands of blind bigotry and
+social prejudice in her lifelong struggle for _freedom of thought_
+seems, to say the least, absurdly inconsistent." After quoting my
+paragraph she went on: "Until proofs to the contrary, we prefer to
+believe that the above lines were dictated to Mrs. Besant by some
+crafty misrepresentations from Madras, inspired by a mean personal
+revenge rather than a desire to remain consistent with the principles
+of 'the scientific materialism of Secularism.' We beg to assure the
+Radical editors of the _National Reformer_ that they were both very
+strangely misled by false reports about the Radical editors of the
+_Theosophist_. The term 'supernaturalists' can no more apply to the
+latter than to Mrs. A. Besant and Mr. C. Bradlaugh."
+
+H.P. Blavatsky, when she commented, as she occasionally did, on the
+struggles going on in England, took of them a singularly large-hearted
+and generous view. She referred with much admiration to Mr.
+Bradlaugh's work and to his Parliamentary struggle, and spoke warmly
+of the services he had rendered to liberty. Again, in pointing out
+that spiritualistic trance orations by no means transcended speeches
+that made no such claim, I find her first mention of myself: "Another
+lady orator, of deservedly great fame, both for eloquence and
+learning--the good Mrs. Annie Besant--without believing in controlling
+spirits, or for that matter in her own spirit, yet speaks and writes
+such sensible and wise things, that we might almost say that one of
+her speeches or chapters contains more matter to benefit humanity than
+would equip a modern trance-speaker for an entire oratorical
+career."[28] I have sometimes wondered of late years whether, had I
+met her then or seen any of her writings, I should have become her
+pupil. I fear not; I was still too much dazzled by the triumphs of
+Western Science, too self-assertive, too fond of combat, too much at
+the mercy of my own emotions, too sensitive to praise and blame. I
+needed to sound yet more deeply the depths of human misery, to hear
+yet more loudly the moaning of "the great Orphan," Humanity, to feel
+yet more keenly the lack of wider knowledge and of clearer light if I
+were to give effective help to man, ere I could bow my pride to crave
+admittance as pupil to the School of Occultism, ere I could put aside
+my prejudices and study the Science of the Soul.
+
+The long-continued attempts of Sir Henry Tyler and his friends to
+stimulate persecutions for blasphemy at length took practical shape,
+and in July, 1882, Mr. Foote, the editor, Mr. Ramsey, the publisher,
+and Mr. Whittle, the printer of the _Freethinker_, were summoned for
+blasphemy by Sir Henry Tyler himself. An attempt was made to involve
+Mr. Bradlaugh in the proceedings, and the solicitors promised to drop
+the case against the editor and printer if Mr. Bradlaugh would himself
+sell them some copies of the paper. But however ready Mr. Bradlaugh
+had always shown himself to shield his subordinates by taking his sins
+on his own shoulders, he saw no reason why he should assume
+responsibility for a paper over which he had no control, and which
+was, he thought, by its caricatures, lowering the tone of Freethought
+advocacy and giving an unnecessary handle to its foes. He therefore
+answered that he would sell the solicitors any works published by
+himself or with his authority, and sent them a catalogue of the whole
+of such works. The object of this effort of Sir Henry Tyler's was
+obvious enough, and Mr. Bradlaugh commented: "The above letters make
+it pretty clear that Sir Henry W. Tyler having failed in his endeavour
+to get the science classes stopped at the Hall of Science, having also
+failed in his attempt to induce Sir W. Vernon Harcourt to prosecute
+myself and Mrs. Besant as editors and publishers of this journal,
+desires to make me personally and criminally responsible for the
+contents of a journal I neither edit nor publish, over which I have
+not a shadow of control, and in which I have not the smallest
+interest. Why does Sir H.W. Tyler so ardently desire to prosecute, me
+for blasphemy? Is it because two convictions will under the 9th and
+10th Will. III. cap. 32, render me 'for ever' incapable of sitting in
+Parliament?" The _Whitehall Review_ frankly put this forward as an
+object to be gained, and Mr. Bradlaugh was summoned to the Mansion
+House on a charge of publishing blasphemous libels in the
+_Freethinker_; meanwhile Sir Henry Tyler put a notice on the Order
+Book to deprive "the daughters of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh" of the grant
+they had earned as science teachers, and got an order which proved to
+be invalid, but which was acted on, to inspect Mr. Bradlaugh's and my
+own private banking accounts, I being no party to the case. Looking
+back, I marvel at the incredible meannesses to which Sir Henry Tyler
+and others stooped in defence of "religion"--Heaven save the mark! Let
+me add that his motion in the House of Commons was a complete failure,
+and it was emphasised by the publication at the same time of the
+successful work, both as teachers and as students, of the "daughters
+of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh," and of my being the only student in all
+England who had succeeded in taking honours in botany.
+
+I must pause a moment to chronicle, in September, 1882, the death of
+Dr. Pusey, whom I had sought in the whirl of my early religious
+struggles. I wrote an article on him in the _National Reformer_, and
+ended by laying a tribute on his grave: "A strong man and a good man.
+Utterly out of harmony with the spirit of his own time, looking with
+sternly-rebuking eyes on all the eager research, the joyous love of
+nature, the earnest inquiry into a world doomed to be burnt up at the
+coming of its Judge. An ascetic, pure in life, stern in faith, harsh
+to unbelievers because sincere in his own cruel creed, generous and
+tender to all who accepted his doctrines and submitted to his Church.
+He never stooped to slander those with whom he disagreed. His hatred
+of heresy led him not to blacken the character of heretics, nor to
+descend to the vulgar abuse used by pettier priests. And therefore I,
+who honour courage and sincerity wherever I find them; I, who do
+homage to steadfastness wherever I find it; I, Atheist, lay my small
+tribute of respect on the bier of this noblest of the Anglo-Catholics,
+Edward Bouverie Pusey."
+
+As a practical answer to the numberless attacks made on us, and as a
+result of the enormous increase of circulation given to our
+theological and political writings by these harassing persecutions, we
+moved our publishing business to 63, Fleet Street, at the end of
+September, 1882, a shop facing that at which Richard Carlile had
+carried on his publishing business for a great time, and so seemed
+still redolent with memories of his gallant struggles. Two of the
+first things sold here were a pamphlet of mine, a strong protest
+against our shameful Egyptian policy, and a critical volume on
+"Genesis" which Mr. Bradlaugh found time to write in the intervals of
+his busy life. Here I worked daily, save when out of London, until Mr.
+Bradlaugh's death in 1891, assisted in the conduct of the business by
+Mr. Bradlaugh's elder daughter--a woman of strong character with many
+noble qualities, who died rather suddenly in December, 1888, and in
+the work on the _National Reformer_, first by Dr. Aveling, and then by
+Mr. John Robertson, its present editor. Here, too, from 1884 onwards,
+worked with me Thornton Smith, one of Mr. Bradlaugh's most devoted
+disciples, who became one of the leading speakers of the National
+Secular Society; like her well-loved chief, she was ever a good friend
+and a good fighter, and to me the most loyal and loving of colleagues,
+one of the few--the very few--Freethinkers who were large-hearted and
+generous enough not to turn against me when I became a Theosophist. A
+second of these--alas! I could count them on my fingers--was the John
+Robertson above mentioned, a man of rare ability and wide culture,
+somewhat too scholarly for popular propagandism of the most generally
+effective order, but a man who is a strength to any movement, always
+on the side of noble living and high thinking, loyal-natured as the
+true Scot should be, incapable of meanness or treachery, and the most
+genial and generous of friends.
+
+Among the new literary ventures that followed on our taking the large
+publishing premises in Fleet Street was a sixpenny magazine, edited by
+myself, and entitled _Our Corner_; its first number was dated January,
+1883, and for six years it appeared regularly, and served me as a
+useful mouthpiece in my Socialist and Labour propagandist work. Among
+its contributors were Moncure D. Conway, Professor Ludwig BĂ¼chner,
+Yves Guyot, Professor Ernst Haeckel, G. Bernard Shaw, Constance Naden,
+Dr. Aveling, J.H. Levy, J.L. Joynes, Mrs. Edgren, John Robertson,
+and many another, Charles Bradlaugh and I writing regularly each
+month.
+
+1883 broke stormily, fights on every hand, and a huge constitutional
+agitation going on in the country, which forced the Government into
+bringing in an Affirmation Bill; resolutions from Liberal Associations
+all over the land; preparations to oppose the re-election of disloyal
+members; no less than a thousand delegates sent up to London by clubs,
+Trade Unions, associations of every sort; a meeting that packed
+Trafalgar Square; an uneasy crowd in Westminster Hall; a request from
+Inspector Denning that Mr. Bradlaugh would go out to them--they feared
+for his safety inside; a word from him, "The Government have pledged
+themselves to bring in an Affirmation Bill at once;" roar after roar
+of cheering; a veritable people's victory on that 15th of February,
+1883. It was the answer of the country to the appeal for justice, the
+rebuke of the electors to the House that had defied them.
+
+Scarcely was this over when a second prosecution for blasphemy against
+Messrs. Foote, Ramsey, and Kemp began, and was hurried on in the
+Central Criminal Court, before Mr. Justice North, a bigot of the
+sternest type. The trial ended in a disagreement of the jury, Mr.
+Foote defending himself in a splendid speech. The judge acted very
+harshly throughout, interrupted Mr. Foote continuously, and even
+refused bail to the defendants during the interval between the first
+and second trial; they were, therefore, confined in Newgate from
+Thursday to Monday, and we were only allowed to see them through iron
+bars and lattice, as they exercised in the prison yard between 8:30
+and 9:30 a.m. Brought up to trial again on Monday, they were
+convicted, and Mr. Foote was sentenced to a year's imprisonment, Mr.
+Ramsey to nine months, and Mr. Kemp to three months. Mr. Foote
+especially behaved with great dignity and courage in a most difficult
+position, and heard his cruel sentence without wincing, and with the
+calm words, "My Lord, I thank you; it is worthy your creed." A few of
+us at once stepped in, to preserve to Mr. Ramsey his shop, and to Mr.
+Foote his literary property; Dr. Aveling undertook the editing of the
+_Freethinker_ and of Mr. Foote's magazine _Progress_; the immediate
+necessities of their families were seen to; Mr. and Mrs. Forder took
+charge of the shop, and within a few days all was in working order.
+Disapproving as many of us did of the policy of the paper, there was
+no time to think of that when a blasphemy prosecution had proved
+successful, and we all closed up in the support of men imprisoned for
+conscience' sake. I commenced a series of articles on "The Christian
+Creed; what it is blasphemy to deny," showing what Christians must
+believe under peril of prosecution. Everywhere a tremendous impulse
+was given to the Freethought movement, as men awakened to the
+knowledge that blasphemy laws were not obsolete.
+
+From over the sea came a word of sympathy from the pen of H.P.
+Blavatsky in the _Theosophist_. "We prefer Mr. Foote's actual position
+to that of his severe judge. Aye, and were we in his guilty skin, we
+would feel more proud, even in the poor editor's present position,
+than we would under the wig of Mr. Justice North."
+
+In April, 1883, the long legal struggles of Mr. Bradlaugh against Mr.
+Newdegate and his common informer, that had lasted from July 2, 1880,
+till April 9, 1883, ended in his complete victory by the judgment of
+the House of Lords in his favour. "Court after Court decided against
+me," he wrote; "and Whig and Tory journals alike mocked at me for my
+persistent resistance. Even some good friends thought that my fight
+was hopeless, and that the bigots held me fast in their toils. I have,
+however, at last shaken myself free of Mr. Newdegate and his common
+informer. The judgment of the House of Lords in my favour is final and
+conclusive, and the boasts of the Tories that I should be made
+bankrupt for the penalties, have now, for ever, come to naught. Yet
+but for the many poor folk who have stood by me with their help and
+sympathy, I should have long since been ruined. The days and weeks
+spent in the Law Courts, the harassing work connected with each stage
+of litigation, the watching daily when each hearing was imminent, the
+absolute hindrance of all provincial lecturing--it is hardly possible
+for any one to judge the terrible mental and pecuniary strain of all
+this long-drawn-out struggle." Aye! it killed him at last, twenty
+years before his time, sapping his splendid vitality, undermining his
+iron constitution.
+
+The blasphemy trial of Mr. Bradlaugh, Mr. Foote, and Mr. Ramsey now
+came on, but this time in the Queen's Bench, before the Lord Chief
+Justice Coleridge. I had the honour of sitting between Mr. Bradlaugh
+and Mr. Foote, charged with the duty of having ready for the former
+all his references, and with a duplicate brief to mark off point after
+point as he dealt with it. Messrs. Foote and Ramsey were brought up in
+custody, but were brave and bright with courage unbroken. Mr.
+Bradlaugh applied to have his case taken separately, as he denied
+responsibility for the paper, and the judge granted the application;
+it was clearly proved that he and I--the "Freethought Publishing
+Company"--had never had anything to do with the production of the
+paper; that until November, 1881, we published it, and then refused to
+publish it any longer; that the reason for the refusal was the
+addition of comic Bible illustrations as a feature of the paper. I was
+called as witness and began with a difficulty; claiming to affirm, I
+was asked by the judge if the oath would not be binding on my
+conscience; I answered that any promise was binding on me whatever the
+form, and after some little argument the judge found a way out of the
+insulting form by asking whether the "invocation of the Deity added
+anything to it of a binding nature--added any sanction?" "None, my
+Lord," was the prompt reply, and I was allowed to affirm. Sir Hardinge
+Giffard subjected me to a very stringent cross-examination, doing his
+best to entangle me, but the perfect frankness of my answers broke all
+his weapons of finesse and inuendo.
+
+Some of the incidents of the trial were curious; Sir Hardinge
+Giffard's opening speech was very able and very unscrupulous. All
+facts in Mr. Bradlaugh's favour were distorted or hidden; anything
+that could be used against him was tricked out in most seductive
+fashion. Among the many monstrous perversions of the truth made by
+this most pious counsel, was the statement that changes of publisher,
+and of registration of the _Freethinker_ were made in consequence of a
+question as to prosecuting it put in the House of Commons. The change
+of publisher was admittedly made in November; the registration was
+made for the first time in November, and could not be changed, as
+there was no previous one. The House of Commons was not sitting in
+November; the question alluded to was asked in the following February.
+This one deliberate lie of the "defender of the faith" will do as well
+as quoting a score of others to show how wickedly and maliciously he
+endeavoured to secure an unjust verdict.
+
+The speech over, a number of witnesses were called. Sir Hardinge did
+not call witnesses who knew the facts, such as Mr. Norrish, the
+shopman, or Mr. Whittle, the printer. These he carefully avoided,
+although he subpoenaed both, because he did not want the real facts to
+come out. But he put in two solicitor's clerks, who had been hanging
+about the premises, and buying endless _National Reformers_ and
+_Freethinkers_, sheaves of them which were never used, but by which
+Sir Hardinge hoped to convey the impression of a mass of criminality.
+He put in a gentleman from the British Museum, who produced two large
+books, presumed to be _National Reformers_ and _Freethinkers_; what
+they were brought for nobody understood, the counsel for the Crown as
+little as any one, and the judge, surveying them over his spectacles,
+treated them with supreme contempt, as utterly irrelevant. Then a man
+came to prove that Mr. Bradlaugh was rated for Stonecutter Street, a
+fact no one disputed. Two policemen came to say they had seen him go
+in. "You saw many people go in, I suppose?" queried the Lord Chief
+Justice. On the whole the most miserably weak and obviously malicious
+case that could be brought into a court of law.
+
+One witness, however, must not be forgotten--Mr. Woodhams, bank
+manager. When he stated that Mr. Maloney, the junior counsel for the
+Crown, had inspected Mr. Bradlaugh's banking account, a murmur of
+surprise and indignation ran round the court. "Oh! Oh!" was heard from
+the crowd of barristers behind. The judge looked down incredulously,
+and for a moment the examination was stopped by the general movement.
+Unless Sir Hardinge Giffard is a splendid actor, he was not aware of
+the infamous proceeding, for he looked as startled as the rest of his
+legal brethren.
+
+Another queer incident occurred, showing, perhaps more than aught
+else, Mr. Bradlaugh's swift perception of the situation and adaptation
+to the environment. He wanted to read the Mansion House deposition of
+Norrish, to show why he was not called; the judge objected, and
+declined to allow it to be read. A pause while you might count five;
+then; "Well, I think I may say the learned counsel did not call
+Norrish because ..." and then the whole substance of the deposition
+was given in supposititious form. The judge looked down a minute, and
+then went off into silent laughter impossible to control at the adroit
+change of means and persistent gaining of end; barristers all round
+broke into ripples of laughter unrestrained; a broad smile pervaded
+the jury box; the only unmoved person was the defendant who proceeded
+in his grave statement as to what Norrish "might" have been asked. The
+nature of the defence was very clearly stated by Mr. Bradlaugh: "I
+shall ask you to find that this prosecution is one of the steps in a
+vindictive attempt to oppress and to crush a political opponent--that
+it was a struggle that commenced on my return to Parliament in 1880.
+If the prosecutor had gone into the box I should have shown you that
+he was one of the first then in the House to use the suggestion of
+blasphemy against me there. Since then I have never had any peace
+until the Monday of this week. Writs for penalties have been served,
+and suits of all kinds have been taken against me. On Monday last the
+House of Lords cleared me from the whole of one set, and, gentlemen, I
+ask you to-day to clear me from another. Three times I have been
+re-elected by my constituents, and what Sir Henry Tyler asks you to do
+is to send me to them branded with the dishonour of a conviction,
+branded not with the conviction for publishing heresy, but branded
+with the conviction, dishonourable to me, of having lied in this
+matter. I have no desire to have a prison's walls closed on me, but I
+would sooner ten times that, than that my constituents should think
+that for one moment I lied to escape the penalties. I am not indicted
+for anything I have ever written or caused to be written. As my Lord
+at the very first stage this morning pointed out, it is no question
+with me, Are the matters indicted blasphemous, or are they not
+blasphemous? Are they defensible, or are they not defensible? That is
+not my duty here. On this I make no comment. I have no duty here of
+even discussing the policy of the blasphemy laws, although I cannot
+help thinking that, if I were here making my defence against them, I
+might say that they were bad laws unfairly revived, doing more
+mischief to those who revive them than to those whom they are revived
+against. But it is not for anything I have said myself; it is not for
+anything I have written myself; it is not for anything I have
+published myself. It is an endeavour to make me technically liable for
+a publication with which I have nothing whatever to do, and I will ask
+you to defeat that here. Every time I have succeeded I have been met
+with some new thing. When I first fought it was hoped to defeat my
+election. When I was re-elected it was sought to make me bankrupt by
+enormous penalties, and when I escaped the suit for enormous penalties
+they hope now to destroy me by this. I have no question here about
+defending my heresy, not because I am not ready to defend it when it
+is challenged in the right way, and it there be anything in it that
+the law can challenge. I have never gone back from anything I have
+ever said; I have never gone back from anything I have ever written; I
+have never gone back from anything I have ever done; and I ask you not
+to allow this Sir Henry Whatley Tyler, who dares not come here to-day,
+to use you as the assassin uses the dagger, to stab a man from behind
+whom he never dares to face."
+
+The summing up by Lord Coleridge was perfect in eloquence, in thought,
+in feeling. Nothing more touching could be imagined than the conflict
+between the real religious feeling, abhorrent of heresy, and the
+determination to be just, despite all prejudice. The earnest effort
+lest the prejudice he felt as a Christian should weigh also in the
+minds of the jury, and should cause them to pervert justice. The
+absolute pleading to them to do what was right and not to admit
+against the unbeliever what they would not admit in ordinary cases.
+Then the protest against prosecution of opinions; the admission of the
+difficulties in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the pathetic fear lest by
+persecution "the sacred truths might be struck through the sides of
+those who are their enemies." For intellectual clearness and moral
+elevation this exquisite piece of eloquence, delivered in a voice of
+silvery beauty, would be hard to excel, and Lord Coleridge did this
+piece of service to the religion so dear to his heart, that he showed
+that a Christian judge could be just and righteous in dealing with a
+foe of his creed.
+
+There was a time of terrible strain waiting for the verdict, and when
+at last it came, "Not Guilty," a sharp clap of applause hailed it,
+sternly and rightly reproved by the judge. It was echoed by the
+country, which almost unanimously condemned the prosecution as an
+iniquitous attempt on the part of Mr. Bradlaugh's political enemies to
+put a stop to his political career. Thus the _Pall Mall Gazette_
+wrote:--
+
+"Whatever may be the personal or political or religious aversion which
+is excited by Mr. Bradlaugh, it is impossible for even his bitterest
+opponents to deny the brilliance of the series of victories which he
+has won in the law courts. His acquittal in the blasphemy prosecution
+of Saturday was but the latest of a number of encounters in which he
+has succeeded in turning the tables upon his opponents in the most
+decisive fashion. The policy of baiting Mr. Bradlaugh which has been
+persisted in so long, savours so strongly of a petty and malignant
+species of persecution that it is well that those who indulge in it
+should be made to smart for their pains. The wise and weighty words
+used by the Lord Chief Justice in summing up should be taken seriously
+to heart: 'Those persons are to be deprecated who would pervert the
+law, even with the best intentions, and "do evil that good may come,
+whose damnation" (says the apostle) "is just."' Without emulating the
+severity of the apostle, we may say that it is satisfactory that the
+promoters of all these prosecutions should be condemned in costs."
+
+In the separate trial of Messrs. Foote and Ramsey, Mr. Foote again
+defended himself in a speech of marked ability, and spoken of by the
+judge as "very striking." Lord Coleridge made a noble charge to the
+jury, in which he strongly condemned prosecutions of unpopular
+opinions, pointing out that no prosecution short of extermination
+could be effective, and caustically remarking on the very easy form of
+virtue indulged in by persecutors. "As a general rule," he said,
+"persecution, unless far more extreme than in England in the
+nineteenth century is possible, is certain to be in vain. It is also
+true, and I cannot help assenting to it, that it is a very easy form
+of virtue. It is a more difficult form of virtue, quietly and
+unostentatiously to obey what we believe to be God's will in our own
+lives. It is not very easy to do it; and it makes much less noise in
+the world. It is very easy to turn upon somebody else who differs from
+us, and in the guise of zeal of God's honour to attack somebody of a
+difference of opinion, whose life may be more pleasing to God and more
+conducive to His honour than our own. And when it is done by persons
+whose own lives are not free from reproach and who take that
+particular form of zeal for God which consists in putting the criminal
+law in force against others, that, no doubt, does more to create a
+sympathy with the defendant than with the prosecutor. And if it should
+be done by those who enjoy the wit of Voltaire, and who do not turn
+away from the sneers of Gibbon, and rather relish the irony of Hume,
+our feelings do not go with the prosecutors, and we are rather
+disposed to sympathise with the defendant. It is still worse if the
+person who takes such a course takes it, not from a kind of notion
+that God wants his assistance, and that he can give it less on his own
+account than by prosecuting others--but it is mixed up with anything
+of partisan or political feeling, then nothing can be more foreign to
+what is high-minded, or religious, or noble, in men's conduct; and
+indeed, it seems to me that any one who will do that, not for the
+honour of God but for the purpose of the ban, deserves the most
+disdainful disapprobation."
+
+The jury disagreed, and a _nolle prosequi_ was entered. The net
+results of the trials were a large addition to the membership of the
+National Secular Society, an increase of circulation of Freethought
+literature, the raising of Mr. Foote for a time to a position of great
+influence and popularity, and the placing of his name in history as a
+brave martyr for liberty of speech. The offence against good taste
+will be forgotten; the loyalty to conviction and to courage will
+remain. History does not ask if men who suffered for heresy ever
+published a rough word; it asks, Were they brave in their
+steadfastness; were they faithful to the truth they saw? It may be
+well to place on record Mr. Foote's punishment for blasphemy: he spent
+twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four alone in his cell; his only
+seat was a stool without a back; his employment was picking matting;
+his bed was a plank with a thin mattress. During the latter part of
+his imprisonment he was allowed some books.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+SOCIALISM.
+
+
+The rest of 1883 passed in the usual way of hard work; the Affirmation
+Bill was rejected, and the agitation for Constitutional right grew
+steadily; the Liberal Press was won over, and Mr. Bradlaugh was
+beginning to earn golden opinions on all sides for his courage, his
+tenacity, and his self-control. A successful International Congress at
+Amsterdam took some of us over to the Northern Venice, where a most
+successful gathering was held. To me, personally, the year has a
+special interest, as being the one in which my attention was called,
+though only partially, to the Socialist movement. I had heard Louise
+Michelle lecture in the early spring; a brief controversy in the
+_National Reformer_ had interested me, but I had not yet concerned
+myself with the economic basis of Socialism; I had realised that the
+land should be public property, but had not gone into the deeper
+economic causes of poverty, though the question was pressing with
+ever-increasing force on heart and brain. Of Socialist teaching I knew
+nothing, having studied only the older English Economists in my
+younger days. In 1884 a more definite call to consider 299 these
+teachings was to come, and I may perhaps open the record of 1884 with
+the words of greeting spoken by me to our readers in the first number
+of the _Reformer_ for that year: "What tests 1884 may have for our
+courage, what strains on our endurance, what trials of our loyalty,
+none can tell. But this we know--that every test of courage
+successfully met, every strain of endurance steadily borne, every
+trial of loyalty nobly surmounted, leaves courage braver, endurance
+stronger, loyalty truer, than each was before. And therefore, for our
+own and for the world's sake, I will not wish you, friends, an 1884 in
+which there shall be no toil and no battling; but I will wish you,
+each and all, the hero's heart and the hero's patience, in the
+struggle for the world's raising that will endure through the coming
+year."
+
+On February 3rd I came for the first time across a paper called
+_Justice_, in which Mr. Bradlaugh was attacked, and which gave an
+account of a meeting of the Democratic Federation--not yet the Social
+Democratic--in which a man had, apparently unrebuked, said that "all
+means were justifiable to attain" working-class ends. I protested
+strongly against the advocacy of criminal means, declaring that those
+who urged the use of such means were the worst foes of social
+progress. A few weeks later the _Echo_ repeated a speech of Mr.
+Hyndman's in which a "bloodier revolution" than that of France was
+prophesied, and the extinction of "book-learning" seemed coupled with
+the success of Socialism, and this again I commented on. But I had the
+pleasure, a week later, of reprinting from _Justice_ a sensible
+paragraph, condemning the advocacy of violence so long as free
+agitation was allowed.
+
+The spring was marked by two events on which I have not time or space
+to dwell--the resignation by Mr. Bradlaugh of his seat, on the
+reiteration of the resolution of exclusion, and his triumphant return
+for the fourth time by an increased majority, a vote of 4,032, a
+higher poll than that of the general election; and the release of Mr.
+Foote, on February 25th, from Holloway, whence he was escorted by a
+procession a quarter of a mile in length. On the 12th of March he and
+his fellow-prisoners received a magnificent reception and were
+presented with valuable testimonials at the Hall of Science.
+
+Taking up again the thread of Socialism, the great debate in St.
+James's Hall, London, between Mr. Bradlaugh and Mr. Hyndman on April
+17th, roused me to a serious study of the questions raised. Socialism
+has in England no more devoted, no more self-sacrificing advocate than
+Henry Hyndman. A man of wide and deep reading, wielding most ably a
+singularly fascinating pen, with talents that would have made him
+wealthy in any career he adopted, he has sacrificed himself without a
+murmur to the people's cause. He has borne obloquy from without,
+suspicion and unkindness from those he served, and surrounded by
+temptations to betray the people, he has never swerved from his
+integrity. He has said rash things, has been stirred to passionate
+outbursts and reckless phrases, but love to the people and sympathy
+with suffering lay at the root of his wildest words, and they count
+but little as against his faithful service. Personally, my debt to him
+is of a mixed character; he kept me from Socialism for some time by
+his bitter and very unjust antagonism to Mr. Bradlaugh; but it was the
+debate at St. James's Hall that, while I angrily resented his
+injustice, made me feel that there was something more in practical
+Socialism than I had imagined, especially when I read it over
+afterwards, away from the magic of Mr. Bradlaugh's commanding
+eloquence and personal magnetism. It was a sore pity that English
+Socialists, from the outset of their movement, treated Mr. Bradlaugh
+so unfairly, so that his friends were set against Socialists ere they
+began to examine their arguments. I must confess that my deep
+attachment to him led me into injustice to his Socialist foes in those
+early days, and often made me ascribe to them calculated malignity
+instead of hasty and prejudiced assertion. Added to this, their
+uncurbed violence in discussion, their constant interruptions during
+the speeches of opponents, their reckless inaccuracy in matters of
+fact, were all bars standing in the way of the thoughtful. When I came
+to know them better, I found that the bulk of their speakers were very
+young men, overworked and underpaid, who spent their scanty leisure in
+efforts to learn, to educate themselves, to train themselves, and I
+learned to pardon faults which grew out of the bitter sense of
+injustice, and which were due largely to the terrible pressure of our
+system on characters not yet strong enough--how few are strong
+enough!--to bear grinding injustice without loss of balance and of
+impartiality. None save those who have worked with them know how much
+of real nobility, of heroic self-sacrifice, of constant self-denial,
+of brotherly affection, there is among the Social Democrats.
+
+At this time also I met George Bernard Shaw, one of the most brilliant
+of Socialist writers and most provoking of men; a man with a perfect
+genius for "aggravating" the enthusiastically earnest, and with a
+passion for representing himself as a scoundrel. On my first
+experience of him on the platform at South Place Institute he
+described himself as a "loafer," and I gave an angry snarl at him in
+the _Reformer_, for a loafer was my detestation, and behold! I found
+that he was very poor, because he was a writer with principles and
+preferred starving his body to starving his conscience; that he gave
+time and earnest work to the spreading of Socialism, spending night
+after night in workmen's clubs; and that "a loafer" was only an
+amiable way of describing himself because he did not carry a hod. Of
+course I had to apologise for my sharp criticism as doing him a
+serious injustice, but privately felt somewhat injured at having been
+entrapped into such a blunder. Meanwhile I was more and more turning
+aside from politics and devoting myself to the social condition of the
+people I find myself, in June, protesting against Sir John Lubbock's
+Bill which fixed a twelve-hour day as the limit of a "young person's"
+toil. "A 'day' of twelve hours is brutal," I wrote; "if the law fixes
+twelve hours as a 'fair day' that law will largely govern custom. I
+declare that a 'legal day' should be eight hours on five days in the
+week and not more than five hours on the sixth. If the labour is of an
+exhausting character these hours are too long." On every side now the
+Socialist controversy grew, and I listened, read, and thought much,
+but said little. The inclusion of John Robertson in the staff of the
+_Reformer_ brought a highly intellectual Socialist into closer touch
+with us, and slowly I found that the case for Socialism was
+intellectually complete and ethically beautiful. The trend of my
+thought was shown by urging the feeding of Board School children,
+breaking down under the combination of education and starvation, and I
+asked, "Why should people be pauperised by a rate-supported meal, and
+not pauperised by, state-supported police, drainage, road-mending,
+street-lighting, &c? "Socialism in its splendid ideal appealed to my
+heart, while the economic soundness of its basis convinced my head.
+All my life was turned towards the progress of the people, the helping
+of man, and it leaped forward to meet the stronger hope, the lofty
+ideal of social brotherhood, the rendering possible to all of freer
+life; so long had I been striving thitherward, and here there opened
+up a path to the yearned-for goal! How strong were the feelings
+surging in my heart may be seen in a brief extract from an article
+published second week of January, 1885: "Christian charity? We know
+its work. It gives a hundred-weight of coal and five pounds of beef
+once a year to a family whose head could earn a hundred such doles if
+Christian justice allowed him fair wage for the work he performs. It
+plunders the workers of the wealth they make, and then flings back at
+them a thousandth part of their own product as 'charity.' It builds
+hospitals for the poor whom it has poisoned in filthy courts and
+alleys, and workhouses for the worn-out creatures from whom it has
+wrung every energy, every hope, every joy. Miss Cobbe summons us to
+admire Christian civilisation, and we see idlers flaunting in the
+robes woven by the toilers, a glittering tinselled super-structure
+founded on the tears, the strugglings, the grey, hopeless misery of
+the poor."
+
+This first month of January, 1885, brought on me the first attack for
+my Socialistic tendencies, from the pen of Mr. W.P. Ball, who wrote
+to the _Reformer_ complaining of my paragraph, quoted above, in which
+I had advocated rate-supported meals for Board School children. A
+brief controversy thus arose, in which I supported my opinion, waiving
+the question as to my being "at heart a Socialist." In truth, I
+dreaded to make the plunge of publicly allying myself with the
+advocates of Socialism, because of the attitude of bitter hostility
+they had adopted towards Mr. Bradlaugh. On his strong, tenacious
+nature, nurtured on self-reliant individualism, the arguments of the
+younger generation made no impression. He could not change his methods
+because a new tendency was rising to the surface, and he did not see
+how different was the Socialism of our day to the Socialist dreams of
+the past--noble ideals of a future not immediately realisable in
+truth, but to be worked towards and rendered possible in the days to
+come. Could I take public action which might bring me into collision
+with the dearest of my friends, which might strain the strong and
+tender tie so long existing between us? My affection, my gratitude,
+all warred against the idea of working with those who wronged him so
+bitterly. But the cry of starving children was ever in my ears; the
+sobs of women poisoned in lead works, exhausted in nail works, driven
+to prostitution by starvation, made old and haggard by ceaseless work.
+I saw their misery was the result of an evil system, was inseparable
+from private ownership of the instruments of wealth production; that
+while the worker was himself but an instrument, selling his labour
+under the law of supply and demand, he must remain helpless in the
+grip of the employing classes, and that trade combinations could only
+mean increased warfare--necessary, indeed, for the time as weapons of
+defence--but meaning war, not brotherly co-operation of all for the
+good of all. A conflict which was stripped of all covering, a conflict
+between a personal tie and a call of duty could not last long, and
+with a heavy heart I made up my mind to profess Socialism openly and
+work for it with all my energy. Happily, Mr. Bradlaugh was as tolerant
+as he was strong, and our private friendship remained unbroken; but he
+never again felt the same confidence in my judgment as he felt before,
+nor did he any more consult me on his own policy, as he had done ever
+since we first clasped hands.
+
+A series of articles in _Our Corner_ on the "Redistribution of
+Political Power," on the "Evolution of Society," on "Modern
+Socialism," made my position clear. "Over against those who laud the
+present state of Society, with its unjustly rich and its unjustly
+poor, with its palaces and its slums, its millionaires and its
+paupers, be it ours to proclaim that there is a higher ideal in life
+than that of being first in the race for wealth, most successful in
+the scramble for gold. Be it ours to declare steadfastly that health,
+comfort, leisure, culture, plenty for every individual are far more
+desirable than breathless struggle for existence, furious trampling
+down of the weak by the strong, huge fortunes accumulated out of the
+toil of others, to be handed down to those who had done nothing to
+earn them. Be it ours to maintain that the greatness of a nation
+depends not on the number of its great proprietors, on the wealth of
+its great capitalists, or the splendour of its great nobles, but on
+the absence of poverty among its people, on the education and
+refinement of its masses, on the universality of enjoyment in life....
+Enough for each of work, of leisure, of joy; too little for none, too
+much for none--such is the Social ideal. Better to strive after it
+worthily and fail, than to die without striving for it at all."
+
+Then I differentiated the methods of the Socialist and the Radical
+Individualist, pleading for union among those who formed the wings of
+the army of Labour, and urging union of all workers against the
+idlers. For the weakness of the people has ever been in their
+divisions, in the readiness of each section to turn its weapons
+against other sections instead of against the common foe. All
+privileged classes, when they are attacked, sink their differences and
+present a serried front to their assailants; the people alone fight
+with each other, while the battle between themselves and the
+privileged is raging.
+
+I strove, as so many others were striving, to sound in the ears of the
+thoughtless and the careless the cry of the sufferings of the poor,
+endeavouring to make articulate their misery. Thus in a description of
+Edinburgh slums came the following: "I saw in a 'house' which was made
+by boarding up part of a passage, which had no window, and in which it
+was necessary to burn an oil lamp all day, thus adding to the burden
+of the rent, a family of three--man, wife, and child--whose lot was
+hardly 'of their own making.' The man was tall and bronzed, but he was
+dying of heart disease; he could not do hard work, and he was too
+clumsy for light work; so he sat there, after two days' fruitless
+search, patiently nursing his miserable, scrofulous baby in his dim
+and narrow den. The cases of individual hopeless suffering are
+heartbreaking. In one room lay a dying child, dying of low fever
+brought on by want of food. 'It hae no faither,' sobbed the mother;
+and for a moment I did not catch the meaning that the father had left
+to the mother all the burden of a child unallowed by law. In another
+lay the corpse of a mother, with the children round her, and
+hard-featured, gentle-hearted women came in to take back to their
+overcrowded beds 'the mitherless bairns.' In yet another a woman,
+shrunken and yellow, crouched over a glimmer of fire; "I am dying of
+cancer of the womb," she said, with that pathetic resignation to the
+inevitable so common among the poor. I sat chatting for a few minutes.
+'Come again, deary,' she said as I rose to go; 'it's gey dull sitting
+here the day through.'"
+
+The article in which these, among other descriptions, occurred was
+closed with the following: "Passing out of the slums into the streets
+of the town, only a few steps separating the horror and the beauty, I
+felt, with a vividness more intense than ever, the fearful contrasts
+between the lots of men; and with more pressing urgency the question
+seemed to ring in my ears, 'Is there no remedy? Must there always be
+rich and poor?' Some say that it must be so; that the palace and the
+slum will for ever exist as the light and the shadow. Not so do I
+believe. I believe that the poverty is the result of ignorance and of
+bad social arrangements, and that therefore it may be eradicated by
+knowledge and by social change. I admit that for many of these adult
+dwellers in the slums there is no hope. Poor victims of a civilisation
+that hides its brutality beneath a veneer of culture and of grace, for
+them individually there is, alas! no salvation. But for their
+children, yes! Healthy surroundings, good food, mental and physical
+training, plenty of play, and carefully chosen work--these might save
+the young and prepare them for happy life. But they are being left to
+grow up as their parents were, and even when a few hours of school are
+given them the home half-neutralises what the education effects. The
+scanty aid given is generally begrudged, the education is to be but
+elementary, as little as possible is doled out. Yet these children
+have each one of them hopes and fears, possibilities of virtue and of
+crime, a life to be made or marred. We shower money on generals and on
+nobles, we keep high-born paupers living on the national charity, we
+squander wealth with both hands on army and navy, on churches and
+palaces; but we grudge every halfpenny that increases the education
+rate and howl down every proposal to build decent houses for the poor.
+We cover our heartlessness and indifference with fine phrases about
+sapping the independence of the poor and destroying their
+self-respect. With loathsome hypocrisy we repair a prince's palace for
+him, and let him live in it rent-free, without one word about the
+degradation involved in his thus living upon charity; while we refuse
+to 'pauperise' the toiler by erecting decent buildings in which he may
+live--not rent-free like the prince, but only paying a rent which
+shall cover the cost of erection and maintenance, instead of one which
+gives a yearly profit to a speculator. And so, year after year, the
+misery grows, and every great city has on its womb a cancer; sapping
+its vitality, poisoning its life-blood. Every great city is breeding
+in its slums a race which is reverting through the savage to the
+brute--a brute more dangerous in that degraded humanity has
+possibilities of evil in it beyond the reach of the mere wild beast.
+If not for Love's sake, then for fear; if not for justice or for human
+pity, then for sheer desire of self-preservation; I appeal to the wise
+and to the wealthy to set their hands to the cure of social evil, ere
+stolidity gives place to passion and dull patience vanishes before
+fury, and they
+
+"'Learn at last, in some wild hour, how much the wretched dare.'"
+
+Because it was less hotly antagonistic to the Radicals than the two
+other Socialist organisations, I joined the Fabian Society, and worked
+hard with it as a speaker and lecturer. Sidney Webb, G. Bernard Shaw,
+Hubert and Mrs. Bland, Graham Wallas--these were some of those who
+gave time, thought, incessant work to the popularising of Socialist
+thought, the spreading of sound economics, the effort to turn the
+workers' energy toward social rather than merely political reform. We
+lectured at workmen's clubs wherever we could gain a hearing, till we
+leavened London Radicalism with Socialist thought, and by treating the
+Radical as the unevolved Socialist rather than as the anti-Socialist,
+we gradually won him over to Socialist views. We circulated questions
+to be put to all candidates for parliamentary or other offices,
+stirred up interest in local elections, educated men and women into an
+understanding of the causes of their poverty, won recruits for the
+army of propagandists from the younger of the educated middle class.
+That the London working classes to-day are so largely Socialist is
+greatly due to the years of work done among them by members of the
+Fabian Society, as well to the splendid, if occasionally too militant,
+energy of the Social Democratic Federation, and to the devotion of
+that noble and generous genius, William Morris.
+
+During this same year (1885) a movement was set on foot in England to
+draw attention to the terrible sufferings of the Russian political
+prisoners, and it was decided at a meeting held in my house to form a
+society of the friends of Russia, which should seek to spread accurate
+and careful information about the present condition of Russia. At that
+meeting were present Charles Bradlaugh, "Stepniak," and many others,
+E.R. Pease acting as honorary secretary. It is noteworthy that some
+of the most prominent Russian exiles--such as Kropotkin--take the view
+that the Tzar himself is not allowed to know what occurs, and is very
+largely the victim of the bureaucracy that surrounds him.
+
+Another matter, that increased as the months went on, was the attempt
+of the police authorities to stop Socialist speaking in the open air.
+Christians, Freethinkers, Salvationists, agitators of all kinds were,
+for the most part, left alone, but there was a regular crusade against
+the Socialists. Liberal and Tory journals alike condemned the way in
+which in Dod Street, in September, the Socialists' meetings were
+attacked. Quiet persistence was shown by the promoters--members of the
+Social Democratic Federation--and they were well supported by other
+Socialists and by the Radical clubs. I volunteered to speak on October
+4th (my first Sunday in London after the summoning and imprisoning of
+the speakers had commenced), but the attitude of the people was so
+determined on the preceding Sunday that all interference was
+withdrawn.
+
+Herbert Burrows stood for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets in
+the November of this year, and I find a paragraph in the _Reformer_ in
+which I heartily wished him success, especially as the first candidate
+who had put forward a demand for industrial education. In this, as in
+so many practical proposals, Socialists have led the way. He polled
+4,232 votes, despite the furious opposition of the clergy to him as a
+Freethinker, of the publicans to him as a teetotaler, of the
+maintainers of the present social system to him as a Socialist. And
+his fight did much to make possible my own success in 1888.
+
+With this autumn, too, began, in connection with the struggle for the
+right of meeting, the helping of the workmen to fair trial by
+providing of bail and legal defence. The first case that I bailed out
+was that of Lewis Lyons, sent to gaol for two months with hard labour
+by Mr. Saunders, of the Thames Police Court. Oh, the weary, sickening
+waiting in the court for "my prisoner," the sordid vice, the revolting
+details of human depravity to which my unwilling eyes and ears were
+witnesses. I carried Lyons off in triumph, and the Middlesex
+magistrates quashed the conviction, the evidence being pronounced by
+them to be "confusing, contradictory, and worthless." Yet but for the
+chance of one of us stepping forward to offer bail and to provide the
+means for an appeal (I acted on Mr. Bradlaugh's suggestion and advice,
+for he acted as counsellor to me all through the weary struggles that
+lasted till 1888, putting his great legal knowledge at my disposal,
+though he often disapproved my action, thinking me Quixotic)--but for
+this, Lewis Lyons would have had to suffer his heavy sentence.
+
+The general election took place this autumn, and Northampton returned
+Mr. Bradlaugh for the fifth time, thus putting an end to the long
+struggle, for he took the oath and his seat in the following January,
+and at once gave notice of an Oaths Bill, to give to all who claimed
+it, under all circumstances, the right to affirm. He was returned with
+the largest vote ever polled for him--4,315--and he entered Parliament
+with all the prestige of his great struggle, and went to the front at
+once, one of the recognised forces in the House. The action of Mr.
+Speaker Peel promptly put an end to an attempted obstruction. Sir
+Michael Hicks Beach, Mr. Cecil Raikes, and Sir John Hennaway had
+written to the Speaker asking his interference, but the Speaker
+declared that he had no authority, no right to stand between a duly
+elected member and the duty of taking the oath prescribed by statute.
+Thus ended the constitutional struggle of six years, that left the
+victor well-nigh bankrupt in health and in purse, and sent him to a
+comparatively early grave. He lived long enough to justify his
+election, to prove his value to the House and to his country, but he
+did not live long enough to render to England all the services which
+his long training, his wide knowledge, his courage, and his honesty so
+eminently fitted him to yield.
+
+[Illustration: NORWICH BRANCH OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE.]
+
+_Our Corner_ now served as a valuable aid in Socialist propaganda, and
+its monthly "Socialist Notes" became a record of Socialist progress in
+all lands. We were busy during the spring in organising a conference
+for the discussion of "The Present Commercial System, and the Better
+Utilisation of National Wealth for the Benefit of the Community," and
+this was successfully held at South Place Institute on June 9th, 10th,
+11th, the three days being given respectively, to the "Utilisation of
+Land," the "Utilisation of Capital," and the "Democratic Policy." On
+the 9th Mr. Bradlaugh spoke on the utilisation of waste lands, arguing
+that in a thickly populated country no one had the right to keep
+cultivable land uncultivated, and that where land was so kept there
+should be compulsory expropriation, the state taking the land and
+letting it out to cultivating tenants. Among the other speakers were
+Edward Carpenter, William Morris, Sidney Webb, John Robertson, William
+Saunders, W. Donnisthorpe, Edward Aveling, Charlotte Wilson, Mrs.
+Fenwick Miller, Hubert Bland, Dr. Pankhurst, and myself--men and women
+of many views, met to compare methods, and so help on the cause of
+social regeneration.
+
+Bitter attacks were made on me for my Socialist advocacy by some of
+the Radicals in the Freethought party, and looking back I find myself
+condemned as a "Saint Athanasius in petticoats," and as possessing a
+"mind like a milk-jug." This same courteous critic remarked, "I have
+heard Mrs. Besant described as being, like most women, at the mercy of
+her last male acquaintance for her views on economics." I was foolish
+enough to break a lance in self-defence with this assailant, not
+having then learned that self-defence was a waste of time that might
+be better employed in doing work for others. I certainly should not
+now take the trouble to write such a paragraph as the following: "The
+moment a man uses a woman's sex to discredit her arguments, the
+thoughtful reader knows that he is unable to answer the arguments
+themselves. But really these silly sneers at woman's ability have lost
+their force, and are best met with a laugh at the stupendous 'male
+self-conceit' of the writer. I may add that such shafts are specially
+pointless against myself. A woman who thought her way out of
+Christianity and Whiggism into Freethought and Radicalism absolutely
+alone; who gave up every old friend, male and female, rather than
+resign the beliefs she had struggled to in solitude; who, again, in
+embracing active Socialism, has run counter to the views of her
+nearest 'male friends'; such a woman may very likely go wrong, but I
+think she may venture, without conceit, to at least claim independence
+of judgment. I did not make the acquaintance of one of my present
+Socialist comrades, male or female, until I had embraced Socialism." A
+foolish paragraph, as are all self-defences, and a mischievous one, as
+all retort breeds fresh strife. But not yet had come the self-control
+that estimates the judgments of others at their true value, that recks
+not of praise and blame; not yet had I learned that evil should not be
+met with evil, wrath with wrath; not yet were the words of the Buddha
+the law to which I strove to render obedience: "Hatred ceases not by
+hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love." The year 1886 was a
+terrible one for labour, everywhere reductions of wages, everywhere
+increase of the numbers of the unemployed; turning over the pages of
+_Our Corner_, I see "Socialist Notes" filled, month after month, with
+a monotonous tale, "there is a reduction of wages at" such and such a
+place; so many "men have been discharged at -----, owing to the
+slackness of trade." Our hearts sank lower and lower as summer passed
+into autumn, and the coming winter threatened to add to starvation the
+bitter pains of cold. The agitation for the eight hours' day increased
+in strength as the unemployed grew more numerous week by week "We
+can't stand it," a sturdy, quiet fellow had said to me during the
+preceding winter; "flesh and blood can't stand it, and two months of
+this bitter cold, too." "We may as well starve idle as starve
+working," had said another, with a fierce laugh. And a spirit of
+sullen discontent was spreading everywhere, discontent that was wholly
+justified by facts. But ah! how patient they were for the most part,
+how sadly, pathetically patient, this crucified Christ, Humanity;
+wrongs that would set my heart and my tongue afire would be accepted
+as a matter of course. O blind and mighty people, how my heart went
+out to you; trampled on, abused, derided, asking so little and needing
+so much; so pathetically grateful for the pettiest services; so loving
+and so loyal to those who offered you but their poor services and
+helpless love. Deeper and deeper into my innermost nature ate the
+growing desire to succour, to suffer for, to save. I had long given up
+my social reputation, I now gave up with ever-increasing surrender
+ease, comfort, time; the passion of pity grew stronger and stronger,
+fed by each new sacrifice, and each sacrifice led me nearer and nearer
+to the threshold of that gateway beyond which stretched a path of
+renunciation I had never dreamed of, which those might tread who were
+ready wholly to strip off self for Man's sake, who for Love's sake
+would surrender Love's return from those they served, and would go out
+into the darkness for themselves that they might, with their own souls
+as fuel, feed the Light of the World.
+
+As the suffering deepened with the darkening months, the meetings of
+the unemployed grew in number, and the murmurs of discontent became
+louder. The Social Democratic Federation carried on an outdoor
+agitation, not without making blunders, being composed of human
+beings, but with abundant courage and self-sacrifice. The policy of
+breaking up Socialist meetings went on while other meetings were
+winked at, and John Williams, a fiery speaker, but a man with a record
+of pathetic struggle and patient heroism, was imprisoned for two
+months for speaking in the open air, and so nearly starved in gaol
+that he came out with his health broken for life.
+
+1887 dawned, the year that was to close so stormily, and Socialists
+everywhere were busying themselves on behalf of the unemployed, urging
+vestries to provide remunerative work for those applying for relief,
+assailing the Local Government Board with practicable proposals for
+utilising the productive energies of the unemployed, circulating
+suggestions to municipalities and other local representative bodies,
+urging remedial measures. A four days' oral debate with Mr. Foote, and
+a written debate with Mr. Bradlaugh, occupied some of my energies, and
+helped in the process of education to which public opinion was being
+subjected. Both these debates were largely circulated as pamphlets. A
+series of afternoon debates between representative speakers was
+organised at South Place Institute, and Mr. Corrie Grant and myself
+had a lively discussion, I affirming "That the existence of classes
+who live upon unearned incomes is detrimental to the welfare of the
+community, and ought to be put an end to by legislation." Another
+debate--in this very quarrelsome spring of 1887--was a written one in
+the _National Reformer_ between the Rev. G.F. Handel Rowe and myself
+on the proposition, "Is Atheism logically tenable, and is there a
+satisfactory Atheistic System for the guidance of Human Conduct." And
+so the months went on, and the menace of misery grew louder and
+louder, till in September I find myself writing: "This one thing is
+clear--Society must deal with the unemployed, or the unemployed will
+deal with Society. Stormier and stormier becomes the social outlook,
+and they at least are not the worst enemies of Society who seek to
+find some way through the breakers by which the ship of the
+Commonwealth may pass into quiet waters."
+
+Some amusement turned up in the shape of a Charing Cross Parliament,
+in which we debated with much vigour the "burning questions" of the
+day. We organised a compact Socialist party, defeated a Liberal
+Government, took the reins of office, and--after a Queen's Speech in
+which her Majesty addressed her loyal Commons with a plainness of
+speech never before (or since) heard from the throne--we brought in
+several Bills of a decidedly heroic character. G. Bernard Shaw, as
+President of the Local Government Board, and I, as Home Secretary,
+came in for a good deal of criticism in connection with various
+drastic measures. An International Freethought Congress, held in
+London, entailed fairly heavy work, and the science classes were ever
+with us. Another written debate came with October, this time on the
+"Teachings of Christianity," making the fifth of these set discussions
+held by me during the year. This same month brought a change, painful
+but just: I resigned my much-prized position as co-editor of the
+_National Reformer,_ and the number for October 23rd bore Charles
+Bradlaugh's name alone. The change did not affect my work on the
+paper, but I became merely a subordinate, though remaining, of course,
+joint proprietor. The reason cannot be more accurately given than in
+the paragraph penned at the time: "For a considerable time past, and
+lately in increasing number, complaints have reached me from various
+quarters of the inconvenience and uncertainty that result from the
+divided editorial policy of this paper on the question of Socialism.
+Some months ago I proposed to avoid this difficulty by resigning my
+share in the editorship; but my colleague, with characteristic
+liberality, asked me to let the proposal stand over and see if matters
+would not adjust themselves. But the difficulty, instead of
+disappearing, has only become more pressing; and we both feel that our
+readers have a right to demand that it be solved.
+
+"When I became co-editor of this paper I was not a Socialist; and,
+although I regard Socialism as the necessary and logical outcome of
+the Radicalism which for so many years the _National Reformer_ has
+taught, still, as in avowing myself a Socialist I have taken a
+distinct step, the partial separation of my policy in labour questions
+from that of my colleague has been of my own making, and not of his,
+and it is, therefore, for me to go away. Over by far the greater part
+of our sphere of action we are still substantially agreed, and are
+likely to remain so. But since, as Socialism becomes more and more a
+question of practical politics, differences of theory tend to produce
+differences in conduct; and since a political paper must have a single
+editorial programme in practical politics, it would obviously be most
+inconvenient for me to retain my position as co-editor. I therefore
+resume my former position as contributor only, thus clearing the
+_National Reformer_ of all responsibility for the views I hold."
+
+To this Mr. Bradlaugh added the following:--
+
+"I need hardly add to this how very deeply I regret the necessity for
+Mrs. Besant's resignation of the joint editorship of this Journal, and
+the real grief I feel in accepting this break in a position in which
+she has rendered such enormous service to the Freethought and Radical
+cause. As a most valued contributor I trust the _National Reformer_
+may never lose the efficient aid of her brain and pen. For thirteen
+years this paper has been richer for good by the measure of her
+never-ceasing and most useful work. I agree with her that a journal
+must have a distinct editorial policy; and I think this distinctness
+the more necessary when, as in the present case, every contributor has
+the greatest freedom of expression. I recognise in the fullest degree
+the spirit of self-sacrifice in which the lines, to which I add these
+words, have been penned by Mrs. Besant. "CHARLES BRADLAUGH."
+
+It was a wrench, this breaking of a tie for which a heavy price had
+been paid thirteen years before, but it was just. Any one who makes a
+change with which pain is connected is bound, in honour and duty, to
+take that pain as much as possible on himself; he must not put his
+sacrifice on others, nor pay his own ransom with their coin. There
+must be honour kept in the life that reaches towards the Ideal, for
+broken faith to that is the only real infidelity.
+
+And there was another reason for the change that I dared not name to
+him, for his quick loyalty would then have made him stubbornly
+determined against change. I saw the swift turning of public opinion,
+the gradual approach to him among Liberals who had hitherto held
+aloof, and I knew that they looked upon me as a clog and a burden, and
+that were I less prominently with him his way would be the easier to
+tread. So I slipped more and more into the background, no longer went
+with him to his meetings; my use to him in public was over, for I had
+become hindrance instead of help. While he was outcast and hated I had
+the pride of standing at his side; when all the fair-weather friends
+came buzzing round him I served him best by self-effacement, and I
+never loved him better than when I stood aside. But I continued all
+the literary work unaltered, and no change of opinions touched his
+kindness to me, although when, a little later, I joined the
+Theosophical Society, he lost his trust in my reasoning powers and
+judgment.
+
+In this same month of October the unemployed began walking in
+procession through the streets, and harshness on the part of the
+police led to some rioting. Sir Charles Warren thought it his duty to
+dragoon London meetings after the fashion of Continental prefects,
+with the inevitable result that an ill-feeling grew up between the
+people and the police.
+
+At last we formed a Socialist Defence Association, in order to help
+poor workmen brought up and sentenced on police evidence only, without
+any chance being given them of proper legal defence, and I organised a
+band of well-to-do men and women, who promised to obey a telegraphic
+summons, night or day, and to bail out any prisoner arrested for
+exercising the ancient right of walking in procession and speaking. To
+take one instance: Mr. Burleigh, the well-known war correspondent, and
+Mr. Winks were arrested and "run in" with Mr. J. Knight, a workman,
+for seditious language. I went down to the police-station to offer
+bail for the latter: Chief-Constable Howard accepted bail for Messrs.
+Burleigh and Winks, but refused it for Mr. Knight. The next day, at
+the police-court, the preposterous bail of £400 was demanded for Mr.
+Knight and supplied by my faithful band, and on the next hearing Mr.
+Poland, solicitor to the Treasury, withdrew the charge against him for
+lack of evidence!
+
+Then came the closing of Trafalgar Square, and the unexpected and
+high-handed order that cost some men their lives, many their liberty,
+and hundreds the most serious injuries. The Metropolitan Radical
+Federation had called a meeting for November 13th to protest against
+the imprisonment of Mr. O'Brien, and as Mr. Matthews, from his place
+in the House, had stated that there was no intention of interfering
+with _bonĂ¢ fide_ political meetings, the Radical clubs did not expect
+police interference. On November 9th Sir Charles Warren had issued an
+order forbidding all meetings in the Square, but the clubs trusted the
+promise of the Home Secretary. On Saturday evening only, November
+12th, when all arrangements were completed, did he issue a peremptory
+order, forbidding processions within a certain area. With this trap
+suddenly sprung upon them, the delegates from the clubs, the Fabian
+Society, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Socialist League,
+met on that same Saturday evening to see to any details that had been
+possibly left unsettled. It was finally decided to go to the Square as
+arranged, and, if challenged by the police, to protest formally
+against the illegal interference, then to break up the processions and
+leave the members to find their own way to the Square. It was also
+decided to go Sunday after Sunday to the Square, until the right of
+public meetings was vindicated.
+
+The procession I was in started from Clerkenwell Green, and walked
+with its banner in front, and the chosen speakers, including myself,
+immediately behind the flag. As we were moving slowly and quietly
+along one of the narrow streets debouching on Trafalgar Square,
+wondering whether we should be challenged, there was a sudden charge,
+and without a word the police were upon us with uplifted truncheons;
+the banner was struck down, and men and women were falling under a
+hail of blows. There was no attempt at resistance, the people were too
+much astounded at the unprepared attack. They scattered, leaving some
+of their number on the ground too much injured to move, and then made
+their way in twos and threes to the Square. It was garrisoned by
+police, drawn up in serried rows, that could only have been broken by
+a deliberate charge. Our orders were to attempt no violence, and we
+attempted none. Mr. Cunninghame Graham and Mr. John Burns, arm-in-arm,
+tried to pass through the police, and were savagely cut about the head
+and arrested. Then ensued a scene to be remembered; the horse police
+charged in squadrons at a hand-gallop, rolling men and women over like
+ninepins, while the foot police struck recklessly with their
+truncheons, cutting a road through the crowd that closed immediately
+behind them. I got on a waggonette and tried to persuade the driver to
+pull his trap across one of the roads, and to get others in line, so
+as to break the charges of the mounted police; but he was afraid, and
+drove away to the Embankment, so I jumped out and went back to the
+Square. At last a rattle of cavalry, and up came the Life Guards,
+cleverly handled but hurting none, trotting their horses gently and
+shouldering the crowd apart; and then the Scots Guards with bayonets
+fixed marched through and occupied the north of the Square. Then the
+people retreated as we passed round the word, "Go home, go home." The
+soldiers were ready to fire, the people unarmed; it would have been
+but a massacre. Slowly the Square emptied and all was still. All other
+processions were treated as ours had been, and the injuries inflicted
+were terrible. Peaceable, law-abiding workmen, who had never dreamed
+of rioting, were left with broken legs, broken arms, wounds of every
+description. One man, Linnell, died almost immediately, others from
+the effect of their injuries. The next day a regular court-martial in
+Bow Street Police Court, witnesses kept out by the police, men dazed
+with their wounds, decent workmen of unblemished character who had
+never been charged in a police-court before, sentenced to imprisonment
+without chance of defence. But a gallant band rallied to their rescue.
+William T. Stead, most chivalrous of journalists, opened a Defence
+Fund, and money rained in; my pledged bail came up by the dozen, and
+we got the men out on appeal. By sheer audacity I got into the
+police-court, addressed the magistrate, too astounded by my profound
+courtesy and calm assurance to remember that I had no right there, and
+then produced bail after bail of the most undeniable character and
+respectability, which no magistrate could refuse. Breathing-time
+gained, a barrister, Mr. W.M. Thompson, worked day after day with
+hearty devotion, and took up the legal defence. Fines we paid, and
+here Mrs. Marx Aveling did eager service. A pretty regiment I led out
+of Millbank Prison, after paying their fines; bruised, clothes torn,
+hatless, we must have looked a disreputable lot. We stopped and bought
+hats, to throw an air of respectability over our _cortège_, and we
+kept together until I saw the men into train and omnibus, lest, with
+the bitter feelings now roused, conflict should again arise. We formed
+the Law and Liberty League to defend all unjustly assailed by the
+police, and thus rescued many a man from prison; and we gave poor
+Linnell, killed in Trafalgar Square, a public funeral. Sir Charles
+Warren forbade the passing of the hearse through any of the main
+thoroughfares west of Waterloo Bridge, so the processions waited there
+for it. W.T. Stead, R. Cunninghame Graham, Herbert Burrows, and
+myself walked on one side the coffin, William Morris, F. Smith, R.
+Dowling, and J. Seddon on the other; the Rev. Stewart D. Headlam, the
+officiating clergyman, walked in front; fifty stewards carrying long
+wands guarded the coffin. From Wellington Street to Bow Cemetery the
+road was one mass of human beings, who uncovered reverently as the
+slain man went by; at Aldgate the procession took three-quarters of an
+hour to pass one spot, and thus we bore Linnell to his grave, symbol
+of a cruel wrong, the vast orderly, silent crowd, bareheaded, making
+mute protest against the outrage wrought.
+
+It is pleasant to put on record here Mr. Bradlaugh's grave approval of
+the heavy work done in the police-courts, and the following paragraph
+shows how generously he could praise one not acting on his own lines:
+"As I have on most serious matters of principle recently differed very
+widely from my brave and loyal co-worker, and as the difference has
+been regrettably emphasised by her resignation of her editorial
+functions on this Journal, it is the more necessary that I should say
+how thoroughly I approve, and how grateful I am to her for, her
+conduct in not only obtaining bail and providing legal assistance for
+the helpless unfortunates in the hands of the police, but also for her
+daily personal attendance and wise conduct at the police-stations and
+police-courts, where she has done so much to abate harsh treatment on
+the one hand and rash folly on the other. While I should not have
+marked out this as fitting woman's work, especially in the recent very
+inclement weather, I desire to record my view that it has been bravely
+done, well done, and most usefully done, and I wish to mark this the
+more emphatically as my views and those of Mrs. Besant seem wider
+apart than I could have deemed possible on many of the points of
+principle underlying what is every day growing into a most serious
+struggle." Ever did I find Charles Bradlaugh thus tolerant of
+difference of opinion, generously eager to approve what to him seemed
+right even in a policy he disapproved.
+
+The indignation grew and grew; the police were silently boycotted, but
+the people were so persistent and so tactful that no excuse for
+violence was given, until the strain on the police force began to
+tell, and the Tory Government felt that London was being hopelessly
+alienated; so at last Sir Charles Warren fell, and a wiser hand was
+put at the helm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+THROUGH STORM TO PEACE.
+
+
+Out of all this turmoil and stress rose a Brotherhood that had in it
+the promise of a fairer day. Mr. Stead and I had become close
+friends--he Christian, I Atheist, burning with one common love for
+man, one common hatred against oppression. And so in _Our Corner_ for
+February, 1888, I wrote:--"Lately there has been dawning on the minds
+of men far apart in questions of theology, the idea of founding a new
+Brotherhood, in which service of Man should take the place erstwhile
+given to service of God--a brotherhood in which work should be worship
+and love should be baptism, in which none should be regarded as alien
+who was willing to work for human good. One day as I was walking
+towards Millbank Gaol with the Rev. S.D. Headlam, on the way to
+liberate a prisoner, I said to him: 'Mr. Headlam, we ought to have a
+new Church, which should include all who have the common ground of
+faith in and love for man.' And a little later I found that my friend
+Mr. W.T. Stead, editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette,_ had long been
+brooding over a similar thought, and wondering whether men 'might not
+be persuaded to be as earnest about making this world happy as they
+are over saving their souls.' The teaching of social duty, the
+upholding of social righteousness, the building up of a true
+commonwealth--such would be among the aims of the Church of the
+future. Is the hope too fair for realisation? Is the winning of such
+beatific vision yet once more the dream of the enthusiast? But surely
+the one fact that persons so deeply differing in theological creeds as
+those who have been toiling for the last three months to aid and
+relieve the oppressed, can work in absolute harmony side by side for
+the one end--surely this proves that there is a bond which is stronger
+than our antagonisms, a unity which is deeper than the speculative
+theories which divide."
+
+How unconsciously I was marching towards the Theosophy which was to
+become the glory of my life, groping blindly in the darkness for that
+very brotherhood, definitely formulated on these very lines by those
+Elder Brothers of our race, at whose feet I was so soon to throw
+myself. How deeply this longing for something loftier than I had yet
+found had wrought itself into my life, how strong the conviction was
+growing that there was something to be sought to which the service of
+man was the road, may be seen in the following passage from the same
+article:--
+
+"It has been thought that in these days of factories and of tramways,
+of shoddy, and of adulteration, that all life must tread with even
+rhythm of measured footsteps, and that the glory of the ideal could no
+longer glow over the greyness of a modern horizon. But signs are not
+awanting that the breath of the older heroism is beginning to stir
+men's breasts, and that the passion for justice and for liberty, which
+thrilled through the veins of the world's greatest in the past, and
+woke our pulses to responsive throb, has not yet died wholly out of
+the hearts of men. Still the quest of the Holy Grail exercises its
+deathless fascination, but the seekers no longer raise eyes to heaven,
+nor search over land and sea, for they know that it waits them in the
+suffering at their doors, that the consecration of the holiest is on
+the agonising masses of the poor and the despairing, the cup is
+crimson with the blood of the
+
+"'People, the grey-grown speechless Christ.'
+
+... If there be a faith that can remove the mountains of ignorance and
+evil, it is surely that faith in the ultimate triumph of Right in the
+final enthronement of Justice, which alone makes life worth the
+living, and which gems the blackest cloud of depression with the
+rainbow-coloured arch of an immortal hope."
+
+As a step towards bringing about some such union of those ready to
+work for man, Mr. Stead and I projected the _Link_, a halfpenny
+weekly, the spirit of which was described in its motto, taken from
+Victor Hugo: "The people are silence. I will be the advocate of this
+silence. I will speak for the dumb. I will speak of the small to the
+great and of the feeble to the strong.... I will speak for all the
+despairing silent ones. I will interpret this stammering; I will
+interpret the grumblings, the murmurs, the tumults of crowds, the
+complaints ill-pronounced, and all these cries of beasts that, through
+ignorance and through suffering, man is forced to utter ... I will be
+the Word of the People. I will be the bleeding mouth whence the gag is
+snatched out. I will say everything." It announced its object to be
+the "building up" of a "New Church, dedicated to the service of man,"
+and "what we want to do is to establish in every village and in every
+street some man or woman who will sacrifice time and labour as
+systematically and as cheerfully in the temporal service of man as
+others do in what they believe to be the service of God." Week after
+week we issued our little paper, and it became a real light in the
+darkness. There the petty injustices inflicted on the poor found
+voice; there the starvation wages paid to women found exposure; there
+sweating was brought to public notice. A finisher of boots paid 2s.
+6d. per dozen pairs and "find your own polish and thread"; women
+working for 10-1/2 hours per day, making shirts--"fancy best"--at from
+10d. to 3s. per dozen, finding their own cotton and needles, paying
+for gas, towel, and tea (compulsory), earning from 4s. to 10s. per
+week for the most part; a mantle finisher 2s. 2d. a week, out of which
+6d. for materials; "respectable hard-working woman" tried for
+attempted suicide, "driven to rid herself of life from want." Another
+part of our work was defending people from unjust landlords, exposing
+workhouse scandals, enforcing the Employers' Liability Act, Charles
+Bradlaugh's Truck Act, forming "Vigilance Circles" whose members kept
+watch in their own district over cases of cruelty to children,
+extortion, insanitary workshops, sweating, &c., reporting each case to
+me. Into this work came Herbert Burrows, who had joined hands with me
+over the Trafalgar Square defence, and who wrote some noble articles
+in the _Link_. A man loving the people with passionate devotion,
+hating oppression and injustice with equal passion, working himself
+with remorseless energy, breaking his heart over wrongs he could not
+remedy. His whole character once came out in a sentence when he was
+lying delirious and thought himself dying: "Tell the people how I have
+loved them always."
+
+In our crusade for the poor we worked for the dockers." To-morrow
+morning, in London alone 20,000 to 25,000 adult men," wrote Sidney
+Webb, "will fight like savages for permission to labour in the docks
+for 4d. an hour, and one-third of them will fight in vain, and be
+turned workless away." We worked for children's dinners. "If we insist
+on these children being educated, is it not necessary that they shall
+be fed? If not, we waste on them knowledge they cannot assimilate, and
+torture many of them to death. Poor waifs of humanity, we drive them
+into the school and bid them learn; and the pitiful, wistful eyes
+question us why we inflict this strange new suffering, and bring into
+their dim lives this new pang. 'Why not leave us alone? 'ask the
+pathetically patient little faces. Why not, indeed, since for these
+child martyrs of the slums, Society has only formulas, not food." We
+cried out against "cheap goods," that meant "sweated and therefore
+stolen goods." "The ethics of buying should surely be simply enough.
+We want a particular thing, and we do not desire to obtain it either
+by begging or by robbery; but if in becoming possessed of it, we
+neither beg it nor steal, we must give for it something equivalent in
+exchange; so much of our neighbour's labour has been put into the
+thing we desire; if we will not yield him fair equivalent for that
+labour, yet take his article, we defraud him, and if we are not
+willing to give that fair equivalent we have no right to become the
+owners of his product."
+
+This branch of our work led to a big fight--a fight most happy in its
+results. At a meeting of the Fabian Society, Miss Clementina Black
+gave a capital lecture on Female Labour, and urged the formation of a
+Consumers' League, pledged only to buy from shops certificated "clean"
+from unfair wage. H.H. Champion, in the discussion that followed,
+drew attention to the wages paid by Bryant & May (Limited), while
+paying an enormous dividend to their shareholders, so that the value
+of the original £5 shares was quoted at £18 7s. 6d. Herbert Burrows
+and I interviewed some of the girls, got lists of wages, of fines, &c.
+"A typical case is that of a girl of sixteen, a piece-worker; she
+earns 4s. a week, and lives with a sister, employed by the same firm,
+who 'earns good money, as much as 8s. or 9s. a week.' Out of the
+earnings 2s. a week is paid for the rent of one room. The child lives
+only on bread and butter and tea, alike for breakfast and dinner, but
+related with dancing eyes that once a month she went to a meal where
+'you get coffee and bread and butter, and jam and marmalade, and lots
+of it.'" We published the facts under the title of "White Slavery in
+London," and called for a boycott of Bryant & May's matches. "It is
+time some one came and helped us," said two pale-faced girls to me;
+and I asked: "Who will help? Plenty of people wish well to any good
+cause; but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still
+fewer will risk anything in its support. 'Some one ought to do it, but
+why should I?' is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability.
+'Some one ought to do it, so why _not_ I?' is the cry of some earnest
+servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty.
+Between those two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution."
+
+I was promptly threatened with an action for libel, but nothing came
+of it; it was easier to strike at the girls, and a few days later
+Fleet Street was enlivened by the irruption of a crowd of match-girls,
+demanding Annie Besant. I couldn't speechify to match-girls in Fleet
+Street, so asked that a deputation should come and explain what they
+wanted. Up came three women and told their story: they had been asked
+to sign a paper certifying that they were well treated and contented,
+and that my statements were untrue; they refused. "You had spoke up
+for us," explained one, "and we weren't going back on you." A girl,
+pitched on as their leader, was threatened with dismissal; she stood
+firm; next day she was discharged for some trifle, and they all threw
+down their work, some 1,400 of them, and then a crowd of them started
+off to me to ask what to do next. If we ever worked in our lives,
+Herbert Burrows and I worked for the next fortnight. And a pretty
+hubbub we created; we asked for money, and it came pouring in; we
+registered the girls to receive strike pay, wrote articles, roused the
+clubs, held public meetings, got Mr. Bradlaugh to ask questions in
+Parliament, stirred up constituencies in which shareholders were
+members, till the whole country rang with the struggle. Mr. Frederick
+Charrington lent us a hall for registration, Mr. Sidney Webb and
+others moved the National Liberal Club to action; we led a procession
+of the girls to the House of Commons, and interviewed, with a
+deputation of them, Members of Parliament who cross-questioned them.
+The girls behaved splendidly, stuck together, kept brave and bright
+all through. Mr. Hobart of the Social Democratic Federation, Messrs.
+Shaw, Bland, and Oliver, and Headlam of the Fabian Society, Miss
+Clementina Black, and many another helped in the heavy work. The
+London Trades Council finally consented to act as arbitrators and a
+satisfactory settlement was arrived at; the girls went in to work,
+fines and deductions were abolished, better wages paid; the
+Match-makers' Union was established, still the strongest woman's
+Trades Union in England, and for years I acted as secretary, till,
+under press of other duties, I resigned, and my work was given by the
+girls to Mrs. Thornton Smith; Herbert Burrows became, and still is,
+the treasurer. For a time there was friction between the Company and
+the Union, but it gradually disappeared under the influence of common
+sense on both sides, and we have found the manager ready to consider
+any just grievance and to endeavour to remove it, while the Company
+have been liberal supporters of the Working Women's Club at Bow,
+founded by H.P. Blavatsky.
+
+[Illustration: STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.]
+
+The worst suffering of all was among the box-makers, thrown out of
+work by the strike, and they were hard to reach. Twopence-farthing per
+gross of boxes, and buy your own string and paste, is not wealth, but
+when the work went more rapid starvation came. Oh, those trudges
+through the lanes and alleys round Bethnal Green Junction late at
+night, when our day's work was over; children lying about on shavings,
+rags, anything; famine looking out of baby faces, out of women's eyes,
+out of the tremulous hands of men. Heart grew sick and eyes dim, and
+ever louder sounded the question, "Where is the cure for sorrow, what
+the way of rescue for the world?"
+
+In August I asked for a "match-girls' drawing-room." "It will want a
+piano, tables for papers, for games, for light literature; so that it
+may offer a bright, homelike refuge to these girls, who now have no
+real homes, no playground save the streets. It is not proposed to
+build an 'institution' with stern and rigid discipline and enforcement
+of prim behaviour, but to open a home, filled with the genial
+atmosphere of cordial comradeship, and self-respecting freedom--the
+atmosphere so familiar to all who have grown up in the blessed shelter
+of a happy home, so strange, alas! to too many of our East London
+girls." In the same month of August, two years later, H.P. Blavatsky
+opened such a home.
+
+Then came a cry for help from South London, from tin-box makers,
+illegally fined, and in many cases grievously mutilated by the
+non-fencing of machinery; then aid to shop assistants, also illegally
+fined; legal defences by the score still continued; a vigorous
+agitation for a free meal for children, and for fair wages to be paid
+by all public bodies; work for the dockers and exposure of their
+wrongs; a visit to the Cradley Heath chain-makers, speeches to them,
+writing for them; a contest for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets
+division, and triumphant return at the head of the poll. Such were
+some of the ways in which the autumn days were spent, to say nothing
+of scores of lectures--Secularist, Labour, Socialist--and scores of
+articles written for the winning of daily bread. When the School Board
+work was added I felt that I had as much work as one woman's strength
+could do.
+
+Thus was ushered in 1889, the to me never-to-be-forgotten year in
+which I found my way "Home," and had the priceless good fortune of
+meeting, and of becoming the pupil of, H.P. Blavatsky. Ever more and
+more had been growing on me the feeling that something more than I had
+was needed for the cure of social ills. The Socialist position
+sufficed on the economic side, but where to gain the inspiration, the
+motive, which should lead to the realisation of the Brotherhood of
+Man? Our efforts to really organise bands of unselfish workers had
+failed. Much indeed had been done, but there was not a real movement
+of self-sacrificing devotion, in which men worked for Love's sake
+only, and asked but to give, not to take. Where was the material for
+the nobler Social Order, where the hewn stones for the building of the
+Temple of Man? A great despair would oppress me as I sought for such a
+movement and found it not.
+
+[Illustration: MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.]
+
+Not only so; but since 1886 there had been slowly growing up a
+conviction that my philosophy was not sufficient; that life and mind
+were other than, more than, I had dreamed. Psychology was advancing
+with rapid strides; hypnotic experiments were revealing unlooked-for
+complexities in human consciousness, strange riddles of multiplex
+personalities, and, most startling of all, vivid intensities of mental
+action when the brain, that should be the generator of thought, was
+reduced to a comatose state. Fact after fact came hurtling in upon me,
+demanding explanation I was incompetent to give. I studied the
+obscurer sides of consciousness, dreams, hallucinations, illusions,
+insanity. Into the darkness shot a ray of light--A.P. Sinnett's
+"Occult World," with its wonderfully suggestive letters, expounding
+not the supernatural but a nature under law, wider than I had dared to
+conceive. I added Spiritualism to my studies, experimenting privately,
+finding the phenomena indubitable, but the spiritualistic explanation
+of them incredible. The phenomena of clairvoyance, clairaudience,
+thought-reading, were found to be real. Under all the rush of the
+outer life, already sketched, these questions were working in my mind,
+their answers were being diligently sought. I read a variety of books,
+but could find little in them that satisfied me. I experimented in
+various ways suggested in them, and got some (to me) curious results.
+I finally convinced myself that there was some hidden thing, some
+hidden power, and resolved to seek until I found, and by the early
+spring of 1889 I had grown desperately determined to find at all
+hazards what I sought. At last, sitting alone in deep thought as I had
+become accustomed to do after the sun had set, filled with an intense
+but nearly hopeless longing to solve the riddle of life and mind, I
+heard a Voice that was later to become to me the holiest sound on
+earth, bidding me take courage for the light was near. A fortnight
+passed, and then Mr. Stead gave into my hands two large volumes. "Can
+you review these? My young men all fight shy of them, but you are
+quite mad enough on these subjects to make something of them." I took
+the books; they were the two volumes of "The Secret Doctrine," written
+by H.P. Blavatsky.
+
+Home I carried my burden, and sat me down to read. As I turned over
+page after page the interest became absorbing; but how familiar it
+seemed; how my mind leapt forward to presage the conclusions, how
+natural it was, how coherent, how subtle, and yet how intelligible. I
+was dazzled, blinded by the light in which disjointed facts were seen
+as parts of a mighty whole, and all my puzzles, riddles, problems,
+seemed to disappear. The effect was partially illusory in one sense,
+in that they all had to be slowly unravelled later, the brain
+gradually assimilating that which the swift intuition had grasped as
+truth. But the light had been seen, and in that flash of illumination
+I knew that the weary search was over and the very Truth was found.
+
+I wrote the review, and asked Mr. Stead for an introduction to the
+writer, and then sent a note asking to be allowed to call. I received
+the most cordial of notes, bidding me come, and in the soft spring
+evening Herbert Burrows and I--for his aspirations were as mine on
+this matter--walked from Netting Hill Station, wondering what we
+should meet, to the door of 17, Lansdowne Road. A pause, a swift
+passing through hall and outer room, through folding-doors thrown
+back, a figure in a large chair before a table, a voice, vibrant,
+compelling, "My dear Mrs. Besant, I have so long wished to see you,"
+and I was standing with my hand in her firm grip, and looking for
+the first time in this life straight into the eyes of "H.P.B." I
+was conscious of a sudden leaping forth of my heart--was it
+recognition?--and then, I am ashamed to say, a fierce rebellion, a
+fierce withdrawal, as of some wild animal when it feels a mastering
+hand. I sat down, after some introductions that conveyed no ideas to
+me, and listened. She talked of travels, of various countries, easy
+brilliant talk, her eyes veiled, her exquisitely moulded fingers
+rolling cigarettes incessantly. Nothing special to record, no word of
+Occultism, nothing mysterious, a woman of the world chatting with her
+evening visitors. We rose to go, and for a moment the veil lifted, and
+two brilliant, piercing eyes met mine, and with a yearning throb in
+the voice: "Oh, my dear Mrs. Besant, if you would only come among us!"
+I felt a well-nigh uncontrollable desire to bend down and kiss her,
+under the compulsion of that yearning voice, those compelling eyes,
+but with a flash of the old unbending pride and an inward jeer at my
+own folly, I said a commonplace polite good-bye, and turned away with
+some inanely courteous and evasive remark. "Child," she said to me
+long afterwards, "your pride is terrible; you are as proud as Lucifer
+himself." But truly I think I never showed it to her again after that
+first evening, though it sprang up wrathfully in her defence many and
+many a time, until I learned the pettiness and the worthlessness of
+all criticism, and knew that the blind were objects of compassion not
+of scorn.
+
+Once again I went, and asked about the Theosophical Society, wishful
+to join, but fighting against it. For I saw, distinct and clear--with
+painful distinctness, indeed--what that joining would mean. I had
+largely conquered public prejudice against me by my work on the London
+School Board, and a smoother road stretched before me, whereon effort
+to help should be praised not blamed. Was I to plunge into a new
+vortex of strife, and make myself a mark for ridicule--worse than
+hatred--and fight again the weary fight for an unpopular truth? Must I
+turn against Materialism, and face the shame of publicly confessing
+that I had been wrong, misled by intellect to ignore the Soul? Must I
+leave the army that had battled for me so bravely, the friends who
+through all brutality of social ostracism had held me dear and true?
+And he, the strongest and truest friend of all, whose confidence I had
+shaken by my Socialism--must he suffer the pang of seeing his
+co-worker, his co-fighter, of whom he had been so proud, to whom he
+had been so generous, go over to the opposing hosts, and leave the
+ranks of Materialism? What would be the look in Charles Bradlaugh's
+eyes when I told him that I had become a Theosophist? The struggle was
+sharp and keen, but with none of the anguish of old days in it, for
+the soldier had now fought many fights and was hardened by many
+wounds. And so it came to pass that I went again to Lansdowne Road to
+ask about the Theosophical Society. H.P. Blavatsky looked at me
+piercingly for a moment. "Have you read the report about me of the
+Society for Psychical Research?" "No; I never heard of it, so far as I
+know." "Go and read it, and if, after reading it, you come
+back--well." And nothing more would she say on the subject, but
+branched off to her experiences in many lands.
+
+I borrowed a copy of the Report, read and re-read it. Quickly I saw
+how slender was the foundation on which the imposing structure was
+built. The continual assumptions on which conclusions were based; the
+incredible character of the allegations; and--most damning fact of
+all--the foul source from which the evidence was derived. Everything
+turned on the veracity of the Coulombs, and they were self-stamped as
+partners in the alleged frauds. Could I put such against the frank,
+fearless nature that I had caught a glimpse of, against the proud
+fiery truthfulness that shone at me from the clear, blue eyes, honest
+and fearless as those of a noble child? Was the writer of "The Secret
+Doctrine" this miserable impostor, this accomplice of tricksters, this
+foul and loathsome deceiver, this conjuror with trap-doors and sliding
+panels? I laughed aloud at the absurdity and flung the Report aside
+with the righteous scorn of an honest nature that knew its own kin
+when it met them, and shrank from the foulness and baseness of a lie.
+The next day saw me at the Theosophical Publishing Company's office at
+7, Duke Street, Adelphi, where Countess Wachtmeister--one of the
+lealest of H.P.B.'s friends--was at work, and I signed an
+application to be admitted as fellow of the Theosophical Society.
+
+On receiving my diploma I betook myself to Lansdowne Road, where I
+found H.P.B. alone. I went over to her, bent down and kissed her,
+but said no word. "You have joined the Society?" "Yes." "You have read
+the report?" "Yes." "Well?" I knelt down before her and clasped her
+hands in mine, looking straight into her eyes. "My answer is, will you
+accept me as your pupil, and give me the honour of proclaiming you my
+teacher in the face of the world?" Her stern, set face softened, the
+unwonted gleam of tears sprang to her eyes; then, with a dignity more
+than regal, she placed her hand upon my head. "You are a noble woman.
+May Master bless you."
+
+From that day, the 10th of May, 1889, until now--two years three and
+half months after she left her body on May 8, 1891--my faith in her
+has never wavered, my trust in her has never been shaken. I gave her
+my faith on an imperious intuition, I proved her true day after day in
+closest intimacy living by her side; and I speak of her with the
+reverence due from a pupil to a teacher who never failed her, with the
+passionate gratitude which, in our School, is the natural meed of the
+one who opens the gateway and points out the path. "Folly!
+fanaticism!" scoffs the Englishman of the nineteenth century. Be it
+so. I have seen, and I can wait. I have been told that I plunged
+headlong into Theosophy and let my enthusiasm carry me away. I think
+the charge is true, in so far as the decision was swiftly taken; but
+it had been long led up to, and realised the dreams of childhood on
+the higher planes of intellectual womanhood. And let me here say that
+more than all I hoped for in that first plunge has been realised, and
+a certainty of knowledge has been gained on doctrines seen as true as
+that swift flash of illumination. I _know_, by personal experiment,
+that the Soul exists, and that my Soul, not my body, is myself; that
+it can leave the body at will; that it can, disembodied, reach and
+learn from living human teachers, and bring back and impress on the
+physical brain that which it has learned; that this process of
+transferring consciousness from one range of being, as it were, to
+another, is a very slow process, during which the body and brain are
+gradually correlated with the subtler form which is essentially that
+of the Soul, and that my own experience of it, still so imperfect, so
+fragmentary, when compared with the experience of the highly trained,
+is like the first struggles of a child learning to speak compared with
+the perfect oratory of the practised speaker; that consciousness, so
+far from being dependent on the brain, is more active when freed from
+the gross forms of matter than when encased within them; that the
+great Sages spoken of by H.P. Blavatsky exist; that they wield powers
+and possess knowledge before which our control of Nature and knowledge
+of her ways is but as child's play. All this, and much more, have I
+learned, and I am but a pupil of low grade, as it were in the infant
+class of the Occult School; so the first plunge has been successful,
+and the intuition has been justified. This same path of knowledge that
+I am treading is open to all others who will pay the toll demanded at
+the gateway--and that toll is willingness to renounce everything for
+the sake of spiritual truth, and willingness to give all the truth
+that is won to the service of man, keeping back no shred for self.
+
+On June 23rd, in a review of "The Secret Doctrine" in the _National
+Reformer,_ the following passages occur, and show how swiftly some of
+the main points of the teaching had been grasped. (There is a blunder
+in the statement that of the seven modifications of Matter Science
+knows only four, and till lately knew only three; these four are
+sub-states only, sub-divisions of the lowest plane.)
+
+After saying that the nineteenth-century Englishman would be but too
+likely to be repelled if he only skimmed the book, I went on: "With
+telescope and with microscope, with scalpel and with battery, Western
+Science interrogates nature, adding fact to fact, storing experience
+after experience, but coming ever to gulfs unfathomable by its
+plummets, to heights unscalable by its ladders. Wide and masterful in
+its answers to the 'How?' the 'Why?' ever eludes it, and causes remain
+enwrapped in gloom. Eastern Science uses as its scientific instrument
+the penetrating faculties of the mind alone, and regarding the
+material plane as _Maya_--illusion--seeks in the mental and spiritual
+planes of being the causes of the material effects. There, too, is the
+only reality; there the true existence of which the visible universe
+is but the shadow.
+
+"It is clear that from such investigations some further mental
+equipment is necessary than that normally afforded by the human body.
+And here comes the parting of the ways between East and West. For the
+study of the material universe, our five senses, aided by the
+instruments invented by Science, may suffice. For all we can hear and
+see, taste and handle, these accustomed servitors, though often
+blundering, are the best available guides to knowledge. But it lies in
+the nature of the case that they are useless when the investigation is
+to be into modes of existence which cannot impress themselves on our
+nerve-ends. For instance, what we know as colour is the vibration
+frequency of etheric waves striking on the retina of the eye, between
+certain definite limits--759 trillions of blows from the maximum, 436
+trillions from the minimum--these waves give rise in us to the
+sensation which the brain translates into colour. (Why the 436
+trillion blows at one end of a nerve become 'Red' at the other end we
+do not know; we chronicle the fact but cannot explain it.) But our
+capacity to respond to the vibration cannot limit the vibrational
+capacity of the ether; to _us_ the higher and lower rates of vibration
+do not exist, but if our sense of vision were more sensitive we should
+see where now we are blind. Following this line of thought we realise
+that matter may exist in forms unknown to us, in modifications to
+which our senses are unable to respond. Now steps in the Eastern Sage
+and says: 'That which you say _may_ be, _is_; we have developed and
+cultivated senses as much superior to yours as your eye is superior to
+that of the jelly-fish; we have evolved mental and spiritual faculties
+which enable us to investigate on the higher planes of being with as
+much certainty as you are investigating on the physical plane; there
+is nothing _supernatural_ in the business, any more than your
+knowledge is supernatural, though much above that accessible to the
+fish; we do not speculate on these higher forms of existence; we
+_know_ them by personal study, just as you know the fauna and flora of
+your world. The powers we possess are not supernatural, they are
+latent in every human being, and will be evolved as the race
+progresses. All that we have done is to evolve them more rapidly than
+our neighbours, by a procedure as open to you as it was to us. Matter
+is everywhere, but it exists in seven modifications of which you only
+know four, and until lately only knew three; in those higher forms
+reside the causes of which you see the effects in the lower, and to
+know these causes you must develop the capacity to take cognisance of
+the higher planes.'"
+
+Then followed a brief outline of the cycle of evolution, and I went
+on: "What part does man play in this vast drama of a universe?
+Needless to say, he is not the only living form in a Cosmos, which for
+the most part is uninhabitable by him. As Science has shown living
+forms everywhere on the material plane, races in each drop of water,
+life throbbing in every leaf and blade, so the 'Secret Doctrine'
+points to living forms on higher planes of existence, each suited to
+its environment, till all space thrills with life, and nowhere is
+there death, but only change. Amid these myriads are some evolving
+towards humanity, some evolving away from humanity as we know it,
+divesting themselves of its grosser parts. For man is regarded as a
+sevenfold being, four of these parts belonging to the animal body, and
+perishing at, or soon after, death; while three form his higher self,
+his true individuality, and these persist and are immortal. These form
+the Ego, and it is this which passes through many incarnations,
+learning life's lesson as it goes, working out its own redemption
+within the limits of an inexorable law, sowing seeds of which it ever
+reaps the harvest, building its own fate with tireless fingers, and
+finding nowhere in the measureless time and space around it any that
+can lift for it one weight it has created, one burden it has gathered,
+unravel for it one tangle it has twisted, close for it one gulf it has
+digged."
+
+Then after noting the approaches of Western Science to Eastern, came
+the final words: "it is of curious interest to note how some of the
+latest theories seem to catch glimpses of the occult Doctrines, as
+though Science were standing on the very threshold of knowledge which
+shall make all her past seem small. Already her hand is trembling
+towards the grasp of forces beside which all those now at her command
+are insignificant. How soon will her grip fasten on them? Let us hope
+not until social order has been transformed, lest they should only
+give more to those who have, and leave the wretched still wretcheder
+by force of contrast. Knowledge used by selfishness widens the gulf
+that divides man from man and race from race, and we may well shrink
+from the idea of new powers in Nature being yoked to the car of Greed.
+Hence the wisdom of those 'Masters,' in whose name Madame Blavatsky
+speaks, has ever denied the knowledge which is power until Love's
+lesson has been learned, and has given only into the hands of the
+selfless the control of those natural forces which, misused, would
+wreck society."
+
+This review, and the public announcement, demanded by honesty, that I
+had joined the Theosophical Society, naturally raised somewhat of a
+storm of criticism, and the _National Reformer_ of June 30th contained
+the following: "The review of Madame Blavatsky's book in the last
+_National Reformer_, and an announcement in the _Star_, have brought
+me several letters on the subject of Theosophy. I am asked for an
+explanation as to what Theosophy is, and as to my own opinion on
+Theosophy--the word 'theosoph' is old, and was used among the
+Neo-platonists. From the dictionary its new meaning appears to be,
+'one who claims to have a knowledge of God, or of the laws of nature
+by means of internal illumination.' An Atheist certainly cannot be a
+Theosophist. A Deist might be a Theosophist. A Monist cannot be a
+Theosophist. Theosophy must at least involve Dualism. Modern
+Theosophy, according to Madame Blavatsky, as set out in last week's
+issue, asserts much that I do not believe, and alleges some things
+that, to me, are certainly not true. I have not had the opportunity of
+reading Madame Blavatsky's two volumes, but I have read during the
+past ten years many publications from the pen of herself, Colonel
+Olcott, and of other Theosophists. They appear to me to have sought to
+rehabilitate a kind of Spiritualism in Eastern phraseology. I think
+many of their allegations utterly erroneous, and their reasonings
+wholly unsound. I very deeply regret indeed that my colleague and
+co-worker has, with somewhat of suddenness, and without any
+interchange of ideas with myself, adopted as facts matters which seem
+to me to be as unreal as it is possible for any fiction to be. My
+regret is greater as I know Mrs. Besant's devotion to any course she
+believes to be true. I know that she will always be earnest in the
+advocacy of any views she undertakes to defend, and I look to possible
+developments of her Theosophic views with the very gravest misgiving.
+The editorial policy of this paper is unchanged, and is directly
+antagonistic to all forms of Theosophy. I would have preferred on this
+subject to have held my peace, for the public disagreeing with Mrs.
+Besant on her adoption of Socialism has caused pain to both; but on
+reading her article and taking the public announcement made of her
+having joined the Theosophical organisation, I owe it to those who
+look to me for guidance to say this with clearness.
+
+"CHARLES BRADLAUGH."
+
+"It is not possible for me here to state fully my reasons for joining
+the Theosophical Society, the three objects of which are: To found a
+Universal Brotherhood without distinction of race or creed; to forward
+the study of Aryan literature and philosophy; to investigate
+unexplained laws of nature and the physical powers latent in man. On
+matters of religious opinion the members are absolutely free. The
+founders of the society deny a personal God, and a somewhat subtle
+form of Pantheism is taught as the Theosophic view of the universe,
+though even this is not forced on members of the society. I have no
+desire to hide the fact that this form of Pantheism appears to me to
+promise solution of some problems, especially problems in psychology,
+which Atheism leaves untouched.
+
+"ANNIE BESANT."
+
+Theosophy, as its students well know, so far from involving Dualism,
+is based on the One, which becomes Two on manifestation, just as
+Atheism posits one existence, only cognisable in the duality force and
+matter, and as philosophic--though not popular--Theism teaches one
+Deity whereof are spirit and matter. Mr. Bradlaugh's temperate
+disapproval was not copied in its temperance by some other Freethought
+leaders, and Mr. Foote especially distinguished himself by the
+bitterness of his attacks. In the midst of the whirl I was called away
+to Paris to attend, with Herbert Burrows, the great Labour Congress
+held there from July 15th to July 20th, and spent a day or two at
+Fontainebleau with H.P. Blavatsky, who had gone abroad for a few
+weeks' rest. There I found her translating the wonderful fragments
+from "The Book of the Golden Precepts," now so widely known under the
+name of "The Voice of the Silence." She wrote it swiftly, without any
+material copy before her, and in the evening made me read it aloud to
+see if the "English was decent." Herbert Burrows was there, and Mrs.
+Candler, a staunch American Theosophist, and we sat round H.P.B. while
+I read. The translation was in perfect and beautiful English, flowing
+and musical; only a word or two could we find to alter, and she looked
+at us like a startled child, wondering at our praises--praises that
+any one with the literary sense would endorse if they read that
+exquisite prose poem.
+
+A little earlier in the same day I had asked her as to the agencies at
+work in producing the taps so constantly heard at Spiritualistic
+_SĂ©ances_. "You don't use spirits to produce taps," she said; "see
+here." She put her hand over my head, not touching it, and I heard and
+felt slight taps on the bone of my skull, each sending a little
+electric thrill down the spine. She then carefully explained how such
+taps were producible at any point desired by the operator, and how
+interplay of the currents to which they were due might be caused
+otherwise than by conscious human volition. It was in this fashion
+that she would illustrate her verbal teachings, proving by experiment
+the statements made as to the existence of subtle forces controllable
+by the trained mind. The phenomena all belonged to the scientific side
+of her teaching, and she never committed the folly of claiming
+authority for her philosophic doctrines on the ground that she was a
+wonder-worker. And constantly she would remind us that there was no
+such thing as "miracle"; that all the phenomena she had produced were
+worked by virtue of a knowledge of nature deeper than that of average
+people, and by the force of a well-trained mind and will; some of them
+were what she would describe as "psychological tricks," the creation
+of images by force of imagination, and in pressing them on others as a
+"collective hallucination"; others, such as the moving of solid
+articles, either by an astral hand projected to draw them towards her,
+or by using an Elemental; others by reading in the Astral Light, and
+so on. But the proof of the reality of her mission from those whom she
+spoke of as Masters lay not in these comparatively trivial physical
+and mental phenomena, but in the splendour of her heroic endurance,
+the depth of her knowledge, the selflessness of her character, the
+lofty spirituality of her teaching, the untiring passion of her
+devotion, the incessant ardour of her work for the enlightening of
+men. It was these, and not her phenomena, that won for her our faith
+and confidence--we who lived beside her, knowing her daily life--and
+we gratefully accepted her teaching not because she claimed any
+authority, but because it woke in us powers, the possibility of which
+in ourselves we had not dreamed of, energies of the Soul that
+demonstrated their own existence.
+
+Returning to London from Paris, it became necessary to make a very
+clear and definite presentment of my change of views, and in the
+_Reformer_ of August 4th I find the following: "Many statements are
+being made just now about me and my beliefs, some of which are
+absurdly, and some of which are maliciously, untrue. I must ask my
+friends not to give credence to them. It would not be fair to my
+friend Mr. Bradlaugh to ask him to open the columns of this Journal to
+an exposition of Theosophy from my pen, and so bring about a long
+controversy on a subject which would not interest the majority of the
+readers of the _National Reformer_. This being so I cannot here answer
+the attacks made on me. I feel, however, that the party with which I
+have worked for so long has a right to demand of me some explanation
+of the step I have taken, and I am therefore preparing a pamphlet
+dealing fully with the question. Further, I have arranged with Mr.
+R.O. Smith to take as subject of the lectures to be delivered by me at
+the Hall of Science on August 4th and 11th 'Why I became a
+Theosophist.' Meanwhile I think that my years of service in the ranks
+of the Freethought party give me the right to ask that I should not be
+condemned unheard, and I even venture to suggest, in view of the
+praises bestowed on me by Freethinkers in the past, that it is
+possible that there may be something to be said, from the intellectual
+standpoint, in favour of Theosophy. The caricatures of it which have
+appeared from some Freethinkers' pens represent it about as accurately
+as the Christian Evidence caricatures of Atheism represent that
+dignified philosophy of life; and, remembering how much they are
+themselves misrepresented, I ask them to wait before they judge."
+
+The lectures were delivered, and were condensed into a pamphlet
+bearing the same title, which has had a very great circulation. It
+closed as follows:--
+
+"There remains a great stumblingblock in the minds of many
+Freethinkers which is certain to prejudice them against Theosophy, and
+which offers to opponents a cheap subject for sarcasm--the assertion
+that there exist other living beings than the men and animals found on
+our own globe. It may be well for people who at once turn away when
+such an assertion is made to stop and ask themselves whether they
+really and seriously believe that throughout this mighty universe, in
+which our little planet is but as a tiny speck of sand in the Sahara,
+this one planet only is inhabited by living things? Is all the
+universe dumb save for _our_ voices? eyeless save for _our_ vision?
+dead save for _our_ life? Such a preposterous belief was well enough
+in the days when Christianity regarded our world as the centre of the
+universe, the human race as the one for which the Creator had deigned
+to die. But now that we are placed in our proper position, one among
+countless myriads of worlds, what ground is there for the preposterous
+conceit which arrogates as ours all sentient existence? Earth, air,
+water, all are teeming with living things suited to their environment;
+our globe is overflowing with life. But the moment we pass in thought
+beyond our atmosphere everything is to be changed. Neither reason nor
+analogy support such a supposition. It was one of Bruno's crimes that
+he dared to teach that other worlds than ours were inhabited; but he
+was wiser than the monks who burned him. All the Theosophists aver is
+that each phase of matter has living things suited to it, and that all
+the universe is pulsing with life. 'Superstition!' shriek the bigoted.
+It is no more superstition than the belief in Bacteria, or in any
+other living thing invisible to the ordinary human eye. 'Spirit' is a
+misleading word, for, historically, it connotes immateriality and a
+supernatural kind of existence, and the Theosophist believes neither
+in the one nor the other. With him all living things act in and
+through a material basis, and 'matter' and 'spirit' are not found
+dissociated. But he alleges that matter exists in states other than
+those at present known to science. To deny this is to be about as
+sensible as was the HindĂ» prince who denied the existence of ice
+because water, in his experience, never became solid. Refusal to
+believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all
+outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
+
+"One last word to my Secularist friends. If you say to me, 'Leave our
+ranks,' I will leave them; I force myself on no party, and the moment
+I feel myself unwelcome I will go.[29] It has cost me pain enough and
+to spare to admit that the Materialism from which I hoped all has
+failed me, and by such admission to bring on myself the disapproval of
+some of my nearest friends. But here, as at other times in my life, I
+dare not purchase peace with a lie. An imperious necessity forces me
+to speak the truth, as I see it, whether the speech please or
+displease, whether it bring praise or blame. That one loyalty to Truth
+I must keep stainless, whatever friendships fail me or human ties be
+broken. She may lead me into the wilderness, yet I must follow her;
+she may strip me of all love, yet I must pursue her; though she slay
+me, yet will I trust in her; and I ask no other epitaph on my tomb but
+
+"'SHE TRIED TO FOLLOW TRUTH.'"
+
+Meanwhile, with this new controversy on my hands, the School Board
+work went on, rendered possible, I ought to say, by the generous
+assistance of friends unknown to me, who sent me, £150 a year during
+the last year and a half. So also went on the vigorous Socialist work,
+and the continual championship of struggling labour movements,
+prominent here being the organisation of the South London fur-pullers
+into a union, and the aiding of the movement for shortening the hours
+of tram and 'bus men, the meetings for which had to be held after
+midnight. The feeding and clothing of children also occupied much time
+and attention, for the little ones in my district were, thousands of
+them, desperately poor. My studies I pursued as best I could, reading
+in railway carriages, tramcars, omnibuses, and stealing hours for
+listening to H.P.B. by shortening the nights.
+
+In October, Mr. Bradlaugh's shaken strength received its death-blow,
+though he was to live yet another fifteen months. He collapsed
+suddenly under a most severe attack of congestion and lay in imminent
+peril, devotedly nursed by his only remaining child, Mrs. Bonner, his
+elder daughter having died the preceding autumn. Slowly he struggled
+back to life, after four weeks in bed, and, ordered by his physician
+to take rest and if possible a sea voyage, he sailed for India on
+November 28th, to attend the National Congress, where he was
+enthusiastically acclaimed as "Member for India."
+
+In November I argued a libel suit, brought by me against the Rev. Mr.
+Hoskyns, vicar of Stepney, who had selected some vile passages from a
+book which was not mine and had circulated them as representing my
+views, during the School Board election of 1888. I had against me the
+Solicitor-General, Sir Edward Clarke, at the bar, and Baron Huddleston
+on the bench; both counsel and judge did their best to browbeat me and
+to use the coarsest language, endeavouring to prove that by advocating
+the limitation of the family I had condemned chastity as a crime. Five
+hours of brutal cross-examination left my denial of such teachings
+unshaken, and even the pleadings of the judge for the clergyman,
+defending his parishioners against an unbeliever and his laying down
+as law that the statement was privileged, did not avail to win a
+verdict. The jury disagreed, not, as one of them told me afterwards,
+on the question of the libel, but on some feeling that a clergyman
+ought not to be mulcted in damages for his over-zeal in defence of his
+faith against the ravening wolf of unbelief, while others, regarding
+the libel as a very cruel one, would not agree to a verdict that did
+not carry substantial damages. I did not carry the case to a new
+trial, feeling that it was not worth while to waste time over it
+further, my innocence of the charge itself having been fully proved.
+
+Busily the months rolled on, and early in the year 1890 H.P.Blavatsky
+had given to her £1,000, to use in her discretion for human service,
+and if she thought well, in the service of women. After a good deal of
+discussion she fixed on the establishment of a club in East London for
+working girls, and with her approval Miss Laura Cooper and I hunted
+for a suitable place. Finally we fixed on a very large and old house,
+193, Bow Road, and some months went in its complete renovation and the
+building of a hall attached to it. On August 15th it was opened by
+Madame Blavatsky, and dedicated by her to the brightening of the lot
+of hardworking and underpaid girls. It has nobly fulfilled its mission
+for the last three years. Very tender was H.P.B.'s heart to human
+suffering, especially to that of women and children. She was very poor
+towards the end of her earthly life, having spent all on her mission,
+and refusing to take time from her Theosophical work to write for the
+Russian papers which were ready to pay highly for her pen. But her
+slender purse was swiftly emptied when any human pain that money could
+relieve came in her way. One day I wrote a letter to a comrade that
+was shown to her, about some little children to whom I had carried a
+quantity of country flowers, and I had spoken of their faces pinched
+with want. The following characteristic note came to me:--
+
+"MY DEAREST FRIEND,--I have just read your letter to ---- and my heart
+is sick for the poor little ones! Look here; I have but 30s. of _my
+own money_ of which I can dispose (for as you know I am a pauper, and
+proud of it), but I want you to take them and _not say a word_. This
+may buy thirty dinners for thirty poor little starving wretches, and I
+may feel happier for thirty minutes at the thought. Now don't say a
+word, and do it; take them to those unfortunate babies who loved your
+flowers and felt happy. Forgive your old uncouth friend, _useless_ in
+this world!
+
+"Ever yours,
+
+"H.P.B."
+
+It was this tenderness of hers that led us, after she had gone, to
+found the "H.P.B. Home for little children," and one day we hope to
+fulfil her expressed desire that a large but homelike Refuge for
+outcast children should be opened under the auspices of the
+Theosophical Society.
+
+The lease of 17, Lansdowne Road expiring in the early summer of 1890,
+it was decided that 19, Avenue Road should be turned into the
+headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Europe. A hall was built
+for the meetings of the Blavatsky Lodge--the lodge founded by her--and
+various alterations made. In July her staff of workers was united
+under one roof; thither came Archibald and Bertram Keightley, who had
+devoted themselves to her service years before, and the Countess
+Wachtmeister, who had thrown aside all the luxuries of wealth and of
+high social rank to give all to the cause she served and the friend
+she loved with deep and faithful loyajty; and George Mead, her
+secretary and earnest disciple, a man of strong brain and strong
+character, a fine scholar and untiring worker; thither, too, Claude
+Wright, most lovable of Irishmen, with keen insight underlying a
+bright and sunny nature, careless on the surface, and Walter Old,
+dreamy and sensitive, a born psychic, and, like many such, easily
+swayed by those around him; Emily Kislingbury also, a studious and
+earnest woman; Isabel Cooper Oakley, intuitional and studious, a rare
+combination, and a most devoted pupil in Occult studies; James Pryse,
+an American, than whom none is more devoted, bringing practical
+knowledge to the help of the work, and making possible the large
+development of our printing department. These, with myself, were at
+first the resident staff, Miss Cooper and Herbert Burrows, who were
+also identified with the work, being prevented by other obligations
+from living always as part of the household.
+
+The rules of the house were--and are--very simple, but H.P.B.
+insisted on great regularity of life; we breakfasted at 8 a.m.,
+worked till lunch at 1, then again till dinner at 7. After dinner
+the outer work for the Society was put aside, and we gathered in
+H.P.B.'s room where we would sit talking over plans, receiving
+instructions, listening to her explanation of knotty points. By 12
+midnight all the lights had to be extinguished. My public work took me
+away for many hours, unfortunately for myself, but such was the
+regular run of our busy lives. She herself wrote incessantly; always
+suffering, but of indomitable will, she drove her body through its
+tasks, merciless to its weaknesses and its pains. Her pupils she
+treated very variously, adapting herself with nicest accuracy to their
+differing natures; as a teacher she was marvellously patient,
+explaining a thing over and over again in different fashions, until
+sometimes after prolonged failure she would throw herself back in her
+chair: "My God!" (the easy "Mon Dieu" of the foreigner) "am I a fool
+that you can't understand? Here, So-and-so"--to some one on whose
+countenance a faint gleam of comprehension was discernible--"tell
+these flapdoodles of the ages what I mean." With vanity, conceit,
+pretence of knowledge, she was merciless, if the pupil were a
+promising one; keen shafts of irony would pierce the sham. With some
+she would get very angry, lashing them out of their lethargy with
+fiery scorn; and in truth she made herself a mere instrument for the
+training of her pupils, careless what they, or any one else thought of
+her, providing that the resulting benefit to them was secured. And we,
+who lived around her, who in closest intimacy watched her day after
+day, we bear witness to the unselfish beauty of her life, the nobility
+of her character, and we lay at her feet our most reverent gratitude
+for knowledge gained, lives purified, strength developed. O noble and
+heroic Soul, whom the outside purblind world misjudges, but whom your
+pupils partly saw, never through lives and deaths shall we repay the
+debt of gratitude we owe to you.
+
+And thus I came through storm to peace, not to the peace of an
+untroubled sea of outer life, which no strong soul can crave, but to
+an inner peace that outer troubles may not avail to ruffle--a peace
+which belongs to the eternal not to the transitory, to the depths not
+to the shallows of life. It carried me scatheless through the terrible
+spring of 1891, when death struck down Charles Bradlaugh in the
+plenitude of his usefulness, and unlocked the gateway into rest for H.
+P. Blavatsky. Through anxieties and responsibilities heavy and
+numerous it has borne me; every strain makes it stronger; every trial
+makes it serener; every assault leaves it more radiant. Quiet
+confidence has taken the place of doubt; a strong security the place
+of anxious dread. In life, through death, to life, I am but the
+servant of the great Brotherhood, and those on whose heads but for a
+moment the touch of the Master has rested in blessing can never again
+look upon the world save through eyes made luminous with the radiance
+of the Eternal Peace.
+
+PEACE TO ALL BEINGS.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: This odious law has now been altered, and a married woman
+is a person, not a chattel.]
+
+[Footnote 2: "The Disciples," p. 14.]
+
+[Footnote 3: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 4: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 5: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 6: "Why I do not Believe in God." 1887.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 9: "Life, Death, and Immortality." 1886.]
+
+[Footnote 10: "Life, Death, and Immortality." 1886.]
+
+[Footnote 11: "Life, Death, and Immortality." 1886.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 13: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 14: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 15: "The True Basis of Morality." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 16: "Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 17: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 18: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 19: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 20: "The Gospels of Christianity and Freethought." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 21: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 22: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 23: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 24: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 25: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 26: "The Christian Creed." 1884.]
+
+[Footnote 27: _National Reformer_, June 18, 1882]
+
+[Footnote 28: _Theosophist_, June, 1882.]
+
+[Footnote 29: I leave these words as they were written in 1889. I
+resigned my office in the N.S.S. in 1890, feeling that the N.S.S. was
+so identified with Materialism that it had no longer place for me.]
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF BOOKS QUOTED.
+
+"Autobiography," J.S. Mill, 184
+
+"Christian Creed, The," 173
+
+"Freethinkers' Text-book," 144
+
+"Gospel of Atheism, The," 145, 152, 158, 168
+
+"Gospels of Christianity and Freethought," 164
+
+"Life, Death, and Immortality," 147, 149, 150
+
+_Link_, The, 333
+
+_National Reformer_, The, 79, 80, 280, 346-50, 354
+
+_Our Corner, _286, 329
+
+_Theosophist_, The, 282, 288
+
+"True Basis of Morality," 156
+
+"Why I do Not Believe in God," 146
+
+"World without God," 165, 169, 172
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+Affirmation Bill brought in, 287
+  rejected, 299
+Atheist, position as an, 139
+Authorship, first attempts at, 84.
+
+Bennett, D.M., prosecution of, 232
+Blasphemy prosecution, 283, 287, 289
+Blavatsky, H.P., 189, 337
+  meeting with, 341
+"Bloody Sunday," 324
+Bradlaugh, Charles, first meeting with, 135
+  as friend, 137
+  in the Clock Tower, 258
+  and the scene in the House, 265
+  _v_. Newdegate; result, 289
+  prosecuted for blasphemy, 283, 289
+
+Confirmation, 51
+
+Daughter, application to remove, 213
+  denied access to, 219
+Death of father, 21
+  of mother, 126
+Doubt the first, 58
+
+"Elements of Social Science," 196
+Engagement, 69
+Essay, first Freethought, 113
+
+Fenians, the, 73
+_Freethinker_ prosecution, 283, 287, 296
+Freethought Publishing Company, the, 285
+
+Harrow, life at, 30
+Hoskyns, Rev. E., libel action against, 359
+
+Knowlton pamphlet, the, 205
+  prosecution, 208
+  trial, 210
+
+"Law of Population, The," 212, 210
+"Law and Liberty League," the, 326
+Lecture, the first, 181
+Linnell, the Trafalgar Square victim, 316
+  funeral of, 327
+_Link_, founding of the, 331
+
+Malthusian League formed, 229
+Malthusianism and Theosophy, 240
+Marriage, 70
+  tie broken, no
+Match-girls' strike, 335
+  Union, established, 336
+
+_National Reformer,_ the, 134
+  first contribution to, 180
+  resignation of co-editorship, 320
+National Secular Society joined, 135
+  elected vice-president of, 202
+  resignation of, 357
+Northampton Election, 183
+  struggle, 253, 344
+
+Oaths Bill, the, 314, 329
+_Our Corner_, 286, 314
+
+Political Opinions, 174
+Pusey, Dr., 109, 284
+
+Russian politics, 311
+
+Scientific work, 249
+School Board, election to, 338
+Scott, Thomas, 112, 127
+Socialism, 299
+  debate on, between Messrs. Bradlaugh and Hyndman, 301
+Socialist debates, 318, 319
+Socialists and open-air speaking, 312
+  Defence Association, 323
+Stanley, Dean, 23, 122
+
+Theosophical Society, the, 180
+  joined, 344
+  headquarters established, 361
+Theosophy and Charles Bradlaugh, 350
+  the National Secular Society, 357
+Trafalgar Square, closing of, to the public, 323
+Truelove, Edward, trial of, 225
+
+Voysey, Rev. Charles, 106
+
+Working Women's Club, 337, 360
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Annie Besant, by Annie Besant
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12085 ***
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Annie Besant, by Annie Besant
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Annie Besant
+       An Autobiography
+
+Author: Annie Besant
+
+Release Date: April 19, 2004 [EBook #12085]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANNIE BESANT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by H.S. Mendelssohn, 27, Cathcart
+Road, South Kensington, London._ ANNIE BESANT. 1885]
+
+
+
+
+ANNIE BESANT
+
+AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+LONDON
+
+SECOND EDITION
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+It is a difficult thing to tell the story of a life, and yet more
+difficult when that life is one's own. At the best, the telling has a
+savour of vanity, and the only excuse for the proceeding is that the
+life, being an average one, reflects many others, and in troublous
+times like ours may give the experience of many rather than of one.
+And so the autobiographer does his work because he thinks that, at the
+cost of some unpleasantness to himself, he may throw light on some of
+the typical problems that are vexing the souls of his contemporaries,
+and perchance may stretch out a helping hand to some brother who is
+struggling in the darkness, and so bring him cheer when despair has
+him in its grip. Since all of us, men and women of this restless and
+eager generation--surrounded by forces we dimly see but cannot as yet
+understand, discontented with old ideas and half afraid of new, greedy
+for the material results of the knowledge brought us by Science but
+looking askance at her agnosticism as regards the soul, fearful of
+superstition but still more fearful of atheism, turning from the husks
+of outgrown creeds but filled with desperate hunger for spiritual
+ideals--since all of us have the same anxieties, the same griefs, the
+same yearning hopes, the same passionate desire for knowledge, it may
+well be that the story of one may help all, and that the tale of one
+should that went out alone into the darkness and on the other side
+found light, that struggled through the Storm and on the other side
+found Peace, may bring some ray of light and of peace into the
+darkness and the storm of other lives.
+
+ANNIE BESANT.
+
+THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY,
+
+17 & 19, AVENUE ROAD, REGENT'S PARK, LONDON.
+
+_August_, 1893.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+CHAP.
+
+I.    "OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE"
+
+II.   EARLY CHILDHOOD
+
+III.  GIRLHOOD
+
+IV.   MARRIAGE
+
+V.    THE STORM OF DOUBT
+
+VI.   CHARLES BRADLAUGH
+
+VII.  ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT
+
+VIII. AT WORK
+
+IX.   THE KNOWLTON PAMPHLET
+
+X.    AT WAR ALL ROUND
+
+XI.   MR. BRADLAUGH'S STRUGGLE
+
+XII.  STILL FIGHTING
+
+XIII. SOCIALISM
+
+XIV.  THROUGH STORM TO PEACE
+
+LIST OF BOOKS QUOTED
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+
+ANNIE BESANT, 1885                          _Frontispiece_
+
+HOROSCOPE OF ANNIE BESANT                   _Page_ 12
+
+ANNIE BESANT, 1869                          _Facing page_ 86
+
+THOMAS SCOTT                                _Facing page_ 112
+
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH, M.P.                     _Facing page_ 212
+
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH AND HENRY LABOUCHERE      _Facing page_ 254
+
+NORWICH BRANCH OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE      _Facing page_ 314
+
+STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION  _Facing page_ 336
+
+MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION           _Facing page_ 338
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+"OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE."
+
+
+On October 1, 1847, I am credibly informed, my baby eyes opened to the
+light(?) of a London afternoon at 5.39.
+
+A friendly astrologer has drawn for me the following chart, showing the
+position of the planets at this, to me fateful, moment; but I know
+nothing of astrology, so feel no wiser as I gaze upon my horoscope.
+
+Keeping in view the way in which sun, moon, and planets influence the
+physical condition of the earth, there is nothing incongruous with the
+orderly course of nature in the view that they also influence the
+physical bodies of men, these being part of the physical earth, and
+largely moulded by its conditions. Any one who knows the
+characteristics ascribed to those who are born under the several signs
+of the Zodiac, may very easily pick out the different types among his
+own acquaintances, and he may then get them to go to some astrologer
+and find out under what signs they were severally born. He will very
+quickly discover that two men of completely opposed types are not born
+under the same sign, and the invariability of the concurrence will
+convince him that law, and not chance, is at work. We are born into
+earthly life under certain conditions, just as we were physically
+affected by them pre-natally, and these will have their bearing on our
+subsequent physical evolution. At the most, astrology, as it is now
+practised, can only calculate the interaction between these physical
+conditions at any given moment, and the conditions brought to them by a
+given person whose general constitution and natal condition are known.
+It cannot say what the person will do, nor what will happen to him, but
+only what will be the physical district, so to speak, in which he will
+find himself, and the impulses that will play upon him from external
+nature and from his own body. Even on those matters modern astrology is
+not quite reliable--judging from the many blunders made--or else its
+professors are very badly instructed; but that there is a real science
+of astrology I have no doubt, and there are some men who are past
+masters in it.
+
+[Illustration: Horoscope of Annie Besant.]
+
+It has always been somewhat of a grievance to me that I was born in
+London, "within the sound of Bow Bells," when three-quarters of my
+blood and all my heart are Irish. My dear mother was of purest Irish
+descent, and my father was Irish on his mother's side, though belonging
+to the Devonshire Woods on his father's. The Woods were yeomen of the
+sturdy English type, farming their own land in honest, independent
+fashion. Of late years they seem to have developed more in the
+direction of brains, from the time, in fact, that Matthew Wood became
+Mayor of London town, fought Queen Caroline's battles against her most
+religious and gracious royal husband, aided the Duke of Kent with no
+niggard hand, and received a baronetcy for his services from the Duke
+of Kent's royal daughter. Since then they have given England a Lord
+Chancellor in the person of the gentle-hearted and pure-living Lord
+Hatherley, while others have distinguished themselves in various ways
+in the service of their country. But I feel playfully inclined to
+grudge the English blood they put into my father's veins, with his
+Irish mother, his Galway birth, and his Trinity College, Dublin,
+education. For the Irish tongue is musical in my ear, and the Irish
+nature dear to my heart. Only in Ireland is it that if you stop to ask
+a worn-out ragged woman the way to some old monument, she will say:
+"Sure, then, my darlin', it's just up the hill and round the corner,
+and then any one will tell you the way. And it's there you'll see the
+place where the blessed Saint Patrick set his foot, and his blessing be
+on yer." Old women as poor as she in other nations would never be as
+bright and as friendly and as garrulous. And where, out of Ireland,
+will you see a whole town crowd into a station to say good-bye to half
+a dozen emigrants, till the platform is a heaving mass of men and
+women, struggling, climbing over each other for a last kiss, crying,
+keening, laughing, all in a breath, till all the air is throbbing and
+there's a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes as the train
+steams out? Where, out of Ireland, will you be bumping along the
+streets on an outside car, beside a taciturn Jarvey, who, on suddenly
+discovering that you are shadowed by "Castle" spies, becomes
+loquaciously friendly, and points out everything that he thinks will
+interest you? Blessings on the quick tongues and warm hearts, on the
+people so easy to lead, so hard to drive. And blessings on the ancient
+land once inhabited by mighty men of wisdom, that in later times became
+the Island of Saints, and shall once again be the Island of Sages, when
+the Wheel turns round.
+
+My maternal grandfather was a typical Irishman, much admired by me and
+somewhat feared also, in the childish days. He belonged to a decayed
+Irish family, the Maurices, and in a gay youth, with a beautiful wife
+as light-hearted as himself, he had merrily run through what remained
+to him in the way of fortune. In his old age, with abundant snow-white
+hair, he still showed the hot Irish blood on the lightest provocation,
+stormily angry for a moment and easily appeased. My mother was the
+second daughter in a large family, in a family that grew more numerous
+as pounds grew fewer, and she was adopted by a maiden aunt, a quaint
+memory of whom came through my mother's childhood into mine, and had
+its moulding effect on both our characters. This maiden aunt was, as
+are most Irish folk of decayed families, very proud of her family tree
+with its roots in the inevitable "kings." Her particular kings were the
+"seven kings of France"--the "Milesian kings"--and the tree grew up a
+parchment, in all its impressive majesty, over the mantelpiece of their
+descendant's modest drawing-room. This heraldic monster was regarded
+with deep respect by child Emily, a respect in no wise deserved, I
+venture to suppose, by the disreputable royalties of whom she was a
+fortunately distant twig. Chased out of France, doubtless for cause
+shown, they had come over the sea to Ireland, and there continued their
+reckless plundering lives. But so strangely turns the wheel of time
+that these ill-doing and barbarous scamps became a kind of moral
+thermometer in the home of the gentle Irish lady in the early half of
+the present century. For my mother has told me that when she had
+committed some act of childish naughtiness, her aunt would say, looking
+gravely over her spectacles at the small culprit, "Emily, your conduct
+is unworthy of the descendant of the seven kings of France." And Emily,
+with her sweet grey Irish eyes and her curling masses of raven black
+hair, would cry in penitent shame over her unworthiness, with some
+vague idea that those royal, and to her very real, ancestors would
+despise her small, sweet, rosebud self, so wholly unworthy of their
+disreputable majesties.
+
+Thus those shadowy forms influenced her in childhood, and exercised
+over her a power that made her shrink from aught that was unworthy,
+petty or mean. To her the lightest breath of dishonour was to be
+avoided at any cost of pain, and she wrought into me, her only
+daughter, that same proud and passionate horror at any taint of shame
+or merited disgrace. To the world always a brave front was to be kept,
+and a stainless reputation, for suffering might be borne but dishonour
+never. A gentlewoman might starve, but she must not run in debt; she
+might break her heart, but it must be with a smile on her face. I have
+often thought that the training in this reticence and pride of honour
+was a strange preparation for my stormy, public, much attacked and
+slandered life; and certain it is that this inwrought shrinking from
+all criticism that touched personal purity and personal honour added a
+keenness of suffering to the fronting of public odium that none can
+appreciate who has not been trained in some similar school of dignified
+self-respect. And yet perhaps there was another result from it that in
+value outweighed the added pain: it was the stubbornly resistant
+feeling that rose and inwardly asserted its own purity in face of
+foulest lie, and turning scornful face against the foe, too proud
+either to justify itself or to defend, said to itself in its own heart,
+when condemnation was loudest: "I am not what you think me, and your
+verdict does not change my own self. You cannot make me vile whatever
+you think of me, and I will never, in my own eyes, be that which you
+deem me to be now." And the very pride became a shield against
+degradation, for, however lost my public reputation, I could never bear
+to become sullied in my own sight--and that is a thing not without its
+use to a woman cut off, as I was at one time, from home, and friends,
+and Society. So peace to the maiden aunt's ashes, and to those of her
+absurd kings, for I owe them something after all. And I keep grateful
+memory of that unknown grand-aunt, for what she did in training my dear
+mother, the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest of women. It is well
+to be able to look back to a mother who served as ideal of all that was
+noblest and dearest during childhood and girlhood, whose face made the
+beauty of home, and whose love was both sun and shield. No other
+experience in life could quite make up for missing the perfect tie
+between mother and child--a tie that in our case never relaxed and
+never weakened. Though her grief at my change of faith and consequent
+social ostracism did much to hasten her death-hour, it never brought a
+cloud between our hearts; though her pleading was the hardest of all to
+face in later days, and brought the bitterest agony, it made no gulf
+between us, it cast no chill upon our mutual love. And I look back at
+her to-day with the same loving gratitude as ever encircled her to me
+in her earthly life. I have never met a woman more selflessly devoted
+to those she loved, more passionately contemptuous of all that was mean
+or base, more keenly sensitive on every question of honour, more iron
+in will, more sweet in tenderness, than the mother who made my girlhood
+sunny as dreamland, who guarded me, until my marriage, from every touch
+of pain that she could ward off or bear for me, who suffered more in
+every trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself, and who
+died in the little house I had taken for our new home in Norwood, worn
+out, ere old age touched her, by sorrow, poverty, and pain, in May,
+1874.
+
+My earliest personal recollections are of a house and garden that we
+lived in when I was three and four years of age, situated in Grove
+Road, St. John's Wood. I can remember my mother hovering round the
+dinner-table to see that all was bright for the home-coming husband; my
+brother--two years older than myself--and I watching "for papa"; the
+loving welcome, the game of romps that always preceded the dinner of
+the elder folks. I can remember on the 1st of October, 1851, jumping up
+in my little cot, and shouting out triumphantly: "Papa! mamma! I am
+four years old!" and the grave demand of my brother, conscious of
+superior age, at dinner-time: "May not Annie have a knife to-day, as
+she is four years old?"
+
+It was a sore grievance during that same year, 1851, that I was not
+judged old enough to go to the Great Exhibition, and I have a faint
+memory of my brother consolingly bringing me home one of those folding
+pictured strips that are sold in the streets, on which were imaged
+glories that I longed only the more to see. Far-away, dusky, trivial
+memories, these. What a pity it is that a baby cannot notice, cannot
+observe, cannot remember, and so throw light on the fashion of the
+dawning of the external world on the human consciousness. If only we
+could remember how things looked when they were first imaged on the
+retinae; what we felt when first we became conscious of the outer world;
+what the feeling was as faces of father and mother grew out of the
+surrounding chaos and became familiar things, greeted with a smile,
+lost with a cry; if only memory would not become a mist when in later
+years we strive to throw our glances backward into the darkness of our
+infancy, what lessons we might learn to help our stumbling psychology,
+how many questions might be solved whose answers we are groping for in
+the West in vain.
+
+The next scene that stands out clearly against the background of the
+past is that of my father's death-bed. The events which led to his
+death I know from my dear mother. He had never lost his fondness for
+the profession for which he had been trained, and having many medical
+friends, he would now and then accompany them on their hospital rounds,
+or share with them the labours of the dissecting-room. It chanced that
+during the dissection of the body of a person who had died of rapid
+consumption, my father cut his finger against the edge of the
+breast-bone. The cut did not heal easily, and the finger became swollen
+and inflamed. "I would have that finger off, Wood, if I were you," said
+one of the surgeons, a day or two afterwards, on seeing the state of
+the wound. But the others laughed at the suggestion, and my father, at
+first inclined to submit to the amputation, was persuaded to "leave
+Nature alone."
+
+About the middle of August, 1852, he got wet through, riding on the top
+of an omnibus, and the wetting resulted in a severe cold, which
+"settled on his chest." One of the most eminent doctors of the day, as
+able as he was rough in manner, was called to see him. He examined him
+carefully, sounded his lungs, and left the room followed by my mother.
+"Well?" she asked, scarcely anxious as to the answer, save as it might
+worry her husband to be kept idly at home. "You must keep up his
+spirits," was the thoughtless answer. "He is in a galloping
+consumption; you will not have him with you six weeks longer." The wife
+staggered back, and fell like a stone on the floor. But love triumphed
+over agony, and half an hour later she was again at her husband's side,
+never to leave it again for ten minutes at a time, night or day, till
+he was lying with closed eyes asleep in death.
+
+I was lifted on to the bed to "say good-bye to dear papa" on the day
+before his death, and I remember being frightened at his eyes which
+looked so large, and his voice which sounded so strange, as he made me
+promise always to be "a very good girl to darling mamma, as papa was
+going right away." I remember insisting that "papa should kiss Cherry,"
+a doll given me on my birthday, three days before, by his direction,
+and being removed, crying and struggling, from the room. He died on the
+following day, October 5th, and I do not think that my elder brother
+and I--who were staying at our maternal grandfather's--went to the
+house again until the day of the funeral. With the death, my mother
+broke down, and when all was over they carried her senseless from the
+room. I remember hearing afterwards how, when she recovered her senses,
+she passionately insisted on being left alone, and locked herself into
+her room for the night; and how on the following morning her mother, at
+last persuading her to open the door, started back at the face she saw
+with the cry: "Good God, Emily! your hair is white!" It was even so;
+her hair, black, glossy and abundant, which, contrasting with her large
+grey eyes, had made her face so strangely attractive, had turned grey
+in that night of agony, and to me my mother's face is ever framed in
+exquisite silver bands of hair as white as the driven unsullied snow.
+
+I have heard that the love between my father and mother was a very
+beautiful thing, and it most certainly stamped her character for life.
+He was keenly intellectual and splendidly educated; a mathematician and
+a good classical scholar, thoroughly master of French, German, Italian,
+Spanish, and Portuguese, with a smattering of Hebrew and Gaelic, the
+treasures of ancient and of modern literature were his daily household
+delight. Nothing pleased him so well as to sit with his wife, reading
+aloud to her while she worked; now translating from some foreign poet,
+now rolling forth melodiously the exquisite cadences of "Queen Mab."
+Student of philosophy as he was, he was deeply and steadily sceptical;
+and a very religious relative has told me that he often drove her from
+the room by his light, playful mockery of the tenets of the Christian
+faith. His mother and sister were strict Roman Catholics, and near the
+end forced a priest into his room, but the priest was promptly ejected
+by the wrath of the dying man, and by the almost fierce resolve of the
+wife that no messenger of the creed he detested should trouble her
+darling at the last.
+
+Deeply read in philosophy, he had outgrown the orthodox beliefs of his
+day, and his wife, who loved him too much to criticise, was wont to
+reconcile her own piety and his scepticism by holding that "women ought
+to be religious," while men had a right to read everything and think as
+they would, provided that they were upright and honourable in their
+lives. But the result of his liberal and unorthodox thought was to
+insensibly modify and partially rationalise her own beliefs, and she
+put on one side as errors the doctrines of eternal punishment, the
+vicarious atonement, the infallibility of the Bible, the equality of
+the Son with the Father in the Trinity, and other orthodox beliefs, and
+rejoiced in her later years in the writings of such men as Jowett,
+Colenso, and Stanley. The last named, indeed, was her ideal Christian
+gentleman, suave, polished, broad-minded, devout in a stately way. The
+baldness of a typical Evangelical service outraged her taste as much as
+the crudity of Evangelical dogmas outraged her intellect; she liked to
+feel herself a Christian in a dignified and artistic manner, and to be
+surrounded by solemn music and splendid architecture when she "attended
+Divine service." Familiarity with celestial personages was detestable
+to her, and she did her duty of saluting them in a courtly and reverent
+fashion. Westminster Abbey was her favourite church, with its dim light
+and shadowy distances; there in a carven stall, with choristers
+chanting in solemn rhythm, with the many-coloured glories of the
+painted windows repeating themselves on upspringing arch and clustering
+pillars, with the rich harmonies of the pealing organ throbbing up
+against screen and monument, with the ashes of the mighty dead around,
+and all the stately memories of the past inwrought into the very
+masonry, there Religion appeared to her to be intellectually dignified
+and emotionally satisfactory.
+
+To me, who took my religion in strenuous fashion, this dainty and
+well-bred piety seemed perilously like Laodicean lukewarmness, while
+my headlong vigour of conviction and practice often jarred on her as
+alien from the delicate balance and absence of extremes that should
+characterise the gentlewoman. She was of the old _régime_; I of the
+stuff from which fanatics are made: and I have often thought, in
+looking back, that she must have had on her lips many a time unspoken
+a phrase that dropped from them when she lay a-dying: "My little one,
+you have never made me sad or sorry except for your own sake; you have
+always been too religious." And then she murmured to herself: "Yes,
+it has been darling Annie's only fault; she has always been too
+religious." Methinks that, as the world judges, the dying voice spake
+truly, and the dying eyes saw with a real insight. For though I was
+then kneeling beside her bed, heretic and outcast, the heart of me was
+religious in its very fervour of repudiation of a religion, and in its
+rebellious uprising against dogmas that crushed the reason and did not
+satisfy the soul. I went out into the darkness alone, not because
+religion was too good for me, but because it was not good enough; it
+was too meagre, too commonplace, too little exacting, too bound up
+with earthly interests, too calculating in its accommodations to
+social conventionalities. The Roman Catholic Church, had it captured
+me, as it nearly did, would have sent me on some mission of danger and
+sacrifice and utilised me as a martyr; the Church established by law
+transformed me into an unbeliever and an antagonist.
+
+For as a child I was mystical and imaginative religious to the very
+finger-tips, and with a certain faculty for seeing visions and
+dreaming dreams. This faculty is not uncommon with the Keltic races,
+and makes them seem "superstitious" to more solidly-built peoples.
+Thus, on the day of my father's funeral, my mother sat with vacant
+eyes and fixed pallid face--the picture comes back to me yet, it so
+impressed my childish imagination--following the funeral service,
+stage after stage, and suddenly, with the words, "It is all over!"
+fell back fainting. She said afterwards that she had followed the
+hearse, had attended the service, had walked behind the coffin to the
+grave. Certain it is that a few weeks later she determined to go to
+the Kensal Green Cemetery, where the body of her husband had been
+laid, and went thither with a relative; he failed to find the grave,
+and while another of the party went in search of an official to
+identify the spot, my mother said, "If you will take me to the chapel
+where the first part of the service was read, I will find the grave."
+The idea seemed to her friend, of course, to be absurd; but he would
+not cross the newly-made widow, so took her to the chapel. She looked
+round, left the chapel door, and followed the path along which the
+corpse had been borne till she reached the grave, where she was
+quietly standing when the caretaker arrived to point it out. The grave
+is at some distance from the chapel, and is not on one of the main
+roads; it had nothing on it to mark it, save the wooden peg with the
+number, and this would be no help to identification at a distance
+since all the graves are thus marked, and at a little way off these
+pegs are not visible. How she found the grave remained a mystery in
+the family, as no one believed her straightforward story that she had
+been present at the funeral. With my present knowledge the matter is
+simple enough, for I now know that the consciousness can leave the
+body, take part in events going on at a distance, and, returning,
+impress on the physical brain what it has experienced. The very fact
+that she asked to be taken to the chapel is significant, showing that
+she was picking up a memory of a previous going from that spot to the
+grave; she could only find the grave if she started from _the place
+from which she had started before_. Another proof of this
+ultra-physical capacity was given a few months later, when her infant
+son, who had been pining himself ill for "papa," was lying one night
+in her arms. On the next morning she said to her sister: "Alf is going
+to die." The child had no definite disease, but was wasting away, and
+it was argued to her that the returning spring would restore the
+health lost during the winter. "No," was her answer. "He was lying
+asleep in my arms last night, and William" (her husband) "came to me
+and said that he wanted Alf with him, but that I might keep the other
+two." In vain she was assured that she had been dreaming, that it was
+quite natural that she should dream about her husband, and that her
+anxiety for the child had given the dream its shape. Nothing would
+persuade her that she had not seen her husband, or that the
+information he had given her was not true. So it was no matter of
+surprise to her when in the following March her arms were empty, and a
+waxen form lay lifeless in the baby's cot.
+
+My brother and I were allowed to see him just before he was placed in
+his coffin; I can see him still, so white and beautiful, with a black
+spot in the middle of the fair, waxen forehead, and I remember the
+deadly cold which startled me when I was told to kiss my little
+brother. It was the first time that I had touched Death. That black
+spot made a curious impression on me, and long afterwards, asking what
+had caused it, I was told that at the moment after his death my mother
+had passionately kissed the baby brow. Pathetic thought, that the
+mother's kiss of farewell should have been marked by the first sign of
+corruption on the child's face!
+
+I do not mention these stories because they are in any fashion
+remarkable or out of the way, but only to show that the sensitiveness
+to impressions other than physical ones, that was a marked feature in
+my own childhood, was present also in the family to which I belonged.
+For the physical nature is inherited from parents, and sensitiveness
+to psychic impressions is a property of the physical body; in our
+family, as in so many Irish ones, belief in "ghosts" of all
+descriptions was general, and my mother has told me of the banshee
+that she had heard wailing when the death-hour of one of the family
+was near. To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were
+very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself
+a child. Punch and Judy were living entities, and the tragedy in which
+they bore part cost me many an agony of tears; to this day I can
+remember running away when I heard the squawk of the coming Punch, and
+burying my head in the pillows that I might shut out the sound of the
+blows and the cry of the ill-used baby. All the objects about me were
+to me alive, the flowers that I kissed as much as the kitten I petted,
+and I used to have a splendid time "making believe" and living out all
+sorts of lovely stories among my treasured and so-called inanimate
+playthings. But there was a more serious side to this dreamful fancy
+when it joined hands with religion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+EARLY CHILDHOOD.
+
+
+And now began my mother's time of struggle and of anxiety. Hitherto,
+since her marriage, she had known no money troubles, for her husband
+was earning a good income; he was apparently vigorous and well: no
+thought of anxiety clouded their future. When he died, he believed
+that he left his wife and children safe, at least, from pecuniary
+distress. It was not so. I know nothing of the details, but the
+outcome of all was that nothing was left for the widow and children,
+save a trifle of ready money. The resolve to which my mother came was
+characteristic. Two of her husband's relatives, Western and Sir
+William Wood, offered to educate her son at a good city school, and to
+start him in commercial life, using their great city influence to push
+him forward. But the young lad's father and mother had talked of a
+different future for their eldest boy; he was to go to a public
+school, and then to the University, and was to enter one of the
+"learned professions"--to take orders, the mother wished; to go to the
+Bar, the father hoped. On his death-bed there was nothing more
+earnestly urged by my father than that Harry should receive the best
+possible education, and the widow was resolute to fulfil that last
+wish. In her eyes, a city school was not "the best possible
+education," and the Irish pride rebelled against the idea of her son
+not being "a University man." Many were the lectures poured out on the
+young widow's head about her "foolish pride," especially by the female
+members of the Wood family; and her persistence in her own way caused
+a considerable alienation between herself and them. But Western and
+William, though half-disapproving, remained her friends, and lent many
+a helping hand to her in her first difficult struggles. After much
+cogitation, she resolved that the boy should be educated at Harrow,
+where the fees are comparatively low to lads living in the town, and
+that he should go thence to Cambridge or to Oxford, as his tastes
+should direct. A bold scheme for a penniless widow, but carried out to
+the letter; for never dwelt in a delicate body a more resolute mind
+and will than that of my dear mother.
+
+In a few months' time--during which we lived, poorly enough, in
+Richmond Terrace, Clapham, close to her father and mother--to Harrow,
+then, she betook herself, into lodgings over a grocer's shop, and set
+herself to look for a house. This grocer was a very pompous man, fond
+of long words, and patronised the young widow exceedingly, and one day
+my mother related with much amusement how he had told her that she was
+sure to get on if she worked hard. "Look at me!" he said, swelling
+visibly with importance; "I was once a poor boy, without a penny of my
+own, and now I am a comfortable man, and have my submarine villa to go
+to every evening." That "submarine villa" was an object of amusement
+when we passed it in our walks for many a long day.
+
+"There is Mr. ----'s submarine villa," some one would say, laughing:
+and I, too, used to laugh merrily, because my elders did, though my
+understanding of the difference between suburban and submarine was on
+a par with that of the honest grocer.
+
+My mother had fortunately found a boy, whose parents were glad to place
+him in her charge, of about the age of her own son, to educate with
+him; and by this means she was able to pay for a tutor, to prepare the
+two boys for school. The tutor had a cork leg, which was a source of
+serious trouble to me, for it stuck out straight behind when we knelt
+down to family prayers--conduct which struck me as irreverent and
+unbecoming, but which I always felt a desire to imitate. After about a
+year my mother found a house which she thought would suit her scheme,
+namely, to obtain permission from Dr. Vaughan, the then head-master of
+Harrow, to take some boys into her house, and so gain means of
+education for her own son. Dr. Vaughan, who must have been won by the
+gentle, strong, little woman, from that time forth became her earnest
+friend and helper; and to the counsel and active assistance both of
+himself and of his wife, was due much of the success that crowned her
+toil. He made only one condition in granting the permission she asked,
+and that was, that she should also have in her house one of the masters
+of the school, so that the boys should not suffer from the want of a
+house-tutor. This condition, of course, she readily accepted, and the
+arrangement lasted for ten years, until after her son had left school
+for Cambridge.
+
+The house she took is now, I am sorry to say, pulled down, and
+replaced by a hideous red-brick structure. It was very old and
+rambling, rose-covered in front, ivy-covered behind; it stood on the
+top of Harrow Hill, between the church and the school, and had once
+been the vicarage of the parish, but the vicar had left it because it
+was so far removed from the part of the village where all his work
+lay. The drawing-room opened by an old-fashioned half-window,
+half-door--which proved a constant source of grief to me, for whenever
+I had on a new frock I always tore it on the bolt as I flew
+through--into a large garden which sloped down one side of the hill,
+and was filled with the most delightful old trees, fir and laurel,
+may, mulberry, hazel, apple, pear, and damson, not to mention currant
+and gooseberry bushes innumerable, and large strawberry beds spreading
+down the sunny slopes. There was not a tree there that I did not
+climb, and one, a widespreading Portugal laurel, was my private
+country house. I had there my bedroom and my sitting-rooms, my study,
+and my larder. The larder was supplied by the fruit-trees, from which
+I was free to pick as I would, and in the study I would sit for hours
+with some favourite book--Milton's "Paradise Lost" the chief favourite
+of all. The birds must often have felt startled, when from the small
+swinging form perching on a branch, came out in childish tones the
+"Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers," of Milton's
+stately and sonorous verse. I liked to personify Satan, and to declaim
+the grand speeches of the hero-rebel, and many a happy hour did I pass
+in Milton's heaven and hell, with for companions Satan and "the Son,"
+Gabriel and Abdiel. Then there was a terrace running by the side of
+the churchyard, always dry in the wettest weather, and bordered by an
+old wooden fence, over which clambered roses of every shade; never was
+such a garden for roses as that of the Old Vicarage. At the end of the
+terrace was a little summer-house, and in this a trap-door in the
+fence, which swung open and displayed one of the fairest views in
+England. Sheer from your feet downwards went the hill, and then far
+below stretched the wooded country till your eye reached the towers of
+Windsor Castle, far away on the horizon. It was the view at which
+Byron was never tired of gazing, as he lay on the flat tombstone close
+by--Byron's tomb, as it is still called--of which he wrote:--
+
+  "Again I behold where for hours I have pondered,
+     As reclining, at eve, on yon tombstone I lay,
+  Or round the steep brow of the churchyard I wandered,
+     To catch the last gleam of the sun's setting ray."
+
+Reader mine, if ever you go to Harrow, ask permission to enter the old
+garden, and try the effect of that sudden burst of beauty, as you
+swing back the small trap-door at the terrace end.
+
+Into this house we moved on my eighth birthday, and for eleven years it
+was "home" to me, left always with regret, returned to always with joy.
+
+Almost immediately afterwards I left my mother for the first time; for
+one day, visiting a family who lived close by, I found a stranger
+sitting in the drawing-room, a lame lady with a strong face, which
+softened marvellously as she smiled at the child who came dancing in;
+she called me to her presently, and took me on her lap and talked to
+me, and on the following day our friend came to see my mother, to ask
+if she would let me go away and be educated with this lady's niece,
+coming home for the holidays regularly, but leaving my education in
+her hands. At first my mother would not hear of it, for she and I
+scarcely ever left each other; my love for her was an idolatry, hers
+for me a devotion. (A foolish little story, about which I was
+unmercifully teased for years, marked that absolute idolatry of her,
+which has not yet faded from my heart. In tenderest rallying one day
+of the child who trotted after her everywhere, content to sit, or
+stand, or wait, if only she might touch hand or dress of "mamma," she
+said: "Little one" (the name by which she always called me), "if you
+cling to mamma in this way, I must really get a string and tie you to
+my apron, and how will you like that?" "O mamma, darling," came the
+fervent answer, "do let it be in a knot." And, indeed, the tie of love
+between us was so tightly knotted that nothing ever loosened it till
+the sword of Death cut that which pain and trouble never availed to
+slacken in the slightest degree.) But it was urged upon her that the
+advantages of education offered were such as no money could purchase
+for me; that it would be a disadvantage for me to grow up in a
+houseful of boys--and, in truth, I was as good a cricketer and climber
+as the best of them--that my mother would soon be obliged to send me
+to school, unless she accepted an offer which gave me every advantage
+of school without its disadvantages. At last she yielded, and it was
+decided that Miss Marryat, on returning home, should take me with her.
+
+Miss Marryat--the favourite sister of Captain Marryat, the famous
+novelist--was a maiden lady of large means. She had nursed her brother
+through the illness that ended in his death, and had been living with
+her mother at Wimbledon Park. On her mother's death she looked round
+for work which would make her useful in the world, and finding that one
+of her brothers had a large family of girls, she offered to take charge
+of one of them, and to educate her thoroughly. Chancing to come to
+Harrow, my good fortune threw me in her way, and she took a fancy to
+me and thought she would like to teach two little girls rather than
+one. Hence her offer to my mother.
+
+Miss Marryat had a perfect genius for teaching, and took in it the
+greatest delight. From time to time she added another child to our
+party, sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl. At first, with Amy Marryat
+and myself, there was a little boy, Walter Powys, son of a clergyman
+with a large family, and him she trained for some years, and then sent
+him on to school admirably prepared. She chose "her children"--as she
+loved to call us--in very definite fashion. Each must be gently born
+and gently trained, but in such position that the education freely
+given should be a relief and aid to a slender parental purse. It was
+her delight to seek out and aid those on whom poverty presses most
+heavily, when the need for education for the children weighs on the
+proud and the poor. "Auntie" we all called her, for she thought "Miss
+Marryat" seemed too cold and stiff. She taught us everything herself
+except music, and for this she had a master, practising us in
+composition, in recitation, in reading aloud English and French, and
+later, German, devoting herself to training us in the soundest, most
+thorough fashion. No words of mine can tell how much I owe her, not
+only of knowledge, but of that love of knowledge which has remained
+with me ever since as a constant spur to study.
+
+Her method of teaching may be of interest to some, who desire to train
+children with least pain, and the most enjoyment to the little ones
+themselves. First, we never used a spelling-book--that torment of the
+small child--nor an English grammar. But we wrote letters, telling of
+the things we had seen in our walks, or told again some story we had
+read; these childish compositions she would read over with us,
+correcting all faults of spelling, of grammar, of style, of cadence; a
+clumsy sentence would be read aloud, that we might hear how unmusical
+it sounded, an error in observation or expression pointed out. Then, as
+the letters recorded what we had seen the day before, the faculty of
+observation was drawn out and trained. "Oh, dear! I have nothing to
+say!" would come from a small child, hanging over a slate. "Did you not
+go out for a walk yesterday?" Auntie would question. "Yes," would be
+sighed out; "but there's nothing to say about it." "Nothing to say! And
+you walked in the lanes for an hour and saw nothing, little No-eyes?
+You must use your eyes better to-day." Then there was a very favourite
+"lesson," which proved an excellent way of teaching spelling. We used
+to write out lists of all the words we could think of which sounded the
+same but were differently spelt. Thus: "key, quay," "knight, night,"
+and so on, and great was the glory of the child who found the largest
+number. Our French lessons--as the German later--included reading from
+the very first. On the day on which we began German we began reading
+Schiller's "Wilhelm Tell," and the verbs given to us to copy out were
+those that had occurred in the reading. We learned much by heart, but
+always things that in themselves were worthy to be learned. We were
+never given the dry questions and answers which lazy teachers so much
+affect. We were taught history by one reading aloud while the others
+worked--the boys as well as the girls learning the use of the needle.
+"It's like a girl to sew," said a little fellow, indignantly, one day.
+"It is like a baby to have to run after a girl if you want a button
+sewn on," quoth Auntie. Geography was learned by painting skeleton
+maps--an exercise much delighted in by small fingers--and by putting
+together puzzle maps, in which countries in the map of a continent, or
+counties in the map of a country, were always cut out in their proper
+shapes. I liked big empires in those days; there was a solid
+satisfaction in putting down Russia, and seeing what a large part of
+the map was filled up thereby.
+
+The only grammar that we ever learned as grammar was the Latin, and
+that not until composition had made us familiar with the use of the
+rules therein given. Auntie had a great horror of children learning by
+rote things they did not understand, and then fancying they knew them.
+"What do you mean by that expression, Annie?" she would ask me. After
+feeble attempts to explain, I would answer: "Indeed, Auntie, I know in
+my own head, but I can't explain." "Then, indeed, Annie, you do not
+know in your own head, or you could explain, so that I might know in my
+own head." And so a healthy habit was fostered of clearness of thought
+and of expression. The Latin grammar was used because it was more
+perfect than the modern grammars, and served as a solid foundation for
+modern languages.
+
+Miss Marryat took a beautiful place, Fern Hill, near Charmouth, in
+Dorsetshire, on the borders of Devon, and there she lived for some five
+years, a centre of beneficence in the district. She started a Sunday
+School, and a Bible Class after awhile for the lads too old for the
+school, who clamoured for admission to her class in it. She visited the
+poor, taking help wherever she went, and sending food from her own
+table to the sick. It was characteristic of her that she would never
+give "scraps" to the poor, but would have a basin brought in at dinner,
+and would cut the best slice to tempt the invalid appetite. Money she
+rarely, if ever, gave, but she would find a day's work, or busy herself
+to seek permanent employment for any one seeking aid. Stern in
+rectitude herself, and iron to the fawning or the dishonest, her
+influence, whether she was feared or loved, was always for good. Of the
+strictest sect of the Evangelicals, she was an Evangelical. On the
+Sunday no books were allowed save the Bible or the "Sunday at Home";
+but she would try to make the day bright by various little devices; by
+a walk with her in the garden; by the singing of hymns, always
+attractive to children; by telling us wonderful missionary stories of
+Moffat and Livingstone, whose adventures with savages and wild beasts
+were as exciting as any tale of Mayne Reid's. We used to learn passages
+from the Bible and hymns for repetition; a favourite amusement was a
+"Bible puzzle," such as a description of some Bible scene, which was to
+be recognised by the description. Then we taught in the Sunday School,
+for Auntie would tell us that it was useless for us to learn if we did
+not try to help those who had no one to teach them. The Sunday-school
+lessons had to be carefully prepared on the Saturday, for we were
+always taught that work given to the poor should be work that cost
+something to the giver. This principle, regarded by her as an
+illustration of the text, "Shall I give unto the Lord my God that which
+has cost me nothing?" ran through all her precept and her practice.
+When in some public distress we children went to her crying, and asking
+whether we could not help the little children who were starving, her
+prompt reply was, "What will you give up for them?" And then she said
+that if we liked to give up the use of sugar, we might thus each save
+sixpence a week to give away. I doubt if a healthier lesson can be
+given to children than that of personal self-denial for the good of
+others.
+
+Daily, when our lessons were over, we had plenty of fun; long walks and
+rides, rides on a lovely pony, who found small children most amusing,
+and on which the coachman taught us to stick firmly, whatever his
+eccentricities of the moment; delightful all-day picnics in the lovely
+country round Charmouth, Auntie our merriest playfellow. Never was a
+healthier home, physically and mentally, made for young things than in
+that quiet village. And then the delight of the holidays! The pride of
+my mother at the good report of her darling's progress, and the renewal
+of acquaintance with every nook and corner in the dear old house and
+garden.
+
+The dreamy tendency in the child, that on its worldly side is fancy,
+imagination, on its religious side is the germ of mysticism, and I
+believe it to be far more common than many people think. But the
+remorseless materialism of the day--not the philosophic materialism of
+the few, but the religious materialism of the many--crushes out all the
+delicate buddings forth of the childish thought, and bandages the eyes
+that might otherwise see. At first the child does not distinguish
+between what it "sees" and what it "fancies"; the one is as real, as
+objective, to it as the other, and it will talk to and play with its
+dream-comrades as merrily as with children like itself. As a child, I
+myself very much preferred the former, and never knew what it was to be
+lonely. But clumsy grown-ups come along and tramp right through the
+dream-garden, and crush the dream-flowers, and push the dream-children
+aside, and then say, in their loud, harsh voices--not soft and singable
+like the dream-voices--"You must not tell such naughty stories, Miss
+Annie; you give me the shivers, and your mamma will be very vexed with
+you." But this tendency in me was too strong to be stifled, and it
+found its food in the fairy tales I loved, and in the religious
+allegories that I found yet more entrancing. How or when I learned to
+read, I do not know, for I cannot remember the time when a book was not
+a delight. At five years of age I must have read easily, for I remember
+being often unswathed from a delightful curtain, in which I used to
+roll myself with a book, and told to "go and play," while I was still a
+five-years'-old dot. And I had a habit of losing myself so completely
+in the book that my name might be called in the room where I was, and I
+never hear it, so that I used to be blamed for wilfully hiding myself,
+when I had simply been away in fairyland, or lying trembling beneath
+some friendly cabbage-leaf as a giant went by.
+
+I was between seven and eight years of age when I first came across
+some children's allegories of a religious kind, and a very little
+later came "Pilgrim's Progress," and Milton's "Paradise Lost."
+Thenceforth my busy fancies carried me ever into the fascinating world
+where boy-soldiers kept some outpost for their absent Prince, bearing
+a shield with his sign of a red cross on it; where devils shaped as
+dragons came swooping down on the pilgrim, but were driven away
+defeated after hard struggle; where angels came and talked with little
+children, and gave them some talisman which warned them of coming
+danger, and lost its light if they were leaving the right path. What a
+dull, tire-some world it was that I had to live in, I used to think to
+myself, when I was told to be a good child, and not to lose my temper,
+and to be tidy, and not mess my pinafore at dinner. How much easier to
+be a Christian if one could have a red-cross shield and a white
+banner, and have a real devil to fight with, and a beautiful Divine
+Prince to smile at you when the battle was over. How much more
+exciting to struggle with a winged and clawed dragon, that you knew
+meant mischief, than to look after your temper, that you never
+remembered you ought to keep until you had lost it. If I had been Eve
+in the garden, that old serpent would never have got the better of me;
+but how was a little girl to know that she might not pick out the
+rosiest, prettiest apple from a tree that had no serpent to show it
+was a forbidden one? And as I grew older the dreams and fancies grew
+less fantastic, but more tinged with real enthusiasm. I read tales of
+the early Christian martyrs, and passionately regretted I was born so
+late when no suffering for religion was practicable; I would spend
+many an hour in daydreams, in which I stood before Roman judges,
+before Dominican Inquisitors, was flung to lions, tortured on the
+rack, burned at the stake; one day I saw myself preaching some great
+new faith to a vast crowd of people, and they listened and were
+converted, and I became a great religious leader. But always, with a
+shock, I was brought back to earth, where there were no heroic deeds
+to do, no lions to face, no judges to defy, but only some dull duty to
+be performed. And I used to fret that I was born so late, when all the
+grand things had been done, and when there was no chance of preaching
+and suffering for a new religion.
+
+From the age of eight my education accented the religious side of my
+character. Under Miss Marryat's training my religious feeling received
+a strongly Evangelical bent, but it was a subject of some distress to
+me that I could never look back to an hour of "conversion"; when
+others gave their experiences, and spoke of the sudden change they had
+felt, I used to be sadly conscious that no such change had occurred in
+me, and I felt that my dreamy longings were very poor things compared
+with the vigorous "sense of sin" spoken of by the preachers, and used
+dolefully to wonder if I were "saved." Then I had an uneasy sense that
+I was often praised for my piety when emulation and vanity were more
+to the front than religion; as when I learned by heart the Epistle of
+James, far more to distinguish myself for my good memory than from any
+love of the text itself; the sonorous cadences of many parts of the
+Old and New Testaments pleased my ear, and I took a dreamy pleasure in
+repeating them aloud, just as I would recite for my own amusement
+hundreds of lines of Milton's "Paradise Lost," as I sat swinging on
+some branch of a tree, lying back often on some swaying bough and
+gazing into the unfathomable blue of the sky, till I lost myself in an
+ecstasy of sound and colour, half chanting the melodious sentences and
+peopling all the blue with misty forms. This facility of learning by
+heart, and the habit of dreamy recitation, made me very familiar with
+the Bible and very apt with its phrases. This stood me in good stead
+at the prayer-meetings dear to the Evangelical, in which we all took
+part; in turn we were called on to pray aloud--a terrible ordeal to
+me, for I was painfully shy when attention was called to me; I used to
+suffer agonies while I waited for the dreaded words, "Now, Annie dear,
+will you speak to our Lord." But when my trembling lips had forced
+themselves into speech, all the nervousness used to vanish and I was
+swept away by an enthusiasm that readily clothed itself in balanced
+sentences, and alack! at the end, I too often hoped that God and
+Auntie had noticed that I prayed very nicely--a vanity certainly not
+intended to be fostered by the pious exercise. On the whole, the
+somewhat Calvinistic teaching tended, I think, to make me a little
+morbid, especially as I always fretted silently after my mother. I
+remember she was surprised on one of my home-comings, when Miss
+Marryat noted "cheerfulness" as a want in my character, for at home I
+was ever the blithest of children, despite my love of solitude; but
+away, there was always an aching for home, and the stern religion cast
+somewhat of a shadow over me, though, strangely enough, hell never
+came into my dreamings except in the interesting shape it took in
+"Paradise Lost." After reading that, the devil was to me no horned and
+hoofed horror, but the beautiful shadowed archangel, and I always
+hoped that Jesus, my ideal Prince, would save him in the end. The
+things that really frightened me were vague, misty presences that I
+felt were near, but could not see; they were so real that I knew just
+where they were in the room, and the peculiar terror they excited lay
+largely in the feeling that I was just going to see them. If by chance
+I came across a ghost story it haunted me for months, for I saw
+whatever unpleasant spectre was described; and there was one horrid
+old woman in a tale by Sir Walter Scott, who glided up to the foot of
+your bed and sprang on it in some eerie fashion and glared at you, and
+who made my going to bed a terror to me for many weeks. I can still
+recall the feeling so vividly that it almost frightens me now!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+GIRLHOOD.
+
+
+In the spring of 1861 Miss Marryat announced her intention of going
+abroad, and asked my dear mother to let me accompany her. A little
+nephew whom she had adopted was suffering from cataract, and she
+desired to place him under the care of the famous Düsseldorf oculist.
+Amy Marryat had been recalled home soon after the death of her mother,
+who had died in giving birth to the child adopted by Miss Marryat, and
+named at her desire after her favourite brother Frederick (Captain
+Marryat). Her place had been taken by a girl a few months older than
+myself, Emma Mann, one of the daughters of a clergyman, who had
+married Miss Stanley, closely related, indeed, if I remember rightly,
+a sister of the Miss Mary Stanley who did such noble work in nursing
+in the Crimea.
+
+For some months we had been diligently studying German, for Miss
+Marryat thought it wise that we should know a language fairly well
+before we visited the country of which it was the native tongue. We
+had been trained also to talk French daily during dinner, so we were
+not quite "helpless foreigners" when we steamed away from St.
+Catherine's Docks, and found ourselves on the following day in
+Antwerp, amid what seemed to us a very Babel of conflicting tongues.
+Alas for our carefully spoken French, articulated laboriously! We were
+lost in that swirl of disputing luggage-porters, and could not
+understand a word! But Miss Marryat was quite equal to the occasion,
+being by no means new to travelling, and her French stood the test
+triumphantly, and steered us safely to a hotel. On the morrow we
+started again through Aix-la-Chapelle to Bonn, the town which lies on
+the borders of the exquisite scenery of which the Siebengebirge and
+Rolandseck serve as the magic portal. Our experiences in Bonn were not
+wholly satisfactory. Dear Auntie was a maiden lady, looking on all
+young men as wolves to be kept far from her growing lambs. Bonn was a
+university town, and there was a mania just then prevailing there for
+all things English. Emma was a plump, rosy, fair-haired typical
+English maiden, full of frolic and harmless fun; I a very slight,
+pale, black-haired girl, alternating between wild fun and extreme
+pensiveness. In the boarding-house to which we went at first--the
+"Château du Rhin," a beautiful place overhanging the broad, blue
+Rhine--there chanced to be staying the two sons of the late Duke of
+Hamilton, the Marquis of Douglas and Lord Charles, with their tutor.
+They had the whole drawing-room floor: we a sitting-room on the ground
+floor and bedrooms above. The lads discovered that Miss Marryat did
+not like her "children" to be on speaking terms with any of the "male
+sect."
+
+Here was a fine source of amusement. They would make their horses
+caracole on the gravel in front of our window; they would be just
+starting for their ride as we went for walk or drive, and would salute
+us with doffed hat and low bow; they would waylay us on our way
+downstairs with demure "Good morning"; they would go to church and
+post themselves so that they could survey our pew, and Lord
+Charles--who possessed the power of moving at will the whole skin of
+the scalp--would wriggle his hair up and down till we were choking
+with laughter, to our own imminent risk. After a month of this Auntie
+was literally driven out of the pretty château, and took refuge in a
+girls' school, much to our disgust; but still she was not allowed to
+be at rest. Mischievous students would pursue us wherever we went;
+sentimental Germans, with gashed cheeks, would whisper complimentary
+phrases as we passed; mere boyish nonsense of most harmless kind, but
+the rather stern English lady thought it "not proper," and after three
+months of Bonn we were sent home for the holidays, somewhat in
+disgrace. But we had some lovely excursions during those months; such
+clambering up mountains, such rows on the swift-flowing Rhine, such
+wanderings in exquisite valleys. I have a long picture-gallery to
+retire into when I want to think of something fair, in recalling the
+moon as it silvered the Rhine at the foot of Drachenfels, or the soft,
+mist-veiled island where dwelt the lady who is consecrated for ever by
+Roland's love.
+
+A couple of months later we rejoined Miss Marryat in Paris, where we
+spent seven happy, workful months. On Wednesdays and Saturdays we were
+free from lessons, and many a long afternoon was passed in the
+galleries of the Louvre, till we became familiar with the masterpieces
+of art gathered there from all lands. I doubt if there was a beautiful
+church in Paris that we did not visit during those weekly wanderings;
+that of St. Germain de l'Auxerrois was my favourite--the church whose
+bell gave the signal for the massacre of St. Bartholomew--for it
+contained such marvellous stained glass, deepest, purest glory of
+colour that I had ever seen. The solemn beauty of Notre Dame, the
+somewhat gaudy magnificence of La Sainte Chapelle, the stateliness of
+La Madeleine, the impressive gloom of St. Roch, were all familiar to
+us. Other delights were found in mingling with the bright crowds which
+passed along the Champs Elysees and sauntered in the Bois de Boulogne,
+in strolling in the garden of the Tuileries, in climbing to the top of
+every monument whence view of Paris could be gained. The Empire was
+then in its heyday of glitter, and we much enjoyed seeing the
+brilliant escort of the imperial carriage, with plumes and gold and
+silver dancing and glistening in the sunlight, while in the carriage
+sat the exquisitely lovely empress, with the little boy beside her,
+touching his cap shyly, but with something of her own grace, in answer
+to a greeting--the boy who was thought to be born to an imperial
+crown, but whose brief career was to find an ending from the spears of
+savages in a quarrel in which he had no concern.
+
+In the spring of 1862 it chanced that the Bishop of Ohio visited
+Paris, and Mr. Forbes, then English chaplain at the Church of the Rue
+d'Aguesseau, arranged to have a confirmation. As said above, I was
+under deep "religious impressions," and, in fact, with the exception
+of that little aberration in Germany, I was decidedly a pious girl. I
+looked on theatres (never having been to one) as traps set by Satan
+for the destruction of foolish souls; I was quite determined never to
+go to a ball, and was prepared to "suffer for conscience' sake
+"--little prig that I was--if I was desired to go to one. I was
+consequently quite prepared to take upon myself the vows made in my
+name at my baptism, and to renounce the world, the flesh, and the
+devil, with a heartiness and sincerity only equalled by my profound
+ignorance of the things I so readily resigned. That confirmation was
+to me a very solemn matter; the careful preparation, the prolonged
+prayers, the wondering awe as to the "seven-fold gifts of the Spirit,"
+which were to be given by "the laying on of hands," all tended to
+excitement. I could scarcely control myself as I knelt at the altar
+rails, and felt as though the gentle touch of the aged bishop, which
+fluttered for an instant on my bowed head, were the very touch of the
+wing of that "Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove," whose presence had been so
+earnestly invoked. Is there anything easier, I wonder, than to make a
+young and sensitive girl "intensely religious"? This stay in Paris
+roused into activity an aspect of my religious nature that had
+hitherto been latent. I discovered the sensuous enjoyment that lay in
+introducing colour and fragrance and pomp into religious services, so
+that the gratification of the aesthetic emotions became dignified with
+the garb of piety. The picture-galleries of the Louvre, crowded with
+Madonnas and saints, the Roman Catholic churches with their
+incense-laden air and exquisite music, brought a new joy into my life,
+a more vivid colour to my dreams. Insensibly, the colder, cruder
+Evangelicalism that I had never thoroughly assimilated, grew warmer
+and more brilliant, and the ideal Divine Prince of my childhood took
+on the more pathetic lineaments of the Man of Sorrows, the deeper
+attractiveness of the suffering Saviour of Men. Keble's "Christian
+Year" took the place of "Paradise Lost," and as my girlhood began to
+bud towards womanhood, all its deeper currents set in the direction of
+religious devotion. My mother did not allow me to read love stories,
+and my daydreams of the future were scarcely touched by any of the
+ordinary hopes and fears of a girl lifting her eyes towards the world
+she is shortly to enter. They were filled with broodings over the days
+when girl-martyrs were blessed with visions of the King of Martyrs,
+when sweet St. Agnes saw her celestial Bridegroom, and angels stooped
+to whisper melodies in St. Cecilia's raptured ear. "Why then and not
+now?" my heart would question, and I would lose myself in these
+fancies, never happier than when alone.
+
+The summer of 1862 was spent with Miss Marryat at Sidmouth, and, wise
+woman that she was, she now carefully directed our studies with a view
+to our coming enfranchisement from the "schoolroom." More and more
+were we trained to work alone; our leading-strings were slackened, so
+that we never felt them save when we blundered; and I remember that
+when I once complained, in loving fashion, that she was "teaching me
+so little," she told me that I was getting old enough to be trusted to
+work by myself, and that I must not expect to "have Auntie for a
+crutch all through life." And I venture to say that this gentle
+withdrawal of constant supervision and teaching was one of the wisest
+and kindest things that this noble-hearted woman ever did for us. It
+is the usual custom to keep girls in the schoolroom until they "come
+out"; then, suddenly, they are left to their own devices, and,
+bewildered by their unaccustomed freedom, they waste time that might
+be priceless for their intellectual growth. Lately, the opening of
+universities to women has removed this danger for the more ambitious;
+but at the time of which I am writing no one dreamed of the changes
+soon to be made in the direction of the "higher education of women."
+
+During the winter of 1862-63 Miss Marryat was in London, and for a few
+months I remained there with her, attending the admirable French
+classes of M. Roche. In the spring I returned home to Harrow, going up
+each week to the classes; and when these were over, Auntie told me
+that she thought all she could usefully do was done, and that it was
+time that I should try my wings alone. So well, however, had she
+succeeded in her aims, that my emancipation from the schoolroom was
+but the starting-point of more eager study, though now the study
+turned into the lines of thought towards which my personal tendencies
+most attracted me. German I continued to read with a master, and
+music, under the marvellously able teaching of Mr. John Farmer,
+musical director of Harrow School, took up much of my time. My dear
+mother had a passion for music, and Beethoven and Bach were her
+favourite composers. There was scarcely a sonata of Beethoven's that I
+did not learn, scarcely a fugue of Bach's that I did not master.
+Mendelssohn's "Lieder" gave a lighter recreation, and many a happy
+evening did we spend, my mother and I, over the stately strains of the
+blind Titan, and the sweet melodies of the German wordless orator.
+Musical "At Homes," too, were favourite amusements at Harrow, and at
+these my facile fingers made me a welcome guest.
+
+Thus set free from the schoolroom at 16½, an only daughter, I could do
+with my time as I would, save for the couple of hours a day given to
+music, for the satisfaction of my mother. From then till I became
+engaged, just before I was 19, my life flowed on smoothly, one current
+visible to all and dancing in the sunlight, the other running
+underground, but full and deep and strong. As regards my outer life,
+no girl had a brighter, happier life than mine; studying all the
+mornings and most of the afternoons in my own way, and spending the
+latter part of the day in games and walks and rides--varied with
+parties at which I was one of the merriest of guests. I practised
+archery so zealously that I carried up triumphantly as prize for the
+best score the first ring I ever possessed, while croquet found me a
+most eager devotee. My darling mother certainly "spoiled" me, so far
+as were concerned all the small roughnesses of life. She never allowed
+a trouble of any kind to touch me, and cared only that all worries
+should fall on her, all joys on me. I know now what I never dreamed
+then, that her life was one of serious anxiety. The heavy burden of my
+brother's school and college life pressed on her constantly, and her
+need of money was often serious. A lawyer whom she trusted absolutely
+cheated her systematically, using for his own purposes the remittances
+she made for payment of liabilities, thus keeping upon her a constant
+drain. Yet for me all that was wanted was ever there. Was it a ball to
+which we were going? I need never think of what I would wear till the
+time for dressing arrived, and there laid out ready for me was all I
+wanted, every detail complete from top to toe. No hand but hers must
+dress my hair, which, loosed, fell in dense curly masses nearly to my
+knees; no hand but hers must fasten dress and deck with flowers, and
+if I sometimes would coaxingly ask if I might not help by sewing in
+laces, or by doing some trifle in aid, she would kiss me and bid me
+run to my books or my play, telling me that her only pleasure in life
+was caring for her "treasure." Alas! how lightly we take the
+self-denying labour that makes life so easy, ere yet we have known
+what life means when the protecting motherwing is withdrawn. So
+guarded and shielded had been my childhood and youth from every touch
+of pain and anxiety that love could bear for me, that I never dreamed
+that life might be a heavy burden, save as I saw it in the poor I was
+sent to help; all the joy of those happy years I took, not
+ungratefully I hope, but certainly with as glad unconsciousness of
+anything rare in it as I took the sunlight. Passionate love, indeed, I
+gave to my darling, but I never knew all I owed her till I passed out
+of her tender guardianship, till I left my mother's home. Is such
+training wise? I am not sure. It makes the ordinary roughnesses of
+life come with so stunning a shock, when one goes out into the world,
+that one is apt to question whether some earlier initiation into
+life's sterner mysteries would not be wiser for the young. Yet it is a
+fair thing to have that joyous youth to look back upon, and at least
+it is a treasury of memory that no thief can steal in the struggles of
+later life. "Sunshine" they called me in those bright days of merry
+play and earnest study. But that study showed the bent of my thought
+and linked itself to the hidden life; for the Fathers of the early
+Christian Church now became my chief companions, and I pored over the
+Shepherd of Hernias, the Epistles of Polycarp, Barnabas, Ignatius, and
+Clement, the commentaries of Chrysostom, the confessions of Augustine.
+With these I studied the writings of Pusey, Liddon, and Keble, with
+many another smaller light, joying in the great conception of a
+Catholic Church, lasting through the centuries, built on the
+foundations of apostles and of martyrs, stretching from the days of
+Christ Himself down to our own--"One Lord, one Faith one Baptism," and
+I myself a child of that Holy Church. The hidden life grew stronger,
+constantly fed by these streams of study; weekly communion became the
+centre round which my devotional life revolved, with its ecstatic
+meditation, its growing intensity of conscious contact with the
+Divine; I fasted, according to the ordinances of the Church;
+occasionally flagellated myself to see if I could bear physical pain,
+should I be fortunate enough ever to tread the pathway trodden by the
+saints; and ever the Christ was the figure round which clustered all
+my hopes and longings, till I often felt that the very passion of, my
+devotion would draw Him down from His throne in heaven, present
+visibly in form as I felt Him invisibly in spirit. To serve Him
+through His Church became more and more a definite ideal in my life,
+and my thoughts began to turn towards some kind of "religious life,"
+in which I might prove my love by sacrifice and turn my passionate
+gratitude into active service.
+
+Looking back to-day over my life, I see that its keynote--through all
+the blunders, and the blind mistakes, and clumsy follies--has been
+this longing for sacrifice to something felt as greater than the self.
+It has been so strong and so persistent that I recognise it now as a
+tendency brought over from a previous life and dominating the present
+one; and this is shown by the fact that to follow it is not the act of
+a deliberate and conscious will, forcing self into submission and
+giving up with pain something the heart desires, but the following it
+is a joyous springing forward along the easiest path, the "sacrifice"
+being the supremely attractive thing, not to make which would be to
+deny the deepest longings of the soul, and to feel oneself polluted
+and dishonoured. And it is here that the misjudgment comes in of many
+generous hearts who have spoken sometimes lately so strongly in my
+praise. For the efforts to serve have not been painful acts of
+self-denial, but the yielding to an overmastering desire. We do not
+praise the mother who, impelled by her protecting love, feeds her
+crying infant and stills its wailings at her breast; rather should we
+blame her if she turned aside from its weeping to play with some toy.
+And so with all those whose ears are opened to the wailings of the
+great orphan Humanity; they are less to be praised for helping than
+they would be to be blamed if they stood aside. I now know that it is
+those wailings that have stirred my heart through life, and that I
+brought with me the ears open to hear them from previous lives of
+service paid to men. It was those lives that drew for the child the
+alluring pictures of martyrdom, breathed into the girl the passion of
+devotion, sent the woman out to face scoff and odium, and drove her
+finally into the Theosophy that rationalises sacrifice, while opening
+up possibilities of service beside which all other hopes grow pale.
+
+The Easter of 1866 was a memorable date in my life. I was introduced
+to the clergyman I married, and I met and conquered my first religious
+doubt. A little mission church had been opened the preceding Christmas
+in a very poor district of Clapham. My grandfather's house was near at
+hand, in Albert Square, and a favourite aunt and myself devoted
+ourselves a good deal to this little church, as enthusiastic girls and
+women will. At Easter we decorated it with spring flowers, with dewy
+primroses and fragrant violets, and with the yellow bells of the wild
+daffodil, to the huge delight of the poor who crowded in, and of the
+little London children who had, many of them, never seen a flower.
+Here I met the Rev. Frank Besant, a young Cambridge man, who had just
+taken orders, and was serving the little mission church as deacon;
+strange that at the same time I should meet the man I was to marry,
+and the doubts which were to break the marriage tie. For in the Holy
+Week preceding that Easter Eve, I had been--as English and Roman
+Catholics are wont to do--trying to throw the mind back to the time
+when the commemorated events occurred, and to follow, step by step,
+the last days of the Son of Man, living, as it were, through those
+last hours, so that I might be ready to kneel before the cross on Good
+Friday, to stand beside the sepulchre on Easter Day. In order to
+facilitate the realisation of those last sacred days of God incarnate
+on earth, working out man's salvation, I resolved to write a brief
+history of that week, compiled from the Four Gospels, meaning them to
+try and realise each day the occurrences that had happened on the
+corresponding date in A.D. 33, and so to follow those "blessed feet"
+step by step, till they were
+
+"... nailed for our advantage to the bitter cross."
+
+With the fearlessness which springs from ignorance I sat down to my
+task. My method was as follows:--
+
+    MATTHEW.         |    MARK.     |    LUKE.      |    JOHN.
+                     |              |               |
+  PALM SUNDAY.       | PALM SUNDAY. | PALM SUNDAY.  | PALM SUNDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Rode into          | Rode into    | Rode into     | Rode into
+  Jerusalem.         | Jerusalem.   | Jerusalem.    | Jerusalem.
+  Purified the       | Returned to  | Purified the  | Spoke in
+  Temple. Returned   | Bethany.     | Temple.       | the Temple.
+  to Bethany.        |              | Note: "Taught |
+                     |              | daily in the  |
+                     |              | temple."      |
+                     |              |               |
+    MONDAY.          |    MONDAY.   |    MONDAY.    |    MONDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Cursed the         | Cursed the   | Like Matthew. |    ----
+  fig-tree.          | fig-tree.    |               |
+  Taught in the      | Purified the |               |
+  Temple, and spake  | Temple. Went |               |
+  many parables.     | out of city. |               |
+  No breaks shown,   |              |               |
+  but the fig-tree   |              |               |
+  (xxi.19) did not   |              |               |
+  wither till        |              |               |
+  Tuesday (see       |              |               |
+  Mark).             |              |               |
+                     |              |               |
+    TUESDAY.         |    TUESDAY.  |   TUESDAY.    |   TUESDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  All chaps. xxi.    | Saw fig-tree | Discourses    |   ----
+  20, xxii.-xxv.,    | withered up. | No date       |
+  spoken on          | Then .       | shown.        |
+  Tuesday, for xxvi. | discourses   |               |
+  2 gives Passover   |              |               |
+  as "after two      |              |               |
+  days."             |              |               |
+                     |              |               |
+  WEDNESDAY.         |   WEDNESDAY. |  WEDNESDAY.   |  WEDNESDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Blank.             |   ----       |   ----        |  ----
+  (Possibly remained in Bethany; the alabaster box of oinment.)
+                     |              |               |
+  THURSDAY.          |   THURSDAY.  |   THURSDAY.   |   THURSDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Preparation of     | Same as Matt.| Same as Matt. | Discourses
+  Passover. Eating   |              |               | with disciples,
+  of Passover, and   |              |               | but _before_ the
+  institution of the |              |               | Passover. Washes
+  Holy Eucharist.    |              |               | the disciples'
+  Gethsemane.        |              |               | feet. Nothing
+  Betrayal by Judas. |              |               | said of Holy
+  Led captive to     |              |               | Eucharist, nor
+  Caiaphas. Denied   |              |               | of agony in
+  by St. Peter.      |              |               | Gethsemane.
+                     |              |               | Malchus' ear.
+                     |              |               | Led captive to
+                     |              |               | Annas first.
+                     |              |               | Then to Caiaphas.
+                     |              |               | Denied
+                     |              |               | by St. Peter.
+                     |              |               |
+  FRIDAY.            |   FRIDAY.    |   FRIDAY.     |   FRIDAY
+                     |              |               |
+  Led to Pilate.     | As Matthew,  | Led to        | Taken to
+  Judas hangs        | but hour of  | Pilate. Sent  | Pilate. Jews
+  himself. Tried.    | crucifixion  | to Herod.     | would not enter,
+  Condemned to       | given,       | Sent back to  | that they
+  death. Scourged    | 9 a.m.       | Pilate. Rest  | might eat
+  and mocked. Led    |              | as in         | the Passover.
+  to crucifixion.    |              | Matthew; but  | Scourged by
+  Darkness from 12   |              | _one_         | Pilate before
+  to 3. Died at 3.   |              | malefactor    | condemnation,
+                     |              | repents.      | and mocked. Shown
+                     |              |               | by Pilate to
+                     |              |               | Jews at 12.
+
+I became uneasy as I proceeded with my task, for discrepancies leaped
+at me from my four columns; the uneasiness grew as the contradictions
+increased, until I saw with a shock of horror that my "harmony" was a
+discord, and a doubt of the veracity of the story sprang up like a
+serpent hissing in my face. It was struck down in a moment, for to me
+to doubt was sin, and to have doubted on the very eve of the Passion
+was an added crime. Quickly I assured myself that these apparent
+contradictions were necessary as tests of faith, and I forced myself
+to repeat Tertullian's famous "Credo quia impossible," till, from a
+wooden recital, it became a triumphant affirmation. I reminded myself
+that St. Peter had said of the Pauline Epistles that in them were
+"some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and
+unstable wrest ... unto their own destruction." I shudderingly
+recognised that I must be very unlearned and unstable to find discord
+among the Holy Evangelists, and imposed on myself an extra fast as
+penance for my ignorance and lack of firmness in the faith. For my
+mental position was one to which doubt was one of the worst of sins. I
+knew that there were people like Colenso, who questioned the
+infallibility of the Bible, but I remembered how the Apostle John had
+fled from the Baths when Cerinthus entered them, lest the roof should
+fall on the heretic, and crush any one in his neighbourhood, and I
+looked on all heretics with holy horror. Pusey had indoctrinated me
+with his stern hatred of all heresy, and I was content to rest with
+him on that faith, "which must be old because it is eternal, and must
+be unchangeable because it is true." I would not even read the works
+of my mothers favourite Stanley, because he was "unsound," and because
+Pusey had condemned his "variegated use of words which destroys all
+definiteness of meaning"--a clever and pointed description, be it said
+in passing, of the Dean's exquisite phrases, capable of so many
+readings. It can then be imagined with what a stab of pain this first
+doubt struck me, and with what haste I smothered it up, buried it, and
+smoothed the turf over its grave. _But it had been there_, and it left
+its mark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+MARRIAGE.
+
+
+The last year of my girlish freedom was drawing to its close; how shall
+I hope to make commonsense readers understand how I became betrothed
+maiden ere yet nineteen, girl-wife when twenty years had struck?
+Looking back over twenty-five years, I feel a profound pity for the
+girl standing at that critical point of life, so utterly, hopelessly
+ignorant of all that marriage meant, so filled with impossible dreams,
+so unfitted for the _rôle_ of wife. As I have said, my day-dreams held
+little place for love, partly from the absence of love novels from my
+reading, partly from the mystic fancies that twined themselves round
+the figure of the Christ. Catholic books of devotion--English or Roman,
+it matters not, for to a large extent they are translations of the same
+hymns and prayers--are exceedingly glowing in their language, and the
+dawning feelings of womanhood unconsciously lend to them a passionate
+fervour. I longed to spend my time in worshipping Jesus, and was, as
+far as my inner life was concerned, absorbed in that passionate love of
+"the Saviour" which, among emotional Catholics, really is the human
+passion of love transferred to an ideal--for women to Jesus, for men to
+the Virgin Mary. In order to show that I am not here exaggerating, I
+subjoin a few of the prayers in which I found daily delight, and I do
+this in order to show how an emotional girl may be attracted by these
+so-called devotional exercises:--
+
+"O crucified Love, raise in me fresh ardours of love and consolation,
+that it may henceforth be the greatest torment I can endure ever to
+offend Thee; that it may be my greatest delight to please Thee."
+
+"Let the remembrance of Thy death, O Lord Jesu, make me to desire and
+pant after Thee, that I may delight in Thy gracious presence."
+
+"O most sweet Jesu Christ, I, unworthy sinner, yet redeemed by Thy
+precious blood.... Thine I am and will be, in life and in death."
+
+"O Jesu, beloved, fairer than the sons of men, draw me after Thee with
+the cords of Thy love."
+
+"Blessed are Thou, O most merciful God, who didst vouchsafe to espouse
+me to the heavenly Bridegroom in the waters of baptism, and hast
+imparted Thy body and blood as a new gift of espousal and the meet
+consummation of Thy love."
+
+"O most sweet Lord Jesu, transfix the affections of my inmost soul with
+that most joyous and most healthful wound of Thy love, with true,
+serene, most holy, apostolical charity; that my soul may ever languish
+and melt with entire love and longing for Thee. Let it desire Thee and
+faint for Thy courts; long to be dissolved and be with Thee."
+
+"Oh, that I could embrace Thee with that most burning love of angels."
+
+"Let Him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth; for Thy love is better
+than wine. Draw me, we will run after Thee. The king hath brought me
+into his chambers.... Let my soul, O Lord, feel the sweetness of Thy
+presence. May it taste how sweet Thou art.... May the sweet and burning
+power of Thy love, I beseech Thee, absorb my soul."
+
+All girls have in them the germ of passion, and the line of its
+development depends on the character brought into the world, and the
+surrounding influences of education. I had but two ideals in my
+childhood and youth, round whom twined these budding tendrils of
+passion; they were my mother and the Christ. I know this may seem
+strange, but I am trying to state things as they were in this
+life-story, and not give mere conventionalisms, and so it was. I had
+men friends, but no lovers--at least, to my knowledge, for I have since
+heard that my mother received two or three offers of marriage for me,
+but declined them on account of my youth and my childishness--friends
+with whom I liked to talk, because they knew more than I did; but they
+had no place in my day-dreams. These were more and more filled with the
+one Ideal Man, and my hopes turned towards the life of the Sister of
+Mercy, who ever worships the Christ, and devotes her life to the
+service of His poor. I knew my dear mother would set herself against
+this idea, but it nestled warm at my heart, for ever that idea of
+escaping from the humdrum of ordinary life by some complete sacrifice
+lured me onwards with its overmastering fascination.
+
+Now one unlucky result of this view of religion is the idealisation of
+the clergyman, the special messenger and chosen servant of the Lord.
+Far more lofty than any title bestowed by earthly monarch is that
+patent of nobility straight from the hand of the "King of kings," that
+seems to give to the mortal something of the authority of the immortal,
+and to crown the head of the priest with the diadem that belongs to
+those who are "kings and priests unto God." Viewed in this way, the
+position of the priest's wife seems second only to that of the nun, and
+has, therefore, a wonderful attractiveness, an attractiveness in which
+the particular clergyman affected plays a very subordinate part; it is
+the "sacred office," the nearness to "holy things," the consecration
+which seems to include the wife--it is these things that shed a glamour
+over the clerical life which attracts most those who are most apt to
+self-devotion, most swayed by imagination. And the saddest pity of all
+this is that the glamour is most over those whose brains are quick,
+whose hearts are pure, who are responsive to all forms of noble
+emotions, all suggestions of personal self-sacrifice; if such in later
+life rise to the higher emotions whose shadows have attracted them, and
+to that higher self-sacrifice whose whispers reached them in their
+early youth, then the false prophet's veil is raised, the poverty of
+the conception seen, and the life is either wrecked, or through
+storm-wind and surge of battling billows, with loss of mast and sail,
+is steered by firm hand into the port of a nobler faith.
+
+That summer of 1866 saw me engaged to the young clergyman I had met at
+the mission church in the spring, our knowledge of each other being an
+almost negligeable quantity. We were thrown together for a week, the
+only two young ones in a small party of holiday-makers, and in our
+walks, rides, and drives we were naturally companions; an hour or two
+before he left he asked me to marry him, taking my consent for granted
+as I had allowed him such full companionship--a perfectly fair
+assumption with girls accustomed to look on all men as possible
+husbands, but wholly mistaken as regarded myself, whose thoughts were
+in quite other directions. Startled, and my sensitive pride touched by
+what seemed to my strict views an assumption that I had been flirting,
+I hesitated, did not follow my first impulse of refusal, but took
+refuge in silence; my suitor had to catch his train, and bound me
+over to silence till he could himself speak to my mother, urging
+authoritatively that it would be dishonourable of me to break his
+confidence, and left me--the most upset and distressed little person
+on the Sussex coast. The fortnight that followed was the first unhappy
+one of my life, for I had a secret from my mother, a secret which I
+passionately longed to tell her, but dared not speak at the risk of
+doing a dishonourable thing. On meeting my suitor on our return to
+town I positively refused to keep silence any longer, and then out
+of sheer weakness and fear of inflicting pain I drifted into an
+engagement with a man I did not pretend to love. "Drifted" is the
+right word, for two or three months passed, on the ground that I was
+so much of a child, before my mother would consent to a definite
+engagement; my dislike of the thought of marriage faded before the
+idea of becoming the wife of a priest, working ever in the Church and
+among the poor. I had no outlet for my growing desire for usefulness
+in my happy and peaceful home-life, where all religious enthusiasm was
+regarded as unbalanced and unbecoming; all that was deepest and truest
+in my nature chafed against my easy, useless days, longed for work,
+yearned to devote itself, as I had read women saints had done, to the
+service of the Church and of the poor, to the battling against sin and
+misery--what empty names sin and misery then were to me! "You will
+have more opportunities for doing good as a clergyman's wife than as
+anything else," was one of the pleas urged on my reluctance.
+
+In the autumn I was definitely betrothed, and I married fourteen months
+later. Once, in the interval, I tried to break the engagement, but, on
+my broaching the subject to my mother, all her pride rose up in revolt.
+Would I, her daughter, break my word, would I dishonour myself by
+jilting a man I had pledged myself to marry? She could be stern where
+honour was involved, that sweet mother of mine, and I yielded to her
+wish as I had been ever wont to do, for a look or a word from her had
+ever been my law, save where religion was concerned. So I married in
+the winter of 1867 with no more idea of the marriage relation than if I
+had been four years old instead of twenty. My dreamy life, into which
+no knowledge of evil had been allowed to penetrate, in which I had been
+guarded from all pain, shielded from all anxiety, kept, innocent on all
+questions of sex, was no preparation for married existence, and left me
+defenceless to face a rude awakening. Looking back on it all, I
+deliberately say that no more fatal blunder can be made than to train a
+girl to womanhood in ignorance of all life's duties and burdens, and
+then to let her face them for the first time away from all the old
+associations, the old helps, the old refuge on the mother's breast.
+That "perfect innocence" may be very beautiful, but it is a perilous
+possession, and Eve should have the knowledge of good and evil ere she
+wanders forth from the paradise of a mother's love. Many an unhappy
+marriage dates from its very beginning, from the terrible shock to a
+young girl's sensitive modesty and pride, her helpless bewilderment and
+fear. Men, with their public school and college education, or the
+knowledge that comes by living in the outside world, may find it hard
+to realise the possibility of such infantile ignorance in many girls.
+None the less, such ignorance is a fact in the case of some girls at
+least, and no mother should let her daughter, blindfold, slip her neck
+under the marriage yoke.
+
+Before leaving the harbourage of girlhood to set sail on the troublous
+sea of life, there is an occurrence of which I must make mention, as
+it marks my first awakening of interest in the outer world of
+political struggle. In the autumn of 1867 my mother and I were staying
+with some dear friends of ours, the Robertses, at Pendleton, near
+Manchester. Mr. Roberts was "the poor man's lawyer," in the
+affectionate phrase used of him by many a hundred men. He was a close
+friend of Ernest Jones, and was always ready to fight a poor man's
+battle without fee. He worked hard in the agitation which saved women
+from working in the mines, and I have heard him tell how he had seen
+them toiling, naked to the waist, with short petticoats barely
+reaching to their knees, rough, foul-tongued, brutalised out of all
+womanly decency and grace; and how he had seen little children working
+there too, babies of three and four set to watch a door, and falling
+asleep at their work to be roused by curse and kick to the unfair
+toil. The old man's eye would begin to flash and his voice to rise as
+he told of these horrors, and then his face would soften as he added
+that, after it was all over and the slavery was put an end to, as he
+went through a coal district the women standing at their doors would
+lift up their children to see "Lawyer Roberts" go by, and would bid
+"God bless him" for what he had done. This dear old man was my first
+tutor in Radicalism, and I was an apt pupil. I had taken no interest
+in politics, but had unconsciously reflected more or less the decorous
+Whiggism which had always surrounded me. I regarded "the poor" as folk
+to be educated, looked after, charitably dealt with, and always
+treated with most perfect courtesy, the courtesy being due from me, as
+a lady, to all equally, whether they were rich or poor. But to Mr.
+Roberts "the poor" were the working-bees, the wealth producers, with a
+right to self-rule not to looking after, with a right to justice, not
+to charity, and he preached his doctrines to me in season and out of
+season. I was a pet of his, and used often to drive him to his office
+in the morning, glorying much in the fact that my skill was trusted in
+guiding a horse through the crowded Manchester streets. During these
+drives, and on all other available occasions, Mr. Roberts would preach
+to me the cause of the people. "What do you think of John Bright?" he
+demanded suddenly one day, looking at me with fiery eyes from under
+heavy brows. "I have never thought of him at all," was the careless
+answer. "Isn't he a rather rough sort of man, who goes about making
+rows?" "There, I thought so!" he thundered at me fiercely. "That's
+just what I say. I believe some of you fine ladies would not go to
+heaven if you had to rub shoulders with John Bright, the noblest man
+God ever gave to the cause of the poor."
+
+This was the hot-tempered and lovable "demagogue," as he was called,
+with whom we were staying when Colonel Kelly and Captain Deasy, two
+Fenian leaders, were arrested in Manchester and put on their trial. The
+whole Irish population became seething with excitement, and on
+September 18th the police van carrying them to Salford Gaol was stopped
+at the Bellevue Railway Arch by the sudden fall of one of the horses,
+shot from the side of the road. In a moment the van was surrounded, and
+crowbars were wrenching at the van door. It resisted; a body of police
+was rapidly approaching, and if the rescue was to be effective the door
+must be opened. The rescuers shouted to Brett, the constable inside, to
+pass out his keys; he refused, and some one exclaimed, "Blow off the
+lock!" In a moment the muzzle of a revolver was against the lock, and
+it was blown off; but Brett, stooping down to look through the keyhole,
+received the bullet in his head, and fell dying as the door flew open.
+Another moment, and Allen, a lad of seventeen, had wrenched open the
+doors of the compartments occupied by Kelly and Deasy, dragged them
+out, and while two or three hurried them off to a place of safety, the
+others threw themselves between the fugitives and the police, and with
+levelled revolvers guarded their flight. The Fenian leaders once safe,
+they scattered, and young William Allen, whose one thought had been for
+his chiefs, seeing them safe, fired his revolver in the air, for he
+would not shed blood in his own defence. Disarmed by his own act, he
+was set on by the police, brutally struck down, kicked and stoned, and
+was dragged off to gaol, faint and bleeding, to meet there some of his
+comrades in much the same plight as himself. Then Manchester went mad,
+and race-passions flared up into flame; no Irish workman was safe in a
+crowd of Englishmen, no Englishman safe in the Irish quarter. The
+friends of the prisoners besieged "Lawyer Roberts's" house, praying his
+aid, and he threw his whole fiery soul into their defence. The man who
+had fired the accidentally fatal shot was safely out of the way, and
+none of the others had hurt a human being. A Special Commission was
+issued, with Mr. Justice Blackburn at its head--"the hanging judge,"
+groaned Mr. Roberts--and it was soon in Manchester, for all Mr.
+Roberts's efforts to get the venue of the trial changed were futile,
+though of fair trial then in Manchester there was no chance. On October
+25th the prisoners were actually brought up before the magistrates in
+irons, and Mr. Ernest Jones, their counsel, failing in his protest
+against this outrage, threw down his brief and left the court. So great
+was the haste with which the trial was hurried on that on the 29th
+Allen, Larkin, Gould (O'Brien), Maguire, and Condon were standing in
+the dock before the Commission charged with murder.
+
+My first experience of an angry crowd was on that day as we drove to
+the court; the streets were barricaded, the soldiers were under arms,
+every approach to the court crowded with surging throngs. At last our
+carriage was stopped as we were passing at a foot's pace through an
+Irish section of the crowd, and various vehement fists came through the
+window, with hearty curses at the "d----d English who were going to see
+the boys murdered." The situation was critical, for we were two women
+and three girls, when I bethought myself that we were unknown, and
+gently touched the nearest fist: "Friends, these are Mr. Roberts' wife
+and daughters." "Roberts! Lawyer Roberts! God bless Roberts! Let his
+carriage through." And all the scowling faces became smile-wreathen,
+and curses changed to cheers, as a road to the court steps was cleared
+for us.
+
+Alas! if there was passion on behalf of the prisoners outside, there
+was passion against them within, and the very opening of the trial
+showed the spirit that animated the prosecution and the bench. Digby
+Seymour, Q.C., and Ernest Jones, were briefed for the defence, and Mr.
+Roberts did not think that they exercised sufficiently their right of
+challenge; he knew, as we all did, that many on the panel had loudly
+proclaimed their hostility to the Irish, and Mr. Roberts persisted in
+challenging them as his counsel would not. In vain Judge Blackburn
+threatened to commit the rebellious solicitor: "These men's lives are
+at stake, my lord," was his indignant plea. "Remove that man!" cried
+the angry judge, but as the officers of the court came forward very
+slowly--for all poor men loved and honoured the sturdy fighter--he
+changed his mind and let him stay. Despite all his efforts, the jury
+contained a man who had declared that he "didn't care what the evidence
+was, he would hang every d----d Irishman of the lot." And the result
+showed that he was not alone in his view, for evidence of the most
+disreputable kind was admitted; women of the lowest type were put into
+the box as witnesses, and their word taken as unchallengeable; thus was
+destroyed an _alibi_ for Maguire, afterwards accepted by the Crown, a
+free pardon being issued on the strength of it. Nothing could save the
+doomed men from the determined verdict, and I could see from where I
+was sitting into a little room behind the bench, where an official was
+quietly preparing the black caps before the verdict had been delivered.
+The foregone "Guilty" was duly repeated as verdict on each of the five
+cases, and the prisoners asked if they had anything to say why sentence
+of death should not be passed on them. Allen, boy as he was, made a
+very brave and manly speech; he had not fired, save in the air--if he
+had done so he might have escaped; he had helped to free Kelly and
+Deasy, and did not regret it; he was willing to die for Ireland.
+Maguire and Condon (he also was reprieved) declared they were not
+present, but, like Allen, were ready to die for their country. Sentence
+of death was passed, and, as echo to the sardonic "The Lord have mercy
+on your souls," rang back from the dock in five clear voices, with
+never a quiver of fear in them, "God save Ireland!" and the men passed
+one by one from the sight of my tear-dimmed eyes.
+
+It was a sorrowful time that followed; the despair of the heart-broken
+girl who was Allen's sweetheart, and who cried to us on her knees,
+"Save my William!" was hard to see; nothing we or any one could do
+availed to avert the doom, and on November 23rd Allen, Larkin, and
+O'Brien were hanged outside Salford Gaol. Had they striven for freedom
+in Italy England would have honoured them; here she buried them as
+common murderers in quicklime in the prison yard.
+
+I have found, with a keen sense of pleasure, that Mr. Bradlaugh and
+myself were in 1867 to some extent co-workers, although we knew not of
+each other's existence, and although he was doing much, and I only
+giving such poor sympathy as a young girl might, who was only just
+awakening to the duty of political work. I read in the _National
+Reformer_ for November 24, 1867, that in the preceding week he was
+pleading on Clerkenwell Green for these men's lives:--"According to
+the evidence at the trial, Deasy and Kelly were illegally arrested.
+They had been arrested for vagrancy of which no evidence was given, and
+apparently remanded for felony without a shadow of justification. He
+had yet to learn that in England the same state of things existed as in
+Ireland; he had yet to learn that an illegal arrest was sufficient
+ground to detain any of the citizens of any country in the prisons of
+this one. If he were illegally held, he was justified in using enough
+force to procure his release. Wearing a policeman's coat gave no
+authority when the officer exceeded his jurisdiction. He had argued
+this before Lord Chief Justice Erie in the Court of Common Pleas, and
+that learned judge did not venture to contradict the argument which he
+submitted. There was another reason why they should spare these men,
+although he hardly expected the Government to listen, because the
+Government sent down one of the judges who was predetermined to convict
+the prisoners; it was that the offence was purely a political one. The
+death of Brett was a sad mischance, but no one who read the evidence
+could regard the killing of Brett as an intentional murder. Legally, it
+was murder; morally, it was homicide in the rescue of a political
+captive. If it were a question of the rescue of the political captives
+of Varignano, or of political captives in Bourbon, in Naples, or in
+Poland, or in Paris, even earls might be found so to argue. Wherein is
+our sister Ireland less than these? In executing these men, they would
+throw down the gauntlet for terrible reprisals. It was a grave and
+solemn question. It had been said by a previous speaker that they were
+prepared to go to any lengths to save these Irishmen. They were not. He
+wished they were. If they were, if the men of England, from one end to
+the other, were prepared to say, 'These men shall not be executed,'
+they would not be. He was afraid they had not pluck enough for that.
+Their moral courage was not equal to their physical strength. Therefore
+he would not say that they were prepared to do so. They must plead _ad
+misericordiam_. He appealed to the press, which represented the power
+of England; to that press which in its panic-stricken moments had done
+much harm, and which ought now to save these four doomed men. If the
+press demanded it, no Government would be mad enough to resist. The
+memory of the blood which was shed in 1798 rose up like a bloody ghost
+against them to-day. He only feared that what they said upon the
+subject might do the poor men more harm than good. If it were not so,
+he would coin words that should speak in words of fire. As it was, he
+could only say to the Government: You are strong to-day; you hold these
+men's lives in your hands; but if you want to reconcile their country
+to you, if you want to win back Ireland, if you want to make her
+children love you--then do not embitter their hearts still more by
+taking the lives of these men. Temper your strength with mercy; do not
+use the sword of justice like one of vengeance, for the day may come
+when it shall be broken in your hands, and you yourselves brained by
+the hilt of the weapon you have so wickedly wielded." In October he
+had printed a plea for Ireland, strong and earnest, asking:--
+
+"Where is our boasted English freedom when you cross to Kingstown pier?
+Where has it been for near two years? The Habeas Corpus Act suspended,
+the gaols crowded, the steamers searched, spies listening at shebeen
+shops for sedition, and the end of it a Fenian panic in England. Oh,
+before it be too late, before more blood stain the pages of our present
+history, before we exasperate and arouse bitter animosities, let us try
+and do justice to our sister land. Abolish once and for all the land
+laws, which in their iniquitous operation have ruined her peasantry.
+Sweep away the leech-like Church which has sucked her vitality, and has
+given her back no word even of comfort in her degradation. Turn her
+barracks into flax mills, encourage a spirit of independence in her
+citizens, restore to her people the protection of the law, so that they
+may speak without fear of arrest, and beg them to plainly and boldly
+state their grievances. Let a commission of the best and wisest amongst
+Irishmen, with some of our highest English judges added, sit solemnly
+to hear all complaints, and then let us honestly legislate, not for the
+punishment of the discontented, but to remove the causes of the
+discontent. It is not the Fenians who have depopulated Ireland's
+strength and increased her misery. It is not the Fenians who have
+evicted tenants by the score. It is not the Fenians who have checked
+cultivation. Those who have caused the wrong at least should frame the
+remedy."
+
+In December, 1867, I sailed out of the safe harbour of my happy and
+peaceful girlhood on to the wide sea of life, and the waves broke
+roughly as soon as the bar was crossed. We were an ill-matched pair, my
+husband and I, from the very outset; he, with very high ideas of a
+husband's authority and a wife's submission, holding strongly to the
+"master-in-my-own-house theory," thinking much of the details of home
+arrangements, precise, methodical, easily angered and with difficulty
+appeased. I, accustomed to freedom, indifferent to home details,
+impulsive, very hot-tempered, and proud as Lucifer. I had never had a
+harsh word spoken to me, never been ordered to do anything, had had my
+way smoothed for my feet, and never a worry had touched me. Harshness
+roused first incredulous wonder, then a storm of indignant tears, and
+after a time a proud, defiant resistance, cold and hard as iron. The
+easy-going, sunshiny, enthusiastic girl changed--and changed pretty
+rapidly--into a grave, proud, reticent woman, burying deep in her own
+heart all her hopes, her fears, and her disillusions. I must have been
+a very unsatisfactory wife from the beginning, though I think other
+treatment might gradually have turned me into a fair imitation of the
+proper conventional article. Beginning with the ignorance before
+alluded to, and so scared and outraged at heart from the very first;
+knowing nothing of household management or economical use of money--I
+had never had an allowance or even bought myself a pair of
+gloves--though eager to perform my new duties creditably; unwilling to
+potter over little things, and liking to do swiftly what I had to do,
+and then turn to my beloved books; at heart fretting for my mother but
+rarely speaking of her, as I found my longing for her presence raised
+jealous vexation; with strangers about me with whom I had no sympathy;
+visited by ladies who talked to me only about babies and
+servants--troubles of which I knew nothing and which bored me
+unutterably--and who were as uninterested in all that had filled my
+life, in theology, in politics, in science, as I was uninterested in
+the discussions on the housemaid's young man and on the cook's
+extravagance in using "butter, when dripping would have done perfectly
+well, my dear"; was it wonderful that I became timid, dull, and
+depressed?
+
+All my eager, passionate enthusiasm, so attractive to men in a young
+girl, were doubtless incompatible with "the solid comfort of a wife,"
+and I must have been inexpressibly tiring to the Rev. Frank Besant.
+And, in truth, I ought never to have married, for under the soft,
+loving, pliable girl there lay hidden, as much unknown to herself as to
+her surroundings, a woman of strong dominant will, strength that panted
+for expression and rebelled against restraint, fiery and passionate
+emotions that were seething under compression--a most undesirable
+partner to sit in the lady's arm-chair on the domestic rug before the
+fire. [_Que le diable faisait-elle dans cette galère,_] I have often
+thought, looking back at my past self, and asking, Why did that foolish
+girl make her bed so foolishly? But self-analysis shows the
+contradictories in my nature that led me into so mistaken a course. I
+have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have
+paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to suffer tortures of
+shyness, and if my shoe-lace was untied would feel shamefacedly that
+every eye was fixed on the unlucky string; as a girl I would shrink
+away from strangers and think myself unwanted and unliked, so that I
+was full of eager gratitude to any one who noticed me kindly; as the
+young mistress of a house, I was afraid of my servants, and would let
+careless work pass rather than bear the pain of reproving the ill-doer;
+when I have been lecturing and debating with no lack of spirit on the
+platform, I have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel
+rather than to ring and make the waiter fetch it; combative on the
+platform in defence of any cause I cared for, I shrink from quarrel or
+disapproval in the home, and am a coward at heart in private while a
+good fighter in public. How often have I passed unhappy quarters of an
+hour screwing up my courage to find fault with some subordinate whom my
+duty compelled me to reprove, and how often have I jeered at myself for
+a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming
+some lad or lass for doing their work badly! An unkind look or word has
+availed to make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while
+on the platform opposition makes me speak my best. So I slid into
+marriage blindly and stupidly, fearing to give pain; fretted my heart
+out for a year; then, roused by harshness and injustice, stiffened and
+hardened, and lived with a wall of ice round me within which I waged
+mental conflicts that nearly killed me; and learned at last how to live
+and work in armour that turned the edge of the weapons that struck it,
+and left the flesh beneath unwounded, armour laid aside, but in the
+presence of a very few.
+
+My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up
+two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of
+a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character,
+"The Lives of the Black Letter Saints." For the sake of the
+unecclesiastically trained it may be as well to mention that in the
+Calendar of the Church of England there are a number of Saints' Days;
+some of these are printed in red, and are Red Letter Days, for which
+services are appointed by the Church; others are printed in black, and
+are Black Letter Days, and have no special services fixed for them. It
+seemed to me that it would be interesting to take each of these days
+and write a sketch of the life of the saint belonging to it, and
+accordingly I set to work to do so, and gathered various books of
+history and legend where-from to collect my "facts." I do not in the
+least know what became of that valuable book; I tried Macmillans with
+it, and it was sent on by them to some one who was preparing a series
+of Church books for the young; later I had a letter from a Church
+brotherhood offering to publish it, if I would give it as "an act of
+piety" to their order; its ultimate fate is to me unknown.
+
+The short stories were more fortunate. I sent the first to the _Family
+Herald_, and some weeks afterwards received a letter from which dropped
+a cheque as I opened it. Dear me! I have earned a good deal of money
+since by my pen, but never any that gave me the intense delight of that
+first thirty shillings. It was the first money I had ever earned, and
+the pride of the earning was added to the pride of authorship. In my
+childish delight and practical religion, I went down on my knees and
+thanked God for sending it to me, and I saw myself earning heaps of
+golden guineas, and becoming quite a support of the household. Besides,
+it was "my very own," I thought, and a delightful sense of independence
+came over me. I had not then realised the beauty of the English law,
+and the dignified position in which it placed the married woman; I did
+not understand that all a married woman earned by law belonged to her
+owner, and that she could have nothing that belonged to her of
+right.[1] I did not want the money: I was only so glad to have
+something of my own to give, and it was rather a shock to learn that it
+was not really mine at all.
+
+From time to time after that I earned a few pounds for stories in the
+same journal; and the _Family Herald_, let me say, has one peculiarity
+which should render it beloved by poor authors; it pays its contributor
+when it accepts the paper, whether it prints it immediately or not;
+thus my first story was not printed for some weeks after I received the
+cheque, and it was the same with all the others accepted by the same
+journal. Encouraged by these small successes, I began writing a novel!
+It took a long time to do, but was at last finished, and sent off to
+the _Family Herald_. The poor thing came back, but with a kind note,
+telling me that it was too political for their pages, but that if I
+would write one of "purely domestic interest," and up to the same
+level, it would probably be accepted. But by that time I was in the
+full struggle of theological doubt, and that novel of "purely domestic
+interest" never got itself written.
+
+I contributed further to the literature of my country a theological
+pamphlet, of which I forget the exact title, but it dealt with the duty
+of fasting incumbent on all faithful Christians, and was very patristic
+in its tone.
+
+In January, 1869, my little son was born, and as I was very ill for
+some months before, and was far too much interested in the tiny
+creature afterwards, to devote myself to pen and paper, my literary
+career was checked for a while. The baby gave a new interest and a new
+pleasure to life, and as we could not afford a nurse I had plenty to do
+in looking after his small majesty. My energy in reading became less
+feverish when it was done by the side of the baby's cradle, and the
+little one's presence almost healed the abiding pain of my mother's
+loss.
+
+I may pass very quickly over the next two years. In August, 1870, a
+little sister was born to my son, and the recovery was slow and
+tedious, for my general health had been failing for some time.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by Dighton's Art Studio, Cheltenham_.
+ANNIE BESANT 1869.]
+
+The boy was a bright, healthy little fellow, but the girl was delicate
+from birth, suffering from her mother's unhappiness, and born somewhat
+prematurely in consequence of a shock. When, in the spring of 1871, the
+two children caught the whooping cough, my Mabel's delicacy made the
+ordeal well-nigh fatal to her. She was very young for so trying a
+disease, and after a while bronchitis set in and was followed by
+congestion of the lungs. For weeks she lay in hourly peril of death We
+arranged a screen round the fire like a tent, and kept it full of steam
+to ease the panting breath; and there I sat, day and night, all through
+those weary weeks, the tortured baby on my knees. I loved my little
+ones passionately, for their clinging love soothed the aching at my
+heart, and their baby eyes could not critically scan the unhappiness
+that grew deeper month by month; and that steam-filled tent became my
+world, and there, alone, I fought with Death for my child. The doctor
+said that recovery was impossible, and that in one of the paroxysms of
+coughing she must die; the most distressing thing was that, at last,
+even a drop or two of milk would bring on the terrible convulsive
+choking, and it seemed cruel to add to the pain of the apparently dying
+child. At length, one morning the doctor said she could not last
+through the day; I had sent for him hurriedly, for the body had
+suddenly swollen up as a result of the perforation of one of the
+pleurae, and the consequent escape of air into the cavity of the chest.
+While he was there one of the fits of coughing came on, and it seemed
+as though it must be the last. He took a small bottle of chloroform out
+of his pocket, and putting a drop on a handkerchief held it near the
+child's face, till the drug soothed the convulsive struggle. "It can't
+do any harm at this stage," he said, "and it checks the suffering." He
+went away, saying that he feared he would never see the child alive
+again. One of the kindest friends I had in my married life was that
+same doctor, Mr. Lauriston Winterbotham; he was as good as he was
+clever, and, like so many of his noble profession, he had the merits of
+discretion and silence. He never breathed a word as to my unhappiness,
+until in 1878 he came up to town to give evidence as to cruelty
+which--had the deed of separation not been held as condonation--would
+have secured me a divorce _a mensa et thoro._
+
+The child, however, recovered, and her recovery was due, I think, to
+that chance thought of Mr. Winterbotham's about the chloroform, for I
+used it whenever the first sign of a fit of coughing appeared, and so
+warded off the convulsive attack and the profound exhaustion that
+followed, in which a mere flicker of breath at the top of the throat
+was the only sign of life, and sometimes even that disappeared, and I
+thought her gone. For years the child remained ailing and delicate,
+requiring the tenderest care, but those weeks of anguish left a deeper
+trace on mother than on child. Once she was out of danger I collapsed
+physically, and lay in bed for a week unmoving, and then rose to face a
+struggle which lasted for three years and two months, and nearly cost
+me my life, the struggle which transformed me from a Christian into an
+Atheist. The agony of the struggle was in the first nineteen months--a
+time to be looked back upon with shrinking, as it was a hell to live
+through at the time. For no one who has not felt it knows the fearful
+anguish inflicted by doubt on the earnestly religious soul. There is in
+life no other pain so horrible, so keen in its torture, so crushing in
+its weight. It seems to shipwreck everything, to destroy the one steady
+gleam of happiness "on the other side" that no earthly storm could
+obscure; to make all life gloomy with a horror of despair, a darkness
+that verily may be felt. Nothing but an imperious intellectual and
+moral necessity can drive into doubt a religious mind, for it is as
+though an earthquake shook the foundations of the soul, and the very
+being quivers and sways under the shock. No life in the empty sky; no
+gleam in the blackness of the night; no voice to break the deadly
+silence; no hand outstretched to save. Empty-brained triflers who have
+never tried to think, who take their creed as they take their fashions,
+speak of Atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious desires. In
+their shallow heartlessness and shallower thought they cannot even
+dimly imagine the anguish of entering the mere penumbra of the Eclipse
+of Faith, much less the horror of that great darkness in which the
+orphaned soul cries out into the infinite emptiness: "Is it a Devil
+that has made the world? Is the echo, 'Children, ye have no Father,'
+true? Is all blind chance, is all the clash of unconscious forces, or
+are we the sentient toys of an Almighty Power that sports with our
+agony, whose peals of awful mockery of laughter ring back answer to the
+wailings of our despair?"
+
+How true are the noble words of Mrs. Hamilton King:--
+
+  "For some may follow Truth from dawn to dark,
+  As a child follows by his mother's hand,
+  Knowing no fear, rejoicing all the way;
+  And unto some her face is as a Star
+  Set through an avenue of thorns and fires,
+  And waving branches black without a leaf;
+  And still It draws them, though the feet must bleed,
+  Though garments must be rent, and eyes be scorched:
+  And if the valley of the shadow of death
+  Be passed, and to the level road they come,
+  Still with their faces to the polar star,
+  It is not with the same looks, the same limbs,
+  But halt, and maimed, and of infirmity.
+  And for the rest of the way they have to go
+  It is not day but night, and oftentimes
+  A night of clouds wherein the stars are lost."[2]
+
+Aye! but never lost is the Star of Truth to which the face is set, and
+while that shines all lesser lights may go. It was the long months of
+suffering through which I had been passing, with the seemingly
+purposeless torturing of my little one as a climax, that struck the
+first stunning blow at my belief in God as a merciful Father of men. I
+had been visiting the poor a good deal, and had marked the patient
+suffering of their lives; my idolised mother had been defrauded by a
+lawyer she had trusted, and was plunged into debt by his non-payment of
+the sums that should have passed through his hands to others; my own
+bright life had been enshrouded by pain and rendered to me degraded by
+an intolerable sense of bondage; and here was my helpless, sinless babe
+tortured for weeks and left frail and suffering. The smooth brightness
+of my previous life made all the disillusionment more startling, and
+the sudden plunge into conditions so new and so unfavourable dazed and
+stunned me. My religious past became the worst enemy of the suffering
+present. All my personal belief in Christ, all my intense faith in His
+constant direction of affairs, all my habit of continual prayer and of
+realisation of His Presence--all were against me now. The very height
+of my trust was the measure of the shock when the trust gave way. To me
+He was no abstract idea, but a living reality, and all my heart rose up
+against this Person in whom I believed, and whose individual finger I
+saw in my baby's agony, my own misery, the breaking of my mother's
+proud heart under a load of debt, and all the bitter suffering of the
+poor. The presence of pain and evil in a world made by a good God; the
+pain falling on the innocent, as on my seven months' old babe; the pain
+begun here reaching on into eternity unhealed; a sorrow-laden world; a
+lurid, hopeless hell; all these, while I still believed, drove me
+desperate, and instead of like the devils believing and trembling, I
+believed and hated. All the hitherto dormant and unsuspected strength
+of my nature rose up in rebellion; I did not yet dream of denial, but I
+would no longer kneel.
+
+As the first stirrings of this hot rebellion moved in my heart I met a
+clergyman of a very noble type, who did much to help me by his ready
+and wise sympathy. Mr. Besant brought him to see me during the crisis
+of the child's illness; he said little, but on the following day I
+received from him the following note:--
+
+"_April_ 21, 1871.
+
+"My Dear Mrs. Besant,--I am painfully conscious that I gave you but
+little help in your trouble yesterday. It is needless to say that it
+was not from want of sympathy. Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to
+say that it was from excess of sympathy. I shrink intensely from
+meddling with the sorrow of any one whom I feel to be of a sensitive
+nature. 'The heart hath its own bitterness, and the stranger meddleth
+not therewith.' It is to me a positively fearful thought that I might
+awaken such a reflection as
+
+  "'And common was the commonplace,
+  And vacant chaff well meant for grain.'
+
+Conventional consolations, conventional verses out of the Bible, and
+conventional prayers are, it seems to me, an intolerable aggravation of
+suffering. And so I acted on a principle that I mentioned to your
+husband that 'there is no power so great as that of one human faith
+looking upon another human faith.' The promises of God, the love of
+Christ for little children, and all that has been given to us of hope
+and comfort, are as deeply planted in your heart as in mine, and I did
+not care to quote them. But when I talk face to face with one who is in
+sore need of them, my faith in them suddenly becomes so vast and
+heart-stirring that I think I must help most by talking naturally, and
+letting the faith find its own way from soul to soul. Indeed, I could
+not find words for it if I tried. And yet I am compelled, as a
+messenger of the glad tidings of God, to solemnly assure you that all
+is well. We have no key to the 'mystery of pain' excepting the Cross of
+Christ. But there is another and a deeper solution in the hands of our
+Father; and it will be ours when we can understand it. There is--in the
+place to which we travelsome blessed explanation of your baby's pain
+and your grief, which will fill with light the darkest heart. Now you
+must believe without having seen; that is true faith. You must
+
+  "'Reach a hand through time to catch
+  The far-off interest of tears.'
+
+That you may have strength so to do is part of your share in the
+prayers of
+
+"Yours very faithfully,
+
+"W. D----."
+
+A noble letter, but the storm was beating too fiercely to be stilled,
+and one night in that summer of 1871 stands out clearly before me. Mr.
+Besant was away, and there had been a fierce quarrel before he left. I
+was outraged, desperate, with no door of escape from a life that,
+losing its hope in God, had not yet learned to live for hope for man.
+No door of escape? The thought came like a flash: "There is one!" And
+before me there swung open, with lure of peace and of safety, the
+gateway into silence and security, the gateway of the tomb. I was
+standing by the drawing-room window, staring hopelessly at the evening
+sky; with the thought came the remembrance that the means was at
+hand--the chloroform that had soothed my baby's pain, and that I had
+locked away upstairs. I ran up to my room, took out the bottle, and
+carried it downstairs, standing again at the window in the summer
+twilight, glad that the struggle was over and peace at hand. I uncorked
+the bottle, and was raising it to my lips, when, as though the words
+were spoken softly and clearly, I heard: "O coward, coward, who used to
+dream of martyrdom, and cannot bear a few short years of pain!" A rush
+of shame swept over me, and I flung the bottle far away among the
+shrubs in the garden at my feet, and for a moment I felt strong as for
+a struggle, and then fell fainting on the floor. Only once again in all
+the strifes of my career did the thought of suicide recur, and then it
+was but for a moment, to be put aside as unworthy a strong soul.
+
+My new friend, Mr. D----, proved a very real help. The endless torture
+of hell, the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, the trustworthiness of
+revelation, doubts on all these hitherto accepted doctrines grew and
+heaped themselves on my bewildered soul. My questionings were neither
+shirked nor discouraged by Mr. D----; he was not horrified nor was he
+sanctimoniously rebukeful, but met them all with a wide comprehension
+inexpressibly soothing to one writhing in the first agonies of doubt.
+He left Cheltenham in the early autumn of 1871, but the following
+extracts from a letter written in November will show the kind of net in
+which I was struggling (I had been reading M'Leod Campbell's work "On
+the Atonement"):--
+
+"You forget one great principle--that God is impassive, cannot suffer.
+Christ, _quâ_ God, did not suffer, but as Son of _Man_ and in His
+humanity. Still, it may be correctly stated that He felt to sin and
+sinners 'as God eternally feels'--_i.e., abhorrence of sin, and love of
+the sinner_. But to infer from that that the Father in His Godhead
+feels the sufferings which Christ experienced solely in humanity, and
+because incarnate is, I think, wrong.
+
+"(2) I felt strongly inclined to blow you up for the last part of your
+letter. You assume, I think quite gratuitously, that God condemns the
+major part of His children to objectless future suffering. You say that
+if He does not, He places a book in their hands which threatens what He
+does not mean to inflict. But how utterly this seems to me opposed to
+the gospel of Christ! All Christ's references to eternal punishment may
+be resolved into references to the Valley of Hinnom, by way of imagery;
+with the exception of the Dives parable, where is distinctly inferred a
+moral amendment beyond the grave. I speak of the unselfish desire of
+Dives to save his brothers. The more I see of the controversy, the more
+baseless does the eternal punishment theory appear. It seems then, to
+me, that instead of feeling aggrieved and shaken, you ought to feel
+encouraged and thankful that God is so much better than you were taught
+to believe Him. You will have discovered by this time in Maurice's
+'What is Revelation?' (I suppose you have the 'Sequel,' too?), that
+God's truth is our truth, and His love is our love, only more perfect
+and full. There is no position more utterly defeated in modern
+philosophy and theology than Dean Mansel's attempt to show that God's
+love, justice, &c., are different in kind from ours. Mill and Maurice,
+from totally alien points of view, have shown up the preposterous
+nature of the notion.
+
+"(3) A good deal of what you have thought is, I fancy, based on a
+strange forgetfulness of your former experience. If you have known
+Christ--(whom to know is eternal life)--and that you have known Him I
+am certain--can you really say that a few intellectual difficulties,
+nay, a few moral difficulties if you will, are able at once to
+obliterate the testimony of that higher state of being?
+
+"Why, the keynote of all my theology is that Christ is lovable because,
+and _just_ because, He is the perfection of all that I know to be noble
+and generous, and loving, and tender, and true. If an angel from heaven
+brought me a gospel which contained doctrines that would not stand the
+test of such perfect lovableness--doctrines hard, or cruel, or
+unjust--I should reject him and his trumpery gospel with scorn, knowing
+that neither could be Christ's. Know Christ and judge religions by Him;
+don't judge Him by religions, and then complain because they find
+yourself looking at Him through a blood-coloured glass."
+
+"I am saturating myself with Maurice, who is the antidote given by God
+to this age against all dreary doublings and temptings of the devil to
+despair."
+
+Many a one, in this age of controversy over all things once held
+sacred, has found peace and new light on this line of thought, and has
+succeeded in thus reconciling theological doctrines with the demands of
+the conscience for love and justice in a world made by a just and
+loving God. I could not do so. The awakening to what the world was, to
+the facts of human misery, to the ruthless tramp of nature and of
+events over the human heart, making no difference between innocent and
+guilty--the shock had been too great for the equilibrium to be restored
+by arguments that appealed to the emotions and left the intellect
+unconvinced. Months of this long-drawn-out mental anguish wrought their
+natural effects on physical health, and at last I broke down
+completely, and lay for weeks helpless and prostrate, in raging and
+unceasing head-pain, unable to sleep, unable to bear the light, lying
+like a log on the bed, not unconscious, but indifferent to everything,
+consciousness centred, as it were, in the ceaseless pain. The doctor
+tried every form of relief, but, entrenched in its citadel, the pain
+defied his puny efforts. He covered my head with ice, he gave me
+opium--which only drove me mad--he did all that skill and kindness
+could do, but all in vain. Finally the pain wore itself out, and the
+moment he dared to do so, he tried mental diversion; he brought me
+books on anatomy, on science, and persuaded me to study them; and out
+of his busy life would steal an hour to explain to me knotty points on
+physiology. He saw that if I were to be brought back to reasonable
+life, it could only be by diverting thought from the channels in which
+the current had been running to a dangerous extent. I have often felt
+that I owed life and sanity to that good man, who felt for the
+helpless, bewildered child-woman, beaten down by the cyclone of doubt
+and misery.
+
+So it will easily be understood that my religious wretchedness only
+increased the unhappiness of homelife, for how absurd it was that any
+reasonable human being should be so tossed with anguish over
+intellectual and moral difficulties on religious matters, and should
+make herself ill over these unsubstantial troubles. Surely it was a
+woman's business to attend to her husband's comforts and to see after
+her children, and not to break her heart over misery here and hell
+hereafter, and distract her brain with questions that had puzzled the
+greatest thinkers and still remained unsolved! And, truly, women or men
+who get themselves concerned about the universe at large, would do well
+not to plunge hastily into marriage, for they do not run smoothly in
+the double-harness of that honourable estate. _Sturm und Drang_ should
+be faced alone, and the soul should go out alone into the wilderness to
+be tempted of the devil, and not bring his majesty and all his imps
+into the placid circle of the home. Unhappy they who go into marriage
+with the glamour of youth upon them and the destiny of conflict
+imprinted on their nature, for they make misery for their partner in
+marriage as well as for themselves. And if that partner, strong in
+traditional authority and conventional habits, seeks to "break in" the
+turbulent and storm-tossed creature--well, it comes to a mere trial of
+strength and endurance, whether that driven creature will fall panting
+and crushed, or whether it will turn in its despair, assert its Divine
+right to intellectual liberty, rend its fetters in pieces, and,
+discovering its own strength in its extremity, speak at all risks its
+"No" when bidden to live a lie.
+
+When that physical crisis was over I decided on my line of action. I
+resolved to take Christianity as it had been taught in the Churches,
+and carefully and thoroughly examine its dogmas one by one, so that I
+should never again say "I believe" where I had not proved, and that,
+however diminished my area of belief, what was left of it might at
+least be firm under my feet. I found that four chief problems were
+pressing for solution, and to these I addressed myself. How many are
+to-day the souls facing just these problems, and disputing every inch
+of their old ground of faith with the steadily advancing waves of
+historical and scientific criticism! Alas! for the many Canutes, as the
+waves wash over their feet. These problems were:--
+
+(1) The eternity of punishment after death.
+
+(2) The meaning of "goodness" and "love," as applied to a God who had
+made this world, with all its sin and misery.
+
+(3) The nature of the atonement of Christ, and the "justice" of God in
+accepting a vicarious suffering from Christ, and a vicarious
+righteousness from the sinner.
+
+(4) The meaning of "inspiration" as applied to the Bible, and the
+reconciliation of the perfections of the author with the blunders and
+immoralities of the work.
+
+It will be seen that the deeper problems of religion--the deity of
+Christ, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul--were not yet
+brought into question, and, looking back, I cannot but see how orderly
+was the progression of thought, how steady the growth, after that first
+terrible earthquake, and the first wild swirl of agony. The points that
+I set myself to study were those which would naturally be first faced
+by any one whose first rebellion against the dogmas of the Churches was
+a rebellion of the moral nature rather than of the intellectual, a
+protest of the conscience rather than of the brain. It was not a desire
+for moral licence which gave me the impulse that finally landed me in
+Atheism; it was the sense of outraged justice and insulted right. I was
+a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty
+and a proud self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me,
+and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of
+outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity.
+My education, my mother's example, my inner timidity and self-distrust,
+all fenced me in from temptations from without. It was the uprising of
+an outraged conscience that made me a rebel against the Churches and
+finally an unbeliever in God. And I place this on record, because the
+progress of Materialism will never be checked by diatribes against
+unbelievers, as though they became unbelievers from desire for vice and
+for licence to do evil. What Religion has to face in the controversies
+of to-day is not the unbelief of the sty, but the unbelief of the
+educated conscience and of the soaring intellect; and unless it can arm
+itself with a loftier ethic and a grander philosophy than its opponent,
+it will lose its hold over the purest and the strongest of the younger
+generation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE STORM OF DOUBT.
+
+
+My reading of heretical and Broad Church works on one side, and of
+orthodox ones on the other, now occupied a large part of my time, and
+our removal to Sibsey, in Lincolnshire, an agricultural village with a
+scattered population, increased my leisure. I read the works of
+Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Stanley, Greg, Matthew Arnold, Liddon,
+Mansel, and many another, and my scepticism grew deeper and deeper as
+I read. The Broad Church arguments appeared to me to be of the nature
+of special pleading, skilful evasions of difficulties rather than the
+real meeting and solving of them. For the problem was: Given a good
+God, how can He have created mankind, knowing beforehand that the vast
+majority of those whom He created were to be tortured for ever? Given
+a just God, how can He punish people for being sinful, when they have
+inherited a sinful nature without their own choice and of necessity?
+Given a righteous God, how can He allow sin to exist for ever, so that
+evil shall be as eternal as good, and Satan shall reign in hell as
+long as Christ in heaven? Worst of all puzzles, perhaps, was that of
+the existence of evil and of misery, and the racking doubt whether God
+_could_ be good, and yet look on the evil and the misery of the world
+unmoved and untouched. It seemed so impossible to believe that a
+Creator could be either cruel enough to be indifferent to the misery,
+or weak enough to be unable to stop it. The old dilemma faced me
+incessantly: "If He can prevent it and does not, He is not good; if He
+wishes to prevent it and cannot, He is not almighty." I racked my
+brains for an answer. I searched writings of believers for a clue, but
+I found no way of escape. Not yet had any doubt of the existence of
+God crossed my mind.
+
+Mr. D---- continued to write me, striving to guide me along the path
+which had led his own soul to contentment, but I can only find room
+here for two brief extracts, which will show how to himself he solved
+the problem. He thought me mistaken in my view
+
+"Of the nature of the _sin_ and _error_ which is supposed to grieve
+God. I take it that sin is an absolutely necessary factor in the
+production of the perfect man. It was foreseen and allowed as means to
+an end--as, in fact, an education. The view of all the sin and misery
+in the world cannot grieve God any more than it can grieve you to see
+Digby fail in his first attempt to build a card-castle or a
+rabbit-hutch. All is part of the training. God looks at the ideal man
+to which all tends.... "No, Mrs. Besant; I never feel at all inclined
+to give up the search, or to suppose that the other side may be right.
+I claim no merit for it, but I have an invincible faith in the
+morality of God and the moral order of the world. I have no more doubt
+about the falsehood of the popular theology than I have about the
+unreality of six robbers who attacked me three nights ago in a horrid
+dream. I exult and rejoice in the grandeur and freedom of the little
+bit of truth it has been given me to see. I am told that 'Present-day
+Papers,' by Bishop Ewing (edited), are a wonderful help, many of them,
+to puzzled people; I mean to get them. But I am sure you will find
+that the truth will (even so little as we may be able to find out)
+grow on you, make you free, light your path, and dispel, at no distant
+time, your _painful_ difficulties and doubts. I should say on no
+account give up your reading. I think with you that you could not do
+without it. It will be a wonderful source of help and peace to you.
+For there are struggles far more fearful than those of intellectual
+doubt. I am keenly alive to the gathered-up sadness of which your last
+two pages are an expression. I was sorrier than I can say to read
+them. They reminded me of a long and very dark time in my own life,
+when I thought the light never would come. Thank God it came, or I
+think I could not have held out much longer. But you have evidently
+strength to bear it now. The more dangerous time, I should fancy, has
+passed. You will have to mind that the fermentation leaves clear
+spiritual wine, and not (as too often) vinegar. I wish I could write
+something more helpful to you in this great matter. But as I sit in
+front of my large bay window and see the shadows on the grass and the
+sunlight on the leaves, and the soft glimmer of the rosebuds left by
+the storms, I can but believe that all will be very well. 'Trust in
+the Lord, wait patiently for Him'--they are trite words. But He made
+the grass, the leaves, the rosebuds, and the sunshine, and He is the
+Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And now the trite words have swelled
+into a mighty argument."
+
+I found more help in Theistic writers like Grey, and Agnostic like
+Arnold, than I did in the Broad Church teachers, but these, of course,
+served to make return to the old faith more and more impossible. The
+Church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was
+only a doubter, I kept my doubts to myself. It was possible, I felt,
+that all my difficulties might be cleared up, and I had no right to
+shake the faith of others while in uncertainty myself. Others had
+doubted and had afterwards recovered their faith; for the doubter
+silence was a duty; the blinded had better keep their misery to
+themselves.
+
+During these weary months of anxiety and torment I found some relief
+from the mental strain in practical parish work, nursing the sick,
+trying to brighten the lot of the poor. I learned then some of the
+lessons as to the agricultural labourer and the land that I was able
+in after-years to teach from the platform. The movement among the
+agricultural labourers, due to the energy and devotion of Joseph Arch,
+was beginning to be discussed in the fens, and my sympathies went
+strongly with the claims of the labourers, for I knew their
+life-conditions. In one cottage I had found four generations sleeping
+in one room--the great-grandfather and his wife, the unmarried
+grandmother, the unmarried mother, the little child; three men lodgers
+completed the tale of eight human beings crowded into that narrow,
+ill-ventilated garret. Other cottages were hovels, through the broken
+roofs of which poured the rain, and wherein rheumatism and ague lived
+with the human dwellers. How could I do aught but sympathise with any
+combination that aimed at the raising of these poor? But the
+Agricultural Labourers' Union was bitterly opposed by the farmers, and
+they would give no work to a "Union man." One example may serve for
+all. There was a young married man with two small children, who was
+sinful enough to go to a Union meeting and sinful enough to talk of it
+on his return home. No farmer would employ him in all the district
+round. He tramped about vainly looking for work, grew reckless, and
+took to drink. Visiting his cottage, consisting of one room and a
+"lean-to," I found his wife ill with fever, a fever-stricken babe in
+her arms, the second child lying dead on the bed. In answer to my
+soft-spoken questions: Yes, she was pining (starving), there was no
+work. Why did she leave the dead child on the bed? Because she had no
+other place for it till the coffin came. And at night the unhappy,
+driven man, the fever-stricken wife, the fever-stricken child, the
+dead child, all lay in the one bed. The farmers hated the Union
+because its success meant higher wages for the men, and it never
+struck them that they might well pay less rent to the absent landlord
+and higher wage to the men who tilled their fields. They had only
+civil words for the burden that crushed them, hard words for the
+mowers of their harvests and the builders-up of their ricks; they made
+common cause with their enemies instead of with their friends, and
+instead of leaguing themselves together with the labourers as forming
+together the true agricultural interest, they leagued themselves with
+the landlords against the labourers, and so made ruinous fratricidal
+strife instead of easy victory over the common foe. And, seeing all
+this, I learned some useful lessons, and the political education
+progressed while the theological strife went on within.
+
+In the early autumn a ray of light broke the darkness. I was in London
+with my mother, and wandered one Sunday morning into St. George's
+Hall, where the Rev. Charles Voysey was preaching. There to my delight
+I found, on listening to the sermon and buying some literature on sale
+in the ante-room, that there were people who had passed through my own
+difficulties, and had given up the dogmas that I found so revolting. I
+went again on the following Sunday, and when the service was over I
+noticed that the outgoing stream of people were passing by Mr. and
+Mrs. Voysey, and that many who were evidently strangers spoke a word
+of thanks to him as they went on. Moved by a strong desire, after the
+long months of lonely striving, to speak to one who had struggled out
+of Christian difficulties, I said to Mr. Voysey, as I passed in my
+turn, "I must thank you for very great help in what you said this
+morning," for in truth, never having yet doubted the existence of God,
+the teaching of Mr. Voysey that He was "loving unto _every_ man, and
+His tender mercy over _all_ His works," came like a gleam of light
+across the stormy sea of doubt and distress on which I had so long
+been tossing. The next Sunday saw me again at the Hall, and Mrs.
+Voysey gave me a cordial invitation to visit them in their Dulwich
+home. I found their Theism was free from the defects that had revolted
+me in Christianity, and they opened up to me new views of religion. I
+read Theodore Parker's "Discourse on Religion," Francis Newman's
+works, those of Miss Frances Power Cobbe, and of others; the anguish
+of the tension relaxed; the nightmare of an Almighty Evil passed away;
+my belief in God, not yet touched, was cleared from all the dark spots
+that had sullied it, and I no longer doubted whether the dogmas that
+had shocked my conscience were true or false. I shook them off, once
+for all, with all their pain and horror and darkness, and felt, with
+joy and relief inexpressible, that they were delusions of the
+ignorance of man, not the revelations of a God.
+
+But there was one belief that had not been definitely challenged, but
+of which the _rationale_ was gone with the orthodox dogmas now
+definitely renounced--the doctrine of the Deity of Christ. The whole
+teaching of the Broad Church school tends, of course, to emphasise the
+humanity of Christ at the expense of His Deity, and when eternal
+punishment and the substitutionary atonement had gone there seemed no
+reason remaining sufficient to account for so tremendous a miracle as
+the incarnation of the Deity. In the course of my reading I had become
+familiar with the idea of Avatâras in Eastern creeds, and I saw that
+the incarnate God was put forward as a fact by all ancient religions,
+and thus the way was paved for challenging the especially Christian
+teaching, when the doctrines morally repulsive were cleared away. But
+I shrank from the thought of placing in the crucible a doctrine so
+dear from all the associations of the past; there was so much that was
+soothing and ennobling in the idea of a union between Man and God,
+between a perfect man and a Divine life, between a human heart and an
+almighty strength. Jesus as God was interwoven with all art and all
+beauty in religion; to break with the Deity of Jesus was to break with
+music, with painting, with literature; the Divine Babe in His Mother's
+arms; the Divine Man in His Passion and His Triumph; the Friend of Man
+encircled with the majesty of the Godhead. Did inexorable Truth demand
+that this ideal Figure, with all its pathos, its beauty, its human
+love, should pass away into the Pantheon of the dead Gods of the Past?
+
+Nor was this all. If I gave up belief in Christ as God, I must give up
+Christianity as creed. Once challenge the unique position of the
+Christ, and the name Christian seemed to me to be a hypocrisy, and its
+renouncement a duty binding on the upright mind. I was a clergyman's
+wife; what would be the effect of such a step? Hitherto mental pain
+alone had been the price demanded inexorably from the searcher after
+truth; but with the renouncing of Christ outer warfare would be added
+to the inner, and who might guess the result upon my life? The
+struggle was keen but short; I decided to carefully review the
+evidence for and against the Deity of Christ, with the result that
+that belief followed the others, and I stood, no longer Christian,
+face to face with a dim future in which I sensed the coming conflict.
+
+One effort I made to escape it; I appealed to Dr. Pusey, thinking that
+if he could not answer my questionings, no answer to them could be
+reasonably hoped for. I had a brief correspondence with him, but was
+referred only to lines of argument familiar to me--as those of Liddon
+in his "Bampton Lectures"--and finally, on his invitation, went down
+to Oxford to see him. I found a short, stout gentleman, dressed in a
+cassock, looking like a comfortable monk; but keen eyes, steadfastly
+gazing straight into mine, told of the force and subtlety enshrined in
+the fine, impressive head. But the learned doctor took the wrong line
+of treatment; he probably saw I was anxious, shy, and nervous, and he
+treated me as a penitent going to confession and seeking the advice of
+a director, instead of as an inquirer struggling after truth, and
+resolute to obtain some firm standing-ground in the sea of doubt. He
+would not deal with the question of the Deity of Jesus as a question
+for argument. "You are speaking of your Judge," he retorted sternly,
+when I pressed a difficulty. The mere suggestion of an imperfection in
+the character of Jesus made him shudder, and he checked me with raised
+hand. "You are blaspheming. The very thought is a terrible sin." Would
+he recommend me any books that might throw light on the subject? "No,
+no; you have read too much already. You must pray; you must pray."
+When I urged that I could not believe without proof, I was told,
+"Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed"; and my
+further questioning was checked by the murmur, "O my child, how
+undisciplined! how impatient!" Truly, he must have found in me--hot,
+eager, passionate in my determination to _know_, resolute not to
+profess belief while belief was absent--nothing of the meek,
+chastened, submissive spirit with which he was wont to deal in
+penitents seeking his counsel as their spiritual guide. In vain did he
+bid me pray as though I believed; in vain did he urge the duty of
+blind submission to the authority of the Church, of blind, unreasoning
+faith that questioned not. I had not trodden the thorny path of doubt
+to come to the point from which I had started; I needed, and would
+have, solid grounds ere I believed. He had no conception of the
+struggles of a sceptical spirit; he had evidently never felt the pangs
+of doubt; his own faith was solid as a rock, firm, satisfied,
+unshakable; he would as soon have committed suicide as have doubted of
+the infallibility of the "Universal Church."
+
+"It is not your duty to ascertain the truth," he told me, sternly. "It
+is your duty to accept and believe the truth as laid down by the
+Church. At your peril you reject it. The responsibility is not yours
+so long as you dutifully accept that which the Church has laid down
+for your acceptance. Did not the Lord promise that the presence of the
+Spirit should be ever with His Church, to guide her into all truth?"
+
+"But the fact of the promise and its value are just the very points on
+which I am doubtful," I answered.
+
+He shuddered. "Pray, pray," he said. "Father, forgive her, for she
+knows not what she says."
+
+It was in vain that I urged on him the sincerity of my seeking,
+pointing out that I had everything to gain by following his
+directions, everything to lose by going my own way, but that it seemed
+to me untruthful to pretend to accept what was not really believed.
+
+"Everything to lose? Yes, indeed. You will be lost for time and lost
+for eternity."
+
+"Lost or not," I rejoined, "I must and will try to find out what is
+true, and I will not believe till I am sure."
+
+"You have no right to make terms with God," he retorted, "as to what
+you will believe or what you will not believe. You are full of
+intellectual pride."
+
+I sighed hopelessly. Little feeling of pride was there in me just
+then, but only a despairful feeling that in this rigid, unyielding
+dogmatism there was no comprehension of my difficulties, no help for
+me in my strugglings. I rose, and, thanking him for his courtesy, said
+that I would not waste his time further, that I must go home and face
+the difficulties, openly leaving the Church and taking the
+consequences. Then for the first time his serenity was ruffled.
+
+"I forbid you to speak of your disbelief," he cried. "I forbid you to
+lead into your own lost state the souls for whom Christ died."
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS SCOTT.]
+
+Slowly and sadly I took my way back to the station, knowing that my
+last chance of escape had failed me. I recognised in this famous
+divine the spirit of priest-craft, that could be tender and pitiful to
+the sinner, repentant, humble, submissive; but that was iron to the
+doubter, the heretic, and would crush out all questionings of
+"revealed truth," silencing by force, not by argument, all challenge
+of the traditions of the Church. Out of such men were made the
+Inquisitors of the Middle Ages, perfectly conscientious, perfectly
+rigid, perfectly merciless to the heretic. To them heretics are
+centres of infectious disease, and charity to the heretic is "the
+worst cruelty to the souls of men." Certain that they hold, "by no
+merit of our own, but by the mercy of our God, the one truth which He
+has revealed," they can permit no questionings, they can accept nought
+but the most complete submission. But while man aspires after truth,
+while his mind yearns after knowledge, while his intellect soars
+upward into the empyrean of speculation and "beats the air with
+tireless wing," so long shall those who demand faith from him be met
+by challenge for proof, and those who would blind him shall be
+defeated by his resolve to gaze unblenching on the face of Truth, even
+though her eyes should turn him into stone. It was during this same
+autumn of 1872 that I first met Mr. and Mrs. Scott, introduced to them
+by Mr. Voysey. At that time Thomas Scott was an old man, with
+beautiful white hair, and eyes like those of a hawk gleaming from
+under shaggy eyebrows. He had been a man of magnificent physique, and,
+though his frame was then enfeebled, the splendid lion-like head kept
+its impressive strength and beauty, and told of a unique personality.
+Well born and wealthy, he had spent his earlier life in adventure in
+all parts of the world, and after his marriage he had settled down at
+Ramsgate, and had made his home a centre of heretical thought. His
+wife, "his right hand," as he justly called her, was young enough to
+be his daughter--a sweet, strong, gentle, noble woman, worthy of her
+husband, and than that no higher praise could be spoken. Mr. Scott for
+many years issued monthly a series of pamphlets, all heretical, though
+very varying in their shades of thought; all were well written,
+cultured, and polished in tone, and to this rule Mr. Scott made no
+exception; his writers might say what they liked, but they must have
+something to say, and must say it in good English. His correspondence
+was enormous, from Prime Ministers downwards. At his house met people
+of the most varied opinions; it was a veritable heretical _salon_.
+Colenso of Natal, Edward Maitland, E. Vansittart Neale, Charles Bray,
+Sarah Hennell, and hundreds more, clerics and laymen, scholars and
+thinkers, all coming to this one house, to which the _entrée_ was
+gained only by love of Truth and desire to spread Freedom among men.
+For Thomas Scott my first Freethought essay was written a few months
+after, "On the Deity of Jesus of Nazareth," by the wife of a benefited
+clergyman. My name was not mine to use, so it was agreed that any
+essays from my pen should be anonymous.
+
+And now came the return to Sibsey, and with it the need for definite
+steps as to the Church. For now I no longer doubted, I had rejected,
+and the time for silence was past. I was willing to attend the Church
+services, taking no part in any not directed to God Himself, but I
+could no longer attend the Holy Communion, for in that service, full
+of recognition of Jesus as Deity and of His atoning sacrifice, I could
+no longer take part without hypocrisy. This was agreed to, and well do
+I remember the pain and trembling wherewith on the first "Sacrament
+Sunday" after my return I rose and left the church. That the vicar's
+wife should "communicate" was as much a matter of course as that the
+vicar should "administer"; I had never done anything in public that
+would draw attention to me, and a feeling of deadly sickness nearly
+overcame me as I made my exit, conscious that every eye was on me, and
+that my non-participation would be the cause of unending comment. As a
+matter of fact, every one naturally thought I was taken suddenly ill,
+and I was overwhelmed with calls and inquiries. To any direct question
+I answered quietly that I was unable to take part in the profession of
+faith required by an honest communicant, but the statement was rarely
+necessary, as the idea of heresy in a vicar's wife is slow to suggest
+itself to the ordinary bucolic mind, and I proffered no information
+where no question was asked.
+
+It happened that, shortly after that (to me) memorable Christmas of
+1872, a sharp epidemic of typhoid fever broke out in the village of
+Sibsey. The drainage there was of the most primitive type, and the
+contagion spread rapidly. Naturally fond of nursing, I found in this
+epidemic work just fitted to my hand, and I was fortunate enough to be
+able to lend personal help that made me welcome in the homes of the
+stricken poor. The mothers who slept exhausted while I watched beside
+their darlings' bedsides will never, I like to fancy, think
+over-harshly of the heretic whose hand was as tender and often more
+skilful than their own. I think Mother Nature meant me for a nurse,
+for I take a sheer delight in nursing any one, provided only that
+there is peril in the sickness, so that there is the strange and
+solemn feeling of the struggle between the human skill one wields and
+the supreme enemy, Death. There is a strange fascination in fighting
+Death, step by step, and this is of course felt to the full where one
+fights for life as life, and not for a life one loves. When the
+patient is beloved the struggle is touched with agony, but where one
+fights with Death over the body of a stranger there is a weird
+enchantment in the contest without personal pain, and as one forces
+back the hated foe there is a curious triumph in the feeling which
+marks the death-grip yielding up its prey, as one snatches back to
+earth the life which had well-nigh perished.
+
+The spring of 1873 brought me knowledge of a power that was to mould
+much of my future life. I delivered my first lecture, but delivered it
+to rows of empty pews in Sibsey Church. A queer whim took me that I
+would like to know how "it felt" to preach, and vague fancies stirred
+in me that I could speak if I had the chance. I saw no platform in the
+distance, nor had any idea of possible speaking in the future dawned
+upon me. But the longing to find outlet in words came upon me, and I
+felt as though I had something to say and was able to say it. So
+locked alone in the great, silent church, whither I had gone to
+practise some organ exercises, I ascended the pulpit steps and
+delivered my first lecture on the Inspiration of the Bible. I shall
+never forget the feeling of power and delight--but especially of
+power--that came upon me as I sent my voice ringing down the aisles,
+and the passion in me broke into balanced sentences and never paused
+for musical cadence or for rhythmical expression. All I wanted then
+was to see the church full of upturned faces, alive with throbbing
+sympathy, instead of the dreary emptiness of silent pews. And as
+though in a dream the solitude was peopled, and I saw the listening
+faces and the eager eyes, and as the sentences flowed unbidden from my
+lips and my own tones echoed back to me from the pillars of the
+ancient church, I knew of a verity that the gift of speech was mine,
+and that if ever--and then it seemed so impossible!--if ever the
+chance came to me of public work, this power of melodious utterance
+should at least win hearing for any message I had to bring.
+
+But the knowledge remained a secret all to my own self for many a long
+month, for I quickly felt ashamed of that foolish speechifying in an
+empty church; but, foolish as it was, I note it here, as it was the
+first effort of that expression in spoken words which later became to
+me one of the deepest delights of life. And, indeed, none can know,
+save they who have felt it, what joy there is in the full rush of
+language that moves and sways; to feel a crowd respond to the lightest
+touch; to see the faces brighten or darken at your bidding; to know
+that the sources of human emotion and human passion gush forth at the
+word of the speaker as the stream from the riven rock; to feel that
+the thought which thrills through a thousand hearers has its impulse
+from you, and throbs back to you the fuller from a thousand
+heart-beats. Is there any emotional joy in life more brilliant than
+this, fuller of passionate triumph, and of the very essence of
+intellectual delight?
+
+In 1873 my marriage tie was broken. I took no new step, but my absence
+from the Communion led to some gossip, and a relative of Mr. Besant
+pressed on him highly-coloured views of the social and professional
+dangers which would accrue if my heresy became known. My health, never
+really restored since the autumn of 1871, grew worse and worse,
+serious heart trouble having arisen from the constant strain under
+which I lived. At last, in July or August, 1873, the crisis came. I
+was told that I must conform to the outward observances of the Church,
+and attend the Communion; I refused. Then came the distinct
+alternative; conformity or exclusion from home--in other words,
+hypocrisy or expulsion. I chose the latter.
+
+A bitterly sad time followed. My dear mother was heart-broken. To her,
+with her wide and vague form of Christianity, loosely held, the
+intensity of my feeling that where I did not believe I would not
+pretend belief, was incomprehensible. She recognised far more fully
+than I did all that a separation from my home meant for me, and the
+difficulties that would surround a young woman, not yet twenty-six,
+living alone. She knew how brutally the world judges, and how the mere
+fact that a woman was young and alone justified any coarseness of
+slander. Then I did not guess how cruel men and women could be, how
+venomous their tongues; now, knowing it, having faced slander and
+lived it down, I deliberately say that were the choice again before me
+I would choose as I chose then; I would rather go through it all again
+than live "in Society" under the burden of an acted lie.
+
+The hardest struggle was against my mother's tears and pleading; to
+cause her pain was tenfold pain to me. Against harshness I had been
+rigid as steel, but it was hard to remain steadfast when my darling
+mother, whom I loved as I loved nothing else on earth, threw herself
+on her knees before me, imploring me to yield. It seemed like a crime
+to bring such anguish on her; and I felt as a murderer as the snowy
+head was pressed against my knees. And yet--to live a lie? Not even
+for her was that shame possible; in that worst crisis of blinding
+agony my will clung fast to Truth. And it is true now as it ever was
+that he who loves father or mother better than Truth is not worthy of
+her, and the flint-strewn path of honesty is the way to Light and
+Peace.
+
+Then there were the children, the two little ones who worshipped me,
+who was to them mother, nurse, and playfellow. Were they, too,
+demanded at my hands? Not wholly--for a time. Facts which I need not
+touch on here enabled my brother to obtain for me a legal separation,
+and when everything was arranged, I found myself guardian of my little
+daughter, and possessor of a small monthly income sufficient for
+respectable starvation. With a great price I had obtained my freedom,
+but--I was free. Home, friends, social position, were the price
+demanded and paid, and, being free, I wondered what to do with my
+freedom. I could have had a home with my brother if I would give up my
+heretical friends and keep quiet, but I had no mind to put my limbs
+into fetters again, and in my youthful inexperience I determined to
+find something to do. The difficulty was the "something," and I spent
+various shillings in agencies, with a quite wonderful unanimity of
+failures. I tried fancy needle-work, offered to "ladies in reduced
+circumstances," and earned 4s. 6d. by some weeks of stitching. I
+experimented with a Birmingham firm, who generously offered every one
+the opportunity of adding to their incomes, and on sending the small
+fee demanded, received a pencil-case, with an explanation that I was
+to sell little articles of that description, going as far as
+cruet-stands, to my friends. I did not feel equal to springing
+pencil-cases and cruet-stands on my acquaintances, so did not enter on
+that line of business, and similar failures in numerous efforts made
+me feel, as so many others have found, that the world-oyster is hard
+to open. However, I was resolute to build a nest for my wee daughter,
+my mother, and myself, and the first thing to do was to save my
+monthly pittance to buy furniture. I found a tiny house in Colby Road,
+Upper Norwood, near the Scotts, who were more than good to me, and
+arranged to take it in the spring, and then accepted a loving
+invitation to Folkestone, where my grandmother and two aunts were
+living, to look for work there. And found it. The vicar wanted a
+governess, and one of my aunts suggested me as a stop-gap, and thither
+I went with my little Mabel, our board and lodging being payment for
+my work. I became head cook, governess, and nurse, glad enough to have
+found "something to do" that enabled me to save my little income. But
+I do not think I will ever take to cooking for a permanence; broiling
+and frying are all right, and making pie-crust is rather pleasant; but
+saucepans and kettles blister your hands. There is a charm in making a
+stew, to the unaccustomed cook, from the excitement of wondering what
+the result will be, and whether any flavour save that of onions will
+survive the competition in the mixture. On the whole, my cooking
+(strictly by cookery book) was a success, but my sweeping was bad, for
+I lacked muscle. This curious episode came to an abrupt end, for one
+of my little pupils fell ill with diphtheria, and I was transformed
+from cook to nurse. Mabel I despatched to her grandmother, who adored
+her with a love condescendingly returned by the little fairy of three,
+and never was there a prettier picture than the red-gold curls nestled
+against the white, the baby-grace in exquisite contrast with the worn
+stateliness of her tender nurse. Scarcely was my little patient out of
+danger when the youngest boy fell ill of scarlet fever; we decided to
+isolate him on the top floor, and I cleared away carpets and curtains,
+hung sheets over the doorways and kept them wet with chloride of lime,
+shut myself up there with the boy, having my meals left on the
+landing; and when all risk was over, proudly handed back my charge,
+the disease touching no one else in the house.
+
+And now the spring of 1874 had come, and in a few weeks my mother and
+I were to set up house together. How we had planned all, and had
+knitted on the new life together we anticipated to the old one we
+remembered! How we had discussed Mabel's education, and the share
+which should fall to each! Day-dreams; day-dreams! never to be
+realised.
+
+My mother went up to town, and in a week or two I received a telegram,
+saying she was dangerously ill, and as fast as express train would
+take me I was beside her. Dying, the doctor said; three days she might
+live--no more. I told her the death-sentence, but she said resolutely,
+"I do not feel that I am going to die just yet," and she was right.
+There was an attack of fearful prostration--the valves of the heart
+had failed--a very wrestling with Death, and then the grim shadow drew
+backwards. I nursed her day and night with a very desperation of
+tenderness, for now Fate had touched the thing dearest to me in life.
+A second horrible crisis came, and for the second time her tenacity
+and my love beat back the death-stroke. She did not wish to die, the
+love of life was strong in her; I would not let her die; between us we
+kept the foe at bay. Then dropsy supervened, and the end loomed slowly
+sure.
+
+It was then, after eighteen months' abstention, that I took the
+Sacrament for the last time. My mother had an intense longing to
+communicate before she died, but absolutely refused to do so unless I
+took it with her. "If it be necessary to salvation," she persisted,
+doggedly, "I will not take it if darling Annie is to be shut out. I
+would rather be lost with her than saved without her." I went to a
+clergyman I knew well, and laid the case before him; as I expected, he
+refused to allow me to communicate. I tried a second, with the same
+result. At last a thought struck me. There was Dean Stanley, my
+mother's favourite, a man known to be of the broadest school within
+the Church of England; suppose I asked him? I did not know him, and I
+felt the request would be an impertinence; but there was just the
+chance that he might consent, and what would I not do to make my
+darling's death-bed easier? I said nothing to any one, but set out to
+the Deanery, Westminster, timidly asked for the Dean, and followed the
+servant upstairs with a sinking heart. I was left for a moment alone
+in the library, and then the Dean came in. I don't think I ever in my
+life felt more intensely uncomfortable than I did in that minute's
+interval as he stood waiting for me to speak, his clear, grave,
+piercing eyes gazing questioningly into mine. Very falteringly--it
+must have been very clumsily--I preferred my request, stating boldly,
+with abrupt honesty, that I was not a Christian, that my mother was
+dying, that she was fretting to take the Sacrament, that she would not
+take it unless I took it with her, that two clergymen had refused to
+allow me to take part in the service, that I had come to him in
+despair, feeling how great was the intrusion, but--she was dying.
+
+His face changed to a great softness. "You were quite right to come to
+me," he answered, in that low, musical voice of his, his keen gaze
+having altered into one no less direct, but marvellously gentle. "Of
+course I will go and see your mother, and I have little doubt that, if
+you will not mind talking over your position with me, we may see our
+way clear to doing as your mother wishes."
+
+I could barely speak my thanks, so much did the kindly sympathy move
+me; the revulsion from the anxiety and fear of rebuff was strong
+enough to be almost pain. But Dean Stanley did more than I asked. He
+suggested that he should call that afternoon, and have a quiet chat
+with my mother, and then come again on the following day to administer
+the Sacrament.
+
+"A stranger's presence is always trying to a sick person," he said,
+with rare delicacy of thought, "and, joined to the excitement of the
+service, it might be too much for your dear mother. If I spend half an
+hour with her to-day, and administer the Sacrament to-morrow, it will,
+I think, be better for her."
+
+So Dean Stanley came that afternoon, all the way to Brompton, and
+remained talking with my mother for about half an hour, and then set
+himself to understand my own position. He finally told me that conduct
+was far more important than theory, and that he regarded all as
+"Christians" who recognised and tried to follow the moral law of
+Christ. On the question of the absolute Deity of Jesus he laid but
+little stress; Jesus was "in a special sense the Son of God," but it
+was folly to quarrel over words with only human meanings when dealing
+with the mystery of the Divine existence, and, above all, it was folly
+to make such words into dividing walls between earnest souls. The one
+important matter was the recognition of "duty to God and man," and all
+who were one in that recognition might rightfully join in an act of
+worship, the essence of which was not acceptance of dogma, but love of
+God and self-sacrifice for man. "The Holy Communion," he concluded, in
+his soft tones, "was never meant to divide from each other hearts that
+are searching after the one true God. It was meant by its founder as a
+symbol of unity, not of strife."
+
+On the following day Dean Stanley celebrated the Holy Communion by the
+bedside of my dear mother, and well was I repaid for the struggle it
+had cost me to ask so great a kindness from a stranger, when I saw the
+comfort that gentle, noble heart had given to her. He soothed away all
+her anxiety about my heresy with tactful wisdom, bidding her have no
+fear of differences of opinion where the heart was set on truth.
+"Remember," she told me he said to her--"remember that our God is the
+God of truth, and that therefore the honest search for truth can never
+be displeasing in His eyes." Once again after that he came, and after
+his visit to my mother we had another long talk. I ventured to ask
+him, the conversation having turned that way, how, with views so broad
+as his, he found it possible to remain in communion with the Church of
+England. "I think," he answered, gently, "that I am of more service to
+true religion by remaining in the Church and striving to widen its
+boundaries from within, than if I left it and worked from without."
+And he went on to explain how, as Dean of Westminster, he was in a
+rarely independent position, and could make the Abbey of a wider
+national service than would otherwise be possible. In all he said on
+this his love for and his pride in the glorious Abbey were manifest,
+and it was easy to see that old historical associations, love of
+music, of painting, of stately architecture, were the bonds that held
+him bound to the "old historic Church of England." His emotions, not
+his intellect, kept him Churchman, and he shrank, with the
+over-sensitiveness of the cultured scholar, from the idea of allowing
+the old traditions to be handled roughly by inartistic hands.
+Naturally of a refined and delicate nature, he had been rendered yet
+more exquisitely sensitive by the training of the college and the
+court; the polished courtesy of his manners was but the natural
+expression of a noble and lofty mind--a mind whose very gentleness
+sometimes veiled its strength. I have often heard Dean Stanley harshly
+spoken of, I have heard his honesty roughly challenged; but never has
+he been attacked in my presence that I have not uttered my protest
+against the injustice done him, and thus striven to repay some small
+fraction of that great debt of gratitude which I shall ever owe his
+memory.
+
+And now the end came swiftly. I had hurriedly furnished a couple of
+rooms in the little house, now ours, that I might take my mother into
+the purer air of Norwood, and permission was given to drive her down
+in an invalid carriage. The following evening she was suddenly taken
+worse; we lifted her into bed, and telegraphed for the doctor. But he
+could do nothing, and she herself felt that the hand of Death had
+gripped her. Selfless to the last, she thought but for my loneliness.
+"I am leaving you alone," she sighed from time to time; and truly I
+felt, with an anguish I did not dare to realise, that when she died I
+should indeed be alone on earth.
+
+For two days longer she was with me, my beloved, and I never left her
+side for five minutes. On May 10th the weakness passed into gentle
+delirium, but even then the faithful eyes followed me about the room,
+until at length they closed for ever, and as the sun sank low in the
+heavens, the breath came slower and slower, till the silence of Death
+came down upon us and she was gone.
+
+Stunned and dazed with the loss, I went mechanically through the next
+few days. I would have none touch my dead save myself and her
+favourite sister, who was with us at the last. Cold and dry-eyed I
+remained, even when they hid her from me with the coffin-lid, even all
+the dreary way to Kensal Green where her husband and her baby-son were
+sleeping, and when we left her alone in the chill earth, damp with the
+rains of spring. I could not believe that our day-dream was dead and
+buried, and the home in ruins ere yet it was fairly built. Truly, my
+"house was left unto me desolate," and the rooms, filled with sunshine
+but unlighted by her presence, seemed to echo from their bare walls,
+"You are all alone."
+
+But my little daughter was there, and her sweet face and dancing feet
+broke the solitude, while her imperious claims for love and tendance
+forced me into attention to the daily needs of life. And life was hard
+in those days of spring and summer, resources small, and work
+difficult to find. In truth, the two months after my mother's death
+were the dreariest my life has known, and they were months of
+tolerably hard struggle. The little house in Colby Road taxed my
+slender resources heavily, and the search for work was not yet
+successful. I do not know how I should have managed but for the help
+ever at hand, of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Scott. During this time I wrote
+for Mr. Scott pamphlets on Inspiration, Atonement, Mediation and
+Salvation, Eternal Torture, Religious Education of Children, Natural
+_v_. Revealed Religion, and the few guineas thus earned were very
+valuable. Their house, too, was always open to me, and this was no
+small help, for often in those days the little money I had was enough
+to buy food for two but not enough to buy it for three, and I would go
+out and study all day at the British Museum, so as to "have my dinner
+in town," the said dinner being conspicuous by its absence. If I was
+away for two evenings running from the hospitable house in the
+terrace, Mrs. Scott would come down to see what had happened, and many
+a time the supper there was of real physical value to me. Well might I
+write, in 1879, when Thomas Scott lay dead: "It was Thomas Scott whose
+house was open to me when my need was sorest, and he never knew, this
+generous, noble heart, how sometimes, when I went in, weary and
+overdone, from a long day's study in the British Museum, with scarce
+food to struggle through the day--he never knew how his genial, 'Well,
+little lady,' in welcoming tone, cheered the then utter loneliness of
+my life. To no living man--save one--do I owe the debt of gratitude
+that I owe to Thomas Scott."
+
+The small amount of jewellery I possessed, and all my superfluous
+clothes, were turned into more necessary articles, and the child, at
+least, never suffered a solitary touch of want. My servant Mary was a
+wonderful contriver, and kept house on the very slenderest funds that
+could be put into a servant's hands, and she also made the little
+place so bright and fresh-looking that it was always a pleasure to go
+into it. Recalling those days of "hard living," I can now look on them
+without regret. More, I am glad to have passed through them, for they
+have taught me how to sympathise with those who are struggling as I
+struggled then, and I never can hear the words fall from pale lips, "I
+am hungry," without remembering how painful a thing hunger is, and
+without curing that pain, at least for the moment.
+
+The presence of the child was good for me, keeping alive my aching,
+lonely heart: she would play contentedly for hours while I was
+working, a word now and again being enough for happiness; when I had
+to go out without her, she would run to the door with me, and the
+"good-bye" would come from down-curved lips; she was ever watching at
+the window for my return, and the sunny face was always the first to
+welcome me home. Many and many a time have I been coming home, weary,
+hungry, and heart-sick, and the glimpse of the little face watching
+has reminded me that I must not carry in a grave face to sadden my
+darling, and the effort to throw off the depression for her sake threw
+it off altogether, and brought back the sunshine. She was the
+sweetness and joy of my life, my curly-headed darling, with her
+red-gold hair and glorious eyes, and passionate, wilful, loving
+nature. The torn, bruised tendrils of my heart gradually twined round
+this little life; she gave something to love and to tend, and thus
+gratified one of the strongest impulses of my nature.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH.
+
+
+During all these months the intellectual life had not stood still; I
+was slowly, cautiously feeling my way onward. And in the intellectual
+and social side of my life I found a delight unknown in the old days
+of bondage. First, there was the joy of freedom, the joy of speaking
+out frankly and honestly each thought. Truly, I had a right to say:
+"With a great price obtained I this freedom," and having paid the
+price, I revelled in the liberty I had bought. Mr. Scott's valuable
+library was at my service; his keen brain challenged my opinions,
+probed my assertions, and suggested phases of thought hitherto
+untouched. I studied harder than ever, and the study now was unchecked
+by any fear of possible consequences. I had nothing left of the old
+faith save belief in "a God," and that began slowly to melt away. The
+Theistic axiom: "If there be a God at all He must be at least as good
+as His highest creature," began with an "if," and to that "if" I
+turned my attention. "Of all impossible things," writes Miss Frances
+Power Cobbe, "the most impossible must surely be that a man should
+dream something of the good and the noble, and that it should prove at
+last that his Creator was less good and less noble than he had
+dreamed." But, I questioned, are we sure that there is a Creator?
+Granted that, if there is, He must be above His highest creature,
+but--is there such a being? "The ground," says the Rev. Charles
+Voysey, "on which our belief in God rests is man. Man, parent of
+Bibles and Churches, inspirer of all good thoughts and good deeds.
+Man, the masterpiece of God's thought on earth. Man, the text-book of
+all spiritual knowledge. Neither miraculous nor infallible, man is
+nevertheless the only trustworthy record of the Divine mind in things
+pertaining to God. Man's reason, conscience, and affections are the
+only true revelation of his Maker." But what if God were only man's
+own image reflected in the mirror of man's mind? What if man were the
+creator, not the revelation of his God?
+
+It was inevitable that such thoughts should arise after the more
+palpably indefensible doctrines of Christianity had been discarded.
+Once encourage the human mind to think, and bounds to the thinking can
+never again be set by authority. Once challenge traditional beliefs,
+and the challenge will ring on every shield which is hanging in the
+intellectual arena. Around me was the atmosphere of conflict, and,
+freed from its long repression, my mind leapt up to share in the
+strife with a joy in the intellectual tumult, the intellectual strain.
+
+I often attended South Place Chapel, where Moncure D. Conway was then
+preaching, and discussion with him did something towards widening my
+views on the deeper religious problems; I re-read Dean Mansel's
+"Bampton Lectures," and they did much towards turning me in the
+direction of Atheism; I re-read Mill's "Examination of Sir William
+Hamilton's Philosophy," and studied carefully Comte's "Philosophie
+Positive." Gradually I recognised the limitations of human intelligence
+and its incapacity for understanding the nature of God, presented as
+infinite and absolute; I had given up the use of prayer as a
+blasphemous absurdity, since an all-wise God could not need my
+suggestions, nor an all-good God require my promptings. But God fades
+out of the daily life of those who never pray; a personal God who is
+not a Providence is a superfluity; when from the heaven does not smile
+a listening Father, it soon becomes an empty space, whence resounds no
+echo of man's cry. I could then reach no loftier conception of the
+Divine than that offered by the orthodox, and that broke hopelessly
+away as I analysed it.
+
+At last I said to Mr. Scott, "Mr. Scott, may I write a tract on the
+nature and existence of God?"
+
+He glanced at me keenly. "Ah, little lady, you are facing, then, that
+problem at last? I thought it must come. Write away."
+
+While this pamphlet was in MS. an event occurred which coloured all my
+succeeding life. I met Charles Bradlaugh. One day in the late spring,
+talking with Mrs. Conway--one of the sweetest and steadiest natures
+whom it has been my lot to meet, and to whom, as to her husband, I owe
+much for kindness generously shown when I was poor and had but few
+friends--she asked me if I had been to the Hall of Science, Old
+Street. I answered, with the stupid, ignorant reflection of other
+people's prejudices so sadly common, "No, I have never been there. Mr.
+Bradlaugh is rather a rough sort of speaker, is he not?"
+
+"He is the finest speaker of Saxon-English that I have ever heard,"
+she answered, "except, perhaps, John Bright, and his power over a
+crowd is something marvellous. Whether you agree with him or not, you
+should hear him."
+
+In the following July I went into the shop of Mr. Edward Truelove,
+256, High Holborn, in search of some Comtist publications, having come
+across his name as a publisher in the course of my study at the
+British Museum. On the counter was a copy of the _National Reformer_,
+and, attracted by the title, I bought it. I read it placidly in the
+omnibus on my way to Victoria Station, and found it excellent, and was
+sent into convulsions of inward merriment when, glancing up, I saw an
+old gentleman gazing at me, with horror speaking from every line of
+his countenance. To see a young woman, respectably dressed in crape,
+reading an Atheistic journal, had evidently upset his peace of mind,
+and he looked so hard at the paper that I was tempted to offer it to
+him, but repressed the mischievous inclination.
+
+This first copy of the paper with which I was to be so closely
+connected bore date July 19, 1874, and contained two long letters from
+a Mr. Arnold of Northampton, attacking Mr. Bradlaugh, and a brief and
+singularly self-restrained answer from the latter. There was also an
+article on the National Secular Society, which made me aware that
+there was an organisation devoted to the propagandism of Free Thought.
+I felt that if such a society existed, I ought to belong to it, and I
+consequently wrote a short note to the editor of the _National
+Reformer_, asking whether it was necessary for a person to profess
+Atheism before being admitted to the Society. The answer appeared in
+the _National Reformer_:--
+
+"S.E.--To be a member of the National Secular Society it is only
+necessary to be able honestly to accept the four principles, as given
+in the _National Reformer_ of June 14th. This any person may do
+without being required to avow himself an Atheist. Candidly, we can
+see no logical resting-place between the entire acceptance of
+authority, as in the Roman Catholic Church, and the most extreme
+Rationalism. If, on again looking to the Principles of the Society,
+you can accept them, we repeat to you our invitation."
+
+I sent my name in as an active member, and find it is recorded in the
+_National Reformer_ of August 9th. Having received an intimation that
+Londoners could receive their certificates at the Hall of Science from
+Mr. Bradlaugh on any Sunday evening, I betook myself thither, and it
+was on August 2, 1874, that I first set foot in a Freethought hall.
+The Hall was crowded to suffocation, and, at the very moment announced
+for the lecture, a roar of cheering burst forth, a tall figure passed
+swiftly up the Hall to the platform, and, with a slight bow in answer
+to the voluminous greeting, Charles Bradlaugh took his seat. I looked
+at him with interest, impressed and surprised. The grave, quiet,
+stern, strong face, the massive head, the keen eyes, the magnificent
+breadth and height of forehead--was this the man I had heard described
+as a blatant agitator, an ignorant demagogue?
+
+He began quietly and simply, tracing out the resemblances between the
+Krishna and the Christ myths, and as he went from point to point his
+voice grew in force and resonance, till it rang round the hall like a
+trumpet. Familiar with the subject, I could test the value of his
+treatment of it, and saw that his knowledge was as sound as his
+language was splendid. Eloquence, fire, sarcasm, pathos, passion, all
+in turn were bent against Christian superstition, till the great
+audience, carried away by the torrent of the orator's force, hung
+silent, breathing soft, as he went on, till the silence that followed
+a magnificent peroration broke the spell, and a hurricane of cheers
+relieved the tension.
+
+He came down the Hall with some certificates in his hand, glanced
+round, and handed me mine with a questioning "Mrs. Besant?" Then he
+said, referring to my question as to a profession of Atheism, that he
+would willingly talk over the subject of Atheism with me if I would
+make an appointment, and offered me a book he had been using in his
+lecture. Long afterwards I asked him how he knew me, whom he had never
+seen, that he came straight to me in such fashion. He laughed and said
+he did not know, but, glancing over the faces, he felt sure that I was
+Annie Besant.
+
+From that first meeting in the Hall of Science dated a friendship that
+lasted unbroken till Death severed the earthly bond, and that to me
+stretches through Death's gateway and links us together still. As
+friends, not as strangers, we met--swift recognition, as it were,
+leaping from eye to eye; and I know now that the instinctive
+friendliness was in very truth an outgrowth of strong friendship in
+other lives, and that on that August day we took up again an ancient
+tie, we did not begin a new one. And so in lives to come we shall meet
+again, and help each other as we helped each other in this. And let me
+here place on record, as I have done before, some word of what I owe
+him for his true friendship; though, indeed, how great is my debt to
+him I can never tell. Some of his wise phrases have ever remained in
+my memory. "You should never say you have an opinion on a subject
+until you have tried to study the strongest things said against the
+view to which you are inclined." "You must not think you know a
+subject until you are acquainted with all that the best minds have
+said about it." "No steady work can be done in public unless the
+worker study at home far more than he talks outside." "Be your own
+harshest judge, listen to your own speech and criticise it; read abuse
+of yourself and see what grains of truth are in it." "Do not waste
+time by reading opinions that are mere echoes of your own; read
+opinions you disagree with, and you will catch aspects of truth you do
+not readily see." Through our long comradeship he was my sternest as
+well as gentlest critic, pointing out to me that in a party like ours,
+where our own education and knowledge were above those whom we led, it
+was very easy to gain indiscriminate praise and unstinted admiration;
+on the other hand, we received from Christians equally indiscriminate
+abuse and hatred. It was, therefore, needful that we should be our own
+harshest judges, and that we should be sure that we knew thoroughly
+every subject that we taught. He saved me from the superficiality that
+my "fatal facility" of speech might so easily have induced; and when I
+began to taste the intoxication of easily won applause, his criticism
+of weak points, his challenge of weak arguments, his trained judgment,
+were of priceless service to me, and what of value there is in my work
+is very largely due to his influence, which at once stimulated and
+restrained.
+
+One very charming characteristic of his was his extreme courtesy in
+private life, especially to women. This outward polish, which sat so
+gracefully on his massive frame and stately presence, was foreign
+rather than English--for the English, as a rule, save such as go to
+Court, are a singularly unpolished people--and it gave his manner a
+peculiar charm. I asked him once where he had learned his gracious
+fashions that were so un-English--he would stand with uplifted hat as
+he asked a question of a maidservant, or handed a woman into a
+carriage--and he answered, with a half-smile, half-scoff, that it was
+only in England he was an outcast from society. In France, in Spain,
+in Italy, he was always welcomed among men and women of the highest
+social rank, and he supposed that he had unconsciously caught the
+foreign tricks of manner. Moreover, he was absolutely indifferent to
+all questions of social position; peer or artisan, it was to him
+exactly the same; he never seemed conscious of the distinctions of
+which men make so much.
+
+Our first conversation, after the meeting at the Hall of Science, took
+place a day or two later in his little study in 29, Turner Street,
+Commercial Road, a wee room overflowing with books, in which he looked
+singularly out of place. Later I learned that he had failed in
+business in consequence of Christian persecution, and, resolute to
+avoid bankruptcy, he had sold everything he possessed, save his books,
+had sent his wife and daughters to live in the country with his
+father-in-law, had taken two tiny rooms in Turner Street, where he
+could live for a mere trifle, and had bent himself to the task of
+paying off the liabilities he had incurred--incurred in consequence of
+his battling for political and religious liberty. I took with me my
+MS. essay "On the Nature and Existence of God," and it served as the
+basis for our conversation; we found there was little difference in
+our views. "You have thought yourself into Atheism without knowing
+it," he said, and all that I changed in the essay was the correction
+of the vulgar error that the Atheist says "there is no God," by the
+insertion of a passage disclaiming this position from an essay pointed
+out to me by Mr. Bradlaugh. And at this stage of my life-story, it is
+necessary to put very clearly the position I took up and held so many
+years as Atheist, because otherwise the further evolution into
+Theosophist will be wholly incomprehensible. It will lead me into
+metaphysics, and to some readers these are dry, but if any one would
+understand the evolution of a Soul he must be willing to face the
+questions which the Soul faces in its growth. And the position of the
+philosophic Atheist is so misunderstood that it is the more necessary
+to put it plainly, and Theosophists, at least, in reading it, will see
+how Theosophy stepped in finally as a further evolution towards
+knowledge, rendering rational, and therefore acceptable, the loftiest
+spirituality that the human mind can as yet conceive.
+
+In order that I may not colour my past thinkings by my present
+thought, I take my statements from pamphlets written when I adopted
+the Atheistic philosophy and while I continued an adherent thereof. No
+charge can then be made that I have softened my old opinions for the
+sake of reconciling them with those now held.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT.
+
+
+The first step which leaves behind the idea of a limited and personal
+God, an extra-cosmic Creator, and leads the student to the point
+whence Atheism and Pantheism diverge, is the recognition that a
+profound unity of substance underlies the infinite diversities of
+natural phenomena, the discernment of the One beneath the Many. This
+was the step I had taken ere my first meeting with Charles Bradlaugh,
+and I had written:--
+
+"It is manifest to all who will take the trouble to think steadily,
+that there can be only one eternal and underived substance, and that
+matter and spirit must, therefore, only be varying manifestations of
+this one substance. The distinction made between matter and spirit is,
+then, simply made for the sake of convenience and clearness, just as
+we may distinguish perception from judgment, both of which, however,
+are alike processes of thought. Matter is, in its constituent elements,
+the same as spirit; existence is _one_, however manifold in its
+phenomena; life is one, however multiform in its evolution. As the
+heat of the coal differs from the coal itself, so do memory,
+perception, judgment, emotion, and will differ from the brain which is
+the instrument of thought. But nevertheless they are all equally
+products of the one sole substance, varying only in their
+conditions.... I find myself, then, compelled to believe that one only
+substance exists in all around me; that the universe is eternal, or at
+least eternal so far as our faculties are concerned, since we cannot,
+as some one has quaintly put it, 'get to the outside of everywhere';
+that a Deity cannot be conceived of as apart from the universe; that
+the Worker and the Work are inextricably interwoven, and in some sense
+eternally and indissolubly combined. Having got so far, we will
+proceed to examine into the possibility of proving the existence of
+that one essence popularly called by the name of _God_, under the
+conditions strictly defined by the orthodox. Having demonstrated, as I
+hope to do, that the orthodox idea of God is unreasonable and absurd,
+we will endeavour to ascertain whether _any_ idea of God, worthy to be
+called an idea, is attainable in the present state of our faculties."
+"The Deity must of necessity be that one and only substance out of
+which all things are evolved, under the uncreated conditions and
+eternal laws of the universe; He must be, as Theodore Parker somewhat
+oddly puts it, 'the materiality of matter as well as the spirituality
+of spirit'--_i.e._, these must both be products of this one substance;
+a truth which is readily accepted as soon as spirit and matter are
+seen to be but different modes of one essence. Thus we identify
+substance with the all-comprehending and vivifying force of nature,
+and in so doing we simply reduce to a physical impossibility the
+existence of the Being described by the orthodox as a God possessing
+the attributes of personality. The Deity becomes identified with
+nature, co-extensive with the universe, but the _God_ of the orthodox
+no longer exists; we may change the signification of God, and use the
+word to express a different idea, but we can no longer mean by it a
+Personal Being in the orthodox sense, possessing an individuality
+which divides Him from the rest of the universe."[3]
+
+Proceeding to search whether _any_ idea of God was attainable, I came
+to the conclusion that evidence of the existence of a conscious Power
+was lacking, and that the ordinary proofs offered were inconclusive;
+that we could grasp phenomena and no more. "There appears, also, to
+be a possibility of a mind in nature, though we have seen that
+intelligence is, strictly speaking, impossible. There cannot be
+perception, memory, comparison, or judgment, but may there not be a
+perfect mind, unchanging, calm, and still? Our faculties fail us when
+we try to estimate the Deity, and we are betrayed into contradictions
+and absurdities; but does it therefore follow that He _is_ not? It
+seems to me that to deny His existence is to overstep the boundaries
+of our thought-power almost as much as to try and define it. We
+pretend to know the Unknown if we declare Him to be the Unknowable.
+Unknowable to us at present, yes! Unknowable for ever, in other
+possible stages of existence? We have reached a region into which we
+cannot penetrate; here all human faculties fail us; we bow our heads
+on 'the threshold of the unknown.'
+
+  "'And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see,
+  But if we could see and hear, this vision--were it not He?'
+
+Thus sings Alfred Tennyson, the poet of metaphysics: '_if_ we could
+see and hear.' Alas! it is always an 'if!'[4]
+
+This refusal to believe without evidence, and the declaration that
+anything "behind phenomena" is unknowable to man as at present
+constituted--these are the two chief planks of the Atheistic platform,
+as Atheism was held by Charles Bradlaugh and myself. In 1876 this
+position was clearly reaffirmed. "It is necessary to put briefly the
+Atheistic position, for no position is more continuously and more
+persistently misrepresented. Atheism is _without_ God. It does not
+assert _no_ God. 'The Atheist does not say "There is no God," but he
+says, "I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the
+word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation.
+I do not deny God, because I cannot deny that of which I have no
+conception, and the conception of which, by its affirmer, is so
+imperfect that he is unable to define it to me."' (Charles Bradlaugh,
+"Freethinker's Text-book," p. 118.) The Atheist neither affirms nor
+denies the possibility of phenomena differing from those recognised by
+human experience.... As his knowledge of the universe is extremely
+limited and very imperfect, the Atheist declines either to deny or to
+affirm anything with regard to modes of existence of which he knows
+nothing. Further, he refuses to believe anything concerning that of
+which he knows nothing, and affirms that that which can never be the
+subject of knowledge ought never to be the object of belief. While the
+Atheist, then, neither affirms nor denies the unknown, he _does_ deny
+all which conflicts with the knowledge to which he has already
+attained. For example, he _knows_ that one is one, and that three
+times one are three; he _denies_ that three times one are, or can be,
+one. The position of the Atheist is a clear and a reasonable one: I
+know nothing about 'God,' and therefore I do not believe in Him or in
+it; what you tell me about your God is self-contradictory, and is
+therefore incredible. I do not deny 'God,' which is an unknown tongue
+to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without
+God."[5] Up to 1887 I find myself writing on the same lines: "No man
+can rationally affirm 'There is no God,' until the word 'God' has for
+him a definite meaning, and until everything that exists is known to
+him, and known with what Leibnitz calls 'perfect knowledge.' The
+Atheist's denial of the Gods begins only when these Gods are defined
+or described. Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not
+palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been
+described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human
+thought--Nor is anything gained by the assertors of Deity when they
+allege that He is incomprehensible. If 'God' exists and is
+incomprehensible, His incomprehensibility is an admirable reason for
+being silent about Him, but can never justify the affirmation of
+self-contradictory propositions, and the threatening of people with
+damnation if they do not accept them."[6] "The belief of the Atheist
+stops where his evidence stops. He believes in the existence of the
+universe, judging the accessible proof thereof to be adequate, and he
+finds in this universe sufficient cause for the happening of all
+phenomena. He finds no intellectual satisfaction in placing a gigantic
+conundrum behind the universe, which only adds its own
+unintelligibility to the already sufficiently difficult problem of
+existence. Our lungs are not fitted to breathe beyond the atmosphere
+which surrounds our globe, and our faculties cannot breathe outside
+the atmosphere of the phenomenal."[7] And I summed up this essay with
+the words: "I do not believe in God. My mind finds no grounds on which
+to build up a reasonable faith. My heart revolts against the spectre
+of an Almighty Indifference to the pain of sentient beings. My
+conscience rebels against the injustice, the cruelty, the inequality,
+which surround me on every side. But I believe in Man. In man's
+redeeming power; in man's remoulding energy; in man's approaching
+triumph, through knowledge, love, and work."[8]
+
+These views of existence naturally colour all views of life and of the
+existence of the Soul. And here steps in the profound difference
+between Atheism and Pantheism; both posit an Existence at present
+inscrutable by human faculties, of which all phenomena are modes; but
+to the Atheist that Existence manifests as Force-Matter, unconscious,
+unintelligent, while to the Pantheist it manifests as Life-Matter,
+conscious, intelligent. To the one, life and consciousness are
+attributes, properties, dependent upon arrangements of matter; to the
+other they are fundamental, essential, and only limited in their
+manifestation by arrangements of matter. Despite the attraction held
+for me in Spinoza's luminous arguments, the over-mastering sway which
+Science was beginning to exercise over me drove me to seek for the
+explanation of all problems of life and mind at the hands of the
+biologist and the chemist. They had done so much, explained so much,
+could they not explain all? Surely, I thought, the one safe ground is
+that of experiment, and the remembered agony of doubt made me very
+slow to believe where I could not prove. So I was fain to regard life
+as an attribute, and this again strengthened the Atheistic position.
+"Scientifically regarded, life is not an entity but a property; it is
+not a mode of existence, but a characteristic of certain modes. Life
+is the result of an arrangement of matter, and when rearrangement
+occurs the former result can no longer be present; we call the result
+of the changed arrangement death. Life and death are two convenient
+words for expressing the general outcome of two arrangements of
+matter, one of which is always found to precede the other."[9] And
+then, having resorted to chemistry for one illustration, I took
+another from one of those striking and easily grasped analogies,
+facility for seeing and presenting which has ever been one of the
+secrets of my success as a propagandist. Like pictures, they impress
+the mind of the hearer with a vivid sense of reality. "Every one knows
+the exquisite iridiscence of mother-of-pearl, the tender, delicate
+hues which melt into each other, glowing with soft radiance. How
+different is the dull, dead surface of a piece of wax. Yet take that
+dull, black wax and mould it so closely to the surface of the
+mother-of-pearl that it shall take every delicate marking of the
+shell, and when you raise it the seven-hued glory shall smile at you
+from the erstwhile colourless surface. For, though it be to the naked
+eye imperceptible, all the surface of the mother-of-pearl is in
+delicate ridges and furrows, like the surface of a newly-ploughed
+field; and when the waves of light come dashing up against the ridged
+surface, they are broken like the waves on a shingly shore, and are
+flung backwards, so that they cross each other and the oncoming waves;
+and, as every ray of white light is made up of waves of seven colours,
+and these waves differ in length each from the others, the fairy
+ridges fling them backward separately, and each ray reaches the eye by
+itself; so that the colour of the mother-of-pearl is really the spray
+of the light waves, and comes from arrangement of matter once again.
+Give the dull, black wax the same ridges and furrows, and its glory
+shall differ in nothing from that of the shell. To apply our
+illustration: as the colour belongs to one arrangement of matter and
+the dead surface to another, so life belongs to some arrangements of
+matter and is their resultant, while the resultant of other
+arrangements is death."[10]
+
+The same line of reasoning naturally was applied to the existence of
+"spirit" in man, and it was argued that mental activity, the domain of
+the "spirit," was dependent on bodily organisation. "When the babe is
+born it shows no sign of mind. For a brief space hunger and repletion,
+cold and warmth are its only sensations. Slowly the specialised senses
+begin to function; still more slowly muscular movements, at first
+aimless and reflex, become co-ordinated and consciously directed.
+There is no sign here of an intelligent spirit controlling a
+mechanism; there is every sign of a learning and developing
+intelligence, developing _pari passu_ with the organism of which it is
+a function. As the body grows, the mind grows with it, and the
+childish mind of the child develops into the hasty, quickly-judging,
+half-informed, unbalanced youthful mind of the youth; with maturity of
+years comes maturity of mind, and body and mind are vigorous and in
+their prime. As old age comes on and the bodily functions decay, the
+mind decays also, until age passes into senility, and body and mind
+sink into second childhood. Has the immortal spirit decayed with the
+organisation, or is it dwelling in sorrow, bound in its 'house of
+clay'? If this be so, the 'spirit' must be unconscious, or else
+separate from the very individual whose essence it is supposed to be,
+for the old man does not suffer when his mind is senile, but is
+contented as a little child. And not only is this constant,
+simultaneous growth and decay of body and mind to be observed, but we
+know that mental functions are disordered and suspended by various
+physical conditions. Alcohol, many drugs, fever, disorder the mind; a
+blow on the cranium suspends its functions, and the 'spirit' returns
+with the surgeon's trepanning. Does the 'spirit' take part in dreams?
+Is it absent from the idiot, from the lunatic? Is it guilty of
+manslaughter when the madman murders, or does it helplessly watch its
+own instrument performing actions at which it shudders? If it can only
+work here through an organism, is its nature changed in its
+independent life, severed from all with which it was identified? Can
+it, in its 'disembodied state,' have anything in common with its
+past?"[11]
+
+It will be seen that my unbelief in the existence of the Soul or
+Spirit was a matter of cold, calm reasoning. As I wrote in 1885: "For
+many of us evidence must precede belief. I would gladly believe in a
+happy immortality for all, as I would gladly believe that all misery
+and crime and poverty will disappear in 1885--_if I could_. But I am
+unable to believe an improbable proposition unless convincing evidence
+is brought in support of it. Immortality is most improbable; no
+evidence is brought forward in its favour. I cannot believe only
+because I wish."[12] Such was the philosophy by which I lived from
+1874 to 1886, when first some researches that will be dealt with in
+their proper place, and which led me ultimately to the evidence I had
+before vainly demanded, began to shake my confidence in its adequacy.
+Amid outer storm and turmoil and conflict, I found it satisfy my
+intellect, while lofty ideals of morality fed my emotions. I called
+myself Atheist, and rightly so, for I was without God, and my horizon
+was bounded by life on earth; I gloried in the name then, as it is
+dear to my heart now, for all the associations with which it is
+connected. "Atheist is one of the grandest titles a man can wear; it
+is the Order of Merit of the world's heroes. Most great discoverers,
+most deep-thinking philosophers, most earnest reformers, most toiling
+pioneers of progress, have in their turn had flung at them the name of
+Atheist. It was howled over the grave of Copernicus; it was clamoured
+round the death-pile of Bruno; it was yelled at Vanini, at Spinoza, at
+Priestley, at Voltaire, at Paine; it has become the laurel-bay of the
+hero, the halo of the martyr; in the world's history it has meant the
+pioneer of progress, and where the cry of 'Atheist' is raised there
+may we be sure that another step is being taken towards the redemption
+of humanity. The saviours of the world are too often howled at as
+Atheists, and then worshipped as Deities. The Atheists are the
+vanguard of the army of Freethought, on whom falls the brunt of the
+battle, and are shivered the hardest of the blows; their feet trample
+down the thorns that others may tread unwounded; their bodies fill up
+the ditch that, by the bridge thus made, others may pass to victory.
+Honour to the pioneers of progress, honour to the vanguard of
+Liberty's army, honour to those who to improve earth have forgotten
+heaven, and who in their zeal for man have forgotten God."[13]
+
+This poor sketch of the conception of the universe, to which I had
+conquered my way at the cost of so much pain, and which was the inner
+centre round which my life revolved for twelve years, may perhaps show
+that the Atheistic Philosophy is misjudged sorely when it is scouted
+as vile or condemned as intellectually degraded. It has outgrown
+anthropomorphic deities, and it leaves us face to face with Nature,
+open to all her purifying, strengthening inspirations. "There is only
+one kind of prayer," it says, "which is reasonable, and that is the
+deep, silent adoration of the greatness and beauty and order around
+us, as revealed in the realms of non-rational life and in Humanity; as
+we bow our heads before the laws of the universe, and mould our lives
+into obedience to their voice, we find a strong, calm peace steal over
+our hearts, a perfect trust in the ultimate triumph of the right, a
+quiet determination to 'make our lives sublime.' Before our own high
+ideals, before those lives which show us 'how high the tides of Divine
+life have risen in the human world,' we stand with hushed voice and
+veiled face; from them we draw strength to emulate, and even dare
+struggle to excel. The contemplation of the ideal is true prayer; it
+inspires, it strengthens, it ennobles. The other part of prayer is
+work; from contemplation to labour, from the forest to the street.
+Study nature's laws, conform to them, work in harmony with them, and
+work becomes a prayer and a thanksgiving, an adoration of the
+universal wisdom, and a true obedience to the universal law."[14]
+
+To a woman of my temperament, filled with passionate desire for the
+bettering of the world, the elevation of humanity, a lofty system of
+ethics was of even more importance than a logical, intellectual
+conception of the universe; and the total loss of all faith in a
+righteous God only made me more strenuously assertive of the binding
+nature of duty and the overwhelming importance of conduct. In 1874
+this conviction found voice in a pamphlet on the "True Basis of
+Morality," and in all the years of my propaganda on the platform of
+the National Secular Society no subject was more frequently dealt with
+in my lectures than that of human ethical growth and the duty of man
+to man. No thought was more constantly in my mind than that of the
+importance of morals, and it was voiced at the very outset of my
+public career. Speaking of the danger lest "in these stirring times of
+inquiry," old sanctions of right conduct should be cast aside ere new
+ones were firmly established, I wrote: "It therefore becomes the duty
+of every one who fights in the ranks of Freethought, and who ventures
+to attack the dogmas of the Churches, and to strike down the
+superstitions which enslave men's intellect, to beware how he uproots
+sanctions of morality which he is too weak to replace, or how, before
+he is prepared with better ones, he removes the barriers which do yet,
+however poorly, to some extent check vice and repress crime.... That
+which touches morality touches the heart of society; a high and pure
+morality is the life-blood of humanity; mistakes in belief are
+inevitable, and are of little moment; mistakes in life destroy
+happiness, and their destructive consequences spread far and wide. It
+is, then, a very important question whether we, who are endeavouring
+to take away from the world the authority on which has hitherto been
+based all its morality, can offer a new and firm ground whereupon may
+safely be built up the fair edifice of a noble life."
+
+I then proceeded to analyse revelation and intuition as a basis for
+morals, and, discarding both, I asserted: "The true basis of morality
+is utility; that is, the adaptation of our actions to the promotion of
+the general welfare and happiness; the endeavour so to rule our lives
+that we may serve and bless mankind." And I argued for this basis,
+showing that the effort after virtue was implied in the search for
+happiness: "Virtue is an indispensable part of all true and solid
+happiness.... But it is, after all, only reasonable that happiness
+should be the ultimate test of right and wrong, if we live, as we do,
+in a realm of law. Obedience to law must necessarily result in
+harmony, and disobedience in discord. But if obedience to law result
+in harmony it must also result in happiness--all through nature
+obedience to law results in happiness, and through obedience each
+living thing fulfils the perfection of its being, and in that
+perfection finds its true happiness." It seemed to me most important
+to remove morality from the controversies about religion, and to give
+it a basis of its own: "As, then, the grave subject of the existence
+of Deity is a matter of dispute, it is evidently of deep importance to
+society that morality should not be dragged into this battlefield, to
+stand or totter with the various theories of the Divine nature which
+human thought creates and destroys. If we can found morality on a
+basis apart from theology, we shall do humanity a service which can
+scarcely be overestimated." A study of the facts of nature, of the
+consequences of man in society, seemed sufficient for such a basis.
+"Our faculties do not suffice to tell us about God; they do suffice to
+study phenomena, and to deduce laws from correlated facts. Surely,
+then, we should do wisely to concentrate our strength and our energies
+on the discovery of the attainable, instead of on the search after the
+unknowable. If we are told that morality consists in obedience to the
+supposed will of a supposed perfectly moral being, because in so doing
+we please God, then we are at once placed in a region where our
+faculties are useless to us, and where our judgment is at fault. But
+if we are told that we are to lead noble lives, because nobility of
+life is desirable for itself alone, because in so doing we are acting
+in harmony with the laws of Nature, because in so doing we spread
+happiness around our pathway and gladden our fellow-men--then, indeed,
+motives are appealed to which spring forward to meet the call, and
+chords are struck in our hearts which respond in music to the touch."
+It was to the establishment of this secure basis that I bent my
+energies, this that was to me of supreme moment. "Amid the fervid
+movement of society, with its wild theories and crude social reforms,
+with its righteous fury against oppression and its unconsidered
+notions of wider freedom and gladder life, it is of vital importance
+that morality should stand on a foundation unshakable; that so through
+all political and religious revolutions human life may grow purer and
+nobler, may rise upwards into settled freedom, and not sink downwards
+into anarchy. Only utility can afford us a sure basis, the
+reasonableness of which will be accepted alike by thoughtful student
+and hard-headed artisan. Utility appeals to all alike, and sets in
+action motives which are found equally in every human heart. Well
+shall it be for humanity that creeds and dogmas pass away, that
+superstition vanishes, and the clear light of freedom and science
+dawns on a regenerated earth--but well only if men draw tighter and
+closer the links of trustworthiness, of honour, and of truth. Equality
+before the law is necessary and just; liberty is the birthright of
+every man and woman; free individual development will elevate and
+glorify the race. But little worth these priceless jewels, little
+worth liberty and equality with all their promise for mankind, little
+worth even wider happiness, if that happiness be selfish, if true
+fraternity, true brotherhood, do not knit man to man, and heart to
+heart, in loyal service to the common need, and generous
+self-sacrifice to the common good."[15]
+
+To the forwarding of this moral growth of man, two things seemed to me
+necessary--an Ideal which should stir the emotions and impel to
+action, and a clear understanding of the sources of evil and of the
+methods by which they might be drained. Into the drawing of the first
+I threw all the passion of my nature, striving to paint the Ideal in
+colours which should enthral and fascinate, so that love and desire to
+realise might stir man to effort. If "morality touched by emotion" be
+religion, then truly was I the most religious of Atheists, finding in
+this dwelling on and glorifying of the Ideal full satisfaction for the
+loftiest emotions. To meet the fascination exercised over men's hearts
+by the Man of Sorrows, I raised the image of man triumphant, man
+perfected. "Rightly is the ideal Christian type of humanity a Man of
+Sorrows. Jesus, with worn and wasted body; with sad, thin lips, curved
+into a mournful droop of penitence for human sin; with weary eyes
+gazing up to heaven because despairing of earth; bowed down and aged
+with grief and pain, broken-hearted with long anguish, broken-spirited
+with unresisted ill-usage--such is the ideal man of the Christian
+creed. Beautiful with a certain pathetic beauty, telling of the long
+travail of earth, eloquent of the sufferings of humanity, but not the
+model type to which men should conform their lives, if they would make
+humanity glorious. And, therefore, in radiant contrast with this,
+stands out in the sunshine and under the blue summer sky, far from
+graveyards and torture of death agony, the fair ideal Humanity of the
+Atheist. In form strong and fair, perfect in physical development as
+the Hercules of Grecian art, radiant with love, glorious in
+self-reliant power; with lips bent firm to resist oppression, and
+melting into soft curves of passion and of pity; with deep, far-seeing
+eyes, gazing piercingly into the secrets of the unknown, and resting
+lovingly on the beauties around him; with hands strong to work in the
+present; with heart full of hope which the future shall realise;
+making earth glad with his labour and beautiful with his skill--this,
+this is the Ideal Man, enshrined in the Atheist's heart. The ideal
+humanity of the Christian is the humanity of the slave, poor, meek,
+broken-spirited, humble, submissive to authority, however oppressive
+and unjust; the ideal humanity of the Atheist is the humanity of the
+free man who knows no lord, who brooks no tyranny, who relies on his
+own strength, who makes his brother's quarrel his, proud,
+true-hearted, loyal, brave."[16]
+
+A one-sided view? Yes. But a very natural outcome of a sunny nature,
+for years held down by unhappiness and the harshness of an outgrown
+creed. It was the rebound of such a nature suddenly set free,
+rejoicing in its liberty and self-conscious strength, and it carried
+with it a great power of rousing the sympathetic enthusiasm of men and
+women, deeply conscious of their own restrictions and their own
+longings. It was the cry of the freed soul that had found articulate
+expression, and the many inarticulate and prisoned souls answered to
+it tumultously, with fluttering of caged wings. With hot insistence I
+battled for the inspiration to be drawn from the beauty and grandeur
+of which human life was capable. "Will any one exclaim, 'You are
+taking all beauty out of human life, all hope, all warmth, all
+inspiration; you give us cold duty for filial obedience, and
+inexorable law in the place of God'? All beauty from life? Is there,
+then, no beauty in the idea of forming part of the great life of the
+universe, no beauty in conscious harmony with Nature, no beauty in
+faithful service, no beauty in ideals of every virtue? 'All hope'?
+Why, I give you more than hope, I give you certainty; if I bid you
+labour for this world, it is with the knowledge that this world will
+repay you a, thousand-fold, because society will grow purer, freedom
+more settled, law more honoured, life more full and glad. What is your
+heaven? A heaven in the clouds! I point to a heaven attainable on
+earth. 'All warmth'? What! you serve warmly a God unknown and
+invisible, in a sense the projected shadow of your own imaginings, and
+can only serve coldly your brother whom you see at your side? There is
+no warmth in brightening the lot of the sad, in reforming abuses, in
+establishing equal justice for rich and poor? You find warmth in the
+church, but none in the home? Warmth in imagining the cloud glories of
+heaven, but none in creating substantial glories on earth?' All
+inspiration'? If you want inspiration to feeling, to sentiment,
+perhaps you had better keep to your Bible and your creeds; if you want
+inspiration to work, go and walk through the East of London, or the
+back streets of Manchester. You are inspired to tenderness as you gaze
+at the wounds of Jesus, dead in Judaea long ago, and find no
+inspiration in the wounds of men and women, dying in the England of
+to-day? You 'have tears to shed for Him,' but none for the sufferer at
+your doors? His passion arouses your sympathies, but you see no pathos
+in the passion of the poor? Duty is colder than 'filial obedience'?
+What do you mean by filial obedience? Obedience to your ideal of
+goodness and love--is it not so? Then how is duty cold? I offer you
+ideals for your homage: here is Truth for your Mistress, to whose
+exaltation you shall devote your intellect; here is Freedom for your
+General, for whose triumph you shall fight; here is Love for your
+Inspirer, who shall influence your every thought; here is Man for your
+Master--not in heaven, but on earth--to whose service you shall
+consecrate every faculty of your being. 'Inexorable law in the place
+of God'? Yes; a stern certainty that you shall not waste your life,
+yet gather a rich reward at the close; that you shall not sow misery,
+yet reap gladness; that you shall not be selfish, yet be crowned with
+love; nor shall you sin, yet find safety in repentance. True, our
+creed _is_ a stern one, stern with the beautiful sternness of Nature.
+But if we be in the right, look to yourselves; laws do not check their
+action for your ignorance; fire will not cease to scorch, because you
+'did not know.'"[17]
+
+With equal vigour did I maintain that "virtue was its own reward," and
+that payment on the other side of the grave was unnecessary as an
+incentive to right living. "What shall we say to Miss Cobbe's
+contention that duty will 'grow grey and cold' without God and
+immortality? Yes, for those with whom duty is a matter of selfish
+calculation, and who are virtuous only because they look for a 'golden
+crown' in payment on the other side the grave. Those of us who find
+joy in right-doing, who work because work is useful to our fellows,
+who live well because in such living we pay our contribution to the
+world's wealth, leaving earth richer than we found it--we need no
+paltry payment after death for our life's labour, for in that labour
+is its own 'exceeding great reward.'"[18] But did any one yearn for
+immortality, that "not all of me shall die"? "Is it true that Atheism
+has no immortality? What is true immortality? Is Beethoven's true
+immortality in his continued personal consciousness, or in his
+glorious music deathless while the world endures? Is Shelley's true
+life in his existence in some far-off heaven, or in the pulsing
+liberty his lyrics send through men's hearts, when they respond to the
+strains of his lyre? Music does not die, though one instrument be
+broken; thought does not die, though one brain be shivered; love does
+not die, though one heart's strings be rent; and no great thinker dies
+so long as his thought re-echoes through the ages, its melody the
+fuller-toned the more human brains send its music on. Not only to the
+hero and the sage is this immortality given; it belongs to each
+according to the measure of his deeds; world-wide life for world-wide
+service; straitened life for straitened work; each reaps as he sows,
+and the harvest is gathered by each in his rightful order."[19]
+
+This longing to leave behind a name that will live among men by right
+of service done them, this yearning for human love and approval that
+springs naturally from the practical and intense realisation of human
+brotherhood--these will be found as strong motives in the breasts of
+the most earnest men and women who have in our generation identified
+themselves with the Freethought cause. They shine through the written
+and spoken words of Charles Bradlaugh all through his life, and every
+friend of his knows how often he has expressed the longing that "when
+the grass grows green over my grave, men may love me a little for the
+work I tried to do."
+
+Needless to say that, in the many controversies in which I took part,
+it was often urged against me that such motives were insufficient,
+that they appealed only to natures already ethically developed, and
+left the average man, and, above all, the man below the average, with
+no sufficiently constraining motive for right conduct. I resolutely
+held to my faith in human nature, and the inherent response of the
+human heart when appealed to from the highest grounds; strange--I
+often think now--this instinctive certainty I had of man's innate
+grandeur, that governed all my thought, inconsistent as that certainty
+was with my belief in his purely animal ancestry. Pressed too hard, I
+would take refuge in a passionate disdain for all who did not hear the
+thrilling voice of Virtue and love her for her own sweet sake. "I have
+myself heard the question asked: 'Why should I seek for truth, and why
+should I lead a good life, if there be no immortality in which to reap
+a reward?' To this question the Freethinker has one clear and short
+answer: 'There is no reason why you should seek Truth, if to you the
+search has no attracting power. There is no reason why you should lead
+a noble life, if you find your happiness in leading a poor and a base
+one.' Friends, no one can enjoy a happiness which is too high for his
+capabilities; a book may be of intensest interest, but a dog will very
+much prefer being given a bone. To him whose highest interest is
+centred in his own miserable self, to him who cares only to gain his
+own ends, to him who seeks only his own individual comfort, to that
+man Freethought can have no attraction. Such a man may indeed be made
+religious by a bribe of heaven; he may be led to seek for truth,
+because he hopes to gain his reward hereafter by the search; but Truth
+disdains the service of the self-seeker; she cannot be grasped by a
+hand that itches for reward. If Truth is not loved for her own pure
+sake, if to lead a noble life, if to make men happier, if to spread
+brightness around us, if to leave the world better than we found
+it--if these aims have no attraction for us, if these thoughts do not
+inspire us, then we are not worthy to be Secularists, we have no right
+to the proud title of Freethinkers. If you want to be paid for your
+good lives by living for ever in a lazy and useless fashion in an idle
+heaven; if you want to be bribed into nobility of life; if, like silly
+children, you learn your lesson not to gain knowledge but to win
+sugar-plums, then you had better go back to your creeds and your
+churches; they are all you are fit for; you are not worthy to be free.
+But we--who, having caught a glimpse of the beauty of Truth, deem the
+possession of her worth more than all the world beside; who have made
+up our minds to do our work ungrudgingly, asking for no reward beyond
+the results which spring up from our labour--we will spread the Gospel
+of Freethought among men, until the sad minor melodies of Christianity
+have sobbed out their last mournful notes on the dying evening breeze,
+and on the fresh morning winds shall ring out the chorus of hope and
+joyfulness, from the glad lips of men whom the Truth has at last set
+free."[20]
+
+The intellectual comprehension of the sources of evil and the method
+of its extinction was the second great plank in my ethical platform.
+The study of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, of Huxley, Büchner and
+Haeckel, had not only convinced me of the truth of evolution, but,
+with help from W.H. Clifford, Lubbock, Buckle, Lecky, and many
+another, had led me to see in the evolution of the social instinct the
+explanation of the growth of conscience and of the strengthening of
+man's mental and moral nature. If man by study of the conditions
+surrounding him and by the application of intelligence to the subdual
+of external nature, had already accomplished so much, why should not
+further persistence along the same road lead to his complete
+emancipation? All the evil, anti-social side of his nature was an
+inheritance from his brute ancestry, and could be gradually
+eradicated; he could not only "let the ape and tiger die," but he
+could kill them out." It may be frankly acknowledged that man inherits
+from his brute progenitors various bestial tendencies which are in
+course of elimination. The wild-beast desire to fight is one of these,
+and this has been encouraged, not checked, by religion.... Another
+bestial tendency is the lust of the male for the female apart from
+love, duty, and loyalty; this again has been encouraged by religion,
+as witness the polygamy and concubinage of the Hebrews--as in Abraham,
+David, and Solomon, not to mention the precepts of the Mosaic
+laws--the bands of male and female prostitutes in connection with
+Pagan temples, and the curious outbursts of sexual passion in
+connection with religious revivals and missions. Another bestial
+tendency is greed, the strongest grabbing all he can and trampling
+down the weak, in the mad struggle for wealth; how and when has
+religion modified this tendency, sanctified as it is in our present
+civilisation? All these bestial tendencies will be eradicated only by
+the recognition of human duty, of the social bond. Religion has not
+eradicated them, but science, by tracing them to their source in our
+brute ancestry, has explained them and has shown them in their true
+light. As each recognises that the anti-social tendencies are the
+bestial tendencies in man, and that man in evolving further must
+evolve out of these, each also feels it part of his personal duty to
+curb these in himself, and so to rise further from the brute. This
+rational 'co-operation with Nature' distinguishes the scientific from
+the religious person, and this constraining sense of obligation is
+becoming stronger and stronger in all those who, in losing faith in
+God, have gained hope for man."[21]
+
+For this rational setting of oneself on the side of the forces working
+for evolution implied active co-operation by personal purity and
+nobility." To the Atheist it seems that the knowledge that the
+perfecting of the race is only possible by the improvement of the
+individual, supplies the most constraining motive which can be
+imagined for efforts after personal perfection. The Theist may desire
+personal perfection, but his desire is self-centred; each righteous
+individual is righteous, as it were, alone, and his righteousness does
+not benefit his fellows save as it may make him helpful and loving in
+his dealings with them. The Atheist desires personal perfection not
+only for his joy in it as beautiful in itself, but because science has
+taught him the unity of the race, and he knows that each fresh
+conquest of his over the baser parts of his nature, and each
+strengthening of the higher, is a gain for all, and not for himself
+alone."[22]
+
+Besides all this, the struggle against evil, regarded as transitory
+and as a necessary concomitant of evolution, loses its bitterness. "In
+dealing with evil, Atheism is full of hope instead of despair. To the
+Christian, evil is as everlasting as good; it exists by the permission
+of God, and, therefore, by the will of God. Our nature is corrupt,
+inclined to evil; the devil is ever near us, working all sin and all
+misery. What hope has the Christian face to face with a world's
+wickedness? what answer to the question, Whence comes sin? To the
+Atheist the terrible problem has in it no figure of despair. Evil
+comes from ignorance, we say; ignorance of physical and of moral
+facts. Primarily, from ignorance of physical order; parents who dwell
+in filthy, unventilated, unweathertight houses, who live on
+insufficient, innutritious, unwholesome food, will necessarily be
+unhealthy, will lack vitality, will probably have disease lurking in
+their veins; such parents will bring into the world ill-nurtured
+children, in whom the brain will generally be the least developed part
+of the body; such children, by their very formation, will incline to
+the animal rather than to the human, and by leading an animal, or
+natural, life will be deficient in those qualities which are necessary
+in social life. Their surroundings as they grow up, the home, the
+food, the associates, all are bad. They are trained into vice,
+educated into criminality; so surely as from the sown corn rises the
+wheat-ear, so from the sowing of misery, filth, and starvation shall
+arise crime. And the root of all is poverty and ignorance. Educate the
+children, and give them fair wage for fair work in their maturity, and
+crime will gradually diminish and ultimately disappear. Man is
+God-made, says Theism; man is circumstance-made, says Atheism. Man is
+the resultant of what his parents were, of what his surroundings have
+been and are, and of what they have made him; himself the result of
+the past he modifies the actual, and so the action and reaction go on,
+he himself the effect of what is past, and one of the causes of what
+is to come. Make the circumstances good and the results will be good,
+for healthy bodies and healthy brains may be built up, and from a
+State composed of such the disease of crime will have disappeared.
+Thus is our work full of hope; no terrible will of God have we to
+struggle against; no despairful future to look forward to, of a world
+growing more and more evil, until it is, at last, to burned up; but a
+glad, fair future of an ever-rising race, where more equal laws, more
+general education, more just division, shall eradicate pauperism,
+destroy ignorance, nourish independence, a future to be made the
+grander by our struggles, a future to be made the nearer by our
+toil."[23]
+
+This joyous, self-reliant facing of the world with the resolute
+determination to improve it is characteristic of the noblest Atheism
+of our day. And it is thus a distintly elevating factor in the midst
+of the selfishness, luxury, and greed of modern civilisation. It is a
+virile virtue in the midst of the calculating and slothful spirit
+which too ofter veils itself under the pretence or religion. It will
+have no putting off of justice to a far-off day of reckoning, and it
+is ever spurred on by the feeling, "The night cometh, when no man can
+work." Bereft of all hope of a personal future, it binds up its hopes
+with that of the race; unbelieving in any aid from Deity, it struggles
+the more strenuously to work out man's salvation by his own strength.
+"To us there is but small comfort in Miss Cobbe's assurance that
+'earth's wrongs and agonies' 'will be righted hereafter.' Granting for
+a moment that man survives death what certainty have we that 'the next
+world' will be any improvement on this? Miss Cobbe assures us that
+this is 'God's world'; whose world will the next be, if not also His?
+Will He be stronger there or better, that He should set right in that
+world the wrongs He has permitted here? Will He have changed His mind,
+or have become weary of the contemplation of suffering? To me the
+thought that the world was in the hands of a God who permitted all the
+present wrongs and pains to exist would be intolerable, maddening in
+its hopelessness. There is every hope of righting earth's wrongs and
+of curing earth's pains if the reason and skill of man which have
+already done so much are free to do the rest; but if they are to
+strive against omnipotence, hopeless indeed is the future of the
+world. It is in this sense that the Atheist looks on good as 'the
+final goal of ill,' and believing that that goal will be reached the
+sooner the more strenuous the efforts of each individual, he works in
+the glad certainty that he is aiding the world's progress thitherward.
+Not dreaming of a personal reward hereafter, not craving a personal
+payment from heavenly treasury, he works and loves, content that he is
+building a future fairer than his present, joyous that he is creating
+a new earth for a happier race."[24]
+
+Such was the creed and such the morality which governed my life and
+thoughts from 1874 to 1886, and with some misgivings to 1889, and from
+which I drew strength and happiness amid all outer struggles and
+distress. And I shall ever remain grateful for the intellectual and
+moral training it gave me, for the self-reliance it nurtured, for the
+altruism it inculcated, for the deep feeling of the unity of man that
+it fostered, for the inspiration to work that it lent. And perhaps the
+chief debt of gratitude I owe to Freethought is that it left the mind
+ever open to new truth, encouraged the most unshrinking questioning of
+Nature, and shrank from no new conclusions, however adverse to the
+old, that were based on solid evidence. I admit sorrowfully that all
+Freethinkers do not learn this lesson, but I worked side by side with
+Charles Bradlaugh, and the Freethought we strove to spread was
+strong-headed and broad-hearted.
+
+The antagonism which, as we shall see in a few moments, blazed out
+against me from the commencement of my platform work, was based partly
+on ignorance, was partly aroused by my direct attacks on Christianity,
+and by the combative spirit I myself showed in those attacks, and very
+largely by my extreme Radicalism in politics. I had against me all the
+conventional beliefs and traditions of society in general, and I
+attacked them, not with bated breath and abundant apologies, but
+joyously and defiantly, with sheer delight in the intellectual strife.
+I was fired, too, with passionate sympathy for the sufferings of the
+poor, for the overburdened, overdriven masses of the people, not only
+here but in every land, and wherever a blow was struck at Liberty or
+Justice my pen or tongue brake silence. It was a perpetual carrying of
+the fiery cross, and the comfortable did not thank me for shaking them
+out of their soft repose.
+
+The antagonism that grew out of ignorance regarded Atheism as implying
+degraded morality and bestial life, and they assailed my conduct not
+on evidence that it was evil, but on the presumption that an Atheist
+must be immoral. Thus a Christian opponent at Leicester assailed me as
+a teacher of free love, fathering on me views which were maintained in
+a book that I had not read, but which, before I had ever seen the
+_National Reformer_, had been reviewed in its columns--as it was
+reviewed in other London papers--and had been commended for its clear
+statement of the Malthusian position, but not for its contention as to
+free love, a theory to which Mr. Bradlaugh was very strongly opposed.
+Nor were the attacks confined to the ascription to me of theories
+which I did not hold, but agents of the Christian Evidence Society, in
+their street preaching, made the foulest accusations against me of
+personal immorality. Remonstrances addressed to the Rev. Mr. Engström,
+the secretary of the society, brought voluble protestations of
+disavowal and disapproval; but as the peccant agents were continued in
+their employment, the apologies were of small value. No accusation was
+too coarse, no slander too baseless, for circulation by these men; and
+for a long time these indignities caused me bitter suffering,
+outraging my pride, and soiling my good name. The time was to come
+when I should throw that good name to the winds for the sake of the
+miserable, but in those early days I had done nothing to merit, even
+ostensibly, such attacks. Even by educated writers, who should have
+known better, the most wanton accusations of violence and would-be
+destructiveness were brought against Atheists; thus Miss Frances Power
+Cobbe wrote in the _Contemporary Review_ that loss of faith in God
+would bring about the secularisation _or destruction_ of all
+cathedrals, churches, and chapels. "Why," I wrote in answer, "should
+cathedrals, churches, and chapels be destroyed? Atheism will utilise,
+not destroy, the beautiful edifices which, once wasted on God, shall
+hereafter be consecrated for man. Destroy Westminster Abbey, with its
+exquisite arches, its glorious tones of soft, rich colour, its
+stonework light as if of cloud, its dreamy, subdued twilight, soothing
+as the 'shadow of a great rock in a weary land'? Nay, but reconsecrate
+it to humanity. The fat cherubs who tumble over guns and banners on
+soldiers' graves will fitly be removed to some spot where their clumsy
+forms will no longer mar the upward-springing grace of lines of pillar
+and of arch; but the glorious building wherein now barbaric psalms are
+chanted and droning canons preach of Eastern follies, shall hereafter
+echo the majestic music of Wagner and Beethoven, and the teachers of
+the future shall there unveil to thronging multitudes the beauties and
+the wonders of the world. The 'towers and spires' will not be effaced,
+but they will no longer be symbols of a religion which sacrifices
+earth to heaven and Man to God."[25] Between the cultured and the
+uncultured burlesques of Atheism we came off pretty badly, being for
+the most part regarded, as the late Cardinal Manning termed us, as
+mere "cattle."
+
+The moral purity and elevation of Atheistic teaching were overlooked
+by many who heard only of my bitter attacks on Christian theology.
+Against the teachings of eternal torture, of the vicarious atonement,
+of the infallibility of the Bible, I levelled all the strength of my
+brain and tongue, and I exposed the history of the Christian Church
+with unsparing hand, its persecutions, its religious wars, its
+cruelties, its oppressions. Smarting under the suffering inflicted on
+myself, and wroth with the cruel pressure continually put on
+Freethinkers by Christian employers, speaking under constant threats
+of prosecution, identifying Christianity with the political and social
+tyrannies of Christendom, I used every weapon that history, science,
+criticism, scholarship could give me against the Churches; eloquence,
+sarcasm, mockery, all were called on to make breaches in the wall of
+traditional belief and crass superstition.
+
+To argument and reason I was ever ready to listen, but I turned a
+front of stubborn defiance to all attempts to compel assent to
+Christianity by appeals to force. "The threat and the enforcement of
+legal and social penalties against unbelief can never compel belief.
+Belief must be gained by demonstration; it can never be forced by
+punishment. Persecution makes the stronger among us bitter; the weaker
+among us hypocrites; it never has made and never can make an honest
+convert."[26]
+
+That men and women are now able to speak and think as openly as they
+do, that a broader spirit is visible in the Churches, that heresy is
+no longer regarded as morally disgraceful--these things are very
+largely due to the active and militant propaganda carried on under the
+leadership of Charles Bradlaugh, whose nearest and most trusted friend
+I was. That my tongue was in the early days bitterer than it should
+have been, I frankly acknowledge; that I ignored the services done by
+Christianity and threw light only on its crimes, thus committing
+injustice, I am ready to admit. But these faults were conquered long
+ere I left the Atheistic camp, and they were the faults of my
+personality, not of the Atheistic philosophy. And my main contentions
+were true, and needed to be made; from many a Christian pulpit to-day
+may be heard the echo of the Freethought teachings; men's minds have
+been awakened, their knowledge enlarged; and while I condemn the
+unnecessary harshness of some of my language, I rejoice that I played
+my part in that educating of England which has made impossible for
+evermore the crude superstitions of the past, and the repetition of
+the cruelties and injustices under which preceding heretics suffered.
+
+But my extreme political views had also much to do with the general
+feeling of hatred with which I was regarded. Politics, as such, I
+cared not for at all, for the necessary compromises of political life
+were intolerable to me; but wherever they touched on the life of the
+people they became to me of burning interest. The land question, the
+incidence of taxation, the cost of Royalty, the obstructive power of
+the House of Lords--these were the matters to which I put my hand; I
+was a Home Ruler, too, of course, and a passionate opponent of all
+injustice to nations weaker than ourselves, so that I found myself
+always in opposition to the Government of the day. Against our
+aggressive and oppressive policy in Ireland, in the Transvaal, in
+India, in Afghanistan, in Burmah, in Egypt, I lifted up my voice in
+all our great towns, trying to touch the consciences of the people,
+and to make them feel the immorality of a land-stealing, piratical
+policy. Against war, against capital punishment, against flogging,
+demanding national education instead of big guns, public libraries
+instead of warships--no wonder I was denounced as an agitator, a
+firebrand, and that all orthodox society turned up at me its most
+respectable nose.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+AT WORK.
+
+
+From this sketch of the inner sources of action let me turn to the
+actions themselves, and see how the outer life was led which fed
+itself at these springs.
+
+I have said that the friendship between Mr. Bradlaugh and myself dated
+from our first meeting, and a few days after our talk in Turner Street
+he came down to see me at Norwood. It was characteristic of the man
+that he refused my first invitation, and bade me to think well ere I
+asked him to my house. He told me that he was so hated by English
+society that any friend of his would be certain to suffer, and that I
+should pay heavily for any friendship extended to him. When, however,
+I wrote to him, repeating my invitation, and telling him that I had
+counted the cost, he came to see me. His words came true; my
+friendship for him alienated from me even many professed Freethinkers,
+but the strength and the happiness of it outweighed a thousand times
+the loss it brought, and never has a shadow of regret touched me that
+I clasped hands with him in 1874, and won the noblest friend that
+woman ever had. He never spoke to me a harsh word; where we differed,
+he never tried to override my judgment, nor force on me his views; we
+discussed all points of difference as equal friends; he guarded me
+from all suffering as far as friend might, and shared with me all the
+pain he could not turn aside; all the brightness of my stormy life
+came to me through him, from his tender thoughtfulness, his ever-ready
+sympathy, his generous love. He was the most unselfish man I ever
+knew, and as patient as he was strong. My quick, impulsive nature
+found in him the restful strength it needed, and learned from him the
+self-control it lacked.
+
+He was the merriest of companions in our rare hours of relaxation; for
+many years he was wont to come to my house in the morning, after the
+hours always set aside by him for receiving poor men who wanted advice
+on legal and other matters--for he was a veritable poor man's lawyer,
+always ready to help and counsel--and, bringing his books and papers,
+he would sit writing, hour after hour, I equally busy with my own
+work, now and then, perhaps, exchanging a word, breaking off just for
+lunch and dinner, and working on again in the evening till about ten
+o'clock--he always went early to bed when at home--he would take
+himself off again to his lodgings, about three-quarters of a mile
+away. Sometimes he would play cards for an hour, euchre being our
+favourite game. But while we were mostly busy and grave, we would make
+holiday sometimes, and then he was like a boy, brimming over with
+mirth, full of quaint turns of thought and speech; all the country
+round London has for me bright memories of our wanderings--Richmond,
+where we tramped across the park, and sat under its mighty trees;
+Windsor, with its groves of bracken; Kew, where we had tea in a funny
+little room, with watercress _ad libitum_; Hampton Court, with its
+dishevelled beauties; Maidenhead and Taplow, where the river was the
+attraction; and, above all, Broxbourne, where he delighted to spend
+the day with his fishing-rod, wandering along the river, of which he
+knew every eddy. For he was a great fisherman, and he taught me all
+the mysteries of the craft, mirthfully disdainful of my dislike of the
+fish when I had caught them. And in those days he would talk of all
+his hopes of the future, of his work, of his duty to the thousands who
+looked to him for guidance, of the time when he would sit in
+Parliament as member for Northampton, and help to pass into laws the
+projects of reform for which he was battling with pen and tongue. How
+often he would voice his love of England, his admiration of her
+Parliament, his pride in her history. Keenly alive to the blots upon
+it in her sinful wars of conquest, in the cruel wrongs inflicted upon
+subject peoples, he was yet an Englishman to the heart's core, but
+feeling above all the Englishman's duty, as one of a race that had
+gripped power and held it, to understand the needs of those he ruled,
+and to do justice willingly, since compulsion to justice there was
+none. His service to India in the latest years of his life was no
+suddenly accepted task. He had spoken for her, pleaded for her, for
+many a long year, through press and on platform, and his spurs as
+member for India were won long ere he was member of Parliament.
+
+A place on the staff of the _National Reformer_ was offered me by Mr.
+Bradlaugh a few days after our first meeting, and the small weekly
+salary thus earned--it was only a guinea, for national reformers are
+always poor--was a very welcome addition to my resources. My first
+contribution appeared in the number for August 30, 1874, over the
+signature of "Ajax," and I wrote in it regularly until Mr. Bradlaugh
+died; from 1877 until his death I sub-edited it, so as to free him
+from all the technical trouble and the weary reading of copy, and for
+part of this period was also co-editor. I wrote at first under a _nom
+de guerre_, because the work I was doing for Mr. Scott would have been
+prejudiced had my name appeared in the columns of the terrible
+_National Reformer_, and until this work--commenced and paid for--was
+concluded I did not feel at liberty to use my own name. Afterwards, I
+signed my _National Reformer_ articles, and the tracts written for Mr.
+Scott appeared anonymously.
+
+  The name was suggested by the famous statue of
+  "Ajax Crying for Light," a cast of which may be seen
+  in the centre walk by any visitor to the Crystal Palace,
+  Sydenham. The cry through the darkness for light,
+  even though light should bring destruction, was one
+  that awoke the keenest sympathy of response from my
+  heart:
+
+  "If our fate be death
+  Give light, and let us die!"
+
+To see, to know, to understand, even though the seeing blind, though
+the knowledge sadden, though the understanding shatter the dearest
+hopes--such has ever been the craving of the upward-striving mind in
+man. Some regard it as a weakness, as a folly, but I am sure that it
+exists most strongly in some of the noblest of our race; that from the
+lips of those who have done most in lifting the burden of ignorance
+from the overstrained and bowed shoulders of a stumbling world has
+gone out most often into the empty darkness the pleading, impassioned
+cry:
+
+"Give light!"
+
+The light may come with a blinding flash, but it is light none the
+less, and we can see.
+
+And now the time had come when I was to use that gift of speech which
+I had discovered in Sibsey Church that I possessed, and to use it to
+move hearts and brains all over the English land. In 1874, tentatively, and in 1875 definitely, I took up this keen weapon, and have used it ever
+since. My first attempt was at a garden party, in a brief informal
+debate, and I found that words came readily and smoothly: the second
+in a discussion at the Liberal Social Union on the opening of museums
+and art galleries on Sunday. My first lecture was given at the
+Co-operative Institute, 55, Castle Street, Oxford Street, on August
+25, 1874. Mr. Greening--then, I think, the secretary--had invited me
+to read a paper before the society, and had left me the choice of the
+subject. I resolved that my first public lecture should be on behalf
+of my own sex, so I selected for my theme, "The Political Status of
+Women," and wrote thereon a paper. But it was a very nervous person
+who presented herself at the Co-operative Institute on that August
+evening. When a visit to the dentist is made, and one stands on the
+steps outside, desiring to run away ere the neat little boy in buttons
+opens the door and beams on one with a smile of compassionate
+superiority and implike triumph, then the world seems dark and life is
+as a huge blunder. But all such feelings are poor and weak as compared
+with the sinking of the heart and the trembling of the knees which
+seize upon the unhappy lecturer as he advances towards his first
+audience, and as before his eyes rises a ghastly vision of a
+tongue-tied would-be lecturer, facing rows of listening faces,
+listening to--silence. But to my surprise all this miserable feeling
+vanished the moment I was on my feet and was looking at the faces
+before me. I felt no tremor of nervousness from the first word to the
+last, and as I heard my own voice ring out over the attentive
+listeners I was conscious of power and of pleasure, not of fear. And
+from that day to this my experience has been the same; before a
+lecture I am horribly nervous, wishing myself at the ends of the
+earth, heart beating violently, and sometimes overcome by deadly
+sickness. Once on my feet, I feel perfectly at my ease, ruler of the
+crowd, master of myself. I often jeer at myself mentally as I feel
+myself throbbing and fearful, knowing that when I stand up I shall be
+all right, and yet I cannot conquer the physical terror and trembling,
+illusory as I know them to be. People often say to me, "You look too
+ill to go on the platform." And I smile feebly and say I am all right,
+and I often fancy that the more miserably nervous I am in the
+ante-room, the better I speak when once on the platform. My second
+lecture was delivered on September 27th, at Mr. Moncure D. Conway's
+Chapel, in St. Paul's Road, Camden Town, and redelivered a few weeks
+later at a Unitarian Chapel, where the Rev. Peter Dean was minister.
+This was on the "True Basis of Morality," and was later printed as a
+pamphlet, which attained a wide circulation. This was all I did in the
+way of speaking in 1874, but I took silent part in an electioneering
+struggle at Northampton, where a seat for the House of Commons had
+fallen vacant by the death of Mr. Charles Gilpin. Mr. Bradlaugh had
+contested the borough as a Radical in 1868, obtaining 1,086 votes, and
+again in February, 1874, when he received 1,653; of these no less than
+1,060 were plumpers, while his four opponents had only 113, 64, 21 and
+12 plumpers respectively; this band formed the compact and personally
+loyal following which was to win the seat for its chief in 1880, after
+twelve years of steady struggle, and to return him over and over again
+to Parliament during the long contest which followed his election, and
+which ended in his final triumph. They never wavered in their
+allegiance to "our Charlie," but stood by him through evil report and
+good report, when he was outcast as when he was triumphant, loving him
+with a deep, passionate devotion, as honourable to them as it was
+precious to him. I have seen him cry like a child at evidences of
+their love for him, he whose courage no danger could daunt, and who
+was never seen to blench before hatred nor change his stern immobility
+in the face of his foes. Iron to enmity, he was soft as a woman to
+kindness; unbending as steel to pressure, he was ductile as wax to
+love. John Stuart Mill had the insight in 1868 to see his value, and
+the courage to recognise it. He strongly supported his candidature,
+and sent a donation to his election expenses. In his "Autobiography"
+he wrote (pp. 311, 312):--
+
+"He had the support of the working classes; having heard him speak I
+knew him to be a man of ability, and he had proved that he was the
+reverse of a demagogue by placing himself in strong opposition to the
+prevailing opinion of the Democratic party on two such important
+subjects as Malthusianism and Proportional Representation. Men of this
+sort, who, while sharing the democratic feeling of the working
+classes, judge political questions for themselves, and have the
+courage to assert their individual convictions against popular
+opposition, were needed, as it seemed to me, in Parliament; and I did
+not think that Mr. Bradlaugh's anti-religious opinions (even though he
+had been intemperate in the expression of them) ought to exclude him."
+
+It has been said that Mr. Mill's support of Mr. Bradlaugh's
+candidature at Northampton cost him his own seat at Westminster, and
+so bitter was bigotry at that time that the statement is very likely
+to be true. On this, Mr. Mill himself said: "It was the right thing to
+do, and if the election were yet to take place, I would do it again."
+
+At this election of September, 1874--the second in the year, for the
+general election had taken place in the February, and Mr. Bradlaugh
+had been put up and defeated during his absence in America--I went
+down to Northampton to report electioneering incidents for the
+_National Reformer_, and spent some days there in the whirl of the
+struggle. The Whig party was more bitter against Mr. Bradlaugh than
+was the Tory. Strenuous efforts were made to procure a Liberal
+candidate, who would be able at least to prevent Mr. Bradlaugh's
+return, and, by dividing the Liberal and Radical party, should let in
+a Tory rather than the detested Radical. Messrs. Bell and James and
+Dr. Pearce came on the scene only to disappear. Mr. Jacob Bright and
+Mr. Arnold Morley were vainly suggested. Mr. Ayrton's name was
+whispered. Major Lumley was recommended by Mr. Bernal Osborne. Dr.
+Kenealy proclaimed himself ready to come to the rescue of the Whigs.
+Mr. Tillett, of Norwich, Mr. Cox, of Belper, were invited, but neither
+would consent to oppose a good Radical who had fought two elections at
+Northampton and had been the chosen of the Radical workers for six
+years. At last Mr. William Fowler, a banker, accepted the task of
+handing over the representation of a Liberal and Radical borough to a
+Tory, and duly succeeded in giving the seat to Mr. Mereweather, a very
+reputable Tory lawyer. Mr. Bradlaugh polled 1,766, thus adding another
+133 voters to those who had polled for him in the previous February.
+
+That election gave me my first experience of anything in the nature of
+rioting. The violent abuse levelled against Mr. Bradlaugh by the
+Whigs, and the foul and wicked slanders circulated against him,
+assailing his private life and family relations, had angered almost to
+madness those who knew and loved him; and when it was found that the
+unscrupulous Whig devices had triumphed, had turned the election
+against him, and given over the borough to a Tory, the fury broke out
+into open violence. One illustration may be given as a type of these
+cruel slanders. It was known that Mr. Bradlaugh was separated from his
+wife, and it was alleged that being an Atheist, and, (therefore!) an
+opponent of marriage, he had deserted his wife and children, and left
+them to the workhouse. The cause of the separation was known to very
+few, for Mr. Bradlaugh was chivalrously honourable to women, and he
+would not shield his own good name at the cost of that of the wife of
+his youth and the mother of his children. But since his death his only
+remaining child has, in devotion to her father's memory, stated the
+melancholy truth: that Mrs. Bradlaugh gave way to drink; that for long
+years he bore with her and did all that man could do to save her; that
+finally, hopeless of cure, he broke up his home, and placed his wife
+in the care of her parents in the country, leaving her daughters with
+her, while he worked for their support. No man could have acted more
+generously and wisely under these cruel circumstances than he did, but
+it was, perhaps, going to an extreme of Quixotism, that he concealed
+the real state of the case, and let the public blame him as it would.
+His Northampton followers did not know the facts, but they knew him as
+an upright, noble man, and these brutal attacks on his personal
+character drove them wild. Stray fights had taken place during the
+election over these slanders, and, defeated by such foul weapons, the
+people lost control of their passions. As Mr. Bradlaugh was sitting
+well-nigh exhausted in the hotel, after the declaration of the poll,
+the landlord rushed in, crying to him to go out and try to stop the
+people, or there would be murder done at the "Palmerston," Mr.
+Fowler's headquarters; the crowd was charging the door, and the
+windows were being broken with showers of stones. Weary as he was, Mr.
+Bradlaugh sprang to his feet, and swiftly made his way to the rescue
+of those who had maligned and defeated him. Flinging himself before
+the doorway, from which the door had just been battered down, he
+knocked down one or two of the most violent, drove the crowd back,
+argued and scolded them into quietness, and finally dispersed them.
+But at nine o'clock he had to leave Northampton to catch the mail
+steamer for America at Queenstown, and after he had left, word went
+round that he had gone, and the riot he had quelled broke out afresh.
+The Riot Act was at last read, the soldiers were called out, stones
+flew freely, heads and windows were broken, but no very serious harm
+was done. The "Palmerston" and the printing-office of the _Mercury_,
+the Whig organ, were the principal sufferers; doors and windows
+disappearing somewhat completely. The day after the election I
+returned home, and soon after fell ill with a severe attack of
+congestion of the lungs. Soon after my recovery I left Norwood and
+settled in a house in Westbourne Terrace, Bayswater, where I remained
+till 1876.
+
+In the following January (1875), after much thought and self-analysis,
+I resolved to give myself wholly to propagandist work, as a
+Freethinker and a Social Reformer, and to use my tongue as well as my
+pen in the struggle. I counted the cost ere I determined on this step,
+for I knew that it would not only outrage the feelings of such new
+friends as I had already made, but would be likely to imperil my
+custody of my little girl. I knew that an Atheist was outside the law,
+obnoxious to its penalties, but deprived of its protection, and that
+the step I contemplated might carry me into conflicts in which
+everything might be lost and nothing could be gained. But the desire
+to spread liberty and truer thought among men, to war against bigotry
+and superstition, to make the world freer and better than I found
+it--all this impelled me with a force that would not be denied. I
+seemed to hear the voice of Truth ringing over the battlefield: "Who
+will go? Who will speak for me?" And I sprang forward with passionate
+enthusiasm, with resolute cry: "Here am I, send me!" Nor have I ever
+regretted for one hour that resolution, come to in solitude, carried
+out amid the surging life of men, to devote to that sacred cause every
+power of brain and tongue that I possessed. Very solemn to me is the
+responsibility of the public teacher, standing forth in Press and on
+platform to partly mould the thought of his time, swaying thousands of
+readers and hearers year after year. No weighter responsibility can
+any take, no more sacred charge. The written and the spoken word start
+forces none may measure, set working brain after brain, influence
+numbers unknown to the forthgiver of the word, work for good or for
+evil all down the stream of time. Feeling the greatness of the career,
+the solemnity of the duty, I pledged my word then to the cause I loved
+that no effort on my part should be wanted to render myself worthy of
+the privilege of service that I took; that I would read and study, and
+would train every faculty that I had; that I would polish my language,
+discipline my thought, widen my knowledge; and this, at least, I may
+say, that if I have written and spoken much, I have studied and
+thought more, and that I have not given to my mistress Truth that
+"which hath cost me nothing."
+
+This same year (1875) that saw me launched on the world as a public
+advocate of Freethought, saw also the founding of the Theosophical
+Society to which my Freethought was to lead me. I have often since
+thought with pleasure that at the very time I began lecturing in
+England, H.P. Blavatsky was at work in the United States, preparing
+the foundation on which in November, 1875, the Theosophical Society
+was to be raised. And with deeper pleasure yet have I found her
+writing of what she called the noble work against superstition done by
+Charles Bradlaugh and myself, rendering the propaganda of Theosophy
+far more practicable and safer than it would otherwise have been. The
+fight soon began, and with some queer little skirmishes. I was a
+member of the "Liberal Social Union," and one night a discussion arose
+as to the admissibility of Atheists to the Society. Dr. Zerffi
+declared that he would not remain a member if avowed Atheists were
+admitted. I promptly declared that I was an Atheist, and that the
+basis of the union was liberty of opinion. The result was that I found
+myself cold-shouldered, and those that had been warmly cordial to me
+merely as a non-Christian looked askance at me when I had avowed that
+my scepticism had advanced beyond their "limits of religious thought."
+The Liberal Social Union soon knew me no more, but in the wider field
+of work open before me, the narrow-mindedness of this petty clique
+troubled me not at all.
+
+I started my definite lecturing work at South Place Chapel in January,
+1875, Mr. Moncure D. Conway presiding for me, and I find in the
+_National Reformer_ for January 17th, the announcement that "Mrs.
+Annie Besant ('Ajax') will lecture at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, on
+'Civil and Religious Liberty.'" Thus I threw off my pseudonym, and
+rode into the field of battle with uplifted visor. The identification
+led to an odd little exhibition of bigotry. I had been invited by the
+Dialectical Society to read a paper, and had selected for subject,
+"The Existence of God." (It may be noted, in passing, that young
+students and speakers always select the most tremendous subjects for
+their discourses. One advances in modesty as one advances in
+knowledge, and after eighteen years of platform work, I am far more
+dubious than I was at their beginning as to my power of dealing in any
+sense adequately with the problems of life.) The Dialectical Society
+had for some years held their meetings in a room in Adam Street,
+rented from the Social Science Association. When the members gathered
+as usual on February 17th, the door was found to be locked, and they
+had to gather on the stairs; they found that "Ajax's" as yet
+undelivered paper was too much for Social Science nerves, and that
+entrance to their ordinary meeting-room was then and thenceforth
+denied them. So they, with "Ajax," found refuge at the Charing Cross
+Hotel, and speculated merrily on the eccentricities of religious
+bigotry.
+
+On February 12th I started on my first provincial lecturing tour, and
+after speaking at Birkenhead that evening went on by the night mail to
+Glasgow. Some races--dog races--I think, had been going on, and very
+unpleasant were many of the passengers waiting on the platform. Some
+Birkenhead friends had secured me a compartment, and watched over me
+till the train began to move. Then, after we had fairly started, the
+door was flung open by a porter, and a man was thrust in who half
+tumbled on to the seat. As he slowly recovered he stood up, and as his
+money rolled out of his hand on to the floor, and he gazed vaguely at
+it, I saw to my horror that he was drunk. The position was not
+pleasant, for the train was an express, and was not timed to stop for
+a considerable time. My odious fellow-passenger spent some time on the
+floor, hunting after his scattered coins; then he slowly gathered
+himself up and presently became conscious of my presence. He studied
+me for some time, and then proposed to shut the window. I assented
+quietly, not wanting to discuss a trifle and feeling in deadly
+terror--alone at night in an express with a man not drunk enough to be
+helpless, but too drunk to be controlled. Never before nor since have
+I felt so thoroughly frightened. I can see him still, swaying as he
+stood, with eyes bleared and pendulous lips--but I sat there quiet and
+outwardly unmoved, as is always my impulse in danger till I see some
+way of escape, only grasping a penknife in my pocket, with a desperate
+resolve to use my feeble weapon as soon as the need arose. The man
+came towards me with a fatuous leer, when a jarring noise was heard
+and the train began to slacken.
+
+"What is that?" stammered my drunken companion.
+
+"They are putting on the brakes to stop the train," I answered very
+slowly and distinctly, though a very passion of relief made it hard to
+say quietly the measured words.
+
+The man sat down stupidly, staring at me, and in a minute or two the
+train pulled up at a station--it had been stopped by signal. My
+immobility was gone. In a moment I was at the window, called the
+guard, and explained rapidly that I was a woman travelling alone, and
+that a half-drunken man was in the carriage. With the usual kindness
+of a railway official, he at once moved me and my baggage into another
+compartment, into which he locked me, and he kept a friendly watch
+over me at every station at which we stopped until he landed me safely
+at Glasgow.
+
+At Glasgow a room had been taken for me at a temperance hotel, and it
+seemed to me so new and lonely a thing to be "all on my own account"
+in a strange hotel in a strange city, that I wanted to sit down and
+cry. This feeling, to which I was too proud to yield, was probably
+partly due to the extreme greyness and grubbiness of my surroundings.
+Things are better now, but in those days temperance hotels were for
+the most part lacking in cleanliness. Abstinence from alcohol and a
+superfluity of "matter in the wrong place" do not seem necessary
+correlatives, yet I rarely went to a temperance hotel in which water
+was liberally used for other purposes than that of drinking. From
+Glasgow I went north to Aberdeen, where I found a very stern and
+critical audience. Not a sound broke the stillness as I walked up the
+hall; not a sound as I ascended the platform and faced the people; the
+canny Scot was not going to applaud a stranger at sight; he was going
+to see what she was like first. In grim silence they listened; I could
+not move them; they were granite like their own granite city, and I
+felt I would like to take off my head and throw it at them, if only to
+break that hard wall. After about twenty minutes, a fortunate phrase
+drew a hiss from some child of the Covenanters. I made a quick retort,
+there was a burst of cheering, and the granite vanished. Never after
+that did I have to complain of the coldness of an Aberdeen audience.
+Back to London from Aberdeen, and a long, weary journey it was, in a
+third-class carriage in the cold month of February; but the labour had
+in it a joy that outpaid all physical discomfort, and the feeling that
+I had found my work in the world gave a new happiness to life.
+
+On February 28th I stood for the first time on the platform of the
+Hall of Science, Old Street, St. Luke's, London, and was received with
+that warmth of greeting which Secularists are always so ready to
+extend to any who sacrifice aught to join their ranks. That hall is
+identified in my mind with many a bitter struggle, with both victory
+and defeat, but whether in victory or in defeat I found there always
+welcome; and the love and the courage wherewith Secularists stood by
+me have overpaid a thousandfold any poor services I was fortunate
+enough to render, while in their ranks, to the cause of Liberty, and
+wholly prevent any bitterness arising in my mind for any
+unfriendliness shown me by some, who have perhaps overstepped kindness
+and justice in their sorrowful wrath at my renunciation of Materialism
+and Atheism. So far as health was concerned, the lecturing acted as a
+tonic. My chest had always been a little delicate, and when I
+consulted a doctor on the possibility of my standing platform work, he
+answered, "It will either kill you or cure you." It entirely cured the
+lung weakness, and I grew strong and vigorous instead of being frail
+and delicate, as of old.
+
+It would be wearisome to go step by step over eighteen years of
+platform work, so I will only select here and there incidents
+illustrative of the whole. And here let me say that the frequent
+attacks made on myself and others, that we were attracted to
+Free-thought propaganda by the gains it offered, formed a somewhat
+grotesque contrast to the facts. On one occasion I spent eight days in
+Northumberland and Durham, gave twelve lectures, and made a deficit of
+eleven shillings on the whole. Of course such a thing could not happen
+in later years, when I had made my name by sheer hard work, but I
+fancy that every Secularist lecturer could tell of similar experiences
+in the early days of "winning his way." The fact is that from Mr.
+Bradlaugh downwards every one of us could have earned a competence
+with comparative ease in any other line of work, and could have earned
+it with public approval instead of amid popular reproach. Much of my
+early lecturing was done in Northumberland and Durham; the miners
+there are, as a rule, shrewd and hard-headed men, and very cordial is
+the greeting given by them to those they have reason to trust. At
+Seghill and at Bedlington I have slept in their cottages and have been
+welcomed to their tables, and I have a vivid memory of one evening at
+Seghill, after a lecture, when my host, himself a miner, invited about
+a dozen of his comrades to supper to meet me; the talk ran on
+politics, and I soon found that my companions knew more of English
+politics, had a far shrewder notion of political methods, and were,
+therefore, much better worth talking to, than most of the ordinary men
+met at dinner parties "in society." They were of the "uneducated"
+class despised by "gentlemen," and had not then the franchise, but
+politically they were far better educated than their social superiors,
+and were far better fitted to discharge the duties of citizenship. How
+well, too, do I remember a ten-mile drive in a butcher's cart, to give
+a lecture in an out-of-the-way spot, unapproached by railway. Such was
+the jolting as we rattled over rough roads and stony places, that I
+felt as though all my bones were broken, and as though I should
+collapse on the platform like a bag half-filled with stones. How kind
+they were to me, those genial, cordial miners, how careful for my
+comfort, and how motherly were the women! Ah! if opponents of my views
+who did not know me were often cruel and malignant, there was
+compensation in the love and honour in which good men and women all
+the country over held me, and their devotion outweighed the hatred,
+and many a time and often soothed a weary and aching heart.
+
+Lecturing in June, 1875, at Leicester, I came for the first time
+across a falsehood that brought sore trouble and cost me more pain
+than I care to tell. An irate Christian opponent, in the discussion
+that followed the lecture, declared that I was responsible for a book
+entitled, "The Elements of Social Science," which was, he averred,
+"The Bible of Secularists." I had never heard of the book, but as he
+stated that it was in favour of the abolition of marriage, and that
+Mr. Bradlaugh agreed with it, I promptly contradicted him; for while I
+knew nothing about the book, I knew a great deal about Mr. Bradlaugh,
+and I knew that on the marriage question he was conservative rather
+than revolutionary. He detested "Free Love" doctrines, and had thrown
+himself strongly on the side of the agitation led so heroically for
+many years by Mrs. Josephine Butler. On my return to London after the
+lecture I naturally made inquiry as to the volume and its contents,
+and I found that it had been written by a Doctor of Medicine some
+years before, and sent to the _National Reformer_ for review, as to
+other journals, in ordinary course of business. It consisted of three
+parts--the first advocated, from the standpoint of medical science,
+what is roughly known as "Free Love"; the second was entirely medical;
+the third consisted of a clear and able exposition of the law of
+population as laid down by the Rev. Mr. Malthus, and--following the
+lines of John Stuart Mill--insisted that it was the duty of married
+persons to voluntarily limit their families within their means of
+subsistence. Mr. Bradlaugh, in reviewing the book, said that it was
+written "with honest and pure intent and purpose," and recommended to
+working men the exposition of the law of population. His enemies took
+hold of this recommendation, declared that he shared the author's
+views on the impermanence of the marriage tie, and, despite his
+reiterated contradictions, they used extracts against marriage from
+the book as containing his views. Anything more meanly vile it would
+be difficult to conceive, but such were the weapons used against him
+all his life, and used often by men whose own lives contrasted most
+unfavourably with his own. Unable to find anything in his own writings
+to serve their purpose, they used this book to damage him with those
+who knew nothing at first-hand of his views. What his enemies feared
+were not his views on marriage--which, as I have said, was
+conservative--but his Radicalism and his Atheism. To discredit him as
+politician they maligned him socially, and the idea that a man desires
+"to abolish marriage and the home," is a most convenient poniard, and
+the one most certain to wound. This was the origin of his worst
+difficulties, to be intensified, ere long, by his defence of
+Malthusianism. On me also fell the same lash, and I found myself held
+up to hatred as upholder of views that I abhorred.
+
+I may add that far warmer praise than that bestowed on this book by
+Mr. Bradlaugh was given by other writers, who were never attacked in
+the same way.
+
+In the _Reasoner_, edited by Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, I find warmer
+praise of it than in the _National Reformer_; in the review the
+following passage appears:--
+
+"In some respects all books of this class are evils: but it would be
+weakness and criminal prudery--a prudery as criminal as vice
+itself--not to say that such a book as the one in question is not only
+a far lesser evil than the one that it combats, but in one sense a
+book which it is a mercy to issue and courage to publish."
+
+The _Examiner_, reviewing the same book, declared it to be--
+
+"A very valuable, though rather heterogeneous book.... This is, we
+believe, the only book that has fully, honestly, and in a scientific
+spirit recognised all the elements in the problem--How are mankind to
+triumph over poverty, with its train of attendant evils?--and
+fearlessly endeavoured to find a practical solution."
+
+The _British Journal of Homoeopathy_ wrote:--
+
+"Though quite out of the province of our journal, we cannot refrain
+from stating that this work is unquestionably the most remarkable one,
+in many respects, we have ever met with. Though we differ _toto coelo_
+from the author in his views of religion and morality, and hold some
+of his remedies to tend rather to a dissolution than a reconstruction
+of society, yet we are bound to admit the benevolence and philanthropy
+of his motives. The scope of the work is nothing less than the whole
+field of political economy."
+
+Ernest Jones and others wrote yet more strongly, but out of all these
+Charles Bradlaugh alone has been selected for reproach, and has had
+the peculiar views of the anonymous author fathered on himself.
+
+Some of the lecture work in those days was pretty rough. In Darwen,
+Lancashire, in June, 1875, stone-throwing was regarded as a fair
+argument addressed to the Atheist lecturer. At Swansea, in March,
+1876, the fear of violence was so great that a guarantee against
+damage to the hall was exacted by the proprietor, and no local friend
+had the courage to take the chair for me. In September, 1876, at
+Hoyland, thanks to the exertions of Mr. Hebblethwaite, a Primitive
+Methodist, and two Protestant missionaries, I found the hall packed
+with a crowd that yelled at me with great vigour, stood on forms,
+shook fists at me, and otherwise showed feelings more warm than
+friendly. Taking advantage of a lull in the noise, I began to speak,
+and the tumult sank into quietness; but as I was leaving the hall it
+broke out afresh, and I walked slowly through a crowd that yelled and
+swore and struck at me, but somehow those nearest always shrank back
+and let me pass. In the dark, outside the hall, they took to kicking,
+but only one kick reached me, and the attempts to overturn the cab
+were foiled by the driver, who put his horse at a gallop. Later in the
+same month Mr. Bradlaugh and I visited Congleton together, having been
+invited there by Mr. and Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy. Mr. Bradlaugh
+lectured on the first evening to an accompaniment of broken windows,
+and I, sitting with Mrs. Elmy facing the platform, received a rather
+heavy blow on the back of the head from a stone thrown by some one in
+the room. We had a mile and a half to walk from the hall to the house,
+and were accompanied all the way by a stone-throwing crowd, who sang
+hymns at the tops of their voices, with interludes of curses and foul
+words. On the following evening I lectured, and our stone-throwing
+admirers escorted us to the hall; in the middle of the lecture a man
+shouted, "Put her out!" and a well-known wrestler of the
+neighbourhood, named Burbery, who had come to the hall with some
+friends to break up the meeting, stood up as at a signal in front of
+the platform and loudly interrupted. Mr. Bradlaugh, who was in the
+chair, told him to sit down, and, as he persisted in interrupting,
+informed him that he must either be quiet or go out. "Put me out!"
+shouted Mr. Burbery, striking an attitude. Mr. Bradlaugh left the
+platform and walked up to the noisy swashbuckler, who at once grappled
+with him and tried to throw him. But Mr. Burbery had not reckoned on
+the massive strength of his opponent, and when the "throw" was
+complete Mr. Burbery was underneath. Amid much excitement Mr. Burbery
+was propelled towards the door, being gently used on the way as a
+battering-ram against his friends who rushed to the rescue, and at the
+door was handed over to the police. The chairman then resumed his
+normal duties, with a brief "Go on" to me, and I promptly went on,
+finishing the lecture in peace. But outside the hall there was plenty
+of stone-throwing, and Mrs. Elmy received a cut on the temple from a
+flint. This stormy work gradually lessened, and my experience of it
+was a mere trifle compared to that which my predecessors had faced.
+Mr. Bradlaugh's early experiences involved much serious rioting, and
+Mrs. Harriet Law, a woman of much courage and of strong natural
+ability, had many a rough meeting in her lecturing days.
+
+In September, 1875, Mr. Bradlaugh again sailed for America, still to
+earn money there to pay his debts. Unhappily he was struck down by
+typhoid fever, and all his hopes of freeing himself thus were
+destroyed. His life was well-nigh despaired of, but the admirable
+skill of physician and nurse pulled him through. Said the _Baltimore
+Advertiser_:--
+
+"This long and severe illness has disappointed the hopes and retarded
+the object for which he came to this country; but he is gentleness and
+patience itself in his sickness in this strange land, and has endeared
+himself greatly to his physicians and attendants by his gratitude and
+appreciation of the slightest attention."
+
+His fortitude in face of death was also much commented on, lying there
+as he did far from home and from all he loved best. Never a quiver of
+fear touched him as he walked down into the valley of the shadow of
+death; the Rev. Mr. Frothingham bore public and admiring testimony in
+his own church to Mr. Bradlaugh's noble serenity, at once fearless and
+unpretending, and, himself a Theist, gave willing witness to the
+Atheist's calm strength. He came back to us at the end of September,
+worn to a shadow, weak as a child, and for many a long month he bore
+the traces of his wrestle with death.
+
+One part of my autumn's work during his absence was the delivery and
+subsequent publication of six lectures on the French Revolution. That
+stormy time had for me an intense fascination. I brooded over it,
+dreamed over it, and longed to tell the story from the people's point
+of view. I consequently read a large amount of the current literature
+of the time, as well as Louis Blanc's monumental work and the
+histories of Michelet, Lamartine, and others. Fortunately for me, Mr.
+Bradlaugh had a splendid collection of books on the subject, and ere
+we left England he brought me two cabs-full of volumes, aristocratic,
+ecclesiastical, democratic, and I studied all these diligently, and
+lived in them, till the French Revolution became to me as a drama in
+which I had myself taken part, and the actors were to me as personal
+friends and foes. In this, again, as in so much of my public work, I
+have to thank Mr. Bradlaugh for the influence which led me to read
+fully all sides of a question, and to read most carefully those from
+which I differed most, ere I considered myself competent to write or
+to speak thereon. From 1875 onwards I held office as one of the
+vice-presidents of the National Secular Society--a society founded on
+a broad basis of liberty, with the inspiring motto, "We Search for
+Truth." Mr. Bradlaugh was president, and I held office under him till
+he resigned his post in February, 1890, nine months after I had joined
+the Theosophical Society. The N.S.S., under his judicious and
+far-sighted leadership, became a real force in the country,
+theologically and politically, embracing large numbers of men and
+women who were Freethinkers as well as Radicals, and forming a nucleus
+of earnest workers, able to gather round them still larger numbers of
+others, and thus to powerfully affect public opinion. Once a year the
+society met in conference, and many a strong and lasting friendship
+between men living far apart dated from these yearly gatherings, so
+that all over the country spread a net-work of comradeship between the
+staunch followers of "our Charlie." These were the men and women who
+paid his election expenses over and over again, supported him in his
+Parliamentary struggle, came up to London to swell the demonstrations
+in his favour. And round them grew up a huge party--"the largest
+personal following of any public man since Mr. Gladstone," it was once
+said by an eminent man--who differed from him in theology, but
+passionately supported him in politics; miners, cutlers, weavers,
+spinners, shoemakers, operatives of every trade, strong, sturdy,
+self-reliant men who loved him to the last.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE KNOWLTON PAMPHLET.
+
+
+The year 1877 dawned, and in its early days began a struggle which,
+ending in victory all along the line, brought with it pain and anguish
+that I scarcely care to recall. An American physician, Dr. Charles
+Knowlton, convinced of the truth of the teaching of the Rev. Mr.
+Malthus, and seeing that that teaching had either no practical value
+or tended to the great increase of prostitution, unless married
+people were taught to limit their families within their means of
+livelihood--wrote a pamphlet on the voluntary limitation of the
+family. It was published somewhere in the Thirties--about 1835, I
+think--and was sold unchallenged in England as well as in America for
+some forty years. Philosophers of the Bentham school, like John Stuart
+Mill, endorsed its teachings, and the bearing of population on poverty
+was an axiom in economic literature. Dr. Knowlton's work was a
+physiological treatise, advocating conjugal prudence and parental
+responsibility; it argued in favour of early marriage, with a view to
+the purity of social life; but as early marriage between persons of
+small means generally implies a large family, leading either to
+pauperism or to lack of necessary food, clothing, education, and fair
+start in life for the children, Dr. Knowlton advocated the restriction
+of the number of the family within the means of subsistence, and
+stated the methods by which this restriction could be carried out. The
+book was never challenged till a disreputable Bristol bookseller put
+some copies on sale to which he added some improper pictures, and he
+was prosecuted and convicted. The publisher of the _National Reformer_
+and of Mr. Bradlaugh's and my books and pamphlets had taken over a
+stock of Knowlton's pamphlets among other literature he bought, and he
+was prosecuted and, to our great dismay, pleaded guilty. We at once
+removed our publishing from his hands, and after careful deliberation
+we decided to publish the incriminated pamphlet in order to test the
+right of discussion on the population question, when, with the advice
+to limit the family, information was given as to how that advice could
+be followed. We took a little shop, printed the pamphlet, and sent
+notice to the police that we would commence the sale at a certain day
+and hour, and ourselves sell the pamphlet, so that no one else might
+be endangered by our action. We resigned our offices in the National
+Secular Society that we might not injure the society, but the
+executive first, and then the Annual Conference, refused to accept the
+resignations. Our position as regarded the pamphlet was simple and
+definite; had it been brought to us for publication, we stated, we
+should not have published it, for it was not a treatise of high merit;
+but, prosecuted as immoral because it advised the limitation of the
+family, it at once embodied the right of publication. In a preface to
+the republished edition, we wrote:--
+
+"We republish this pamphlet, honestly believing that on all questions
+affecting the happiness of the people, whether they be theological,
+political, or social, fullest right of free discussion ought to be
+maintained at all hazards. We do not personally endorse all that Dr.
+Knowlton says: his 'Philosophical Proem' seems to us full of
+philosophical mistakes, and--as we are neither of us doctors--we are
+not prepared to endorse his medical views; but since progress can only
+be made through discussion, and no discussion is possible where
+differing opinions are suppressed, we claim the right to publish all
+opinions, so that the public, enabled to see all sides of a question,
+may have the materials for forming a sound judgment."
+
+We were not blind to the danger to which this defiance of the
+authorities exposed us, but it was not the danger of failure, with the
+prison as penalty, that gave us pause. It was the horrible
+misconceptions that we saw might arise; the odious imputations on
+honour and purity that would follow. Could we, the teachers of a lofty
+morality, venture to face a prosecution for publishing what would be
+technically described as an obscene book, and risk the ruin of our
+future, dependent as that was on our fair fame? To Mr. Bradlaugh it
+meant, as he felt, the almost certain destruction of his Parliamentary
+position, the forging by his own hands of a weapon that in the hands
+of his foes would be well-nigh fatal. To me it meant the loss of the
+pure reputation I prized, the good name I had guarded--scandal the
+most terrible a woman could face. But I had seen the misery of the
+poor, of my sister-women with children crying for bread; the wages of
+the workmen were often sufficient for four, but eight or ten they
+could not maintain. Should I set my own safety, my own good name,
+against the helping of these? Did it matter that my reputation should
+be ruined, if its ruin helped to bring remedy to this otherwise
+hopeless wretchedness of thousands? What was worth all my talk about
+self-sacrifice and self-surrender, if, brought to the test, I failed?
+So, with heart aching but steady, I came to my resolution; and though
+I know now that I was wrong intellectually, and blundered in the
+remedy, I was right morally in the will to sacrifice all to help the
+poor, and I can rejoice that I faced a storm of obloquy fiercer and
+harder to bear than any other which can ever touch me again. I learned
+a lesson of stern indifference to all judgments from without that were
+not endorsed by condemnation from within. The long suffering that
+followed was a splendid school for the teaching of endurance.
+
+The day before the pamphlet was put on sale we ourselves delivered
+copies to the Chief Clerk of the Magistrates at Guildhall, to the
+officer in charge at the City Police Office in Old Jewry, and to the
+Solicitor for the City of London. With each pamphlet was a notice that
+we would attend and sell the book from 4 to 5 p.m. on the following
+day, Saturday, March 24th. This we accordingly did, and in order to
+save trouble we offered to attend daily at the shop from 10 to 11 a.m.
+to facilitate our arrest, should the authorities determine to
+prosecute. The offer was readily accepted, and after some little
+delay--during which a deputation from the Christian Evidence Society
+waited upon Mr. Cross to urge the Tory Government to prosecute
+us--warrants were issued against us and we were arrested on April 6th.
+Letters of approval and encouragement came from the most diverse
+quarters, including among their writers General Garibaldi, the
+well-known economist, Yves Guyot, the great French constitutional
+lawyer, Emile Acollas, together with letters literally by the hundred
+from poor men and women thanking and blessing us for the stand taken.
+Noticeable were the numbers of letters from clergymen's wives, and
+wives of ministers of all denominations.
+
+After our arrest we were taken to the police-station in Bridewell
+Place, and thence to the Guildhall, where Alderman Figgins was
+sitting, before whom we duly appeared, while in the back of the court
+waited what an official described as "a regular waggon-load of bail."
+We were quickly released, the preliminary investigation being fixed
+for ten days later--April 17th. At the close of the day the magistrate
+released us on our own recognisances, without bail; and it was so
+fully seen on all sides that we were fighting for a principle that no
+bail was asked for during the various stages of the trial. Two days
+later we were committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court, but
+Mr. Bradlaugh moved for a writ of _certiorari_ to remove the trial to
+the Court of Queen's Bench; Lord Chief Justice Cockburn said he would
+grant the writ if "upon looking at it (the book), we think its object
+is the legitimate one of promoting knowledge on a matter of human
+interest," but not if the science were only a cover for impurity, and
+he directed that copies of the book should be handed in for perusal by
+himself and Mr. Justice Mellor. Having read the book they granted the
+writ.
+
+The trial commenced on June 18th before the Lord Chief Justice of
+England and a special jury, Sir Hardinge Giffard, the
+Solicitor-General of the Tory Government, leading against us, and we
+defending ourselves. The Lord Chief Justice "summed up strongly for an
+acquittal," as a morning paper said; he declared that "a more
+ill-advised and more injudicious proceeding in the way of a
+prosecution was probably never brought into a court of justice," and
+described us as "two enthusiasts who have been actuated by a desire to
+do good in a particular department of society." He then went on to a
+splendid statement of the law of population, and ended by praising our
+straightforwardness and asserting Knowlton's honesty of intention.
+Every one in court thought that we had won our case, but they had not
+taken into account the religious and political hatred against us and
+the presence on the jury of such men as Mr. Walter, of the _Times_.
+After an hour and thirty-five minutes of delay the verdict was a
+compromise: "We are unanimously of opinion that the book in question
+is calculated to deprave public morals, but at the same time we
+entirely exonerate the defendants from any corrupt motive in
+publishing it." The Lord Chief Justice looked troubled, and said that
+he should have to translate the verdict into one of guilty, and on
+that some of the jury turned to leave the box, it having been
+agreed--we heard later from one of them--that if the verdict were not
+accepted in that form they should retire again, as six of the jury
+were against convicting us; but the foreman, who was bitterly hostile,
+jumped at the chance of snatching a conviction, and none of those in
+our favour had the courage to contradict him on the spur of the
+moment, so the foreman's "Guilty" passed, and the judge set us free,
+on Mr. Bradlaugh's recognisances to come up for judgment that day
+week.
+
+On that day we moved to quash the indictment and for a new trial,
+partly on a technical ground and partly on the ground that the
+verdict, having acquitted us of wrong motive, was in our favour, not
+against us. On this the Court did not agree with us, holding that the
+part of the indictment alleging corrupt motive was superfluous. Then
+came the question of sentence, and on this the Lord Chief Justice did
+his best to save us; we were acquitted of any intent to violate the
+law; would we submit to the verdict of the jury and promise not to
+sell the book? No, we would not; we claimed the right to sell, and
+meant to vindicate it. The judge pleaded, argued, finally got angry
+with us, and, at last, compelled to pass sentence, he stated that if
+we would have yielded he would have let us go free without penalty,
+but that as we would set ourselves against the law, break it and defy
+it--a sore offence from the judge's point of view--he could only pass
+a heavy sentence on each of six months' imprisonment, a fine of £200,
+and recognisances of £500 for two years, and this, as he again
+repeated, upon the assumption "that they do intend to set the law at
+defiance." Even despite this he made us first-class misdemeanants.
+Then, as Mr. Bradlaugh stated that we should move for a writ of error,
+he liberated us on Mr. Bradlaugh's recognisance for £100, the queerest
+comment on his view of the case and of our characters, since we were
+liable jointly to £1,400 under the sentence, to say nothing of the
+imprisonment. But prison and money penalties vanished into thin air,
+for the writ of error was granted, proved successful, and the verdict
+was quashed.
+
+Then ensued a somewhat anxious time. We were resolute to continue
+selling; were our opponents equally resolved to prosecute us? We could
+not tell. I wrote a pamphlet entitled "The Law of Population," giving
+the arguments which had convinced me of its truth, the terrible
+distress and degradation entailed on families by overcrowding and the
+lack of the necessaries of life, pleading for early marriages that
+prostitution might be destroyed, and limitation of the family that
+pauperism might be avoided; finally, giving the information which
+rendered early marriage without these evils possible. This pamphlet
+was put in circulation as representing our view of the subject, and we
+again took up the sale of Knowlton's. Mr. Bradlaugh carried the war
+into the enemy's country, and commenced an action against the police
+for the recovery of some pamphlets they had seized; he carried the
+action to a successful issue, recovered the pamphlets, bore them off
+in triumph, and we sold them all with an inscription across them,
+"Recovered from the police." We continued the sale of Knowlton's tract
+for some time, until we received an intimation that no further
+prosecution would be attempted, and on this we at once dropped its
+publication, substituting for it my "Law of Population."
+
+[Illustration: CHARLES BRADLAUGH M.P.]
+
+But the worst part of the fight, for me, was to come. Prosecution of
+the "Law of Population" was threatened, but never commenced; a worse
+weapon against me was in store. An attempt had been made in August,
+1875, to deprive me of the custody of my little girl by hiding her
+away when she went on her annual visit of one month to her father, but
+I had promptly recovered her by threatening to issue a writ of _habeas
+corpus._ Now it was felt that the Knowlton trial might be added to the
+charges of blasphemy that could be urged against me, and that this
+double-barrelled gun might be discharged with effect. I received
+notice in January, 1878, that an application was to be made to the
+High Court of Chancery to deprive me of the child, but the petition
+was not filed till the following April. Mabel was dangerously ill with
+scarlet fever at the time, and though this fact was communicated to
+her father I received a copy of the petition while sitting at her
+bedside. The petition alleged that, "The said Annie Besant is, by
+addresses, lectures, and writings, endeavouring to propagate the
+principles of Atheism, and has published a book entitled 'The Gospel
+of Atheism.' She has also associated herself with an infidel lecturer
+and author named Charles Bradlaugh in giving lectures and in
+publishing books and pamphlets, whereby the truth of the Christian
+religion is impeached, and disbelief in all religion inculcated."
+
+It further alleged against me the publication of the Knowlton
+pamphlet, and the writing of the "Law of Population." Unhappily, the
+petition came for hearing before the then Master of the Rolls, Sir
+George Jessel, a man animated by the old spirit of Hebrew bigotry, to
+which he had added the time-serving morality of a "man of the world,"
+sceptical as to all sincerity, and contemptuous of all devotion to an
+unpopular cause. The treatment I received at his hands on my first
+appearance in court told me what I had to expect. I had already had
+some experience of English judges, the stately kindness and gentleness
+of the Lord Chief Justice, the perfect impartiality and dignified
+courtesy of the Lords Justices of Appeal. My astonishment, then, can
+be imagined when, in answer to a statement by Mr. Ince, Q.C., that I
+appeared in person, I heard a harsh, loud voice exclaim:
+
+"Appear in person? A lady appear in person? Never heard of such a
+thing! Does the lady really appear in person?"
+
+As the London papers had been full of my appearing in person in the
+other courts and had contained the high compliments of the Lord Chief
+Justice on my conduct of my own case, Sir George Jessel's pretended
+astonishment seemed a little overdone. After a variety of similar
+remarks delivered in the most grating tones and in the roughest
+manner, Sir George Jessel tried to obtain his object by browbeating me
+directly. "Is this the lady?"
+
+"I am the respondent, my lord, Mrs. Besant."
+
+"Then I advise you, Mrs. Besant, to employ counsel to represent you,
+if you can afford it; and I suppose you can."
+
+"With all submission to your lordship, I am afraid I must claim my
+right of arguing my case in person."
+
+"You will do so if you please, of course, but I think you had much
+better appear by counsel. I give you notice that, if you do not, you
+must not expect to be shown any consideration. You will not be heard
+by me at any greater length than the case requires, nor allowed to go
+into irrelevant matter, as persons who argue their own cases usually
+do."
+
+"I trust I shall not do so, my lord; but in any case I shall be
+arguing under your lordship's complete control."
+
+This encouraging beginning may be taken as a sample of the case--it
+was one long fight against clever counsel, aided by a counsel instead
+of a judge on the bench. Only once did judge and counsel fall out. Mr.
+Ince and Mr. Bardswell had been arguing that my Atheism and
+Malthusianism made me an unfit guardian for my child; Mr. Ince
+declared that Mabel, educated by me, would "be helpless for good in
+this world," and "hopeless for good hereafter, outcast in this life
+and damned in the next." Mr. Bardswell implored the judge to consider
+that my custody of her "would be detrimental to the future prospects
+of the child in society, to say nothing of her eternal prospects." Had
+not the matter been to me of such heart-breaking importance, I could
+have laughed at the mixture of Mrs. Grundy, marriage establishment,
+and hell, presented as an argument for robbing a mother of her child.
+But Mr. Bardswell carelessly forgot that Sir George Jessel was a Jew,
+and lifting eyes to heaven in horrified appeal, he gasped out:
+
+"Your lordship, I think, will scarcely credit it, but Mrs. Besant
+says, in a later affidavit, that she took away the Testament from the
+child because it contained coarse passages unfit for a child to read."
+
+The opportunity was too tempting for a Jew to refrain from striking at
+a book written by apostate Jews, and Sir George Jessel answered
+sharply:
+
+"It is not true to say there are no passages unfit for a child's
+reading, because I think there are a great many."
+
+"I do not know of any passages that could fairly be called coarse."
+
+"I cannot quite assent to that."
+
+Barring this little episode judge and counsel showed a charming
+unanimity. I distinctly said I was an Atheist, that I had withdrawn
+the child from religious instruction at the day-school she attended,
+that I had written various anti-Christian books, and so on; but I
+claimed the child's custody on the ground that the deed of separation
+distinctly gave it to me, and had been executed by her father after I
+had left the Christian Church, and that my opinions were not
+sufficient to invalidate it. It was admitted on the other side that
+the child was admirably cared for, and there was no attempt at
+attacking my personal character. The judge stated that I had taken the
+greatest possible care of the child, but decided that the mere fact of
+my refusing to give the child religious instruction was sufficient
+ground for depriving me of her custody. Secular education he regarded
+as "not only reprehensible, but detestable, and likely to work utter
+ruin to the child, and I certainly should upon this ground alone
+decide that this child ought not to remain another day under the care
+of her mother."
+
+Sir George Jessel denounced also my Malthusian views in a fashion at
+once so brutal and so untruthful as to facts, that some years later
+another judge, the senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court of New
+South Wales, declared in a judgment delivered in his own court that
+there was "no language used by Lord Cockburn which justified the
+Master of the Rolls in assuming that Lord Cockburn regarded the book
+as obscene," and that "little weight is to be attached to his opinion
+on a point not submitted for his decision"; he went on to administer a
+sharp rebuke for the way in which Sir George Jessel travelled outside
+the case, and remarked that "abuse, however, of an unpopular opinion,
+whether indulged in by judges or other people, is not argument, nor
+can the vituperation of opponents in opinion prove them to be
+immoral." However, Sir George Jessel was all-powerful in his own
+court, and he deprived me of my child, refusing to stay the order even
+until the hearing of my appeal against his decision. A messenger from
+the father came to my house, and the little child was carried away by
+main force, shrieking and struggling, still weak from the fever, and
+nearly frantic with fear and passionate resistance. No access to her
+was given me, and I gave notice that if access were denied me, I would
+sue for a restitution of conjugal rights, merely that I might see my
+children. But the strain had been too great, and I nearly went mad,
+spending hours pacing up and down the empty rooms, striving to weary
+myself to exhaustion that I might forget. The loneliness and silence
+of the house, of which my darling had always been the sunshine and the
+music, weighed on me like an evil dream; I listened for the patter of
+the dancing feet, and merry, thrilling laughter that rang through the
+garden, the sweet music of the childish voice; during my sleepless
+nights I missed in the darkness the soft breathing of the little
+child; each morning I longed in vain for the clinging arms and soft,
+sweet kisses. At last health broke down, and fever struck me, and
+mercifully gave me the rest of pain and delirium instead of the agony
+of conscious loss. Through that terrible illness, day after day, Mr.
+Bradlaugh came to me, and sat writing beside me, feeding me with ice
+and milk, refused from all others, and behaving more like a tender
+mother than a man friend; he saved my life, though it seemed to me for
+awhile of little value, till the first months of lonely pain were
+over. When recovered, I took steps to set aside an order obtained by
+Mr. Besant during my illness, forbidding me to bring any suit against
+him, and even the Master of the Rolls, on hearing that all access had
+been denied to me, and the money due to me stopped, uttered words of
+strong condemnation of the way in which I had been treated. Finally
+the deed of separation executed in 1873 was held to be good as
+protecting Mr. Besant from any suit brought by me, whether for divorce
+or for restitution of conjugal rights, while the clauses giving me the
+custody of the child were set aside. The Court of Appeal in April,
+1879, upheld the decision, the absolute right of the father as against
+a married mother being upheld. This ignoring of all right to her
+children on the part of the married mother is a scandal and a wrong
+that has since been redressed by Parliament, and the husband has no
+longer in his grasp this instrument of torture, whose power to agonise
+depends on the tenderness and strength of the motherliness of the
+wife. In the days when the law took my child from me, it virtually
+said to all women: "Choose which of these two positions, as wife and
+mother, you will occupy. If you are legally your husband's wife, you
+can have no legal claim to your children; if legally you are your
+husband's mistress, your rights as mother are secure." That stigma on
+marriage is now removed.
+
+One thing I gained in the Court of Appeal. The Court expressed a
+strong view as to my right of access, and directed me to apply to Sir
+George Jessel for it, adding that it could not doubt he would grant
+it. Under cover of this I applied to the Master of the Rolls, and
+obtained liberal access to the children; but I found that my visits
+kept Mabel in a continual state of longing and fretting for me, while
+the ingenious forms of petty insult that were devised against me and
+used in the children's presence would soon become palpable to them and
+cause continual pain. So, after a painful struggle with myself, I
+resolved to give up the right of seeing them, feeling that thus only
+could I save them from constantly recurring conflict, destructive of
+all happiness and of all respect for one or the other parent.
+Resolutely I turned my back on them that I might spare them trouble,
+and determined that, robbed of my own, I would be a mother to all
+helpless children I could aid, and cure the pain at my own heart by
+soothing the pain of others.
+
+As far as regards this whole struggle over the Knowlton pamphlet,
+victory was finally won all along the line. Not only did we, as
+related, recover all our seized pamphlets, and continue the sale till
+all prosecution and threat of prosecution were definitely surrendered;
+but my own tract had an enormous sale, so that when I withdrew it from
+sale in June, 1891, I was offered a large sum for the copyright, an
+offer which I, of course, refused. Since that time not a copy has been
+sold with my knowledge or permission, but long ere that the pamphlet
+had received a very complete legal vindication. For while it
+circulated untouched in England, a prosecution was attempted against
+it in New South Wales, but was put an end to by an eloquent and
+luminous judgment by the senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court, Mr.
+Justice Windmeyer, in December, 1888. This judge, the most respected
+in the great Australian colony, spoke out plainly and strongly on the
+morality of such teaching. "Take the case," he said, "of a woman
+married to a drunken husband, steadily ruining his constitution and
+hastening to the drunkard's doom, loss of employment for himself,
+semi-starvation for his family, and finally death, without a shilling
+to leave those whom he has brought into the world, but armed with the
+authority of the law to treat his wife as his slave, ever brutally
+insisting on the indulgence of his marital rights. Where is the
+immorality, if, already broken in health from unresting maternity,
+having already a larger family than she can support when the miserable
+breadwinner has drunk himself to death, the woman avails herself of
+the information given in this book, and so averts the consequences of
+yielding to her husband's brutal insistence on his marital rights?
+Already weighted with a family that she is unable to decently bring
+up, the immorality, it seems to me, would be in the reckless and
+criminal disregard of precautions which would prevent her bringing
+into the world daughters whose future outlook as a career would be
+prostitution, or sons whose inherited taint of alcoholism would soon
+drag them down with their sisters to herd with the seething mass of
+degenerate and criminal humanity that constitutes the dangerous
+classes of great cities. In all these cases the appeal is from
+thoughtless, unreasoning prejudice to conscience, and, if listened to,
+its voice will be heard unmistakably indicating where the path of duty
+lies."
+
+The judge forcibly refused to be any party to the prohibition of such
+a pamphlet, regarding it as of high service to the community. He said:
+"So strong is the dread of the world's censure upon this topic that
+few have the courage openly to express their views upon it; and its
+nature is such that it is only amongst thinkers who discuss all
+subjects, or amongst intimate acquaintances, that community of thought
+upon the question is discovered. But let any one inquire amongst those
+who have sufficient education and ability to think for themselves, and
+who do not idly float, slaves to the current of conventional opinion,
+and he will discover that numbers of men and women of purest lives, of
+noblest aspirations, pious, cultivated, and refined, see no wrong in
+teaching the ignorant that it is wrong to bring into the world
+children to whom they cannot do justice, and who think it folly to
+stop short in telling them simply and plainly how to prevent it. A
+more robust view of morals teaches that it is puerile to ignore human
+passions and human physiology. A clearer perception of truth and the
+safety of trusting to it teaches that in law, as in religion, it is
+useless trying to limit the knowledge of mankind by any inquisitorial
+attempts to place upon a judicial Index Expurgatorius works written
+with an earnest purpose, and commending themselves to thinkers of
+well-balanced minds. I will be no party to any such attempt. I do not
+believe that it was ever meant that the Obscene Publication Act should
+apply to cases of this kind, but only to the publication of such
+matter as all good men would regard as lewd and filthy, to lewd and
+bawdy novels, pictures and exhibitions, evidently published and given
+for lucre's sake. It could never have been intended to stifle the
+expression of thought by the earnest-minded on a subject of
+transcendent national importance like the present, and I will not
+strain it for that purpose. As pointed out by Lord Cockburn in the
+case of the Queen v. Bradlaugh and Besant, all prosecutions of this
+kind should be regarded as mischievous, even by those who disapprove
+the opinions sought to be stifled, inasmuch as they only tend more
+widely to diffuse the teaching objected to. To those, on the other
+hand, who desire its promulgation, it must be a matter of
+congratulation that this, like all attempted persecutions of thinkers,
+will defeat its own object, and that truth, like a torch, 'the more
+it's shook it shines.'"
+
+The argument of Mr. Justice Windmeyer for the Neo-Malthusian position
+was (as any one may see who reads the full text of the judgment) one
+of the most luminous and cogent I have ever read. The judgment was
+spoken of at the time in the English press as a "brilliant triumph for
+Mrs. Besant," and so I suppose it was; but no legal judgment could
+undo the harm wrought on the public mind in England by malignant and
+persistent misrepresentation. What that trial and its results cost me
+in pain no one but myself will ever know; on the other hand, there was
+the passionate gratitude evidenced by letters from thousands of poor
+married women--many from the wives of country clergymen and
+curates--thanking and blessing me for showing them how to escape from
+the veritable hell in which they lived. The "upper classes" of society
+know nothing about the way in which the poor live; how their
+overcrowding destroys all sense of personal dignity, of modesty, of
+outward decency, till human life, as Bishop Fraser justly said, is
+"degraded below the level of the swine." To such, and among such I
+went, and I could not grudge the price that then seemed to me as the
+ransom for their redemption. To me, indeed, it meant the losing of all
+that made life dear, but for them it seemed to be the gaining of all
+that gave hope of a better future. So how could I hesitate--I whose
+heart had been fired by devotion to an ideal Humanity, inspired by
+that Materialism that is of love and not of hate?
+
+And now, in August, 1893, we find the _Christian World,_ the
+representative organ of orthodox Christian Protestantism, proclaiming
+the right and the duty of voluntary limitation of the family. In a
+leading article, after a number of letters had been inserted, it
+said:--
+
+"The conditions are assuredly wrong which bring one member of the
+married partnership into a bondage so cruel. It is no less evident
+that the cause of the bondage in such cases lies in the too rapid
+multiplication of the family. There was a time when any idea of
+voluntary limitation was regarded by pious people as interfering with
+Providence. We are beyond that now, and have become capable of
+recognising that Providence works through the common sense of
+individual brains. We limit population just as much by deferring
+marriage from prudential motives as by any action that may be taken
+after it.... Apart from certain methods of limitation, the morality of
+which is gravely questioned by many, there are certain
+easily-understood physiological laws of the subject, the failure to
+know and to observe which is inexcusable on the part either of men or
+women in these circumstances. It is worth noting in this connection
+that Dr. Billings, in his article in this month's _Forum_, on the
+diminishing birth-rate of the United States, gives as one of the
+reasons the greater diffusion of intelligence, by means of popular and
+school treatises on physiology, than formerly prevailed."
+
+Thus has opinion changed in sixteen years, and all the obloquy poured
+on us is seen to have been the outcome of ignorance and bigotry.
+
+As for the children, what was gained by their separation from me? The
+moment they were old enough to free themselves, they came back to me,
+my little girl's too brief stay with me being ended by her happy
+marriage, and I fancy the fears expressed for her eternal future will
+prove as groundless as the fears for her temporal ruin have proved to
+be! Not only so, but both are treading in my steps as regards their
+views of the nature and destiny of man, and have joined in their
+bright youth the Theosophical Society to which, after so many
+struggles, I won my way.
+
+The struggle on the right to discuss the prudential restraint of
+population did not, however, conclude without a martyr. Mr. Edward
+Truelove, alluded to above, was prosecuted for selling a treatise by
+Robert Dale Owen on "Moral Physiology," and a pamphlet entitled,
+"Individual, Family, and National Poverty." He was tried on February
+1, 1878, before the Lord Chief Justice in the Court of Queen's Bench,
+and was most ably defended by Professor W.A. Hunter. The jury spent
+two hours in considering their verdict, and returned into court and
+stated that they were unable to agree. The majority of the jury were
+ready to convict, if they felt sure that Mr. Truelove would not be
+punished, but one of them boldly declared in court: "As to the book,
+it is written in plain language for plain people, and I think that
+many more persons ought to know what the contents of the book are."
+The jury was discharged, in consequence of this one man's courage, but
+Mr. Truelove's persecutors--the Vice Society--were determined not to
+let their victim free. They proceeded to trial a second time, and
+wisely endeavoured to secure a special jury, feeling that as
+prudential restraint would raise wages by limiting the supply of
+labour, they would be more likely to obtain a verdict from a jury of
+"gentlemen" than from one composed of workers. This attempt was
+circumvented by Mr. Truelove's legal advisers, who let a _procedendo_
+go which sent back the trial to the Old Bailey. The second trial was
+held on May 16th at the Central Criminal Court before Baron Pollock
+and a common jury, Professor Hunter and Mr. J.M. Davidson appearing
+for the defence. The jury convicted, and the brave old man,
+sixty-eight years of age, was condemned to four months' imprisonment
+and £50 fine for selling a pamphlet which had been sold unchallenged,
+during a period of forty-five years, by James Watson, George Jacob
+Holyoake, Austin Holyoake, and Charles Watts. Mr. Grain, the counsel
+employed by the Vice Society, most unfairly used against Mr. Truelove
+my "Law of Population," a pamphlet which contained, Baron Pollock
+said, "the head and front of the offence in the other [the Knowlton]
+case." I find an indignant protest against this odious unfairness in
+the _National Reformer_ for May 19th: "My 'Law of Population' was used
+against Mr. Truelove as an aggravation of his offence, passing over
+the utter meanness--worthy only of Collette--of using against a
+prisoner a book whose author has never been attacked for writing
+it--does Mr. Collette, or do the authorities, imagine that the
+severity shown to Mr. Truelove will in any fashion deter me from
+continuing the Malthusian propaganda? Let me here assure them, one and
+all, that it will do nothing of the kind; I shall continue to sell the
+'Law of Population' and to advocate scientific checks to population,
+just as though Mr. Collette and his Vice Society were all dead and
+buried. In commonest justice they are bound to prosecute me, and if
+they get, and keep, a verdict against me, and succeed in sending me to
+prison, they will only make people more anxious to read my book, and
+make me more personally powerful as a teacher of the views which they
+attack."
+
+A persistent attempt was made to obtain a writ of error in Mr.
+Truelove's case, but the Tory Attorney-General, Sir John Holker,
+refused it, although the ground on which it was asked was one of the
+grounds on which a similar writ had been granted to Mr. Bradlaugh and
+myself. Mr. Truelove was therefore compelled to suffer his sentence,
+but memorials, signed by 11,000 persons, asking for his release, were
+sent to the Home Secretary from every part of the country, and a
+crowded meeting in St. James's Hall, London, demanded his liberation
+with only six dissentients. The whole agitation did not shorten Mr.
+Truelove's sentence by a single day, and he was not released from
+Coldbath Fields Prison until September 5th. On the 12th of the same
+month the Hall of Science was crowded with enthusiastic friends, who
+assembled to do him honour, and he was presented with a
+beautifully-illuminated address and a purse containing £177
+(subsequent subscriptions raised the amount to £197 16s. 6d.).
+
+It is scarcely necessary to say that one of the results of the
+prosecution was a great agitation throughout the country, and a wide
+popularisation of Malthusian views. Some huge demonstrations were held
+in favour of free discussion; on one occasion the Free Trade Hall,
+Manchester, was crowded to the doors; on another the Star Music Hall,
+Bradford, was crammed in every corner; on another the Town Hall,
+Birmingham, had not a seat or a bit of standing-room unoccupied.
+Wherever we went, separately or together, it was the same story, and
+not only were Malthusian lectures eagerly attended, and Malthusian
+literature eagerly bought, but curiosity brought many to listen to our
+Radical and Freethought lectures, and thousands heard for the first
+time what Secularism really meant. The Press, both London and
+provincial, agreed in branding the prosecution as foolish, and it was
+generally remarked that it resulted only in the wider circulation of
+the indicted book, and the increased popularity of those who had stood
+for the right of publication. The furious attacks since made upon us
+have been made chiefly by those who differ from us in theological
+creed, and who have found a misrepresentation of our prosecution
+served them as a convenient weapon of attack. During the last few
+years public opinion has been gradually coming round to our side, in
+consequence of the pressure of poverty resulting from widespread
+depression of trade, and during the sensation caused in 1884 by "The
+Bitter Cry of Outcast London," many writers in the _Daily
+News_--notably Mr. G.R. Sims--boldly alleged that the distress was to
+a great extent due to the large families of the poor, and mentioned
+that we had been prosecuted for giving the very knowledge which would
+bring salvation to the sufferers in our great cities.
+
+Among the useful results of the prosecution was the establishment of
+the Malthusian League, "to agitate for the abolition of all penalties
+on the public discussion of the population question," and "to spread
+among the people, by all practicable means, a knowledge of the law of
+population, of its consequences, and of its bearing upon human conduct
+and morals." The first general meeting of the League was held at the
+Hall of Science on July 26, 1877, and a council of twenty persons was
+elected, and this council on August 2nd elected Dr. C.R. Drysdale,
+M.D., President; Mr. Swaagman, Treasurer; Mrs. Besant, Secretary; Mr.
+Shearer, Assistant-Secretary; and Mr. Hember, Financial Secretary.
+Since 1877 the League, under the same indefatigable president, has
+worked hard to carry out its objects; it has issued a large number of
+leaflets and tracts; it supports a monthly journal, the _Malthusian;_
+numerous lectures have been delivered under its auspices in all parts
+of the country; and it has now a medical branch, into which none but
+duly qualified medical men and women are admitted, with members in all
+European countries.
+
+Another result of the prosecution was the accession of "D." to the
+staff of the _National Reformer_. This able and thoughtful writer came
+forward and joined our ranks as soon as he heard of the attack on us,
+and he further volunteered to conduct the journal during our expected
+imprisonment. From that time to this--a period of fifteen
+years--articles from his pen appeared in its columns week by week, and
+during all that time not one solitary difficulty arose between editors
+and contributor. In public a trustworthy colleague, in private a warm
+and sincere friend, "D." proved an unmixed benefit bestowed upon us by
+the prosecution.
+
+Nor was "D." the only friend brought to us by our foes. I cannot ever
+think of that time without remembering that the prosecution brought me
+first into close intimacy with Mrs. Annie Parris--the wife of Mr.
+Touzeau Parris, the Secretary of the Defence Committee throughout all
+the fight--a lady who, during that long struggle, and during the, for
+me, far worse struggle that succeeded it, over the custody of my
+daughter, proved to me the most loving and sisterly of friends. One or
+two other friendships which will, I hope, last my life, date from that
+same time of strife and anxiety.
+
+The amount of money subscribed by the public during the Knowlton and
+succeeding prosecutions gives some idea of the interest felt in the
+struggle. The Defence Fund Committee in March, 1878, presented a
+balance-sheet, showing subscriptions amounting to £1,292 5s. 4d., and
+total expenditure in the Queen v. Bradlaugh and Besant, the Queen v.
+Truelove, and the appeal against Mr. Vaughan's order (the last two up
+to date) of £1,274 10s. This account was then closed and the balance
+of £17 15s. 4d. passed on to a new fund for the defence of Mr.
+Truelove, the carrying on of the appeal against the destruction of the
+Knowlton pamphlet, and the bearing of the costs incident on the
+petition lodged against myself. In July this new fund had reached £196
+16s. 7d., and after paying the remainder of the costs in Mr.
+Truelove's case, a balance of £26 15s. 2d. was carried on. This again
+rose to £247 15s. 2-1/2d., and the fund bore the expenses of Mr.
+Bradlaugh's successful appeal on the Knowlton pamphlet, the petition
+and subsequent proceedings in which I was concerned in the Court of
+Chancery, and an appeal on Mr. Truelove's behalf, unfortunately
+unsuccessful, against an order for the destruction of the Dale Owen
+pamphlet. This last decision was given on February 21, 1880, and on
+this the Defence Fund was closed. On Mr. Truelove's release, as
+mentioned above, a testimonial to the amount of £197 16s. 6d. was
+presented to him, and after the close of the struggle some anonymous
+friend sent to me personally £200 as "thanks for the courage and
+ability shown." In addition to all this, the Malthusian League
+received no less than £455 11s. 9d. during the first year of its life,
+and started on its second year with a balance in hand of £77 5s. 8d.
+
+A somewhat similar prosecution in America, in which the bookseller,
+Mr. D.M. Bennett, sold a book with which he did not agree, and was
+imprisoned, led to our giving him a warm welcome when, after his
+release, he visited England. We entertained him at the Hall of Science
+at a crowded gathering, and I was deputed as spokesman to present him
+with a testimonial. This I did in the following speech, quoted here in
+order to show the spirit then animating me:--
+
+"Friends, Mr. Bradlaugh has spoken of the duty that calls us here
+to-night. It is pleasant to think that in our work that duty is one to
+which we are not unaccustomed. In our army there are more true
+soldiers than traitors, more that are faithful to the trust of keeping
+the truth than those who shrink when the hour of danger comes. And I
+would ask Mr. Bennett to-night not to measure English feeling towards
+him by the mere number of those present. They that are here are
+representatives of many thousands of our fellow-countrymen. Glance
+down this middle table, and you will see that it is not without some
+right that we claim to welcome you in the name of multitudes of the
+citizens of England. There are those who taunt us with want of
+loyalty, and with the name of infidels. In what church will they find
+men and women more loyal to truth and conscience? The name infidel is
+not for us so long as we are faithful to the truth we know. If I
+speak, as I have done, of national representation in this hall this
+evening, tell me, you who know those who sit here, who have watched
+some of them for years, others of them but for a brief time, do I not
+speak truth? Take them one by one. Your President but a little while
+ago in circumstances similar to those wherein our guest himself was
+placed, with the true lover's keenness that recognises the mistress
+under all disguise, beholding his mistress Liberty in danger, under
+circumstances that would have blinded less sure eyes, leapt to her
+rescue. He risked the ambition of his life rather than be disloyal to
+liberty. And next is seated a woman, who, student of a noble
+profession, thought that liberty had greater claim upon her than even
+her work. When we stood in worse peril than even loss of liberty, she
+risked her own good name for the truth's sake. One also is here who,
+eminent in his own profession, came with the weight of his position
+and his right to speak, and gave a kindred testimony. One step
+further, and you see one who, soldier to liberty, throughout a long
+and spotless life, when the task was far harder than it is to-day,
+when there were no greetings, no welcomes, when to serve was to peril
+name as well as liberty, never flinched from the first until now. He
+is crowned with the glory of the jail, that was his for no crime but
+for claiming the right to publish that wherein the noblest thought is
+uttered in the bravest words. And next to him is another who speaks
+for liberty, who has brought culture, university degree, position in
+men's sight, and many friends, and cast them all at her beloved feet.
+Sir, not alone the past and the present greet you to-night. The future
+also greets you with us. We have here also those who are training
+themselves to walk in the footsteps of the one most dear to them, who
+shall carry on, when we have passed away, the work which we shall have
+dropped from our hands. But he whom we delight to honour at this hour
+in truth honours us, in that he allows us to offer him the welcome
+that it is our glory and our pleasure to give. He has fought bravely.
+The Christian creed had in its beginning more traitors and less true
+hearts than the creed of to-day. We are happy to-day not only in the
+thought of what manner of men we have for leaders, but in the thought
+of what manner of men we have as soldiers in our army. Jesus had
+twelve apostles. One betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver; a
+second denied Him. They all forsook Him and fled. We can scarcely
+point to one who has thus deserted our sacred cause. The traditions of
+our party tell us of many who went to jail because they claimed for
+all that right of free speech which is the heritage of all. One of the
+most famous members of our body in England, Richard Carlile, turned
+bookseller to sell books that were prosecuted. This man became
+Free-thinker, driven thereto by the bigotry and wickedness of the
+Churches. He sold the books of Hone not because he agreed with them,
+but because Hone was prosecuted. He saw that the book in whose
+prosecution freedom was attacked was the book for the freeman to sell;
+and the story of our guest shows that in all this England and America
+are one. Those who gave Milton to the world can yet bring forth men of
+the same stamp in continents leagues asunder. Because our friend was
+loyal and true, prison had to him no dread. It was far, far less of
+dishonour to wear the garb of the convict than to wear that of the
+hypocrite. The society we represent, like his society in America,
+pleads for free thought, speaks for free speech, claims for every one,
+however antagonistic, the right to speak the thought he feels. It is
+better that this should be, even though the thought be wrong, for thus
+the sooner will its error be discovered--better if the thought be
+right, for then the sooner does the gladness of a new truth find place
+in the heart of man. As the mouthpiece, Sir, of our National Secular
+Society, and of its thousands of members, I speak to you now:--
+
+"'ADDRESS.
+
+"'_We seek for Truth_.'
+
+"'To D.M. Bennett.
+
+"'In asking you to accept at the hands of the National Secular Society
+of England this symbol of cordial sympathy and brotherly welcome, we
+are but putting into act the motto of our Society. "We seek for Truth"
+is our badge, and it is as Truthseeker that we do you homage to-night.
+Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free
+speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without free speech progress
+is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards the nobler
+life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of
+free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the
+denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race.
+
+"'In your own country you have pleaded for free speech, and when,
+under a wicked and an odious law, one of your fellow-citizens was
+imprisoned for the publication of his opinions, you, not sharing the
+opinions but faithful to liberty, sprang forward to defend in him the
+principle of free speech which you claimed for yourself, and sold his
+book while he lay in prison. For this act you were in turn arrested
+and sent to jail, and the country which won its freedom by the aid of
+Paine in the eighteenth century disgraced itself in the nineteenth by
+the imprisonment of a heretic. The Republic of the United States
+dishonoured herself, and not you, in Albany penitentiary. Two hundred
+thousand of your countrymen pleaded for your release, but bigotry was
+too strong. We sent you greeting in your captivity; we rejoiced when
+the time came for your release. We offer you to-night our thanks and
+our hope--thanks for the heroism which never flinched in the hour of
+battle, hope for a more peaceful future, in which the memory of a past
+pain may be a sacred heritage and not a regret.
+
+"'Charles Bradlaugh, _President_.'
+
+"Soldier of liberty, we give you this. Do in the future the same good
+service that you have done in the past, and your reward shall be in
+the love that true men shall bear to you."
+
+That, however, which no force could compel me to do, which I refused
+to threats of fine and prison, to separation from my children, to
+social ostracism, and to insults and ignominy worse to bear than
+death, I surrendered freely when all the struggle was over, and a
+great part of society and of public opinion had adopted the view that
+cost Mr. Bradlaugh and myself so dear. I may as well complete the
+story here, so as not to have to refer to it again. I gave up
+Neo-Malthusianism in April, 1891, its renunciation being part of the
+outcome of two years' instruction from Mdme. H.P. Blavatsky, who
+showed me that however justifiable Neo-Malthusianism might be while
+man was regarded only as the most perfect outcome of physical
+evolution, it was wholly incompatible with the view of man as a
+spiritual being, whose material form and environment were the results
+of his own mental activity. Why and how I embraced Theosophy, and
+accepted H.P. Blavatsky as teacher, will soon be told in its proper
+place. Here I am concerned only with the why and how of my
+renunciation of the Neo-Malthusian teaching, for which I had fought so
+hard and suffered so much.
+
+When I built my life on the basis of Materialism I judged all actions
+by their effect on human happiness in this world now and in future
+generations, regarding man as an organism that lived on earth and
+there perished, with activities confined to earth and limited by
+physical laws. The object of life was the ultimate building-up of a
+physically, mentally, morally perfect man by the cumulative effects of
+heredity--mental and moral tendencies being regarded as the outcome of
+material conditions, to be slowly but surely evolved by rational
+selection and the transmission to offspring of qualities carefully
+acquired by, and developed in, parents. The most characteristic note
+of this serious and lofty Materialism had been struck by Professor W.
+K. Clifford in his noble article on the "Ethics of Belief."
+
+Taking this view of human duty in regard to the rational co-operation
+with nature in the evolution of the human race, it became of the first
+importance to rescue the control of the generation of offspring from
+mere blind brute passion, and to transfer it to the reason and to the
+intelligence; to impress on parents the sacredness of the parental
+office, the tremendous responsibility of the exercise of the creative
+function. And since, further, one of the most pressing problems for
+solution in the older countries is that of poverty, the horrible slums
+and dens into which are crowded and in which are festering families of
+eight and ten children, whose parents are earning an uncertain 10s.,
+12s., 15s., and 20s. a week; since an immediate palliative is wanted,
+if popular risings impelled by starvation are to be avoided; since the
+lives of men and women of the poorer classes, and of the worst paid
+professional classes, are one long, heart-breaking struggle "to make
+both ends meet and keep respectable"; since in the middle class
+marriage is often avoided, or delayed till late in life, from the
+dread of the large family, and late marriage is followed by its
+shadow, the prevalence of vice and the moral and social ruin of
+thousands of women; for these, and many other reasons, the teaching of
+the duty of limiting the family within the means of subsistence is the
+logical outcome of Materialism linked with the scientific view of
+evolution, and with a knowledge of the physical law, by which
+evolution is accelerated or retarded. Seeking to improve the physical
+type, scientific Materialism, it seemed to me, must forbid parentage
+to any but healthy married couples; it must restrict childbearing
+within the limits consistent with the thorough health and physical
+well-being of the mother; it must impose it as a duty never to bring
+children into the world unless the conditions for their fair nurture
+and development are present. Regarding it as hopeless, as well as
+mischievous, to preach asceticism, and looking on the conjunction of
+nominal celibacy with widespread prostitution as inevitable, from the
+constitution of human nature, scientific Materialism--quite rationally
+and logically--advises deliberate restriction of the production of
+offspring, while sanctioning the exercise of the sexual instinct
+within the limits imposed by temperance, the highest physical and
+mental efficiency, the good order and dignity of society, and the
+self-respect of the individual.
+
+In all this there is nothing which for one moment implies approval of
+licentiousness, profligacy, unbridled self-indulgence. On the
+contrary, it is a well-considered and intellectually-defensible scheme
+of human evolution, regarding all natural instincts as matters for
+regulation, not for destruction, and seeking to develop the perfectly
+healthy and well-balanced physical body as the necessary basis for the
+healthy and well-balanced mind. If the premises of Materialism be
+true, there is no answer to the Neo-Malthusian conclusions; for even
+those Socialists who have bitterly opposed the promulgation of
+Neo-Malthusianism--regarding it as a "red herring intended to draw the
+attention of the proletariat away from the real cause of poverty, the
+monopoly of land and capital by a class"--admit that when society is
+built on the foundation of common property in all that is necessary
+for the production of wealth, the time will come for the consideration
+of the population question. Nor do I now see, any more than I saw
+then, how any Materialist can rationally avoid the Neo-Malthusian
+position. For if man be the outcome of purely physical causes, it is
+with these that we must deal in guiding his future evolution. If he be
+related but to terrestrial existence, he is but the loftiest organism
+of earth; and, failing to see his past and his future, how should my
+eyes not have been then blinded to the deep-lying causes of his
+present woe? I brought a material cure to a disease which appeared to
+me to be of material origin; but how when the evil came from a subtler
+source, and its causes lay not on the material plane? How if the
+remedy only set up new causes for a future evil, and, while
+immediately a palliative, strengthened the disease itself, and ensured
+its reappearance in the future? This was the view of the problem set
+before me by H.P. Blavatsky when she unrolled the story of man, told
+of his origin and his destiny, showed me the forces that went to the
+making of man, and the true relation between his past, his present,
+and his future.
+
+For what is man in the light of Theosophy? He is a spiritual
+intelligence, eternal and uncreate, treading a vast cycle of human
+experience, born and reborn on earth millennium after millennium,
+evolving slowly into the ideal man. He is not the product of matter,
+but is encased in matter, and the forms of matter with which he
+clothes himself are of his own making. For the intelligence and will
+of man are creative forces--not creative _ex nihilo_, but creative as
+is the brain of the painter--and these forces are exercised by man in
+every act of thought. Thus he is ever creating round him
+thought-forms, moulding subtlest matter into shape by these energies,
+forms which persist as tangible realities when the body of the thinker
+has long gone back to earth and air and water. When the time for
+rebirth into this earth-life comes for the soul these thought-forms,
+its own progeny, help to form the tenuous model into which the
+molecules of physical matter are builded for the making of the body,
+and matter is thus moulded for the new body in which the soul is to
+dwell, on the lines laid down by the intelligent and volitional life
+of the previous, or of many previous, incarnations. So does each man
+create for himself in verity the form wherein he functions, and what
+he is in his present is the inevitable outcome of his own creative
+energies in his past. Applying this to the Neo-Malthusian theory, we
+see in sexual love not only a passion which man has in common with the
+brute, and which forms, at the present stage of evolution, a necessary
+part of human nature, but an animal passion that may be trained and
+purified into a human emotion, which may be used as one of the levers
+in human progress, one of the factors in human growth. But, instead of
+this, man in the past has made his intellect the servant of his
+passions; the abnormal development of the sexual instinct in man--in
+whom it is far greater and more continuous than in any brute--is due
+to the mingling with it of the intellectual element, all sexual
+thoughts, desires, and imaginations having created thought-forms,
+which have been wrought into the human race, giving rise to a
+continual demand, far beyond nature, and in marked contrast with the
+temperance of normal animal life. Hence it has become one of the most
+fruitful sources of human misery and human degradation, and the
+satisfaction of its imperious cravings in civilised countries lies at
+the root of our worst social evils. This excessive development has to
+be fought against, and the instinct reduced within natural limits, and
+this will certainly never be done by easy-going self-indulgence within
+the marital relation any more than by self-indulgence outside it. By
+none other road than that of self-control and self-denial can men and
+women now set going the causes which will build for them brains and
+bodies of a higher type for their future return to earth-life. They
+have to hold this instinct in complete control, to transmute it from
+passion into tender and self-denying affection, to develop the
+intellectual at the expense of the animal, and thus to raise the whole
+man to the human stage, in which every intellectual and physical
+capacity shall subserve the purposes of the soul. From all this it
+follows that Theosophists should sound the note of self-restraint
+within marriage, and the gradual--for with the mass it cannot be
+sudden--restriction of the sexual relation to the perpetuation of the
+race.
+
+Such was the bearing of Theosophical teaching on Neo-Malthusianism, as
+laid before me by H.P. Blavatsky, and when I urged, out of my bitter
+knowledge of the miseries endured by the poor, that it surely might,
+for a time at least, be recommended as a palliative, as a defence in
+the hands of a woman against intolerable oppression and enforced
+suffering, she bade me look beyond the moment, and see how the
+suffering must come back and back with every generation, unless we
+sought to remove the roots of wrong. "I do not judge a woman," she
+said, "who has resort to such means of defence in the midst of
+circumstances so evil, and whose ignorance of the real causes of all
+this misery is her excuse for snatching at any relief. But it is not
+for you, an Occultist, to continue to teach a method which you now
+know must tend to the perpetuation of the sorrow." I felt that she was
+right, and though I shrank from the decision--for my heart somewhat
+failed me at withdrawing from the knowledge of the poor, so far as I
+could, a temporary palliative of evils which too often wreck their
+lives and bring many to an early grave, worn old before even middle
+age has touched them--yet the decision was made. I refused to reprint
+the "Law of Population," or to sell the copyright, giving pain, as I
+sadly knew, to all the brave and loyal friends who had so generously
+stood by me in that long and bitter struggle, and who saw the results
+of victory thrown away on grounds to them inadequate and mistaken!
+Will it always be, I wonder, in man's climbing upward, that every step
+must be set on his own heart and on the hearts of those he loves?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+AT WAR ALL ROUND.
+
+
+Coming back to my work after my long and dangerous illness, I took up
+again its thread, heartsick, but with courage unshaken, and I find
+myself in the _National Reformer_ for September 15, 1878, saying in a
+brief note of thanks that "neither the illness nor the trouble which
+produced it has in any fashion lessened my determination to work for
+the cause." In truth, I plunged into work with added vigour, for only
+in that did I find any solace, but the pamphlets written at this time
+against Christianity were marked with considerable bitterness, for it
+was Christianity that had robbed me of my child, and I struck
+mercilessly at it in return. In the political struggles of that time,
+when the Beaconsfield Government was in full swing, with its policy of
+annexation and aggression, I played my part with tongue and pen, and
+my articles in defence of an honest and liberty-loving policy in
+India, against the invasion of Afghanistan and other outrages, laid in
+many an Indian heart a foundation of affection for me, and seem to me
+now as a preparation for the work among Indians to which much of my
+time and thought to-day are given. In November of this same year
+(1878) I wrote a little book on "England, India, and Afghanistan" that
+has brought me many a warm letter of thanks, and with this, the
+carrying on of the suit against Mr. Besant before alluded to, two and
+often three lectures every Sunday, to say nothing of the editorial
+work on the _National Reformer_, the secretarial work on the
+Malthusian League, and stray lectures during the week, my time was
+fairly well filled. But I found that in my reading I developed a
+tendency to let my thoughts wander from the subject in hand, and that
+they would drift after my lost little one, so I resolved to fill up
+the gaps in my scientific education, and to amuse myself by reading up
+for some examinations; I thought it would serve as an absorbing form
+of recreation from my other work, and would at the same time, by
+making my knowledge exact, render me more useful as a speaker on
+behalf of the causes to which my life was given.
+
+At the opening of the new year (1879) I met for the first time a man
+to whom I subsequently owed much in this department of work--Edward B.
+Aveling, a D.Sc. of London University, and a marvellously able teacher
+of scientific subjects, the very ablest, in fact, that I have ever
+met. Clear and accurate in his knowledge, with a singular gift for
+lucid exposition, enthusiastic in his love of science, and taking
+vivid pleasure in imparting his knowledge to others, he was an ideal
+teacher. This young man, in January, 1879, began writing under
+initials for the _National Reformer_, and in February I became his
+pupil, with the view of matriculating in June at the London
+University, an object which was duly accomplished. And here let me say
+to any one in mental trouble, that they might find an immense relief
+in taking up some intellectual recreation of this kind; during that
+spring, in addition to my ordinary work of writing, lecturing, and
+editing--and the lecturing meant travelling from one end of England to
+the other--I translated a fair-sized French volume, and had the
+wear-and-tear of pleading my case for the custody of my daughter in
+the Court of Appeal, as well as the case before the Master of the
+Rolls; and I found it the very greatest relief to turn to algebra,
+geometry, and physics, and forget the harassing legal struggles in
+wrestling with formulae and problems. The full access I gained to my
+children marked a step in the long battle of Freethinkers against
+disabilities, for, as noted in the _National Reformer_ by Mr.
+Bradlaugh, it was "won with a pleading unequalled in any case on
+record for the boldness of its affirmation of Freethought," a pleading
+of which he generously said that it deserved well of the party as "the
+most powerful pleading for freedom of opinion to which it has ever
+been our good fortune to listen."
+
+In the London _Daily News_ some powerful letters of protest appeared,
+one from Lord Harberton, in which he declared that "the Inquisition
+acted on no other principle" than that applied to me; and a second
+from Mr. Band, in which he sarcastically observed that "this Christian
+community has for some time had the pleasure of seeing her Majesty's
+courts repeatedly springing engines of torture upon a young mother--a
+clergyman's wife who dared to disagree with his creed--and her evident
+anguish, her long and expensive struggles to save her child, have
+proved that so far as heretical mothers are concerned modern defenders
+of the faith need not envy the past those persuasive instruments which
+so long secured the unity of the Church. In making Mrs. Besant an
+example, the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice James have been
+careful not to allow any of the effect to be lost by confusion of the
+main point--the intellectual heresy--with side questions. There was a
+Malthusian matter in the case, but the judges were very clear in
+stating that without any reference whatever to that, they would
+simply, on the ground of Mrs. Besant's 'religious, or anti-religious,
+opinions,' take her child from her." The great provincial papers took
+a similar tone, the _Manchester Examiner_ going so far as to say of
+the ruling of the judges: "We do not say they have done so wrongly. We
+only say that the effect of their judgment is cruel, and it shows that
+the holding of unpopular opinions is, in the eye of the law, an
+offence which, despite all we had thought to the contrary, may be
+visited with the severest punishment a woman and a mother can be
+possibly called on to bear." The outcome of all this long struggle and
+of another case of sore injustice--in which Mrs. Agar-Ellis, a Roman
+Catholic, was separated from her children by a judicial decision
+obtained against her by her husband, a Protestant--was a change in the
+law which had vested all power over the children in the hands of the
+father, and from thenceforth the rights of the married mother were
+recognised to a limited extent. A small side-fight was with the
+National Sunday League, the president of which, Lord Thurlow, strongly
+objected to me as one of the vice-presidents. Mr. P.A. Taylor and
+others at once resigned their offices, and, on the calling of a
+general meeting, Lord Thurlow was rejected as president. Mr. P.A.
+Taylor was requested to assume the presidency, and the vice-presidents
+who had resigned were, with myself, re-elected. Little battles of this
+sort were a running accompaniment of graver struggles during all these
+battling years.
+
+And through all the struggles the organised strength of the
+Freethought party grew, 650 new members being enrolled in the National
+Secular Society in the year 1878-79, and in July, 1879, the public
+adhesion of Dr. Edward B. Aveling brought into the ranks a pen of rare
+force and power, and gave a strong impulse to the educational side of
+our movement. I presided for him at his first lecture at the Hall of
+Science on August 10, 1879, and he soon paid the penalty of his
+boldness, finding himself, a few months later, dismissed from the
+Chair of Comparative Anatomy at the London Hospital, though the Board
+admitted that all his duties were discharged with punctuality and
+ability. One of the first results of his adhesion was the
+establishment of two classes under the Science and Art Department at
+South Kensington, and these grew year after year, attended by numbers
+of young men and women, till in 1883 we had thirteen classes in full
+swing, as well as Latin, and London University Matriculation classes;
+all these were taught by Dr. Aveling and pupils that he had trained. I
+took advanced certificates, one in honours, and so became qualified as
+a science teacher in eight different sciences, and Alice and Hypatia
+Bradlaugh followed a similar course, so that winter after winter we
+kept these classes going from September to the following May, from
+1879 until the year 1888. In addition to these Miss Bradlaugh carried
+on a choral union.
+
+Personally I found that this study and teaching together with
+attendance at classes held for teachers at South Kensington, the study
+for passing the First B.Sc. and Prel. Sc. Examinations at London
+University, and the study for the B.Sc. degree at London, at which I
+failed in practical chemistry three times--a thing that puzzled me not
+a little at the time, as I had passed a far more difficult practical
+chemical examination for teachers at South Kensington--all this gave
+me a knowledge of science that has stood me in good stead in my public
+work. But even here theological and social hatred pursued me.
+
+When Miss Bradlaugh and myself applied for permission to attend the
+botany class at University College, we were refused, I for my sins,
+and she only for being her father's daughter; when I had qualified as
+teacher, I stood back from claiming recognition from the Department
+for a year in order not to prejudice the claims of Mr. Bradlaugh's
+daughters, and later, when I had been recognised, Sir Henry Tyler in
+the House of Commons attacked the Education Department for accepting
+me, and actually tried to prevent the Government grant being paid to
+the Hall of Science Schools because Dr. Aveling, the Misses Bradlaugh,
+and myself were unbelievers in Christianity. When I asked permission
+to go to the Botanical Gardens in Regent's Park the curator refused
+it, on the ground that his daughters studied there. On every side
+repulse and insult, hard to struggle against, bitter to bear. It was
+against difficulties of this kind on every side that we had to make
+our way, handicapped in every effort by our heresy. Let our work be as
+good as it might--and our Science School was exceptionally
+successful--the subtle fragrance of heresy was everywhere
+distinguishable, and when Mr. Bradlaugh and myself are blamed for
+bitterness in our anti-Christian advocacy, this constant gnawing
+annoyance and petty persecution should be taken into account. For him
+it was especially trying, for he saw his daughters--girls of ability
+and of high character, whose only crime was that they were
+his--insulted, sneered at, slandered, continually put at a
+disadvantage, because they were his children and loved and honoured
+him beyond all others.
+
+It was in October, 1879, that I first met Herbert Burrows, though I
+did not become intimately acquainted with him till the Socialist
+troubles of the autumn of 1887 drew us into a common stream of work.
+He came as a delegate from the Tower Hamlets Radical Association to a
+preliminary conference, called by Mr. Bradlaugh, at the Hall of
+Science, on October 11th, to consider the advisability of holding a
+great London Convention on Land Law Reform, to be attended by
+delegates from all parts of the kingdom. He was appointed on the
+Executive Committee with Mr. Bradlaugh, Mr. Mottershead, Mr. Nieass,
+and others. The Convention was successfully held, and an advanced
+platform of Land Law Reform adopted, used later by Mr. Bradlaugh as a
+basis for some of the proposals he laid before Parliament.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+MR. BRADLAUGH'S STRUGGLE.
+
+
+And now dawned the year 1880, the memorable year in which commenced
+Mr. Bradlaugh's long Parliamentary battle. After a long and bitter
+struggle he was elected, with Mr. Labouchere, as member for
+Northampton, at the general election, and so the prize so long fought
+for was won. Shall I ever forget that election day, April 2, 1880? How
+at four o'clock Mr. Bradlaugh came into the room at the "George",
+where his daughters and I were sitting, flung himself into a chair
+with, "There's nothing more to do; our last man is polled." Then the
+waiting for the declaration through the long, weary hours of suspense,
+till as the time drew near we knelt by the window listening--listening
+to the hoarse murmur of the crowd, knowing that presently there would
+be a roar of triumph or a howl of anger when the numbers were read out
+from the steps of the Town Hall. And now silence sank, and we knew the
+moment had come, and we held our breath, and then--a roar, a wild roar
+of joy and exultation, cheer after cheer, ringing, throbbing, pealing,
+and then the mighty surge of the crowd bringing him back, their member
+at last, waving hats, handkerchiefs, a very madness of tumultuous
+delight, and the shrill strains of "Bradlaugh for Northampton!" with a
+ring of triumph in them they had never had before. And he, very grave,
+somewhat shaken by the outpour of love and exultation, very silent,
+feeling the weight of new responsibility more than the gladness of
+victory. And then the next morning, as he left the town, the mass of
+men and women, one sea of heads from hotel to station, every window
+crowded, his colours waving everywhere, men fighting to get near him,
+to touch him, women sobbing, the cries, "Our Charlie, our Charlie;
+we've got you and we'll keep you." How they loved him, how they joyed
+in the triumph won after twelve years of strife. Ah me! we thought the
+struggle over, and it was only beginning; we thought our hero
+victorious, and a fiercer, crueller fight lay in front. True, he was
+to win that fight, but his life was to be the price of the winning;
+victory for him was to be final, complete, but the laurel-wreath was
+to fall upon a grave.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by T. Westley, 57, Vernon Street,
+Northampton._ CHARLES BRADLAUGH AND HENRY LABOUCHERE.]
+
+The outburst of anger from the more bigoted of the Christian community
+was as savage as the outburst of delight had been exultant, but we
+recked little of it. Was he not member, duly elected, without
+possibility of assailment in his legal right? Parliament was to meet
+on April 29th, the swearing-in beginning on the following day, and Mr.
+Bradlaugh had taken counsel with some other Freethinking members as to
+the right of Freethinkers to affirm. He held that under the Act 29 and
+30 Vict. c. 19, and the Evidence Amendment Acts 1869 and 1870, the
+right to substitute affirmation for oath was clear; he was willing to
+take the oath as a necessary form if obligatory, but, believing it to
+be optional, he preferred affirmation. On May 3rd he presented himself
+and, according to the evidence of Sir Erskine May, the Clerk of the
+House, given before the second Select Committee on his case, he "came
+to the table and delivered the following statement in writing to the
+Clerk: 'To the Right Honourable the Speaker of the House of Commons.
+I, the undersigned, Charles Bradlaugh, beg respectfully to claim to be
+allowed to affirm, as a person for the time being by law permitted to
+make a solemn affirmation or declaration, instead of taking an oath.
+(Signed) Charles Bradlaugh.' And being asked by the Clerk upon what
+grounds he claimed to make an affirmation, he answered: 'By virtue of
+the Evidence Amendment Acts, 1869 and 1870.' Whereupon the Clerk
+reported to Mr. Speaker" the claim, and Mr. Speaker told Mr. Bradlaugh
+that he might address the House on the matter. "Mr. Bradlaugh's
+observations were very short. He repeated that he relied upon the
+Evidence Further Amendment Act, 1869, and the Evidence Amendment Act,
+1870, adding: 'I have repeatedly, for nine years past, made an
+affirmation in the highest courts of jurisdiction in this realm. I am
+ready to make such a declaration or affirmation.' Substantially those
+were the words which he addressed to the Speaker." This was the
+simple, quiet, and dignified scene which took place in the House. Mr.
+Bradlaugh was directed to withdraw, and he withdrew, and, after
+debate, a Select Committee was appointed to consider whether he could
+make affirmation; that Committee decided against the claim, and gave
+in its report on May 20th. On the following day Mr. Bradlaugh
+presented himself at the table of the House to take the oath in the
+form prescribed by the law, and on the objection of Sir Henry Drummond
+Wolff, who submitted a motion that he should not be allowed to take
+the oath, another Committee was appointed.
+
+Before this Committee Mr. Bradlaugh stated his case, and pointed out
+that the legal obligation lay on him to take the oath, adding: "Any
+form that I went through, any oath that I took, I should regard as
+binding upon my conscience in the fullest degree. I would go through
+no form, I would take no oath, unless I meant it to be so binding." He
+wrote in the same sense to the _Times_, saying that he should regard
+himself "as bound, not by the letter of its words, but by the spirit
+which the affirmation would have conveyed, had I been permitted to use
+it." The Committee reported against him, and on June 23rd he was heard
+at the Bar of the House, and made a speech so self-restrained, so
+noble, so dignified, that the House, in defiance of all its own rules,
+broke out over and over again into applause. In the debate that
+preceded his speech, members had lost sight of the ordinary rules of
+decency, and had used expressions against myself wholly gratuitous in
+such a quarrel; the grave rebuke to him who "was wanting in chivalry,
+because, while I can answer for myself and am able to answer for
+myself, nothing justified the introduction of any other name beside my
+own to make prejudice against me," brought irrepressible cheers. His
+appeal was wholly to the law. "I have not yet used--I trust no passion
+may tempt me into using--any words that would seem to savour of even a
+desire to enter into conflict with this House. I have always taught,
+preached, and believed the supremacy of Parliament, and it is not
+because for a moment the judgment of one Chamber of Parliament should
+be hostile to me that I am going to deny the ideas I have always held;
+but I submit that one Chamber of Parliament--even its grandest
+Chamber, as I have always held this to be--had no right to override
+the law. The law gives me the right to sign that roll, to take and
+subscribe the oath, and to take my seat there [with a gesture towards
+the benches]. I admit that the moment I am in the House, without any
+reason but your own good will, you can send me away. That is your
+right. You have full control over your members. But you cannot send me
+away until I have been heard in my place, not a suppliant as I am now,
+but with the rightful audience that each member has always had.... I
+am ready to admit, if you please, for the sake of argument, that every
+opinion I hold is wrong and deserves punishment. Let the law punish
+it. If you say the law cannot, then you admit that you have no right,
+and I appeal to public opinion against the iniquity of a decision
+which overrides the law and denies me justice. I beg your pardon, sir,
+and that of the House too, if in this warmth there seems to lack
+respect for its dignity. And as I shall have, if your decision be
+against me, to come to that table when your decision is given, I beg
+you, before the step is taken in which we may both lose our
+dignity--mine is not much, but yours is that of the Commons of
+England--I beg you, before the gauntlet is fatally thrown, I beg you,
+not in any sort of menace, not in any sort of boast, but as one man
+against six hundred, to give me that justice which on the other side
+of this hall the judges would give me, were I pleading there before
+them."
+
+But no eloquence, no plea for justice, could stay the tide of Tory and
+religious bigotry, and the House voted that he should not be allowed
+to take the oath. Summoned to the table to hear the decision
+communicated by the Speaker, he answered that decision with the words
+firmly spoken: "I respectfully refuse to obey the order of the House,
+because that order was against the law." The Speaker appealed to the
+House for direction, and on a division--during which the Speaker and
+Charles Bradlaugh were left together in the chamber--the House ordered
+the enforcement of Mr. Bradlaugh's withdrawal. Once more the order is
+given, once more the refusal made, and then the Serjeant-at-Arms was
+bidden to remove him. Strange was the scene as little Captain Cosset
+walked up to the member of Herculean proportions, and men wondered how
+the order would be enforced; but Charles Bradlaugh was not the man to
+make a vulgar brawl, and the light touch on his shoulder was to him
+the touch of an authority he admitted and to which he bowed. So he
+gravely accompanied his small captor, and was lodged in the Clock
+Tower of the House as prisoner until the House should further consider
+what to do with him--the most awkward prisoner it had ever had, in
+that in his person it was imprisoning the law.
+
+In a special issue of the _National Reformer_, giving an account of
+the Committee's work and of Mr. Bradlaugh's committal to the Clock
+Tower, I find the following from my own pen: "The Tory party, beaten
+at the polls by the nation, has thus, for the moment, triumphed in the
+House of Commons. The man chosen by the Radicals of Northampton has
+been committed to prison on the motion of the Tory ex-Chancellor of
+the Exchequer, simply because he desires to discharge the duty laid
+upon him by his constituency and by the law of the land. As this paper
+goes to press, I go to Westminster to receive from him his directions
+as to the conduct of the struggle with the nation into which the House
+of Commons has so recklessly plunged." I found him busily writing,
+prepared for all events, ready for a long imprisonment. On the
+following day a leaflet from my pen, "Law Makers and Law Breakers,"
+appealed to the people; after reciting what had happened, it
+concluded: "Let the people speak. Gladstone and Bright are for
+Liberty, and the help denied them within the House must come to them
+from without. No time must be lost. While we remain idle, a
+representative of the people is illegally held in prison. Northampton
+is insulted, and in this great constituency every constituency is
+threatened. On freedom of election depends our liberty; on freedom of
+conscience depends our progress. Tory squires and lordlings have
+defied the people and measured their strength against the masses. Let
+the masses speak." But there was no need to make appeals, for the
+outrage itself caused so swiftly a growl of anger that on the very
+next day the prisoner was set free, and there came protest upon
+protest against the high-handed action of the House. In Westminster
+Hall 4,000 people gathered to cheer Mr. Bradlaugh when he came to the
+House on the day after his liberation. In less than a week 200
+meetings had thundered out their protest. Liberal associations, clubs,
+societies, sent up messages of anger and of demand for justice. In
+Trafalgar Square there gathered--so said the papers--the largest crowd
+ever seen there, and on the Thursday following--the meeting was held
+on Monday--the House of Commons rescinded its resolution, refusing to
+allow Mr. Bradlaugh to affirm, and admitted him on Friday, July 2nd,
+to take his seat after affirmation. "At last the bitter struggle is
+over," I wrote, "and law and right have triumphed. The House of
+Commons has, by rescinding the resolution passed by Tories and
+Ultramontanes, re-established its good name in the eyes of the world.
+The triumph is not one of Freethought over Christianity, nor is it
+over the House of Commons; it is the triumph of law, brought about by
+good men--of all shades of opinion, but of one faith in justice--over
+Tory contempt of law and Ultramontane bigotry. It is the reassertion
+of civil and religious liberty under the most difficult circumstances,
+the declaration that the House of Commons is the creation of the
+people, and not a club of the aristocracy with the right of
+blackballing in its own hands."
+
+The battle between Charles Bradlaugh and his persecutors was now
+transferred to the law courts. As soon as he had taken his seat he was
+served with a writ for having voted without having taken the oath, and
+this began the wearisome proceedings by which his defeated enemies
+boasted that they would make him bankrupt, and so vacate the seat he
+had so hardly gained. Rich men like Mr. Newdegate sued him, putting
+forward a man of straw as nominal plaintiff; for many a weary month
+Mr. Bradlaugh kept all his enemies at bay, fighting each case himself;
+defeated time after time, he fought on, finally carrying the cases to
+the House of Lords, and there winning them triumphantly. But they were
+won at such heavy cost of physical strength and of money, that they
+undermined his strength and burdened him heavily with debt. For all
+this time he had not only to fight in the law courts and to attend
+scrupulously to his Parliamentary duties, but he had to earn his
+living by lecturing and writing, so that his nights away from the
+House were spent in travelling and his days in incessant labour. Many
+of his defeated foes turned their weapons against me, hoping thus to
+give him pain; thus Admiral Sir John Hay, at Wigton, used language of
+me so coarse that the _Scotsman_ and _Glasgow Herald_ refused to print
+it, and the editor of the _Scotsman_ described it as "language so
+coarse that it could have hardly dropped from a yahoo." August 25th
+found me at Brussels, whither I went, with Miss Hypatia Bradlaugh, to
+represent the English Freethinkers at the International Freethought
+Conference. It was an interesting gathering, attended by men of
+world-wide reputation, including Dr. Ludwig Büchner, a man of noble
+and kindly nature. An International Federation of Freethinkers was
+there founded, which did something towards bringing together the
+Freethinkers of different countries, and held interesting congresses
+in the following years in London and Amsterdam; but beyond these
+meetings it did little, and lacked energy and vitality. In truth, the
+Freethought party in each country had so much to do in holding its own
+that little time and thought could be given to international
+organisation. For myself, my introduction to Dr. Büchner, led to much
+interesting correspondence, and I translated, with his approval, his
+"Mind in Animals," and the enlarged fourteenth edition of "Force and
+Matter," as well as one or two pamphlets. This autumn of 1880 found
+the so-called Liberal Government in full tilt against the Irish
+leaders, and I worked hard to raise English feeling in defence of
+Irish freedom even against attack by one so much honoured as was Mr.
+Gladstone. It was uphill work, for harsh language had been used
+against England and all things English, but I showed by definite
+figures--all up and down England--that life and property were far
+safer in Ireland than in England, that Ireland was singularly free
+from crime save in agrarian disputes, and I argued that these would
+disappear if the law should step in between landlord and tenant, and
+by stopping the crimes of rack-renting and most brutal eviction, put
+an end to the horrible retaliations that were born of despair and
+revenge. A striking point on these evictions I quoted from Mr. T.P.
+O'Connor, who, using Mr. Gladstone's words that a sentence of eviction
+was a sentence of starvation, told of 15,000 processes of eviction
+issued in that one year. The autumn's work was varied by the teaching
+of science classes, a debate with a clergyman of the Church of
+England, and an operation which kept me in bed for three weeks, but
+which, on the other hand, was useful, for I learned to write while
+lying on my back, and accomplished in this fashion a good part of the
+translation of "Mind in Animals."
+
+And here let me point a moral about hard work. Hard work kills no one.
+I find a note in the _National Reformer_ in 1880 from the pen of Mr.
+Bradlaugh: "It is, we fear, useless to add that, in the judgment of
+her best friends, Mrs. Besant has worked far too hard during the last
+two years." This is 1893, and the thirteen years' interval has been
+full of incessant work, and I am working harder than ever now, and in
+splendid health. Looking over the _National Reformer_ for all these
+years, it seems to me that it did really fine educational work; Mr.
+Bradlaugh's strenuous utterances on political and theological matters;
+Dr. Aveling's luminous and beautiful scientific teachings; and to my
+share fell much of the educative work on questions of political and
+national morality in our dealings with weaker nations. We put all our
+hearts into our work, and the influence exercised was distinctly in
+favour of pure living and high thinking.
+
+In the spring of 1881 the Court of Appeal decided against Mr.
+Bradlaugh's right to affirm as Member of Parliament, and his seat was
+declared vacant, but he was at once returned again by the borough of
+Northampton, despite the virulence of slander directed against him, so
+that he rightly described the election as "the most bitter I have ever
+fought." His work in the House had won him golden opinions in the
+country, and he was already recognised as a power there; so Tory fear
+was added to bigoted hatred, and the efforts to keep him out of the
+House were increased.
+
+He was introduced to the House as a new member to take his seat by Mr.
+Labouchere and Mr. Burt, but Sir Stafford Northcote intervened, and
+after a lengthy debate, which included a speech from Mr. Bradlaugh at
+the Bar, a majority of thirty-three refused to allow him to take the
+oath. After a prolonged scene, during which Mr. Bradlaugh declined to
+withdraw and the House hesitated to use force, the House adjourned,
+and finally the Government promised to bring in an Affirmation Bill,
+and Mr. Bradlaugh promised, with the consent of his constituents, to
+await the decision of the House on this Bill. Meantime, a League for
+the Defence of Constitutional Rights was formed, and the agitation in
+the country grew: wherever Mr. Bradlaugh went to speak vast crowds
+awaited him, and he travelled from one end of the country to the
+other, the people answering his appeal for justice with no uncertain
+voice. On July 2nd, in consequence of Tory obstruction, Mr. Gladstone
+wrote to Mr. Bradlaugh that the Government were going to drop the
+Affirmation Bill, and Mr. Bradlaugh thereupon determined to present
+himself once more in the House, and fixed on August 3rd as the date of
+such action, so that the Irish Land Bill might get through the House
+ere any delay in business was caused by him. The House was then
+closely guarded with police; the great gates were closed, reserves of
+police were packed in the law courts, and all through July this state
+of siege continued. On August 2nd there was a large meeting in
+Trafalgar Square, at which delegates were present from all parts of
+England, and from as far north as Edinburgh, and on Wednesday, August
+3rd, Mr. Bradlaugh went down to the House. His last words to me were:
+"The people know you better than they know any one, save myself;
+whatever happens, mind, whatever happens, let them do no violence; I
+trust to you to keep them quiet." He went to the House entrance with
+Dr. Aveling, and into the House alone. His daughters and I went
+together, and with some hundreds of others carrying petitions--ten
+only with each petition, and the ten rigidly counted and allowed to
+pass through the gate, sufficiently opened to let one through at a
+time--reached Westminster Hall, where we waited on the steps leading
+to the passage of the lobby.
+
+An inspector ordered us off. I gently intimated that we were within
+our rights. Dramatic order: "Four officers this way." Up they marched
+and looked at us, and we looked at them. "I think you had better
+consult Inspector Denning before you use violence," I remarked
+placidly. They thought they had, and in a few moments up came the
+inspector, and seeing that we were standing in a place where we had a
+right to be, and were doing no harm, he rebuked his over-zealous
+subordinates, and they retired and left us in peace. A man of much
+tact and discretion was Inspector Denning. Indeed, all through this,
+the House of Commons police behaved admirably well. Even in the attack
+they were ordered to make on Mr. Bradlaugh, the police used as little
+violence as they could. It was Mr. Erskine, the Deputy
+Serjeant-at-Arms, and his ushers, who showed the brutality; as Dr.
+Aveling wrote at the time: "The police disliked their work, and, as
+brave men, had a sympathy for a brave man. Their orders they obeyed
+rigidly. This done, they were kindness itself." Gradually the crowd of
+petitioners grew and grew; angry murmurs were heard, for no news came
+from the House, and they loved "Charlie," and were mostly north
+country men, sturdy and independent. They thought they had a right to
+go into the lobby, and suddenly, with the impulse that will sway a
+crowd to a single action there was a roar, "Petition, petition,
+justice, justice," and they surged up the steps, charging at the
+policemen who held the door. Flashed into my mind my chief's charge,
+his words, "I trust to you to keep them quiet," and as the police
+sprang forward to meet the crowd I threw myself between them, with all
+the advantage of the position of the top of the steps that I had
+chosen, so that every man in the charging crowd saw me, and as they
+checked themselves in surprise I bade them stop for his sake, and keep
+for him the peace which he had bade us should not be broken. I heard
+afterwards that as I sprang forward the police laughed--they must have
+thought me a fool to face the rush of the charging men; but I knew his
+friends would never trample me down, and as the crowd stopped the
+laugh died out, and they drew back and left me my own way.
+
+Sullenly the men drew back, mastering themselves with effort, reining
+in their wrath, still for his sake. Ah! had I known what was going on
+inside, would I have kept his trust unbroken! and, as many a man said
+to me afterwards in northern towns, "Oh! if you had let us go we would
+have carried him into the House up to the Speaker's chair." We heard a
+crash inside, and listened, and there was sound of breaking glass and
+splintering wood, and in a few minutes a messenger came to me: "He is
+in Palace Yard." And we went thither and saw him standing, still and
+white, face set like marble, coat torn, motionless, as though carved
+in stone, facing the members' door. Now we know the whole shameful
+story: how as that one man stood alone, on his way to claim his right,
+alone so that he could do no violence, fourteen men, said the Central
+News, police and ushers, flung themselves upon him, pushed and pulled
+him down the stairs, smashing in their violence the glass and wood of
+the passage door; how he struck no blow, but used only his great
+strength in passive resistance--" Of all I have ever seen, I never saw
+one man struggle with ten like that," said one of the chiefs, angrily
+disdainful of the wrong he was forced to do--till they flung him out
+into Palace Yard. An eye-witness thus reported the scene in the Press:
+"The strong, broad, heavy, powerful frame of Mr. Bradlaugh was hard to
+move, with its every nerve and muscle strained to resist the coercion.
+Bending and straining against the overpowering numbers, he held every
+inch with surprising tenacity, and only surrendered it after almost
+superhuman exertions to retain it. The sight--little of it as was seen
+from the outside--soon became sickening. The overborne man appeared
+almost at his last gasp. The face, in spite of the warmth of the
+struggle, had an ominous pallor. The limbs barely sustained him....
+The Trafalgar Square phrase that this man might be broken but not bent
+occurred to minds apprehensive at the present appearance of him."
+
+They flung him out, and swift, short words were there interchanged. "I
+nearly did wrong at the door," he said afterwards, "I was very angry.
+I said to Inspector Denning, 'I shall come again with force enough to
+overcome it,' He said, 'When?' I said, 'Within a minute if I raise my
+hand.'" He stood in Palace Yard, and there outside the gate was a vast
+sea of heads, the men who had journeyed from all parts of England for
+love of him, and in defence of the great right he represented of a
+constituency to send to Parliament the man of its choice. Ah! he was
+never greater than in that moment of outrage and of triumphant wrong;
+with all the passion of a proud man surging within him, insulted by
+physical violence, injured by the cruel wrenching of all his
+muscles--so that for weeks his arms had to be swathed in bandages--he
+was never greater than when he conquered his own wrath, crushed down
+his own longing for battle, stirred to flame by the bodily struggle,
+and the bodily injury, and with thousands waiting within sound of his
+voice, longing to leap to his side, he gave the word to tell them to
+meet him that evening away from the scene of conflict, and meanwhile
+to disperse quietly, "no riot, no disorder." But how he suffered
+mentally no words of mine may tell, and none can understand how it
+wrung his heart who does not know how he reverenced the great
+Parliament of England, how he honoured law, how he believed in justice
+being done; it was the breaking down of his national ideals, of his
+pride in his country, of his belief that faith would be kept with a
+foe by English gentlemen, who with all their faults, he thought,
+held honour and chivalry dear. "No man will sleep in gaol for me
+to-night," he said to me that day; "no woman can blame me for her
+husband killed or wounded, but--" A wave of agony swept over his face,
+and from that fatal day Charles Bradlaugh was never the same man.
+Some hold their ideals lightly, but his heart-strings were twined
+round his; some care little for their country--he was an Englishman,
+law-abiding, liberty-loving, to his heart's core, of the type of the
+seventeenth-century patriot, holding England's honour dear. It was the
+treachery that broke his heart; he had gone alone, believing in the
+honour of his foes, ready to submit to expulsion, to imprisonment, and
+it was the latter that he expected; but he never dreamed that, going
+alone amongst his foes, they would use brutal and cowardly violence,
+and shame every Parliamentary tradition by personal outrage on a
+duly-elected member, outrage more worthy of a slum pot-house than of
+the great Commons House, the House of Hampden and of Vane, the House
+that had guarded its own from Royal violence, and had maintained its
+privileges in the teeth of kings.
+
+These stormy scenes brought about a promise of Government aid; Mr.
+Bradlaugh failed to get any legal redress, as, indeed, he expected to
+fail, on the ground that the officials of the House were covered by
+the House's order, but the Government promised to support his claim to
+his seat during the next session, and thus prevented the campaign
+against them on which we had resolved. I had solely on my own
+responsibility organised a great band of people pledged to refrain
+from the use of all excisable articles after a certain date, and to
+withdraw all their moneys in the Savings Bank, thus seriously
+crippling the financial resources of the Government. The response from
+the workers to my appeal to "Stop the supplies" was great and
+touching. One man wrote that as he never drank nor smoked he would
+leave off tea; others that though tobacco was their one luxury, they
+would forego it; and so on. Somewhat reluctantly, I asked the people
+to lay aside this formidable weapon, as "we have no right to embarrass
+the Government financially save when they refuse to do the first duty
+of a Government to maintain law. They have now promised to do justice,
+and we must wait." Meanwhile the injuries inflicted on Mr. Bradlaugh,
+rupturing the sheaths of some of the muscles of the arm, laid him
+prostrate, and various small fights went on during the temporary truce
+in the great struggle. I turned up in the House two or three times,
+haled thither, though not in person, by the people who kept Mr.
+Bradlaugh out, and a speech of mine became the subject of a question
+by Mr. Ritchie, while Sir Henry Tyler waged war on the science
+classes. Another joy was added to life by the use of my name--which
+by all these struggles had gained a marketable value--as author of
+pamphlets I had never seen, and this forgery of my name by
+unscrupulous people in the colonies caused me a good deal of
+annoyance. In the strengthening of the constitutional agitation in the
+country, the holding of an International Congress of Freethinkers in
+London, the studying and teaching of science, the delivering of
+courses of scientific lectures in the Hall of Science, a sharp
+correspondence with the Bishop of Manchester, who had libelled
+Secularists, and which led to a fiery pamphlet, "God's Views on
+Marriage," as retort--in all these matters the autumn months sped
+rapidly away. One incident of that autumn I record with regret. I was
+misled by very partial knowledge of the nature of the experiments
+performed, and by my fear that if scientific men were forbidden to
+experiment on animals with drugs they would perforce experiment with
+them on the poor in hospitals, to write two articles, republished as a
+pamphlet, against Sir Eardley Wilmot's Bill for the "Total Suppression
+of Vivisection." I limited my approval to highly skilled men engaged
+in original investigations, and took the representations made of the
+character of the experiments without sufficient care to verify them.
+Hence the publication of the one thing I ever wrote for which I feel
+deep regret and shame, as against the whole trend and efforts of my
+life. I am thankful to say that Dr. Anna Kingsford answered my
+articles, and I readily inserted her replies in the paper in which
+mine had appeared--our _National Reformer_--and she touched that
+question of the moral sense to which my nature at once responded.
+Ultimately, I looked carefully into the subject, found that
+vivisection abroad was very different from vivisection in England, saw
+that it was in very truth the fiendishly cruel thing that its
+opponents alleged, and destroyed my partial defence of even its less
+brutal form.
+
+1882 saw no cessation of the struggles in which Mr. Bradlaugh and
+those who stood by him were involved. On February 7th he was heard for
+the third time at the Bar of the House of Commons, and closed his
+speech with an offer that, accepted, would have closed the contest. "I
+am ready to stand aside, say for four or five weeks, without coming to
+that table, if the House within that time, or within such time as its
+great needs might demand, would discuss whether an Affirmation Bill
+should pass or not. I want to obey the law, and I tell you how I might
+meet the House still further, if the House will pardon me for seeming
+to advise it. Hon. members have said that would be a Bradlaugh Relief
+Bill. Bradlaugh is more proud than you are. Let the Bill pass without
+applying to elections that have taken place previously, and I will
+undertake not to claim my seat, and when the Bill has passed I will
+apply for the Chiltern Hundreds. I have no fear. If I am not fit for
+my constituents, they shall dismiss me, but you never shall. The grave
+alone shall make me yield." But the House would do nothing. He had
+asked for 100,000 signatures in favour of his constitutional right,
+and on February 8th, 9th, and 10th 1,008 petitions, bearing 241,970
+signatures, were presented; the House treated them with contemptuous
+indifference. The House refused to declare his seat vacant, and also
+refused to allow him to fill it, thus half-disfranchising Northampton,
+while closing every avenue to legal redress. Mr. Labouchere--who did
+all a loyal colleague could do to assist his brother member--brought
+in an Affirmation Bill; it was blocked. Mr. Gladstone, appealed to
+support the law declared by his own Attorney-General, refused to do
+anything. An _impasse_ was created, and all the enemies of freedom
+rejoiced. Out of this position of what the _Globe_ called "quiet
+omnipotence" the House was shaken by an audacious defiance, for on
+February 21st the member it was trying to hold at arm's length took
+the oath in its startled face, went to his seat, and--waited events.
+The House then expelled him--and, indeed, it could scarcely do
+anything else after such defiance--and Mr. Labouchere moved for a new
+writ, declaring that Northampton was ready, its "candidate was Charles
+Bradlaugh, expelled this House." Northampton, ever steadfast, returned
+him for the third time--the vote in his favour showing an increase of
+359 over the second bye-election--and the triumph was received in all
+the great towns of England with wild enthusiasm. By the small majority
+of fifteen in a House of 599 members--and this due to the vacillation
+of the Government--he was again refused the right to take his seat.
+But now the whole Liberal Press took up his quarrel; the oath question
+became a test question for every candidate for Parliament, and the
+Government was warned that it was alienating its best friends. The
+_Pall Mall Gazette_ voiced the general feeling. "What is the evidence
+that an Oaths Bill would injure the Government in the country? Of one
+thing we may be sure, that if they shirk the Bill they will do no good
+to themselves at the elections. Nobody doubts that it will be made a
+test question, and any Liberal who declines to vote for such a Bill
+will certainly lose the support of the Northampton sort of Radicalism
+in every constituency. The Liberal Press throughout the country is
+absolutely unanimous. The political Non-conformists are for it. The
+local clubs are for it. All that is wanted is that the Government
+should pick up a little more moral courage, and recognise that even in
+practice honesty is the best policy." The Government did not think so,
+and they paid the penalty, for one of the causes that led to their
+defeat at the polls was the disgust felt at their vacillation and
+cowardice in regard to the rights of constituencies. Not untruly did I
+write, in May, 1882, that Charles Bradlaugh was a man "who by the
+infliction of a great wrong had become the incarnation of a great
+principle"; for the agitation in the country grew and grew, until,
+returned again to Parliament at the General Election, he took the oath
+and his seat, brought in and carried an Oaths Bill, not only giving
+Members of Parliament the right to affirm, but making Freethinkers
+competent as jurymen, and relieving witnesses from the insult hitherto
+put upon those who objected to swearing; he thus ended an
+unprecedented struggle by a complete victory, weaving his name for
+ever into the constitutional history of his country.
+
+In the House of Lords, Lord Redesdale brought in a Bill disqualifying
+Atheists from sitting in Parliament, but in face of the feeling
+aroused in the country, the Lords, with many pathetic expressions of
+regret, declined to pass it. But, meanwhile, Sir Henry Tyler in the
+Commons was calling out for prosecutions for blasphemy to be brought
+against Mr. Bradlaugh and his friends, while he carried on his crusade
+against Mr. Bradlaugh's daughters, Dr. Aveling, and myself, as science
+teachers. I summed up the position in the spring of 1882 in the
+following somewhat strong language: "This short-lived 'Parliamentary
+Declaration Bill' is but one of the many clouds which presage a storm
+of prosecution. The reiterated attempts in the House of Commons to
+force the Government into prosecuting heretics for blasphemy; the
+petty and vicious attacks on the science classes at the Hall; the
+odious and wicked efforts of Mr. Newdegate to drive Mr. Bradlaugh into
+the Bankruptcy Court; all these are but signs that the heterogeneous
+army of pious and bigoted Christians are gathering together their
+forces for a furious attack on those who have silenced them in
+argument, but whom they hope to conquer by main force, by sheer
+brutality. Let them come. Free-thinkers were never so strong, never so
+united, never so well organised as they are to-day. Strong in the
+goodness of our cause, in our faith in the ultimate triumph of Truth,
+in our willingness to give up all save fidelity to the sacred cause of
+liberty of human thought and human speech, we await gravely and
+fearlessly the successors of the men who burned Bruno, who imprisoned
+Galileo, who tortured Vanini--the men who have in their hands the
+blood-red cross of Jesus of Nazareth, and in their hearts the love of
+God and the hate of man."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+STILL FIGHTING.
+
+
+All this hot fighting on the religious field did not render me blind
+to the misery of the Irish land so dear to my heart, writhing in the
+cruel grip of Mr. Forster's Coercion Act. An article "Coercion in
+Ireland and its Results," exposing the wrongs done under the Act, was
+reprinted as a pamphlet and had a wide circulation.
+
+I pleaded against eviction--7,020 persons had been evicted during the
+quarter ending in March--for the trial of those imprisoned on
+suspicion, for indemnity for those who before the Land Act had striven
+against wrongs the Land Act had been carried to prevent, and I urged
+that "no chance is given for the healing measures to cure the sore of
+Irish disaffection until not only are the prisoners in Ireland set at
+liberty, but until the brave, unfortunate Michael Davitt stands once
+more a free man on Irish soil." At last the Government reconsidered
+its policy and resolved on juster dealings; it sent Lord Frederick
+Cavendish over to Ireland, carrying with him the release of the
+"suspects," and scarcely had he landed ere the knife of assassination
+struck him--a foul and cowardly murder of an innocent messenger of
+peace. I was at Blackburn, to lecture on "The Irish Question," and as
+I was walking towards the platform, my heart full of joy for the
+dawning hope of peace, a telegram announcing the assassination was
+placed in my hands. Never shall I forget the shock, the incredulous
+horror, the wave of despair. "It is not only two men they have
+killed," I wrote, a day or two later; "they have stabbed the new-born
+hope of friendship between two countries, and have reopened the gulf
+of hatred that was just beginning to close." Alas! the crime succeeded
+in its object, and hurried the Government into new wrong. Hastily a
+new Coercion Bill was brought in, and rushed through its stages in
+Parliament, and, facing the storm of public excitement, I pleaded
+still, "Force no remedy," despite the hardship of the task. "There is
+excessive difficulty in dealing with the Irish difficulty at the
+present moment. Tories are howling for revenge on a whole nation as
+answer to the crime committed by a few; Whigs are swelling the outcry;
+many Radicals are swept away by the current, and feeling that
+'something must be done,' they endorse the Government action,
+forgetting to ask whether the 'something' proposed is the wisest
+thing. A few stand firm, but they are very few--too few to prevent the
+new Coercion Bill from passing into law. But few though we be who lift
+up the voice of protest against the wrong which we are powerless to
+prevent, we may yet do much to make the new Act of brief duration, by
+so rousing public opinion as to bring about its early repeal. When the
+measure is understood by the public half the battle will be won; it is
+accepted at the moment from faith in the Government; it will be
+rejected when its true character is grasped. The murders which have
+given birth to this repressive measure came with a shock upon the
+country, which was the more terrible from the sudden change from
+gladness and hope to darkness and despair. The new policy was welcomed
+so joyfully; the messenger of the new policy was slain ere yet the pen
+was dry which had signed the orders of mercy and of liberty. Small
+wonder that cry of horror should be followed by measures of vengeance;
+but the murders were the work of a few criminals, while the measure of
+vengeance strikes the whole of the Irish people. I plead against the
+panic which confounds political agitation and political redressal of
+wrong with crime and its punishment; the Government measure gags every
+mouth in Ireland, and puts, as we shall see, all political effort at
+the mercy of the Lord-Lieutenant, the magistracy, and the police." I
+then sketched the misery of the peasants in the grip of absentee
+landlords, the turning out on the roadside to die of the mother with
+new-born babe at her breast, the loss of "all thought of the sanctity
+of human life when the lives of the dearest are reckoned as less worth
+than the shillings of overdue rack-rental." I analysed the new Act:
+"When this Act passes, trial by jury, right of public meeting, liberty
+of press, sanctity of house, will one and all be held at the will of
+the Lord-Lieutenant, the irresponsible autocrat of Ireland, while
+liberty of person will lie at the mercy of every constable. Such is
+England's way of governing Ireland in the year 1882. And this is
+supposed to be a Bill for the 'repression of crime.'" Bluntly, I put
+the bald truth: "The plain fact is that the murderers have succeeded.
+They saw in the new policy the reconciliation of England and Ireland;
+they knew that friendship would follow justice, and that the two
+countries, for the first time in history, would clasp hands. To
+prevent this they dug a new gulf, which they hoped the English nation
+would not span; they sent a river of blood across the road of
+friendship, and they flung two corpses to bar the newly-opened gate of
+reconciliation and peace. They have succeeded."
+
+Into this whirl of political and social strife came the first whisper
+to me of the Theosophical Society, in the shape of a statement of its
+principles, which conveyed, I remarked, "no very definite idea of the
+requirements for membership, beyond a dreamy, emotional, scholarly
+interest in the religio-philosophic fancies of the past." Also a
+report of an address by Colonel Olcott, which led me to suppose that
+the society held to "some strange theory of 'apparitions' of the dead,
+and to some existence outside the physical and apart from it." These
+came to me from some Hindû Freethinkers, who asked my opinion as to
+Secularists joining the Theosophical Society, and Theosophists being
+admitted to the National Secular Society. I replied, judging from
+these reports, that "while Secularists would have no right to refuse
+to enrol Theosophists, if they desired it, among their members, there
+is a radical difference between the mysticism of Theosophy and the
+scientific materialism of Secularism. The exclusive devotion to this
+world implied in the profession of Secularism leaves no room for
+other-worldism; and consistent members of our body cannot join a
+society which professes belief therein."[27]
+
+H.P. Blavatsky penned a brief article in the _Theosophist_ for
+August, 1882, in which she commented on my paragraph, remarking, in
+her generous way, that it must have been written "while labouring
+under entirely misconceived notions about the real nature of our
+society. For one so highly intellectual and keen as that renowned
+writer to dogmatise and issue autocratic ukases, after she has herself
+suffered so cruelly and undeservedly at the hands of blind bigotry and
+social prejudice in her lifelong struggle for _freedom of thought_
+seems, to say the least, absurdly inconsistent." After quoting my
+paragraph she went on: "Until proofs to the contrary, we prefer to
+believe that the above lines were dictated to Mrs. Besant by some
+crafty misrepresentations from Madras, inspired by a mean personal
+revenge rather than a desire to remain consistent with the principles
+of 'the scientific materialism of Secularism.' We beg to assure the
+Radical editors of the _National Reformer_ that they were both very
+strangely misled by false reports about the Radical editors of the
+_Theosophist_. The term 'supernaturalists' can no more apply to the
+latter than to Mrs. A. Besant and Mr. C. Bradlaugh."
+
+H.P. Blavatsky, when she commented, as she occasionally did, on the
+struggles going on in England, took of them a singularly large-hearted
+and generous view. She referred with much admiration to Mr.
+Bradlaugh's work and to his Parliamentary struggle, and spoke warmly
+of the services he had rendered to liberty. Again, in pointing out
+that spiritualistic trance orations by no means transcended speeches
+that made no such claim, I find her first mention of myself: "Another
+lady orator, of deservedly great fame, both for eloquence and
+learning--the good Mrs. Annie Besant--without believing in controlling
+spirits, or for that matter in her own spirit, yet speaks and writes
+such sensible and wise things, that we might almost say that one of
+her speeches or chapters contains more matter to benefit humanity than
+would equip a modern trance-speaker for an entire oratorical
+career."[28] I have sometimes wondered of late years whether, had I
+met her then or seen any of her writings, I should have become her
+pupil. I fear not; I was still too much dazzled by the triumphs of
+Western Science, too self-assertive, too fond of combat, too much at
+the mercy of my own emotions, too sensitive to praise and blame. I
+needed to sound yet more deeply the depths of human misery, to hear
+yet more loudly the moaning of "the great Orphan," Humanity, to feel
+yet more keenly the lack of wider knowledge and of clearer light if I
+were to give effective help to man, ere I could bow my pride to crave
+admittance as pupil to the School of Occultism, ere I could put aside
+my prejudices and study the Science of the Soul.
+
+The long-continued attempts of Sir Henry Tyler and his friends to
+stimulate persecutions for blasphemy at length took practical shape,
+and in July, 1882, Mr. Foote, the editor, Mr. Ramsey, the publisher,
+and Mr. Whittle, the printer of the _Freethinker_, were summoned for
+blasphemy by Sir Henry Tyler himself. An attempt was made to involve
+Mr. Bradlaugh in the proceedings, and the solicitors promised to drop
+the case against the editor and printer if Mr. Bradlaugh would himself
+sell them some copies of the paper. But however ready Mr. Bradlaugh
+had always shown himself to shield his subordinates by taking his sins
+on his own shoulders, he saw no reason why he should assume
+responsibility for a paper over which he had no control, and which
+was, he thought, by its caricatures, lowering the tone of Freethought
+advocacy and giving an unnecessary handle to its foes. He therefore
+answered that he would sell the solicitors any works published by
+himself or with his authority, and sent them a catalogue of the whole
+of such works. The object of this effort of Sir Henry Tyler's was
+obvious enough, and Mr. Bradlaugh commented: "The above letters make
+it pretty clear that Sir Henry W. Tyler having failed in his endeavour
+to get the science classes stopped at the Hall of Science, having also
+failed in his attempt to induce Sir W. Vernon Harcourt to prosecute
+myself and Mrs. Besant as editors and publishers of this journal,
+desires to make me personally and criminally responsible for the
+contents of a journal I neither edit nor publish, over which I have
+not a shadow of control, and in which I have not the smallest
+interest. Why does Sir H.W. Tyler so ardently desire to prosecute, me
+for blasphemy? Is it because two convictions will under the 9th and
+10th Will. III. cap. 32, render me 'for ever' incapable of sitting in
+Parliament?" The _Whitehall Review_ frankly put this forward as an
+object to be gained, and Mr. Bradlaugh was summoned to the Mansion
+House on a charge of publishing blasphemous libels in the
+_Freethinker_; meanwhile Sir Henry Tyler put a notice on the Order
+Book to deprive "the daughters of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh" of the grant
+they had earned as science teachers, and got an order which proved to
+be invalid, but which was acted on, to inspect Mr. Bradlaugh's and my
+own private banking accounts, I being no party to the case. Looking
+back, I marvel at the incredible meannesses to which Sir Henry Tyler
+and others stooped in defence of "religion"--Heaven save the mark! Let
+me add that his motion in the House of Commons was a complete failure,
+and it was emphasised by the publication at the same time of the
+successful work, both as teachers and as students, of the "daughters
+of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh," and of my being the only student in all
+England who had succeeded in taking honours in botany.
+
+I must pause a moment to chronicle, in September, 1882, the death of
+Dr. Pusey, whom I had sought in the whirl of my early religious
+struggles. I wrote an article on him in the _National Reformer_, and
+ended by laying a tribute on his grave: "A strong man and a good man.
+Utterly out of harmony with the spirit of his own time, looking with
+sternly-rebuking eyes on all the eager research, the joyous love of
+nature, the earnest inquiry into a world doomed to be burnt up at the
+coming of its Judge. An ascetic, pure in life, stern in faith, harsh
+to unbelievers because sincere in his own cruel creed, generous and
+tender to all who accepted his doctrines and submitted to his Church.
+He never stooped to slander those with whom he disagreed. His hatred
+of heresy led him not to blacken the character of heretics, nor to
+descend to the vulgar abuse used by pettier priests. And therefore I,
+who honour courage and sincerity wherever I find them; I, who do
+homage to steadfastness wherever I find it; I, Atheist, lay my small
+tribute of respect on the bier of this noblest of the Anglo-Catholics,
+Edward Bouverie Pusey."
+
+As a practical answer to the numberless attacks made on us, and as a
+result of the enormous increase of circulation given to our
+theological and political writings by these harassing persecutions, we
+moved our publishing business to 63, Fleet Street, at the end of
+September, 1882, a shop facing that at which Richard Carlile had
+carried on his publishing business for a great time, and so seemed
+still redolent with memories of his gallant struggles. Two of the
+first things sold here were a pamphlet of mine, a strong protest
+against our shameful Egyptian policy, and a critical volume on
+"Genesis" which Mr. Bradlaugh found time to write in the intervals of
+his busy life. Here I worked daily, save when out of London, until Mr.
+Bradlaugh's death in 1891, assisted in the conduct of the business by
+Mr. Bradlaugh's elder daughter--a woman of strong character with many
+noble qualities, who died rather suddenly in December, 1888, and in
+the work on the _National Reformer_, first by Dr. Aveling, and then by
+Mr. John Robertson, its present editor. Here, too, from 1884 onwards,
+worked with me Thornton Smith, one of Mr. Bradlaugh's most devoted
+disciples, who became one of the leading speakers of the National
+Secular Society; like her well-loved chief, she was ever a good friend
+and a good fighter, and to me the most loyal and loving of colleagues,
+one of the few--the very few--Freethinkers who were large-hearted and
+generous enough not to turn against me when I became a Theosophist. A
+second of these--alas! I could count them on my fingers--was the John
+Robertson above mentioned, a man of rare ability and wide culture,
+somewhat too scholarly for popular propagandism of the most generally
+effective order, but a man who is a strength to any movement, always
+on the side of noble living and high thinking, loyal-natured as the
+true Scot should be, incapable of meanness or treachery, and the most
+genial and generous of friends.
+
+Among the new literary ventures that followed on our taking the large
+publishing premises in Fleet Street was a sixpenny magazine, edited by
+myself, and entitled _Our Corner_; its first number was dated January,
+1883, and for six years it appeared regularly, and served me as a
+useful mouthpiece in my Socialist and Labour propagandist work. Among
+its contributors were Moncure D. Conway, Professor Ludwig Büchner,
+Yves Guyot, Professor Ernst Haeckel, G. Bernard Shaw, Constance Naden,
+Dr. Aveling, J.H. Levy, J.L. Joynes, Mrs. Edgren, John Robertson,
+and many another, Charles Bradlaugh and I writing regularly each
+month.
+
+1883 broke stormily, fights on every hand, and a huge constitutional
+agitation going on in the country, which forced the Government into
+bringing in an Affirmation Bill; resolutions from Liberal Associations
+all over the land; preparations to oppose the re-election of disloyal
+members; no less than a thousand delegates sent up to London by clubs,
+Trade Unions, associations of every sort; a meeting that packed
+Trafalgar Square; an uneasy crowd in Westminster Hall; a request from
+Inspector Denning that Mr. Bradlaugh would go out to them--they feared
+for his safety inside; a word from him, "The Government have pledged
+themselves to bring in an Affirmation Bill at once;" roar after roar
+of cheering; a veritable people's victory on that 15th of February,
+1883. It was the answer of the country to the appeal for justice, the
+rebuke of the electors to the House that had defied them.
+
+Scarcely was this over when a second prosecution for blasphemy against
+Messrs. Foote, Ramsey, and Kemp began, and was hurried on in the
+Central Criminal Court, before Mr. Justice North, a bigot of the
+sternest type. The trial ended in a disagreement of the jury, Mr.
+Foote defending himself in a splendid speech. The judge acted very
+harshly throughout, interrupted Mr. Foote continuously, and even
+refused bail to the defendants during the interval between the first
+and second trial; they were, therefore, confined in Newgate from
+Thursday to Monday, and we were only allowed to see them through iron
+bars and lattice, as they exercised in the prison yard between 8:30
+and 9:30 a.m. Brought up to trial again on Monday, they were
+convicted, and Mr. Foote was sentenced to a year's imprisonment, Mr.
+Ramsey to nine months, and Mr. Kemp to three months. Mr. Foote
+especially behaved with great dignity and courage in a most difficult
+position, and heard his cruel sentence without wincing, and with the
+calm words, "My Lord, I thank you; it is worthy your creed." A few of
+us at once stepped in, to preserve to Mr. Ramsey his shop, and to Mr.
+Foote his literary property; Dr. Aveling undertook the editing of the
+_Freethinker_ and of Mr. Foote's magazine _Progress_; the immediate
+necessities of their families were seen to; Mr. and Mrs. Forder took
+charge of the shop, and within a few days all was in working order.
+Disapproving as many of us did of the policy of the paper, there was
+no time to think of that when a blasphemy prosecution had proved
+successful, and we all closed up in the support of men imprisoned for
+conscience' sake. I commenced a series of articles on "The Christian
+Creed; what it is blasphemy to deny," showing what Christians must
+believe under peril of prosecution. Everywhere a tremendous impulse
+was given to the Freethought movement, as men awakened to the
+knowledge that blasphemy laws were not obsolete.
+
+From over the sea came a word of sympathy from the pen of H.P.
+Blavatsky in the _Theosophist_. "We prefer Mr. Foote's actual position
+to that of his severe judge. Aye, and were we in his guilty skin, we
+would feel more proud, even in the poor editor's present position,
+than we would under the wig of Mr. Justice North."
+
+In April, 1883, the long legal struggles of Mr. Bradlaugh against Mr.
+Newdegate and his common informer, that had lasted from July 2, 1880,
+till April 9, 1883, ended in his complete victory by the judgment of
+the House of Lords in his favour. "Court after Court decided against
+me," he wrote; "and Whig and Tory journals alike mocked at me for my
+persistent resistance. Even some good friends thought that my fight
+was hopeless, and that the bigots held me fast in their toils. I have,
+however, at last shaken myself free of Mr. Newdegate and his common
+informer. The judgment of the House of Lords in my favour is final and
+conclusive, and the boasts of the Tories that I should be made
+bankrupt for the penalties, have now, for ever, come to naught. Yet
+but for the many poor folk who have stood by me with their help and
+sympathy, I should have long since been ruined. The days and weeks
+spent in the Law Courts, the harassing work connected with each stage
+of litigation, the watching daily when each hearing was imminent, the
+absolute hindrance of all provincial lecturing--it is hardly possible
+for any one to judge the terrible mental and pecuniary strain of all
+this long-drawn-out struggle." Aye! it killed him at last, twenty
+years before his time, sapping his splendid vitality, undermining his
+iron constitution.
+
+The blasphemy trial of Mr. Bradlaugh, Mr. Foote, and Mr. Ramsey now
+came on, but this time in the Queen's Bench, before the Lord Chief
+Justice Coleridge. I had the honour of sitting between Mr. Bradlaugh
+and Mr. Foote, charged with the duty of having ready for the former
+all his references, and with a duplicate brief to mark off point after
+point as he dealt with it. Messrs. Foote and Ramsey were brought up in
+custody, but were brave and bright with courage unbroken. Mr.
+Bradlaugh applied to have his case taken separately, as he denied
+responsibility for the paper, and the judge granted the application;
+it was clearly proved that he and I--the "Freethought Publishing
+Company"--had never had anything to do with the production of the
+paper; that until November, 1881, we published it, and then refused to
+publish it any longer; that the reason for the refusal was the
+addition of comic Bible illustrations as a feature of the paper. I was
+called as witness and began with a difficulty; claiming to affirm, I
+was asked by the judge if the oath would not be binding on my
+conscience; I answered that any promise was binding on me whatever the
+form, and after some little argument the judge found a way out of the
+insulting form by asking whether the "invocation of the Deity added
+anything to it of a binding nature--added any sanction?" "None, my
+Lord," was the prompt reply, and I was allowed to affirm. Sir Hardinge
+Giffard subjected me to a very stringent cross-examination, doing his
+best to entangle me, but the perfect frankness of my answers broke all
+his weapons of finesse and inuendo.
+
+Some of the incidents of the trial were curious; Sir Hardinge
+Giffard's opening speech was very able and very unscrupulous. All
+facts in Mr. Bradlaugh's favour were distorted or hidden; anything
+that could be used against him was tricked out in most seductive
+fashion. Among the many monstrous perversions of the truth made by
+this most pious counsel, was the statement that changes of publisher,
+and of registration of the _Freethinker_ were made in consequence of a
+question as to prosecuting it put in the House of Commons. The change
+of publisher was admittedly made in November; the registration was
+made for the first time in November, and could not be changed, as
+there was no previous one. The House of Commons was not sitting in
+November; the question alluded to was asked in the following February.
+This one deliberate lie of the "defender of the faith" will do as well
+as quoting a score of others to show how wickedly and maliciously he
+endeavoured to secure an unjust verdict.
+
+The speech over, a number of witnesses were called. Sir Hardinge did
+not call witnesses who knew the facts, such as Mr. Norrish, the
+shopman, or Mr. Whittle, the printer. These he carefully avoided,
+although he subpoenaed both, because he did not want the real facts to
+come out. But he put in two solicitor's clerks, who had been hanging
+about the premises, and buying endless _National Reformers_ and
+_Freethinkers_, sheaves of them which were never used, but by which
+Sir Hardinge hoped to convey the impression of a mass of criminality.
+He put in a gentleman from the British Museum, who produced two large
+books, presumed to be _National Reformers_ and _Freethinkers_; what
+they were brought for nobody understood, the counsel for the Crown as
+little as any one, and the judge, surveying them over his spectacles,
+treated them with supreme contempt, as utterly irrelevant. Then a man
+came to prove that Mr. Bradlaugh was rated for Stonecutter Street, a
+fact no one disputed. Two policemen came to say they had seen him go
+in. "You saw many people go in, I suppose?" queried the Lord Chief
+Justice. On the whole the most miserably weak and obviously malicious
+case that could be brought into a court of law.
+
+One witness, however, must not be forgotten--Mr. Woodhams, bank
+manager. When he stated that Mr. Maloney, the junior counsel for the
+Crown, had inspected Mr. Bradlaugh's banking account, a murmur of
+surprise and indignation ran round the court. "Oh! Oh!" was heard from
+the crowd of barristers behind. The judge looked down incredulously,
+and for a moment the examination was stopped by the general movement.
+Unless Sir Hardinge Giffard is a splendid actor, he was not aware of
+the infamous proceeding, for he looked as startled as the rest of his
+legal brethren.
+
+Another queer incident occurred, showing, perhaps more than aught
+else, Mr. Bradlaugh's swift perception of the situation and adaptation
+to the environment. He wanted to read the Mansion House deposition of
+Norrish, to show why he was not called; the judge objected, and
+declined to allow it to be read. A pause while you might count five;
+then; "Well, I think I may say the learned counsel did not call
+Norrish because ..." and then the whole substance of the deposition
+was given in supposititious form. The judge looked down a minute, and
+then went off into silent laughter impossible to control at the adroit
+change of means and persistent gaining of end; barristers all round
+broke into ripples of laughter unrestrained; a broad smile pervaded
+the jury box; the only unmoved person was the defendant who proceeded
+in his grave statement as to what Norrish "might" have been asked. The
+nature of the defence was very clearly stated by Mr. Bradlaugh: "I
+shall ask you to find that this prosecution is one of the steps in a
+vindictive attempt to oppress and to crush a political opponent--that
+it was a struggle that commenced on my return to Parliament in 1880.
+If the prosecutor had gone into the box I should have shown you that
+he was one of the first then in the House to use the suggestion of
+blasphemy against me there. Since then I have never had any peace
+until the Monday of this week. Writs for penalties have been served,
+and suits of all kinds have been taken against me. On Monday last the
+House of Lords cleared me from the whole of one set, and, gentlemen, I
+ask you to-day to clear me from another. Three times I have been
+re-elected by my constituents, and what Sir Henry Tyler asks you to do
+is to send me to them branded with the dishonour of a conviction,
+branded not with the conviction for publishing heresy, but branded
+with the conviction, dishonourable to me, of having lied in this
+matter. I have no desire to have a prison's walls closed on me, but I
+would sooner ten times that, than that my constituents should think
+that for one moment I lied to escape the penalties. I am not indicted
+for anything I have ever written or caused to be written. As my Lord
+at the very first stage this morning pointed out, it is no question
+with me, Are the matters indicted blasphemous, or are they not
+blasphemous? Are they defensible, or are they not defensible? That is
+not my duty here. On this I make no comment. I have no duty here of
+even discussing the policy of the blasphemy laws, although I cannot
+help thinking that, if I were here making my defence against them, I
+might say that they were bad laws unfairly revived, doing more
+mischief to those who revive them than to those whom they are revived
+against. But it is not for anything I have said myself; it is not for
+anything I have written myself; it is not for anything I have
+published myself. It is an endeavour to make me technically liable for
+a publication with which I have nothing whatever to do, and I will ask
+you to defeat that here. Every time I have succeeded I have been met
+with some new thing. When I first fought it was hoped to defeat my
+election. When I was re-elected it was sought to make me bankrupt by
+enormous penalties, and when I escaped the suit for enormous penalties
+they hope now to destroy me by this. I have no question here about
+defending my heresy, not because I am not ready to defend it when it
+is challenged in the right way, and it there be anything in it that
+the law can challenge. I have never gone back from anything I have
+ever said; I have never gone back from anything I have ever written; I
+have never gone back from anything I have ever done; and I ask you not
+to allow this Sir Henry Whatley Tyler, who dares not come here to-day,
+to use you as the assassin uses the dagger, to stab a man from behind
+whom he never dares to face."
+
+The summing up by Lord Coleridge was perfect in eloquence, in thought,
+in feeling. Nothing more touching could be imagined than the conflict
+between the real religious feeling, abhorrent of heresy, and the
+determination to be just, despite all prejudice. The earnest effort
+lest the prejudice he felt as a Christian should weigh also in the
+minds of the jury, and should cause them to pervert justice. The
+absolute pleading to them to do what was right and not to admit
+against the unbeliever what they would not admit in ordinary cases.
+Then the protest against prosecution of opinions; the admission of the
+difficulties in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the pathetic fear lest by
+persecution "the sacred truths might be struck through the sides of
+those who are their enemies." For intellectual clearness and moral
+elevation this exquisite piece of eloquence, delivered in a voice of
+silvery beauty, would be hard to excel, and Lord Coleridge did this
+piece of service to the religion so dear to his heart, that he showed
+that a Christian judge could be just and righteous in dealing with a
+foe of his creed.
+
+There was a time of terrible strain waiting for the verdict, and when
+at last it came, "Not Guilty," a sharp clap of applause hailed it,
+sternly and rightly reproved by the judge. It was echoed by the
+country, which almost unanimously condemned the prosecution as an
+iniquitous attempt on the part of Mr. Bradlaugh's political enemies to
+put a stop to his political career. Thus the _Pall Mall Gazette_
+wrote:--
+
+"Whatever may be the personal or political or religious aversion which
+is excited by Mr. Bradlaugh, it is impossible for even his bitterest
+opponents to deny the brilliance of the series of victories which he
+has won in the law courts. His acquittal in the blasphemy prosecution
+of Saturday was but the latest of a number of encounters in which he
+has succeeded in turning the tables upon his opponents in the most
+decisive fashion. The policy of baiting Mr. Bradlaugh which has been
+persisted in so long, savours so strongly of a petty and malignant
+species of persecution that it is well that those who indulge in it
+should be made to smart for their pains. The wise and weighty words
+used by the Lord Chief Justice in summing up should be taken seriously
+to heart: 'Those persons are to be deprecated who would pervert the
+law, even with the best intentions, and "do evil that good may come,
+whose damnation" (says the apostle) "is just."' Without emulating the
+severity of the apostle, we may say that it is satisfactory that the
+promoters of all these prosecutions should be condemned in costs."
+
+In the separate trial of Messrs. Foote and Ramsey, Mr. Foote again
+defended himself in a speech of marked ability, and spoken of by the
+judge as "very striking." Lord Coleridge made a noble charge to the
+jury, in which he strongly condemned prosecutions of unpopular
+opinions, pointing out that no prosecution short of extermination
+could be effective, and caustically remarking on the very easy form of
+virtue indulged in by persecutors. "As a general rule," he said,
+"persecution, unless far more extreme than in England in the
+nineteenth century is possible, is certain to be in vain. It is also
+true, and I cannot help assenting to it, that it is a very easy form
+of virtue. It is a more difficult form of virtue, quietly and
+unostentatiously to obey what we believe to be God's will in our own
+lives. It is not very easy to do it; and it makes much less noise in
+the world. It is very easy to turn upon somebody else who differs from
+us, and in the guise of zeal of God's honour to attack somebody of a
+difference of opinion, whose life may be more pleasing to God and more
+conducive to His honour than our own. And when it is done by persons
+whose own lives are not free from reproach and who take that
+particular form of zeal for God which consists in putting the criminal
+law in force against others, that, no doubt, does more to create a
+sympathy with the defendant than with the prosecutor. And if it should
+be done by those who enjoy the wit of Voltaire, and who do not turn
+away from the sneers of Gibbon, and rather relish the irony of Hume,
+our feelings do not go with the prosecutors, and we are rather
+disposed to sympathise with the defendant. It is still worse if the
+person who takes such a course takes it, not from a kind of notion
+that God wants his assistance, and that he can give it less on his own
+account than by prosecuting others--but it is mixed up with anything
+of partisan or political feeling, then nothing can be more foreign to
+what is high-minded, or religious, or noble, in men's conduct; and
+indeed, it seems to me that any one who will do that, not for the
+honour of God but for the purpose of the ban, deserves the most
+disdainful disapprobation."
+
+The jury disagreed, and a _nolle prosequi_ was entered. The net
+results of the trials were a large addition to the membership of the
+National Secular Society, an increase of circulation of Freethought
+literature, the raising of Mr. Foote for a time to a position of great
+influence and popularity, and the placing of his name in history as a
+brave martyr for liberty of speech. The offence against good taste
+will be forgotten; the loyalty to conviction and to courage will
+remain. History does not ask if men who suffered for heresy ever
+published a rough word; it asks, Were they brave in their
+steadfastness; were they faithful to the truth they saw? It may be
+well to place on record Mr. Foote's punishment for blasphemy: he spent
+twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four alone in his cell; his only
+seat was a stool without a back; his employment was picking matting;
+his bed was a plank with a thin mattress. During the latter part of
+his imprisonment he was allowed some books.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+SOCIALISM.
+
+
+The rest of 1883 passed in the usual way of hard work; the Affirmation
+Bill was rejected, and the agitation for Constitutional right grew
+steadily; the Liberal Press was won over, and Mr. Bradlaugh was
+beginning to earn golden opinions on all sides for his courage, his
+tenacity, and his self-control. A successful International Congress at
+Amsterdam took some of us over to the Northern Venice, where a most
+successful gathering was held. To me, personally, the year has a
+special interest, as being the one in which my attention was called,
+though only partially, to the Socialist movement. I had heard Louise
+Michelle lecture in the early spring; a brief controversy in the
+_National Reformer_ had interested me, but I had not yet concerned
+myself with the economic basis of Socialism; I had realised that the
+land should be public property, but had not gone into the deeper
+economic causes of poverty, though the question was pressing with
+ever-increasing force on heart and brain. Of Socialist teaching I knew
+nothing, having studied only the older English Economists in my
+younger days. In 1884 a more definite call to consider 299 these
+teachings was to come, and I may perhaps open the record of 1884 with
+the words of greeting spoken by me to our readers in the first number
+of the _Reformer_ for that year: "What tests 1884 may have for our
+courage, what strains on our endurance, what trials of our loyalty,
+none can tell. But this we know--that every test of courage
+successfully met, every strain of endurance steadily borne, every
+trial of loyalty nobly surmounted, leaves courage braver, endurance
+stronger, loyalty truer, than each was before. And therefore, for our
+own and for the world's sake, I will not wish you, friends, an 1884 in
+which there shall be no toil and no battling; but I will wish you,
+each and all, the hero's heart and the hero's patience, in the
+struggle for the world's raising that will endure through the coming
+year."
+
+On February 3rd I came for the first time across a paper called
+_Justice_, in which Mr. Bradlaugh was attacked, and which gave an
+account of a meeting of the Democratic Federation--not yet the Social
+Democratic--in which a man had, apparently unrebuked, said that "all
+means were justifiable to attain" working-class ends. I protested
+strongly against the advocacy of criminal means, declaring that those
+who urged the use of such means were the worst foes of social
+progress. A few weeks later the _Echo_ repeated a speech of Mr.
+Hyndman's in which a "bloodier revolution" than that of France was
+prophesied, and the extinction of "book-learning" seemed coupled with
+the success of Socialism, and this again I commented on. But I had the
+pleasure, a week later, of reprinting from _Justice_ a sensible
+paragraph, condemning the advocacy of violence so long as free
+agitation was allowed.
+
+The spring was marked by two events on which I have not time or space
+to dwell--the resignation by Mr. Bradlaugh of his seat, on the
+reiteration of the resolution of exclusion, and his triumphant return
+for the fourth time by an increased majority, a vote of 4,032, a
+higher poll than that of the general election; and the release of Mr.
+Foote, on February 25th, from Holloway, whence he was escorted by a
+procession a quarter of a mile in length. On the 12th of March he and
+his fellow-prisoners received a magnificent reception and were
+presented with valuable testimonials at the Hall of Science.
+
+Taking up again the thread of Socialism, the great debate in St.
+James's Hall, London, between Mr. Bradlaugh and Mr. Hyndman on April
+17th, roused me to a serious study of the questions raised. Socialism
+has in England no more devoted, no more self-sacrificing advocate than
+Henry Hyndman. A man of wide and deep reading, wielding most ably a
+singularly fascinating pen, with talents that would have made him
+wealthy in any career he adopted, he has sacrificed himself without a
+murmur to the people's cause. He has borne obloquy from without,
+suspicion and unkindness from those he served, and surrounded by
+temptations to betray the people, he has never swerved from his
+integrity. He has said rash things, has been stirred to passionate
+outbursts and reckless phrases, but love to the people and sympathy
+with suffering lay at the root of his wildest words, and they count
+but little as against his faithful service. Personally, my debt to him
+is of a mixed character; he kept me from Socialism for some time by
+his bitter and very unjust antagonism to Mr. Bradlaugh; but it was the
+debate at St. James's Hall that, while I angrily resented his
+injustice, made me feel that there was something more in practical
+Socialism than I had imagined, especially when I read it over
+afterwards, away from the magic of Mr. Bradlaugh's commanding
+eloquence and personal magnetism. It was a sore pity that English
+Socialists, from the outset of their movement, treated Mr. Bradlaugh
+so unfairly, so that his friends were set against Socialists ere they
+began to examine their arguments. I must confess that my deep
+attachment to him led me into injustice to his Socialist foes in those
+early days, and often made me ascribe to them calculated malignity
+instead of hasty and prejudiced assertion. Added to this, their
+uncurbed violence in discussion, their constant interruptions during
+the speeches of opponents, their reckless inaccuracy in matters of
+fact, were all bars standing in the way of the thoughtful. When I came
+to know them better, I found that the bulk of their speakers were very
+young men, overworked and underpaid, who spent their scanty leisure in
+efforts to learn, to educate themselves, to train themselves, and I
+learned to pardon faults which grew out of the bitter sense of
+injustice, and which were due largely to the terrible pressure of our
+system on characters not yet strong enough--how few are strong
+enough!--to bear grinding injustice without loss of balance and of
+impartiality. None save those who have worked with them know how much
+of real nobility, of heroic self-sacrifice, of constant self-denial,
+of brotherly affection, there is among the Social Democrats.
+
+At this time also I met George Bernard Shaw, one of the most brilliant
+of Socialist writers and most provoking of men; a man with a perfect
+genius for "aggravating" the enthusiastically earnest, and with a
+passion for representing himself as a scoundrel. On my first
+experience of him on the platform at South Place Institute he
+described himself as a "loafer," and I gave an angry snarl at him in
+the _Reformer_, for a loafer was my detestation, and behold! I found
+that he was very poor, because he was a writer with principles and
+preferred starving his body to starving his conscience; that he gave
+time and earnest work to the spreading of Socialism, spending night
+after night in workmen's clubs; and that "a loafer" was only an
+amiable way of describing himself because he did not carry a hod. Of
+course I had to apologise for my sharp criticism as doing him a
+serious injustice, but privately felt somewhat injured at having been
+entrapped into such a blunder. Meanwhile I was more and more turning
+aside from politics and devoting myself to the social condition of the
+people I find myself, in June, protesting against Sir John Lubbock's
+Bill which fixed a twelve-hour day as the limit of a "young person's"
+toil. "A 'day' of twelve hours is brutal," I wrote; "if the law fixes
+twelve hours as a 'fair day' that law will largely govern custom. I
+declare that a 'legal day' should be eight hours on five days in the
+week and not more than five hours on the sixth. If the labour is of an
+exhausting character these hours are too long." On every side now the
+Socialist controversy grew, and I listened, read, and thought much,
+but said little. The inclusion of John Robertson in the staff of the
+_Reformer_ brought a highly intellectual Socialist into closer touch
+with us, and slowly I found that the case for Socialism was
+intellectually complete and ethically beautiful. The trend of my
+thought was shown by urging the feeding of Board School children,
+breaking down under the combination of education and starvation, and I
+asked, "Why should people be pauperised by a rate-supported meal, and
+not pauperised by, state-supported police, drainage, road-mending,
+street-lighting, &c? "Socialism in its splendid ideal appealed to my
+heart, while the economic soundness of its basis convinced my head.
+All my life was turned towards the progress of the people, the helping
+of man, and it leaped forward to meet the stronger hope, the lofty
+ideal of social brotherhood, the rendering possible to all of freer
+life; so long had I been striving thitherward, and here there opened
+up a path to the yearned-for goal! How strong were the feelings
+surging in my heart may be seen in a brief extract from an article
+published second week of January, 1885: "Christian charity? We know
+its work. It gives a hundred-weight of coal and five pounds of beef
+once a year to a family whose head could earn a hundred such doles if
+Christian justice allowed him fair wage for the work he performs. It
+plunders the workers of the wealth they make, and then flings back at
+them a thousandth part of their own product as 'charity.' It builds
+hospitals for the poor whom it has poisoned in filthy courts and
+alleys, and workhouses for the worn-out creatures from whom it has
+wrung every energy, every hope, every joy. Miss Cobbe summons us to
+admire Christian civilisation, and we see idlers flaunting in the
+robes woven by the toilers, a glittering tinselled super-structure
+founded on the tears, the strugglings, the grey, hopeless misery of
+the poor."
+
+This first month of January, 1885, brought on me the first attack for
+my Socialistic tendencies, from the pen of Mr. W.P. Ball, who wrote
+to the _Reformer_ complaining of my paragraph, quoted above, in which
+I had advocated rate-supported meals for Board School children. A
+brief controversy thus arose, in which I supported my opinion, waiving
+the question as to my being "at heart a Socialist." In truth, I
+dreaded to make the plunge of publicly allying myself with the
+advocates of Socialism, because of the attitude of bitter hostility
+they had adopted towards Mr. Bradlaugh. On his strong, tenacious
+nature, nurtured on self-reliant individualism, the arguments of the
+younger generation made no impression. He could not change his methods
+because a new tendency was rising to the surface, and he did not see
+how different was the Socialism of our day to the Socialist dreams of
+the past--noble ideals of a future not immediately realisable in
+truth, but to be worked towards and rendered possible in the days to
+come. Could I take public action which might bring me into collision
+with the dearest of my friends, which might strain the strong and
+tender tie so long existing between us? My affection, my gratitude,
+all warred against the idea of working with those who wronged him so
+bitterly. But the cry of starving children was ever in my ears; the
+sobs of women poisoned in lead works, exhausted in nail works, driven
+to prostitution by starvation, made old and haggard by ceaseless work.
+I saw their misery was the result of an evil system, was inseparable
+from private ownership of the instruments of wealth production; that
+while the worker was himself but an instrument, selling his labour
+under the law of supply and demand, he must remain helpless in the
+grip of the employing classes, and that trade combinations could only
+mean increased warfare--necessary, indeed, for the time as weapons of
+defence--but meaning war, not brotherly co-operation of all for the
+good of all. A conflict which was stripped of all covering, a conflict
+between a personal tie and a call of duty could not last long, and
+with a heavy heart I made up my mind to profess Socialism openly and
+work for it with all my energy. Happily, Mr. Bradlaugh was as tolerant
+as he was strong, and our private friendship remained unbroken; but he
+never again felt the same confidence in my judgment as he felt before,
+nor did he any more consult me on his own policy, as he had done ever
+since we first clasped hands.
+
+A series of articles in _Our Corner_ on the "Redistribution of
+Political Power," on the "Evolution of Society," on "Modern
+Socialism," made my position clear. "Over against those who laud the
+present state of Society, with its unjustly rich and its unjustly
+poor, with its palaces and its slums, its millionaires and its
+paupers, be it ours to proclaim that there is a higher ideal in life
+than that of being first in the race for wealth, most successful in
+the scramble for gold. Be it ours to declare steadfastly that health,
+comfort, leisure, culture, plenty for every individual are far more
+desirable than breathless struggle for existence, furious trampling
+down of the weak by the strong, huge fortunes accumulated out of the
+toil of others, to be handed down to those who had done nothing to
+earn them. Be it ours to maintain that the greatness of a nation
+depends not on the number of its great proprietors, on the wealth of
+its great capitalists, or the splendour of its great nobles, but on
+the absence of poverty among its people, on the education and
+refinement of its masses, on the universality of enjoyment in life....
+Enough for each of work, of leisure, of joy; too little for none, too
+much for none--such is the Social ideal. Better to strive after it
+worthily and fail, than to die without striving for it at all."
+
+Then I differentiated the methods of the Socialist and the Radical
+Individualist, pleading for union among those who formed the wings of
+the army of Labour, and urging union of all workers against the
+idlers. For the weakness of the people has ever been in their
+divisions, in the readiness of each section to turn its weapons
+against other sections instead of against the common foe. All
+privileged classes, when they are attacked, sink their differences and
+present a serried front to their assailants; the people alone fight
+with each other, while the battle between themselves and the
+privileged is raging.
+
+I strove, as so many others were striving, to sound in the ears of the
+thoughtless and the careless the cry of the sufferings of the poor,
+endeavouring to make articulate their misery. Thus in a description of
+Edinburgh slums came the following: "I saw in a 'house' which was made
+by boarding up part of a passage, which had no window, and in which it
+was necessary to burn an oil lamp all day, thus adding to the burden
+of the rent, a family of three--man, wife, and child--whose lot was
+hardly 'of their own making.' The man was tall and bronzed, but he was
+dying of heart disease; he could not do hard work, and he was too
+clumsy for light work; so he sat there, after two days' fruitless
+search, patiently nursing his miserable, scrofulous baby in his dim
+and narrow den. The cases of individual hopeless suffering are
+heartbreaking. In one room lay a dying child, dying of low fever
+brought on by want of food. 'It hae no faither,' sobbed the mother;
+and for a moment I did not catch the meaning that the father had left
+to the mother all the burden of a child unallowed by law. In another
+lay the corpse of a mother, with the children round her, and
+hard-featured, gentle-hearted women came in to take back to their
+overcrowded beds 'the mitherless bairns.' In yet another a woman,
+shrunken and yellow, crouched over a glimmer of fire; "I am dying of
+cancer of the womb," she said, with that pathetic resignation to the
+inevitable so common among the poor. I sat chatting for a few minutes.
+'Come again, deary,' she said as I rose to go; 'it's gey dull sitting
+here the day through.'"
+
+The article in which these, among other descriptions, occurred was
+closed with the following: "Passing out of the slums into the streets
+of the town, only a few steps separating the horror and the beauty, I
+felt, with a vividness more intense than ever, the fearful contrasts
+between the lots of men; and with more pressing urgency the question
+seemed to ring in my ears, 'Is there no remedy? Must there always be
+rich and poor?' Some say that it must be so; that the palace and the
+slum will for ever exist as the light and the shadow. Not so do I
+believe. I believe that the poverty is the result of ignorance and of
+bad social arrangements, and that therefore it may be eradicated by
+knowledge and by social change. I admit that for many of these adult
+dwellers in the slums there is no hope. Poor victims of a civilisation
+that hides its brutality beneath a veneer of culture and of grace, for
+them individually there is, alas! no salvation. But for their
+children, yes! Healthy surroundings, good food, mental and physical
+training, plenty of play, and carefully chosen work--these might save
+the young and prepare them for happy life. But they are being left to
+grow up as their parents were, and even when a few hours of school are
+given them the home half-neutralises what the education effects. The
+scanty aid given is generally begrudged, the education is to be but
+elementary, as little as possible is doled out. Yet these children
+have each one of them hopes and fears, possibilities of virtue and of
+crime, a life to be made or marred. We shower money on generals and on
+nobles, we keep high-born paupers living on the national charity, we
+squander wealth with both hands on army and navy, on churches and
+palaces; but we grudge every halfpenny that increases the education
+rate and howl down every proposal to build decent houses for the poor.
+We cover our heartlessness and indifference with fine phrases about
+sapping the independence of the poor and destroying their
+self-respect. With loathsome hypocrisy we repair a prince's palace for
+him, and let him live in it rent-free, without one word about the
+degradation involved in his thus living upon charity; while we refuse
+to 'pauperise' the toiler by erecting decent buildings in which he may
+live--not rent-free like the prince, but only paying a rent which
+shall cover the cost of erection and maintenance, instead of one which
+gives a yearly profit to a speculator. And so, year after year, the
+misery grows, and every great city has on its womb a cancer; sapping
+its vitality, poisoning its life-blood. Every great city is breeding
+in its slums a race which is reverting through the savage to the
+brute--a brute more dangerous in that degraded humanity has
+possibilities of evil in it beyond the reach of the mere wild beast.
+If not for Love's sake, then for fear; if not for justice or for human
+pity, then for sheer desire of self-preservation; I appeal to the wise
+and to the wealthy to set their hands to the cure of social evil, ere
+stolidity gives place to passion and dull patience vanishes before
+fury, and they
+
+"'Learn at last, in some wild hour, how much the wretched dare.'"
+
+Because it was less hotly antagonistic to the Radicals than the two
+other Socialist organisations, I joined the Fabian Society, and worked
+hard with it as a speaker and lecturer. Sidney Webb, G. Bernard Shaw,
+Hubert and Mrs. Bland, Graham Wallas--these were some of those who
+gave time, thought, incessant work to the popularising of Socialist
+thought, the spreading of sound economics, the effort to turn the
+workers' energy toward social rather than merely political reform. We
+lectured at workmen's clubs wherever we could gain a hearing, till we
+leavened London Radicalism with Socialist thought, and by treating the
+Radical as the unevolved Socialist rather than as the anti-Socialist,
+we gradually won him over to Socialist views. We circulated questions
+to be put to all candidates for parliamentary or other offices,
+stirred up interest in local elections, educated men and women into an
+understanding of the causes of their poverty, won recruits for the
+army of propagandists from the younger of the educated middle class.
+That the London working classes to-day are so largely Socialist is
+greatly due to the years of work done among them by members of the
+Fabian Society, as well to the splendid, if occasionally too militant,
+energy of the Social Democratic Federation, and to the devotion of
+that noble and generous genius, William Morris.
+
+During this same year (1885) a movement was set on foot in England to
+draw attention to the terrible sufferings of the Russian political
+prisoners, and it was decided at a meeting held in my house to form a
+society of the friends of Russia, which should seek to spread accurate
+and careful information about the present condition of Russia. At that
+meeting were present Charles Bradlaugh, "Stepniak," and many others,
+E.R. Pease acting as honorary secretary. It is noteworthy that some
+of the most prominent Russian exiles--such as Kropotkin--take the view
+that the Tzar himself is not allowed to know what occurs, and is very
+largely the victim of the bureaucracy that surrounds him.
+
+Another matter, that increased as the months went on, was the attempt
+of the police authorities to stop Socialist speaking in the open air.
+Christians, Freethinkers, Salvationists, agitators of all kinds were,
+for the most part, left alone, but there was a regular crusade against
+the Socialists. Liberal and Tory journals alike condemned the way in
+which in Dod Street, in September, the Socialists' meetings were
+attacked. Quiet persistence was shown by the promoters--members of the
+Social Democratic Federation--and they were well supported by other
+Socialists and by the Radical clubs. I volunteered to speak on October
+4th (my first Sunday in London after the summoning and imprisoning of
+the speakers had commenced), but the attitude of the people was so
+determined on the preceding Sunday that all interference was
+withdrawn.
+
+Herbert Burrows stood for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets in
+the November of this year, and I find a paragraph in the _Reformer_ in
+which I heartily wished him success, especially as the first candidate
+who had put forward a demand for industrial education. In this, as in
+so many practical proposals, Socialists have led the way. He polled
+4,232 votes, despite the furious opposition of the clergy to him as a
+Freethinker, of the publicans to him as a teetotaler, of the
+maintainers of the present social system to him as a Socialist. And
+his fight did much to make possible my own success in 1888.
+
+With this autumn, too, began, in connection with the struggle for the
+right of meeting, the helping of the workmen to fair trial by
+providing of bail and legal defence. The first case that I bailed out
+was that of Lewis Lyons, sent to gaol for two months with hard labour
+by Mr. Saunders, of the Thames Police Court. Oh, the weary, sickening
+waiting in the court for "my prisoner," the sordid vice, the revolting
+details of human depravity to which my unwilling eyes and ears were
+witnesses. I carried Lyons off in triumph, and the Middlesex
+magistrates quashed the conviction, the evidence being pronounced by
+them to be "confusing, contradictory, and worthless." Yet but for the
+chance of one of us stepping forward to offer bail and to provide the
+means for an appeal (I acted on Mr. Bradlaugh's suggestion and advice,
+for he acted as counsellor to me all through the weary struggles that
+lasted till 1888, putting his great legal knowledge at my disposal,
+though he often disapproved my action, thinking me Quixotic)--but for
+this, Lewis Lyons would have had to suffer his heavy sentence.
+
+The general election took place this autumn, and Northampton returned
+Mr. Bradlaugh for the fifth time, thus putting an end to the long
+struggle, for he took the oath and his seat in the following January,
+and at once gave notice of an Oaths Bill, to give to all who claimed
+it, under all circumstances, the right to affirm. He was returned with
+the largest vote ever polled for him--4,315--and he entered Parliament
+with all the prestige of his great struggle, and went to the front at
+once, one of the recognised forces in the House. The action of Mr.
+Speaker Peel promptly put an end to an attempted obstruction. Sir
+Michael Hicks Beach, Mr. Cecil Raikes, and Sir John Hennaway had
+written to the Speaker asking his interference, but the Speaker
+declared that he had no authority, no right to stand between a duly
+elected member and the duty of taking the oath prescribed by statute.
+Thus ended the constitutional struggle of six years, that left the
+victor well-nigh bankrupt in health and in purse, and sent him to a
+comparatively early grave. He lived long enough to justify his
+election, to prove his value to the House and to his country, but he
+did not live long enough to render to England all the services which
+his long training, his wide knowledge, his courage, and his honesty so
+eminently fitted him to yield.
+
+[Illustration: NORWICH BRANCH OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE.]
+
+_Our Corner_ now served as a valuable aid in Socialist propaganda, and
+its monthly "Socialist Notes" became a record of Socialist progress in
+all lands. We were busy during the spring in organising a conference
+for the discussion of "The Present Commercial System, and the Better
+Utilisation of National Wealth for the Benefit of the Community," and
+this was successfully held at South Place Institute on June 9th, 10th,
+11th, the three days being given respectively, to the "Utilisation of
+Land," the "Utilisation of Capital," and the "Democratic Policy." On
+the 9th Mr. Bradlaugh spoke on the utilisation of waste lands, arguing
+that in a thickly populated country no one had the right to keep
+cultivable land uncultivated, and that where land was so kept there
+should be compulsory expropriation, the state taking the land and
+letting it out to cultivating tenants. Among the other speakers were
+Edward Carpenter, William Morris, Sidney Webb, John Robertson, William
+Saunders, W. Donnisthorpe, Edward Aveling, Charlotte Wilson, Mrs.
+Fenwick Miller, Hubert Bland, Dr. Pankhurst, and myself--men and women
+of many views, met to compare methods, and so help on the cause of
+social regeneration.
+
+Bitter attacks were made on me for my Socialist advocacy by some of
+the Radicals in the Freethought party, and looking back I find myself
+condemned as a "Saint Athanasius in petticoats," and as possessing a
+"mind like a milk-jug." This same courteous critic remarked, "I have
+heard Mrs. Besant described as being, like most women, at the mercy of
+her last male acquaintance for her views on economics." I was foolish
+enough to break a lance in self-defence with this assailant, not
+having then learned that self-defence was a waste of time that might
+be better employed in doing work for others. I certainly should not
+now take the trouble to write such a paragraph as the following: "The
+moment a man uses a woman's sex to discredit her arguments, the
+thoughtful reader knows that he is unable to answer the arguments
+themselves. But really these silly sneers at woman's ability have lost
+their force, and are best met with a laugh at the stupendous 'male
+self-conceit' of the writer. I may add that such shafts are specially
+pointless against myself. A woman who thought her way out of
+Christianity and Whiggism into Freethought and Radicalism absolutely
+alone; who gave up every old friend, male and female, rather than
+resign the beliefs she had struggled to in solitude; who, again, in
+embracing active Socialism, has run counter to the views of her
+nearest 'male friends'; such a woman may very likely go wrong, but I
+think she may venture, without conceit, to at least claim independence
+of judgment. I did not make the acquaintance of one of my present
+Socialist comrades, male or female, until I had embraced Socialism." A
+foolish paragraph, as are all self-defences, and a mischievous one, as
+all retort breeds fresh strife. But not yet had come the self-control
+that estimates the judgments of others at their true value, that recks
+not of praise and blame; not yet had I learned that evil should not be
+met with evil, wrath with wrath; not yet were the words of the Buddha
+the law to which I strove to render obedience: "Hatred ceases not by
+hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love." The year 1886 was a
+terrible one for labour, everywhere reductions of wages, everywhere
+increase of the numbers of the unemployed; turning over the pages of
+_Our Corner_, I see "Socialist Notes" filled, month after month, with
+a monotonous tale, "there is a reduction of wages at" such and such a
+place; so many "men have been discharged at -----, owing to the
+slackness of trade." Our hearts sank lower and lower as summer passed
+into autumn, and the coming winter threatened to add to starvation the
+bitter pains of cold. The agitation for the eight hours' day increased
+in strength as the unemployed grew more numerous week by week "We
+can't stand it," a sturdy, quiet fellow had said to me during the
+preceding winter; "flesh and blood can't stand it, and two months of
+this bitter cold, too." "We may as well starve idle as starve
+working," had said another, with a fierce laugh. And a spirit of
+sullen discontent was spreading everywhere, discontent that was wholly
+justified by facts. But ah! how patient they were for the most part,
+how sadly, pathetically patient, this crucified Christ, Humanity;
+wrongs that would set my heart and my tongue afire would be accepted
+as a matter of course. O blind and mighty people, how my heart went
+out to you; trampled on, abused, derided, asking so little and needing
+so much; so pathetically grateful for the pettiest services; so loving
+and so loyal to those who offered you but their poor services and
+helpless love. Deeper and deeper into my innermost nature ate the
+growing desire to succour, to suffer for, to save. I had long given up
+my social reputation, I now gave up with ever-increasing surrender
+ease, comfort, time; the passion of pity grew stronger and stronger,
+fed by each new sacrifice, and each sacrifice led me nearer and nearer
+to the threshold of that gateway beyond which stretched a path of
+renunciation I had never dreamed of, which those might tread who were
+ready wholly to strip off self for Man's sake, who for Love's sake
+would surrender Love's return from those they served, and would go out
+into the darkness for themselves that they might, with their own souls
+as fuel, feed the Light of the World.
+
+As the suffering deepened with the darkening months, the meetings of
+the unemployed grew in number, and the murmurs of discontent became
+louder. The Social Democratic Federation carried on an outdoor
+agitation, not without making blunders, being composed of human
+beings, but with abundant courage and self-sacrifice. The policy of
+breaking up Socialist meetings went on while other meetings were
+winked at, and John Williams, a fiery speaker, but a man with a record
+of pathetic struggle and patient heroism, was imprisoned for two
+months for speaking in the open air, and so nearly starved in gaol
+that he came out with his health broken for life.
+
+1887 dawned, the year that was to close so stormily, and Socialists
+everywhere were busying themselves on behalf of the unemployed, urging
+vestries to provide remunerative work for those applying for relief,
+assailing the Local Government Board with practicable proposals for
+utilising the productive energies of the unemployed, circulating
+suggestions to municipalities and other local representative bodies,
+urging remedial measures. A four days' oral debate with Mr. Foote, and
+a written debate with Mr. Bradlaugh, occupied some of my energies, and
+helped in the process of education to which public opinion was being
+subjected. Both these debates were largely circulated as pamphlets. A
+series of afternoon debates between representative speakers was
+organised at South Place Institute, and Mr. Corrie Grant and myself
+had a lively discussion, I affirming "That the existence of classes
+who live upon unearned incomes is detrimental to the welfare of the
+community, and ought to be put an end to by legislation." Another
+debate--in this very quarrelsome spring of 1887--was a written one in
+the _National Reformer_ between the Rev. G.F. Handel Rowe and myself
+on the proposition, "Is Atheism logically tenable, and is there a
+satisfactory Atheistic System for the guidance of Human Conduct." And
+so the months went on, and the menace of misery grew louder and
+louder, till in September I find myself writing: "This one thing is
+clear--Society must deal with the unemployed, or the unemployed will
+deal with Society. Stormier and stormier becomes the social outlook,
+and they at least are not the worst enemies of Society who seek to
+find some way through the breakers by which the ship of the
+Commonwealth may pass into quiet waters."
+
+Some amusement turned up in the shape of a Charing Cross Parliament,
+in which we debated with much vigour the "burning questions" of the
+day. We organised a compact Socialist party, defeated a Liberal
+Government, took the reins of office, and--after a Queen's Speech in
+which her Majesty addressed her loyal Commons with a plainness of
+speech never before (or since) heard from the throne--we brought in
+several Bills of a decidedly heroic character. G. Bernard Shaw, as
+President of the Local Government Board, and I, as Home Secretary,
+came in for a good deal of criticism in connection with various
+drastic measures. An International Freethought Congress, held in
+London, entailed fairly heavy work, and the science classes were ever
+with us. Another written debate came with October, this time on the
+"Teachings of Christianity," making the fifth of these set discussions
+held by me during the year. This same month brought a change, painful
+but just: I resigned my much-prized position as co-editor of the
+_National Reformer,_ and the number for October 23rd bore Charles
+Bradlaugh's name alone. The change did not affect my work on the
+paper, but I became merely a subordinate, though remaining, of course,
+joint proprietor. The reason cannot be more accurately given than in
+the paragraph penned at the time: "For a considerable time past, and
+lately in increasing number, complaints have reached me from various
+quarters of the inconvenience and uncertainty that result from the
+divided editorial policy of this paper on the question of Socialism.
+Some months ago I proposed to avoid this difficulty by resigning my
+share in the editorship; but my colleague, with characteristic
+liberality, asked me to let the proposal stand over and see if matters
+would not adjust themselves. But the difficulty, instead of
+disappearing, has only become more pressing; and we both feel that our
+readers have a right to demand that it be solved.
+
+"When I became co-editor of this paper I was not a Socialist; and,
+although I regard Socialism as the necessary and logical outcome of
+the Radicalism which for so many years the _National Reformer_ has
+taught, still, as in avowing myself a Socialist I have taken a
+distinct step, the partial separation of my policy in labour questions
+from that of my colleague has been of my own making, and not of his,
+and it is, therefore, for me to go away. Over by far the greater part
+of our sphere of action we are still substantially agreed, and are
+likely to remain so. But since, as Socialism becomes more and more a
+question of practical politics, differences of theory tend to produce
+differences in conduct; and since a political paper must have a single
+editorial programme in practical politics, it would obviously be most
+inconvenient for me to retain my position as co-editor. I therefore
+resume my former position as contributor only, thus clearing the
+_National Reformer_ of all responsibility for the views I hold."
+
+To this Mr. Bradlaugh added the following:--
+
+"I need hardly add to this how very deeply I regret the necessity for
+Mrs. Besant's resignation of the joint editorship of this Journal, and
+the real grief I feel in accepting this break in a position in which
+she has rendered such enormous service to the Freethought and Radical
+cause. As a most valued contributor I trust the _National Reformer_
+may never lose the efficient aid of her brain and pen. For thirteen
+years this paper has been richer for good by the measure of her
+never-ceasing and most useful work. I agree with her that a journal
+must have a distinct editorial policy; and I think this distinctness
+the more necessary when, as in the present case, every contributor has
+the greatest freedom of expression. I recognise in the fullest degree
+the spirit of self-sacrifice in which the lines, to which I add these
+words, have been penned by Mrs. Besant. "CHARLES BRADLAUGH."
+
+It was a wrench, this breaking of a tie for which a heavy price had
+been paid thirteen years before, but it was just. Any one who makes a
+change with which pain is connected is bound, in honour and duty, to
+take that pain as much as possible on himself; he must not put his
+sacrifice on others, nor pay his own ransom with their coin. There
+must be honour kept in the life that reaches towards the Ideal, for
+broken faith to that is the only real infidelity.
+
+And there was another reason for the change that I dared not name to
+him, for his quick loyalty would then have made him stubbornly
+determined against change. I saw the swift turning of public opinion,
+the gradual approach to him among Liberals who had hitherto held
+aloof, and I knew that they looked upon me as a clog and a burden, and
+that were I less prominently with him his way would be the easier to
+tread. So I slipped more and more into the background, no longer went
+with him to his meetings; my use to him in public was over, for I had
+become hindrance instead of help. While he was outcast and hated I had
+the pride of standing at his side; when all the fair-weather friends
+came buzzing round him I served him best by self-effacement, and I
+never loved him better than when I stood aside. But I continued all
+the literary work unaltered, and no change of opinions touched his
+kindness to me, although when, a little later, I joined the
+Theosophical Society, he lost his trust in my reasoning powers and
+judgment.
+
+In this same month of October the unemployed began walking in
+procession through the streets, and harshness on the part of the
+police led to some rioting. Sir Charles Warren thought it his duty to
+dragoon London meetings after the fashion of Continental prefects,
+with the inevitable result that an ill-feeling grew up between the
+people and the police.
+
+At last we formed a Socialist Defence Association, in order to help
+poor workmen brought up and sentenced on police evidence only, without
+any chance being given them of proper legal defence, and I organised a
+band of well-to-do men and women, who promised to obey a telegraphic
+summons, night or day, and to bail out any prisoner arrested for
+exercising the ancient right of walking in procession and speaking. To
+take one instance: Mr. Burleigh, the well-known war correspondent, and
+Mr. Winks were arrested and "run in" with Mr. J. Knight, a workman,
+for seditious language. I went down to the police-station to offer
+bail for the latter: Chief-Constable Howard accepted bail for Messrs.
+Burleigh and Winks, but refused it for Mr. Knight. The next day, at
+the police-court, the preposterous bail of £400 was demanded for Mr.
+Knight and supplied by my faithful band, and on the next hearing Mr.
+Poland, solicitor to the Treasury, withdrew the charge against him for
+lack of evidence!
+
+Then came the closing of Trafalgar Square, and the unexpected and
+high-handed order that cost some men their lives, many their liberty,
+and hundreds the most serious injuries. The Metropolitan Radical
+Federation had called a meeting for November 13th to protest against
+the imprisonment of Mr. O'Brien, and as Mr. Matthews, from his place
+in the House, had stated that there was no intention of interfering
+with _bonâ fide_ political meetings, the Radical clubs did not expect
+police interference. On November 9th Sir Charles Warren had issued an
+order forbidding all meetings in the Square, but the clubs trusted the
+promise of the Home Secretary. On Saturday evening only, November
+12th, when all arrangements were completed, did he issue a peremptory
+order, forbidding processions within a certain area. With this trap
+suddenly sprung upon them, the delegates from the clubs, the Fabian
+Society, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Socialist League,
+met on that same Saturday evening to see to any details that had been
+possibly left unsettled. It was finally decided to go to the Square as
+arranged, and, if challenged by the police, to protest formally
+against the illegal interference, then to break up the processions and
+leave the members to find their own way to the Square. It was also
+decided to go Sunday after Sunday to the Square, until the right of
+public meetings was vindicated.
+
+The procession I was in started from Clerkenwell Green, and walked
+with its banner in front, and the chosen speakers, including myself,
+immediately behind the flag. As we were moving slowly and quietly
+along one of the narrow streets debouching on Trafalgar Square,
+wondering whether we should be challenged, there was a sudden charge,
+and without a word the police were upon us with uplifted truncheons;
+the banner was struck down, and men and women were falling under a
+hail of blows. There was no attempt at resistance, the people were too
+much astounded at the unprepared attack. They scattered, leaving some
+of their number on the ground too much injured to move, and then made
+their way in twos and threes to the Square. It was garrisoned by
+police, drawn up in serried rows, that could only have been broken by
+a deliberate charge. Our orders were to attempt no violence, and we
+attempted none. Mr. Cunninghame Graham and Mr. John Burns, arm-in-arm,
+tried to pass through the police, and were savagely cut about the head
+and arrested. Then ensued a scene to be remembered; the horse police
+charged in squadrons at a hand-gallop, rolling men and women over like
+ninepins, while the foot police struck recklessly with their
+truncheons, cutting a road through the crowd that closed immediately
+behind them. I got on a waggonette and tried to persuade the driver to
+pull his trap across one of the roads, and to get others in line, so
+as to break the charges of the mounted police; but he was afraid, and
+drove away to the Embankment, so I jumped out and went back to the
+Square. At last a rattle of cavalry, and up came the Life Guards,
+cleverly handled but hurting none, trotting their horses gently and
+shouldering the crowd apart; and then the Scots Guards with bayonets
+fixed marched through and occupied the north of the Square. Then the
+people retreated as we passed round the word, "Go home, go home." The
+soldiers were ready to fire, the people unarmed; it would have been
+but a massacre. Slowly the Square emptied and all was still. All other
+processions were treated as ours had been, and the injuries inflicted
+were terrible. Peaceable, law-abiding workmen, who had never dreamed
+of rioting, were left with broken legs, broken arms, wounds of every
+description. One man, Linnell, died almost immediately, others from
+the effect of their injuries. The next day a regular court-martial in
+Bow Street Police Court, witnesses kept out by the police, men dazed
+with their wounds, decent workmen of unblemished character who had
+never been charged in a police-court before, sentenced to imprisonment
+without chance of defence. But a gallant band rallied to their rescue.
+William T. Stead, most chivalrous of journalists, opened a Defence
+Fund, and money rained in; my pledged bail came up by the dozen, and
+we got the men out on appeal. By sheer audacity I got into the
+police-court, addressed the magistrate, too astounded by my profound
+courtesy and calm assurance to remember that I had no right there, and
+then produced bail after bail of the most undeniable character and
+respectability, which no magistrate could refuse. Breathing-time
+gained, a barrister, Mr. W.M. Thompson, worked day after day with
+hearty devotion, and took up the legal defence. Fines we paid, and
+here Mrs. Marx Aveling did eager service. A pretty regiment I led out
+of Millbank Prison, after paying their fines; bruised, clothes torn,
+hatless, we must have looked a disreputable lot. We stopped and bought
+hats, to throw an air of respectability over our _cortège_, and we
+kept together until I saw the men into train and omnibus, lest, with
+the bitter feelings now roused, conflict should again arise. We formed
+the Law and Liberty League to defend all unjustly assailed by the
+police, and thus rescued many a man from prison; and we gave poor
+Linnell, killed in Trafalgar Square, a public funeral. Sir Charles
+Warren forbade the passing of the hearse through any of the main
+thoroughfares west of Waterloo Bridge, so the processions waited there
+for it. W.T. Stead, R. Cunninghame Graham, Herbert Burrows, and
+myself walked on one side the coffin, William Morris, F. Smith, R.
+Dowling, and J. Seddon on the other; the Rev. Stewart D. Headlam, the
+officiating clergyman, walked in front; fifty stewards carrying long
+wands guarded the coffin. From Wellington Street to Bow Cemetery the
+road was one mass of human beings, who uncovered reverently as the
+slain man went by; at Aldgate the procession took three-quarters of an
+hour to pass one spot, and thus we bore Linnell to his grave, symbol
+of a cruel wrong, the vast orderly, silent crowd, bareheaded, making
+mute protest against the outrage wrought.
+
+It is pleasant to put on record here Mr. Bradlaugh's grave approval of
+the heavy work done in the police-courts, and the following paragraph
+shows how generously he could praise one not acting on his own lines:
+"As I have on most serious matters of principle recently differed very
+widely from my brave and loyal co-worker, and as the difference has
+been regrettably emphasised by her resignation of her editorial
+functions on this Journal, it is the more necessary that I should say
+how thoroughly I approve, and how grateful I am to her for, her
+conduct in not only obtaining bail and providing legal assistance for
+the helpless unfortunates in the hands of the police, but also for her
+daily personal attendance and wise conduct at the police-stations and
+police-courts, where she has done so much to abate harsh treatment on
+the one hand and rash folly on the other. While I should not have
+marked out this as fitting woman's work, especially in the recent very
+inclement weather, I desire to record my view that it has been bravely
+done, well done, and most usefully done, and I wish to mark this the
+more emphatically as my views and those of Mrs. Besant seem wider
+apart than I could have deemed possible on many of the points of
+principle underlying what is every day growing into a most serious
+struggle." Ever did I find Charles Bradlaugh thus tolerant of
+difference of opinion, generously eager to approve what to him seemed
+right even in a policy he disapproved.
+
+The indignation grew and grew; the police were silently boycotted, but
+the people were so persistent and so tactful that no excuse for
+violence was given, until the strain on the police force began to
+tell, and the Tory Government felt that London was being hopelessly
+alienated; so at last Sir Charles Warren fell, and a wiser hand was
+put at the helm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+THROUGH STORM TO PEACE.
+
+
+Out of all this turmoil and stress rose a Brotherhood that had in it
+the promise of a fairer day. Mr. Stead and I had become close
+friends--he Christian, I Atheist, burning with one common love for
+man, one common hatred against oppression. And so in _Our Corner_ for
+February, 1888, I wrote:--"Lately there has been dawning on the minds
+of men far apart in questions of theology, the idea of founding a new
+Brotherhood, in which service of Man should take the place erstwhile
+given to service of God--a brotherhood in which work should be worship
+and love should be baptism, in which none should be regarded as alien
+who was willing to work for human good. One day as I was walking
+towards Millbank Gaol with the Rev. S.D. Headlam, on the way to
+liberate a prisoner, I said to him: 'Mr. Headlam, we ought to have a
+new Church, which should include all who have the common ground of
+faith in and love for man.' And a little later I found that my friend
+Mr. W.T. Stead, editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette,_ had long been
+brooding over a similar thought, and wondering whether men 'might not
+be persuaded to be as earnest about making this world happy as they
+are over saving their souls.' The teaching of social duty, the
+upholding of social righteousness, the building up of a true
+commonwealth--such would be among the aims of the Church of the
+future. Is the hope too fair for realisation? Is the winning of such
+beatific vision yet once more the dream of the enthusiast? But surely
+the one fact that persons so deeply differing in theological creeds as
+those who have been toiling for the last three months to aid and
+relieve the oppressed, can work in absolute harmony side by side for
+the one end--surely this proves that there is a bond which is stronger
+than our antagonisms, a unity which is deeper than the speculative
+theories which divide."
+
+How unconsciously I was marching towards the Theosophy which was to
+become the glory of my life, groping blindly in the darkness for that
+very brotherhood, definitely formulated on these very lines by those
+Elder Brothers of our race, at whose feet I was so soon to throw
+myself. How deeply this longing for something loftier than I had yet
+found had wrought itself into my life, how strong the conviction was
+growing that there was something to be sought to which the service of
+man was the road, may be seen in the following passage from the same
+article:--
+
+"It has been thought that in these days of factories and of tramways,
+of shoddy, and of adulteration, that all life must tread with even
+rhythm of measured footsteps, and that the glory of the ideal could no
+longer glow over the greyness of a modern horizon. But signs are not
+awanting that the breath of the older heroism is beginning to stir
+men's breasts, and that the passion for justice and for liberty, which
+thrilled through the veins of the world's greatest in the past, and
+woke our pulses to responsive throb, has not yet died wholly out of
+the hearts of men. Still the quest of the Holy Grail exercises its
+deathless fascination, but the seekers no longer raise eyes to heaven,
+nor search over land and sea, for they know that it waits them in the
+suffering at their doors, that the consecration of the holiest is on
+the agonising masses of the poor and the despairing, the cup is
+crimson with the blood of the
+
+"'People, the grey-grown speechless Christ.'
+
+... If there be a faith that can remove the mountains of ignorance and
+evil, it is surely that faith in the ultimate triumph of Right in the
+final enthronement of Justice, which alone makes life worth the
+living, and which gems the blackest cloud of depression with the
+rainbow-coloured arch of an immortal hope."
+
+As a step towards bringing about some such union of those ready to
+work for man, Mr. Stead and I projected the _Link_, a halfpenny
+weekly, the spirit of which was described in its motto, taken from
+Victor Hugo: "The people are silence. I will be the advocate of this
+silence. I will speak for the dumb. I will speak of the small to the
+great and of the feeble to the strong.... I will speak for all the
+despairing silent ones. I will interpret this stammering; I will
+interpret the grumblings, the murmurs, the tumults of crowds, the
+complaints ill-pronounced, and all these cries of beasts that, through
+ignorance and through suffering, man is forced to utter ... I will be
+the Word of the People. I will be the bleeding mouth whence the gag is
+snatched out. I will say everything." It announced its object to be
+the "building up" of a "New Church, dedicated to the service of man,"
+and "what we want to do is to establish in every village and in every
+street some man or woman who will sacrifice time and labour as
+systematically and as cheerfully in the temporal service of man as
+others do in what they believe to be the service of God." Week after
+week we issued our little paper, and it became a real light in the
+darkness. There the petty injustices inflicted on the poor found
+voice; there the starvation wages paid to women found exposure; there
+sweating was brought to public notice. A finisher of boots paid 2s.
+6d. per dozen pairs and "find your own polish and thread"; women
+working for 10-1/2 hours per day, making shirts--"fancy best"--at from
+10d. to 3s. per dozen, finding their own cotton and needles, paying
+for gas, towel, and tea (compulsory), earning from 4s. to 10s. per
+week for the most part; a mantle finisher 2s. 2d. a week, out of which
+6d. for materials; "respectable hard-working woman" tried for
+attempted suicide, "driven to rid herself of life from want." Another
+part of our work was defending people from unjust landlords, exposing
+workhouse scandals, enforcing the Employers' Liability Act, Charles
+Bradlaugh's Truck Act, forming "Vigilance Circles" whose members kept
+watch in their own district over cases of cruelty to children,
+extortion, insanitary workshops, sweating, &c., reporting each case to
+me. Into this work came Herbert Burrows, who had joined hands with me
+over the Trafalgar Square defence, and who wrote some noble articles
+in the _Link_. A man loving the people with passionate devotion,
+hating oppression and injustice with equal passion, working himself
+with remorseless energy, breaking his heart over wrongs he could not
+remedy. His whole character once came out in a sentence when he was
+lying delirious and thought himself dying: "Tell the people how I have
+loved them always."
+
+In our crusade for the poor we worked for the dockers." To-morrow
+morning, in London alone 20,000 to 25,000 adult men," wrote Sidney
+Webb, "will fight like savages for permission to labour in the docks
+for 4d. an hour, and one-third of them will fight in vain, and be
+turned workless away." We worked for children's dinners. "If we insist
+on these children being educated, is it not necessary that they shall
+be fed? If not, we waste on them knowledge they cannot assimilate, and
+torture many of them to death. Poor waifs of humanity, we drive them
+into the school and bid them learn; and the pitiful, wistful eyes
+question us why we inflict this strange new suffering, and bring into
+their dim lives this new pang. 'Why not leave us alone? 'ask the
+pathetically patient little faces. Why not, indeed, since for these
+child martyrs of the slums, Society has only formulas, not food." We
+cried out against "cheap goods," that meant "sweated and therefore
+stolen goods." "The ethics of buying should surely be simply enough.
+We want a particular thing, and we do not desire to obtain it either
+by begging or by robbery; but if in becoming possessed of it, we
+neither beg it nor steal, we must give for it something equivalent in
+exchange; so much of our neighbour's labour has been put into the
+thing we desire; if we will not yield him fair equivalent for that
+labour, yet take his article, we defraud him, and if we are not
+willing to give that fair equivalent we have no right to become the
+owners of his product."
+
+This branch of our work led to a big fight--a fight most happy in its
+results. At a meeting of the Fabian Society, Miss Clementina Black
+gave a capital lecture on Female Labour, and urged the formation of a
+Consumers' League, pledged only to buy from shops certificated "clean"
+from unfair wage. H.H. Champion, in the discussion that followed,
+drew attention to the wages paid by Bryant & May (Limited), while
+paying an enormous dividend to their shareholders, so that the value
+of the original £5 shares was quoted at £18 7s. 6d. Herbert Burrows
+and I interviewed some of the girls, got lists of wages, of fines, &c.
+"A typical case is that of a girl of sixteen, a piece-worker; she
+earns 4s. a week, and lives with a sister, employed by the same firm,
+who 'earns good money, as much as 8s. or 9s. a week.' Out of the
+earnings 2s. a week is paid for the rent of one room. The child lives
+only on bread and butter and tea, alike for breakfast and dinner, but
+related with dancing eyes that once a month she went to a meal where
+'you get coffee and bread and butter, and jam and marmalade, and lots
+of it.'" We published the facts under the title of "White Slavery in
+London," and called for a boycott of Bryant & May's matches. "It is
+time some one came and helped us," said two pale-faced girls to me;
+and I asked: "Who will help? Plenty of people wish well to any good
+cause; but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still
+fewer will risk anything in its support. 'Some one ought to do it, but
+why should I?' is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability.
+'Some one ought to do it, so why _not_ I?' is the cry of some earnest
+servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty.
+Between those two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution."
+
+I was promptly threatened with an action for libel, but nothing came
+of it; it was easier to strike at the girls, and a few days later
+Fleet Street was enlivened by the irruption of a crowd of match-girls,
+demanding Annie Besant. I couldn't speechify to match-girls in Fleet
+Street, so asked that a deputation should come and explain what they
+wanted. Up came three women and told their story: they had been asked
+to sign a paper certifying that they were well treated and contented,
+and that my statements were untrue; they refused. "You had spoke up
+for us," explained one, "and we weren't going back on you." A girl,
+pitched on as their leader, was threatened with dismissal; she stood
+firm; next day she was discharged for some trifle, and they all threw
+down their work, some 1,400 of them, and then a crowd of them started
+off to me to ask what to do next. If we ever worked in our lives,
+Herbert Burrows and I worked for the next fortnight. And a pretty
+hubbub we created; we asked for money, and it came pouring in; we
+registered the girls to receive strike pay, wrote articles, roused the
+clubs, held public meetings, got Mr. Bradlaugh to ask questions in
+Parliament, stirred up constituencies in which shareholders were
+members, till the whole country rang with the struggle. Mr. Frederick
+Charrington lent us a hall for registration, Mr. Sidney Webb and
+others moved the National Liberal Club to action; we led a procession
+of the girls to the House of Commons, and interviewed, with a
+deputation of them, Members of Parliament who cross-questioned them.
+The girls behaved splendidly, stuck together, kept brave and bright
+all through. Mr. Hobart of the Social Democratic Federation, Messrs.
+Shaw, Bland, and Oliver, and Headlam of the Fabian Society, Miss
+Clementina Black, and many another helped in the heavy work. The
+London Trades Council finally consented to act as arbitrators and a
+satisfactory settlement was arrived at; the girls went in to work,
+fines and deductions were abolished, better wages paid; the
+Match-makers' Union was established, still the strongest woman's
+Trades Union in England, and for years I acted as secretary, till,
+under press of other duties, I resigned, and my work was given by the
+girls to Mrs. Thornton Smith; Herbert Burrows became, and still is,
+the treasurer. For a time there was friction between the Company and
+the Union, but it gradually disappeared under the influence of common
+sense on both sides, and we have found the manager ready to consider
+any just grievance and to endeavour to remove it, while the Company
+have been liberal supporters of the Working Women's Club at Bow,
+founded by H.P. Blavatsky.
+
+[Illustration: STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.]
+
+The worst suffering of all was among the box-makers, thrown out of
+work by the strike, and they were hard to reach. Twopence-farthing per
+gross of boxes, and buy your own string and paste, is not wealth, but
+when the work went more rapid starvation came. Oh, those trudges
+through the lanes and alleys round Bethnal Green Junction late at
+night, when our day's work was over; children lying about on shavings,
+rags, anything; famine looking out of baby faces, out of women's eyes,
+out of the tremulous hands of men. Heart grew sick and eyes dim, and
+ever louder sounded the question, "Where is the cure for sorrow, what
+the way of rescue for the world?"
+
+In August I asked for a "match-girls' drawing-room." "It will want a
+piano, tables for papers, for games, for light literature; so that it
+may offer a bright, homelike refuge to these girls, who now have no
+real homes, no playground save the streets. It is not proposed to
+build an 'institution' with stern and rigid discipline and enforcement
+of prim behaviour, but to open a home, filled with the genial
+atmosphere of cordial comradeship, and self-respecting freedom--the
+atmosphere so familiar to all who have grown up in the blessed shelter
+of a happy home, so strange, alas! to too many of our East London
+girls." In the same month of August, two years later, H.P. Blavatsky
+opened such a home.
+
+Then came a cry for help from South London, from tin-box makers,
+illegally fined, and in many cases grievously mutilated by the
+non-fencing of machinery; then aid to shop assistants, also illegally
+fined; legal defences by the score still continued; a vigorous
+agitation for a free meal for children, and for fair wages to be paid
+by all public bodies; work for the dockers and exposure of their
+wrongs; a visit to the Cradley Heath chain-makers, speeches to them,
+writing for them; a contest for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets
+division, and triumphant return at the head of the poll. Such were
+some of the ways in which the autumn days were spent, to say nothing
+of scores of lectures--Secularist, Labour, Socialist--and scores of
+articles written for the winning of daily bread. When the School Board
+work was added I felt that I had as much work as one woman's strength
+could do.
+
+Thus was ushered in 1889, the to me never-to-be-forgotten year in
+which I found my way "Home," and had the priceless good fortune of
+meeting, and of becoming the pupil of, H.P. Blavatsky. Ever more and
+more had been growing on me the feeling that something more than I had
+was needed for the cure of social ills. The Socialist position
+sufficed on the economic side, but where to gain the inspiration, the
+motive, which should lead to the realisation of the Brotherhood of
+Man? Our efforts to really organise bands of unselfish workers had
+failed. Much indeed had been done, but there was not a real movement
+of self-sacrificing devotion, in which men worked for Love's sake
+only, and asked but to give, not to take. Where was the material for
+the nobler Social Order, where the hewn stones for the building of the
+Temple of Man? A great despair would oppress me as I sought for such a
+movement and found it not.
+
+[Illustration: MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.]
+
+Not only so; but since 1886 there had been slowly growing up a
+conviction that my philosophy was not sufficient; that life and mind
+were other than, more than, I had dreamed. Psychology was advancing
+with rapid strides; hypnotic experiments were revealing unlooked-for
+complexities in human consciousness, strange riddles of multiplex
+personalities, and, most startling of all, vivid intensities of mental
+action when the brain, that should be the generator of thought, was
+reduced to a comatose state. Fact after fact came hurtling in upon me,
+demanding explanation I was incompetent to give. I studied the
+obscurer sides of consciousness, dreams, hallucinations, illusions,
+insanity. Into the darkness shot a ray of light--A.P. Sinnett's
+"Occult World," with its wonderfully suggestive letters, expounding
+not the supernatural but a nature under law, wider than I had dared to
+conceive. I added Spiritualism to my studies, experimenting privately,
+finding the phenomena indubitable, but the spiritualistic explanation
+of them incredible. The phenomena of clairvoyance, clairaudience,
+thought-reading, were found to be real. Under all the rush of the
+outer life, already sketched, these questions were working in my mind,
+their answers were being diligently sought. I read a variety of books,
+but could find little in them that satisfied me. I experimented in
+various ways suggested in them, and got some (to me) curious results.
+I finally convinced myself that there was some hidden thing, some
+hidden power, and resolved to seek until I found, and by the early
+spring of 1889 I had grown desperately determined to find at all
+hazards what I sought. At last, sitting alone in deep thought as I had
+become accustomed to do after the sun had set, filled with an intense
+but nearly hopeless longing to solve the riddle of life and mind, I
+heard a Voice that was later to become to me the holiest sound on
+earth, bidding me take courage for the light was near. A fortnight
+passed, and then Mr. Stead gave into my hands two large volumes. "Can
+you review these? My young men all fight shy of them, but you are
+quite mad enough on these subjects to make something of them." I took
+the books; they were the two volumes of "The Secret Doctrine," written
+by H.P. Blavatsky.
+
+Home I carried my burden, and sat me down to read. As I turned over
+page after page the interest became absorbing; but how familiar it
+seemed; how my mind leapt forward to presage the conclusions, how
+natural it was, how coherent, how subtle, and yet how intelligible. I
+was dazzled, blinded by the light in which disjointed facts were seen
+as parts of a mighty whole, and all my puzzles, riddles, problems,
+seemed to disappear. The effect was partially illusory in one sense,
+in that they all had to be slowly unravelled later, the brain
+gradually assimilating that which the swift intuition had grasped as
+truth. But the light had been seen, and in that flash of illumination
+I knew that the weary search was over and the very Truth was found.
+
+I wrote the review, and asked Mr. Stead for an introduction to the
+writer, and then sent a note asking to be allowed to call. I received
+the most cordial of notes, bidding me come, and in the soft spring
+evening Herbert Burrows and I--for his aspirations were as mine on
+this matter--walked from Netting Hill Station, wondering what we
+should meet, to the door of 17, Lansdowne Road. A pause, a swift
+passing through hall and outer room, through folding-doors thrown
+back, a figure in a large chair before a table, a voice, vibrant,
+compelling, "My dear Mrs. Besant, I have so long wished to see you,"
+and I was standing with my hand in her firm grip, and looking for
+the first time in this life straight into the eyes of "H.P.B." I
+was conscious of a sudden leaping forth of my heart--was it
+recognition?--and then, I am ashamed to say, a fierce rebellion, a
+fierce withdrawal, as of some wild animal when it feels a mastering
+hand. I sat down, after some introductions that conveyed no ideas to
+me, and listened. She talked of travels, of various countries, easy
+brilliant talk, her eyes veiled, her exquisitely moulded fingers
+rolling cigarettes incessantly. Nothing special to record, no word of
+Occultism, nothing mysterious, a woman of the world chatting with her
+evening visitors. We rose to go, and for a moment the veil lifted, and
+two brilliant, piercing eyes met mine, and with a yearning throb in
+the voice: "Oh, my dear Mrs. Besant, if you would only come among us!"
+I felt a well-nigh uncontrollable desire to bend down and kiss her,
+under the compulsion of that yearning voice, those compelling eyes,
+but with a flash of the old unbending pride and an inward jeer at my
+own folly, I said a commonplace polite good-bye, and turned away with
+some inanely courteous and evasive remark. "Child," she said to me
+long afterwards, "your pride is terrible; you are as proud as Lucifer
+himself." But truly I think I never showed it to her again after that
+first evening, though it sprang up wrathfully in her defence many and
+many a time, until I learned the pettiness and the worthlessness of
+all criticism, and knew that the blind were objects of compassion not
+of scorn.
+
+Once again I went, and asked about the Theosophical Society, wishful
+to join, but fighting against it. For I saw, distinct and clear--with
+painful distinctness, indeed--what that joining would mean. I had
+largely conquered public prejudice against me by my work on the London
+School Board, and a smoother road stretched before me, whereon effort
+to help should be praised not blamed. Was I to plunge into a new
+vortex of strife, and make myself a mark for ridicule--worse than
+hatred--and fight again the weary fight for an unpopular truth? Must I
+turn against Materialism, and face the shame of publicly confessing
+that I had been wrong, misled by intellect to ignore the Soul? Must I
+leave the army that had battled for me so bravely, the friends who
+through all brutality of social ostracism had held me dear and true?
+And he, the strongest and truest friend of all, whose confidence I had
+shaken by my Socialism--must he suffer the pang of seeing his
+co-worker, his co-fighter, of whom he had been so proud, to whom he
+had been so generous, go over to the opposing hosts, and leave the
+ranks of Materialism? What would be the look in Charles Bradlaugh's
+eyes when I told him that I had become a Theosophist? The struggle was
+sharp and keen, but with none of the anguish of old days in it, for
+the soldier had now fought many fights and was hardened by many
+wounds. And so it came to pass that I went again to Lansdowne Road to
+ask about the Theosophical Society. H.P. Blavatsky looked at me
+piercingly for a moment. "Have you read the report about me of the
+Society for Psychical Research?" "No; I never heard of it, so far as I
+know." "Go and read it, and if, after reading it, you come
+back--well." And nothing more would she say on the subject, but
+branched off to her experiences in many lands.
+
+I borrowed a copy of the Report, read and re-read it. Quickly I saw
+how slender was the foundation on which the imposing structure was
+built. The continual assumptions on which conclusions were based; the
+incredible character of the allegations; and--most damning fact of
+all--the foul source from which the evidence was derived. Everything
+turned on the veracity of the Coulombs, and they were self-stamped as
+partners in the alleged frauds. Could I put such against the frank,
+fearless nature that I had caught a glimpse of, against the proud
+fiery truthfulness that shone at me from the clear, blue eyes, honest
+and fearless as those of a noble child? Was the writer of "The Secret
+Doctrine" this miserable impostor, this accomplice of tricksters, this
+foul and loathsome deceiver, this conjuror with trap-doors and sliding
+panels? I laughed aloud at the absurdity and flung the Report aside
+with the righteous scorn of an honest nature that knew its own kin
+when it met them, and shrank from the foulness and baseness of a lie.
+The next day saw me at the Theosophical Publishing Company's office at
+7, Duke Street, Adelphi, where Countess Wachtmeister--one of the
+lealest of H.P.B.'s friends--was at work, and I signed an
+application to be admitted as fellow of the Theosophical Society.
+
+On receiving my diploma I betook myself to Lansdowne Road, where I
+found H.P.B. alone. I went over to her, bent down and kissed her,
+but said no word. "You have joined the Society?" "Yes." "You have read
+the report?" "Yes." "Well?" I knelt down before her and clasped her
+hands in mine, looking straight into her eyes. "My answer is, will you
+accept me as your pupil, and give me the honour of proclaiming you my
+teacher in the face of the world?" Her stern, set face softened, the
+unwonted gleam of tears sprang to her eyes; then, with a dignity more
+than regal, she placed her hand upon my head. "You are a noble woman.
+May Master bless you."
+
+From that day, the 10th of May, 1889, until now--two years three and
+half months after she left her body on May 8, 1891--my faith in her
+has never wavered, my trust in her has never been shaken. I gave her
+my faith on an imperious intuition, I proved her true day after day in
+closest intimacy living by her side; and I speak of her with the
+reverence due from a pupil to a teacher who never failed her, with the
+passionate gratitude which, in our School, is the natural meed of the
+one who opens the gateway and points out the path. "Folly!
+fanaticism!" scoffs the Englishman of the nineteenth century. Be it
+so. I have seen, and I can wait. I have been told that I plunged
+headlong into Theosophy and let my enthusiasm carry me away. I think
+the charge is true, in so far as the decision was swiftly taken; but
+it had been long led up to, and realised the dreams of childhood on
+the higher planes of intellectual womanhood. And let me here say that
+more than all I hoped for in that first plunge has been realised, and
+a certainty of knowledge has been gained on doctrines seen as true as
+that swift flash of illumination. I _know_, by personal experiment,
+that the Soul exists, and that my Soul, not my body, is myself; that
+it can leave the body at will; that it can, disembodied, reach and
+learn from living human teachers, and bring back and impress on the
+physical brain that which it has learned; that this process of
+transferring consciousness from one range of being, as it were, to
+another, is a very slow process, during which the body and brain are
+gradually correlated with the subtler form which is essentially that
+of the Soul, and that my own experience of it, still so imperfect, so
+fragmentary, when compared with the experience of the highly trained,
+is like the first struggles of a child learning to speak compared with
+the perfect oratory of the practised speaker; that consciousness, so
+far from being dependent on the brain, is more active when freed from
+the gross forms of matter than when encased within them; that the
+great Sages spoken of by H.P. Blavatsky exist; that they wield powers
+and possess knowledge before which our control of Nature and knowledge
+of her ways is but as child's play. All this, and much more, have I
+learned, and I am but a pupil of low grade, as it were in the infant
+class of the Occult School; so the first plunge has been successful,
+and the intuition has been justified. This same path of knowledge that
+I am treading is open to all others who will pay the toll demanded at
+the gateway--and that toll is willingness to renounce everything for
+the sake of spiritual truth, and willingness to give all the truth
+that is won to the service of man, keeping back no shred for self.
+
+On June 23rd, in a review of "The Secret Doctrine" in the _National
+Reformer,_ the following passages occur, and show how swiftly some of
+the main points of the teaching had been grasped. (There is a blunder
+in the statement that of the seven modifications of Matter Science
+knows only four, and till lately knew only three; these four are
+sub-states only, sub-divisions of the lowest plane.)
+
+After saying that the nineteenth-century Englishman would be but too
+likely to be repelled if he only skimmed the book, I went on: "With
+telescope and with microscope, with scalpel and with battery, Western
+Science interrogates nature, adding fact to fact, storing experience
+after experience, but coming ever to gulfs unfathomable by its
+plummets, to heights unscalable by its ladders. Wide and masterful in
+its answers to the 'How?' the 'Why?' ever eludes it, and causes remain
+enwrapped in gloom. Eastern Science uses as its scientific instrument
+the penetrating faculties of the mind alone, and regarding the
+material plane as _Maya_--illusion--seeks in the mental and spiritual
+planes of being the causes of the material effects. There, too, is the
+only reality; there the true existence of which the visible universe
+is but the shadow.
+
+"It is clear that from such investigations some further mental
+equipment is necessary than that normally afforded by the human body.
+And here comes the parting of the ways between East and West. For the
+study of the material universe, our five senses, aided by the
+instruments invented by Science, may suffice. For all we can hear and
+see, taste and handle, these accustomed servitors, though often
+blundering, are the best available guides to knowledge. But it lies in
+the nature of the case that they are useless when the investigation is
+to be into modes of existence which cannot impress themselves on our
+nerve-ends. For instance, what we know as colour is the vibration
+frequency of etheric waves striking on the retina of the eye, between
+certain definite limits--759 trillions of blows from the maximum, 436
+trillions from the minimum--these waves give rise in us to the
+sensation which the brain translates into colour. (Why the 436
+trillion blows at one end of a nerve become 'Red' at the other end we
+do not know; we chronicle the fact but cannot explain it.) But our
+capacity to respond to the vibration cannot limit the vibrational
+capacity of the ether; to _us_ the higher and lower rates of vibration
+do not exist, but if our sense of vision were more sensitive we should
+see where now we are blind. Following this line of thought we realise
+that matter may exist in forms unknown to us, in modifications to
+which our senses are unable to respond. Now steps in the Eastern Sage
+and says: 'That which you say _may_ be, _is_; we have developed and
+cultivated senses as much superior to yours as your eye is superior to
+that of the jelly-fish; we have evolved mental and spiritual faculties
+which enable us to investigate on the higher planes of being with as
+much certainty as you are investigating on the physical plane; there
+is nothing _supernatural_ in the business, any more than your
+knowledge is supernatural, though much above that accessible to the
+fish; we do not speculate on these higher forms of existence; we
+_know_ them by personal study, just as you know the fauna and flora of
+your world. The powers we possess are not supernatural, they are
+latent in every human being, and will be evolved as the race
+progresses. All that we have done is to evolve them more rapidly than
+our neighbours, by a procedure as open to you as it was to us. Matter
+is everywhere, but it exists in seven modifications of which you only
+know four, and until lately only knew three; in those higher forms
+reside the causes of which you see the effects in the lower, and to
+know these causes you must develop the capacity to take cognisance of
+the higher planes.'"
+
+Then followed a brief outline of the cycle of evolution, and I went
+on: "What part does man play in this vast drama of a universe?
+Needless to say, he is not the only living form in a Cosmos, which for
+the most part is uninhabitable by him. As Science has shown living
+forms everywhere on the material plane, races in each drop of water,
+life throbbing in every leaf and blade, so the 'Secret Doctrine'
+points to living forms on higher planes of existence, each suited to
+its environment, till all space thrills with life, and nowhere is
+there death, but only change. Amid these myriads are some evolving
+towards humanity, some evolving away from humanity as we know it,
+divesting themselves of its grosser parts. For man is regarded as a
+sevenfold being, four of these parts belonging to the animal body, and
+perishing at, or soon after, death; while three form his higher self,
+his true individuality, and these persist and are immortal. These form
+the Ego, and it is this which passes through many incarnations,
+learning life's lesson as it goes, working out its own redemption
+within the limits of an inexorable law, sowing seeds of which it ever
+reaps the harvest, building its own fate with tireless fingers, and
+finding nowhere in the measureless time and space around it any that
+can lift for it one weight it has created, one burden it has gathered,
+unravel for it one tangle it has twisted, close for it one gulf it has
+digged."
+
+Then after noting the approaches of Western Science to Eastern, came
+the final words: "it is of curious interest to note how some of the
+latest theories seem to catch glimpses of the occult Doctrines, as
+though Science were standing on the very threshold of knowledge which
+shall make all her past seem small. Already her hand is trembling
+towards the grasp of forces beside which all those now at her command
+are insignificant. How soon will her grip fasten on them? Let us hope
+not until social order has been transformed, lest they should only
+give more to those who have, and leave the wretched still wretcheder
+by force of contrast. Knowledge used by selfishness widens the gulf
+that divides man from man and race from race, and we may well shrink
+from the idea of new powers in Nature being yoked to the car of Greed.
+Hence the wisdom of those 'Masters,' in whose name Madame Blavatsky
+speaks, has ever denied the knowledge which is power until Love's
+lesson has been learned, and has given only into the hands of the
+selfless the control of those natural forces which, misused, would
+wreck society."
+
+This review, and the public announcement, demanded by honesty, that I
+had joined the Theosophical Society, naturally raised somewhat of a
+storm of criticism, and the _National Reformer_ of June 30th contained
+the following: "The review of Madame Blavatsky's book in the last
+_National Reformer_, and an announcement in the _Star_, have brought
+me several letters on the subject of Theosophy. I am asked for an
+explanation as to what Theosophy is, and as to my own opinion on
+Theosophy--the word 'theosoph' is old, and was used among the
+Neo-platonists. From the dictionary its new meaning appears to be,
+'one who claims to have a knowledge of God, or of the laws of nature
+by means of internal illumination.' An Atheist certainly cannot be a
+Theosophist. A Deist might be a Theosophist. A Monist cannot be a
+Theosophist. Theosophy must at least involve Dualism. Modern
+Theosophy, according to Madame Blavatsky, as set out in last week's
+issue, asserts much that I do not believe, and alleges some things
+that, to me, are certainly not true. I have not had the opportunity of
+reading Madame Blavatsky's two volumes, but I have read during the
+past ten years many publications from the pen of herself, Colonel
+Olcott, and of other Theosophists. They appear to me to have sought to
+rehabilitate a kind of Spiritualism in Eastern phraseology. I think
+many of their allegations utterly erroneous, and their reasonings
+wholly unsound. I very deeply regret indeed that my colleague and
+co-worker has, with somewhat of suddenness, and without any
+interchange of ideas with myself, adopted as facts matters which seem
+to me to be as unreal as it is possible for any fiction to be. My
+regret is greater as I know Mrs. Besant's devotion to any course she
+believes to be true. I know that she will always be earnest in the
+advocacy of any views she undertakes to defend, and I look to possible
+developments of her Theosophic views with the very gravest misgiving.
+The editorial policy of this paper is unchanged, and is directly
+antagonistic to all forms of Theosophy. I would have preferred on this
+subject to have held my peace, for the public disagreeing with Mrs.
+Besant on her adoption of Socialism has caused pain to both; but on
+reading her article and taking the public announcement made of her
+having joined the Theosophical organisation, I owe it to those who
+look to me for guidance to say this with clearness.
+
+"CHARLES BRADLAUGH."
+
+"It is not possible for me here to state fully my reasons for joining
+the Theosophical Society, the three objects of which are: To found a
+Universal Brotherhood without distinction of race or creed; to forward
+the study of Aryan literature and philosophy; to investigate
+unexplained laws of nature and the physical powers latent in man. On
+matters of religious opinion the members are absolutely free. The
+founders of the society deny a personal God, and a somewhat subtle
+form of Pantheism is taught as the Theosophic view of the universe,
+though even this is not forced on members of the society. I have no
+desire to hide the fact that this form of Pantheism appears to me to
+promise solution of some problems, especially problems in psychology,
+which Atheism leaves untouched.
+
+"ANNIE BESANT."
+
+Theosophy, as its students well know, so far from involving Dualism,
+is based on the One, which becomes Two on manifestation, just as
+Atheism posits one existence, only cognisable in the duality force and
+matter, and as philosophic--though not popular--Theism teaches one
+Deity whereof are spirit and matter. Mr. Bradlaugh's temperate
+disapproval was not copied in its temperance by some other Freethought
+leaders, and Mr. Foote especially distinguished himself by the
+bitterness of his attacks. In the midst of the whirl I was called away
+to Paris to attend, with Herbert Burrows, the great Labour Congress
+held there from July 15th to July 20th, and spent a day or two at
+Fontainebleau with H.P. Blavatsky, who had gone abroad for a few
+weeks' rest. There I found her translating the wonderful fragments
+from "The Book of the Golden Precepts," now so widely known under the
+name of "The Voice of the Silence." She wrote it swiftly, without any
+material copy before her, and in the evening made me read it aloud to
+see if the "English was decent." Herbert Burrows was there, and Mrs.
+Candler, a staunch American Theosophist, and we sat round H.P.B. while
+I read. The translation was in perfect and beautiful English, flowing
+and musical; only a word or two could we find to alter, and she looked
+at us like a startled child, wondering at our praises--praises that
+any one with the literary sense would endorse if they read that
+exquisite prose poem.
+
+A little earlier in the same day I had asked her as to the agencies at
+work in producing the taps so constantly heard at Spiritualistic
+_Séances_. "You don't use spirits to produce taps," she said; "see
+here." She put her hand over my head, not touching it, and I heard and
+felt slight taps on the bone of my skull, each sending a little
+electric thrill down the spine. She then carefully explained how such
+taps were producible at any point desired by the operator, and how
+interplay of the currents to which they were due might be caused
+otherwise than by conscious human volition. It was in this fashion
+that she would illustrate her verbal teachings, proving by experiment
+the statements made as to the existence of subtle forces controllable
+by the trained mind. The phenomena all belonged to the scientific side
+of her teaching, and she never committed the folly of claiming
+authority for her philosophic doctrines on the ground that she was a
+wonder-worker. And constantly she would remind us that there was no
+such thing as "miracle"; that all the phenomena she had produced were
+worked by virtue of a knowledge of nature deeper than that of average
+people, and by the force of a well-trained mind and will; some of them
+were what she would describe as "psychological tricks," the creation
+of images by force of imagination, and in pressing them on others as a
+"collective hallucination"; others, such as the moving of solid
+articles, either by an astral hand projected to draw them towards her,
+or by using an Elemental; others by reading in the Astral Light, and
+so on. But the proof of the reality of her mission from those whom she
+spoke of as Masters lay not in these comparatively trivial physical
+and mental phenomena, but in the splendour of her heroic endurance,
+the depth of her knowledge, the selflessness of her character, the
+lofty spirituality of her teaching, the untiring passion of her
+devotion, the incessant ardour of her work for the enlightening of
+men. It was these, and not her phenomena, that won for her our faith
+and confidence--we who lived beside her, knowing her daily life--and
+we gratefully accepted her teaching not because she claimed any
+authority, but because it woke in us powers, the possibility of which
+in ourselves we had not dreamed of, energies of the Soul that
+demonstrated their own existence.
+
+Returning to London from Paris, it became necessary to make a very
+clear and definite presentment of my change of views, and in the
+_Reformer_ of August 4th I find the following: "Many statements are
+being made just now about me and my beliefs, some of which are
+absurdly, and some of which are maliciously, untrue. I must ask my
+friends not to give credence to them. It would not be fair to my
+friend Mr. Bradlaugh to ask him to open the columns of this Journal to
+an exposition of Theosophy from my pen, and so bring about a long
+controversy on a subject which would not interest the majority of the
+readers of the _National Reformer_. This being so I cannot here answer
+the attacks made on me. I feel, however, that the party with which I
+have worked for so long has a right to demand of me some explanation
+of the step I have taken, and I am therefore preparing a pamphlet
+dealing fully with the question. Further, I have arranged with Mr.
+R.O. Smith to take as subject of the lectures to be delivered by me at
+the Hall of Science on August 4th and 11th 'Why I became a
+Theosophist.' Meanwhile I think that my years of service in the ranks
+of the Freethought party give me the right to ask that I should not be
+condemned unheard, and I even venture to suggest, in view of the
+praises bestowed on me by Freethinkers in the past, that it is
+possible that there may be something to be said, from the intellectual
+standpoint, in favour of Theosophy. The caricatures of it which have
+appeared from some Freethinkers' pens represent it about as accurately
+as the Christian Evidence caricatures of Atheism represent that
+dignified philosophy of life; and, remembering how much they are
+themselves misrepresented, I ask them to wait before they judge."
+
+The lectures were delivered, and were condensed into a pamphlet
+bearing the same title, which has had a very great circulation. It
+closed as follows:--
+
+"There remains a great stumblingblock in the minds of many
+Freethinkers which is certain to prejudice them against Theosophy, and
+which offers to opponents a cheap subject for sarcasm--the assertion
+that there exist other living beings than the men and animals found on
+our own globe. It may be well for people who at once turn away when
+such an assertion is made to stop and ask themselves whether they
+really and seriously believe that throughout this mighty universe, in
+which our little planet is but as a tiny speck of sand in the Sahara,
+this one planet only is inhabited by living things? Is all the
+universe dumb save for _our_ voices? eyeless save for _our_ vision?
+dead save for _our_ life? Such a preposterous belief was well enough
+in the days when Christianity regarded our world as the centre of the
+universe, the human race as the one for which the Creator had deigned
+to die. But now that we are placed in our proper position, one among
+countless myriads of worlds, what ground is there for the preposterous
+conceit which arrogates as ours all sentient existence? Earth, air,
+water, all are teeming with living things suited to their environment;
+our globe is overflowing with life. But the moment we pass in thought
+beyond our atmosphere everything is to be changed. Neither reason nor
+analogy support such a supposition. It was one of Bruno's crimes that
+he dared to teach that other worlds than ours were inhabited; but he
+was wiser than the monks who burned him. All the Theosophists aver is
+that each phase of matter has living things suited to it, and that all
+the universe is pulsing with life. 'Superstition!' shriek the bigoted.
+It is no more superstition than the belief in Bacteria, or in any
+other living thing invisible to the ordinary human eye. 'Spirit' is a
+misleading word, for, historically, it connotes immateriality and a
+supernatural kind of existence, and the Theosophist believes neither
+in the one nor the other. With him all living things act in and
+through a material basis, and 'matter' and 'spirit' are not found
+dissociated. But he alleges that matter exists in states other than
+those at present known to science. To deny this is to be about as
+sensible as was the Hindû prince who denied the existence of ice
+because water, in his experience, never became solid. Refusal to
+believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all
+outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
+
+"One last word to my Secularist friends. If you say to me, 'Leave our
+ranks,' I will leave them; I force myself on no party, and the moment
+I feel myself unwelcome I will go.[29] It has cost me pain enough and
+to spare to admit that the Materialism from which I hoped all has
+failed me, and by such admission to bring on myself the disapproval of
+some of my nearest friends. But here, as at other times in my life, I
+dare not purchase peace with a lie. An imperious necessity forces me
+to speak the truth, as I see it, whether the speech please or
+displease, whether it bring praise or blame. That one loyalty to Truth
+I must keep stainless, whatever friendships fail me or human ties be
+broken. She may lead me into the wilderness, yet I must follow her;
+she may strip me of all love, yet I must pursue her; though she slay
+me, yet will I trust in her; and I ask no other epitaph on my tomb but
+
+"'SHE TRIED TO FOLLOW TRUTH.'"
+
+Meanwhile, with this new controversy on my hands, the School Board
+work went on, rendered possible, I ought to say, by the generous
+assistance of friends unknown to me, who sent me, £150 a year during
+the last year and a half. So also went on the vigorous Socialist work,
+and the continual championship of struggling labour movements,
+prominent here being the organisation of the South London fur-pullers
+into a union, and the aiding of the movement for shortening the hours
+of tram and 'bus men, the meetings for which had to be held after
+midnight. The feeding and clothing of children also occupied much time
+and attention, for the little ones in my district were, thousands of
+them, desperately poor. My studies I pursued as best I could, reading
+in railway carriages, tramcars, omnibuses, and stealing hours for
+listening to H.P.B. by shortening the nights.
+
+In October, Mr. Bradlaugh's shaken strength received its death-blow,
+though he was to live yet another fifteen months. He collapsed
+suddenly under a most severe attack of congestion and lay in imminent
+peril, devotedly nursed by his only remaining child, Mrs. Bonner, his
+elder daughter having died the preceding autumn. Slowly he struggled
+back to life, after four weeks in bed, and, ordered by his physician
+to take rest and if possible a sea voyage, he sailed for India on
+November 28th, to attend the National Congress, where he was
+enthusiastically acclaimed as "Member for India."
+
+In November I argued a libel suit, brought by me against the Rev. Mr.
+Hoskyns, vicar of Stepney, who had selected some vile passages from a
+book which was not mine and had circulated them as representing my
+views, during the School Board election of 1888. I had against me the
+Solicitor-General, Sir Edward Clarke, at the bar, and Baron Huddleston
+on the bench; both counsel and judge did their best to browbeat me and
+to use the coarsest language, endeavouring to prove that by advocating
+the limitation of the family I had condemned chastity as a crime. Five
+hours of brutal cross-examination left my denial of such teachings
+unshaken, and even the pleadings of the judge for the clergyman,
+defending his parishioners against an unbeliever and his laying down
+as law that the statement was privileged, did not avail to win a
+verdict. The jury disagreed, not, as one of them told me afterwards,
+on the question of the libel, but on some feeling that a clergyman
+ought not to be mulcted in damages for his over-zeal in defence of his
+faith against the ravening wolf of unbelief, while others, regarding
+the libel as a very cruel one, would not agree to a verdict that did
+not carry substantial damages. I did not carry the case to a new
+trial, feeling that it was not worth while to waste time over it
+further, my innocence of the charge itself having been fully proved.
+
+Busily the months rolled on, and early in the year 1890 H.P.Blavatsky
+had given to her £1,000, to use in her discretion for human service,
+and if she thought well, in the service of women. After a good deal of
+discussion she fixed on the establishment of a club in East London for
+working girls, and with her approval Miss Laura Cooper and I hunted
+for a suitable place. Finally we fixed on a very large and old house,
+193, Bow Road, and some months went in its complete renovation and the
+building of a hall attached to it. On August 15th it was opened by
+Madame Blavatsky, and dedicated by her to the brightening of the lot
+of hardworking and underpaid girls. It has nobly fulfilled its mission
+for the last three years. Very tender was H.P.B.'s heart to human
+suffering, especially to that of women and children. She was very poor
+towards the end of her earthly life, having spent all on her mission,
+and refusing to take time from her Theosophical work to write for the
+Russian papers which were ready to pay highly for her pen. But her
+slender purse was swiftly emptied when any human pain that money could
+relieve came in her way. One day I wrote a letter to a comrade that
+was shown to her, about some little children to whom I had carried a
+quantity of country flowers, and I had spoken of their faces pinched
+with want. The following characteristic note came to me:--
+
+"MY DEAREST FRIEND,--I have just read your letter to ---- and my heart
+is sick for the poor little ones! Look here; I have but 30s. of _my
+own money_ of which I can dispose (for as you know I am a pauper, and
+proud of it), but I want you to take them and _not say a word_. This
+may buy thirty dinners for thirty poor little starving wretches, and I
+may feel happier for thirty minutes at the thought. Now don't say a
+word, and do it; take them to those unfortunate babies who loved your
+flowers and felt happy. Forgive your old uncouth friend, _useless_ in
+this world!
+
+"Ever yours,
+
+"H.P.B."
+
+It was this tenderness of hers that led us, after she had gone, to
+found the "H.P.B. Home for little children," and one day we hope to
+fulfil her expressed desire that a large but homelike Refuge for
+outcast children should be opened under the auspices of the
+Theosophical Society.
+
+The lease of 17, Lansdowne Road expiring in the early summer of 1890,
+it was decided that 19, Avenue Road should be turned into the
+headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Europe. A hall was built
+for the meetings of the Blavatsky Lodge--the lodge founded by her--and
+various alterations made. In July her staff of workers was united
+under one roof; thither came Archibald and Bertram Keightley, who had
+devoted themselves to her service years before, and the Countess
+Wachtmeister, who had thrown aside all the luxuries of wealth and of
+high social rank to give all to the cause she served and the friend
+she loved with deep and faithful loyajty; and George Mead, her
+secretary and earnest disciple, a man of strong brain and strong
+character, a fine scholar and untiring worker; thither, too, Claude
+Wright, most lovable of Irishmen, with keen insight underlying a
+bright and sunny nature, careless on the surface, and Walter Old,
+dreamy and sensitive, a born psychic, and, like many such, easily
+swayed by those around him; Emily Kislingbury also, a studious and
+earnest woman; Isabel Cooper Oakley, intuitional and studious, a rare
+combination, and a most devoted pupil in Occult studies; James Pryse,
+an American, than whom none is more devoted, bringing practical
+knowledge to the help of the work, and making possible the large
+development of our printing department. These, with myself, were at
+first the resident staff, Miss Cooper and Herbert Burrows, who were
+also identified with the work, being prevented by other obligations
+from living always as part of the household.
+
+The rules of the house were--and are--very simple, but H.P.B.
+insisted on great regularity of life; we breakfasted at 8 a.m.,
+worked till lunch at 1, then again till dinner at 7. After dinner
+the outer work for the Society was put aside, and we gathered in
+H.P.B.'s room where we would sit talking over plans, receiving
+instructions, listening to her explanation of knotty points. By 12
+midnight all the lights had to be extinguished. My public work took me
+away for many hours, unfortunately for myself, but such was the
+regular run of our busy lives. She herself wrote incessantly; always
+suffering, but of indomitable will, she drove her body through its
+tasks, merciless to its weaknesses and its pains. Her pupils she
+treated very variously, adapting herself with nicest accuracy to their
+differing natures; as a teacher she was marvellously patient,
+explaining a thing over and over again in different fashions, until
+sometimes after prolonged failure she would throw herself back in her
+chair: "My God!" (the easy "Mon Dieu" of the foreigner) "am I a fool
+that you can't understand? Here, So-and-so"--to some one on whose
+countenance a faint gleam of comprehension was discernible--"tell
+these flapdoodles of the ages what I mean." With vanity, conceit,
+pretence of knowledge, she was merciless, if the pupil were a
+promising one; keen shafts of irony would pierce the sham. With some
+she would get very angry, lashing them out of their lethargy with
+fiery scorn; and in truth she made herself a mere instrument for the
+training of her pupils, careless what they, or any one else thought of
+her, providing that the resulting benefit to them was secured. And we,
+who lived around her, who in closest intimacy watched her day after
+day, we bear witness to the unselfish beauty of her life, the nobility
+of her character, and we lay at her feet our most reverent gratitude
+for knowledge gained, lives purified, strength developed. O noble and
+heroic Soul, whom the outside purblind world misjudges, but whom your
+pupils partly saw, never through lives and deaths shall we repay the
+debt of gratitude we owe to you.
+
+And thus I came through storm to peace, not to the peace of an
+untroubled sea of outer life, which no strong soul can crave, but to
+an inner peace that outer troubles may not avail to ruffle--a peace
+which belongs to the eternal not to the transitory, to the depths not
+to the shallows of life. It carried me scatheless through the terrible
+spring of 1891, when death struck down Charles Bradlaugh in the
+plenitude of his usefulness, and unlocked the gateway into rest for H.
+P. Blavatsky. Through anxieties and responsibilities heavy and
+numerous it has borne me; every strain makes it stronger; every trial
+makes it serener; every assault leaves it more radiant. Quiet
+confidence has taken the place of doubt; a strong security the place
+of anxious dread. In life, through death, to life, I am but the
+servant of the great Brotherhood, and those on whose heads but for a
+moment the touch of the Master has rested in blessing can never again
+look upon the world save through eyes made luminous with the radiance
+of the Eternal Peace.
+
+PEACE TO ALL BEINGS.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: This odious law has now been altered, and a married woman
+is a person, not a chattel.]
+
+[Footnote 2: "The Disciples," p. 14.]
+
+[Footnote 3: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 4: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 5: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 6: "Why I do not Believe in God." 1887.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 9: "Life, Death, and Immortality." 1886.]
+
+[Footnote 10: "Life, Death, and Immortality." 1886.]
+
+[Footnote 11: "Life, Death, and Immortality." 1886.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 13: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 14: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 15: "The True Basis of Morality." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 16: "Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 17: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 18: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 19: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 20: "The Gospels of Christianity and Freethought." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 21: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 22: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 23: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 24: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 25: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 26: "The Christian Creed." 1884.]
+
+[Footnote 27: _National Reformer_, June 18, 1882]
+
+[Footnote 28: _Theosophist_, June, 1882.]
+
+[Footnote 29: I leave these words as they were written in 1889. I
+resigned my office in the N.S.S. in 1890, feeling that the N.S.S. was
+so identified with Materialism that it had no longer place for me.]
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF BOOKS QUOTED.
+
+"Autobiography," J.S. Mill, 184
+
+"Christian Creed, The," 173
+
+"Freethinkers' Text-book," 144
+
+"Gospel of Atheism, The," 145, 152, 158, 168
+
+"Gospels of Christianity and Freethought," 164
+
+"Life, Death, and Immortality," 147, 149, 150
+
+_Link_, The, 333
+
+_National Reformer_, The, 79, 80, 280, 346-50, 354
+
+_Our Corner, _286, 329
+
+_Theosophist_, The, 282, 288
+
+"True Basis of Morality," 156
+
+"Why I do Not Believe in God," 146
+
+"World without God," 165, 169, 172
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+Affirmation Bill brought in, 287
+  rejected, 299
+Atheist, position as an, 139
+Authorship, first attempts at, 84.
+
+Bennett, D.M., prosecution of, 232
+Blasphemy prosecution, 283, 287, 289
+Blavatsky, H.P., 189, 337
+  meeting with, 341
+"Bloody Sunday," 324
+Bradlaugh, Charles, first meeting with, 135
+  as friend, 137
+  in the Clock Tower, 258
+  and the scene in the House, 265
+  _v_. Newdegate; result, 289
+  prosecuted for blasphemy, 283, 289
+
+Confirmation, 51
+
+Daughter, application to remove, 213
+  denied access to, 219
+Death of father, 21
+  of mother, 126
+Doubt the first, 58
+
+"Elements of Social Science," 196
+Engagement, 69
+Essay, first Freethought, 113
+
+Fenians, the, 73
+_Freethinker_ prosecution, 283, 287, 296
+Freethought Publishing Company, the, 285
+
+Harrow, life at, 30
+Hoskyns, Rev. E., libel action against, 359
+
+Knowlton pamphlet, the, 205
+  prosecution, 208
+  trial, 210
+
+"Law of Population, The," 212, 210
+"Law and Liberty League," the, 326
+Lecture, the first, 181
+Linnell, the Trafalgar Square victim, 316
+  funeral of, 327
+_Link_, founding of the, 331
+
+Malthusian League formed, 229
+Malthusianism and Theosophy, 240
+Marriage, 70
+  tie broken, no
+Match-girls' strike, 335
+  Union, established, 336
+
+_National Reformer,_ the, 134
+  first contribution to, 180
+  resignation of co-editorship, 320
+National Secular Society joined, 135
+  elected vice-president of, 202
+  resignation of, 357
+Northampton Election, 183
+  struggle, 253, 344
+
+Oaths Bill, the, 314, 329
+_Our Corner_, 286, 314
+
+Political Opinions, 174
+Pusey, Dr., 109, 284
+
+Russian politics, 311
+
+Scientific work, 249
+School Board, election to, 338
+Scott, Thomas, 112, 127
+Socialism, 299
+  debate on, between Messrs. Bradlaugh and Hyndman, 301
+Socialist debates, 318, 319
+Socialists and open-air speaking, 312
+  Defence Association, 323
+Stanley, Dean, 23, 122
+
+Theosophical Society, the, 180
+  joined, 344
+  headquarters established, 361
+Theosophy and Charles Bradlaugh, 350
+  the National Secular Society, 357
+Trafalgar Square, closing of, to the public, 323
+Truelove, Edward, trial of, 225
+
+Voysey, Rev. Charles, 106
+
+Working Women's Club, 337, 360
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Annie Besant, by Annie Besant
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Annie Besant, by Annie Besant
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Annie Besant
+       An Autobiography
+
+Author: Annie Besant
+
+Release Date: April 19, 2004 [EBook #12085]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANNIE BESANT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<h1>
+ANNIE BESANT
+</h1>
+
+<h2>
+AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
+</h2>
+
+<h4>
+Illustrated
+</h4>
+
+
+<h5>
+LONDON
+</h5>
+
+<h5>
+SECOND EDITION
+</h5>
+<a name="01"></a>
+
+<p class="ctr"><img src="Images/01.jpg" alt="Annie Besant. 1885." width="382" height="541"></p>
+
+<h5><i>From a photograph by H.S. Mendelssohn, 27, Cathcart Road, South Kensington, London</i></h5>
+<h5>ANNIE BESANT<br>
+1885</h5>
+
+<hr>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>
+PREFACE
+</h3>
+<p>
+It is a difficult thing to tell the story of a life, and yet more
+difficult when that life is one's own. At the best, the telling has a
+savour of vanity, and the only excuse for the proceeding is that the
+life, being an average one, reflects many others, and in troublous
+times like ours may give the experience of many rather than of one.
+And so the autobiographer does his work because he thinks that, at the
+cost of some unpleasantness to himself, he may throw light on some of
+the typical problems that are vexing the souls of his contemporaries,
+and perchance may stretch out a helping hand to some brother who is
+struggling in the darkness, and so bring him cheer when despair has
+him in its grip. Since all of us, men and women of this restless and
+eager generation&mdash;surrounded by forces we dimly see but cannot as yet
+understand, discontented with old ideas and half afraid of new, greedy
+for the material results of the knowledge brought us by Science but
+looking askance at her agnosticism as regards the soul, fearful of
+superstition but still more fearful of atheism, turning from the husks
+of outgrown creeds but filled with desperate hunger for spiritual
+ideals--since all of us have the same anxieties, the same griefs, the
+same yearning hopes, the same passionate desire for knowledge, it may
+well be that the story of one may help all, and that the tale of one
+should that went out alone into the darkness and on the other side
+found light, that struggled through the Storm and on the other side
+found Peace, may bring some ray of light and of peace into the
+darkness and the storm of other lives.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+ANNIE BESANT.<br>
+The Theosophical Society,<Br>
+17 &amp; 19, Avenue Road, Regent's Park, London.<br>
+<i>August</i>, 1893.<br>
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+
+<h3>
+CONTENTS
+</h3>
+
+
+<p class="noindent">CHAP.</p>
+
+<ol>
+<li><a href="#CHI">&nbsp;&quot;OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE&quot;</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHII">&nbsp;EARLY CHILDHOOD</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHIII">&nbsp;GIRLHOOD</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHIV">&nbsp;MARRIAGE</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHV">&nbsp;THE STORM OF DOUBT</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHVI">&nbsp;CHARLES BRADLAUGH</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHVII">&nbsp;ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHVIII">&nbsp;AT WORK</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHIX">&nbsp;THE KNOWLTON PAMPHLET</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHX">&nbsp;AT WAR ALL ROUND</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHXI">&nbsp;MR. BRADLAUGH'S STRUGGLE</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHXII">&nbsp;STILL FIGHTING</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHXIII">&nbsp;SOCIALISM</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHXIV">&nbsp;THROUGH STORM TO PEACE</a></li>
+</ol>
+
+<p class="addindent"><a href ="#LIST">LIST OF BOOKS QUOTED</a></p>
+
+<p class="addindent"><a href ="#INDEX">INDEX</a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+</h3>
+
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#01">
+ANNIE BESANT, 1885</a><br>
+<i>Frontispiece</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#01">HOROSCOPE OF ANNIE BESANT</a><br><i>Page</i> 12
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#02">ANNIE BESANT, 1869</a><br><i>Facing page</i> 86
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#03">THOMAS SCOTT</a><br><i>Facing page</i> 112
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#04">CHARLES BRADLAUGH, M.P.</a><br><i>Facing page</i> 212
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#05">CHARLES BRADLAUGH AND HENRY LABOUCHERE</a><br><i>Facing page</i> 254
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#06">NORWICH BRANCH OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE</a><br><i>Facing page</i> 314
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#07">STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION</a><br><i>Facing page</i> 336
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#08">MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION</a><br><i>Facing page</i> 338
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<a name="CHI"></a>
+<p class="chapter">
+CHAPTER I.
+</p>
+<h5>
+&quot;OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE.&quot;
+</h5>
+
+<p>
+On October 1, 1847, I am credibly informed, my baby eyes opened to the
+light(?) of a London afternoon at 5.39.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A friendly astrologer has drawn for me the following chart, showing the
+position of the planets at this, to me fateful, moment; but I know
+nothing of astrology, so feel no wiser as I gaze upon my horoscope.
+</p>
+
+<a name="02"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="Images/02.jpg" alt="Horoscope of Annie Besant." width="301" height="280"></p>
+<h5>Horoscope of Annie Besant.</h5>
+<p>
+Keeping in view the way in which sun, moon, and planets influence the
+physical condition of the earth, there is nothing incongruous with the
+orderly course of nature in the view that they also influence the
+physical bodies of men, these being part of the physical earth, and
+largely moulded by its conditions. Any one who knows the
+characteristics ascribed to those who are born under the several signs
+of the Zodiac, may very easily pick out the different types among his
+own acquaintances, and he may then get them to go to some astrologer
+and find out under what signs they were severally born. He will very
+quickly discover that two men of completely opposed types are not born
+under the same sign, and the invariability of the concurrence will
+convince him that law, and not chance, is at work. We are born into
+earthly life under certain conditions, just as we were physically
+affected by them pre-natally, and these will have their bearing on our
+subsequent physical evolution. At the most, astrology, as it is now
+practised, can only calculate the interaction between these physical
+conditions at any given moment, and the conditions brought to them by a
+given person whose general constitution and natal condition are known.
+It cannot say what the person will do, nor what will happen to him, but
+only what will be the physical district, so to speak, in which he will
+find himself, and the impulses that will play upon him from external
+nature and from his own body. Even on those matters modern astrology is
+not quite reliable&mdash;judging from the many blunders made&mdash;or else its
+professors are very badly instructed; but that there is a real science
+of astrology I have no doubt, and there are some men who are past
+masters in it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It has always been somewhat of a grievance to me that I was born in
+London, &quot;within the sound of Bow Bells,&quot; when three-quarters of my
+blood and all my heart are Irish. My dear mother was of purest Irish
+descent, and my father was Irish on his mother's side, though belonging
+to the Devonshire Woods on his father's. The Woods were yeomen of the
+sturdy English type, farming their own land in honest, independent
+fashion. Of late years they seem to have developed more in the
+direction of brains, from the time, in fact, that Matthew Wood became
+Mayor of London town, fought Queen Caroline's battles against her most
+religious and gracious royal husband, aided the Duke of Kent with no
+niggard hand, and received a baronetcy for his services from the Duke
+of Kent's royal daughter. Since then they have given England a Lord
+Chancellor in the person of the gentle-hearted and pure-living Lord
+Hatherley, while others have distinguished themselves in various ways
+in the service of their country. But I feel playfully inclined to
+grudge the English blood they put into my father's veins, with his
+Irish mother, his Galway birth, and his Trinity College, Dublin,
+education. For the Irish tongue is musical in my ear, and the Irish
+nature dear to my heart. Only in Ireland is it that if you stop to ask
+a worn-out ragged woman the way to some old monument, she will say:
+&quot;Sure, then, my darlin', it's just up the hill and round the corner,
+and then any one will tell you the way. And it's there you'll see the
+place where the blessed Saint Patrick set his foot, and his blessing be
+on yer.&quot; Old women as poor as she in other nations would never be as
+bright and as friendly and as garrulous. And where, out of Ireland,
+will you see a whole town crowd into a station to say good-bye to half
+a dozen emigrants, till the platform is a heaving mass of men and
+women, struggling, climbing over each other for a last kiss, crying,
+keening, laughing, all in a breath, till all the air is throbbing and
+there's a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes as the train
+steams out? Where, out of Ireland, will you be bumping along the
+streets on an outside car, beside a taciturn Jarvey, who, on suddenly
+discovering that you are shadowed by &quot;Castle&quot; spies, becomes
+loquaciously friendly, and points out everything that he thinks will
+interest you? Blessings on the quick tongues and warm hearts, on the
+people so easy to lead, so hard to drive. And blessings on the ancient
+land once inhabited by mighty men of wisdom, that in later times became
+the Island of Saints, and shall once again be the Island of Sages, when
+the Wheel turns round.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My maternal grandfather was a typical Irishman, much admired by me and
+somewhat feared also, in the childish days. He belonged to a decayed
+Irish family, the Maurices, and in a gay youth, with a beautiful wife
+as light-hearted as himself, he had merrily run through what remained
+to him in the way of fortune. In his old age, with abundant snow-white
+hair, he still showed the hot Irish blood on the lightest provocation,
+stormily angry for a moment and easily appeased. My mother was the
+second daughter in a large family, in a family that grew more numerous
+as pounds grew fewer, and she was adopted by a maiden aunt, a quaint
+memory of whom came through my mother's childhood into mine, and had
+its moulding effect on both our characters. This maiden aunt was, as
+are most Irish folk of decayed families, very proud of her family tree
+with its roots in the inevitable &quot;kings.&quot; Her particular kings were the
+&quot;seven kings of France&quot;&mdash;the &quot;Milesian kings&quot;&mdash;and the tree grew up a
+parchment, in all its impressive majesty, over the mantelpiece of their
+descendant's modest drawing-room. This heraldic monster was regarded
+with deep respect by child Emily, a respect in no wise deserved, I
+venture to suppose, by the disreputable royalties of whom she was a
+fortunately distant twig. Chased out of France, doubtless for cause
+shown, they had come over the sea to Ireland, and there continued their
+reckless plundering lives. But so strangely turns the wheel of time
+that these ill-doing and barbarous scamps became a kind of moral
+thermometer in the home of the gentle Irish lady in the early half of
+the present century. For my mother has told me that when she had
+committed some act of childish naughtiness, her aunt would say, looking
+gravely over her spectacles at the small culprit, &quot;Emily, your conduct
+is unworthy of the descendant of the seven kings of France.&quot; And Emily,
+with her sweet grey Irish eyes and her curling masses of raven black
+hair, would cry in penitent shame over her unworthiness, with some
+vague idea that those royal, and to her very real, ancestors would
+despise her small, sweet, rosebud self, so wholly unworthy of their
+disreputable majesties.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus those shadowy forms influenced her in childhood, and exercised
+over her a power that made her shrink from aught that was unworthy,
+petty or mean. To her the lightest breath of dishonour was to be
+avoided at any cost of pain, and she wrought into me, her only
+daughter, that same proud and passionate horror at any taint of shame
+or merited disgrace. To the world always a brave front was to be kept,
+and a stainless reputation, for suffering might be borne but dishonour
+never. A gentlewoman might starve, but she must not run in debt; she
+might break her heart, but it must be with a smile on her face. I have
+often thought that the training in this reticence and pride of honour
+was a strange preparation for my stormy, public, much attacked and
+slandered life; and certain it is that this inwrought shrinking from
+all criticism that touched personal purity and personal honour added a
+keenness of suffering to the fronting of public odium that none can
+appreciate who has not been trained in some similar school of dignified
+self-respect. And yet perhaps there was another result from it that in
+value outweighed the added pain: it was the stubbornly resistant
+feeling that rose and inwardly asserted its own purity in face of
+foulest lie, and turning scornful face against the foe, too proud
+either to justify itself or to defend, said to itself in its own heart,
+when condemnation was loudest: &quot;I am not what you think me, and your
+verdict does not change my own self. You cannot make me vile whatever
+you think of me, and I will never, in my own eyes, be that which you
+deem me to be now.&quot; And the very pride became a shield against
+degradation, for, however lost my public reputation, I could never bear
+to become sullied in my own sight&mdash;and that is a thing not without its
+use to a woman cut off, as I was at one time, from home, and friends,
+and Society. So peace to the maiden aunt's ashes, and to those of her
+absurd kings, for I owe them something after all. And I keep grateful
+memory of that unknown grand-aunt, for what she did in training my dear
+mother, the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest of women. It is well
+to be able to look back to a mother who served as ideal of all that was
+noblest and dearest during childhood and girlhood, whose face made the
+beauty of home, and whose love was both sun and shield. No other
+experience in life could quite make up for missing the perfect tie
+between mother and child&mdash;a tie that in our case never relaxed and
+never weakened. Though her grief at my change of faith and consequent
+social ostracism did much to hasten her death-hour, it never brought a
+cloud between our hearts; though her pleading was the hardest of all to
+face in later days, and brought the bitterest agony, it made no gulf
+between us, it cast no chill upon our mutual love. And I look back at
+her to-day with the same loving gratitude as ever encircled her to me
+in her earthly life. I have never met a woman more selflessly devoted
+to those she loved, more passionately contemptuous of all that was mean
+or base, more keenly sensitive on every question of honour, more iron
+in will, more sweet in tenderness, than the mother who made my girlhood
+sunny as dreamland, who guarded me, until my marriage, from every touch
+of pain that she could ward off or bear for me, who suffered more in
+every trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself, and who
+died in the little house I had taken for our new home in Norwood, worn
+out, ere old age touched her, by sorrow, poverty, and pain, in May,
+1874.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My earliest personal recollections are of a house and garden that we
+lived in when I was three and four years of age, situated in Grove
+Road, St. John's Wood. I can remember my mother hovering round the
+dinner-table to see that all was bright for the home-coming husband; my
+brother&mdash;two years older than myself&mdash;and I watching &quot;for papa&quot;; the
+loving welcome, the game of romps that always preceded the dinner of
+the elder folks. I can remember on the 1st of October, 1851, jumping up
+in my little cot, and shouting out triumphantly: &quot;Papa! mamma! I am
+four years old!&quot; and the grave demand of my brother, conscious of
+superior age, at dinner-time: &quot;May not Annie have a knife to-day, as
+she is four years old?&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a sore grievance during that same year, 1851, that I was not
+judged old enough to go to the Great Exhibition, and I have a faint
+memory of my brother consolingly bringing me home one of those folding
+pictured strips that are sold in the streets, on which were imaged
+glories that I longed only the more to see. Far-away, dusky, trivial
+memories, these. What a pity it is that a baby cannot notice, cannot
+observe, cannot remember, and so throw light on the fashion of the
+dawning of the external world on the human consciousness. If only we
+could remember how things looked when they were first imaged on the
+retinae; what we felt when first we became conscious of the outer world;
+what the feeling was as faces of father and mother grew out of the
+surrounding chaos and became familiar things, greeted with a smile,
+lost with a cry; if only memory would not become a mist when in later
+years we strive to throw our glances backward into the darkness of our
+infancy, what lessons we might learn to help our stumbling psychology,
+how many questions might be solved whose answers we are groping for in
+the West in vain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next scene that stands out clearly against the background of the
+past is that of my father's death-bed. The events which led to his
+death I know from my dear mother. He had never lost his fondness for
+the profession for which he had been trained, and having many medical
+friends, he would now and then accompany them on their hospital rounds,
+or share with them the labours of the dissecting-room. It chanced that
+during the dissection of the body of a person who had died of rapid
+consumption, my father cut his finger against the edge of the
+breast-bone. The cut did not heal easily, and the finger became swollen
+and inflamed. &quot;I would have that finger off, Wood, if I were you,&quot; said
+one of the surgeons, a day or two afterwards, on seeing the state of
+the wound. But the others laughed at the suggestion, and my father, at
+first inclined to submit to the amputation, was persuaded to &quot;leave
+Nature alone.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About the middle of August, 1852, he got wet through, riding on the top
+of an omnibus, and the wetting resulted in a severe cold, which
+&quot;settled on his chest.&quot; One of the most eminent doctors of the day, as
+able as he was rough in manner, was called to see him. He examined him
+carefully, sounded his lungs, and left the room followed by my mother.
+&quot;Well?&quot; she asked, scarcely anxious as to the answer, save as it might
+worry her husband to be kept idly at home. &quot;You must keep up his
+spirits,&quot; was the thoughtless answer. &quot;He is in a galloping
+consumption; you will not have him with you six weeks longer.&quot; The wife
+staggered back, and fell like a stone on the floor. But love triumphed
+over agony, and half an hour later she was again at her husband's side,
+never to leave it again for ten minutes at a time, night or day, till
+he was lying with closed eyes asleep in death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was lifted on to the bed to &quot;say good-bye to dear papa&quot; on the day
+before his death, and I remember being frightened at his eyes which
+looked so large, and his voice which sounded so strange, as he made me
+promise always to be &quot;a very good girl to darling mamma, as papa was
+going right away.&quot; I remember insisting that &quot;papa should kiss Cherry,&quot;
+a doll given me on my birthday, three days before, by his direction,
+and being removed, crying and struggling, from the room. He died on the
+following day, October 5th, and I do not think that my elder brother
+and I&mdash;who were staying at our maternal grandfather's&mdash;went to the
+house again until the day of the funeral. With the death, my mother
+broke down, and when all was over they carried her senseless from the
+room. I remember hearing afterwards how, when she recovered her senses,
+she passionately insisted on being left alone, and locked herself into
+her room for the night; and how on the following morning her mother, at
+last persuading her to open the door, started back at the face she saw
+with the cry: &quot;Good God, Emily! your hair is white!&quot; It was even so;
+her hair, black, glossy and abundant, which, contrasting with her large
+grey eyes, had made her face so strangely attractive, had turned grey
+in that night of agony, and to me my mother's face is ever framed in
+exquisite silver bands of hair as white as the driven unsullied snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have heard that the love between my father and mother was a very
+beautiful thing, and it most certainly stamped her character for life.
+He was keenly intellectual and splendidly educated; a mathematician and
+a good classical scholar, thoroughly master of French, German, Italian,
+Spanish, and Portuguese, with a smattering of Hebrew and Gaelic, the
+treasures of ancient and of modern literature were his daily household
+delight. Nothing pleased him so well as to sit with his wife, reading
+aloud to her while she worked; now translating from some foreign poet,
+now rolling forth melodiously the exquisite cadences of &quot;Queen Mab.&quot;
+Student of philosophy as he was, he was deeply and steadily sceptical;
+and a very religious relative has told me that he often drove her from
+the room by his light, playful mockery of the tenets of the Christian
+faith. His mother and sister were strict Roman Catholics, and near the
+end forced a priest into his room, but the priest was promptly ejected
+by the wrath of the dying man, and by the almost fierce resolve of the
+wife that no messenger of the creed he detested should trouble her
+darling at the last.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Deeply read in philosophy, he had outgrown the orthodox beliefs of his
+day, and his wife, who loved him too much to criticise, was wont to
+reconcile her own piety and his scepticism by holding that &quot;women ought
+to be religious,&quot; while men had a right to read everything and think as
+they would, provided that they were upright and honourable in their
+lives. But the result of his liberal and unorthodox thought was to
+insensibly modify and partially rationalise her own beliefs, and she
+put on one side as errors the doctrines of eternal punishment, the
+vicarious atonement, the infallibility of the Bible, the equality of
+the Son with the Father in the Trinity, and other orthodox beliefs, and
+rejoiced in her later years in the writings of such men as Jowett,
+Colenso, and Stanley. The last named, indeed, was her ideal Christian
+gentleman, suave, polished, broad-minded, devout in a stately way. The
+baldness of a typical Evangelical service outraged her taste as much as
+the crudity of Evangelical dogmas outraged her intellect; she liked to
+feel herself a Christian in a dignified and artistic manner, and to be
+surrounded by solemn music and splendid architecture when she &quot;attended
+Divine service.&quot; Familiarity with celestial personages was detestable
+to her, and she did her duty of saluting them in a courtly and reverent
+fashion. Westminster Abbey was her favourite church, with its dim light
+and shadowy distances; there in a carven stall, with choristers
+chanting in solemn rhythm, with the many-coloured glories of the
+painted windows repeating themselves on upspringing arch and clustering
+pillars, with the rich harmonies of the pealing organ throbbing up
+against screen and monument, with the ashes of the mighty dead around,
+and all the stately memories of the past inwrought into the very
+masonry, there Religion appeared to her to be intellectually dignified
+and emotionally satisfactory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To me, who took my religion in strenuous fashion, this dainty and
+well-bred piety seemed perilously like Laodicean lukewarmness, while
+my headlong vigour of conviction and practice often jarred on her as
+alien from the delicate balance and absence of extremes that should
+characterise the gentlewoman. She was of the old <i>r&eacute;gime</i>; I of the
+stuff from which fanatics are made: and I have often thought, in
+looking back, that she must have had on her lips many a time unspoken
+a phrase that dropped from them when she lay a-dying: &quot;My little one,
+you have never made me sad or sorry except for your own sake; you have
+always been too religious.&quot; And then she murmured to herself: &quot;Yes,
+it has been darling Annie's only fault; she has always been too
+religious.&quot; Methinks that, as the world judges, the dying voice spake
+truly, and the dying eyes saw with a real insight. For though I was
+then kneeling beside her bed, heretic and outcast, the heart of me was
+religious in its very fervour of repudiation of a religion, and in its
+rebellious uprising against dogmas that crushed the reason and did not
+satisfy the soul. I went out into the darkness alone, not because
+religion was too good for me, but because it was not good enough; it
+was too meagre, too commonplace, too little exacting, too bound up
+with earthly interests, too calculating in its accommodations to
+social conventionalities. The Roman Catholic Church, had it captured
+me, as it nearly did, would have sent me on some mission of danger and
+sacrifice and utilised me as a martyr; the Church established by law
+transformed me into an unbeliever and an antagonist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For as a child I was mystical and imaginative religious to the very
+finger-tips, and with a certain faculty for seeing visions and
+dreaming dreams. This faculty is not uncommon with the Keltic races,
+and makes them seem &quot;superstitious&quot; to more solidly-built peoples.
+Thus, on the day of my father's funeral, my mother sat with vacant
+eyes and fixed pallid face&mdash;the picture comes back to me yet, it so
+impressed my childish imagination&mdash;following the funeral service,
+stage after stage, and suddenly, with the words, &quot;It is all over!&quot;
+fell back fainting. She said afterwards that she had followed the
+hearse, had attended the service, had walked behind the coffin to the
+grave. Certain it is that a few weeks later she determined to go to
+the Kensal Green Cemetery, where the body of her husband had been
+laid, and went thither with a relative; he failed to find the grave,
+and while another of the party went in search of an official to
+identify the spot, my mother said, &quot;If you will take me to the chapel
+where the first part of the service was read, I will find the grave.&quot;
+The idea seemed to her friend, of course, to be absurd; but he would
+not cross the newly-made widow, so took her to the chapel. She looked
+round, left the chapel door, and followed the path along which the
+corpse had been borne till she reached the grave, where she was
+quietly standing when the caretaker arrived to point it out. The grave
+is at some distance from the chapel, and is not on one of the main
+roads; it had nothing on it to mark it, save the wooden peg with the
+number, and this would be no help to identification at a distance
+since all the graves are thus marked, and at a little way off these
+pegs are not visible. How she found the grave remained a mystery in
+the family, as no one believed her straightforward story that she had
+been present at the funeral. With my present knowledge the matter is
+simple enough, for I now know that the consciousness can leave the
+body, take part in events going on at a distance, and, returning,
+impress on the physical brain what it has experienced. The very fact
+that she asked to be taken to the chapel is significant, showing that
+she was picking up a memory of a previous going from that spot to the
+grave; she could only find the grave if she started from <i>the place
+from which she had started before</i>. Another proof of this
+ultra-physical capacity was given a few months later, when her infant
+son, who had been pining himself ill for &quot;papa,&quot; was lying one night
+in her arms. On the next morning she said to her sister: &quot;Alf is going
+to die.&quot; The child had no definite disease, but was wasting away, and
+it was argued to her that the returning spring would restore the
+health lost during the winter. &quot;No,&quot; was her answer. &quot;He was lying
+asleep in my arms last night, and William&quot; (her husband) &quot;came to me
+and said that he wanted Alf with him, but that I might keep the other
+two.&quot; In vain she was assured that she had been dreaming, that it was
+quite natural that she should dream about her husband, and that her
+anxiety for the child had given the dream its shape. Nothing would
+persuade her that she had not seen her husband, or that the
+information he had given her was not true. So it was no matter of
+surprise to her when in the following March her arms were empty, and a
+waxen form lay lifeless in the baby's cot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My brother and I were allowed to see him just before he was placed in
+his coffin; I can see him still, so white and beautiful, with a black
+spot in the middle of the fair, waxen forehead, and I remember the
+deadly cold which startled me when I was told to kiss my little
+brother. It was the first time that I had touched Death. That black
+spot made a curious impression on me, and long afterwards, asking what
+had caused it, I was told that at the moment after his death my mother
+had passionately kissed the baby brow. Pathetic thought, that the
+mother's kiss of farewell should have been marked by the first sign of
+corruption on the child's face!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I do not mention these stories because they are in any fashion
+remarkable or out of the way, but only to show that the sensitiveness
+to impressions other than physical ones, that was a marked feature in
+my own childhood, was present also in the family to which I belonged.
+For the physical nature is inherited from parents, and sensitiveness
+to psychic impressions is a property of the physical body; in our
+family, as in so many Irish ones, belief in &quot;ghosts&quot; of all
+descriptions was general, and my mother has told me of the banshee
+that she had heard wailing when the death-hour of one of the family
+was near. To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were
+very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself
+a child. Punch and Judy were living entities, and the tragedy in which
+they bore part cost me many an agony of tears; to this day I can
+remember running away when I heard the squawk of the coming Punch, and
+burying my head in the pillows that I might shut out the sound of the
+blows and the cry of the ill-used baby. All the objects about me were
+to me alive, the flowers that I kissed as much as the kitten I petted,
+and I used to have a splendid time &quot;making believe&quot; and living out all
+sorts of lovely stories among my treasured and so-called inanimate
+playthings. But there was a more serious side to this dreamful fancy
+when it joined hands with religion.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHII"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER II.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+EARLY CHILDHOOD.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+And now began my mother's time of struggle and of anxiety. Hitherto,
+since her marriage, she had known no money troubles, for her husband
+was earning a good income; he was apparently vigorous and well: no
+thought of anxiety clouded their future. When he died, he believed
+that he left his wife and children safe, at least, from pecuniary
+distress. It was not so. I know nothing of the details, but the
+outcome of all was that nothing was left for the widow and children,
+save a trifle of ready money. The resolve to which my mother came was
+characteristic. Two of her husband's relatives, Western and Sir
+William Wood, offered to educate her son at a good city school, and to
+start him in commercial life, using their great city influence to push
+him forward. But the young lad's father and mother had talked of a
+different future for their eldest boy; he was to go to a public
+school, and then to the University, and was to enter one of the
+&quot;learned professions&quot;&mdash;to take orders, the mother wished; to go to the
+Bar, the father hoped. On his death-bed there was nothing more
+earnestly urged by my father than that Harry should receive the best
+possible education, and the widow was resolute to fulfil that last
+wish. In her eyes, a city school was not &quot;the best possible
+education,&quot; and the Irish pride rebelled against the idea of her son
+not being &quot;a University man.&quot; Many were the lectures poured out on the
+young widow's head about her &quot;foolish pride,&quot; especially by the female
+members of the Wood family; and her persistence in her own way caused
+a considerable alienation between herself and them. But Western and
+William, though half-disapproving, remained her friends, and lent many
+a helping hand to her in her first difficult struggles. After much
+cogitation, she resolved that the boy should be educated at Harrow,
+where the fees are comparatively low to lads living in the town, and
+that he should go thence to Cambridge or to Oxford, as his tastes
+should direct. A bold scheme for a penniless widow, but carried out to
+the letter; for never dwelt in a delicate body a more resolute mind
+and will than that of my dear mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a few months' time&mdash;during which we lived, poorly enough, in
+Richmond Terrace, Clapham, close to her father and mother&mdash;to Harrow,
+then, she betook herself, into lodgings over a grocer's shop, and set
+herself to look for a house. This grocer was a very pompous man, fond
+of long words, and patronised the young widow exceedingly, and one day
+my mother related with much amusement how he had told her that she was
+sure to get on if she worked hard. &quot;Look at me!&quot; he said, swelling
+visibly with importance; &quot;I was once a poor boy, without a penny of my
+own, and now I am a comfortable man, and have my submarine villa to go
+to every evening.&quot; That &quot;submarine villa&quot; was an object of amusement
+when we passed it in our walks for many a long day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;There is Mr. &mdash;'s submarine villa,&quot; some one would say, laughing:
+and I, too, used to laugh merrily, because my elders did, though my
+understanding of the difference between suburban and submarine was on
+a par with that of the honest grocer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My mother had fortunately found a boy, whose parents were glad to place
+him in her charge, of about the age of her own son, to educate with
+him; and by this means she was able to pay for a tutor, to prepare the
+two boys for school. The tutor had a cork leg, which was a source of
+serious trouble to me, for it stuck out straight behind when we knelt
+down to family prayers&mdash;conduct which struck me as irreverent and
+unbecoming, but which I always felt a desire to imitate. After about a
+year my mother found a house which she thought would suit her scheme,
+namely, to obtain permission from Dr. Vaughan, the then head-master of
+Harrow, to take some boys into her house, and so gain means of
+education for her own son. Dr. Vaughan, who must have been won by the
+gentle, strong, little woman, from that time forth became her earnest
+friend and helper; and to the counsel and active assistance both of
+himself and of his wife, was due much of the success that crowned her
+toil. He made only one condition in granting the permission she asked,
+and that was, that she should also have in her house one of the masters
+of the school, so that the boys should not suffer from the want of a
+house-tutor. This condition, of course, she readily accepted, and the
+arrangement lasted for ten years, until after her son had left school
+for Cambridge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The house she took is now, I am sorry to say, pulled down, and
+replaced by a hideous red-brick structure. It was very old and
+rambling, rose-covered in front, ivy-covered behind; it stood on the
+top of Harrow Hill, between the church and the school, and had once
+been the vicarage of the parish, but the vicar had left it because it
+was so far removed from the part of the village where all his work
+lay. The drawing-room opened by an old-fashioned half-window,
+half-door&mdash;which proved a constant source of grief to me, for whenever
+I had on a new frock I always tore it on the bolt as I flew
+through&mdash;into a large garden which sloped down one side of the hill,
+and was filled with the most delightful old trees, fir and laurel,
+may, mulberry, hazel, apple, pear, and damson, not to mention currant
+and gooseberry bushes innumerable, and large strawberry beds spreading
+down the sunny slopes. There was not a tree there that I did not
+climb, and one, a widespreading Portugal laurel, was my private
+country house. I had there my bedroom and my sitting-rooms, my study,
+and my larder. The larder was supplied by the fruit-trees, from which
+I was free to pick as I would, and in the study I would sit for hours
+with some favourite book&mdash;Milton's &quot;Paradise Lost&quot; the chief favourite
+of all. The birds must often have felt startled, when from the small
+swinging form perching on a branch, came out in childish tones the
+&quot;Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers,&quot; of Milton's
+stately and sonorous verse. I liked to personify Satan, and to declaim
+the grand speeches of the hero-rebel, and many a happy hour did I pass
+in Milton's heaven and hell, with for companions Satan and &quot;the Son,&quot;
+Gabriel and Abdiel. Then there was a terrace running by the side of
+the churchyard, always dry in the wettest weather, and bordered by an
+old wooden fence, over which clambered roses of every shade; never was
+such a garden for roses as that of the Old Vicarage. At the end of the
+terrace was a little summer-house, and in this a trap-door in the
+fence, which swung open and displayed one of the fairest views in
+England. Sheer from your feet downwards went the hill, and then far
+below stretched the wooded country till your eye reached the towers of
+Windsor Castle, far away on the horizon. It was the view at which
+Byron was never tired of gazing, as he lay on the flat tombstone close
+by&mdash;Byron's tomb, as it is still called&mdash;of which he wrote:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+&quot;Again I behold where for hours I have pondered,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As reclining, at eve, on yon tombstone I lay,<br>
+Or round the steep brow of the churchyard I wandered,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;To catch the last gleam of the sun's setting ray.&quot;
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+Reader mine, if ever you go to Harrow, ask permission to enter the old
+garden, and try the effect of that sudden burst of beauty, as you
+swing back the small trap-door at the terrace end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Into this house we moved on my eighth birthday, and for eleven years it
+was &quot;home&quot; to me, left always with regret, returned to always with joy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Almost immediately afterwards I left my mother for the first time; for
+one day, visiting a family who lived close by, I found a stranger
+sitting in the drawing-room, a lame lady with a strong face, which
+softened marvellously as she smiled at the child who came dancing in;
+she called me to her presently, and took me on her lap and talked to
+me, and on the following day our friend came to see my mother, to ask
+if she would let me go away and be educated with this lady's niece,
+coming home for the holidays regularly, but leaving my education in
+her hands. At first my mother would not hear of it, for she and I
+scarcely ever left each other; my love for her was an idolatry, hers
+for me a devotion. (A foolish little story, about which I was
+unmercifully teased for years, marked that absolute idolatry of her,
+which has not yet faded from my heart. In tenderest rallying one day
+of the child who trotted after her everywhere, content to sit, or
+stand, or wait, if only she might touch hand or dress of &quot;mamma,&quot; she
+said: &quot;Little one&quot; (the name by which she always called me), &quot;if you
+cling to mamma in this way, I must really get a string and tie you to
+my apron, and how will you like that?&quot; &quot;O mamma, darling,&quot; came the
+fervent answer, &quot;do let it be in a knot.&quot; And, indeed, the tie of love
+between us was so tightly knotted that nothing ever loosened it till
+the sword of Death cut that which pain and trouble never availed to
+slacken in the slightest degree.) But it was urged upon her that the
+advantages of education offered were such as no money could purchase
+for me; that it would be a disadvantage for me to grow up in a
+houseful of boys&mdash;and, in truth, I was as good a cricketer and climber
+as the best of them&mdash;that my mother would soon be obliged to send me
+to school, unless she accepted an offer which gave me every advantage
+of school without its disadvantages. At last she yielded, and it was
+decided that Miss Marryat, on returning home, should take me with her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Marryat&mdash;the favourite sister of Captain Marryat, the famous
+novelist&mdash;was a maiden lady of large means. She had nursed her brother
+through the illness that ended in his death, and had been living with
+her mother at Wimbledon Park. On her mother's death she looked round
+for work which would make her useful in the world, and finding that one
+of her brothers had a large family of girls, she offered to take charge
+of one of them, and to educate her thoroughly. Chancing to come to
+Harrow, my good fortune threw me in her way, and she took a fancy to
+me and thought she would like to teach two little girls rather than
+one. Hence her offer to my mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Marryat had a perfect genius for teaching, and took in it the
+greatest delight. From time to time she added another child to our
+party, sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl. At first, with Amy Marryat
+and myself, there was a little boy, Walter Powys, son of a clergyman
+with a large family, and him she trained for some years, and then sent
+him on to school admirably prepared. She chose &quot;her children&quot;&mdash;as she
+loved to call us&mdash;in very definite fashion. Each must be gently born
+and gently trained, but in such position that the education freely
+given should be a relief and aid to a slender parental purse. It was
+her delight to seek out and aid those on whom poverty presses most
+heavily, when the need for education for the children weighs on the
+proud and the poor. &quot;Auntie&quot; we all called her, for she thought &quot;Miss
+Marryat&quot; seemed too cold and stiff. She taught us everything herself
+except music, and for this she had a master, practising us in
+composition, in recitation, in reading aloud English and French, and
+later, German, devoting herself to training us in the soundest, most
+thorough fashion. No words of mine can tell how much I owe her, not
+only of knowledge, but of that love of knowledge which has remained
+with me ever since as a constant spur to study.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her method of teaching may be of interest to some, who desire to train
+children with least pain, and the most enjoyment to the little ones
+themselves. First, we never used a spelling-book&mdash;that torment of the
+small child&mdash;nor an English grammar. But we wrote letters, telling of
+the things we had seen in our walks, or told again some story we had
+read; these childish compositions she would read over with us,
+correcting all faults of spelling, of grammar, of style, of cadence; a
+clumsy sentence would be read aloud, that we might hear how unmusical
+it sounded, an error in observation or expression pointed out. Then, as
+the letters recorded what we had seen the day before, the faculty of
+observation was drawn out and trained. &quot;Oh, dear! I have nothing to
+say!&quot; would come from a small child, hanging over a slate. &quot;Did you not
+go out for a walk yesterday?&quot; Auntie would question. &quot;Yes,&quot; would be
+sighed out; &quot;but there's nothing to say about it.&quot; &quot;Nothing to say! And
+you walked in the lanes for an hour and saw nothing, little No-eyes?
+You must use your eyes better to-day.&quot; Then there was a very favourite
+&quot;lesson,&quot; which proved an excellent way of teaching spelling. We used
+to write out lists of all the words we could think of which sounded the
+same but were differently spelt. Thus: &quot;key, quay,&quot; &quot;knight, night,&quot;
+and so on, and great was the glory of the child who found the largest
+number. Our French lessons&mdash;as the German later&mdash;included reading from
+the very first. On the day on which we began German we began reading
+Schiller's &quot;Wilhelm Tell,&quot; and the verbs given to us to copy out were
+those that had occurred in the reading. We learned much by heart, but
+always things that in themselves were worthy to be learned. We were
+never given the dry questions and answers which lazy teachers so much
+affect. We were taught history by one reading aloud while the others
+worked&mdash;the boys as well as the girls learning the use of the needle.
+&quot;It's like a girl to sew,&quot; said a little fellow, indignantly, one day.
+&quot;It is like a baby to have to run after a girl if you want a button
+sewn on,&quot; quoth Auntie. Geography was learned by painting skeleton
+maps&mdash;an exercise much delighted in by small fingers&mdash;and by putting
+together puzzle maps, in which countries in the map of a continent, or
+counties in the map of a country, were always cut out in their proper
+shapes. I liked big empires in those days; there was a solid
+satisfaction in putting down Russia, and seeing what a large part of
+the map was filled up thereby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The only grammar that we ever learned as grammar was the Latin, and
+that not until composition had made us familiar with the use of the
+rules therein given. Auntie had a great horror of children learning by
+rote things they did not understand, and then fancying they knew them.
+&quot;What do you mean by that expression, Annie?&quot; she would ask me. After
+feeble attempts to explain, I would answer: &quot;Indeed, Auntie, I know in
+my own head, but I can't explain.&quot; &quot;Then, indeed, Annie, you do not
+know in your own head, or you could explain, so that I might know in my
+own head.&quot; And so a healthy habit was fostered of clearness of thought
+and of expression. The Latin grammar was used because it was more
+perfect than the modern grammars, and served as a solid foundation for
+modern languages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Marryat took a beautiful place, Fern Hill, near Charmouth, in
+Dorsetshire, on the borders of Devon, and there she lived for some five
+years, a centre of beneficence in the district. She started a Sunday
+School, and a Bible Class after awhile for the lads too old for the
+school, who clamoured for admission to her class in it. She visited the
+poor, taking help wherever she went, and sending food from her own
+table to the sick. It was characteristic of her that she would never
+give &quot;scraps&quot; to the poor, but would have a basin brought in at dinner,
+and would cut the best slice to tempt the invalid appetite. Money she
+rarely, if ever, gave, but she would find a day's work, or busy herself
+to seek permanent employment for any one seeking aid. Stern in
+rectitude herself, and iron to the fawning or the dishonest, her
+influence, whether she was feared or loved, was always for good. Of the
+strictest sect of the Evangelicals, she was an Evangelical. On the
+Sunday no books were allowed save the Bible or the &quot;Sunday at Home&quot;;
+but she would try to make the day bright by various little devices; by
+a walk with her in the garden; by the singing of hymns, always
+attractive to children; by telling us wonderful missionary stories of
+Moffat and Livingstone, whose adventures with savages and wild beasts
+were as exciting as any tale of Mayne Reid's. We used to learn passages
+from the Bible and hymns for repetition; a favourite amusement was a
+&quot;Bible puzzle,&quot; such as a description of some Bible scene, which was to
+be recognised by the description. Then we taught in the Sunday School,
+for Auntie would tell us that it was useless for us to learn if we did
+not try to help those who had no one to teach them. The Sunday-school
+lessons had to be carefully prepared on the Saturday, for we were
+always taught that work given to the poor should be work that cost
+something to the giver. This principle, regarded by her as an
+illustration of the text, &quot;Shall I give unto the Lord my God that which
+has cost me nothing?&quot; ran through all her precept and her practice.
+When in some public distress we children went to her crying, and asking
+whether we could not help the little children who were starving, her
+prompt reply was, &quot;What will you give up for them?&quot; And then she said
+that if we liked to give up the use of sugar, we might thus each save
+sixpence a week to give away. I doubt if a healthier lesson can be
+given to children than that of personal self-denial for the good of
+others.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Daily, when our lessons were over, we had plenty of fun; long walks and
+rides, rides on a lovely pony, who found small children most amusing,
+and on which the coachman taught us to stick firmly, whatever his
+eccentricities of the moment; delightful all-day picnics in the lovely
+country round Charmouth, Auntie our merriest playfellow. Never was a
+healthier home, physically and mentally, made for young things than in
+that quiet village. And then the delight of the holidays! The pride of
+my mother at the good report of her darling's progress, and the renewal
+of acquaintance with every nook and corner in the dear old house and
+garden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dreamy tendency in the child, that on its worldly side is fancy,
+imagination, on its religious side is the germ of mysticism, and I
+believe it to be far more common than many people think. But the
+remorseless materialism of the day&mdash;not the philosophic materialism of
+the few, but the religious materialism of the many&mdash;crushes out all the
+delicate buddings forth of the childish thought, and bandages the eyes
+that might otherwise see. At first the child does not distinguish
+between what it &quot;sees&quot; and what it &quot;fancies&quot;; the one is as real, as
+objective, to it as the other, and it will talk to and play with its
+dream-comrades as merrily as with children like itself. As a child, I
+myself very much preferred the former, and never knew what it was to be
+lonely. But clumsy grown-ups come along and tramp right through the
+dream-garden, and crush the dream-flowers, and push the dream-children
+aside, and then say, in their loud, harsh voices&mdash;not soft and singable
+like the dream-voices&mdash;&quot;You must not tell such naughty stories, Miss
+Annie; you give me the shivers, and your mamma will be very vexed with
+you.&quot; But this tendency in me was too strong to be stifled, and it
+found its food in the fairy tales I loved, and in the religious
+allegories that I found yet more entrancing. How or when I learned to
+read, I do not know, for I cannot remember the time when a book was not
+a delight. At five years of age I must have read easily, for I remember
+being often unswathed from a delightful curtain, in which I used to
+roll myself with a book, and told to &quot;go and play,&quot; while I was still a
+five-years'-old dot. And I had a habit of losing myself so completely
+in the book that my name might be called in the room where I was, and I
+never hear it, so that I used to be blamed for wilfully hiding myself,
+when I had simply been away in fairyland, or lying trembling beneath
+some friendly cabbage-leaf as a giant went by.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was between seven and eight years of age when I first came across
+some children's allegories of a religious kind, and a very little
+later came &quot;Pilgrim's Progress,&quot; and Milton's &quot;Paradise Lost.&quot;
+Thenceforth my busy fancies carried me ever into the fascinating world
+where boy-soldiers kept some outpost for their absent Prince, bearing
+a shield with his sign of a red cross on it; where devils shaped as
+dragons came swooping down on the pilgrim, but were driven away
+defeated after hard struggle; where angels came and talked with little
+children, and gave them some talisman which warned them of coming
+danger, and lost its light if they were leaving the right path. What a
+dull, tire-some world it was that I had to live in, I used to think to
+myself, when I was told to be a good child, and not to lose my temper,
+and to be tidy, and not mess my pinafore at dinner. How much easier to
+be a Christian if one could have a red-cross shield and a white
+banner, and have a real devil to fight with, and a beautiful Divine
+Prince to smile at you when the battle was over. How much more
+exciting to struggle with a winged and clawed dragon, that you knew
+meant mischief, than to look after your temper, that you never
+remembered you ought to keep until you had lost it. If I had been Eve
+in the garden, that old serpent would never have got the better of me;
+but how was a little girl to know that she might not pick out the
+rosiest, prettiest apple from a tree that had no serpent to show it
+was a forbidden one? And as I grew older the dreams and fancies grew
+less fantastic, but more tinged with real enthusiasm. I read tales of
+the early Christian martyrs, and passionately regretted I was born so
+late when no suffering for religion was practicable; I would spend
+many an hour in daydreams, in which I stood before Roman judges,
+before Dominican Inquisitors, was flung to lions, tortured on the
+rack, burned at the stake; one day I saw myself preaching some great
+new faith to a vast crowd of people, and they listened and were
+converted, and I became a great religious leader. But always, with a
+shock, I was brought back to earth, where there were no heroic deeds
+to do, no lions to face, no judges to defy, but only some dull duty to
+be performed. And I used to fret that I was born so late, when all the
+grand things had been done, and when there was no chance of preaching
+and suffering for a new religion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the age of eight my education accented the religious side of my
+character. Under Miss Marryat's training my religious feeling received
+a strongly Evangelical bent, but it was a subject of some distress to
+me that I could never look back to an hour of &quot;conversion&quot;; when
+others gave their experiences, and spoke of the sudden change they had
+felt, I used to be sadly conscious that no such change had occurred in
+me, and I felt that my dreamy longings were very poor things compared
+with the vigorous &quot;sense of sin&quot; spoken of by the preachers, and used
+dolefully to wonder if I were &quot;saved.&quot; Then I had an uneasy sense that
+I was often praised for my piety when emulation and vanity were more
+to the front than religion; as when I learned by heart the Epistle of
+James, far more to distinguish myself for my good memory than from any
+love of the text itself; the sonorous cadences of many parts of the
+Old and New Testaments pleased my ear, and I took a dreamy pleasure in
+repeating them aloud, just as I would recite for my own amusement
+hundreds of lines of Milton's &quot;Paradise Lost,&quot; as I sat swinging on
+some branch of a tree, lying back often on some swaying bough and
+gazing into the unfathomable blue of the sky, till I lost myself in an
+ecstasy of sound and colour, half chanting the melodious sentences and
+peopling all the blue with misty forms. This facility of learning by
+heart, and the habit of dreamy recitation, made me very familiar with
+the Bible and very apt with its phrases. This stood me in good stead
+at the prayer-meetings dear to the Evangelical, in which we all took
+part; in turn we were called on to pray aloud&mdash;a terrible ordeal to
+me, for I was painfully shy when attention was called to me; I used to
+suffer agonies while I waited for the dreaded words, &quot;Now, Annie dear,
+will you speak to our Lord.&quot; But when my trembling lips had forced
+themselves into speech, all the nervousness used to vanish and I was
+swept away by an enthusiasm that readily clothed itself in balanced
+sentences, and alack! at the end, I too often hoped that God and
+Auntie had noticed that I prayed very nicely&mdash;a vanity certainly not
+intended to be fostered by the pious exercise. On the whole, the
+somewhat Calvinistic teaching tended, I think, to make me a little
+morbid, especially as I always fretted silently after my mother. I
+remember she was surprised on one of my home-comings, when Miss
+Marryat noted &quot;cheerfulness&quot; as a want in my character, for at home I
+was ever the blithest of children, despite my love of solitude; but
+away, there was always an aching for home, and the stern religion cast
+somewhat of a shadow over me, though, strangely enough, hell never
+came into my dreamings except in the interesting shape it took in
+&quot;Paradise Lost.&quot; After reading that, the devil was to me no horned and
+hoofed horror, but the beautiful shadowed archangel, and I always
+hoped that Jesus, my ideal Prince, would save him in the end. The
+things that really frightened me were vague, misty presences that I
+felt were near, but could not see; they were so real that I knew just
+where they were in the room, and the peculiar terror they excited lay
+largely in the feeling that I was just going to see them. If by chance
+I came across a ghost story it haunted me for months, for I saw
+whatever unpleasant spectre was described; and there was one horrid
+old woman in a tale by Sir Walter Scott, who glided up to the foot of
+your bed and sprang on it in some eerie fashion and glared at you, and
+who made my going to bed a terror to me for many weeks. I can still
+recall the feeling so vividly that it almost frightens me now!
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHIII"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER III.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+GIRLHOOD.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+In the spring of 1861 Miss Marryat announced her intention of going
+abroad, and asked my dear mother to let me accompany her. A little
+nephew whom she had adopted was suffering from cataract, and she
+desired to place him under the care of the famous D&uuml;sseldorf oculist.
+Amy Marryat had been recalled home soon after the death of her mother,
+who had died in giving birth to the child adopted by Miss Marryat, and
+named at her desire after her favourite brother Frederick (Captain
+Marryat). Her place had been taken by a girl a few months older than
+myself, Emma Mann, one of the daughters of a clergyman, who had
+married Miss Stanley, closely related, indeed, if I remember rightly,
+a sister of the Miss Mary Stanley who did such noble work in nursing
+in the Crimea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For some months we had been diligently studying German, for Miss
+Marryat thought it wise that we should know a language fairly well
+before we visited the country of which it was the native tongue. We
+had been trained also to talk French daily during dinner, so we were
+not quite &quot;helpless foreigners&quot; when we steamed away from St.
+Catherine's Docks, and found ourselves on the following day in
+Antwerp, amid what seemed to us a very Babel of conflicting tongues.
+Alas for our carefully spoken French, articulated laboriously! We were
+lost in that swirl of disputing luggage-porters, and could not
+understand a word! But Miss Marryat was quite equal to the occasion,
+being by no means new to travelling, and her French stood the test
+triumphantly, and steered us safely to a hotel. On the morrow we
+started again through Aix-la-Chapelle to Bonn, the town which lies on
+the borders of the exquisite scenery of which the Siebengebirge and
+Rolandseck serve as the magic portal. Our experiences in Bonn were not
+wholly satisfactory. Dear Auntie was a maiden lady, looking on all
+young men as wolves to be kept far from her growing lambs. Bonn was a
+university town, and there was a mania just then prevailing there for
+all things English. Emma was a plump, rosy, fair-haired typical
+English maiden, full of frolic and harmless fun; I a very slight,
+pale, black-haired girl, alternating between wild fun and extreme
+pensiveness. In the boarding-house to which we went at first&mdash;the
+&quot;Ch&acirc;teau du Rhin,&quot; a beautiful place overhanging the broad, blue
+Rhine&mdash;there chanced to be staying the two sons of the late Duke of
+Hamilton, the Marquis of Douglas and Lord Charles, with their tutor.
+They had the whole drawing-room floor: we a sitting-room on the ground
+floor and bedrooms above. The lads discovered that Miss Marryat did
+not like her &quot;children&quot; to be on speaking terms with any of the &quot;male
+sect.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here was a fine source of amusement. They would make their horses
+caracole on the gravel in front of our window; they would be just
+starting for their ride as we went for walk or drive, and would salute
+us with doffed hat and low bow; they would waylay us on our way
+downstairs with demure &quot;Good morning&quot;; they would go to church and
+post themselves so that they could survey our pew, and Lord
+Charles&mdash;who possessed the power of moving at will the whole skin of
+the scalp&mdash;would wriggle his hair up and down till we were choking
+with laughter, to our own imminent risk. After a month of this Auntie
+was literally driven out of the pretty ch&acirc;teau, and took refuge in a
+girls' school, much to our disgust; but still she was not allowed to
+be at rest. Mischievous students would pursue us wherever we went;
+sentimental Germans, with gashed cheeks, would whisper complimentary
+phrases as we passed; mere boyish nonsense of most harmless kind, but
+the rather stern English lady thought it &quot;not proper,&quot; and after three
+months of Bonn we were sent home for the holidays, somewhat in
+disgrace. But we had some lovely excursions during those months; such
+clambering up mountains, such rows on the swift-flowing Rhine, such
+wanderings in exquisite valleys. I have a long picture-gallery to
+retire into when I want to think of something fair, in recalling the
+moon as it silvered the Rhine at the foot of Drachenfels, or the soft,
+mist-veiled island where dwelt the lady who is consecrated for ever by
+Roland's love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A couple of months later we rejoined Miss Marryat in Paris, where we
+spent seven happy, workful months. On Wednesdays and Saturdays we were
+free from lessons, and many a long afternoon was passed in the
+galleries of the Louvre, till we became familiar with the masterpieces
+of art gathered there from all lands. I doubt if there was a beautiful
+church in Paris that we did not visit during those weekly wanderings;
+that of St. Germain de l'Auxerrois was my favourite&mdash;the church whose
+bell gave the signal for the massacre of St. Bartholomew&mdash;for it
+contained such marvellous stained glass, deepest, purest glory of
+colour that I had ever seen. The solemn beauty of Notre Dame, the
+somewhat gaudy magnificence of La Sainte Chapelle, the stateliness of
+La Madeleine, the impressive gloom of St. Roch, were all familiar to
+us. Other delights were found in mingling with the bright crowds which
+passed along the Champs Elysees and sauntered in the Bois de Boulogne,
+in strolling in the garden of the Tuileries, in climbing to the top of
+every monument whence view of Paris could be gained. The Empire was
+then in its heyday of glitter, and we much enjoyed seeing the
+brilliant escort of the imperial carriage, with plumes and gold and
+silver dancing and glistening in the sunlight, while in the carriage
+sat the exquisitely lovely empress, with the little boy beside her,
+touching his cap shyly, but with something of her own grace, in answer
+to a greeting&mdash;the boy who was thought to be born to an imperial
+crown, but whose brief career was to find an ending from the spears of
+savages in a quarrel in which he had no concern.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the spring of 1862 it chanced that the Bishop of Ohio visited
+Paris, and Mr. Forbes, then English chaplain at the Church of the Rue
+d'Aguesseau, arranged to have a confirmation. As said above, I was
+under deep &quot;religious impressions,&quot; and, in fact, with the exception
+of that little aberration in Germany, I was decidedly a pious girl. I
+looked on theatres (never having been to one) as traps set by Satan
+for the destruction of foolish souls; I was quite determined never to
+go to a ball, and was prepared to &quot;suffer for conscience' sake
+&quot;&mdash;little prig that I was&mdash;if I was desired to go to one. I was
+consequently quite prepared to take upon myself the vows made in my
+name at my baptism, and to renounce the world, the flesh, and the
+devil, with a heartiness and sincerity only equalled by my profound
+ignorance of the things I so readily resigned. That confirmation was
+to me a very solemn matter; the careful preparation, the prolonged
+prayers, the wondering awe as to the &quot;seven-fold gifts of the Spirit,&quot;
+which were to be given by &quot;the laying on of hands,&quot; all tended to
+excitement. I could scarcely control myself as I knelt at the altar
+rails, and felt as though the gentle touch of the aged bishop, which
+fluttered for an instant on my bowed head, were the very touch of the
+wing of that &quot;Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove,&quot; whose presence had been so
+earnestly invoked. Is there anything easier, I wonder, than to make a
+young and sensitive girl &quot;intensely religious&quot;? This stay in Paris
+roused into activity an aspect of my religious nature that had
+hitherto been latent. I discovered the sensuous enjoyment that lay in
+introducing colour and fragrance and pomp into religious services, so
+that the gratification of the aesthetic emotions became dignified with
+the garb of piety. The picture-galleries of the Louvre, crowded with
+Madonnas and saints, the Roman Catholic churches with their
+incense-laden air and exquisite music, brought a new joy into my life,
+a more vivid colour to my dreams. Insensibly, the colder, cruder
+Evangelicalism that I had never thoroughly assimilated, grew warmer
+and more brilliant, and the ideal Divine Prince of my childhood took
+on the more pathetic lineaments of the Man of Sorrows, the deeper
+attractiveness of the suffering Saviour of Men. Keble's &quot;Christian
+Year&quot; took the place of &quot;Paradise Lost,&quot; and as my girlhood began to
+bud towards womanhood, all its deeper currents set in the direction of
+religious devotion. My mother did not allow me to read love stories,
+and my daydreams of the future were scarcely touched by any of the
+ordinary hopes and fears of a girl lifting her eyes towards the world
+she is shortly to enter. They were filled with broodings over the days
+when girl-martyrs were blessed with visions of the King of Martyrs,
+when sweet St. Agnes saw her celestial Bridegroom, and angels stooped
+to whisper melodies in St. Cecilia's raptured ear. &quot;Why then and not
+now?&quot; my heart would question, and I would lose myself in these
+fancies, never happier than when alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The summer of 1862 was spent with Miss Marryat at Sidmouth, and, wise
+woman that she was, she now carefully directed our studies with a view
+to our coming enfranchisement from the &quot;schoolroom.&quot; More and more
+were we trained to work alone; our leading-strings were slackened, so
+that we never felt them save when we blundered; and I remember that
+when I once complained, in loving fashion, that she was &quot;teaching me
+so little,&quot; she told me that I was getting old enough to be trusted to
+work by myself, and that I must not expect to &quot;have Auntie for a
+crutch all through life.&quot; And I venture to say that this gentle
+withdrawal of constant supervision and teaching was one of the wisest
+and kindest things that this noble-hearted woman ever did for us. It
+is the usual custom to keep girls in the schoolroom until they &quot;come
+out&quot;; then, suddenly, they are left to their own devices, and,
+bewildered by their unaccustomed freedom, they waste time that might
+be priceless for their intellectual growth. Lately, the opening of
+universities to women has removed this danger for the more ambitious;
+but at the time of which I am writing no one dreamed of the changes
+soon to be made in the direction of the &quot;higher education of women.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During the winter of 1862-63 Miss Marryat was in London, and for a few
+months I remained there with her, attending the admirable French
+classes of M. Roche. In the spring I returned home to Harrow, going up
+each week to the classes; and when these were over, Auntie told me
+that she thought all she could usefully do was done, and that it was
+time that I should try my wings alone. So well, however, had she
+succeeded in her aims, that my emancipation from the schoolroom was
+but the starting-point of more eager study, though now the study
+turned into the lines of thought towards which my personal tendencies
+most attracted me. German I continued to read with a master, and
+music, under the marvellously able teaching of Mr. John Farmer,
+musical director of Harrow School, took up much of my time. My dear
+mother had a passion for music, and Beethoven and Bach were her
+favourite composers. There was scarcely a sonata of Beethoven's that I
+did not learn, scarcely a fugue of Bach's that I did not master.
+Mendelssohn's &quot;Lieder&quot; gave a lighter recreation, and many a happy
+evening did we spend, my mother and I, over the stately strains of the
+blind Titan, and the sweet melodies of the German wordless orator.
+Musical &quot;At Homes,&quot; too, were favourite amusements at Harrow, and at
+these my facile fingers made me a welcome guest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus set free from the schoolroom at 16&frac12;, an only daughter, I could do
+with my time as I would, save for the couple of hours a day given to
+music, for the satisfaction of my mother. From then till I became
+engaged, just before I was 19, my life flowed on smoothly, one current
+visible to all and dancing in the sunlight, the other running
+underground, but full and deep and strong. As regards my outer life,
+no girl had a brighter, happier life than mine; studying all the
+mornings and most of the afternoons in my own way, and spending the
+latter part of the day in games and walks and rides&mdash;varied with
+parties at which I was one of the merriest of guests. I practised
+archery so zealously that I carried up triumphantly as prize for the
+best score the first ring I ever possessed, while croquet found me a
+most eager devotee. My darling mother certainly &quot;spoiled&quot; me, so far
+as were concerned all the small roughnesses of life. She never allowed
+a trouble of any kind to touch me, and cared only that all worries
+should fall on her, all joys on me. I know now what I never dreamed
+then, that her life was one of serious anxiety. The heavy burden of my
+brother's school and college life pressed on her constantly, and her
+need of money was often serious. A lawyer whom she trusted absolutely
+cheated her systematically, using for his own purposes the remittances
+she made for payment of liabilities, thus keeping upon her a constant
+drain. Yet for me all that was wanted was ever there. Was it a ball to
+which we were going? I need never think of what I would wear till the
+time for dressing arrived, and there laid out ready for me was all I
+wanted, every detail complete from top to toe. No hand but hers must
+dress my hair, which, loosed, fell in dense curly masses nearly to my
+knees; no hand but hers must fasten dress and deck with flowers, and
+if I sometimes would coaxingly ask if I might not help by sewing in
+laces, or by doing some trifle in aid, she would kiss me and bid me
+run to my books or my play, telling me that her only pleasure in life
+was caring for her &quot;treasure.&quot; Alas! how lightly we take the
+self-denying labour that makes life so easy, ere yet we have known
+what life means when the protecting motherwing is withdrawn. So
+guarded and shielded had been my childhood and youth from every touch
+of pain and anxiety that love could bear for me, that I never dreamed
+that life might be a heavy burden, save as I saw it in the poor I was
+sent to help; all the joy of those happy years I took, not
+ungratefully I hope, but certainly with as glad unconsciousness of
+anything rare in it as I took the sunlight. Passionate love, indeed, I
+gave to my darling, but I never knew all I owed her till I passed out
+of her tender guardianship, till I left my mother's home. Is such
+training wise? I am not sure. It makes the ordinary roughnesses of
+life come with so stunning a shock, when one goes out into the world,
+that one is apt to question whether some earlier initiation into
+life's sterner mysteries would not be wiser for the young. Yet it is a
+fair thing to have that joyous youth to look back upon, and at least
+it is a treasury of memory that no thief can steal in the struggles of
+later life. &quot;Sunshine&quot; they called me in those bright days of merry
+play and earnest study. But that study showed the bent of my thought
+and linked itself to the hidden life; for the Fathers of the early
+Christian Church now became my chief companions, and I pored over the
+Shepherd of Hernias, the Epistles of Polycarp, Barnabas, Ignatius, and
+Clement, the commentaries of Chrysostom, the confessions of Augustine.
+With these I studied the writings of Pusey, Liddon, and Keble, with
+many another smaller light, joying in the great conception of a
+Catholic Church, lasting through the centuries, built on the
+foundations of apostles and of martyrs, stretching from the days of
+Christ Himself down to our own&mdash;&quot;One Lord, one Faith one Baptism,&quot; and
+I myself a child of that Holy Church. The hidden life grew stronger,
+constantly fed by these streams of study; weekly communion became the
+centre round which my devotional life revolved, with its ecstatic
+meditation, its growing intensity of conscious contact with the
+Divine; I fasted, according to the ordinances of the Church;
+occasionally flagellated myself to see if I could bear physical pain,
+should I be fortunate enough ever to tread the pathway trodden by the
+saints; and ever the Christ was the figure round which clustered all
+my hopes and longings, till I often felt that the very passion of, my
+devotion would draw Him down from His throne in heaven, present
+visibly in form as I felt Him invisibly in spirit. To serve Him
+through His Church became more and more a definite ideal in my life,
+and my thoughts began to turn towards some kind of &quot;religious life,&quot;
+in which I might prove my love by sacrifice and turn my passionate
+gratitude into active service.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Looking back to-day over my life, I see that its keynote&mdash;through all
+the blunders, and the blind mistakes, and clumsy follies&mdash;has been
+this longing for sacrifice to something felt as greater than the self.
+It has been so strong and so persistent that I recognise it now as a
+tendency brought over from a previous life and dominating the present
+one; and this is shown by the fact that to follow it is not the act of
+a deliberate and conscious will, forcing self into submission and
+giving up with pain something the heart desires, but the following it
+is a joyous springing forward along the easiest path, the &quot;sacrifice&quot;
+being the supremely attractive thing, not to make which would be to
+deny the deepest longings of the soul, and to feel oneself polluted
+and dishonoured. And it is here that the misjudgment comes in of many
+generous hearts who have spoken sometimes lately so strongly in my
+praise. For the efforts to serve have not been painful acts of
+self-denial, but the yielding to an overmastering desire. We do not
+praise the mother who, impelled by her protecting love, feeds her
+crying infant and stills its wailings at her breast; rather should we
+blame her if she turned aside from its weeping to play with some toy.
+And so with all those whose ears are opened to the wailings of the
+great orphan Humanity; they are less to be praised for helping than
+they would be to be blamed if they stood aside. I now know that it is
+those wailings that have stirred my heart through life, and that I
+brought with me the ears open to hear them from previous lives of
+service paid to men. It was those lives that drew for the child the
+alluring pictures of martyrdom, breathed into the girl the passion of
+devotion, sent the woman out to face scoff and odium, and drove her
+finally into the Theosophy that rationalises sacrifice, while opening
+up possibilities of service beside which all other hopes grow pale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Easter of 1866 was a memorable date in my life. I was introduced
+to the clergyman I married, and I met and conquered my first religious
+doubt. A little mission church had been opened the preceding Christmas
+in a very poor district of Clapham. My grandfather's house was near at
+hand, in Albert Square, and a favourite aunt and myself devoted
+ourselves a good deal to this little church, as enthusiastic girls and
+women will. At Easter we decorated it with spring flowers, with dewy
+primroses and fragrant violets, and with the yellow bells of the wild
+daffodil, to the huge delight of the poor who crowded in, and of the
+little London children who had, many of them, never seen a flower.
+Here I met the Rev. Frank Besant, a young Cambridge man, who had just
+taken orders, and was serving the little mission church as deacon;
+strange that at the same time I should meet the man I was to marry,
+and the doubts which were to break the marriage tie. For in the Holy
+Week preceding that Easter Eve, I had been&mdash;as English and Roman
+Catholics are wont to do&mdash;trying to throw the mind back to the time
+when the commemorated events occurred, and to follow, step by step,
+the last days of the Son of Man, living, as it were, through those
+last hours, so that I might be ready to kneel before the cross on Good
+Friday, to stand beside the sepulchre on Easter Day. In order to
+facilitate the realisation of those last sacred days of God incarnate
+on earth, working out man's salvation, I resolved to write a brief
+history of that week, compiled from the Four Gospels, meaning them to
+try and realise each day the occurrences that had happened on the
+corresponding date in A.D. 33, and so to follow those &quot;blessed feet&quot;
+step by step, till they were
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;... nailed for our advantage to the bitter cross.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the fearlessness which springs from ignorance I sat down to my
+task. My method was as follows:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<table border="1" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="4" summary="Four Gospels.">
+
+<tr>
+<th width="21%">MATTHEW.</th>
+<th width="21%">MARK.</th>
+<th width="21%">LUKE.</th>
+<th width="21%">JOHN.</th>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="center" valign="top">
+<td>PALM SUNDAY.</td>
+<td>PALM SUNDAY.</td>
+<td>PALM SUNDAY.</td>
+<td>PALM SUNDAY.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="left" valign="top"><td>Rode into Jerusalem. Purified the Temple. Returned to Bethany.</td>
+<td>Rode into Jerusalem. Returned to Bethany.</td>
+<td>Rode into Jerusalem. Purified the Temple. Note: &quot;Taught daily in the temple.&quot;</td>
+<td>Rode into Jerusalem. Spoke in the Temple.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="center" valign="top">
+<td>MONDAY.</td>
+<td>MONDAY.</td>
+<td>MONDAY.</td>
+<td>MONDAY.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="left" valign="top">
+<td>Cursed the fig-tree. Taught in the Temple, and spake many parables. No breaks shown, but the fig-tree (xxi.19) did not wither till Tuesday (see Mark).</td>
+<td>Cursed the fig-tree. Purified the Temple. Went out of city.</td>
+<td>Like Matthew.</td>
+<td>&mdash;&mdash;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="center" valign="top">
+<td>TUESDAY.</td>
+<td>TUESDAY.</td>
+<td>TUESDAY.</td>
+<td>TUESDAY.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="left" valign="top"><td>All chaps, xxi. 20, xxii-xxv., spoken on Tuesday, for xxvi. 2 gives Passover as &quot;after two days.&quot;</td>
+<td>Saw fig-tree withered up. Then discourses.</td>
+<td>Discourses. No date shown.</td>
+<td>&mdash;&mdash;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="center" valign="top">
+<td>WEDNESDAY.</td>
+<td>WEDNESDAY.</td>
+<td>WEDNESDAY.</td>
+<td>WEDNESDAY.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="center" valign="top">
+<td colspan="4">Blank. (Possibly remained in Bethany, the alabaster box of ointment.)</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="center" valign="top">
+<td>THURSDAY.</td>
+<td>THURSDAY.</td>
+<td>THURSDAY.</td>
+<td>THURSDAY.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="left" valign="top"><td>Preparation of Passover. Eating of Passover, and institution of the Holy Eucharist. Gethsemane. Betrayal by Judas. Led captive to Caiaphas. Denied by St. Peter.</td>
+<td>Same as Matt.</td>
+<td>Same as Matt.</td>
+<td>Discourses with disciples, but <i>before</i> the Passover. Washes the disciples' feet. Nothing said of Holy Eucharist, nor of agony in Gethsemane. Malchus' ear. Led captives to Annas first. Then to Caiaphas. Denied by St. Peter.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="center" valign="top">
+<td>FRIDAY.</td>
+<td>FRIDAY.</td>
+<td>FRIDAY.</td>
+<td>FRIDAY.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="left" valign="top"><td>Led to Pilate. Judas hangs himself. Tried. Condemned to death. Scourged and mocked. Led to crucifixion. Darkness from 12 to 3. Died at 3.</td>
+<td>As Matthew, but hour of crucifixion given, 9 a.m.</td>
+<td>Led to Pilate. Sent to Herod. Sent back to Pilate. Rest as in Matthew; but <i>one</i> malefactor repents.</td>
+<td>Taken to Pilate. Jews would not enter, that they might eat the Passover. Scourged by Pilate before condemnation, and mocked. Shown by Pilate to Jews at 12.</td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<p>
+I became uneasy as I proceeded with my task, for discrepancies leaped
+at me from my four columns; the uneasiness grew as the contradictions
+increased, until I saw with a shock of horror that my &quot;harmony&quot; was a
+discord, and a doubt of the veracity of the story sprang up like a
+serpent hissing in my face. It was struck down in a moment, for to me
+to doubt was sin, and to have doubted on the very eve of the Passion
+was an added crime. Quickly I assured myself that these apparent
+contradictions were necessary as tests of faith, and I forced myself
+to repeat Tertullian's famous &quot;Credo quia impossible,&quot; till, from a
+wooden recital, it became a triumphant affirmation. I reminded myself
+that St. Peter had said of the Pauline Epistles that in them were
+&quot;some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and
+unstable wrest ... unto their own destruction.&quot; I shudderingly
+recognised that I must be very unlearned and unstable to find discord
+among the Holy Evangelists, and imposed on myself an extra fast as
+penance for my ignorance and lack of firmness in the faith. For my
+mental position was one to which doubt was one of the worst of sins. I
+knew that there were people like Colenso, who questioned the
+infallibility of the Bible, but I remembered how the Apostle John had
+fled from the Baths when Cerinthus entered them, lest the roof should
+fall on the heretic, and crush any one in his neighbourhood, and I
+looked on all heretics with holy horror. Pusey had indoctrinated me
+with his stern hatred of all heresy, and I was content to rest with
+him on that faith, &quot;which must be old because it is eternal, and must
+be unchangeable because it is true.&quot; I would not even read the works
+of my mothers favourite Stanley, because he was &quot;unsound,&quot; and because
+Pusey had condemned his &quot;variegated use of words which destroys all
+definiteness of meaning&quot;&mdash;a clever and pointed description, be it said
+in passing, of the Dean's exquisite phrases, capable of so many
+readings. It can then be imagined with what a stab of pain this first
+doubt struck me, and with what haste I smothered it up, buried it, and
+smoothed the turf over its grave. <i>But it had been there</i>, and it left
+its mark.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHIV"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER IV.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+MARRIAGE.
+</h5>
+
+<p>
+The last year of my girlish freedom was drawing to its close; how shall
+I hope to make commonsense readers understand how I became betrothed
+maiden ere yet nineteen, girl-wife when twenty years had struck?
+Looking back over twenty-five years, I feel a profound pity for the
+girl standing at that critical point of life, so utterly, hopelessly
+ignorant of all that marriage meant, so filled with impossible dreams,
+so unfitted for the <i>r&ocirc;le</i> of wife. As I have said, my day-dreams held
+little place for love, partly from the absence of love novels from my
+reading, partly from the mystic fancies that twined themselves round
+the figure of the Christ. Catholic books of devotion&mdash;English or Roman,
+it matters not, for to a large extent they are translations of the same
+hymns and prayers&mdash;are exceedingly glowing in their language, and the
+dawning feelings of womanhood unconsciously lend to them a passionate
+fervour. I longed to spend my time in worshipping Jesus, and was, as
+far as my inner life was concerned, absorbed in that passionate love of
+&quot;the Saviour&quot; which, among emotional Catholics, really is the human
+passion of love transferred to an ideal&mdash;for women to Jesus, for men to
+the Virgin Mary. In order to show that I am not here exaggerating, I
+subjoin a few of the prayers in which I found daily delight, and I do
+this in order to show how an emotional girl may be attracted by these
+so-called devotional exercises:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;O crucified Love, raise in me fresh ardours of love and consolation,
+that it may henceforth be the greatest torment I can endure ever to
+offend Thee; that it may be my greatest delight to please Thee.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Let the remembrance of Thy death, O Lord Jesu, make me to desire and
+pant after Thee, that I may delight in Thy gracious presence.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;O most sweet Jesu Christ, I, unworthy sinner, yet redeemed by Thy
+precious blood.... Thine I am and will be, in life and in death.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;O Jesu, beloved, fairer than the sons of men, draw me after Thee with
+the cords of Thy love.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Blessed are Thou, O most merciful God, who didst vouchsafe to espouse
+me to the heavenly Bridegroom in the waters of baptism, and hast
+imparted Thy body and blood as a new gift of espousal and the meet
+consummation of Thy love.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;O most sweet Lord Jesu, transfix the affections of my inmost soul with
+that most joyous and most healthful wound of Thy love, with true,
+serene, most holy, apostolical charity; that my soul may ever languish
+and melt with entire love and longing for Thee. Let it desire Thee and
+faint for Thy courts; long to be dissolved and be with Thee.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Oh, that I could embrace Thee with that most burning love of angels.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Let Him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth; for Thy love is better
+than wine. Draw me, we will run after Thee. The king hath brought me
+into his chambers.... Let my soul, O Lord, feel the sweetness of Thy
+presence. May it taste how sweet Thou art.... May the sweet and burning
+power of Thy love, I beseech Thee, absorb my soul.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All girls have in them the germ of passion, and the line of its
+development depends on the character brought into the world, and the
+surrounding influences of education. I had but two ideals in my
+childhood and youth, round whom twined these budding tendrils of
+passion; they were my mother and the Christ. I know this may seem
+strange, but I am trying to state things as they were in this
+life-story, and not give mere conventionalisms, and so it was. I had
+men friends, but no lovers&mdash;at least, to my knowledge, for I have since
+heard that my mother received two or three offers of marriage for me,
+but declined them on account of my youth and my childishness&mdash;friends
+with whom I liked to talk, because they knew more than I did; but they
+had no place in my day-dreams. These were more and more filled with the
+one Ideal Man, and my hopes turned towards the life of the Sister of
+Mercy, who ever worships the Christ, and devotes her life to the
+service of His poor. I knew my dear mother would set herself against
+this idea, but it nestled warm at my heart, for ever that idea of
+escaping from the humdrum of ordinary life by some complete sacrifice
+lured me onwards with its overmastering fascination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now one unlucky result of this view of religion is the idealisation of
+the clergyman, the special messenger and chosen servant of the Lord.
+Far more lofty than any title bestowed by earthly monarch is that
+patent of nobility straight from the hand of the &quot;King of kings,&quot; that
+seems to give to the mortal something of the authority of the immortal,
+and to crown the head of the priest with the diadem that belongs to
+those who are &quot;kings and priests unto God.&quot; Viewed in this way, the
+position of the priest's wife seems second only to that of the nun, and
+has, therefore, a wonderful attractiveness, an attractiveness in which
+the particular clergyman affected plays a very subordinate part; it is
+the &quot;sacred office,&quot; the nearness to &quot;holy things,&quot; the consecration
+which seems to include the wife&mdash;it is these things that shed a glamour
+over the clerical life which attracts most those who are most apt to
+self-devotion, most swayed by imagination. And the saddest pity of all
+this is that the glamour is most over those whose brains are quick,
+whose hearts are pure, who are responsive to all forms of noble
+emotions, all suggestions of personal self-sacrifice; if such in later
+life rise to the higher emotions whose shadows have attracted them, and
+to that higher self-sacrifice whose whispers reached them in their
+early youth, then the false prophet's veil is raised, the poverty of
+the conception seen, and the life is either wrecked, or through
+storm-wind and surge of battling billows, with loss of mast and sail,
+is steered by firm hand into the port of a nobler faith.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That summer of 1866 saw me engaged to the young clergyman I had met at
+the mission church in the spring, our knowledge of each other being an
+almost negligeable quantity. We were thrown together for a week, the
+only two young ones in a small party of holiday-makers, and in our
+walks, rides, and drives we were naturally companions; an hour or two
+before he left he asked me to marry him, taking my consent for granted
+as I had allowed him such full companionship&mdash;a perfectly fair
+assumption with girls accustomed to look on all men as possible
+husbands, but wholly mistaken as regarded myself, whose thoughts were
+in quite other directions. Startled, and my sensitive pride touched by
+what seemed to my strict views an assumption that I had been flirting,
+I hesitated, did not follow my first impulse of refusal, but took
+refuge in silence; my suitor had to catch his train, and bound me
+over to silence till he could himself speak to my mother, urging
+authoritatively that it would be dishonourable of me to break his
+confidence, and left me&mdash;the most upset and distressed little person
+on the Sussex coast. The fortnight that followed was the first unhappy
+one of my life, for I had a secret from my mother, a secret which I
+passionately longed to tell her, but dared not speak at the risk of
+doing a dishonourable thing. On meeting my suitor on our return to
+town I positively refused to keep silence any longer, and then out
+of sheer weakness and fear of inflicting pain I drifted into an
+engagement with a man I did not pretend to love. &quot;Drifted&quot; is the
+right word, for two or three months passed, on the ground that I was
+so much of a child, before my mother would consent to a definite
+engagement; my dislike of the thought of marriage faded before the
+idea of becoming the wife of a priest, working ever in the Church and
+among the poor. I had no outlet for my growing desire for usefulness
+in my happy and peaceful home-life, where all religious enthusiasm was
+regarded as unbalanced and unbecoming; all that was deepest and truest
+in my nature chafed against my easy, useless days, longed for work,
+yearned to devote itself, as I had read women saints had done, to the
+service of the Church and of the poor, to the battling against sin and
+misery&mdash;what empty names sin and misery then were to me! &quot;You will
+have more opportunities for doing good as a clergyman's wife than as
+anything else,&quot; was one of the pleas urged on my reluctance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the autumn I was definitely betrothed, and I married fourteen months
+later. Once, in the interval, I tried to break the engagement, but, on
+my broaching the subject to my mother, all her pride rose up in revolt.
+Would I, her daughter, break my word, would I dishonour myself by
+jilting a man I had pledged myself to marry? She could be stern where
+honour was involved, that sweet mother of mine, and I yielded to her
+wish as I had been ever wont to do, for a look or a word from her had
+ever been my law, save where religion was concerned. So I married in
+the winter of 1867 with no more idea of the marriage relation than if I
+had been four years old instead of twenty. My dreamy life, into which
+no knowledge of evil had been allowed to penetrate, in which I had been
+guarded from all pain, shielded from all anxiety, kept, innocent on all
+questions of sex, was no preparation for married existence, and left me
+defenceless to face a rude awakening. Looking back on it all, I
+deliberately say that no more fatal blunder can be made than to train a
+girl to womanhood in ignorance of all life's duties and burdens, and
+then to let her face them for the first time away from all the old
+associations, the old helps, the old refuge on the mother's breast.
+That &quot;perfect innocence&quot; may be very beautiful, but it is a perilous
+possession, and Eve should have the knowledge of good and evil ere she
+wanders forth from the paradise of a mother's love. Many an unhappy
+marriage dates from its very beginning, from the terrible shock to a
+young girl's sensitive modesty and pride, her helpless bewilderment and
+fear. Men, with their public school and college education, or the
+knowledge that comes by living in the outside world, may find it hard
+to realise the possibility of such infantile ignorance in many girls.
+None the less, such ignorance is a fact in the case of some girls at
+least, and no mother should let her daughter, blindfold, slip her neck
+under the marriage yoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before leaving the harbourage of girlhood to set sail on the troublous
+sea of life, there is an occurrence of which I must make mention, as
+it marks my first awakening of interest in the outer world of
+political struggle. In the autumn of 1867 my mother and I were staying
+with some dear friends of ours, the Robertses, at Pendleton, near
+Manchester. Mr. Roberts was &quot;the poor man's lawyer,&quot; in the
+affectionate phrase used of him by many a hundred men. He was a close
+friend of Ernest Jones, and was always ready to fight a poor man's
+battle without fee. He worked hard in the agitation which saved women
+from working in the mines, and I have heard him tell how he had seen
+them toiling, naked to the waist, with short petticoats barely
+reaching to their knees, rough, foul-tongued, brutalised out of all
+womanly decency and grace; and how he had seen little children working
+there too, babies of three and four set to watch a door, and falling
+asleep at their work to be roused by curse and kick to the unfair
+toil. The old man's eye would begin to flash and his voice to rise as
+he told of these horrors, and then his face would soften as he added
+that, after it was all over and the slavery was put an end to, as he
+went through a coal district the women standing at their doors would
+lift up their children to see &quot;Lawyer Roberts&quot; go by, and would bid
+&quot;God bless him&quot; for what he had done. This dear old man was my first
+tutor in Radicalism, and I was an apt pupil. I had taken no interest
+in politics, but had unconsciously reflected more or less the decorous
+Whiggism which had always surrounded me. I regarded &quot;the poor&quot; as folk
+to be educated, looked after, charitably dealt with, and always
+treated with most perfect courtesy, the courtesy being due from me, as
+a lady, to all equally, whether they were rich or poor. But to Mr.
+Roberts &quot;the poor&quot; were the working-bees, the wealth producers, with a
+right to self-rule not to looking after, with a right to justice, not
+to charity, and he preached his doctrines to me in season and out of
+season. I was a pet of his, and used often to drive him to his office
+in the morning, glorying much in the fact that my skill was trusted in
+guiding a horse through the crowded Manchester streets. During these
+drives, and on all other available occasions, Mr. Roberts would preach
+to me the cause of the people. &quot;What do you think of John Bright?&quot; he
+demanded suddenly one day, looking at me with fiery eyes from under
+heavy brows. &quot;I have never thought of him at all,&quot; was the careless
+answer. &quot;Isn't he a rather rough sort of man, who goes about making
+rows?&quot; &quot;There, I thought so!&quot; he thundered at me fiercely. &quot;That's
+just what I say. I believe some of you fine ladies would not go to
+heaven if you had to rub shoulders with John Bright, the noblest man
+God ever gave to the cause of the poor.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was the hot-tempered and lovable &quot;demagogue,&quot; as he was called,
+with whom we were staying when Colonel Kelly and Captain Deasy, two
+Fenian leaders, were arrested in Manchester and put on their trial. The
+whole Irish population became seething with excitement, and on
+September 18th the police van carrying them to Salford Gaol was stopped
+at the Bellevue Railway Arch by the sudden fall of one of the horses,
+shot from the side of the road. In a moment the van was surrounded, and
+crowbars were wrenching at the van door. It resisted; a body of police
+was rapidly approaching, and if the rescue was to be effective the door
+must be opened. The rescuers shouted to Brett, the constable inside, to
+pass out his keys; he refused, and some one exclaimed, &quot;Blow off the
+lock!&quot; In a moment the muzzle of a revolver was against the lock, and
+it was blown off; but Brett, stooping down to look through the keyhole,
+received the bullet in his head, and fell dying as the door flew open.
+Another moment, and Allen, a lad of seventeen, had wrenched open the
+doors of the compartments occupied by Kelly and Deasy, dragged them
+out, and while two or three hurried them off to a place of safety, the
+others threw themselves between the fugitives and the police, and with
+levelled revolvers guarded their flight. The Fenian leaders once safe,
+they scattered, and young William Allen, whose one thought had been for
+his chiefs, seeing them safe, fired his revolver in the air, for he
+would not shed blood in his own defence. Disarmed by his own act, he
+was set on by the police, brutally struck down, kicked and stoned, and
+was dragged off to gaol, faint and bleeding, to meet there some of his
+comrades in much the same plight as himself. Then Manchester went mad,
+and race-passions flared up into flame; no Irish workman was safe in a
+crowd of Englishmen, no Englishman safe in the Irish quarter. The
+friends of the prisoners besieged &quot;Lawyer Roberts's&quot; house, praying his
+aid, and he threw his whole fiery soul into their defence. The man who
+had fired the accidentally fatal shot was safely out of the way, and
+none of the others had hurt a human being. A Special Commission was
+issued, with Mr. Justice Blackburn at its head&mdash;&quot;the hanging judge,&quot;
+groaned Mr. Roberts&mdash;and it was soon in Manchester, for all Mr.
+Roberts's efforts to get the venue of the trial changed were futile,
+though of fair trial then in Manchester there was no chance. On October
+25th the prisoners were actually brought up before the magistrates in
+irons, and Mr. Ernest Jones, their counsel, failing in his protest
+against this outrage, threw down his brief and left the court. So great
+was the haste with which the trial was hurried on that on the 29th
+Allen, Larkin, Gould (O'Brien), Maguire, and Condon were standing in
+the dock before the Commission charged with murder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My first experience of an angry crowd was on that day as we drove to
+the court; the streets were barricaded, the soldiers were under arms,
+every approach to the court crowded with surging throngs. At last our
+carriage was stopped as we were passing at a foot's pace through an
+Irish section of the crowd, and various vehement fists came through the
+window, with hearty curses at the &quot;d&mdash;d English who were going to see
+the boys murdered.&quot; The situation was critical, for we were two women
+and three girls, when I bethought myself that we were unknown, and
+gently touched the nearest fist: &quot;Friends, these are Mr. Roberts' wife
+and daughters.&quot; &quot;Roberts! Lawyer Roberts! God bless Roberts! Let his
+carriage through.&quot; And all the scowling faces became smile-wreathen,
+and curses changed to cheers, as a road to the court steps was cleared
+for us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alas! if there was passion on behalf of the prisoners outside, there
+was passion against them within, and the very opening of the trial
+showed the spirit that animated the prosecution and the bench. Digby
+Seymour, Q.C., and Ernest Jones, were briefed for the defence, and Mr.
+Roberts did not think that they exercised sufficiently their right of
+challenge; he knew, as we all did, that many on the panel had loudly
+proclaimed their hostility to the Irish, and Mr. Roberts persisted in
+challenging them as his counsel would not. In vain Judge Blackburn
+threatened to commit the rebellious solicitor: &quot;These men's lives are
+at stake, my lord,&quot; was his indignant plea. &quot;Remove that man!&quot; cried
+the angry judge, but as the officers of the court came forward very
+slowly&mdash;for all poor men loved and honoured the sturdy fighter&mdash;he
+changed his mind and let him stay. Despite all his efforts, the jury
+contained a man who had declared that he &quot;didn't care what the evidence
+was, he would hang every d&mdash;d Irishman of the lot.&quot; And the result
+showed that he was not alone in his view, for evidence of the most
+disreputable kind was admitted; women of the lowest type were put into
+the box as witnesses, and their word taken as unchallengeable; thus was
+destroyed an <i>alibi</i> for Maguire, afterwards accepted by the Crown, a
+free pardon being issued on the strength of it. Nothing could save the
+doomed men from the determined verdict, and I could see from where I
+was sitting into a little room behind the bench, where an official was
+quietly preparing the black caps before the verdict had been delivered.
+The foregone &quot;Guilty&quot; was duly repeated as verdict on each of the five
+cases, and the prisoners asked if they had anything to say why sentence
+of death should not be passed on them. Allen, boy as he was, made a
+very brave and manly speech; he had not fired, save in the air&mdash;if he
+had done so he might have escaped; he had helped to free Kelly and
+Deasy, and did not regret it; he was willing to die for Ireland.
+Maguire and Condon (he also was reprieved) declared they were not
+present, but, like Allen, were ready to die for their country. Sentence
+of death was passed, and, as echo to the sardonic &quot;The Lord have mercy
+on your souls,&quot; rang back from the dock in five clear voices, with
+never a quiver of fear in them, &quot;God save Ireland!&quot; and the men passed
+one by one from the sight of my tear-dimmed eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a sorrowful time that followed; the despair of the heart-broken
+girl who was Allen's sweetheart, and who cried to us on her knees,
+&quot;Save my William!&quot; was hard to see; nothing we or any one could do
+availed to avert the doom, and on November 23rd Allen, Larkin, and
+O'Brien were hanged outside Salford Gaol. Had they striven for freedom
+in Italy England would have honoured them; here she buried them as
+common murderers in quicklime in the prison yard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have found, with a keen sense of pleasure, that Mr. Bradlaugh and
+myself were in 1867 to some extent co-workers, although we knew not of
+each other's existence, and although he was doing much, and I only
+giving such poor sympathy as a young girl might, who was only just
+awakening to the duty of political work. I read in the <i>National
+Reformer</i> for November 24, 1867, that in the preceding week he was
+pleading on Clerkenwell Green for these men's lives:&mdash;&quot;According to
+the evidence at the trial, Deasy and Kelly were illegally arrested.
+They had been arrested for vagrancy of which no evidence was given, and
+apparently remanded for felony without a shadow of justification. He
+had yet to learn that in England the same state of things existed as in
+Ireland; he had yet to learn that an illegal arrest was sufficient
+ground to detain any of the citizens of any country in the prisons of
+this one. If he were illegally held, he was justified in using enough
+force to procure his release. Wearing a policeman's coat gave no
+authority when the officer exceeded his jurisdiction. He had argued
+this before Lord Chief Justice Erie in the Court of Common Pleas, and
+that learned judge did not venture to contradict the argument which he
+submitted. There was another reason why they should spare these men,
+although he hardly expected the Government to listen, because the
+Government sent down one of the judges who was predetermined to convict
+the prisoners; it was that the offence was purely a political one. The
+death of Brett was a sad mischance, but no one who read the evidence
+could regard the killing of Brett as an intentional murder. Legally, it
+was murder; morally, it was homicide in the rescue of a political
+captive. If it were a question of the rescue of the political captives
+of Varignano, or of political captives in Bourbon, in Naples, or in
+Poland, or in Paris, even earls might be found so to argue. Wherein is
+our sister Ireland less than these? In executing these men, they would
+throw down the gauntlet for terrible reprisals. It was a grave and
+solemn question. It had been said by a previous speaker that they were
+prepared to go to any lengths to save these Irishmen. They were not. He
+wished they were. If they were, if the men of England, from one end to
+the other, were prepared to say, 'These men shall not be executed,'
+they would not be. He was afraid they had not pluck enough for that.
+Their moral courage was not equal to their physical strength. Therefore
+he would not say that they were prepared to do so. They must plead <i>ad
+misericordiam</i>. He appealed to the press, which represented the power
+of England; to that press which in its panic-stricken moments had done
+much harm, and which ought now to save these four doomed men. If the
+press demanded it, no Government would be mad enough to resist. The
+memory of the blood which was shed in 1798 rose up like a bloody ghost
+against them to-day. He only feared that what they said upon the
+subject might do the poor men more harm than good. If it were not so,
+he would coin words that should speak in words of fire. As it was, he
+could only say to the Government: You are strong to-day; you hold these
+men's lives in your hands; but if you want to reconcile their country
+to you, if you want to win back Ireland, if you want to make her
+children love you&mdash;then do not embitter their hearts still more by
+taking the lives of these men. Temper your strength with mercy; do not
+use the sword of justice like one of vengeance, for the day may come
+when it shall be broken in your hands, and you yourselves brained by
+the hilt of the weapon you have so wickedly wielded.&quot; In October he
+had printed a plea for Ireland, strong and earnest, asking:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Where is our boasted English freedom when you cross to Kingstown pier?
+Where has it been for near two years? The Habeas Corpus Act suspended,
+the gaols crowded, the steamers searched, spies listening at shebeen
+shops for sedition, and the end of it a Fenian panic in England. Oh,
+before it be too late, before more blood stain the pages of our present
+history, before we exasperate and arouse bitter animosities, let us try
+and do justice to our sister land. Abolish once and for all the land
+laws, which in their iniquitous operation have ruined her peasantry.
+Sweep away the leech-like Church which has sucked her vitality, and has
+given her back no word even of comfort in her degradation. Turn her
+barracks into flax mills, encourage a spirit of independence in her
+citizens, restore to her people the protection of the law, so that they
+may speak without fear of arrest, and beg them to plainly and boldly
+state their grievances. Let a commission of the best and wisest amongst
+Irishmen, with some of our highest English judges added, sit solemnly
+to hear all complaints, and then let us honestly legislate, not for the
+punishment of the discontented, but to remove the causes of the
+discontent. It is not the Fenians who have depopulated Ireland's
+strength and increased her misery. It is not the Fenians who have
+evicted tenants by the score. It is not the Fenians who have checked
+cultivation. Those who have caused the wrong at least should frame the
+remedy.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In December, 1867, I sailed out of the safe harbour of my happy and
+peaceful girlhood on to the wide sea of life, and the waves broke
+roughly as soon as the bar was crossed. We were an ill-matched pair, my
+husband and I, from the very outset; he, with very high ideas of a
+husband's authority and a wife's submission, holding strongly to the
+&quot;master-in-my-own-house theory,&quot; thinking much of the details of home
+arrangements, precise, methodical, easily angered and with difficulty
+appeased. I, accustomed to freedom, indifferent to home details,
+impulsive, very hot-tempered, and proud as Lucifer. I had never had a
+harsh word spoken to me, never been ordered to do anything, had had my
+way smoothed for my feet, and never a worry had touched me. Harshness
+roused first incredulous wonder, then a storm of indignant tears, and
+after a time a proud, defiant resistance, cold and hard as iron. The
+easy-going, sunshiny, enthusiastic girl changed&mdash;and changed pretty
+rapidly&mdash;into a grave, proud, reticent woman, burying deep in her own
+heart all her hopes, her fears, and her disillusions. I must have been
+a very unsatisfactory wife from the beginning, though I think other
+treatment might gradually have turned me into a fair imitation of the
+proper conventional article. Beginning with the ignorance before
+alluded to, and so scared and outraged at heart from the very first;
+knowing nothing of household management or economical use of money&mdash;I
+had never had an allowance or even bought myself a pair of
+gloves&mdash;though eager to perform my new duties creditably; unwilling to
+potter over little things, and liking to do swiftly what I had to do,
+and then turn to my beloved books; at heart fretting for my mother but
+rarely speaking of her, as I found my longing for her presence raised
+jealous vexation; with strangers about me with whom I had no sympathy;
+visited by ladies who talked to me only about babies and
+servants&mdash;troubles of which I knew nothing and which bored me
+unutterably&mdash;and who were as uninterested in all that had filled my
+life, in theology, in politics, in science, as I was uninterested in
+the discussions on the housemaid's young man and on the cook's
+extravagance in using &quot;butter, when dripping would have done perfectly
+well, my dear&quot;; was it wonderful that I became timid, dull, and
+depressed?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All my eager, passionate enthusiasm, so attractive to men in a young
+girl, were doubtless incompatible with &quot;the solid comfort of a wife,&quot;
+and I must have been inexpressibly tiring to the Rev. Frank Besant.
+And, in truth, I ought never to have married, for under the soft,
+loving, pliable girl there lay hidden, as much unknown to herself as to
+her surroundings, a woman of strong dominant will, strength that panted
+for expression and rebelled against restraint, fiery and passionate
+emotions that were seething under compression&mdash;a most undesirable
+partner to sit in the lady's arm-chair on the domestic rug before the
+fire. [<i>Que le diable faisait-elle dans cette gal&egrave;re,</i>] I have often
+thought, looking back at my past self, and asking, Why did that foolish
+girl make her bed so foolishly? But self-analysis shows the
+contradictories in my nature that led me into so mistaken a course. I
+have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have
+paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to suffer tortures of
+shyness, and if my shoe-lace was untied would feel shamefacedly that
+every eye was fixed on the unlucky string; as a girl I would shrink
+away from strangers and think myself unwanted and unliked, so that I
+was full of eager gratitude to any one who noticed me kindly; as the
+young mistress of a house, I was afraid of my servants, and would let
+careless work pass rather than bear the pain of reproving the ill-doer;
+when I have been lecturing and debating with no lack of spirit on the
+platform, I have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel
+rather than to ring and make the waiter fetch it; combative on the
+platform in defence of any cause I cared for, I shrink from quarrel or
+disapproval in the home, and am a coward at heart in private while a
+good fighter in public. How often have I passed unhappy quarters of an
+hour screwing up my courage to find fault with some subordinate whom my
+duty compelled me to reprove, and how often have I jeered at myself for
+a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming
+some lad or lass for doing their work badly! An unkind look or word has
+availed to make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while
+on the platform opposition makes me speak my best. So I slid into
+marriage blindly and stupidly, fearing to give pain; fretted my heart
+out for a year; then, roused by harshness and injustice, stiffened and
+hardened, and lived with a wall of ice round me within which I waged
+mental conflicts that nearly killed me; and learned at last how to live
+and work in armour that turned the edge of the weapons that struck it,
+and left the flesh beneath unwounded, armour laid aside, but in the
+presence of a very few.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up
+two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of
+a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character,
+&quot;The Lives of the Black Letter Saints.&quot; For the sake of the
+unecclesiastically trained it may be as well to mention that in the
+Calendar of the Church of England there are a number of Saints' Days;
+some of these are printed in red, and are Red Letter Days, for which
+services are appointed by the Church; others are printed in black, and
+are Black Letter Days, and have no special services fixed for them. It
+seemed to me that it would be interesting to take each of these days
+and write a sketch of the life of the saint belonging to it, and
+accordingly I set to work to do so, and gathered various books of
+history and legend where-from to collect my &quot;facts.&quot; I do not in the
+least know what became of that valuable book; I tried Macmillans with
+it, and it was sent on by them to some one who was preparing a series
+of Church books for the young; later I had a letter from a Church
+brotherhood offering to publish it, if I would give it as &quot;an act of
+piety&quot; to their order; its ultimate fate is to me unknown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The short stories were more fortunate. I sent the first to the <i>Family
+Herald</i>, and some weeks afterwards received a letter from which dropped
+a cheque as I opened it. Dear me! I have earned a good deal of money
+since by my pen, but never any that gave me the intense delight of that
+first thirty shillings. It was the first money I had ever earned, and
+the pride of the earning was added to the pride of authorship. In my
+childish delight and practical religion, I went down on my knees and
+thanked God for sending it to me, and I saw myself earning heaps of
+golden guineas, and becoming quite a support of the household. Besides,
+it was &quot;my very own,&quot; I thought, and a delightful sense of independence
+came over me. I had not then realised the beauty of the English law,
+and the dignified position in which it placed the married woman; I did
+not understand that all a married woman earned by law belonged to her
+owner, and that she could have nothing that belonged to her of
+right.<a href="#FN1"><sup>[1]</sup></a> I did not want the money: I was only so glad to have
+something of my own to give, and it was rather a shock to learn that it
+was not really mine at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From time to time after that I earned a few pounds for stories in the
+same journal; and the <i>Family Herald</i>, let me say, has one peculiarity
+which should render it beloved by poor authors; it pays its contributor
+when it accepts the paper, whether it prints it immediately or not;
+thus my first story was not printed for some weeks after I received the
+cheque, and it was the same with all the others accepted by the same
+journal. Encouraged by these small successes, I began writing a novel!
+It took a long time to do, but was at last finished, and sent off to
+the <i>Family Herald</i>. The poor thing came back, but with a kind note,
+telling me that it was too political for their pages, but that if I
+would write one of &quot;purely domestic interest,&quot; and up to the same
+level, it would probably be accepted. But by that time I was in the
+full struggle of theological doubt, and that novel of &quot;purely domestic
+interest&quot; never got itself written.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I contributed further to the literature of my country a theological
+pamphlet, of which I forget the exact title, but it dealt with the duty
+of fasting incumbent on all faithful Christians, and was very patristic
+in its tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In January, 1869, my little son was born, and as I was very ill for
+some months before, and was far too much interested in the tiny
+creature afterwards, to devote myself to pen and paper, my literary
+career was checked for a while. The baby gave a new interest and a new
+pleasure to life, and as we could not afford a nurse I had plenty to do
+in looking after his small majesty. My energy in reading became less
+feverish when it was done by the side of the baby's cradle, and the
+little one's presence almost healed the abiding pain of my mother's
+loss.
+</p>
+
+<a name="03"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="Images/03.jpg" alt="Annie Besant. 1869."
+height="464" width="319"></p>
+<h5><i>From a photograph by Dighton's Art Studio, Cheltenham</i>.</h5>
+<h5>
+ANNIE BESANT<br>1869.</h5>
+
+
+
+<p>
+I may pass very quickly over the next two years. In August, 1870, a
+little sister was born to my son, and the recovery was slow and
+tedious, for my general health had been failing for some time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boy was a bright, healthy little fellow, but the girl was delicate
+from birth, suffering from her mother's unhappiness, and born somewhat
+prematurely in consequence of a shock. When, in the spring of 1871, the
+two children caught the whooping cough, my Mabel's delicacy made the
+ordeal well-nigh fatal to her. She was very young for so trying a
+disease, and after a while bronchitis set in and was followed by
+congestion of the lungs. For weeks she lay in hourly peril of death We
+arranged a screen round the fire like a tent, and kept it full of steam
+to ease the panting breath; and there I sat, day and night, all through
+those weary weeks, the tortured baby on my knees. I loved my little
+ones passionately, for their clinging love soothed the aching at my
+heart, and their baby eyes could not critically scan the unhappiness
+that grew deeper month by month; and that steam-filled tent became my
+world, and there, alone, I fought with Death for my child. The doctor
+said that recovery was impossible, and that in one of the paroxysms of
+coughing she must die; the most distressing thing was that, at last,
+even a drop or two of milk would bring on the terrible convulsive
+choking, and it seemed cruel to add to the pain of the apparently dying
+child. At length, one morning the doctor said she could not last
+through the day; I had sent for him hurriedly, for the body had
+suddenly swollen up as a result of the perforation of one of the
+pleurae, and the consequent escape of air into the cavity of the chest.
+While he was there one of the fits of coughing came on, and it seemed
+as though it must be the last. He took a small bottle of chloroform out
+of his pocket, and putting a drop on a handkerchief held it near the
+child's face, till the drug soothed the convulsive struggle. &quot;It can't
+do any harm at this stage,&quot; he said, &quot;and it checks the suffering.&quot; He
+went away, saying that he feared he would never see the child alive
+again. One of the kindest friends I had in my married life was that
+same doctor, Mr. Lauriston Winterbotham; he was as good as he was
+clever, and, like so many of his noble profession, he had the merits of
+discretion and silence. He never breathed a word as to my unhappiness,
+until in 1878 he came up to town to give evidence as to cruelty
+which&mdash;had the deed of separation not been held as condonation&mdash;would
+have secured me a divorce <i>a mensa et thoro</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The child, however, recovered, and her recovery was due, I think, to
+that chance thought of Mr. Winterbotham's about the chloroform, for I
+used it whenever the first sign of a fit of coughing appeared, and so
+warded off the convulsive attack and the profound exhaustion that
+followed, in which a mere flicker of breath at the top of the throat
+was the only sign of life, and sometimes even that disappeared, and I
+thought her gone. For years the child remained ailing and delicate,
+requiring the tenderest care, but those weeks of anguish left a deeper
+trace on mother than on child. Once she was out of danger I collapsed
+physically, and lay in bed for a week unmoving, and then rose to face a
+struggle which lasted for three years and two months, and nearly cost
+me my life, the struggle which transformed me from a Christian into an
+Atheist. The agony of the struggle was in the first nineteen months&mdash;a
+time to be looked back upon with shrinking, as it was a hell to live
+through at the time. For no one who has not felt it knows the fearful
+anguish inflicted by doubt on the earnestly religious soul. There is in
+life no other pain so horrible, so keen in its torture, so crushing in
+its weight. It seems to shipwreck everything, to destroy the one steady
+gleam of happiness &quot;on the other side&quot; that no earthly storm could
+obscure; to make all life gloomy with a horror of despair, a darkness
+that verily may be felt. Nothing but an imperious intellectual and
+moral necessity can drive into doubt a religious mind, for it is as
+though an earthquake shook the foundations of the soul, and the very
+being quivers and sways under the shock. No life in the empty sky; no
+gleam in the blackness of the night; no voice to break the deadly
+silence; no hand outstretched to save. Empty-brained triflers who have
+never tried to think, who take their creed as they take their fashions,
+speak of Atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious desires. In
+their shallow heartlessness and shallower thought they cannot even
+dimly imagine the anguish of entering the mere penumbra of the Eclipse
+of Faith, much less the horror of that great darkness in which the
+orphaned soul cries out into the infinite emptiness: &quot;Is it a Devil
+that has made the world? Is the echo, 'Children, ye have no Father,'
+true? Is all blind chance, is all the clash of unconscious forces, or
+are we the sentient toys of an Almighty Power that sports with our
+agony, whose peals of awful mockery of laughter ring back answer to the
+wailings of our despair?&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How true are the noble words of Mrs. Hamilton King:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+  &quot;For some may follow Truth from dawn to dark,<br>
+  As a child follows by his mother's hand,<br>
+  Knowing no fear, rejoicing all the way;<br>
+  And unto some her face is as a Star<br>
+  Set through an avenue of thorns and fires,<br>
+  And waving branches black without a leaf;<br>
+  And still It draws them, though the feet must bleed,<br>
+  Though garments must be rent, and eyes be scorched:<br>
+  And if the valley of the shadow of death<br>
+  Be passed, and to the level road they come,<br>
+  Still with their faces to the polar star,<br>
+  It is not with the same looks, the same limbs,<br>
+  But halt, and maimed, and of infirmity.<br>
+  And for the rest of the way they have to go<br>
+  It is not day but night, and oftentimes<br>
+  A night of clouds wherein the stars are lost.&quot;<a href="#FN2"><sup>[2]</sup></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aye! but never lost is the Star of Truth to which the face is set, and
+while that shines all lesser lights may go. It was the long months of
+suffering through which I had been passing, with the seemingly
+purposeless torturing of my little one as a climax, that struck the
+first stunning blow at my belief in God as a merciful Father of men. I
+had been visiting the poor a good deal, and had marked the patient
+suffering of their lives; my idolised mother had been defrauded by a
+lawyer she had trusted, and was plunged into debt by his non-payment of
+the sums that should have passed through his hands to others; my own
+bright life had been enshrouded by pain and rendered to me degraded by
+an intolerable sense of bondage; and here was my helpless, sinless babe
+tortured for weeks and left frail and suffering. The smooth brightness
+of my previous life made all the disillusionment more startling, and
+the sudden plunge into conditions so new and so unfavourable dazed and
+stunned me. My religious past became the worst enemy of the suffering
+present. All my personal belief in Christ, all my intense faith in His
+constant direction of affairs, all my habit of continual prayer and of
+realisation of His Presence&mdash;all were against me now. The very height
+of my trust was the measure of the shock when the trust gave way. To me
+He was no abstract idea, but a living reality, and all my heart rose up
+against this Person in whom I believed, and whose individual finger I
+saw in my baby's agony, my own misery, the breaking of my mother's
+proud heart under a load of debt, and all the bitter suffering of the
+poor. The presence of pain and evil in a world made by a good God; the
+pain falling on the innocent, as on my seven months' old babe; the pain
+begun here reaching on into eternity unhealed; a sorrow-laden world; a
+lurid, hopeless hell; all these, while I still believed, drove me
+desperate, and instead of like the devils believing and trembling, I
+believed and hated. All the hitherto dormant and unsuspected strength
+of my nature rose up in rebellion; I did not yet dream of denial, but I
+would no longer kneel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the first stirrings of this hot rebellion moved in my heart I met a
+clergyman of a very noble type, who did much to help me by his ready
+and wise sympathy. Mr. Besant brought him to see me during the crisis
+of the child's illness; he said little, but on the following day I
+received from him the following note:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;<i>April</i> 21, 1871.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;My Dear Mrs. Besant,&mdash;I am painfully conscious that I gave you but
+little help in your trouble yesterday. It is needless to say that it
+was not from want of sympathy. Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to
+say that it was from excess of sympathy. I shrink intensely from
+meddling with the sorrow of any one whom I feel to be of a sensitive
+nature. 'The heart hath its own bitterness, and the stranger meddleth
+not therewith.' It is to me a positively fearful thought that I might
+awaken such a reflection as
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+  &quot;'And common was the commonplace,<br>
+  And vacant chaff well meant for grain.'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Conventional consolations, conventional verses out of the Bible, and
+conventional prayers are, it seems to me, an intolerable aggravation of
+suffering. And so I acted on a principle that I mentioned to your
+husband that 'there is no power so great as that of one human faith
+looking upon another human faith.' The promises of God, the love of
+Christ for little children, and all that has been given to us of hope
+and comfort, are as deeply planted in your heart as in mine, and I did
+not care to quote them. But when I talk face to face with one who is in
+sore need of them, my faith in them suddenly becomes so vast and
+heart-stirring that I think I must help most by talking naturally, and
+letting the faith find its own way from soul to soul. Indeed, I could
+not find words for it if I tried. And yet I am compelled, as a
+messenger of the glad tidings of God, to solemnly assure you that all
+is well. We have no key to the 'mystery of pain' excepting the Cross of
+Christ. But there is another and a deeper solution in the hands of our
+Father; and it will be ours when we can understand it. There is&mdash;in the
+place to which we travelsome blessed explanation of your baby's pain
+and your grief, which will fill with light the darkest heart. Now you
+must believe without having seen; that is true faith. You must
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+  &quot;'Reach a hand through time to catch<br>
+  The far-off interest of tears.'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That you may have strength so to do is part of your share in the
+prayers of
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Yours very faithfully,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;W. D&mdash;.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A noble letter, but the storm was beating too fiercely to be stilled,
+and one night in that summer of 1871 stands out clearly before me. Mr.
+Besant was away, and there had been a fierce quarrel before he left. I
+was outraged, desperate, with no door of escape from a life that,
+losing its hope in God, had not yet learned to live for hope for man.
+No door of escape? The thought came like a flash: &quot;There is one!&quot; And
+before me there swung open, with lure of peace and of safety, the
+gateway into silence and security, the gateway of the tomb. I was
+standing by the drawing-room window, staring hopelessly at the evening
+sky; with the thought came the remembrance that the means was at
+hand&mdash;the chloroform that had soothed my baby's pain, and that I had
+locked away upstairs. I ran up to my room, took out the bottle, and
+carried it downstairs, standing again at the window in the summer
+twilight, glad that the struggle was over and peace at hand. I uncorked
+the bottle, and was raising it to my lips, when, as though the words
+were spoken softly and clearly, I heard: &quot;O coward, coward, who used to
+dream of martyrdom, and cannot bear a few short years of pain!&quot; A rush
+of shame swept over me, and I flung the bottle far away among the
+shrubs in the garden at my feet, and for a moment I felt strong as for
+a struggle, and then fell fainting on the floor. Only once again in all
+the strifes of my career did the thought of suicide recur, and then it
+was but for a moment, to be put aside as unworthy a strong soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My new friend, Mr. D&mdash;, proved a very real help. The endless torture
+of hell, the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, the trustworthiness of
+revelation, doubts on all these hitherto accepted doctrines grew and
+heaped themselves on my bewildered soul. My questionings were neither
+shirked nor discouraged by Mr. D&mdash;; he was not horrified nor was he
+sanctimoniously rebukeful, but met them all with a wide comprehension
+inexpressibly soothing to one writhing in the first agonies of doubt.
+He left Cheltenham in the early autumn of 1871, but the following
+extracts from a letter written in November will show the kind of net in
+which I was struggling (I had been reading M'Leod Campbell's work &quot;On
+the Atonement&quot;):&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;You forget one great principle&mdash;that God is impassive, cannot suffer.
+Christ, <i>qu&acirc;</i> God, did not suffer, but as Son of <i>Man</i> and in His
+humanity. Still, it may be correctly stated that He felt to sin and
+sinners 'as God eternally feels'&mdash;<i>i.e., abhorrence of sin, and love of
+the sinner</i>. But to infer from that that the Father in His Godhead
+feels the sufferings which Christ experienced solely in humanity, and
+because incarnate is, I think, wrong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;(2) I felt strongly inclined to blow you up for the last part of your
+letter. You assume, I think quite gratuitously, that God condemns the
+major part of His children to objectless future suffering. You say that
+if He does not, He places a book in their hands which threatens what He
+does not mean to inflict. But how utterly this seems to me opposed to
+the gospel of Christ! All Christ's references to eternal punishment may
+be resolved into references to the Valley of Hinnom, by way of imagery;
+with the exception of the Dives parable, where is distinctly inferred a
+moral amendment beyond the grave. I speak of the unselfish desire of
+Dives to save his brothers. The more I see of the controversy, the more
+baseless does the eternal punishment theory appear. It seems then, to
+me, that instead of feeling aggrieved and shaken, you ought to feel
+encouraged and thankful that God is so much better than you were taught
+to believe Him. You will have discovered by this time in Maurice's
+'What is Revelation?' (I suppose you have the 'Sequel,' too?), that
+God's truth is our truth, and His love is our love, only more perfect
+and full. There is no position more utterly defeated in modern
+philosophy and theology than Dean Mansel's attempt to show that God's
+love, justice, &amp;c., are different in kind from ours. Mill and Maurice,
+from totally alien points of view, have shown up the preposterous
+nature of the notion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;(3) A good deal of what you have thought is, I fancy, based on a
+strange forgetfulness of your former experience. If you have known
+Christ&mdash;(whom to know is eternal life)&mdash;and that you have known Him I
+am certain&mdash;can you really say that a few intellectual difficulties,
+nay, a few moral difficulties if you will, are able at once to
+obliterate the testimony of that higher state of being?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Why, the keynote of all my theology is that Christ is lovable because,
+and <i>just</i> because, He is the perfection of all that I know to be noble
+and generous, and loving, and tender, and true. If an angel from heaven
+brought me a gospel which contained doctrines that would not stand the
+test of such perfect lovableness&mdash;doctrines hard, or cruel, or
+unjust&mdash;I should reject him and his trumpery gospel with scorn, knowing
+that neither could be Christ's. Know Christ and judge religions by Him;
+don't judge Him by religions, and then complain because they find
+yourself looking at Him through a blood-coloured glass.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;I am saturating myself with Maurice, who is the antidote given by God
+to this age against all dreary doublings and temptings of the devil to
+despair.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Many a one, in this age of controversy over all things once held
+sacred, has found peace and new light on this line of thought, and has
+succeeded in thus reconciling theological doctrines with the demands of
+the conscience for love and justice in a world made by a just and
+loving God. I could not do so. The awakening to what the world was, to
+the facts of human misery, to the ruthless tramp of nature and of
+events over the human heart, making no difference between innocent and
+guilty&mdash;the shock had been too great for the equilibrium to be restored
+by arguments that appealed to the emotions and left the intellect
+unconvinced. Months of this long-drawn-out mental anguish wrought their
+natural effects on physical health, and at last I broke down
+completely, and lay for weeks helpless and prostrate, in raging and
+unceasing head-pain, unable to sleep, unable to bear the light, lying
+like a log on the bed, not unconscious, but indifferent to everything,
+consciousness centred, as it were, in the ceaseless pain. The doctor
+tried every form of relief, but, entrenched in its citadel, the pain
+defied his puny efforts. He covered my head with ice, he gave me
+opium&mdash;which only drove me mad&mdash;he did all that skill and kindness
+could do, but all in vain. Finally the pain wore itself out, and the
+moment he dared to do so, he tried mental diversion; he brought me
+books on anatomy, on science, and persuaded me to study them; and out
+of his busy life would steal an hour to explain to me knotty points on
+physiology. He saw that if I were to be brought back to reasonable
+life, it could only be by diverting thought from the channels in which
+the current had been running to a dangerous extent. I have often felt
+that I owed life and sanity to that good man, who felt for the
+helpless, bewildered child-woman, beaten down by the cyclone of doubt
+and misery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So it will easily be understood that my religious wretchedness only
+increased the unhappiness of homelife, for how absurd it was that any
+reasonable human being should be so tossed with anguish over
+intellectual and moral difficulties on religious matters, and should
+make herself ill over these unsubstantial troubles. Surely it was a
+woman's business to attend to her husband's comforts and to see after
+her children, and not to break her heart over misery here and hell
+hereafter, and distract her brain with questions that had puzzled the
+greatest thinkers and still remained unsolved! And, truly, women or men
+who get themselves concerned about the universe at large, would do well
+not to plunge hastily into marriage, for they do not run smoothly in
+the double-harness of that honourable estate. <i>Sturm und Drang</i> should
+be faced alone, and the soul should go out alone into the wilderness to
+be tempted of the devil, and not bring his majesty and all his imps
+into the placid circle of the home. Unhappy they who go into marriage
+with the glamour of youth upon them and the destiny of conflict
+imprinted on their nature, for they make misery for their partner in
+marriage as well as for themselves. And if that partner, strong in
+traditional authority and conventional habits, seeks to &quot;break in&quot; the
+turbulent and storm-tossed creature&mdash;well, it comes to a mere trial of
+strength and endurance, whether that driven creature will fall panting
+and crushed, or whether it will turn in its despair, assert its Divine
+right to intellectual liberty, rend its fetters in pieces, and,
+discovering its own strength in its extremity, speak at all risks its
+&quot;No&quot; when bidden to live a lie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When that physical crisis was over I decided on my line of action. I
+resolved to take Christianity as it had been taught in the Churches,
+and carefully and thoroughly examine its dogmas one by one, so that I
+should never again say &quot;I believe&quot; where I had not proved, and that,
+however diminished my area of belief, what was left of it might at
+least be firm under my feet. I found that four chief problems were
+pressing for solution, and to these I addressed myself. How many are
+to-day the souls facing just these problems, and disputing every inch
+of their old ground of faith with the steadily advancing waves of
+historical and scientific criticism! Alas! for the many Canutes, as the
+waves wash over their feet. These problems were:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(1) The eternity of punishment after death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(2) The meaning of &quot;goodness&quot; and &quot;love,&quot; as applied to a God who had
+made this world, with all its sin and misery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(3) The nature of the atonement of Christ, and the &quot;justice&quot; of God in
+accepting a vicarious suffering from Christ, and a vicarious
+righteousness from the sinner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(4) The meaning of &quot;inspiration&quot; as applied to the Bible, and the
+reconciliation of the perfections of the author with the blunders and
+immoralities of the work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It will be seen that the deeper problems of religion&mdash;the deity of
+Christ, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul&mdash;were not yet
+brought into question, and, looking back, I cannot but see how orderly
+was the progression of thought, how steady the growth, after that first
+terrible earthquake, and the first wild swirl of agony. The points that
+I set myself to study were those which would naturally be first faced
+by any one whose first rebellion against the dogmas of the Churches was
+a rebellion of the moral nature rather than of the intellectual, a
+protest of the conscience rather than of the brain. It was not a desire
+for moral licence which gave me the impulse that finally landed me in
+Atheism; it was the sense of outraged justice and insulted right. I was
+a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty
+and a proud self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me,
+and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of
+outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity.
+My education, my mother's example, my inner timidity and self-distrust,
+all fenced me in from temptations from without. It was the uprising of
+an outraged conscience that made me a rebel against the Churches and
+finally an unbeliever in God. And I place this on record, because the
+progress of Materialism will never be checked by diatribes against
+unbelievers, as though they became unbelievers from desire for vice and
+for licence to do evil. What Religion has to face in the controversies
+of to-day is not the unbelief of the sty, but the unbelief of the
+educated conscience and of the soaring intellect; and unless it can arm
+itself with a loftier ethic and a grander philosophy than its opponent,
+it will lose its hold over the purest and the strongest of the younger
+generation.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHV"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER V.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+THE STORM OF DOUBT.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+My reading of heretical and Broad Church works on one side, and of
+orthodox ones on the other, now occupied a large part of my time, and
+our removal to Sibsey, in Lincolnshire, an agricultural village with a
+scattered population, increased my leisure. I read the works of
+Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Stanley, Greg, Matthew Arnold, Liddon,
+Mansel, and many another, and my scepticism grew deeper and deeper as
+I read. The Broad Church arguments appeared to me to be of the nature
+of special pleading, skilful evasions of difficulties rather than the
+real meeting and solving of them. For the problem was: Given a good
+God, how can He have created mankind, knowing beforehand that the vast
+majority of those whom He created were to be tortured for ever? Given
+a just God, how can He punish people for being sinful, when they have
+inherited a sinful nature without their own choice and of necessity?
+Given a righteous God, how can He allow sin to exist for ever, so that
+evil shall be as eternal as good, and Satan shall reign in hell as
+long as Christ in heaven? Worst of all puzzles, perhaps, was that of
+the existence of evil and of misery, and the racking doubt whether God
+<i>could</i> be good, and yet look on the evil and the misery of the world
+unmoved and untouched. It seemed so impossible to believe that a
+Creator could be either cruel enough to be indifferent to the misery,
+or weak enough to be unable to stop it. The old dilemma faced me
+incessantly: &quot;If He can prevent it and does not, He is not good; if He
+wishes to prevent it and cannot, He is not almighty.&quot; I racked my
+brains for an answer. I searched writings of believers for a clue, but
+I found no way of escape. Not yet had any doubt of the existence of
+God crossed my mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. D&mdash; continued to write me, striving to guide me along the path
+which had led his own soul to contentment, but I can only find room
+here for two brief extracts, which will show how to himself he solved
+the problem. He thought me mistaken in my view
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Of the nature of the <i>sin</i> and <i>error</i> which is supposed to grieve
+God. I take it that sin is an absolutely necessary factor in the
+production of the perfect man. It was foreseen and allowed as means to
+an end&mdash;as, in fact, an education. The view of all the sin and misery
+in the world cannot grieve God any more than it can grieve you to see
+Digby fail in his first attempt to build a card-castle or a
+rabbit-hutch. All is part of the training. God looks at the ideal man
+to which all tends.... &quot;No, Mrs. Besant; I never feel at all inclined
+to give up the search, or to suppose that the other side may be right.
+I claim no merit for it, but I have an invincible faith in the
+morality of God and the moral order of the world. I have no more doubt
+about the falsehood of the popular theology than I have about the
+unreality of six robbers who attacked me three nights ago in a horrid
+dream. I exult and rejoice in the grandeur and freedom of the little
+bit of truth it has been given me to see. I am told that 'Present-day
+Papers,' by Bishop Ewing (edited), are a wonderful help, many of them,
+to puzzled people; I mean to get them. But I am sure you will find
+that the truth will (even so little as we may be able to find out)
+grow on you, make you free, light your path, and dispel, at no distant
+time, your <i>painful</i> difficulties and doubts. I should say on no
+account give up your reading. I think with you that you could not do
+without it. It will be a wonderful source of help and peace to you.
+For there are struggles far more fearful than those of intellectual
+doubt. I am keenly alive to the gathered-up sadness of which your last
+two pages are an expression. I was sorrier than I can say to read
+them. They reminded me of a long and very dark time in my own life,
+when I thought the light never would come. Thank God it came, or I
+think I could not have held out much longer. But you have evidently
+strength to bear it now. The more dangerous time, I should fancy, has
+passed. You will have to mind that the fermentation leaves clear
+spiritual wine, and not (as too often) vinegar. I wish I could write
+something more helpful to you in this great matter. But as I sit in
+front of my large bay window and see the shadows on the grass and the
+sunlight on the leaves, and the soft glimmer of the rosebuds left by
+the storms, I can but believe that all will be very well. 'Trust in
+the Lord, wait patiently for Him'&mdash;they are trite words. But He made
+the grass, the leaves, the rosebuds, and the sunshine, and He is the
+Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And now the trite words have swelled
+into a mighty argument.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I found more help in Theistic writers like Grey, and Agnostic like
+Arnold, than I did in the Broad Church teachers, but these, of course,
+served to make return to the old faith more and more impossible. The
+Church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was
+only a doubter, I kept my doubts to myself. It was possible, I felt,
+that all my difficulties might be cleared up, and I had no right to
+shake the faith of others while in uncertainty myself. Others had
+doubted and had afterwards recovered their faith; for the doubter
+silence was a duty; the blinded had better keep their misery to
+themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During these weary months of anxiety and torment I found some relief
+from the mental strain in practical parish work, nursing the sick,
+trying to brighten the lot of the poor. I learned then some of the
+lessons as to the agricultural labourer and the land that I was able
+in after-years to teach from the platform. The movement among the
+agricultural labourers, due to the energy and devotion of Joseph Arch,
+was beginning to be discussed in the fens, and my sympathies went
+strongly with the claims of the labourers, for I knew their
+life-conditions. In one cottage I had found four generations sleeping
+in one room&mdash;the great-grandfather and his wife, the unmarried
+grandmother, the unmarried mother, the little child; three men lodgers
+completed the tale of eight human beings crowded into that narrow,
+ill-ventilated garret. Other cottages were hovels, through the broken
+roofs of which poured the rain, and wherein rheumatism and ague lived
+with the human dwellers. How could I do aught but sympathise with any
+combination that aimed at the raising of these poor? But the
+Agricultural Labourers' Union was bitterly opposed by the farmers, and
+they would give no work to a &quot;Union man.&quot; One example may serve for
+all. There was a young married man with two small children, who was
+sinful enough to go to a Union meeting and sinful enough to talk of it
+on his return home. No farmer would employ him in all the district
+round. He tramped about vainly looking for work, grew reckless, and
+took to drink. Visiting his cottage, consisting of one room and a
+&quot;lean-to,&quot; I found his wife ill with fever, a fever-stricken babe in
+her arms, the second child lying dead on the bed. In answer to my
+soft-spoken questions: Yes, she was pining (starving), there was no
+work. Why did she leave the dead child on the bed? Because she had no
+other place for it till the coffin came. And at night the unhappy,
+driven man, the fever-stricken wife, the fever-stricken child, the
+dead child, all lay in the one bed. The farmers hated the Union
+because its success meant higher wages for the men, and it never
+struck them that they might well pay less rent to the absent landlord
+and higher wage to the men who tilled their fields. They had only
+civil words for the burden that crushed them, hard words for the
+mowers of their harvests and the builders-up of their ricks; they made
+common cause with their enemies instead of with their friends, and
+instead of leaguing themselves together with the labourers as forming
+together the true agricultural interest, they leagued themselves with
+the landlords against the labourers, and so made ruinous fratricidal
+strife instead of easy victory over the common foe. And, seeing all
+this, I learned some useful lessons, and the political education
+progressed while the theological strife went on within.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the early autumn a ray of light broke the darkness. I was in London
+with my mother, and wandered one Sunday morning into St. George's
+Hall, where the Rev. Charles Voysey was preaching. There to my delight
+I found, on listening to the sermon and buying some literature on sale
+in the ante-room, that there were people who had passed through my own
+difficulties, and had given up the dogmas that I found so revolting. I
+went again on the following Sunday, and when the service was over I
+noticed that the outgoing stream of people were passing by Mr. and
+Mrs. Voysey, and that many who were evidently strangers spoke a word
+of thanks to him as they went on. Moved by a strong desire, after the
+long months of lonely striving, to speak to one who had struggled out
+of Christian difficulties, I said to Mr. Voysey, as I passed in my
+turn, &quot;I must thank you for very great help in what you said this
+morning,&quot; for in truth, never having yet doubted the existence of God,
+the teaching of Mr. Voysey that He was &quot;loving unto <i>every</i> man, and
+His tender mercy over <i>all</i> His works,&quot; came like a gleam of light
+across the stormy sea of doubt and distress on which I had so long
+been tossing. The next Sunday saw me again at the Hall, and Mrs.
+Voysey gave me a cordial invitation to visit them in their Dulwich
+home. I found their Theism was free from the defects that had revolted
+me in Christianity, and they opened up to me new views of religion. I
+read Theodore Parker's &quot;Discourse on Religion,&quot; Francis Newman's
+works, those of Miss Frances Power Cobbe, and of others; the anguish
+of the tension relaxed; the nightmare of an Almighty Evil passed away;
+my belief in God, not yet touched, was cleared from all the dark spots
+that had sullied it, and I no longer doubted whether the dogmas that
+had shocked my conscience were true or false. I shook them off, once
+for all, with all their pain and horror and darkness, and felt, with
+joy and relief inexpressible, that they were delusions of the
+ignorance of man, not the revelations of a God.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was one belief that had not been definitely challenged, but
+of which the <i>rationale</i> was gone with the orthodox dogmas now
+definitely renounced&mdash;the doctrine of the Deity of Christ. The whole
+teaching of the Broad Church school tends, of course, to emphasise the
+humanity of Christ at the expense of His Deity, and when eternal
+punishment and the substitutionary atonement had gone there seemed no
+reason remaining sufficient to account for so tremendous a miracle as
+the incarnation of the Deity. In the course of my reading I had become
+familiar with the idea of Avat&acirc;ras in Eastern creeds, and I saw that
+the incarnate God was put forward as a fact by all ancient religions,
+and thus the way was paved for challenging the especially Christian
+teaching, when the doctrines morally repulsive were cleared away. But
+I shrank from the thought of placing in the crucible a doctrine so
+dear from all the associations of the past; there was so much that was
+soothing and ennobling in the idea of a union between Man and God,
+between a perfect man and a Divine life, between a human heart and an
+almighty strength. Jesus as God was interwoven with all art and all
+beauty in religion; to break with the Deity of Jesus was to break with
+music, with painting, with literature; the Divine Babe in His Mother's
+arms; the Divine Man in His Passion and His Triumph; the Friend of Man
+encircled with the majesty of the Godhead. Did inexorable Truth demand
+that this ideal Figure, with all its pathos, its beauty, its human
+love, should pass away into the Pantheon of the dead Gods of the Past?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor was this all. If I gave up belief in Christ as God, I must give up
+Christianity as creed. Once challenge the unique position of the
+Christ, and the name Christian seemed to me to be a hypocrisy, and its
+renouncement a duty binding on the upright mind. I was a clergyman's
+wife; what would be the effect of such a step? Hitherto mental pain
+alone had been the price demanded inexorably from the searcher after
+truth; but with the renouncing of Christ outer warfare would be added
+to the inner, and who might guess the result upon my life? The
+struggle was keen but short; I decided to carefully review the
+evidence for and against the Deity of Christ, with the result that
+that belief followed the others, and I stood, no longer Christian,
+face to face with a dim future in which I sensed the coming conflict.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One effort I made to escape it; I appealed to Dr. Pusey, thinking that
+if he could not answer my questionings, no answer to them could be
+reasonably hoped for. I had a brief correspondence with him, but was
+referred only to lines of argument familiar to me&mdash;as those of Liddon
+in his &quot;Bampton Lectures&quot;&mdash;and finally, on his invitation, went down
+to Oxford to see him. I found a short, stout gentleman, dressed in a
+cassock, looking like a comfortable monk; but keen eyes, steadfastly
+gazing straight into mine, told of the force and subtlety enshrined in
+the fine, impressive head. But the learned doctor took the wrong line
+of treatment; he probably saw I was anxious, shy, and nervous, and he
+treated me as a penitent going to confession and seeking the advice of
+a director, instead of as an inquirer struggling after truth, and
+resolute to obtain some firm standing-ground in the sea of doubt. He
+would not deal with the question of the Deity of Jesus as a question
+for argument. &quot;You are speaking of your Judge,&quot; he retorted sternly,
+when I pressed a difficulty. The mere suggestion of an imperfection in
+the character of Jesus made him shudder, and he checked me with raised
+hand. &quot;You are blaspheming. The very thought is a terrible sin.&quot; Would
+he recommend me any books that might throw light on the subject? &quot;No,
+no; you have read too much already. You must pray; you must pray.&quot;
+When I urged that I could not believe without proof, I was told,
+&quot;Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed&quot;; and my
+further questioning was checked by the murmur, &quot;O my child, how
+undisciplined! how impatient!&quot; Truly, he must have found in me&mdash;hot,
+eager, passionate in my determination to <i>know</i>, resolute not to
+profess belief while belief was absent&mdash;nothing of the meek,
+chastened, submissive spirit with which he was wont to deal in
+penitents seeking his counsel as their spiritual guide. In vain did he
+bid me pray as though I believed; in vain did he urge the duty of
+blind submission to the authority of the Church, of blind, unreasoning
+faith that questioned not. I had not trodden the thorny path of doubt
+to come to the point from which I had started; I needed, and would
+have, solid grounds ere I believed. He had no conception of the
+struggles of a sceptical spirit; he had evidently never felt the pangs
+of doubt; his own faith was solid as a rock, firm, satisfied,
+unshakable; he would as soon have committed suicide as have doubted of
+the infallibility of the &quot;Universal Church.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;It is not your duty to ascertain the truth,&quot; he told me, sternly. &quot;It
+is your duty to accept and believe the truth as laid down by the
+Church. At your peril you reject it. The responsibility is not yours
+so long as you dutifully accept that which the Church has laid down
+for your acceptance. Did not the Lord promise that the presence of the
+Spirit should be ever with His Church, to guide her into all truth?&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;But the fact of the promise and its value are just the very points on
+which I am doubtful,&quot; I answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shuddered. &quot;Pray, pray,&quot; he said. &quot;Father, forgive her, for she
+knows not what she says.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in vain that I urged on him the sincerity of my seeking,
+pointing out that I had everything to gain by following his
+directions, everything to lose by going my own way, but that it seemed
+to me untruthful to pretend to accept what was not really believed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Everything to lose? Yes, indeed. You will be lost for time and lost
+for eternity.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Lost or not,&quot; I rejoined, &quot;I must and will try to find out what is
+true, and I will not believe till I am sure.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;You have no right to make terms with God,&quot; he retorted, &quot;as to what
+you will believe or what you will not believe. You are full of
+intellectual pride.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I sighed hopelessly. Little feeling of pride was there in me just
+then, but only a despairful feeling that in this rigid, unyielding
+dogmatism there was no comprehension of my difficulties, no help for
+me in my strugglings. I rose, and, thanking him for his courtesy, said
+that I would not waste his time further, that I must go home and face
+the difficulties, openly leaving the Church and taking the
+consequences. Then for the first time his serenity was ruffled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;I forbid you to speak of your disbelief,&quot; he cried. &quot;I forbid you to
+lead into your own lost state the souls for whom Christ died.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<a name="04"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="Images/04.jpg" alt="Thomas Scott." width="330" height="397">
+</p>
+<h5>THOMAS SCOTT</h5>
+
+<p>
+Slowly and sadly I took my way back to the station, knowing that my
+last chance of escape had failed me. I recognised in this famous
+divine the spirit of priest-craft, that could be tender and pitiful to
+the sinner, repentant, humble, submissive; but that was iron to the
+doubter, the heretic, and would crush out all questionings of
+&quot;revealed truth,&quot; silencing by force, not by argument, all challenge
+of the traditions of the Church. Out of such men were made the
+Inquisitors of the Middle Ages, perfectly conscientious, perfectly
+rigid, perfectly merciless to the heretic. To them heretics are
+centres of infectious disease, and charity to the heretic is &quot;the
+worst cruelty to the souls of men.&quot; Certain that they hold, &quot;by no
+merit of our own, but by the mercy of our God, the one truth which He
+has revealed,&quot; they can permit no questionings, they can accept nought
+but the most complete submission. But while man aspires after truth,
+while his mind yearns after knowledge, while his intellect soars
+upward into the empyrean of speculation and &quot;beats the air with
+tireless wing,&quot; so long shall those who demand faith from him be met
+by challenge for proof, and those who would blind him shall be
+defeated by his resolve to gaze unblenching on the face of Truth, even
+though her eyes should turn him into stone. It was during this same
+autumn of 1872 that I first met Mr. and Mrs. Scott, introduced to them
+by Mr. Voysey. At that time Thomas Scott was an old man, with
+beautiful white hair, and eyes like those of a hawk gleaming from
+under shaggy eyebrows. He had been a man of magnificent physique, and,
+though his frame was then enfeebled, the splendid lion-like head kept
+its impressive strength and beauty, and told of a unique personality.
+Well born and wealthy, he had spent his earlier life in adventure in
+all parts of the world, and after his marriage he had settled down at
+Ramsgate, and had made his home a centre of heretical thought. His
+wife, &quot;his right hand,&quot; as he justly called her, was young enough to
+be his daughter&mdash;a sweet, strong, gentle, noble woman, worthy of her
+husband, and than that no higher praise could be spoken. Mr. Scott for
+many years issued monthly a series of pamphlets, all heretical, though
+very varying in their shades of thought; all were well written,
+cultured, and polished in tone, and to this rule Mr. Scott made no
+exception; his writers might say what they liked, but they must have
+something to say, and must say it in good English. His correspondence
+was enormous, from Prime Ministers downwards. At his house met people
+of the most varied opinions; it was a veritable heretical <i>salon</i>.
+Colenso of Natal, Edward Maitland, E. Vansittart Neale, Charles Bray,
+Sarah Hennell, and hundreds more, clerics and laymen, scholars and
+thinkers, all coming to this one house, to which the <i>entr&eacute;e</i> was
+gained only by love of Truth and desire to spread Freedom among men.
+For Thomas Scott my first Freethought essay was written a few months
+after, &quot;On the Deity of Jesus of Nazareth,&quot; by the wife of a benefited
+clergyman. My name was not mine to use, so it was agreed that any
+essays from my pen should be anonymous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now came the return to Sibsey, and with it the need for definite
+steps as to the Church. For now I no longer doubted, I had rejected,
+and the time for silence was past. I was willing to attend the Church
+services, taking no part in any not directed to God Himself, but I
+could no longer attend the Holy Communion, for in that service, full
+of recognition of Jesus as Deity and of His atoning sacrifice, I could
+no longer take part without hypocrisy. This was agreed to, and well do
+I remember the pain and trembling wherewith on the first &quot;Sacrament
+Sunday&quot; after my return I rose and left the church. That the vicar's
+wife should &quot;communicate&quot; was as much a matter of course as that the
+vicar should &quot;administer&quot;; I had never done anything in public that
+would draw attention to me, and a feeling of deadly sickness nearly
+overcame me as I made my exit, conscious that every eye was on me, and
+that my non-participation would be the cause of unending comment. As a
+matter of fact, every one naturally thought I was taken suddenly ill,
+and I was overwhelmed with calls and inquiries. To any direct question
+I answered quietly that I was unable to take part in the profession of
+faith required by an honest communicant, but the statement was rarely
+necessary, as the idea of heresy in a vicar's wife is slow to suggest
+itself to the ordinary bucolic mind, and I proffered no information
+where no question was asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It happened that, shortly after that (to me) memorable Christmas of
+1872, a sharp epidemic of typhoid fever broke out in the village of
+Sibsey. The drainage there was of the most primitive type, and the
+contagion spread rapidly. Naturally fond of nursing, I found in this
+epidemic work just fitted to my hand, and I was fortunate enough to be
+able to lend personal help that made me welcome in the homes of the
+stricken poor. The mothers who slept exhausted while I watched beside
+their darlings' bedsides will never, I like to fancy, think
+over-harshly of the heretic whose hand was as tender and often more
+skilful than their own. I think Mother Nature meant me for a nurse,
+for I take a sheer delight in nursing any one, provided only that
+there is peril in the sickness, so that there is the strange and
+solemn feeling of the struggle between the human skill one wields and
+the supreme enemy, Death. There is a strange fascination in fighting
+Death, step by step, and this is of course felt to the full where one
+fights for life as life, and not for a life one loves. When the
+patient is beloved the struggle is touched with agony, but where one
+fights with Death over the body of a stranger there is a weird
+enchantment in the contest without personal pain, and as one forces
+back the hated foe there is a curious triumph in the feeling which
+marks the death-grip yielding up its prey, as one snatches back to
+earth the life which had well-nigh perished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The spring of 1873 brought me knowledge of a power that was to mould
+much of my future life. I delivered my first lecture, but delivered it
+to rows of empty pews in Sibsey Church. A queer whim took me that I
+would like to know how &quot;it felt&quot; to preach, and vague fancies stirred
+in me that I could speak if I had the chance. I saw no platform in the
+distance, nor had any idea of possible speaking in the future dawned
+upon me. But the longing to find outlet in words came upon me, and I
+felt as though I had something to say and was able to say it. So
+locked alone in the great, silent church, whither I had gone to
+practise some organ exercises, I ascended the pulpit steps and
+delivered my first lecture on the Inspiration of the Bible. I shall
+never forget the feeling of power and delight&mdash;but especially of
+power&mdash;that came upon me as I sent my voice ringing down the aisles,
+and the passion in me broke into balanced sentences and never paused
+for musical cadence or for rhythmical expression. All I wanted then
+was to see the church full of upturned faces, alive with throbbing
+sympathy, instead of the dreary emptiness of silent pews. And as
+though in a dream the solitude was peopled, and I saw the listening
+faces and the eager eyes, and as the sentences flowed unbidden from my
+lips and my own tones echoed back to me from the pillars of the
+ancient church, I knew of a verity that the gift of speech was mine,
+and that if ever&mdash;and then it seemed so impossible!&mdash;if ever the
+chance came to me of public work, this power of melodious utterance
+should at least win hearing for any message I had to bring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the knowledge remained a secret all to my own self for many a long
+month, for I quickly felt ashamed of that foolish speechifying in an
+empty church; but, foolish as it was, I note it here, as it was the
+first effort of that expression in spoken words which later became to
+me one of the deepest delights of life. And, indeed, none can know,
+save they who have felt it, what joy there is in the full rush of
+language that moves and sways; to feel a crowd respond to the lightest
+touch; to see the faces brighten or darken at your bidding; to know
+that the sources of human emotion and human passion gush forth at the
+word of the speaker as the stream from the riven rock; to feel that
+the thought which thrills through a thousand hearers has its impulse
+from you, and throbs back to you the fuller from a thousand
+heart-beats. Is there any emotional joy in life more brilliant than
+this, fuller of passionate triumph, and of the very essence of
+intellectual delight?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1873 my marriage tie was broken. I took no new step, but my absence
+from the Communion led to some gossip, and a relative of Mr. Besant
+pressed on him highly-coloured views of the social and professional
+dangers which would accrue if my heresy became known. My health, never
+really restored since the autumn of 1871, grew worse and worse,
+serious heart trouble having arisen from the constant strain under
+which I lived. At last, in July or August, 1873, the crisis came. I
+was told that I must conform to the outward observances of the Church,
+and attend the Communion; I refused. Then came the distinct
+alternative; conformity or exclusion from home&mdash;in other words,
+hypocrisy or expulsion. I chose the latter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A bitterly sad time followed. My dear mother was heart-broken. To her,
+with her wide and vague form of Christianity, loosely held, the
+intensity of my feeling that where I did not believe I would not
+pretend belief, was incomprehensible. She recognised far more fully
+than I did all that a separation from my home meant for me, and the
+difficulties that would surround a young woman, not yet twenty-six,
+living alone. She knew how brutally the world judges, and how the mere
+fact that a woman was young and alone justified any coarseness of
+slander. Then I did not guess how cruel men and women could be, how
+venomous their tongues; now, knowing it, having faced slander and
+lived it down, I deliberately say that were the choice again before me
+I would choose as I chose then; I would rather go through it all again
+than live &quot;in Society&quot; under the burden of an acted lie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hardest struggle was against my mother's tears and pleading; to
+cause her pain was tenfold pain to me. Against harshness I had been
+rigid as steel, but it was hard to remain steadfast when my darling
+mother, whom I loved as I loved nothing else on earth, threw herself
+on her knees before me, imploring me to yield. It seemed like a crime
+to bring such anguish on her; and I felt as a murderer as the snowy
+head was pressed against my knees. And yet&mdash;to live a lie? Not even
+for her was that shame possible; in that worst crisis of blinding
+agony my will clung fast to Truth. And it is true now as it ever was
+that he who loves father or mother better than Truth is not worthy of
+her, and the flint-strewn path of honesty is the way to Light and
+Peace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then there were the children, the two little ones who worshipped me,
+who was to them mother, nurse, and playfellow. Were they, too,
+demanded at my hands? Not wholly&mdash;for a time. Facts which I need not
+touch on here enabled my brother to obtain for me a legal separation,
+and when everything was arranged, I found myself guardian of my little
+daughter, and possessor of a small monthly income sufficient for
+respectable starvation. With a great price I had obtained my freedom,
+but&mdash;I was free. Home, friends, social position, were the price
+demanded and paid, and, being free, I wondered what to do with my
+freedom. I could have had a home with my brother if I would give up my
+heretical friends and keep quiet, but I had no mind to put my limbs
+into fetters again, and in my youthful inexperience I determined to
+find something to do. The difficulty was the &quot;something,&quot; and I spent
+various shillings in agencies, with a quite wonderful unanimity of
+failures. I tried fancy needle-work, offered to &quot;ladies in reduced
+circumstances,&quot; and earned 4s. 6d. by some weeks of stitching. I
+experimented with a Birmingham firm, who generously offered every one
+the opportunity of adding to their incomes, and on sending the small
+fee demanded, received a pencil-case, with an explanation that I was
+to sell little articles of that description, going as far as
+cruet-stands, to my friends. I did not feel equal to springing
+pencil-cases and cruet-stands on my acquaintances, so did not enter on
+that line of business, and similar failures in numerous efforts made
+me feel, as so many others have found, that the world-oyster is hard
+to open. However, I was resolute to build a nest for my wee daughter,
+my mother, and myself, and the first thing to do was to save my
+monthly pittance to buy furniture. I found a tiny house in Colby Road,
+Upper Norwood, near the Scotts, who were more than good to me, and
+arranged to take it in the spring, and then accepted a loving
+invitation to Folkestone, where my grandmother and two aunts were
+living, to look for work there. And found it. The vicar wanted a
+governess, and one of my aunts suggested me as a stop-gap, and thither
+I went with my little Mabel, our board and lodging being payment for
+my work. I became head cook, governess, and nurse, glad enough to have
+found &quot;something to do&quot; that enabled me to save my little income. But
+I do not think I will ever take to cooking for a permanence; broiling
+and frying are all right, and making pie-crust is rather pleasant; but
+saucepans and kettles blister your hands. There is a charm in making a
+stew, to the unaccustomed cook, from the excitement of wondering what
+the result will be, and whether any flavour save that of onions will
+survive the competition in the mixture. On the whole, my cooking
+(strictly by cookery book) was a success, but my sweeping was bad, for
+I lacked muscle. This curious episode came to an abrupt end, for one
+of my little pupils fell ill with diphtheria, and I was transformed
+from cook to nurse. Mabel I despatched to her grandmother, who adored
+her with a love condescendingly returned by the little fairy of three,
+and never was there a prettier picture than the red-gold curls nestled
+against the white, the baby-grace in exquisite contrast with the worn
+stateliness of her tender nurse. Scarcely was my little patient out of
+danger when the youngest boy fell ill of scarlet fever; we decided to
+isolate him on the top floor, and I cleared away carpets and curtains,
+hung sheets over the doorways and kept them wet with chloride of lime,
+shut myself up there with the boy, having my meals left on the
+landing; and when all risk was over, proudly handed back my charge,
+the disease touching no one else in the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now the spring of 1874 had come, and in a few weeks my mother and
+I were to set up house together. How we had planned all, and had
+knitted on the new life together we anticipated to the old one we
+remembered! How we had discussed Mabel's education, and the share
+which should fall to each! Day-dreams; day-dreams! never to be
+realised.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My mother went up to town, and in a week or two I received a telegram,
+saying she was dangerously ill, and as fast as express train would
+take me I was beside her. Dying, the doctor said; three days she might
+live&mdash;no more. I told her the death-sentence, but she said resolutely,
+&quot;I do not feel that I am going to die just yet,&quot; and she was right.
+There was an attack of fearful prostration&mdash;the valves of the heart
+had failed&mdash;a very wrestling with Death, and then the grim shadow drew
+backwards. I nursed her day and night with a very desperation of
+tenderness, for now Fate had touched the thing dearest to me in life.
+A second horrible crisis came, and for the second time her tenacity
+and my love beat back the death-stroke. She did not wish to die, the
+love of life was strong in her; I would not let her die; between us we
+kept the foe at bay. Then dropsy supervened, and the end loomed slowly
+sure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was then, after eighteen months' abstention, that I took the
+Sacrament for the last time. My mother had an intense longing to
+communicate before she died, but absolutely refused to do so unless I
+took it with her. &quot;If it be necessary to salvation,&quot; she persisted,
+doggedly, &quot;I will not take it if darling Annie is to be shut out. I
+would rather be lost with her than saved without her.&quot; I went to a
+clergyman I knew well, and laid the case before him; as I expected, he
+refused to allow me to communicate. I tried a second, with the same
+result. At last a thought struck me. There was Dean Stanley, my
+mother's favourite, a man known to be of the broadest school within
+the Church of England; suppose I asked him? I did not know him, and I
+felt the request would be an impertinence; but there was just the
+chance that he might consent, and what would I not do to make my
+darling's death-bed easier? I said nothing to any one, but set out to
+the Deanery, Westminster, timidly asked for the Dean, and followed the
+servant upstairs with a sinking heart. I was left for a moment alone
+in the library, and then the Dean came in. I don't think I ever in my
+life felt more intensely uncomfortable than I did in that minute's
+interval as he stood waiting for me to speak, his clear, grave,
+piercing eyes gazing questioningly into mine. Very falteringly&mdash;it
+must have been very clumsily&mdash;I preferred my request, stating boldly,
+with abrupt honesty, that I was not a Christian, that my mother was
+dying, that she was fretting to take the Sacrament, that she would not
+take it unless I took it with her, that two clergymen had refused to
+allow me to take part in the service, that I had come to him in
+despair, feeling how great was the intrusion, but&mdash;she was dying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His face changed to a great softness. &quot;You were quite right to come to
+me,&quot; he answered, in that low, musical voice of his, his keen gaze
+having altered into one no less direct, but marvellously gentle. &quot;Of
+course I will go and see your mother, and I have little doubt that, if
+you will not mind talking over your position with me, we may see our
+way clear to doing as your mother wishes.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could barely speak my thanks, so much did the kindly sympathy move
+me; the revulsion from the anxiety and fear of rebuff was strong
+enough to be almost pain. But Dean Stanley did more than I asked. He
+suggested that he should call that afternoon, and have a quiet chat
+with my mother, and then come again on the following day to administer
+the Sacrament.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;A stranger's presence is always trying to a sick person,&quot; he said,
+with rare delicacy of thought, &quot;and, joined to the excitement of the
+service, it might be too much for your dear mother. If I spend half an
+hour with her to-day, and administer the Sacrament to-morrow, it will,
+I think, be better for her.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Dean Stanley came that afternoon, all the way to Brompton, and
+remained talking with my mother for about half an hour, and then set
+himself to understand my own position. He finally told me that conduct
+was far more important than theory, and that he regarded all as
+&quot;Christians&quot; who recognised and tried to follow the moral law of
+Christ. On the question of the absolute Deity of Jesus he laid but
+little stress; Jesus was &quot;in a special sense the Son of God,&quot; but it
+was folly to quarrel over words with only human meanings when dealing
+with the mystery of the Divine existence, and, above all, it was folly
+to make such words into dividing walls between earnest souls. The one
+important matter was the recognition of &quot;duty to God and man,&quot; and all
+who were one in that recognition might rightfully join in an act of
+worship, the essence of which was not acceptance of dogma, but love of
+God and self-sacrifice for man. &quot;The Holy Communion,&quot; he concluded, in
+his soft tones, &quot;was never meant to divide from each other hearts that
+are searching after the one true God. It was meant by its founder as a
+symbol of unity, not of strife.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the following day Dean Stanley celebrated the Holy Communion by the
+bedside of my dear mother, and well was I repaid for the struggle it
+had cost me to ask so great a kindness from a stranger, when I saw the
+comfort that gentle, noble heart had given to her. He soothed away all
+her anxiety about my heresy with tactful wisdom, bidding her have no
+fear of differences of opinion where the heart was set on truth.
+&quot;Remember,&quot; she told me he said to her&mdash;&quot;remember that our God is the
+God of truth, and that therefore the honest search for truth can never
+be displeasing in His eyes.&quot; Once again after that he came, and after
+his visit to my mother we had another long talk. I ventured to ask
+him, the conversation having turned that way, how, with views so broad
+as his, he found it possible to remain in communion with the Church of
+England. &quot;I think,&quot; he answered, gently, &quot;that I am of more service to
+true religion by remaining in the Church and striving to widen its
+boundaries from within, than if I left it and worked from without.&quot;
+And he went on to explain how, as Dean of Westminster, he was in a
+rarely independent position, and could make the Abbey of a wider
+national service than would otherwise be possible. In all he said on
+this his love for and his pride in the glorious Abbey were manifest,
+and it was easy to see that old historical associations, love of
+music, of painting, of stately architecture, were the bonds that held
+him bound to the &quot;old historic Church of England.&quot; His emotions, not
+his intellect, kept him Churchman, and he shrank, with the
+over-sensitiveness of the cultured scholar, from the idea of allowing
+the old traditions to be handled roughly by inartistic hands.
+Naturally of a refined and delicate nature, he had been rendered yet
+more exquisitely sensitive by the training of the college and the
+court; the polished courtesy of his manners was but the natural
+expression of a noble and lofty mind&mdash;a mind whose very gentleness
+sometimes veiled its strength. I have often heard Dean Stanley harshly
+spoken of, I have heard his honesty roughly challenged; but never has
+he been attacked in my presence that I have not uttered my protest
+against the injustice done him, and thus striven to repay some small
+fraction of that great debt of gratitude which I shall ever owe his
+memory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now the end came swiftly. I had hurriedly furnished a couple of
+rooms in the little house, now ours, that I might take my mother into
+the purer air of Norwood, and permission was given to drive her down
+in an invalid carriage. The following evening she was suddenly taken
+worse; we lifted her into bed, and telegraphed for the doctor. But he
+could do nothing, and she herself felt that the hand of Death had
+gripped her. Selfless to the last, she thought but for my loneliness.
+&quot;I am leaving you alone,&quot; she sighed from time to time; and truly I
+felt, with an anguish I did not dare to realise, that when she died I
+should indeed be alone on earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For two days longer she was with me, my beloved, and I never left her
+side for five minutes. On May 10th the weakness passed into gentle
+delirium, but even then the faithful eyes followed me about the room,
+until at length they closed for ever, and as the sun sank low in the
+heavens, the breath came slower and slower, till the silence of Death
+came down upon us and she was gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stunned and dazed with the loss, I went mechanically through the next
+few days. I would have none touch my dead save myself and her
+favourite sister, who was with us at the last. Cold and dry-eyed I
+remained, even when they hid her from me with the coffin-lid, even all
+the dreary way to Kensal Green where her husband and her baby-son were
+sleeping, and when we left her alone in the chill earth, damp with the
+rains of spring. I could not believe that our day-dream was dead and
+buried, and the home in ruins ere yet it was fairly built. Truly, my
+&quot;house was left unto me desolate,&quot; and the rooms, filled with sunshine
+but unlighted by her presence, seemed to echo from their bare walls,
+&quot;You are all alone.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But my little daughter was there, and her sweet face and dancing feet
+broke the solitude, while her imperious claims for love and tendance
+forced me into attention to the daily needs of life. And life was hard
+in those days of spring and summer, resources small, and work
+difficult to find. In truth, the two months after my mother's death
+were the dreariest my life has known, and they were months of
+tolerably hard struggle. The little house in Colby Road taxed my
+slender resources heavily, and the search for work was not yet
+successful. I do not know how I should have managed but for the help
+ever at hand, of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Scott. During this time I wrote
+for Mr. Scott pamphlets on Inspiration, Atonement, Mediation and
+Salvation, Eternal Torture, Religious Education of Children, Natural
+<i>v</i>. Revealed Religion, and the few guineas thus earned were very
+valuable. Their house, too, was always open to me, and this was no
+small help, for often in those days the little money I had was enough
+to buy food for two but not enough to buy it for three, and I would go
+out and study all day at the British Museum, so as to &quot;have my dinner
+in town,&quot; the said dinner being conspicuous by its absence. If I was
+away for two evenings running from the hospitable house in the
+terrace, Mrs. Scott would come down to see what had happened, and many
+a time the supper there was of real physical value to me. Well might I
+write, in 1879, when Thomas Scott lay dead: &quot;It was Thomas Scott whose
+house was open to me when my need was sorest, and he never knew, this
+generous, noble heart, how sometimes, when I went in, weary and
+overdone, from a long day's study in the British Museum, with scarce
+food to struggle through the day&mdash;he never knew how his genial, 'Well,
+little lady,' in welcoming tone, cheered the then utter loneliness of
+my life. To no living man&mdash;save one&mdash;do I owe the debt of gratitude
+that I owe to Thomas Scott.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The small amount of jewellery I possessed, and all my superfluous
+clothes, were turned into more necessary articles, and the child, at
+least, never suffered a solitary touch of want. My servant Mary was a
+wonderful contriver, and kept house on the very slenderest funds that
+could be put into a servant's hands, and she also made the little
+place so bright and fresh-looking that it was always a pleasure to go
+into it. Recalling those days of &quot;hard living,&quot; I can now look on them
+without regret. More, I am glad to have passed through them, for they
+have taught me how to sympathise with those who are struggling as I
+struggled then, and I never can hear the words fall from pale lips, &quot;I
+am hungry,&quot; without remembering how painful a thing hunger is, and
+without curing that pain, at least for the moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The presence of the child was good for me, keeping alive my aching,
+lonely heart: she would play contentedly for hours while I was
+working, a word now and again being enough for happiness; when I had
+to go out without her, she would run to the door with me, and the
+&quot;good-bye&quot; would come from down-curved lips; she was ever watching at
+the window for my return, and the sunny face was always the first to
+welcome me home. Many and many a time have I been coming home, weary,
+hungry, and heart-sick, and the glimpse of the little face watching
+has reminded me that I must not carry in a grave face to sadden my
+darling, and the effort to throw off the depression for her sake threw
+it off altogether, and brought back the sunshine. She was the
+sweetness and joy of my life, my curly-headed darling, with her
+red-gold hair and glorious eyes, and passionate, wilful, loving
+nature. The torn, bruised tendrils of my heart gradually twined round
+this little life; she gave something to love and to tend, and thus
+gratified one of the strongest impulses of my nature.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHVI"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER VI.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+During all these months the intellectual life had not stood still; I
+was slowly, cautiously feeling my way onward. And in the intellectual
+and social side of my life I found a delight unknown in the old days
+of bondage. First, there was the joy of freedom, the joy of speaking
+out frankly and honestly each thought. Truly, I had a right to say:
+&quot;With a great price obtained I this freedom,&quot; and having paid the
+price, I revelled in the liberty I had bought. Mr. Scott's valuable
+library was at my service; his keen brain challenged my opinions,
+probed my assertions, and suggested phases of thought hitherto
+untouched. I studied harder than ever, and the study now was unchecked
+by any fear of possible consequences. I had nothing left of the old
+faith save belief in &quot;a God,&quot; and that began slowly to melt away. The
+Theistic axiom: &quot;If there be a God at all He must be at least as good
+as His highest creature,&quot; began with an &quot;if,&quot; and to that &quot;if&quot; I
+turned my attention. &quot;Of all impossible things,&quot; writes Miss Frances
+Power Cobbe, &quot;the most impossible must surely be that a man should
+dream something of the good and the noble, and that it should prove at
+last that his Creator was less good and less noble than he had
+dreamed.&quot; But, I questioned, are we sure that there is a Creator?
+Granted that, if there is, He must be above His highest creature,
+but&mdash;is there such a being? &quot;The ground,&quot; says the Rev. Charles
+Voysey, &quot;on which our belief in God rests is man. Man, parent of
+Bibles and Churches, inspirer of all good thoughts and good deeds.
+Man, the masterpiece of God's thought on earth. Man, the text-book of
+all spiritual knowledge. Neither miraculous nor infallible, man is
+nevertheless the only trustworthy record of the Divine mind in things
+pertaining to God. Man's reason, conscience, and affections are the
+only true revelation of his Maker.&quot; But what if God were only man's
+own image reflected in the mirror of man's mind? What if man were the
+creator, not the revelation of his God?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was inevitable that such thoughts should arise after the more
+palpably indefensible doctrines of Christianity had been discarded.
+Once encourage the human mind to think, and bounds to the thinking can
+never again be set by authority. Once challenge traditional beliefs,
+and the challenge will ring on every shield which is hanging in the
+intellectual arena. Around me was the atmosphere of conflict, and,
+freed from its long repression, my mind leapt up to share in the
+strife with a joy in the intellectual tumult, the intellectual strain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I often attended South Place Chapel, where Moncure D. Conway was then
+preaching, and discussion with him did something towards widening my
+views on the deeper religious problems; I re-read Dean Mansel's
+&quot;Bampton Lectures,&quot; and they did much towards turning me in the
+direction of Atheism; I re-read Mill's &quot;Examination of Sir William
+Hamilton's Philosophy,&quot; and studied carefully Comte's &quot;Philosophie
+Positive.&quot; Gradually I recognised the limitations of human intelligence
+and its incapacity for understanding the nature of God, presented as
+infinite and absolute; I had given up the use of prayer as a
+blasphemous absurdity, since an all-wise God could not need my
+suggestions, nor an all-good God require my promptings. But God fades
+out of the daily life of those who never pray; a personal God who is
+not a Providence is a superfluity; when from the heaven does not smile
+a listening Father, it soon becomes an empty space, whence resounds no
+echo of man's cry. I could then reach no loftier conception of the
+Divine than that offered by the orthodox, and that broke hopelessly
+away as I analysed it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last I said to Mr. Scott, &quot;Mr. Scott, may I write a tract on the
+nature and existence of God?&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He glanced at me keenly. &quot;Ah, little lady, you are facing, then, that
+problem at last? I thought it must come. Write away.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While this pamphlet was in MS. an event occurred which coloured all my
+succeeding life. I met Charles Bradlaugh. One day in the late spring,
+talking with Mrs. Conway&mdash;one of the sweetest and steadiest natures
+whom it has been my lot to meet, and to whom, as to her husband, I owe
+much for kindness generously shown when I was poor and had but few
+friends&mdash;she asked me if I had been to the Hall of Science, Old
+Street. I answered, with the stupid, ignorant reflection of other
+people's prejudices so sadly common, &quot;No, I have never been there. Mr.
+Bradlaugh is rather a rough sort of speaker, is he not?&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;He is the finest speaker of Saxon-English that I have ever heard,&quot;
+she answered, &quot;except, perhaps, John Bright, and his power over a
+crowd is something marvellous. Whether you agree with him or not, you
+should hear him.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<a name="05"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="Images/05.jpg" alt="Charles Bradlaugh M.P." width="275" height="407">
+</p>
+<h5>CHARLES BRADLAUGH M.P.</h5>
+
+<p>
+In the following July I went into the shop of Mr. Edward Truelove,
+256, High Holborn, in search of some Comtist publications, having come
+across his name as a publisher in the course of my study at the
+British Museum. On the counter was a copy of the <i>National Reformer</i>,
+and, attracted by the title, I bought it. I read it placidly in the
+omnibus on my way to Victoria Station, and found it excellent, and was
+sent into convulsions of inward merriment when, glancing up, I saw an
+old gentleman gazing at me, with horror speaking from every line of
+his countenance. To see a young woman, respectably dressed in crape,
+reading an Atheistic journal, had evidently upset his peace of mind,
+and he looked so hard at the paper that I was tempted to offer it to
+him, but repressed the mischievous inclination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This first copy of the paper with which I was to be so closely
+connected bore date July 19, 1874, and contained two long letters from
+a Mr. Arnold of Northampton, attacking Mr. Bradlaugh, and a brief and
+singularly self-restrained answer from the latter. There was also an
+article on the National Secular Society, which made me aware that
+there was an organisation devoted to the propagandism of Free Thought.
+I felt that if such a society existed, I ought to belong to it, and I
+consequently wrote a short note to the editor of the <i>National
+Reformer</i>, asking whether it was necessary for a person to profess
+Atheism before being admitted to the Society. The answer appeared in
+the <i>National Reformer</i>:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;S.E.&mdash;To be a member of the National Secular Society it is only
+necessary to be able honestly to accept the four principles, as given
+in the <i>National Reformer</i> of June 14th. This any person may do
+without being required to avow himself an Atheist. Candidly, we can
+see no logical resting-place between the entire acceptance of
+authority, as in the Roman Catholic Church, and the most extreme
+Rationalism. If, on again looking to the Principles of the Society,
+you can accept them, we repeat to you our invitation.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I sent my name in as an active member, and find it is recorded in the
+<i>National Reformer</i> of August 9th. Having received an intimation that
+Londoners could receive their certificates at the Hall of Science from
+Mr. Bradlaugh on any Sunday evening, I betook myself thither, and it
+was on August 2, 1874, that I first set foot in a Freethought hall.
+The Hall was crowded to suffocation, and, at the very moment announced
+for the lecture, a roar of cheering burst forth, a tall figure passed
+swiftly up the Hall to the platform, and, with a slight bow in answer
+to the voluminous greeting, Charles Bradlaugh took his seat. I looked
+at him with interest, impressed and surprised. The grave, quiet,
+stern, strong face, the massive head, the keen eyes, the magnificent
+breadth and height of forehead&mdash;was this the man I had heard described
+as a blatant agitator, an ignorant demagogue?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He began quietly and simply, tracing out the resemblances between the
+Krishna and the Christ myths, and as he went from point to point his
+voice grew in force and resonance, till it rang round the hall like a
+trumpet. Familiar with the subject, I could test the value of his
+treatment of it, and saw that his knowledge was as sound as his
+language was splendid. Eloquence, fire, sarcasm, pathos, passion, all
+in turn were bent against Christian superstition, till the great
+audience, carried away by the torrent of the orator's force, hung
+silent, breathing soft, as he went on, till the silence that followed
+a magnificent peroration broke the spell, and a hurricane of cheers
+relieved the tension.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came down the Hall with some certificates in his hand, glanced
+round, and handed me mine with a questioning &quot;Mrs. Besant?&quot; Then he
+said, referring to my question as to a profession of Atheism, that he
+would willingly talk over the subject of Atheism with me if I would
+make an appointment, and offered me a book he had been using in his
+lecture. Long afterwards I asked him how he knew me, whom he had never
+seen, that he came straight to me in such fashion. He laughed and said
+he did not know, but, glancing over the faces, he felt sure that I was
+Annie Besant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From that first meeting in the Hall of Science dated a friendship that
+lasted unbroken till Death severed the earthly bond, and that to me
+stretches through Death's gateway and links us together still. As
+friends, not as strangers, we met&mdash;swift recognition, as it were,
+leaping from eye to eye; and I know now that the instinctive
+friendliness was in very truth an outgrowth of strong friendship in
+other lives, and that on that August day we took up again an ancient
+tie, we did not begin a new one. And so in lives to come we shall meet
+again, and help each other as we helped each other in this. And let me
+here place on record, as I have done before, some word of what I owe
+him for his true friendship; though, indeed, how great is my debt to
+him I can never tell. Some of his wise phrases have ever remained in
+my memory. &quot;You should never say you have an opinion on a subject
+until you have tried to study the strongest things said against the
+view to which you are inclined.&quot; &quot;You must not think you know a
+subject until you are acquainted with all that the best minds have
+said about it.&quot; &quot;No steady work can be done in public unless the
+worker study at home far more than he talks outside.&quot; &quot;Be your own
+harshest judge, listen to your own speech and criticise it; read abuse
+of yourself and see what grains of truth are in it.&quot; &quot;Do not waste
+time by reading opinions that are mere echoes of your own; read
+opinions you disagree with, and you will catch aspects of truth you do
+not readily see.&quot; Through our long comradeship he was my sternest as
+well as gentlest critic, pointing out to me that in a party like ours,
+where our own education and knowledge were above those whom we led, it
+was very easy to gain indiscriminate praise and unstinted admiration;
+on the other hand, we received from Christians equally indiscriminate
+abuse and hatred. It was, therefore, needful that we should be our own
+harshest judges, and that we should be sure that we knew thoroughly
+every subject that we taught. He saved me from the superficiality that
+my &quot;fatal facility&quot; of speech might so easily have induced; and when I
+began to taste the intoxication of easily won applause, his criticism
+of weak points, his challenge of weak arguments, his trained judgment,
+were of priceless service to me, and what of value there is in my work
+is very largely due to his influence, which at once stimulated and
+restrained.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One very charming characteristic of his was his extreme courtesy in
+private life, especially to women. This outward polish, which sat so
+gracefully on his massive frame and stately presence, was foreign
+rather than English&mdash;for the English, as a rule, save such as go to
+Court, are a singularly unpolished people&mdash;and it gave his manner a
+peculiar charm. I asked him once where he had learned his gracious
+fashions that were so un-English&mdash;he would stand with uplifted hat as
+he asked a question of a maidservant, or handed a woman into a
+carriage&mdash;and he answered, with a half-smile, half-scoff, that it was
+only in England he was an outcast from society. In France, in Spain,
+in Italy, he was always welcomed among men and women of the highest
+social rank, and he supposed that he had unconsciously caught the
+foreign tricks of manner. Moreover, he was absolutely indifferent to
+all questions of social position; peer or artisan, it was to him
+exactly the same; he never seemed conscious of the distinctions of
+which men make so much.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our first conversation, after the meeting at the Hall of Science, took
+place a day or two later in his little study in 29, Turner Street,
+Commercial Road, a wee room overflowing with books, in which he looked
+singularly out of place. Later I learned that he had failed in
+business in consequence of Christian persecution, and, resolute to
+avoid bankruptcy, he had sold everything he possessed, save his books,
+had sent his wife and daughters to live in the country with his
+father-in-law, had taken two tiny rooms in Turner Street, where he
+could live for a mere trifle, and had bent himself to the task of
+paying off the liabilities he had incurred&mdash;incurred in consequence of
+his battling for political and religious liberty. I took with me my
+MS. essay &quot;On the Nature and Existence of God,&quot; and it served as the
+basis for our conversation; we found there was little difference in
+our views. &quot;You have thought yourself into Atheism without knowing
+it,&quot; he said, and all that I changed in the essay was the correction
+of the vulgar error that the Atheist says &quot;there is no God,&quot; by the
+insertion of a passage disclaiming this position from an essay pointed
+out to me by Mr. Bradlaugh. And at this stage of my life-story, it is
+necessary to put very clearly the position I took up and held so many
+years as Atheist, because otherwise the further evolution into
+Theosophist will be wholly incomprehensible. It will lead me into
+metaphysics, and to some readers these are dry, but if any one would
+understand the evolution of a Soul he must be willing to face the
+questions which the Soul faces in its growth. And the position of the
+philosophic Atheist is so misunderstood that it is the more necessary
+to put it plainly, and Theosophists, at least, in reading it, will see
+how Theosophy stepped in finally as a further evolution towards
+knowledge, rendering rational, and therefore acceptable, the loftiest
+spirituality that the human mind can as yet conceive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In order that I may not colour my past thinkings by my present
+thought, I take my statements from pamphlets written when I adopted
+the Atheistic philosophy and while I continued an adherent thereof. No
+charge can then be made that I have softened my old opinions for the
+sake of reconciling them with those now held.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHVII"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER VII.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+The first step which leaves behind the idea of a limited and personal
+God, an extra-cosmic Creator, and leads the student to the point
+whence Atheism and Pantheism diverge, is the recognition that a
+profound unity of substance underlies the infinite diversities of
+natural phenomena, the discernment of the One beneath the Many. This
+was the step I had taken ere my first meeting with Charles Bradlaugh,
+and I had written:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;It is manifest to all who will take the trouble to think steadily,
+that there can be only one eternal and underived substance, and that
+matter and spirit must, therefore, only be varying manifestations of
+this one substance. The distinction made between matter and spirit is,
+then, simply made for the sake of convenience and clearness, just as
+we may distinguish perception from judgment, both of which, however,
+are alike processes of thought. Matter is, in its constituent elements,
+the same as spirit; existence is <i>one</i>, however manifold in its
+phenomena; life is one, however multiform in its evolution. As the
+heat of the coal differs from the coal itself, so do memory,
+perception, judgment, emotion, and will differ from the brain which is
+the instrument of thought. But nevertheless they are all equally
+products of the one sole substance, varying only in their
+conditions.... I find myself, then, compelled to believe that one only
+substance exists in all around me; that the universe is eternal, or at
+least eternal so far as our faculties are concerned, since we cannot,
+as some one has quaintly put it, 'get to the outside of everywhere';
+that a Deity cannot be conceived of as apart from the universe; that
+the Worker and the Work are inextricably interwoven, and in some sense
+eternally and indissolubly combined. Having got so far, we will
+proceed to examine into the possibility of proving the existence of
+that one essence popularly called by the name of <i>God</i>, under the
+conditions strictly defined by the orthodox. Having demonstrated, as I
+hope to do, that the orthodox idea of God is unreasonable and absurd,
+we will endeavour to ascertain whether <i>any</i> idea of God, worthy to be
+called an idea, is attainable in the present state of our faculties.&quot;
+&quot;The Deity must of necessity be that one and only substance out of
+which all things are evolved, under the uncreated conditions and
+eternal laws of the universe; He must be, as Theodore Parker somewhat
+oddly puts it, 'the materiality of matter as well as the spirituality
+of spirit'&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>, these must both be products of this one substance;
+a truth which is readily accepted as soon as spirit and matter are
+seen to be but different modes of one essence. Thus we identify
+substance with the all-comprehending and vivifying force of nature,
+and in so doing we simply reduce to a physical impossibility the
+existence of the Being described by the orthodox as a God possessing
+the attributes of personality. The Deity becomes identified with
+nature, co-extensive with the universe, but the <i>God</i> of the orthodox
+no longer exists; we may change the signification of God, and use the
+word to express a different idea, but we can no longer mean by it a
+Personal Being in the orthodox sense, possessing an individuality
+which divides Him from the rest of the universe.&quot;<a href="#FN3"><sup>[3]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Proceeding to search whether <i>any</i> idea of God was attainable, I came
+to the conclusion that evidence of the existence of a conscious Power
+was lacking, and that the ordinary proofs offered were inconclusive;
+that we could grasp phenomena and no more. &quot;There appears, also, to
+be a possibility of a mind in nature, though we have seen that
+intelligence is, strictly speaking, impossible. There cannot be
+perception, memory, comparison, or judgment, but may there not be a
+perfect mind, unchanging, calm, and still? Our faculties fail us when
+we try to estimate the Deity, and we are betrayed into contradictions
+and absurdities; but does it therefore follow that He <i>is</i> not? It
+seems to me that to deny His existence is to overstep the boundaries
+of our thought-power almost as much as to try and define it. We
+pretend to know the Unknown if we declare Him to be the Unknowable.
+Unknowable to us at present, yes! Unknowable for ever, in other
+possible stages of existence? We have reached a region into which we
+cannot penetrate; here all human faculties fail us; we bow our heads
+on 'the threshold of the unknown.'
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+  &quot;'And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see,<br>
+  But if we could see and hear, this vision&mdash;were it not He?'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus sings Alfred Tennyson, the poet of metaphysics: '<i>if</i> we could
+see and hear.' Alas! it is always an 'if!'<a href="#FN4"><sup>[4]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This refusal to believe without evidence, and the declaration that
+anything &quot;behind phenomena&quot; is unknowable to man as at present
+constituted&mdash;these are the two chief planks of the Atheistic platform,
+as Atheism was held by Charles Bradlaugh and myself. In 1876 this
+position was clearly reaffirmed. &quot;It is necessary to put briefly the
+Atheistic position, for no position is more continuously and more
+persistently misrepresented. Atheism is <i>without</i> God. It does not
+assert <i>no</i> God. 'The Atheist does not say &quot;There is no God,&quot; but he
+says, &quot;I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the
+word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation.
+I do not deny God, because I cannot deny that of which I have no
+conception, and the conception of which, by its affirmer, is so
+imperfect that he is unable to define it to me.&quot;' (Charles Bradlaugh,
+&quot;Freethinker's Text-book,&quot; p. 118.) The Atheist neither affirms nor
+denies the possibility of phenomena differing from those recognised by
+human experience.... As his knowledge of the universe is extremely
+limited and very imperfect, the Atheist declines either to deny or to
+affirm anything with regard to modes of existence of which he knows
+nothing. Further, he refuses to believe anything concerning that of
+which he knows nothing, and affirms that that which can never be the
+subject of knowledge ought never to be the object of belief. While the
+Atheist, then, neither affirms nor denies the unknown, he <i>does</i> deny
+all which conflicts with the knowledge to which he has already
+attained. For example, he <i>knows</i> that one is one, and that three
+times one are three; he <i>denies</i> that three times one are, or can be,
+one. The position of the Atheist is a clear and a reasonable one: I
+know nothing about 'God,' and therefore I do not believe in Him or in
+it; what you tell me about your God is self-contradictory, and is
+therefore incredible. I do not deny 'God,' which is an unknown tongue
+to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without
+God.&quot;<a href="#FN5"><sup>[5]</sup></a>
+ Up to 1887 I find myself writing on the same lines: &quot;No man
+can rationally affirm 'There is no God,' until the word 'God' has for
+him a definite meaning, and until everything that exists is known to
+him, and known with what Leibnitz calls 'perfect knowledge.' The
+Atheist's denial of the Gods begins only when these Gods are defined
+or described. Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not
+palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been
+described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human
+thought&mdash;Nor is anything gained by the assertors of Deity when they
+allege that He is incomprehensible. If 'God' exists and is
+incomprehensible, His incomprehensibility is an admirable reason for
+being silent about Him, but can never justify the affirmation of
+self-contradictory propositions, and the threatening of people with
+damnation if they do not accept them.&quot;<a href="#FN6"><sup>[6]</sup></a>
+ &quot;The belief of the Atheist
+stops where his evidence stops. He believes in the existence of the
+universe, judging the accessible proof thereof to be adequate, and he
+finds in this universe sufficient cause for the happening of all
+phenomena. He finds no intellectual satisfaction in placing a gigantic
+conundrum behind the universe, which only adds its own
+unintelligibility to the already sufficiently difficult problem of
+existence. Our lungs are not fitted to breathe beyond the atmosphere
+which surrounds our globe, and our faculties cannot breathe outside
+the atmosphere of the phenomenal.&quot;<a href="#FN7"><sup>[7]</sup></a>
+ And I summed up this essay with
+the words: &quot;I do not believe in God. My mind finds no grounds on which
+to build up a reasonable faith. My heart revolts against the spectre
+of an Almighty Indifference to the pain of sentient beings. My
+conscience rebels against the injustice, the cruelty, the inequality,
+which surround me on every side. But I believe in Man. In man's
+redeeming power; in man's remoulding energy; in man's approaching
+triumph, through knowledge, love, and work.&quot;<a href="#FN8"><sup>[8]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These views of existence naturally colour all views of life and of the
+existence of the Soul. And here steps in the profound difference
+between Atheism and Pantheism; both posit an Existence at present
+inscrutable by human faculties, of which all phenomena are modes; but
+to the Atheist that Existence manifests as Force-Matter, unconscious,
+unintelligent, while to the Pantheist it manifests as Life-Matter,
+conscious, intelligent. To the one, life and consciousness are
+attributes, properties, dependent upon arrangements of matter; to the
+other they are fundamental, essential, and only limited in their
+manifestation by arrangements of matter. Despite the attraction held
+for me in Spinoza's luminous arguments, the over-mastering sway which
+Science was beginning to exercise over me drove me to seek for the
+explanation of all problems of life and mind at the hands of the
+biologist and the chemist. They had done so much, explained so much,
+could they not explain all? Surely, I thought, the one safe ground is
+that of experiment, and the remembered agony of doubt made me very
+slow to believe where I could not prove. So I was fain to regard life
+as an attribute, and this again strengthened the Atheistic position.
+&quot;Scientifically regarded, life is not an entity but a property; it is
+not a mode of existence, but a characteristic of certain modes. Life
+is the result of an arrangement of matter, and when rearrangement
+occurs the former result can no longer be present; we call the result
+of the changed arrangement death. Life and death are two convenient
+words for expressing the general outcome of two arrangements of
+matter, one of which is always found to precede the other.&quot;<a href="#FN9"><sup>[9]</sup></a>
+ And
+then, having resorted to chemistry for one illustration, I took
+another from one of those striking and easily grasped analogies,
+facility for seeing and presenting which has ever been one of the
+secrets of my success as a propagandist. Like pictures, they impress
+the mind of the hearer with a vivid sense of reality. &quot;Every one knows
+the exquisite iridiscence of mother-of-pearl, the tender, delicate
+hues which melt into each other, glowing with soft radiance. How
+different is the dull, dead surface of a piece of wax. Yet take that
+dull, black wax and mould it so closely to the surface of the
+mother-of-pearl that it shall take every delicate marking of the
+shell, and when you raise it the seven-hued glory shall smile at you
+from the erstwhile colourless surface. For, though it be to the naked
+eye imperceptible, all the surface of the mother-of-pearl is in
+delicate ridges and furrows, like the surface of a newly-ploughed
+field; and when the waves of light come dashing up against the ridged
+surface, they are broken like the waves on a shingly shore, and are
+flung backwards, so that they cross each other and the oncoming waves;
+and, as every ray of white light is made up of waves of seven colours,
+and these waves differ in length each from the others, the fairy
+ridges fling them backward separately, and each ray reaches the eye by
+itself; so that the colour of the mother-of-pearl is really the spray
+of the light waves, and comes from arrangement of matter once again.
+Give the dull, black wax the same ridges and furrows, and its glory
+shall differ in nothing from that of the shell. To apply our
+illustration: as the colour belongs to one arrangement of matter and
+the dead surface to another, so life belongs to some arrangements of
+matter and is their resultant, while the resultant of other
+arrangements is death.&quot;<a href="#FN10"><sup>[10]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The same line of reasoning naturally was applied to the existence of
+&quot;spirit&quot; in man, and it was argued that mental activity, the domain of
+the &quot;spirit,&quot; was dependent on bodily organisation. &quot;When the babe is
+born it shows no sign of mind. For a brief space hunger and repletion,
+cold and warmth are its only sensations. Slowly the specialised senses
+begin to function; still more slowly muscular movements, at first
+aimless and reflex, become co-ordinated and consciously directed.
+There is no sign here of an intelligent spirit controlling a
+mechanism; there is every sign of a learning and developing
+intelligence, developing <i>pari passu</i> with the organism of which it is
+a function. As the body grows, the mind grows with it, and the
+childish mind of the child develops into the hasty, quickly-judging,
+half-informed, unbalanced youthful mind of the youth; with maturity of
+years comes maturity of mind, and body and mind are vigorous and in
+their prime. As old age comes on and the bodily functions decay, the
+mind decays also, until age passes into senility, and body and mind
+sink into second childhood. Has the immortal spirit decayed with the
+organisation, or is it dwelling in sorrow, bound in its 'house of
+clay'? If this be so, the 'spirit' must be unconscious, or else
+separate from the very individual whose essence it is supposed to be,
+for the old man does not suffer when his mind is senile, but is
+contented as a little child. And not only is this constant,
+simultaneous growth and decay of body and mind to be observed, but we
+know that mental functions are disordered and suspended by various
+physical conditions. Alcohol, many drugs, fever, disorder the mind; a
+blow on the cranium suspends its functions, and the 'spirit' returns
+with the surgeon's trepanning. Does the 'spirit' take part in dreams?
+Is it absent from the idiot, from the lunatic? Is it guilty of
+manslaughter when the madman murders, or does it helplessly watch its
+own instrument performing actions at which it shudders? If it can only
+work here through an organism, is its nature changed in its
+independent life, severed from all with which it was identified? Can
+it, in its 'disembodied state,' have anything in common with its
+past?&quot;<a href="#FN11"><sup>[11]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It will be seen that my unbelief in the existence of the Soul or
+Spirit was a matter of cold, calm reasoning. As I wrote in 1885: &quot;For
+many of us evidence must precede belief. I would gladly believe in a
+happy immortality for all, as I would gladly believe that all misery
+and crime and poverty will disappear in 1885&mdash;<i>if I could</i>. But I am
+unable to believe an improbable proposition unless convincing evidence
+is brought in support of it. Immortality is most improbable; no
+evidence is brought forward in its favour. I cannot believe only
+because I wish.&quot;<a href="#FN12"><sup>[12]</sup></a>
+ Such was the philosophy by which I lived from
+1874 to 1886, when first some researches that will be dealt with in
+their proper place, and which led me ultimately to the evidence I had
+before vainly demanded, began to shake my confidence in its adequacy.
+Amid outer storm and turmoil and conflict, I found it satisfy my
+intellect, while lofty ideals of morality fed my emotions. I called
+myself Atheist, and rightly so, for I was without God, and my horizon
+was bounded by life on earth; I gloried in the name then, as it is
+dear to my heart now, for all the associations with which it is
+connected. &quot;Atheist is one of the grandest titles a man can wear; it
+is the Order of Merit of the world's heroes. Most great discoverers,
+most deep-thinking philosophers, most earnest reformers, most toiling
+pioneers of progress, have in their turn had flung at them the name of
+Atheist. It was howled over the grave of Copernicus; it was clamoured
+round the death-pile of Bruno; it was yelled at Vanini, at Spinoza, at
+Priestley, at Voltaire, at Paine; it has become the laurel-bay of the
+hero, the halo of the martyr; in the world's history it has meant the
+pioneer of progress, and where the cry of 'Atheist' is raised there
+may we be sure that another step is being taken towards the redemption
+of humanity. The saviours of the world are too often howled at as
+Atheists, and then worshipped as Deities. The Atheists are the
+vanguard of the army of Freethought, on whom falls the brunt of the
+battle, and are shivered the hardest of the blows; their feet trample
+down the thorns that others may tread unwounded; their bodies fill up
+the ditch that, by the bridge thus made, others may pass to victory.
+Honour to the pioneers of progress, honour to the vanguard of
+Liberty's army, honour to those who to improve earth have forgotten
+heaven, and who in their zeal for man have forgotten God.&quot;<a href="#FN13"><sup>[13]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This poor sketch of the conception of the universe, to which I had
+conquered my way at the cost of so much pain, and which was the inner
+centre round which my life revolved for twelve years, may perhaps show
+that the Atheistic Philosophy is misjudged sorely when it is scouted
+as vile or condemned as intellectually degraded. It has outgrown
+anthropomorphic deities, and it leaves us face to face with Nature,
+open to all her purifying, strengthening inspirations. &quot;There is only
+one kind of prayer,&quot; it says, &quot;which is reasonable, and that is the
+deep, silent adoration of the greatness and beauty and order around
+us, as revealed in the realms of non-rational life and in Humanity; as
+we bow our heads before the laws of the universe, and mould our lives
+into obedience to their voice, we find a strong, calm peace steal over
+our hearts, a perfect trust in the ultimate triumph of the right, a
+quiet determination to 'make our lives sublime.' Before our own high
+ideals, before those lives which show us 'how high the tides of Divine
+life have risen in the human world,' we stand with hushed voice and
+veiled face; from them we draw strength to emulate, and even dare
+struggle to excel. The contemplation of the ideal is true prayer; it
+inspires, it strengthens, it ennobles. The other part of prayer is
+work; from contemplation to labour, from the forest to the street.
+Study nature's laws, conform to them, work in harmony with them, and
+work becomes a prayer and a thanksgiving, an adoration of the
+universal wisdom, and a true obedience to the universal law.&quot;<a href="#FN14"><sup>[14]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To a woman of my temperament, filled with passionate desire for the
+bettering of the world, the elevation of humanity, a lofty system of
+ethics was of even more importance than a logical, intellectual
+conception of the universe; and the total loss of all faith in a
+righteous God only made me more strenuously assertive of the binding
+nature of duty and the overwhelming importance of conduct. In 1874
+this conviction found voice in a pamphlet on the &quot;True Basis of
+Morality,&quot; and in all the years of my propaganda on the platform of
+the National Secular Society no subject was more frequently dealt with
+in my lectures than that of human ethical growth and the duty of man
+to man. No thought was more constantly in my mind than that of the
+importance of morals, and it was voiced at the very outset of my
+public career. Speaking of the danger lest &quot;in these stirring times of
+inquiry,&quot; old sanctions of right conduct should be cast aside ere new
+ones were firmly established, I wrote: &quot;It therefore becomes the duty
+of every one who fights in the ranks of Freethought, and who ventures
+to attack the dogmas of the Churches, and to strike down the
+superstitions which enslave men's intellect, to beware how he uproots
+sanctions of morality which he is too weak to replace, or how, before
+he is prepared with better ones, he removes the barriers which do yet,
+however poorly, to some extent check vice and repress crime.... That
+which touches morality touches the heart of society; a high and pure
+morality is the life-blood of humanity; mistakes in belief are
+inevitable, and are of little moment; mistakes in life destroy
+happiness, and their destructive consequences spread far and wide. It
+is, then, a very important question whether we, who are endeavouring
+to take away from the world the authority on which has hitherto been
+based all its morality, can offer a new and firm ground whereupon may
+safely be built up the fair edifice of a noble life.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I then proceeded to analyse revelation and intuition as a basis for
+morals, and, discarding both, I asserted: &quot;The true basis of morality
+is utility; that is, the adaptation of our actions to the promotion of
+the general welfare and happiness; the endeavour so to rule our lives
+that we may serve and bless mankind.&quot; And I argued for this basis,
+showing that the effort after virtue was implied in the search for
+happiness: &quot;Virtue is an indispensable part of all true and solid
+happiness.... But it is, after all, only reasonable that happiness
+should be the ultimate test of right and wrong, if we live, as we do,
+in a realm of law. Obedience to law must necessarily result in
+harmony, and disobedience in discord. But if obedience to law result
+in harmony it must also result in happiness&mdash;all through nature
+obedience to law results in happiness, and through obedience each
+living thing fulfils the perfection of its being, and in that
+perfection finds its true happiness.&quot; It seemed to me most important
+to remove morality from the controversies about religion, and to give
+it a basis of its own: &quot;As, then, the grave subject of the existence
+of Deity is a matter of dispute, it is evidently of deep importance to
+society that morality should not be dragged into this battlefield, to
+stand or totter with the various theories of the Divine nature which
+human thought creates and destroys. If we can found morality on a
+basis apart from theology, we shall do humanity a service which can
+scarcely be overestimated.&quot; A study of the facts of nature, of the
+consequences of man in society, seemed sufficient for such a basis.
+&quot;Our faculties do not suffice to tell us about God; they do suffice to
+study phenomena, and to deduce laws from correlated facts. Surely,
+then, we should do wisely to concentrate our strength and our energies
+on the discovery of the attainable, instead of on the search after the
+unknowable. If we are told that morality consists in obedience to the
+supposed will of a supposed perfectly moral being, because in so doing
+we please God, then we are at once placed in a region where our
+faculties are useless to us, and where our judgment is at fault. But
+if we are told that we are to lead noble lives, because nobility of
+life is desirable for itself alone, because in so doing we are acting
+in harmony with the laws of Nature, because in so doing we spread
+happiness around our pathway and gladden our fellow-men&mdash;then, indeed,
+motives are appealed to which spring forward to meet the call, and
+chords are struck in our hearts which respond in music to the touch.&quot;
+It was to the establishment of this secure basis that I bent my
+energies, this that was to me of supreme moment. &quot;Amid the fervid
+movement of society, with its wild theories and crude social reforms,
+with its righteous fury against oppression and its unconsidered
+notions of wider freedom and gladder life, it is of vital importance
+that morality should stand on a foundation unshakable; that so through
+all political and religious revolutions human life may grow purer and
+nobler, may rise upwards into settled freedom, and not sink downwards
+into anarchy. Only utility can afford us a sure basis, the
+reasonableness of which will be accepted alike by thoughtful student
+and hard-headed artisan. Utility appeals to all alike, and sets in
+action motives which are found equally in every human heart. Well
+shall it be for humanity that creeds and dogmas pass away, that
+superstition vanishes, and the clear light of freedom and science
+dawns on a regenerated earth&mdash;but well only if men draw tighter and
+closer the links of trustworthiness, of honour, and of truth. Equality
+before the law is necessary and just; liberty is the birthright of
+every man and woman; free individual development will elevate and
+glorify the race. But little worth these priceless jewels, little
+worth liberty and equality with all their promise for mankind, little
+worth even wider happiness, if that happiness be selfish, if true
+fraternity, true brotherhood, do not knit man to man, and heart to
+heart, in loyal service to the common need, and generous
+self-sacrifice to the common good.&quot;<a href="#FN15"><sup>[15]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the forwarding of this moral growth of man, two things seemed to me
+necessary&mdash;an Ideal which should stir the emotions and impel to
+action, and a clear understanding of the sources of evil and of the
+methods by which they might be drained. Into the drawing of the first
+I threw all the passion of my nature, striving to paint the Ideal in
+colours which should enthral and fascinate, so that love and desire to
+realise might stir man to effort. If &quot;morality touched by emotion&quot; be
+religion, then truly was I the most religious of Atheists, finding in
+this dwelling on and glorifying of the Ideal full satisfaction for the
+loftiest emotions. To meet the fascination exercised over men's hearts
+by the Man of Sorrows, I raised the image of man triumphant, man
+perfected. &quot;Rightly is the ideal Christian type of humanity a Man of
+Sorrows. Jesus, with worn and wasted body; with sad, thin lips, curved
+into a mournful droop of penitence for human sin; with weary eyes
+gazing up to heaven because despairing of earth; bowed down and aged
+with grief and pain, broken-hearted with long anguish, broken-spirited
+with unresisted ill-usage&mdash;such is the ideal man of the Christian
+creed. Beautiful with a certain pathetic beauty, telling of the long
+travail of earth, eloquent of the sufferings of humanity, but not the
+model type to which men should conform their lives, if they would make
+humanity glorious. And, therefore, in radiant contrast with this,
+stands out in the sunshine and under the blue summer sky, far from
+graveyards and torture of death agony, the fair ideal Humanity of the
+Atheist. In form strong and fair, perfect in physical development as
+the Hercules of Grecian art, radiant with love, glorious in
+self-reliant power; with lips bent firm to resist oppression, and
+melting into soft curves of passion and of pity; with deep, far-seeing
+eyes, gazing piercingly into the secrets of the unknown, and resting
+lovingly on the beauties around him; with hands strong to work in the
+present; with heart full of hope which the future shall realise;
+making earth glad with his labour and beautiful with his skill&mdash;this,
+this is the Ideal Man, enshrined in the Atheist's heart. The ideal
+humanity of the Christian is the humanity of the slave, poor, meek,
+broken-spirited, humble, submissive to authority, however oppressive
+and unjust; the ideal humanity of the Atheist is the humanity of the
+free man who knows no lord, who brooks no tyranny, who relies on his
+own strength, who makes his brother's quarrel his, proud,
+true-hearted, loyal, brave.&quot;<a href="#FN16"><sup>[16]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A one-sided view? Yes. But a very natural outcome of a sunny nature,
+for years held down by unhappiness and the harshness of an outgrown
+creed. It was the rebound of such a nature suddenly set free,
+rejoicing in its liberty and self-conscious strength, and it carried
+with it a great power of rousing the sympathetic enthusiasm of men and
+women, deeply conscious of their own restrictions and their own
+longings. It was the cry of the freed soul that had found articulate
+expression, and the many inarticulate and prisoned souls answered to
+it tumultously, with fluttering of caged wings. With hot insistence I
+battled for the inspiration to be drawn from the beauty and grandeur
+of which human life was capable. &quot;Will any one exclaim, 'You are
+taking all beauty out of human life, all hope, all warmth, all
+inspiration; you give us cold duty for filial obedience, and
+inexorable law in the place of God'? All beauty from life? Is there,
+then, no beauty in the idea of forming part of the great life of the
+universe, no beauty in conscious harmony with Nature, no beauty in
+faithful service, no beauty in ideals of every virtue? 'All hope'?
+Why, I give you more than hope, I give you certainty; if I bid you
+labour for this world, it is with the knowledge that this world will
+repay you a, thousand-fold, because society will grow purer, freedom
+more settled, law more honoured, life more full and glad. What is your
+heaven? A heaven in the clouds! I point to a heaven attainable on
+earth. 'All warmth'? What! you serve warmly a God unknown and
+invisible, in a sense the projected shadow of your own imaginings, and
+can only serve coldly your brother whom you see at your side? There is
+no warmth in brightening the lot of the sad, in reforming abuses, in
+establishing equal justice for rich and poor? You find warmth in the
+church, but none in the home? Warmth in imagining the cloud glories of
+heaven, but none in creating substantial glories on earth?' All
+inspiration'? If you want inspiration to feeling, to sentiment,
+perhaps you had better keep to your Bible and your creeds; if you want
+inspiration to work, go and walk through the East of London, or the
+back streets of Manchester. You are inspired to tenderness as you gaze
+at the wounds of Jesus, dead in Judaea long ago, and find no
+inspiration in the wounds of men and women, dying in the England of
+to-day? You 'have tears to shed for Him,' but none for the sufferer at
+your doors? His passion arouses your sympathies, but you see no pathos
+in the passion of the poor? Duty is colder than 'filial obedience'?
+What do you mean by filial obedience? Obedience to your ideal of
+goodness and love&mdash;is it not so? Then how is duty cold? I offer you
+ideals for your homage: here is Truth for your Mistress, to whose
+exaltation you shall devote your intellect; here is Freedom for your
+General, for whose triumph you shall fight; here is Love for your
+Inspirer, who shall influence your every thought; here is Man for your
+Master&mdash;not in heaven, but on earth&mdash;to whose service you shall
+consecrate every faculty of your being. 'Inexorable law in the place
+of God'? Yes; a stern certainty that you shall not waste your life,
+yet gather a rich reward at the close; that you shall not sow misery,
+yet reap gladness; that you shall not be selfish, yet be crowned with
+love; nor shall you sin, yet find safety in repentance. True, our
+creed <i>is</i> a stern one, stern with the beautiful sternness of Nature.
+But if we be in the right, look to yourselves; laws do not check their
+action for your ignorance; fire will not cease to scorch, because you
+'did not know.'&quot;<a href="#FN17"><sup>[17]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With equal vigour did I maintain that &quot;virtue was its own reward,&quot; and
+that payment on the other side of the grave was unnecessary as an
+incentive to right living. &quot;What shall we say to Miss Cobbe's
+contention that duty will 'grow grey and cold' without God and
+immortality? Yes, for those with whom duty is a matter of selfish
+calculation, and who are virtuous only because they look for a 'golden
+crown' in payment on the other side the grave. Those of us who find
+joy in right-doing, who work because work is useful to our fellows,
+who live well because in such living we pay our contribution to the
+world's wealth, leaving earth richer than we found it&mdash;we need no
+paltry payment after death for our life's labour, for in that labour
+is its own 'exceeding great reward.'&quot;<a href="#FN18"><sup>[18]</sup></a>
+ But did any one yearn for
+immortality, that &quot;not all of me shall die&quot;? &quot;Is it true that Atheism
+has no immortality? What is true immortality? Is Beethoven's true
+immortality in his continued personal consciousness, or in his
+glorious music deathless while the world endures? Is Shelley's true
+life in his existence in some far-off heaven, or in the pulsing
+liberty his lyrics send through men's hearts, when they respond to the
+strains of his lyre? Music does not die, though one instrument be
+broken; thought does not die, though one brain be shivered; love does
+not die, though one heart's strings be rent; and no great thinker dies
+so long as his thought re-echoes through the ages, its melody the
+fuller-toned the more human brains send its music on. Not only to the
+hero and the sage is this immortality given; it belongs to each
+according to the measure of his deeds; world-wide life for world-wide
+service; straitened life for straitened work; each reaps as he sows,
+and the harvest is gathered by each in his rightful order.&quot;<a href="#FN19"><sup>[19]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This longing to leave behind a name that will live among men by right
+of service done them, this yearning for human love and approval that
+springs naturally from the practical and intense realisation of human
+brotherhood&mdash;these will be found as strong motives in the breasts of
+the most earnest men and women who have in our generation identified
+themselves with the Freethought cause. They shine through the written
+and spoken words of Charles Bradlaugh all through his life, and every
+friend of his knows how often he has expressed the longing that &quot;when
+the grass grows green over my grave, men may love me a little for the
+work I tried to do.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Needless to say that, in the many controversies in which I took part,
+it was often urged against me that such motives were insufficient,
+that they appealed only to natures already ethically developed, and
+left the average man, and, above all, the man below the average, with
+no sufficiently constraining motive for right conduct. I resolutely
+held to my faith in human nature, and the inherent response of the
+human heart when appealed to from the highest grounds; strange&mdash;I
+often think now&mdash;this instinctive certainty I had of man's innate
+grandeur, that governed all my thought, inconsistent as that certainty
+was with my belief in his purely animal ancestry. Pressed too hard, I
+would take refuge in a passionate disdain for all who did not hear the
+thrilling voice of Virtue and love her for her own sweet sake. &quot;I have
+myself heard the question asked: 'Why should I seek for truth, and why
+should I lead a good life, if there be no immortality in which to reap
+a reward?' To this question the Freethinker has one clear and short
+answer: 'There is no reason why you should seek Truth, if to you the
+search has no attracting power. There is no reason why you should lead
+a noble life, if you find your happiness in leading a poor and a base
+one.' Friends, no one can enjoy a happiness which is too high for his
+capabilities; a book may be of intensest interest, but a dog will very
+much prefer being given a bone. To him whose highest interest is
+centred in his own miserable self, to him who cares only to gain his
+own ends, to him who seeks only his own individual comfort, to that
+man Freethought can have no attraction. Such a man may indeed be made
+religious by a bribe of heaven; he may be led to seek for truth,
+because he hopes to gain his reward hereafter by the search; but Truth
+disdains the service of the self-seeker; she cannot be grasped by a
+hand that itches for reward. If Truth is not loved for her own pure
+sake, if to lead a noble life, if to make men happier, if to spread
+brightness around us, if to leave the world better than we found
+it&mdash;if these aims have no attraction for us, if these thoughts do not
+inspire us, then we are not worthy to be Secularists, we have no right
+to the proud title of Freethinkers. If you want to be paid for your
+good lives by living for ever in a lazy and useless fashion in an idle
+heaven; if you want to be bribed into nobility of life; if, like silly
+children, you learn your lesson not to gain knowledge but to win
+sugar-plums, then you had better go back to your creeds and your
+churches; they are all you are fit for; you are not worthy to be free.
+But we&mdash;who, having caught a glimpse of the beauty of Truth, deem the
+possession of her worth more than all the world beside; who have made
+up our minds to do our work ungrudgingly, asking for no reward beyond
+the results which spring up from our labour&mdash;we will spread the Gospel
+of Freethought among men, until the sad minor melodies of Christianity
+have sobbed out their last mournful notes on the dying evening breeze,
+and on the fresh morning winds shall ring out the chorus of hope and
+joyfulness, from the glad lips of men whom the Truth has at last set
+free.&quot;<a href="#FN20"><sup>[20]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The intellectual comprehension of the sources of evil and the method
+of its extinction was the second great plank in my ethical platform.
+The study of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, of Huxley, B&uuml;chner and
+Haeckel, had not only convinced me of the truth of evolution, but,
+with help from W.H. Clifford, Lubbock, Buckle, Lecky, and many
+another, had led me to see in the evolution of the social instinct the
+explanation of the growth of conscience and of the strengthening of
+man's mental and moral nature. If man by study of the conditions
+surrounding him and by the application of intelligence to the subdual
+of external nature, had already accomplished so much, why should not
+further persistence along the same road lead to his complete
+emancipation? All the evil, anti-social side of his nature was an
+inheritance from his brute ancestry, and could be gradually
+eradicated; he could not only &quot;let the ape and tiger die,&quot; but he
+could kill them out.&quot; It may be frankly acknowledged that man inherits
+from his brute progenitors various bestial tendencies which are in
+course of elimination. The wild-beast desire to fight is one of these,
+and this has been encouraged, not checked, by religion.... Another
+bestial tendency is the lust of the male for the female apart from
+love, duty, and loyalty; this again has been encouraged by religion,
+as witness the polygamy and concubinage of the Hebrews&mdash;as in Abraham,
+David, and Solomon, not to mention the precepts of the Mosaic
+laws&mdash;the bands of male and female prostitutes in connection with
+Pagan temples, and the curious outbursts of sexual passion in
+connection with religious revivals and missions. Another bestial
+tendency is greed, the strongest grabbing all he can and trampling
+down the weak, in the mad struggle for wealth; how and when has
+religion modified this tendency, sanctified as it is in our present
+civilisation? All these bestial tendencies will be eradicated only by
+the recognition of human duty, of the social bond. Religion has not
+eradicated them, but science, by tracing them to their source in our
+brute ancestry, has explained them and has shown them in their true
+light. As each recognises that the anti-social tendencies are the
+bestial tendencies in man, and that man in evolving further must
+evolve out of these, each also feels it part of his personal duty to
+curb these in himself, and so to rise further from the brute. This
+rational 'co-operation with Nature' distinguishes the scientific from
+the religious person, and this constraining sense of obligation is
+becoming stronger and stronger in all those who, in losing faith in
+God, have gained hope for man.&quot;<a href="#FN21"><sup>[21]</sup></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For this rational setting of oneself on the side of the forces working
+for evolution implied active co-operation by personal purity and
+nobility.&quot; To the Atheist it seems that the knowledge that the
+perfecting of the race is only possible by the improvement of the
+individual, supplies the most constraining motive which can be
+imagined for efforts after personal perfection. The Theist may desire
+personal perfection, but his desire is self-centred; each righteous
+individual is righteous, as it were, alone, and his righteousness does
+not benefit his fellows save as it may make him helpful and loving in
+his dealings with them. The Atheist desires personal perfection not
+only for his joy in it as beautiful in itself, but because science has
+taught him the unity of the race, and he knows that each fresh
+conquest of his over the baser parts of his nature, and each
+strengthening of the higher, is a gain for all, and not for himself
+alone.&quot;<a href="#FN22"><sup>[22]</sup></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Besides all this, the struggle against evil, regarded as transitory
+and as a necessary concomitant of evolution, loses its bitterness. &quot;In
+dealing with evil, Atheism is full of hope instead of despair. To the
+Christian, evil is as everlasting as good; it exists by the permission
+of God, and, therefore, by the will of God. Our nature is corrupt,
+inclined to evil; the devil is ever near us, working all sin and all
+misery. What hope has the Christian face to face with a world's
+wickedness? what answer to the question, Whence comes sin? To the
+Atheist the terrible problem has in it no figure of despair. Evil
+comes from ignorance, we say; ignorance of physical and of moral
+facts. Primarily, from ignorance of physical order; parents who dwell
+in filthy, unventilated, unweathertight houses, who live on
+insufficient, innutritious, unwholesome food, will necessarily be
+unhealthy, will lack vitality, will probably have disease lurking in
+their veins; such parents will bring into the world ill-nurtured
+children, in whom the brain will generally be the least developed part
+of the body; such children, by their very formation, will incline to
+the animal rather than to the human, and by leading an animal, or
+natural, life will be deficient in those qualities which are necessary
+in social life. Their surroundings as they grow up, the home, the
+food, the associates, all are bad. They are trained into vice,
+educated into criminality; so surely as from the sown corn rises the
+wheat-ear, so from the sowing of misery, filth, and starvation shall
+arise crime. And the root of all is poverty and ignorance. Educate the
+children, and give them fair wage for fair work in their maturity, and
+crime will gradually diminish and ultimately disappear. Man is
+God-made, says Theism; man is circumstance-made, says Atheism. Man is
+the resultant of what his parents were, of what his surroundings have
+been and are, and of what they have made him; himself the result of
+the past he modifies the actual, and so the action and reaction go on,
+he himself the effect of what is past, and one of the causes of what
+is to come. Make the circumstances good and the results will be good,
+for healthy bodies and healthy brains may be built up, and from a
+State composed of such the disease of crime will have disappeared.
+Thus is our work full of hope; no terrible will of God have we to
+struggle against; no despairful future to look forward to, of a world
+growing more and more evil, until it is, at last, to burned up; but a
+glad, fair future of an ever-rising race, where more equal laws, more
+general education, more just division, shall eradicate pauperism,
+destroy ignorance, nourish independence, a future to be made the
+grander by our struggles, a future to be made the nearer by our
+toil.&quot;<a href="#FN23"><sup>[23]</sup></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This joyous, self-reliant facing of the world with the resolute
+determination to improve it is characteristic of the noblest Atheism
+of our day. And it is thus a distintly elevating factor in the midst
+of the selfishness, luxury, and greed of modern civilisation. It is a
+virile virtue in the midst of the calculating and slothful spirit
+which too ofter veils itself under the pretence or religion. It will
+have no putting off of justice to a far-off day of reckoning, and it
+is ever spurred on by the feeling, &quot;The night cometh, when no man can
+work.&quot; Bereft of all hope of a personal future, it binds up its hopes
+with that of the race; unbelieving in any aid from Deity, it struggles
+the more strenuously to work out man's salvation by his own strength.
+&quot;To us there is but small comfort in Miss Cobbe's assurance that
+'earth's wrongs and agonies' 'will be righted hereafter.' Granting for
+a moment that man survives death what certainty have we that 'the next
+world' will be any improvement on this? Miss Cobbe assures us that
+this is 'God's world'; whose world will the next be, if not also His?
+Will He be stronger there or better, that He should set right in that
+world the wrongs He has permitted here? Will He have changed His mind,
+or have become weary of the contemplation of suffering? To me the
+thought that the world was in the hands of a God who permitted all the
+present wrongs and pains to exist would be intolerable, maddening in
+its hopelessness. There is every hope of righting earth's wrongs and
+of curing earth's pains if the reason and skill of man which have
+already done so much are free to do the rest; but if they are to
+strive against omnipotence, hopeless indeed is the future of the
+world. It is in this sense that the Atheist looks on good as 'the
+final goal of ill,' and believing that that goal will be reached the
+sooner the more strenuous the efforts of each individual, he works in
+the glad certainty that he is aiding the world's progress thitherward.
+Not dreaming of a personal reward hereafter, not craving a personal
+payment from heavenly treasury, he works and loves, content that he is
+building a future fairer than his present, joyous that he is creating
+a new earth for a happier race.&quot;<a href="#FN24"><sup>[24]</sup></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such was the creed and such the morality which governed my life and
+thoughts from 1874 to 1886, and with some misgivings to 1889, and from
+which I drew strength and happiness amid all outer struggles and
+distress. And I shall ever remain grateful for the intellectual and
+moral training it gave me, for the self-reliance it nurtured, for the
+altruism it inculcated, for the deep feeling of the unity of man that
+it fostered, for the inspiration to work that it lent. And perhaps the
+chief debt of gratitude I owe to Freethought is that it left the mind
+ever open to new truth, encouraged the most unshrinking questioning of
+Nature, and shrank from no new conclusions, however adverse to the
+old, that were based on solid evidence. I admit sorrowfully that all
+Freethinkers do not learn this lesson, but I worked side by side with
+Charles Bradlaugh, and the Freethought we strove to spread was
+strong-headed and broad-hearted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The antagonism which, as we shall see in a few moments, blazed out
+against me from the commencement of my platform work, was based partly
+on ignorance, was partly aroused by my direct attacks on Christianity,
+and by the combative spirit I myself showed in those attacks, and very
+largely by my extreme Radicalism in politics. I had against me all the
+conventional beliefs and traditions of society in general, and I
+attacked them, not with bated breath and abundant apologies, but
+joyously and defiantly, with sheer delight in the intellectual strife.
+I was fired, too, with passionate sympathy for the sufferings of the
+poor, for the overburdened, overdriven masses of the people, not only
+here but in every land, and wherever a blow was struck at Liberty or
+Justice my pen or tongue brake silence. It was a perpetual carrying of
+the fiery cross, and the comfortable did not thank me for shaking them
+out of their soft repose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The antagonism that grew out of ignorance regarded Atheism as implying
+degraded morality and bestial life, and they assailed my conduct not
+on evidence that it was evil, but on the presumption that an Atheist
+must be immoral. Thus a Christian opponent at Leicester assailed me as
+a teacher of free love, fathering on me views which were maintained in
+a book that I had not read, but which, before I had ever seen the
+<i>National Reformer</i>, had been reviewed in its columns&mdash;as it was
+reviewed in other London papers&mdash;and had been commended for its clear
+statement of the Malthusian position, but not for its contention as to
+free love, a theory to which Mr. Bradlaugh was very strongly opposed.
+Nor were the attacks confined to the ascription to me of theories
+which I did not hold, but agents of the Christian Evidence Society, in
+their street preaching, made the foulest accusations against me of
+personal immorality. Remonstrances addressed to the Rev. Mr. Engstr&ouml;m,
+the secretary of the society, brought voluble protestations of
+disavowal and disapproval; but as the peccant agents were continued in
+their employment, the apologies were of small value. No accusation was
+too coarse, no slander too baseless, for circulation by these men; and
+for a long time these indignities caused me bitter suffering,
+outraging my pride, and soiling my good name. The time was to come
+when I should throw that good name to the winds for the sake of the
+miserable, but in those early days I had done nothing to merit, even
+ostensibly, such attacks. Even by educated writers, who should have
+known better, the most wanton accusations of violence and would-be
+destructiveness were brought against Atheists; thus Miss Frances Power
+Cobbe wrote in the <i>Contemporary Review</i> that loss of faith in God
+would bring about the secularisation <i>or destruction</i> of all
+cathedrals, churches, and chapels. &quot;Why,&quot; I wrote in answer, &quot;should
+cathedrals, churches, and chapels be destroyed? Atheism will utilise,
+not destroy, the beautiful edifices which, once wasted on God, shall
+hereafter be consecrated for man. Destroy Westminster Abbey, with its
+exquisite arches, its glorious tones of soft, rich colour, its
+stonework light as if of cloud, its dreamy, subdued twilight, soothing
+as the 'shadow of a great rock in a weary land'? Nay, but reconsecrate
+it to humanity. The fat cherubs who tumble over guns and banners on
+soldiers' graves will fitly be removed to some spot where their clumsy
+forms will no longer mar the upward-springing grace of lines of pillar
+and of arch; but the glorious building wherein now barbaric psalms are
+chanted and droning canons preach of Eastern follies, shall hereafter
+echo the majestic music of Wagner and Beethoven, and the teachers of
+the future shall there unveil to thronging multitudes the beauties and
+the wonders of the world. The 'towers and spires' will not be effaced,
+but they will no longer be symbols of a religion which sacrifices
+earth to heaven and Man to God.&quot;<a href="#FN25"><sup>[25]</sup></a> Between the cultured and the
+uncultured burlesques of Atheism we came off pretty badly, being for
+the most part regarded, as the late Cardinal Manning termed us, as
+mere &quot;cattle.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moral purity and elevation of Atheistic teaching were overlooked
+by many who heard only of my bitter attacks on Christian theology.
+Against the teachings of eternal torture, of the vicarious atonement,
+of the infallibility of the Bible, I levelled all the strength of my
+brain and tongue, and I exposed the history of the Christian Church
+with unsparing hand, its persecutions, its religious wars, its
+cruelties, its oppressions. Smarting under the suffering inflicted on
+myself, and wroth with the cruel pressure continually put on
+Freethinkers by Christian employers, speaking under constant threats
+of prosecution, identifying Christianity with the political and social
+tyrannies of Christendom, I used every weapon that history, science,
+criticism, scholarship could give me against the Churches; eloquence,
+sarcasm, mockery, all were called on to make breaches in the wall of
+traditional belief and crass superstition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To argument and reason I was ever ready to listen, but I turned a
+front of stubborn defiance to all attempts to compel assent to
+Christianity by appeals to force. &quot;The threat and the enforcement of
+legal and social penalties against unbelief can never compel belief.
+Belief must be gained by demonstration; it can never be forced by
+punishment. Persecution makes the stronger among us bitter; the weaker
+among us hypocrites; it never has made and never can make an honest
+convert.&quot;<a href="#FN26"><sup>[26]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That men and women are now able to speak and think as openly as they
+do, that a broader spirit is visible in the Churches, that heresy is
+no longer regarded as morally disgraceful&mdash;these things are very
+largely due to the active and militant propaganda carried on under the
+leadership of Charles Bradlaugh, whose nearest and most trusted friend
+I was. That my tongue was in the early days bitterer than it should
+have been, I frankly acknowledge; that I ignored the services done by
+Christianity and threw light only on its crimes, thus committing
+injustice, I am ready to admit. But these faults were conquered long
+ere I left the Atheistic camp, and they were the faults of my
+personality, not of the Atheistic philosophy. And my main contentions
+were true, and needed to be made; from many a Christian pulpit to-day
+may be heard the echo of the Freethought teachings; men's minds have
+been awakened, their knowledge enlarged; and while I condemn the
+unnecessary harshness of some of my language, I rejoice that I played
+my part in that educating of England which has made impossible for
+evermore the crude superstitions of the past, and the repetition of
+the cruelties and injustices under which preceding heretics suffered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But my extreme political views had also much to do with the general
+feeling of hatred with which I was regarded. Politics, as such, I
+cared not for at all, for the necessary compromises of political life
+were intolerable to me; but wherever they touched on the life of the
+people they became to me of burning interest. The land question, the
+incidence of taxation, the cost of Royalty, the obstructive power of
+the House of Lords&mdash;these were the matters to which I put my hand; I
+was a Home Ruler, too, of course, and a passionate opponent of all
+injustice to nations weaker than ourselves, so that I found myself
+always in opposition to the Government of the day. Against our
+aggressive and oppressive policy in Ireland, in the Transvaal, in
+India, in Afghanistan, in Burmah, in Egypt, I lifted up my voice in
+all our great towns, trying to touch the consciences of the people,
+and to make them feel the immorality of a land-stealing, piratical
+policy. Against war, against capital punishment, against flogging,
+demanding national education instead of big guns, public libraries
+instead of warships&mdash;no wonder I was denounced as an agitator, a
+firebrand, and that all orthodox society turned up at me its most
+respectable nose.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHVIII"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER VIII.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+AT WORK.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+From this sketch of the inner sources of action let me turn to the
+actions themselves, and see how the outer life was led which fed
+itself at these springs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have said that the friendship between Mr. Bradlaugh and myself dated
+from our first meeting, and a few days after our talk in Turner Street
+he came down to see me at Norwood. It was characteristic of the man
+that he refused my first invitation, and bade me to think well ere I
+asked him to my house. He told me that he was so hated by English
+society that any friend of his would be certain to suffer, and that I
+should pay heavily for any friendship extended to him. When, however,
+I wrote to him, repeating my invitation, and telling him that I had
+counted the cost, he came to see me. His words came true; my
+friendship for him alienated from me even many professed Freethinkers,
+but the strength and the happiness of it outweighed a thousand times
+the loss it brought, and never has a shadow of regret touched me that
+I clasped hands with him in 1874, and won the noblest friend that
+woman ever had. He never spoke to me a harsh word; where we differed,
+he never tried to override my judgment, nor force on me his views; we
+discussed all points of difference as equal friends; he guarded me
+from all suffering as far as friend might, and shared with me all the
+pain he could not turn aside; all the brightness of my stormy life
+came to me through him, from his tender thoughtfulness, his ever-ready
+sympathy, his generous love. He was the most unselfish man I ever
+knew, and as patient as he was strong. My quick, impulsive nature
+found in him the restful strength it needed, and learned from him the
+self-control it lacked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was the merriest of companions in our rare hours of relaxation; for
+many years he was wont to come to my house in the morning, after the
+hours always set aside by him for receiving poor men who wanted advice
+on legal and other matters&mdash;for he was a veritable poor man's lawyer,
+always ready to help and counsel&mdash;and, bringing his books and papers,
+he would sit writing, hour after hour, I equally busy with my own
+work, now and then, perhaps, exchanging a word, breaking off just for
+lunch and dinner, and working on again in the evening till about ten
+o'clock&mdash;he always went early to bed when at home&mdash;he would take
+himself off again to his lodgings, about three-quarters of a mile
+away. Sometimes he would play cards for an hour, euchre being our
+favourite game. But while we were mostly busy and grave, we would make
+holiday sometimes, and then he was like a boy, brimming over with
+mirth, full of quaint turns of thought and speech; all the country
+round London has for me bright memories of our wanderings&mdash;Richmond,
+where we tramped across the park, and sat under its mighty trees;
+Windsor, with its groves of bracken; Kew, where we had tea in a funny
+little room, with watercress <i>ad libitum</i>; Hampton Court, with its
+dishevelled beauties; Maidenhead and Taplow, where the river was the
+attraction; and, above all, Broxbourne, where he delighted to spend
+the day with his fishing-rod, wandering along the river, of which he
+knew every eddy. For he was a great fisherman, and he taught me all
+the mysteries of the craft, mirthfully disdainful of my dislike of the
+fish when I had caught them. And in those days he would talk of all
+his hopes of the future, of his work, of his duty to the thousands who
+looked to him for guidance, of the time when he would sit in
+Parliament as member for Northampton, and help to pass into laws the
+projects of reform for which he was battling with pen and tongue. How
+often he would voice his love of England, his admiration of her
+Parliament, his pride in her history. Keenly alive to the blots upon
+it in her sinful wars of conquest, in the cruel wrongs inflicted upon
+subject peoples, he was yet an Englishman to the heart's core, but
+feeling above all the Englishman's duty, as one of a race that had
+gripped power and held it, to understand the needs of those he ruled,
+and to do justice willingly, since compulsion to justice there was
+none. His service to India in the latest years of his life was no
+suddenly accepted task. He had spoken for her, pleaded for her, for
+many a long year, through press and on platform, and his spurs as
+member for India were won long ere he was member of Parliament.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A place on the staff of the <i>National Reformer</i> was offered me by Mr.
+Bradlaugh a few days after our first meeting, and the small weekly
+salary thus earned&mdash;it was only a guinea, for national reformers are
+always poor&mdash;was a very welcome addition to my resources. My first
+contribution appeared in the number for August 30, 1874, over the
+signature of &quot;Ajax,&quot; and I wrote in it regularly until Mr. Bradlaugh
+died; from 1877 until his death I sub-edited it, so as to free him
+from all the technical trouble and the weary reading of copy, and for
+part of this period was also co-editor. I wrote at first under a <i>nom
+de guerre</i>, because the work I was doing for Mr. Scott would have been
+prejudiced had my name appeared in the columns of the terrible
+<i>National Reformer</i>, and until this work&mdash;commenced and paid for&mdash;was
+concluded I did not feel at liberty to use my own name. Afterwards, I
+signed my <i>National Reformer</i> articles, and the tracts written for Mr.
+Scott appeared anonymously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+  The name was suggested by the famous statue of
+  &quot;Ajax Crying for Light,&quot; a cast of which may be seen
+  in the centre walk by any visitor to the Crystal Palace,
+  Sydenham. The cry through the darkness for light,
+  even though light should bring destruction, was one
+  that awoke the keenest sympathy of response from my
+  heart:
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+  &quot;If our fate be death<br>
+  Give light, and let us die!&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To see, to know, to understand, even though the seeing blind, though
+the knowledge sadden, though the understanding shatter the dearest
+hopes&mdash;such has ever been the craving of the upward-striving mind in
+man. Some regard it as a weakness, as a folly, but I am sure that it
+exists most strongly in some of the noblest of our race; that from the
+lips of those who have done most in lifting the burden of ignorance
+from the overstrained and bowed shoulders of a stumbling world has
+gone out most often into the empty darkness the pleading, impassioned
+cry:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Give light!&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The light may come with a blinding flash, but it is light none the
+less, and we can see.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now the time had come when I was to use that gift of speech which
+I had discovered in Sibsey Church that I possessed, and to use it to
+move hearts and brains all over the English land. In 1874, tentatively, and in 1875 definitely, I took up this keen weapon, and have used it ever
+since. My first attempt was at a garden party, in a brief informal
+debate, and I found that words came readily and smoothly: the second
+in a discussion at the Liberal Social Union on the opening of museums
+and art galleries on Sunday. My first lecture was given at the
+Co-operative Institute, 55, Castle Street, Oxford Street, on August
+25, 1874. Mr. Greening&mdash;then, I think, the secretary&mdash;had invited me
+to read a paper before the society, and had left me the choice of the
+subject. I resolved that my first public lecture should be on behalf
+of my own sex, so I selected for my theme, &quot;The Political Status of
+Women,&quot; and wrote thereon a paper. But it was a very nervous person
+who presented herself at the Co-operative Institute on that August
+evening. When a visit to the dentist is made, and one stands on the
+steps outside, desiring to run away ere the neat little boy in buttons
+opens the door and beams on one with a smile of compassionate
+superiority and implike triumph, then the world seems dark and life is
+as a huge blunder. But all such feelings are poor and weak as compared
+with the sinking of the heart and the trembling of the knees which
+seize upon the unhappy lecturer as he advances towards his first
+audience, and as before his eyes rises a ghastly vision of a
+tongue-tied would-be lecturer, facing rows of listening faces,
+listening to&mdash;silence. But to my surprise all this miserable feeling
+vanished the moment I was on my feet and was looking at the faces
+before me. I felt no tremor of nervousness from the first word to the
+last, and as I heard my own voice ring out over the attentive
+listeners I was conscious of power and of pleasure, not of fear. And
+from that day to this my experience has been the same; before a
+lecture I am horribly nervous, wishing myself at the ends of the
+earth, heart beating violently, and sometimes overcome by deadly
+sickness. Once on my feet, I feel perfectly at my ease, ruler of the
+crowd, master of myself. I often jeer at myself mentally as I feel
+myself throbbing and fearful, knowing that when I stand up I shall be
+all right, and yet I cannot conquer the physical terror and trembling,
+illusory as I know them to be. People often say to me, &quot;You look too
+ill to go on the platform.&quot; And I smile feebly and say I am all right,
+and I often fancy that the more miserably nervous I am in the
+ante-room, the better I speak when once on the platform. My second
+lecture was delivered on September 27th, at Mr. Moncure D. Conway's
+Chapel, in St. Paul's Road, Camden Town, and redelivered a few weeks
+later at a Unitarian Chapel, where the Rev. Peter Dean was minister.
+This was on the &quot;True Basis of Morality,&quot; and was later printed as a
+pamphlet, which attained a wide circulation. This was all I did in the
+way of speaking in 1874, but I took silent part in an electioneering
+struggle at Northampton, where a seat for the House of Commons had
+fallen vacant by the death of Mr. Charles Gilpin. Mr. Bradlaugh had
+contested the borough as a Radical in 1868, obtaining 1,086 votes, and
+again in February, 1874, when he received 1,653; of these no less than
+1,060 were plumpers, while his four opponents had only 113, 64, 21 and
+12 plumpers respectively; this band formed the compact and personally
+loyal following which was to win the seat for its chief in 1880, after
+twelve years of steady struggle, and to return him over and over again
+to Parliament during the long contest which followed his election, and
+which ended in his final triumph. They never wavered in their
+allegiance to &quot;our Charlie,&quot; but stood by him through evil report and
+good report, when he was outcast as when he was triumphant, loving him
+with a deep, passionate devotion, as honourable to them as it was
+precious to him. I have seen him cry like a child at evidences of
+their love for him, he whose courage no danger could daunt, and who
+was never seen to blench before hatred nor change his stern immobility
+in the face of his foes. Iron to enmity, he was soft as a woman to
+kindness; unbending as steel to pressure, he was ductile as wax to
+love. John Stuart Mill had the insight in 1868 to see his value, and
+the courage to recognise it. He strongly supported his candidature,
+and sent a donation to his election expenses. In his &quot;Autobiography&quot;
+he wrote (pp. 311, 312):&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;He had the support of the working classes; having heard him speak I
+knew him to be a man of ability, and he had proved that he was the
+reverse of a demagogue by placing himself in strong opposition to the
+prevailing opinion of the Democratic party on two such important
+subjects as Malthusianism and Proportional Representation. Men of this
+sort, who, while sharing the democratic feeling of the working
+classes, judge political questions for themselves, and have the
+courage to assert their individual convictions against popular
+opposition, were needed, as it seemed to me, in Parliament; and I did
+not think that Mr. Bradlaugh's anti-religious opinions (even though he
+had been intemperate in the expression of them) ought to exclude him.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It has been said that Mr. Mill's support of Mr. Bradlaugh's
+candidature at Northampton cost him his own seat at Westminster, and
+so bitter was bigotry at that time that the statement is very likely
+to be true. On this, Mr. Mill himself said: &quot;It was the right thing to
+do, and if the election were yet to take place, I would do it again.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this election of September, 1874&mdash;the second in the year, for the
+general election had taken place in the February, and Mr. Bradlaugh
+had been put up and defeated during his absence in America&mdash;I went
+down to Northampton to report electioneering incidents for the
+<i>National Reformer</i>, and spent some days there in the whirl of the
+struggle. The Whig party was more bitter against Mr. Bradlaugh than
+was the Tory. Strenuous efforts were made to procure a Liberal
+candidate, who would be able at least to prevent Mr. Bradlaugh's
+return, and, by dividing the Liberal and Radical party, should let in
+a Tory rather than the detested Radical. Messrs. Bell and James and
+Dr. Pearce came on the scene only to disappear. Mr. Jacob Bright and
+Mr. Arnold Morley were vainly suggested. Mr. Ayrton's name was
+whispered. Major Lumley was recommended by Mr. Bernal Osborne. Dr.
+Kenealy proclaimed himself ready to come to the rescue of the Whigs.
+Mr. Tillett, of Norwich, Mr. Cox, of Belper, were invited, but neither
+would consent to oppose a good Radical who had fought two elections at
+Northampton and had been the chosen of the Radical workers for six
+years. At last Mr. William Fowler, a banker, accepted the task of
+handing over the representation of a Liberal and Radical borough to a
+Tory, and duly succeeded in giving the seat to Mr. Mereweather, a very
+reputable Tory lawyer. Mr. Bradlaugh polled 1,766, thus adding another
+133 voters to those who had polled for him in the previous February.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That election gave me my first experience of anything in the nature of
+rioting. The violent abuse levelled against Mr. Bradlaugh by the
+Whigs, and the foul and wicked slanders circulated against him,
+assailing his private life and family relations, had angered almost to
+madness those who knew and loved him; and when it was found that the
+unscrupulous Whig devices had triumphed, had turned the election
+against him, and given over the borough to a Tory, the fury broke out
+into open violence. One illustration may be given as a type of these
+cruel slanders. It was known that Mr. Bradlaugh was separated from his
+wife, and it was alleged that being an Atheist, and, (therefore!) an
+opponent of marriage, he had deserted his wife and children, and left
+them to the workhouse. The cause of the separation was known to very
+few, for Mr. Bradlaugh was chivalrously honourable to women, and he
+would not shield his own good name at the cost of that of the wife of
+his youth and the mother of his children. But since his death his only
+remaining child has, in devotion to her father's memory, stated the
+melancholy truth: that Mrs. Bradlaugh gave way to drink; that for long
+years he bore with her and did all that man could do to save her; that
+finally, hopeless of cure, he broke up his home, and placed his wife
+in the care of her parents in the country, leaving her daughters with
+her, while he worked for their support. No man could have acted more
+generously and wisely under these cruel circumstances than he did, but
+it was, perhaps, going to an extreme of Quixotism, that he concealed
+the real state of the case, and let the public blame him as it would.
+His Northampton followers did not know the facts, but they knew him as
+an upright, noble man, and these brutal attacks on his personal
+character drove them wild. Stray fights had taken place during the
+election over these slanders, and, defeated by such foul weapons, the
+people lost control of their passions. As Mr. Bradlaugh was sitting
+well-nigh exhausted in the hotel, after the declaration of the poll,
+the landlord rushed in, crying to him to go out and try to stop the
+people, or there would be murder done at the &quot;Palmerston,&quot; Mr.
+Fowler's headquarters; the crowd was charging the door, and the
+windows were being broken with showers of stones. Weary as he was, Mr.
+Bradlaugh sprang to his feet, and swiftly made his way to the rescue
+of those who had maligned and defeated him. Flinging himself before
+the doorway, from which the door had just been battered down, he
+knocked down one or two of the most violent, drove the crowd back,
+argued and scolded them into quietness, and finally dispersed them.
+But at nine o'clock he had to leave Northampton to catch the mail
+steamer for America at Queenstown, and after he had left, word went
+round that he had gone, and the riot he had quelled broke out afresh.
+The Riot Act was at last read, the soldiers were called out, stones
+flew freely, heads and windows were broken, but no very serious harm
+was done. The &quot;Palmerston&quot; and the printing-office of the <i>Mercury</i>,
+the Whig organ, were the principal sufferers; doors and windows
+disappearing somewhat completely. The day after the election I
+returned home, and soon after fell ill with a severe attack of
+congestion of the lungs. Soon after my recovery I left Norwood and
+settled in a house in Westbourne Terrace, Bayswater, where I remained
+till 1876.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the following January (1875), after much thought and self-analysis,
+I resolved to give myself wholly to propagandist work, as a
+Freethinker and a Social Reformer, and to use my tongue as well as my
+pen in the struggle. I counted the cost ere I determined on this step,
+for I knew that it would not only outrage the feelings of such new
+friends as I had already made, but would be likely to imperil my
+custody of my little girl. I knew that an Atheist was outside the law,
+obnoxious to its penalties, but deprived of its protection, and that
+the step I contemplated might carry me into conflicts in which
+everything might be lost and nothing could be gained. But the desire
+to spread liberty and truer thought among men, to war against bigotry
+and superstition, to make the world freer and better than I found
+it&mdash;all this impelled me with a force that would not be denied. I
+seemed to hear the voice of Truth ringing over the battlefield: &quot;Who
+will go? Who will speak for me?&quot; And I sprang forward with passionate
+enthusiasm, with resolute cry: &quot;Here am I, send me!&quot; Nor have I ever
+regretted for one hour that resolution, come to in solitude, carried
+out amid the surging life of men, to devote to that sacred cause every
+power of brain and tongue that I possessed. Very solemn to me is the
+responsibility of the public teacher, standing forth in Press and on
+platform to partly mould the thought of his time, swaying thousands of
+readers and hearers year after year. No weighter responsibility can
+any take, no more sacred charge. The written and the spoken word start
+forces none may measure, set working brain after brain, influence
+numbers unknown to the forthgiver of the word, work for good or for
+evil all down the stream of time. Feeling the greatness of the career,
+the solemnity of the duty, I pledged my word then to the cause I loved
+that no effort on my part should be wanted to render myself worthy of
+the privilege of service that I took; that I would read and study, and
+would train every faculty that I had; that I would polish my language,
+discipline my thought, widen my knowledge; and this, at least, I may
+say, that if I have written and spoken much, I have studied and
+thought more, and that I have not given to my mistress Truth that
+&quot;which hath cost me nothing.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This same year (1875) that saw me launched on the world as a public
+advocate of Freethought, saw also the founding of the Theosophical
+Society to which my Freethought was to lead me. I have often since
+thought with pleasure that at the very time I began lecturing in
+England, H.P. Blavatsky was at work in the United States, preparing
+the foundation on which in November, 1875, the Theosophical Society
+was to be raised. And with deeper pleasure yet have I found her
+writing of what she called the noble work against superstition done by
+Charles Bradlaugh and myself, rendering the propaganda of Theosophy
+far more practicable and safer than it would otherwise have been. The
+fight soon began, and with some queer little skirmishes. I was a
+member of the &quot;Liberal Social Union,&quot; and one night a discussion arose
+as to the admissibility of Atheists to the Society. Dr. Zerffi
+declared that he would not remain a member if avowed Atheists were
+admitted. I promptly declared that I was an Atheist, and that the
+basis of the union was liberty of opinion. The result was that I found
+myself cold-shouldered, and those that had been warmly cordial to me
+merely as a non-Christian looked askance at me when I had avowed that
+my scepticism had advanced beyond their &quot;limits of religious thought.&quot;
+The Liberal Social Union soon knew me no more, but in the wider field
+of work open before me, the narrow-mindedness of this petty clique
+troubled me not at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I started my definite lecturing work at South Place Chapel in January,
+1875, Mr. Moncure D. Conway presiding for me, and I find in the
+<i>National Reformer</i> for January 17th, the announcement that &quot;Mrs.
+Annie Besant ('Ajax') will lecture at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, on
+'Civil and Religious Liberty.'&quot; Thus I threw off my pseudonym, and
+rode into the field of battle with uplifted visor. The identification
+led to an odd little exhibition of bigotry. I had been invited by the
+Dialectical Society to read a paper, and had selected for subject,
+&quot;The Existence of God.&quot; (It may be noted, in passing, that young
+students and speakers always select the most tremendous subjects for
+their discourses. One advances in modesty as one advances in
+knowledge, and after eighteen years of platform work, I am far more
+dubious than I was at their beginning as to my power of dealing in any
+sense adequately with the problems of life.) The Dialectical Society
+had for some years held their meetings in a room in Adam Street,
+rented from the Social Science Association. When the members gathered
+as usual on February 17th, the door was found to be locked, and they
+had to gather on the stairs; they found that &quot;Ajax's&quot; as yet
+undelivered paper was too much for Social Science nerves, and that
+entrance to their ordinary meeting-room was then and thenceforth
+denied them. So they, with &quot;Ajax,&quot; found refuge at the Charing Cross
+Hotel, and speculated merrily on the eccentricities of religious
+bigotry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On February 12th I started on my first provincial lecturing tour, and
+after speaking at Birkenhead that evening went on by the night mail to
+Glasgow. Some races&mdash;dog races&mdash;I think, had been going on, and very
+unpleasant were many of the passengers waiting on the platform. Some
+Birkenhead friends had secured me a compartment, and watched over me
+till the train began to move. Then, after we had fairly started, the
+door was flung open by a porter, and a man was thrust in who half
+tumbled on to the seat. As he slowly recovered he stood up, and as his
+money rolled out of his hand on to the floor, and he gazed vaguely at
+it, I saw to my horror that he was drunk. The position was not
+pleasant, for the train was an express, and was not timed to stop for
+a considerable time. My odious fellow-passenger spent some time on the
+floor, hunting after his scattered coins; then he slowly gathered
+himself up and presently became conscious of my presence. He studied
+me for some time, and then proposed to shut the window. I assented
+quietly, not wanting to discuss a trifle and feeling in deadly
+terror&mdash;alone at night in an express with a man not drunk enough to be
+helpless, but too drunk to be controlled. Never before nor since have
+I felt so thoroughly frightened. I can see him still, swaying as he
+stood, with eyes bleared and pendulous lips&mdash;but I sat there quiet and
+outwardly unmoved, as is always my impulse in danger till I see some
+way of escape, only grasping a penknife in my pocket, with a desperate
+resolve to use my feeble weapon as soon as the need arose. The man
+came towards me with a fatuous leer, when a jarring noise was heard
+and the train began to slacken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;What is that?&quot; stammered my drunken companion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;They are putting on the brakes to stop the train,&quot; I answered very
+slowly and distinctly, though a very passion of relief made it hard to
+say quietly the measured words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man sat down stupidly, staring at me, and in a minute or two the
+train pulled up at a station&mdash;it had been stopped by signal. My
+immobility was gone. In a moment I was at the window, called the
+guard, and explained rapidly that I was a woman travelling alone, and
+that a half-drunken man was in the carriage. With the usual kindness
+of a railway official, he at once moved me and my baggage into another
+compartment, into which he locked me, and he kept a friendly watch
+over me at every station at which we stopped until he landed me safely
+at Glasgow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At Glasgow a room had been taken for me at a temperance hotel, and it
+seemed to me so new and lonely a thing to be &quot;all on my own account&quot;
+in a strange hotel in a strange city, that I wanted to sit down and
+cry. This feeling, to which I was too proud to yield, was probably
+partly due to the extreme greyness and grubbiness of my surroundings.
+Things are better now, but in those days temperance hotels were for
+the most part lacking in cleanliness. Abstinence from alcohol and a
+superfluity of &quot;matter in the wrong place&quot; do not seem necessary
+correlatives, yet I rarely went to a temperance hotel in which water
+was liberally used for other purposes than that of drinking. From
+Glasgow I went north to Aberdeen, where I found a very stern and
+critical audience. Not a sound broke the stillness as I walked up the
+hall; not a sound as I ascended the platform and faced the people; the
+canny Scot was not going to applaud a stranger at sight; he was going
+to see what she was like first. In grim silence they listened; I could
+not move them; they were granite like their own granite city, and I
+felt I would like to take off my head and throw it at them, if only to
+break that hard wall. After about twenty minutes, a fortunate phrase
+drew a hiss from some child of the Covenanters. I made a quick retort,
+there was a burst of cheering, and the granite vanished. Never after
+that did I have to complain of the coldness of an Aberdeen audience.
+Back to London from Aberdeen, and a long, weary journey it was, in a
+third-class carriage in the cold month of February; but the labour had
+in it a joy that outpaid all physical discomfort, and the feeling that
+I had found my work in the world gave a new happiness to life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On February 28th I stood for the first time on the platform of the
+Hall of Science, Old Street, St. Luke's, London, and was received with
+that warmth of greeting which Secularists are always so ready to
+extend to any who sacrifice aught to join their ranks. That hall is
+identified in my mind with many a bitter struggle, with both victory
+and defeat, but whether in victory or in defeat I found there always
+welcome; and the love and the courage wherewith Secularists stood by
+me have overpaid a thousandfold any poor services I was fortunate
+enough to render, while in their ranks, to the cause of Liberty, and
+wholly prevent any bitterness arising in my mind for any
+unfriendliness shown me by some, who have perhaps overstepped kindness
+and justice in their sorrowful wrath at my renunciation of Materialism
+and Atheism. So far as health was concerned, the lecturing acted as a
+tonic. My chest had always been a little delicate, and when I
+consulted a doctor on the possibility of my standing platform work, he
+answered, &quot;It will either kill you or cure you.&quot; It entirely cured the
+lung weakness, and I grew strong and vigorous instead of being frail
+and delicate, as of old.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It would be wearisome to go step by step over eighteen years of
+platform work, so I will only select here and there incidents
+illustrative of the whole. And here let me say that the frequent
+attacks made on myself and others, that we were attracted to
+Free-thought propaganda by the gains it offered, formed a somewhat
+grotesque contrast to the facts. On one occasion I spent eight days in
+Northumberland and Durham, gave twelve lectures, and made a deficit of
+eleven shillings on the whole. Of course such a thing could not happen
+in later years, when I had made my name by sheer hard work, but I
+fancy that every Secularist lecturer could tell of similar experiences
+in the early days of &quot;winning his way.&quot; The fact is that from Mr.
+Bradlaugh downwards every one of us could have earned a competence
+with comparative ease in any other line of work, and could have earned
+it with public approval instead of amid popular reproach. Much of my
+early lecturing was done in Northumberland and Durham; the miners
+there are, as a rule, shrewd and hard-headed men, and very cordial is
+the greeting given by them to those they have reason to trust. At
+Seghill and at Bedlington I have slept in their cottages and have been
+welcomed to their tables, and I have a vivid memory of one evening at
+Seghill, after a lecture, when my host, himself a miner, invited about
+a dozen of his comrades to supper to meet me; the talk ran on
+politics, and I soon found that my companions knew more of English
+politics, had a far shrewder notion of political methods, and were,
+therefore, much better worth talking to, than most of the ordinary men
+met at dinner parties &quot;in society.&quot; They were of the &quot;uneducated&quot;
+class despised by &quot;gentlemen,&quot; and had not then the franchise, but
+politically they were far better educated than their social superiors,
+and were far better fitted to discharge the duties of citizenship. How
+well, too, do I remember a ten-mile drive in a butcher's cart, to give
+a lecture in an out-of-the-way spot, unapproached by railway. Such was
+the jolting as we rattled over rough roads and stony places, that I
+felt as though all my bones were broken, and as though I should
+collapse on the platform like a bag half-filled with stones. How kind
+they were to me, those genial, cordial miners, how careful for my
+comfort, and how motherly were the women! Ah! if opponents of my views
+who did not know me were often cruel and malignant, there was
+compensation in the love and honour in which good men and women all
+the country over held me, and their devotion outweighed the hatred,
+and many a time and often soothed a weary and aching heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lecturing in June, 1875, at Leicester, I came for the first time
+across a falsehood that brought sore trouble and cost me more pain
+than I care to tell. An irate Christian opponent, in the discussion
+that followed the lecture, declared that I was responsible for a book
+entitled, &quot;The Elements of Social Science,&quot; which was, he averred,
+&quot;The Bible of Secularists.&quot; I had never heard of the book, but as he
+stated that it was in favour of the abolition of marriage, and that
+Mr. Bradlaugh agreed with it, I promptly contradicted him; for while I
+knew nothing about the book, I knew a great deal about Mr. Bradlaugh,
+and I knew that on the marriage question he was conservative rather
+than revolutionary. He detested &quot;Free Love&quot; doctrines, and had thrown
+himself strongly on the side of the agitation led so heroically for
+many years by Mrs. Josephine Butler. On my return to London after the
+lecture I naturally made inquiry as to the volume and its contents,
+and I found that it had been written by a Doctor of Medicine some
+years before, and sent to the <i>National Reformer</i> for review, as to
+other journals, in ordinary course of business. It consisted of three
+parts&mdash;the first advocated, from the standpoint of medical science,
+what is roughly known as &quot;Free Love&quot;; the second was entirely medical;
+the third consisted of a clear and able exposition of the law of
+population as laid down by the Rev. Mr. Malthus, and&mdash;following the
+lines of John Stuart Mill&mdash;insisted that it was the duty of married
+persons to voluntarily limit their families within their means of
+subsistence. Mr. Bradlaugh, in reviewing the book, said that it was
+written &quot;with honest and pure intent and purpose,&quot; and recommended to
+working men the exposition of the law of population. His enemies took
+hold of this recommendation, declared that he shared the author's
+views on the impermanence of the marriage tie, and, despite his
+reiterated contradictions, they used extracts against marriage from
+the book as containing his views. Anything more meanly vile it would
+be difficult to conceive, but such were the weapons used against him
+all his life, and used often by men whose own lives contrasted most
+unfavourably with his own. Unable to find anything in his own writings
+to serve their purpose, they used this book to damage him with those
+who knew nothing at first-hand of his views. What his enemies feared
+were not his views on marriage&mdash;which, as I have said, was
+conservative&mdash;but his Radicalism and his Atheism. To discredit him as
+politician they maligned him socially, and the idea that a man desires
+&quot;to abolish marriage and the home,&quot; is a most convenient poniard, and
+the one most certain to wound. This was the origin of his worst
+difficulties, to be intensified, ere long, by his defence of
+Malthusianism. On me also fell the same lash, and I found myself held
+up to hatred as upholder of views that I abhorred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I may add that far warmer praise than that bestowed on this book by
+Mr. Bradlaugh was given by other writers, who were never attacked in
+the same way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the <i>Reasoner</i>, edited by Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, I find warmer
+praise of it than in the <i>National Reformer</i>; in the review the
+following passage appears:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;In some respects all books of this class are evils: but it would be
+weakness and criminal prudery&mdash;a prudery as criminal as vice
+itself&mdash;not to say that such a book as the one in question is not only
+a far lesser evil than the one that it combats, but in one sense a
+book which it is a mercy to issue and courage to publish.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Examiner</i>, reviewing the same book, declared it to be&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;A very valuable, though rather heterogeneous book.... This is, we
+believe, the only book that has fully, honestly, and in a scientific
+spirit recognised all the elements in the problem&mdash;How are mankind to
+triumph over poverty, with its train of attendant evils?&mdash;and
+fearlessly endeavoured to find a practical solution.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>British Journal of Homoeopathy</i> wrote:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Though quite out of the province of our journal, we cannot refrain
+from stating that this work is unquestionably the most remarkable one,
+in many respects, we have ever met with. Though we differ <i>toto coelo</i>
+from the author in his views of religion and morality, and hold some
+of his remedies to tend rather to a dissolution than a reconstruction
+of society, yet we are bound to admit the benevolence and philanthropy
+of his motives. The scope of the work is nothing less than the whole
+field of political economy.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ernest Jones and others wrote yet more strongly, but out of all these
+Charles Bradlaugh alone has been selected for reproach, and has had
+the peculiar views of the anonymous author fathered on himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some of the lecture work in those days was pretty rough. In Darwen,
+Lancashire, in June, 1875, stone-throwing was regarded as a fair
+argument addressed to the Atheist lecturer. At Swansea, in March,
+1876, the fear of violence was so great that a guarantee against
+damage to the hall was exacted by the proprietor, and no local friend
+had the courage to take the chair for me. In September, 1876, at
+Hoyland, thanks to the exertions of Mr. Hebblethwaite, a Primitive
+Methodist, and two Protestant missionaries, I found the hall packed
+with a crowd that yelled at me with great vigour, stood on forms,
+shook fists at me, and otherwise showed feelings more warm than
+friendly. Taking advantage of a lull in the noise, I began to speak,
+and the tumult sank into quietness; but as I was leaving the hall it
+broke out afresh, and I walked slowly through a crowd that yelled and
+swore and struck at me, but somehow those nearest always shrank back
+and let me pass. In the dark, outside the hall, they took to kicking,
+but only one kick reached me, and the attempts to overturn the cab
+were foiled by the driver, who put his horse at a gallop. Later in the
+same month Mr. Bradlaugh and I visited Congleton together, having been
+invited there by Mr. and Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy. Mr. Bradlaugh
+lectured on the first evening to an accompaniment of broken windows,
+and I, sitting with Mrs. Elmy facing the platform, received a rather
+heavy blow on the back of the head from a stone thrown by some one in
+the room. We had a mile and a half to walk from the hall to the house,
+and were accompanied all the way by a stone-throwing crowd, who sang
+hymns at the tops of their voices, with interludes of curses and foul
+words. On the following evening I lectured, and our stone-throwing
+admirers escorted us to the hall; in the middle of the lecture a man
+shouted, &quot;Put her out!&quot; and a well-known wrestler of the
+neighbourhood, named Burbery, who had come to the hall with some
+friends to break up the meeting, stood up as at a signal in front of
+the platform and loudly interrupted. Mr. Bradlaugh, who was in the
+chair, told him to sit down, and, as he persisted in interrupting,
+informed him that he must either be quiet or go out. &quot;Put me out!&quot;
+shouted Mr. Burbery, striking an attitude. Mr. Bradlaugh left the
+platform and walked up to the noisy swashbuckler, who at once grappled
+with him and tried to throw him. But Mr. Burbery had not reckoned on
+the massive strength of his opponent, and when the &quot;throw&quot; was
+complete Mr. Burbery was underneath. Amid much excitement Mr. Burbery
+was propelled towards the door, being gently used on the way as a
+battering-ram against his friends who rushed to the rescue, and at the
+door was handed over to the police. The chairman then resumed his
+normal duties, with a brief &quot;Go on&quot; to me, and I promptly went on,
+finishing the lecture in peace. But outside the hall there was plenty
+of stone-throwing, and Mrs. Elmy received a cut on the temple from a
+flint. This stormy work gradually lessened, and my experience of it
+was a mere trifle compared to that which my predecessors had faced.
+Mr. Bradlaugh's early experiences involved much serious rioting, and
+Mrs. Harriet Law, a woman of much courage and of strong natural
+ability, had many a rough meeting in her lecturing days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In September, 1875, Mr. Bradlaugh again sailed for America, still to
+earn money there to pay his debts. Unhappily he was struck down by
+typhoid fever, and all his hopes of freeing himself thus were
+destroyed. His life was well-nigh despaired of, but the admirable
+skill of physician and nurse pulled him through. Said the <i>Baltimore
+Advertiser</i>:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;This long and severe illness has disappointed the hopes and retarded
+the object for which he came to this country; but he is gentleness and
+patience itself in his sickness in this strange land, and has endeared
+himself greatly to his physicians and attendants by his gratitude and
+appreciation of the slightest attention.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His fortitude in face of death was also much commented on, lying there
+as he did far from home and from all he loved best. Never a quiver of
+fear touched him as he walked down into the valley of the shadow of
+death; the Rev. Mr. Frothingham bore public and admiring testimony in
+his own church to Mr. Bradlaugh's noble serenity, at once fearless and
+unpretending, and, himself a Theist, gave willing witness to the
+Atheist's calm strength. He came back to us at the end of September,
+worn to a shadow, weak as a child, and for many a long month he bore
+the traces of his wrestle with death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One part of my autumn's work during his absence was the delivery and
+subsequent publication of six lectures on the French Revolution. That
+stormy time had for me an intense fascination. I brooded over it,
+dreamed over it, and longed to tell the story from the people's point
+of view. I consequently read a large amount of the current literature
+of the time, as well as Louis Blanc's monumental work and the
+histories of Michelet, Lamartine, and others. Fortunately for me, Mr.
+Bradlaugh had a splendid collection of books on the subject, and ere
+we left England he brought me two cabs-full of volumes, aristocratic,
+ecclesiastical, democratic, and I studied all these diligently, and
+lived in them, till the French Revolution became to me as a drama in
+which I had myself taken part, and the actors were to me as personal
+friends and foes. In this, again, as in so much of my public work, I
+have to thank Mr. Bradlaugh for the influence which led me to read
+fully all sides of a question, and to read most carefully those from
+which I differed most, ere I considered myself competent to write or
+to speak thereon. From 1875 onwards I held office as one of the
+vice-presidents of the National Secular Society&mdash;a society founded on
+a broad basis of liberty, with the inspiring motto, &quot;We Search for
+Truth.&quot; Mr. Bradlaugh was president, and I held office under him till
+he resigned his post in February, 1890, nine months after I had joined
+the Theosophical Society. The N.S.S., under his judicious and
+far-sighted leadership, became a real force in the country,
+theologically and politically, embracing large numbers of men and
+women who were Freethinkers as well as Radicals, and forming a nucleus
+of earnest workers, able to gather round them still larger numbers of
+others, and thus to powerfully affect public opinion. Once a year the
+society met in conference, and many a strong and lasting friendship
+between men living far apart dated from these yearly gatherings, so
+that all over the country spread a net-work of comradeship between the
+staunch followers of &quot;our Charlie.&quot; These were the men and women who
+paid his election expenses over and over again, supported him in his
+Parliamentary struggle, came up to London to swell the demonstrations
+in his favour. And round them grew up a huge party&mdash;&quot;the largest
+personal following of any public man since Mr. Gladstone,&quot; it was once
+said by an eminent man&mdash;who differed from him in theology, but
+passionately supported him in politics; miners, cutlers, weavers,
+spinners, shoemakers, operatives of every trade, strong, sturdy,
+self-reliant men who loved him to the last.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHIX"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER IX.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+THE KNOWLTON PAMPHLET.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+The year 1877 dawned, and in its early days began a struggle which,
+ending in victory all along the line, brought with it pain and anguish
+that I scarcely care to recall. An American physician, Dr. Charles
+Knowlton, convinced of the truth of the teaching of the Rev. Mr.
+Malthus, and seeing that that teaching had either no practical value
+or tended to the great increase of prostitution, unless married
+people were taught to limit their families within their means of
+livelihood&mdash;wrote a pamphlet on the voluntary limitation of the
+family. It was published somewhere in the Thirties&mdash;about 1835, I
+think&mdash;and was sold unchallenged in England as well as in America for
+some forty years. Philosophers of the Bentham school, like John Stuart
+Mill, endorsed its teachings, and the bearing of population on poverty
+was an axiom in economic literature. Dr. Knowlton's work was a
+physiological treatise, advocating conjugal prudence and parental
+responsibility; it argued in favour of early marriage, with a view to
+the purity of social life; but as early marriage between persons of
+small means generally implies a large family, leading either to
+pauperism or to lack of necessary food, clothing, education, and fair
+start in life for the children, Dr. Knowlton advocated the restriction
+of the number of the family within the means of subsistence, and
+stated the methods by which this restriction could be carried out. The
+book was never challenged till a disreputable Bristol bookseller put
+some copies on sale to which he added some improper pictures, and he
+was prosecuted and convicted. The publisher of the <i>National Reformer</i>
+and of Mr. Bradlaugh's and my books and pamphlets had taken over a
+stock of Knowlton's pamphlets among other literature he bought, and he
+was prosecuted and, to our great dismay, pleaded guilty. We at once
+removed our publishing from his hands, and after careful deliberation
+we decided to publish the incriminated pamphlet in order to test the
+right of discussion on the population question, when, with the advice
+to limit the family, information was given as to how that advice could
+be followed. We took a little shop, printed the pamphlet, and sent
+notice to the police that we would commence the sale at a certain day
+and hour, and ourselves sell the pamphlet, so that no one else might
+be endangered by our action. We resigned our offices in the National
+Secular Society that we might not injure the society, but the
+executive first, and then the Annual Conference, refused to accept the
+resignations. Our position as regarded the pamphlet was simple and
+definite; had it been brought to us for publication, we stated, we
+should not have published it, for it was not a treatise of high merit;
+but, prosecuted as immoral because it advised the limitation of the
+family, it at once embodied the right of publication. In a preface to
+the republished edition, we wrote:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;We republish this pamphlet, honestly believing that on all questions
+affecting the happiness of the people, whether they be theological,
+political, or social, fullest right of free discussion ought to be
+maintained at all hazards. We do not personally endorse all that Dr.
+Knowlton says: his 'Philosophical Proem' seems to us full of
+philosophical mistakes, and&mdash;as we are neither of us doctors&mdash;we are
+not prepared to endorse his medical views; but since progress can only
+be made through discussion, and no discussion is possible where
+differing opinions are suppressed, we claim the right to publish all
+opinions, so that the public, enabled to see all sides of a question,
+may have the materials for forming a sound judgment.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We were not blind to the danger to which this defiance of the
+authorities exposed us, but it was not the danger of failure, with the
+prison as penalty, that gave us pause. It was the horrible
+misconceptions that we saw might arise; the odious imputations on
+honour and purity that would follow. Could we, the teachers of a lofty
+morality, venture to face a prosecution for publishing what would be
+technically described as an obscene book, and risk the ruin of our
+future, dependent as that was on our fair fame? To Mr. Bradlaugh it
+meant, as he felt, the almost certain destruction of his Parliamentary
+position, the forging by his own hands of a weapon that in the hands
+of his foes would be well-nigh fatal. To me it meant the loss of the
+pure reputation I prized, the good name I had guarded&mdash;scandal the
+most terrible a woman could face. But I had seen the misery of the
+poor, of my sister-women with children crying for bread; the wages of
+the workmen were often sufficient for four, but eight or ten they
+could not maintain. Should I set my own safety, my own good name,
+against the helping of these? Did it matter that my reputation should
+be ruined, if its ruin helped to bring remedy to this otherwise
+hopeless wretchedness of thousands? What was worth all my talk about
+self-sacrifice and self-surrender, if, brought to the test, I failed?
+So, with heart aching but steady, I came to my resolution; and though
+I know now that I was wrong intellectually, and blundered in the
+remedy, I was right morally in the will to sacrifice all to help the
+poor, and I can rejoice that I faced a storm of obloquy fiercer and
+harder to bear than any other which can ever touch me again. I learned
+a lesson of stern indifference to all judgments from without that were
+not endorsed by condemnation from within. The long suffering that
+followed was a splendid school for the teaching of endurance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The day before the pamphlet was put on sale we ourselves delivered
+copies to the Chief Clerk of the Magistrates at Guildhall, to the
+officer in charge at the City Police Office in Old Jewry, and to the
+Solicitor for the City of London. With each pamphlet was a notice that
+we would attend and sell the book from 4 to 5 p.m. on the following
+day, Saturday, March 24th. This we accordingly did, and in order to
+save trouble we offered to attend daily at the shop from 10 to 11 a.m.
+to facilitate our arrest, should the authorities determine to
+prosecute. The offer was readily accepted, and after some little
+delay&mdash;during which a deputation from the Christian Evidence Society
+waited upon Mr. Cross to urge the Tory Government to prosecute
+us&mdash;warrants were issued against us and we were arrested on April 6th.
+Letters of approval and encouragement came from the most diverse
+quarters, including among their writers General Garibaldi, the
+well-known economist, Yves Guyot, the great French constitutional
+lawyer, Emile Acollas, together with letters literally by the hundred
+from poor men and women thanking and blessing us for the stand taken.
+Noticeable were the numbers of letters from clergymen's wives, and
+wives of ministers of all denominations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After our arrest we were taken to the police-station in Bridewell
+Place, and thence to the Guildhall, where Alderman Figgins was
+sitting, before whom we duly appeared, while in the back of the court
+waited what an official described as &quot;a regular waggon-load of bail.&quot;
+We were quickly released, the preliminary investigation being fixed
+for ten days later&mdash;April 17th. At the close of the day the magistrate
+released us on our own recognisances, without bail; and it was so
+fully seen on all sides that we were fighting for a principle that no
+bail was asked for during the various stages of the trial. Two days
+later we were committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court, but
+Mr. Bradlaugh moved for a writ of <i>certiorari</i> to remove the trial to
+the Court of Queen's Bench; Lord Chief Justice Cockburn said he would
+grant the writ if &quot;upon looking at it (the book), we think its object
+is the legitimate one of promoting knowledge on a matter of human
+interest,&quot; but not if the science were only a cover for impurity, and
+he directed that copies of the book should be handed in for perusal by
+himself and Mr. Justice Mellor. Having read the book they granted the
+writ.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The trial commenced on June 18th before the Lord Chief Justice of
+England and a special jury, Sir Hardinge Giffard, the
+Solicitor-General of the Tory Government, leading against us, and we
+defending ourselves. The Lord Chief Justice &quot;summed up strongly for an
+acquittal,&quot; as a morning paper said; he declared that &quot;a more
+ill-advised and more injudicious proceeding in the way of a
+prosecution was probably never brought into a court of justice,&quot; and
+described us as &quot;two enthusiasts who have been actuated by a desire to
+do good in a particular department of society.&quot; He then went on to a
+splendid statement of the law of population, and ended by praising our
+straightforwardness and asserting Knowlton's honesty of intention.
+Every one in court thought that we had won our case, but they had not
+taken into account the religious and political hatred against us and
+the presence on the jury of such men as Mr. Walter, of the <i>Times</i>.
+After an hour and thirty-five minutes of delay the verdict was a
+compromise: &quot;We are unanimously of opinion that the book in question
+is calculated to deprave public morals, but at the same time we
+entirely exonerate the defendants from any corrupt motive in
+publishing it.&quot; The Lord Chief Justice looked troubled, and said that
+he should have to translate the verdict into one of guilty, and on
+that some of the jury turned to leave the box, it having been
+agreed&mdash;we heard later from one of them&mdash;that if the verdict were not
+accepted in that form they should retire again, as six of the jury
+were against convicting us; but the foreman, who was bitterly hostile,
+jumped at the chance of snatching a conviction, and none of those in
+our favour had the courage to contradict him on the spur of the
+moment, so the foreman's &quot;Guilty&quot; passed, and the judge set us free,
+on Mr. Bradlaugh's recognisances to come up for judgment that day
+week.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On that day we moved to quash the indictment and for a new trial,
+partly on a technical ground and partly on the ground that the
+verdict, having acquitted us of wrong motive, was in our favour, not
+against us. On this the Court did not agree with us, holding that the
+part of the indictment alleging corrupt motive was superfluous. Then
+came the question of sentence, and on this the Lord Chief Justice did
+his best to save us; we were acquitted of any intent to violate the
+law; would we submit to the verdict of the jury and promise not to
+sell the book? No, we would not; we claimed the right to sell, and
+meant to vindicate it. The judge pleaded, argued, finally got angry
+with us, and, at last, compelled to pass sentence, he stated that if
+we would have yielded he would have let us go free without penalty,
+but that as we would set ourselves against the law, break it and defy
+it&mdash;a sore offence from the judge's point of view&mdash;he could only pass
+a heavy sentence on each of six months' imprisonment, a fine of &pound;200,
+and recognisances of &pound;500 for two years, and this, as he again
+repeated, upon the assumption &quot;that they do intend to set the law at
+defiance.&quot; Even despite this he made us first-class misdemeanants.
+Then, as Mr. Bradlaugh stated that we should move for a writ of error,
+he liberated us on Mr. Bradlaugh's recognisance for &pound;100, the queerest
+comment on his view of the case and of our characters, since we were
+liable jointly to &pound;1,400 under the sentence, to say nothing of the
+imprisonment. But prison and money penalties vanished into thin air,
+for the writ of error was granted, proved successful, and the verdict
+was quashed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then ensued a somewhat anxious time. We were resolute to continue
+selling; were our opponents equally resolved to prosecute us? We could
+not tell. I wrote a pamphlet entitled &quot;The Law of Population,&quot; giving
+the arguments which had convinced me of its truth, the terrible
+distress and degradation entailed on families by overcrowding and the
+lack of the necessaries of life, pleading for early marriages that
+prostitution might be destroyed, and limitation of the family that
+pauperism might be avoided; finally, giving the information which
+rendered early marriage without these evils possible. This pamphlet
+was put in circulation as representing our view of the subject, and we
+again took up the sale of Knowlton's. Mr. Bradlaugh carried the war
+into the enemy's country, and commenced an action against the police
+for the recovery of some pamphlets they had seized; he carried the
+action to a successful issue, recovered the pamphlets, bore them off
+in triumph, and we sold them all with an inscription across them,
+&quot;Recovered from the police.&quot; We continued the sale of Knowlton's tract
+for some time, until we received an intimation that no further
+prosecution would be attempted, and on this we at once dropped its
+publication, substituting for it my &quot;Law of Population.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the worst part of the fight, for me, was to come. Prosecution of
+the &quot;Law of Population&quot; was threatened, but never commenced; a worse
+weapon against me was in store. An attempt had been made in August,
+1875, to deprive me of the custody of my little girl by hiding her
+away when she went on her annual visit of one month to her father, but
+I had promptly recovered her by threatening to issue a writ of <i>habeas
+corpus.</i> Now it was felt that the Knowlton trial might be added to the
+charges of blasphemy that could be urged against me, and that this
+double-barrelled gun might be discharged with effect. I received
+notice in January, 1878, that an application was to be made to the
+High Court of Chancery to deprive me of the child, but the petition
+was not filed till the following April. Mabel was dangerously ill with
+scarlet fever at the time, and though this fact was communicated to
+her father I received a copy of the petition while sitting at her
+bedside. The petition alleged that, &quot;The said Annie Besant is, by
+addresses, lectures, and writings, endeavouring to propagate the
+principles of Atheism, and has published a book entitled 'The Gospel
+of Atheism.' She has also associated herself with an infidel lecturer
+and author named Charles Bradlaugh in giving lectures and in
+publishing books and pamphlets, whereby the truth of the Christian
+religion is impeached, and disbelief in all religion inculcated.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It further alleged against me the publication of the Knowlton
+pamphlet, and the writing of the &quot;Law of Population.&quot; Unhappily, the
+petition came for hearing before the then Master of the Rolls, Sir
+George Jessel, a man animated by the old spirit of Hebrew bigotry, to
+which he had added the time-serving morality of a &quot;man of the world,&quot;
+sceptical as to all sincerity, and contemptuous of all devotion to an
+unpopular cause. The treatment I received at his hands on my first
+appearance in court told me what I had to expect. I had already had
+some experience of English judges, the stately kindness and gentleness
+of the Lord Chief Justice, the perfect impartiality and dignified
+courtesy of the Lords Justices of Appeal. My astonishment, then, can
+be imagined when, in answer to a statement by Mr. Ince, Q.C., that I
+appeared in person, I heard a harsh, loud voice exclaim:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Appear in person? A lady appear in person? Never heard of such a
+thing! Does the lady really appear in person?&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the London papers had been full of my appearing in person in the
+other courts and had contained the high compliments of the Lord Chief
+Justice on my conduct of my own case, Sir George Jessel's pretended
+astonishment seemed a little overdone. After a variety of similar
+remarks delivered in the most grating tones and in the roughest
+manner, Sir George Jessel tried to obtain his object by browbeating me
+directly. &quot;Is this the lady?&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;I am the respondent, my lord, Mrs. Besant.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Then I advise you, Mrs. Besant, to employ counsel to represent you,
+if you can afford it; and I suppose you can.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;With all submission to your lordship, I am afraid I must claim my
+right of arguing my case in person.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;You will do so if you please, of course, but I think you had much
+better appear by counsel. I give you notice that, if you do not, you
+must not expect to be shown any consideration. You will not be heard
+by me at any greater length than the case requires, nor allowed to go
+into irrelevant matter, as persons who argue their own cases usually
+do.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;I trust I shall not do so, my lord; but in any case I shall be
+arguing under your lordship's complete control.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This encouraging beginning may be taken as a sample of the case&mdash;it
+was one long fight against clever counsel, aided by a counsel instead
+of a judge on the bench. Only once did judge and counsel fall out. Mr.
+Ince and Mr. Bardswell had been arguing that my Atheism and
+Malthusianism made me an unfit guardian for my child; Mr. Ince
+declared that Mabel, educated by me, would &quot;be helpless for good in
+this world,&quot; and &quot;hopeless for good hereafter, outcast in this life
+and damned in the next.&quot; Mr. Bardswell implored the judge to consider
+that my custody of her &quot;would be detrimental to the future prospects
+of the child in society, to say nothing of her eternal prospects.&quot; Had
+not the matter been to me of such heart-breaking importance, I could
+have laughed at the mixture of Mrs. Grundy, marriage establishment,
+and hell, presented as an argument for robbing a mother of her child.
+But Mr. Bardswell carelessly forgot that Sir George Jessel was a Jew,
+and lifting eyes to heaven in horrified appeal, he gasped out:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Your lordship, I think, will scarcely credit it, but Mrs. Besant
+says, in a later affidavit, that she took away the Testament from the
+child because it contained coarse passages unfit for a child to read.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The opportunity was too tempting for a Jew to refrain from striking at
+a book written by apostate Jews, and Sir George Jessel answered
+sharply:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;It is not true to say there are no passages unfit for a child's
+reading, because I think there are a great many.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;I do not know of any passages that could fairly be called coarse.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;I cannot quite assent to that.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Barring this little episode judge and counsel showed a charming
+unanimity. I distinctly said I was an Atheist, that I had withdrawn
+the child from religious instruction at the day-school she attended,
+that I had written various anti-Christian books, and so on; but I
+claimed the child's custody on the ground that the deed of separation
+distinctly gave it to me, and had been executed by her father after I
+had left the Christian Church, and that my opinions were not
+sufficient to invalidate it. It was admitted on the other side that
+the child was admirably cared for, and there was no attempt at
+attacking my personal character. The judge stated that I had taken the
+greatest possible care of the child, but decided that the mere fact of
+my refusing to give the child religious instruction was sufficient
+ground for depriving me of her custody. Secular education he regarded
+as &quot;not only reprehensible, but detestable, and likely to work utter
+ruin to the child, and I certainly should upon this ground alone
+decide that this child ought not to remain another day under the care
+of her mother.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sir George Jessel denounced also my Malthusian views in a fashion at
+once so brutal and so untruthful as to facts, that some years later
+another judge, the senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court of New
+South Wales, declared in a judgment delivered in his own court that
+there was &quot;no language used by Lord Cockburn which justified the
+Master of the Rolls in assuming that Lord Cockburn regarded the book
+as obscene,&quot; and that &quot;little weight is to be attached to his opinion
+on a point not submitted for his decision&quot;; he went on to administer a
+sharp rebuke for the way in which Sir George Jessel travelled outside
+the case, and remarked that &quot;abuse, however, of an unpopular opinion,
+whether indulged in by judges or other people, is not argument, nor
+can the vituperation of opponents in opinion prove them to be
+immoral.&quot; However, Sir George Jessel was all-powerful in his own
+court, and he deprived me of my child, refusing to stay the order even
+until the hearing of my appeal against his decision. A messenger from
+the father came to my house, and the little child was carried away by
+main force, shrieking and struggling, still weak from the fever, and
+nearly frantic with fear and passionate resistance. No access to her
+was given me, and I gave notice that if access were denied me, I would
+sue for a restitution of conjugal rights, merely that I might see my
+children. But the strain had been too great, and I nearly went mad,
+spending hours pacing up and down the empty rooms, striving to weary
+myself to exhaustion that I might forget. The loneliness and silence
+of the house, of which my darling had always been the sunshine and the
+music, weighed on me like an evil dream; I listened for the patter of
+the dancing feet, and merry, thrilling laughter that rang through the
+garden, the sweet music of the childish voice; during my sleepless
+nights I missed in the darkness the soft breathing of the little
+child; each morning I longed in vain for the clinging arms and soft,
+sweet kisses. At last health broke down, and fever struck me, and
+mercifully gave me the rest of pain and delirium instead of the agony
+of conscious loss. Through that terrible illness, day after day, Mr.
+Bradlaugh came to me, and sat writing beside me, feeding me with ice
+and milk, refused from all others, and behaving more like a tender
+mother than a man friend; he saved my life, though it seemed to me for
+awhile of little value, till the first months of lonely pain were
+over. When recovered, I took steps to set aside an order obtained by
+Mr. Besant during my illness, forbidding me to bring any suit against
+him, and even the Master of the Rolls, on hearing that all access had
+been denied to me, and the money due to me stopped, uttered words of
+strong condemnation of the way in which I had been treated. Finally
+the deed of separation executed in 1873 was held to be good as
+protecting Mr. Besant from any suit brought by me, whether for divorce
+or for restitution of conjugal rights, while the clauses giving me the
+custody of the child were set aside. The Court of Appeal in April,
+1879, upheld the decision, the absolute right of the father as against
+a married mother being upheld. This ignoring of all right to her
+children on the part of the married mother is a scandal and a wrong
+that has since been redressed by Parliament, and the husband has no
+longer in his grasp this instrument of torture, whose power to agonise
+depends on the tenderness and strength of the motherliness of the
+wife. In the days when the law took my child from me, it virtually
+said to all women: &quot;Choose which of these two positions, as wife and
+mother, you will occupy. If you are legally your husband's wife, you
+can have no legal claim to your children; if legally you are your
+husband's mistress, your rights as mother are secure.&quot; That stigma on
+marriage is now removed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One thing I gained in the Court of Appeal. The Court expressed a
+strong view as to my right of access, and directed me to apply to Sir
+George Jessel for it, adding that it could not doubt he would grant
+it. Under cover of this I applied to the Master of the Rolls, and
+obtained liberal access to the children; but I found that my visits
+kept Mabel in a continual state of longing and fretting for me, while
+the ingenious forms of petty insult that were devised against me and
+used in the children's presence would soon become palpable to them and
+cause continual pain. So, after a painful struggle with myself, I
+resolved to give up the right of seeing them, feeling that thus only
+could I save them from constantly recurring conflict, destructive of
+all happiness and of all respect for one or the other parent.
+Resolutely I turned my back on them that I might spare them trouble,
+and determined that, robbed of my own, I would be a mother to all
+helpless children I could aid, and cure the pain at my own heart by
+soothing the pain of others.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As far as regards this whole struggle over the Knowlton pamphlet,
+victory was finally won all along the line. Not only did we, as
+related, recover all our seized pamphlets, and continue the sale till
+all prosecution and threat of prosecution were definitely surrendered;
+but my own tract had an enormous sale, so that when I withdrew it from
+sale in June, 1891, I was offered a large sum for the copyright, an
+offer which I, of course, refused. Since that time not a copy has been
+sold with my knowledge or permission, but long ere that the pamphlet
+had received a very complete legal vindication. For while it
+circulated untouched in England, a prosecution was attempted against
+it in New South Wales, but was put an end to by an eloquent and
+luminous judgment by the senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court, Mr.
+Justice Windmeyer, in December, 1888. This judge, the most respected
+in the great Australian colony, spoke out plainly and strongly on the
+morality of such teaching. &quot;Take the case,&quot; he said, &quot;of a woman
+married to a drunken husband, steadily ruining his constitution and
+hastening to the drunkard's doom, loss of employment for himself,
+semi-starvation for his family, and finally death, without a shilling
+to leave those whom he has brought into the world, but armed with the
+authority of the law to treat his wife as his slave, ever brutally
+insisting on the indulgence of his marital rights. Where is the
+immorality, if, already broken in health from unresting maternity,
+having already a larger family than she can support when the miserable
+breadwinner has drunk himself to death, the woman avails herself of
+the information given in this book, and so averts the consequences of
+yielding to her husband's brutal insistence on his marital rights?
+Already weighted with a family that she is unable to decently bring
+up, the immorality, it seems to me, would be in the reckless and
+criminal disregard of precautions which would prevent her bringing
+into the world daughters whose future outlook as a career would be
+prostitution, or sons whose inherited taint of alcoholism would soon
+drag them down with their sisters to herd with the seething mass of
+degenerate and criminal humanity that constitutes the dangerous
+classes of great cities. In all these cases the appeal is from
+thoughtless, unreasoning prejudice to conscience, and, if listened to,
+its voice will be heard unmistakably indicating where the path of duty
+lies.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The judge forcibly refused to be any party to the prohibition of such
+a pamphlet, regarding it as of high service to the community. He said:
+&quot;So strong is the dread of the world's censure upon this topic that
+few have the courage openly to express their views upon it; and its
+nature is such that it is only amongst thinkers who discuss all
+subjects, or amongst intimate acquaintances, that community of thought
+upon the question is discovered. But let any one inquire amongst those
+who have sufficient education and ability to think for themselves, and
+who do not idly float, slaves to the current of conventional opinion,
+and he will discover that numbers of men and women of purest lives, of
+noblest aspirations, pious, cultivated, and refined, see no wrong in
+teaching the ignorant that it is wrong to bring into the world
+children to whom they cannot do justice, and who think it folly to
+stop short in telling them simply and plainly how to prevent it. A
+more robust view of morals teaches that it is puerile to ignore human
+passions and human physiology. A clearer perception of truth and the
+safety of trusting to it teaches that in law, as in religion, it is
+useless trying to limit the knowledge of mankind by any inquisitorial
+attempts to place upon a judicial Index Expurgatorius works written
+with an earnest purpose, and commending themselves to thinkers of
+well-balanced minds. I will be no party to any such attempt. I do not
+believe that it was ever meant that the Obscene Publication Act should
+apply to cases of this kind, but only to the publication of such
+matter as all good men would regard as lewd and filthy, to lewd and
+bawdy novels, pictures and exhibitions, evidently published and given
+for lucre's sake. It could never have been intended to stifle the
+expression of thought by the earnest-minded on a subject of
+transcendent national importance like the present, and I will not
+strain it for that purpose. As pointed out by Lord Cockburn in the
+case of the Queen v. Bradlaugh and Besant, all prosecutions of this
+kind should be regarded as mischievous, even by those who disapprove
+the opinions sought to be stifled, inasmuch as they only tend more
+widely to diffuse the teaching objected to. To those, on the other
+hand, who desire its promulgation, it must be a matter of
+congratulation that this, like all attempted persecutions of thinkers,
+will defeat its own object, and that truth, like a torch, 'the more
+it's shook it shines.'&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The argument of Mr. Justice Windmeyer for the Neo-Malthusian position
+was (as any one may see who reads the full text of the judgment) one
+of the most luminous and cogent I have ever read. The judgment was
+spoken of at the time in the English press as a &quot;brilliant triumph for
+Mrs. Besant,&quot; and so I suppose it was; but no legal judgment could
+undo the harm wrought on the public mind in England by malignant and
+persistent misrepresentation. What that trial and its results cost me
+in pain no one but myself will ever know; on the other hand, there was
+the passionate gratitude evidenced by letters from thousands of poor
+married women&mdash;many from the wives of country clergymen and
+curates&mdash;thanking and blessing me for showing them how to escape from
+the veritable hell in which they lived. The &quot;upper classes&quot; of society
+know nothing about the way in which the poor live; how their
+overcrowding destroys all sense of personal dignity, of modesty, of
+outward decency, till human life, as Bishop Fraser justly said, is
+&quot;degraded below the level of the swine.&quot; To such, and among such I
+went, and I could not grudge the price that then seemed to me as the
+ransom for their redemption. To me, indeed, it meant the losing of all
+that made life dear, but for them it seemed to be the gaining of all
+that gave hope of a better future. So how could I hesitate&mdash;I whose
+heart had been fired by devotion to an ideal Humanity, inspired by
+that Materialism that is of love and not of hate?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now, in August, 1893, we find the <i>Christian World,</i> the
+representative organ of orthodox Christian Protestantism, proclaiming
+the right and the duty of voluntary limitation of the family. In a
+leading article, after a number of letters had been inserted, it
+said:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;The conditions are assuredly wrong which bring one member of the
+married partnership into a bondage so cruel. It is no less evident
+that the cause of the bondage in such cases lies in the too rapid
+multiplication of the family. There was a time when any idea of
+voluntary limitation was regarded by pious people as interfering with
+Providence. We are beyond that now, and have become capable of
+recognising that Providence works through the common sense of
+individual brains. We limit population just as much by deferring
+marriage from prudential motives as by any action that may be taken
+after it.... Apart from certain methods of limitation, the morality of
+which is gravely questioned by many, there are certain
+easily-understood physiological laws of the subject, the failure to
+know and to observe which is inexcusable on the part either of men or
+women in these circumstances. It is worth noting in this connection
+that Dr. Billings, in his article in this month's <i>Forum</i>, on the
+diminishing birth-rate of the United States, gives as one of the
+reasons the greater diffusion of intelligence, by means of popular and
+school treatises on physiology, than formerly prevailed.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus has opinion changed in sixteen years, and all the obloquy poured
+on us is seen to have been the outcome of ignorance and bigotry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for the children, what was gained by their separation from me? The
+moment they were old enough to free themselves, they came back to me,
+my little girl's too brief stay with me being ended by her happy
+marriage, and I fancy the fears expressed for her eternal future will
+prove as groundless as the fears for her temporal ruin have proved to
+be! Not only so, but both are treading in my steps as regards their
+views of the nature and destiny of man, and have joined in their
+bright youth the Theosophical Society to which, after so many
+struggles, I won my way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The struggle on the right to discuss the prudential restraint of
+population did not, however, conclude without a martyr. Mr. Edward
+Truelove, alluded to above, was prosecuted for selling a treatise by
+Robert Dale Owen on &quot;Moral Physiology,&quot; and a pamphlet entitled,
+&quot;Individual, Family, and National Poverty.&quot; He was tried on February
+1, 1878, before the Lord Chief Justice in the Court of Queen's Bench,
+and was most ably defended by Professor W.A. Hunter. The jury spent
+two hours in considering their verdict, and returned into court and
+stated that they were unable to agree. The majority of the jury were
+ready to convict, if they felt sure that Mr. Truelove would not be
+punished, but one of them boldly declared in court: &quot;As to the book,
+it is written in plain language for plain people, and I think that
+many more persons ought to know what the contents of the book are.&quot;
+The jury was discharged, in consequence of this one man's courage, but
+Mr. Truelove's persecutors&mdash;the Vice Society&mdash;were determined not to
+let their victim free. They proceeded to trial a second time, and
+wisely endeavoured to secure a special jury, feeling that as
+prudential restraint would raise wages by limiting the supply of
+labour, they would be more likely to obtain a verdict from a jury of
+&quot;gentlemen&quot; than from one composed of workers. This attempt was
+circumvented by Mr. Truelove's legal advisers, who let a <i>procedendo</i>
+go which sent back the trial to the Old Bailey. The second trial was
+held on May 16th at the Central Criminal Court before Baron Pollock
+and a common jury, Professor Hunter and Mr. J.M. Davidson appearing
+for the defence. The jury convicted, and the brave old man,
+sixty-eight years of age, was condemned to four months' imprisonment
+and &pound;50 fine for selling a pamphlet which had been sold unchallenged,
+during a period of forty-five years, by James Watson, George Jacob
+Holyoake, Austin Holyoake, and Charles Watts. Mr. Grain, the counsel
+employed by the Vice Society, most unfairly used against Mr. Truelove
+my &quot;Law of Population,&quot; a pamphlet which contained, Baron Pollock
+said, &quot;the head and front of the offence in the other [the Knowlton]
+case.&quot; I find an indignant protest against this odious unfairness in
+the <i>National Reformer</i> for May 19th: &quot;My 'Law of Population' was used
+against Mr. Truelove as an aggravation of his offence, passing over
+the utter meanness&mdash;worthy only of Collette&mdash;of using against a
+prisoner a book whose author has never been attacked for writing
+it&mdash;does Mr. Collette, or do the authorities, imagine that the
+severity shown to Mr. Truelove will in any fashion deter me from
+continuing the Malthusian propaganda? Let me here assure them, one and
+all, that it will do nothing of the kind; I shall continue to sell the
+'Law of Population' and to advocate scientific checks to population,
+just as though Mr. Collette and his Vice Society were all dead and
+buried. In commonest justice they are bound to prosecute me, and if
+they get, and keep, a verdict against me, and succeed in sending me to
+prison, they will only make people more anxious to read my book, and
+make me more personally powerful as a teacher of the views which they
+attack.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A persistent attempt was made to obtain a writ of error in Mr.
+Truelove's case, but the Tory Attorney-General, Sir John Holker,
+refused it, although the ground on which it was asked was one of the
+grounds on which a similar writ had been granted to Mr. Bradlaugh and
+myself. Mr. Truelove was therefore compelled to suffer his sentence,
+but memorials, signed by 11,000 persons, asking for his release, were
+sent to the Home Secretary from every part of the country, and a
+crowded meeting in St. James's Hall, London, demanded his liberation
+with only six dissentients. The whole agitation did not shorten Mr.
+Truelove's sentence by a single day, and he was not released from
+Coldbath Fields Prison until September 5th. On the 12th of the same
+month the Hall of Science was crowded with enthusiastic friends, who
+assembled to do him honour, and he was presented with a
+beautifully-illuminated address and a purse containing &pound;177
+(subsequent subscriptions raised the amount to &pound;197 16s. 6d.).
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is scarcely necessary to say that one of the results of the
+prosecution was a great agitation throughout the country, and a wide
+popularisation of Malthusian views. Some huge demonstrations were held
+in favour of free discussion; on one occasion the Free Trade Hall,
+Manchester, was crowded to the doors; on another the Star Music Hall,
+Bradford, was crammed in every corner; on another the Town Hall,
+Birmingham, had not a seat or a bit of standing-room unoccupied.
+Wherever we went, separately or together, it was the same story, and
+not only were Malthusian lectures eagerly attended, and Malthusian
+literature eagerly bought, but curiosity brought many to listen to our
+Radical and Freethought lectures, and thousands heard for the first
+time what Secularism really meant. The Press, both London and
+provincial, agreed in branding the prosecution as foolish, and it was
+generally remarked that it resulted only in the wider circulation of
+the indicted book, and the increased popularity of those who had stood
+for the right of publication. The furious attacks since made upon us
+have been made chiefly by those who differ from us in theological
+creed, and who have found a misrepresentation of our prosecution
+served them as a convenient weapon of attack. During the last few
+years public opinion has been gradually coming round to our side, in
+consequence of the pressure of poverty resulting from widespread
+depression of trade, and during the sensation caused in 1884 by &quot;The
+Bitter Cry of Outcast London,&quot; many writers in the <i>Daily
+News</i>&mdash;notably Mr. G.R. Sims&mdash;boldly alleged that the distress was to
+a great extent due to the large families of the poor, and mentioned
+that we had been prosecuted for giving the very knowledge which would
+bring salvation to the sufferers in our great cities.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Among the useful results of the prosecution was the establishment of
+the Malthusian League, &quot;to agitate for the abolition of all penalties
+on the public discussion of the population question,&quot; and &quot;to spread
+among the people, by all practicable means, a knowledge of the law of
+population, of its consequences, and of its bearing upon human conduct
+and morals.&quot; The first general meeting of the League was held at the
+Hall of Science on July 26, 1877, and a council of twenty persons was
+elected, and this council on August 2nd elected Dr. C.R. Drysdale,
+M.D., President; Mr. Swaagman, Treasurer; Mrs. Besant, Secretary; Mr.
+Shearer, Assistant-Secretary; and Mr. Hember, Financial Secretary.
+Since 1877 the League, under the same indefatigable president, has
+worked hard to carry out its objects; it has issued a large number of
+leaflets and tracts; it supports a monthly journal, the <i>Malthusian</i>;
+numerous lectures have been delivered under its auspices in all parts
+of the country; and it has now a medical branch, into which none but
+duly qualified medical men and women are admitted, with members in all
+European countries.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another result of the prosecution was the accession of &quot;D.&quot; to the
+staff of the <i>National Reformer</i>. This able and thoughtful writer came
+forward and joined our ranks as soon as he heard of the attack on us,
+and he further volunteered to conduct the journal during our expected
+imprisonment. From that time to this&mdash;a period of fifteen
+years&mdash;articles from his pen appeared in its columns week by week, and
+during all that time not one solitary difficulty arose between editors
+and contributor. In public a trustworthy colleague, in private a warm
+and sincere friend, &quot;D.&quot; proved an unmixed benefit bestowed upon us by
+the prosecution.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor was &quot;D.&quot; the only friend brought to us by our foes. I cannot ever
+think of that time without remembering that the prosecution brought me
+first into close intimacy with Mrs. Annie Parris&mdash;the wife of Mr.
+Touzeau Parris, the Secretary of the Defence Committee throughout all
+the fight&mdash;a lady who, during that long struggle, and during the, for
+me, far worse struggle that succeeded it, over the custody of my
+daughter, proved to me the most loving and sisterly of friends. One or
+two other friendships which will, I hope, last my life, date from that
+same time of strife and anxiety.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The amount of money subscribed by the public during the Knowlton and
+succeeding prosecutions gives some idea of the interest felt in the
+struggle. The Defence Fund Committee in March, 1878, presented a
+balance-sheet, showing subscriptions amounting to &pound;1,292 5s. 4d., and
+total expenditure in the Queen v. Bradlaugh and Besant, the Queen v.
+Truelove, and the appeal against Mr. Vaughan's order (the last two up
+to date) of &pound;1,274 10s. This account was then closed and the balance
+of &pound;17 15s. 4d. passed on to a new fund for the defence of Mr.
+Truelove, the carrying on of the appeal against the destruction of the
+Knowlton pamphlet, and the bearing of the costs incident on the
+petition lodged against myself. In July this new fund had reached &pound;196
+16s. 7d., and after paying the remainder of the costs in Mr.
+Truelove's case, a balance of &pound;26 15s. 2d. was carried on. This again
+rose to &pound;247 15s. 2&frac12;d., and the fund bore the expenses of Mr.
+Bradlaugh's successful appeal on the Knowlton pamphlet, the petition
+and subsequent proceedings in which I was concerned in the Court of
+Chancery, and an appeal on Mr. Truelove's behalf, unfortunately
+unsuccessful, against an order for the destruction of the Dale Owen
+pamphlet. This last decision was given on February 21, 1880, and on
+this the Defence Fund was closed. On Mr. Truelove's release, as
+mentioned above, a testimonial to the amount of &pound;197 16s. 6d. was
+presented to him, and after the close of the struggle some anonymous
+friend sent to me personally &pound;200 as &quot;thanks for the courage and
+ability shown.&quot; In addition to all this, the Malthusian League
+received no less than &pound;455 11s. 9d. during the first year of its life,
+and started on its second year with a balance in hand of &pound;77 5s. 8d.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A somewhat similar prosecution in America, in which the bookseller,
+Mr. D.M. Bennett, sold a book with which he did not agree, and was
+imprisoned, led to our giving him a warm welcome when, after his
+release, he visited England. We entertained him at the Hall of Science
+at a crowded gathering, and I was deputed as spokesman to present him
+with a testimonial. This I did in the following speech, quoted here in
+order to show the spirit then animating me:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Friends, Mr. Bradlaugh has spoken of the duty that calls us here
+to-night. It is pleasant to think that in our work that duty is one to
+which we are not unaccustomed. In our army there are more true
+soldiers than traitors, more that are faithful to the trust of keeping
+the truth than those who shrink when the hour of danger comes. And I
+would ask Mr. Bennett to-night not to measure English feeling towards
+him by the mere number of those present. They that are here are
+representatives of many thousands of our fellow-countrymen. Glance
+down this middle table, and you will see that it is not without some
+right that we claim to welcome you in the name of multitudes of the
+citizens of England. There are those who taunt us with want of
+loyalty, and with the name of infidels. In what church will they find
+men and women more loyal to truth and conscience? The name infidel is
+not for us so long as we are faithful to the truth we know. If I
+speak, as I have done, of national representation in this hall this
+evening, tell me, you who know those who sit here, who have watched
+some of them for years, others of them but for a brief time, do I not
+speak truth? Take them one by one. Your President but a little while
+ago in circumstances similar to those wherein our guest himself was
+placed, with the true lover's keenness that recognises the mistress
+under all disguise, beholding his mistress Liberty in danger, under
+circumstances that would have blinded less sure eyes, leapt to her
+rescue. He risked the ambition of his life rather than be disloyal to
+liberty. And next is seated a woman, who, student of a noble
+profession, thought that liberty had greater claim upon her than even
+her work. When we stood in worse peril than even loss of liberty, she
+risked her own good name for the truth's sake. One also is here who,
+eminent in his own profession, came with the weight of his position
+and his right to speak, and gave a kindred testimony. One step
+further, and you see one who, soldier to liberty, throughout a long
+and spotless life, when the task was far harder than it is to-day,
+when there were no greetings, no welcomes, when to serve was to peril
+name as well as liberty, never flinched from the first until now. He
+is crowned with the glory of the jail, that was his for no crime but
+for claiming the right to publish that wherein the noblest thought is
+uttered in the bravest words. And next to him is another who speaks
+for liberty, who has brought culture, university degree, position in
+men's sight, and many friends, and cast them all at her beloved feet.
+Sir, not alone the past and the present greet you to-night. The future
+also greets you with us. We have here also those who are training
+themselves to walk in the footsteps of the one most dear to them, who
+shall carry on, when we have passed away, the work which we shall have
+dropped from our hands. But he whom we delight to honour at this hour
+in truth honours us, in that he allows us to offer him the welcome
+that it is our glory and our pleasure to give. He has fought bravely.
+The Christian creed had in its beginning more traitors and less true
+hearts than the creed of to-day. We are happy to-day not only in the
+thought of what manner of men we have for leaders, but in the thought
+of what manner of men we have as soldiers in our army. Jesus had
+twelve apostles. One betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver; a
+second denied Him. They all forsook Him and fled. We can scarcely
+point to one who has thus deserted our sacred cause. The traditions of
+our party tell us of many who went to jail because they claimed for
+all that right of free speech which is the heritage of all. One of the
+most famous members of our body in England, Richard Carlile, turned
+bookseller to sell books that were prosecuted. This man became
+Free-thinker, driven thereto by the bigotry and wickedness of the
+Churches. He sold the books of Hone not because he agreed with them,
+but because Hone was prosecuted. He saw that the book in whose
+prosecution freedom was attacked was the book for the freeman to sell;
+and the story of our guest shows that in all this England and America
+are one. Those who gave Milton to the world can yet bring forth men of
+the same stamp in continents leagues asunder. Because our friend was
+loyal and true, prison had to him no dread. It was far, far less of
+dishonour to wear the garb of the convict than to wear that of the
+hypocrite. The society we represent, like his society in America,
+pleads for free thought, speaks for free speech, claims for every one,
+however antagonistic, the right to speak the thought he feels. It is
+better that this should be, even though the thought be wrong, for thus
+the sooner will its error be discovered&mdash;better if the thought be
+right, for then the sooner does the gladness of a new truth find place
+in the heart of man. As the mouthpiece, Sir, of our National Secular
+Society, and of its thousands of members, I speak to you now:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;'ADDRESS.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;'<i>We seek for Truth</i>.'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;'To D.M. Bennett.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;'In asking you to accept at the hands of the National Secular Society
+of England this symbol of cordial sympathy and brotherly welcome, we
+are but putting into act the motto of our Society. &quot;We seek for Truth&quot;
+is our badge, and it is as Truthseeker that we do you homage to-night.
+Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free
+speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without free speech progress
+is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards the nobler
+life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of
+free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the
+denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;'In your own country you have pleaded for free speech, and when,
+under a wicked and an odious law, one of your fellow-citizens was
+imprisoned for the publication of his opinions, you, not sharing the
+opinions but faithful to liberty, sprang forward to defend in him the
+principle of free speech which you claimed for yourself, and sold his
+book while he lay in prison. For this act you were in turn arrested
+and sent to jail, and the country which won its freedom by the aid of
+Paine in the eighteenth century disgraced itself in the nineteenth by
+the imprisonment of a heretic. The Republic of the United States
+dishonoured herself, and not you, in Albany penitentiary. Two hundred
+thousand of your countrymen pleaded for your release, but bigotry was
+too strong. We sent you greeting in your captivity; we rejoiced when
+the time came for your release. We offer you to-night our thanks and
+our hope&mdash;thanks for the heroism which never flinched in the hour of
+battle, hope for a more peaceful future, in which the memory of a past
+pain may be a sacred heritage and not a regret.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;'Charles Bradlaugh, <i>President</i>.'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Soldier of liberty, we give you this. Do in the future the same good
+service that you have done in the past, and your reward shall be in
+the love that true men shall bear to you.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That, however, which no force could compel me to do, which I refused
+to threats of fine and prison, to separation from my children, to
+social ostracism, and to insults and ignominy worse to bear than
+death, I surrendered freely when all the struggle was over, and a
+great part of society and of public opinion had adopted the view that
+cost Mr. Bradlaugh and myself so dear. I may as well complete the
+story here, so as not to have to refer to it again. I gave up
+Neo-Malthusianism in April, 1891, its renunciation being part of the
+outcome of two years' instruction from Mdme. H.P. Blavatsky, who
+showed me that however justifiable Neo-Malthusianism might be while
+man was regarded only as the most perfect outcome of physical
+evolution, it was wholly incompatible with the view of man as a
+spiritual being, whose material form and environment were the results
+of his own mental activity. Why and how I embraced Theosophy, and
+accepted H.P. Blavatsky as teacher, will soon be told in its proper
+place. Here I am concerned only with the why and how of my
+renunciation of the Neo-Malthusian teaching, for which I had fought so
+hard and suffered so much.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I built my life on the basis of Materialism I judged all actions
+by their effect on human happiness in this world now and in future
+generations, regarding man as an organism that lived on earth and
+there perished, with activities confined to earth and limited by
+physical laws. The object of life was the ultimate building-up of a
+physically, mentally, morally perfect man by the cumulative effects of
+heredity&mdash;mental and moral tendencies being regarded as the outcome of
+material conditions, to be slowly but surely evolved by rational
+selection and the transmission to offspring of qualities carefully
+acquired by, and developed in, parents. The most characteristic note
+of this serious and lofty Materialism had been struck by Professor W.
+K. Clifford in his noble article on the &quot;Ethics of Belief.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Taking this view of human duty in regard to the rational co-operation
+with nature in the evolution of the human race, it became of the first
+importance to rescue the control of the generation of offspring from
+mere blind brute passion, and to transfer it to the reason and to the
+intelligence; to impress on parents the sacredness of the parental
+office, the tremendous responsibility of the exercise of the creative
+function. And since, further, one of the most pressing problems for
+solution in the older countries is that of poverty, the horrible slums
+and dens into which are crowded and in which are festering families of
+eight and ten children, whose parents are earning an uncertain 10s.,
+12s., 15s., and 20s. a week; since an immediate palliative is wanted,
+if popular risings impelled by starvation are to be avoided; since the
+lives of men and women of the poorer classes, and of the worst paid
+professional classes, are one long, heart-breaking struggle &quot;to make
+both ends meet and keep respectable&quot;; since in the middle class
+marriage is often avoided, or delayed till late in life, from the
+dread of the large family, and late marriage is followed by its
+shadow, the prevalence of vice and the moral and social ruin of
+thousands of women; for these, and many other reasons, the teaching of
+the duty of limiting the family within the means of subsistence is the
+logical outcome of Materialism linked with the scientific view of
+evolution, and with a knowledge of the physical law, by which
+evolution is accelerated or retarded. Seeking to improve the physical
+type, scientific Materialism, it seemed to me, must forbid parentage
+to any but healthy married couples; it must restrict childbearing
+within the limits consistent with the thorough health and physical
+well-being of the mother; it must impose it as a duty never to bring
+children into the world unless the conditions for their fair nurture
+and development are present. Regarding it as hopeless, as well as
+mischievous, to preach asceticism, and looking on the conjunction of
+nominal celibacy with widespread prostitution as inevitable, from the
+constitution of human nature, scientific Materialism&mdash;quite rationally
+and logically&mdash;advises deliberate restriction of the production of
+offspring, while sanctioning the exercise of the sexual instinct
+within the limits imposed by temperance, the highest physical and
+mental efficiency, the good order and dignity of society, and the
+self-respect of the individual.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In all this there is nothing which for one moment implies approval of
+licentiousness, profligacy, unbridled self-indulgence. On the
+contrary, it is a well-considered and intellectually-defensible scheme
+of human evolution, regarding all natural instincts as matters for
+regulation, not for destruction, and seeking to develop the perfectly
+healthy and well-balanced physical body as the necessary basis for the
+healthy and well-balanced mind. If the premises of Materialism be
+true, there is no answer to the Neo-Malthusian conclusions; for even
+those Socialists who have bitterly opposed the promulgation of
+Neo-Malthusianism&mdash;regarding it as a &quot;red herring intended to draw the
+attention of the proletariat away from the real cause of poverty, the
+monopoly of land and capital by a class&quot;&mdash;admit that when society is
+built on the foundation of common property in all that is necessary
+for the production of wealth, the time will come for the consideration
+of the population question. Nor do I now see, any more than I saw
+then, how any Materialist can rationally avoid the Neo-Malthusian
+position. For if man be the outcome of purely physical causes, it is
+with these that we must deal in guiding his future evolution. If he be
+related but to terrestrial existence, he is but the loftiest organism
+of earth; and, failing to see his past and his future, how should my
+eyes not have been then blinded to the deep-lying causes of his
+present woe? I brought a material cure to a disease which appeared to
+me to be of material origin; but how when the evil came from a subtler
+source, and its causes lay not on the material plane? How if the
+remedy only set up new causes for a future evil, and, while
+immediately a palliative, strengthened the disease itself, and ensured
+its reappearance in the future? This was the view of the problem set
+before me by H.P. Blavatsky when she unrolled the story of man, told
+of his origin and his destiny, showed me the forces that went to the
+making of man, and the true relation between his past, his present,
+and his future.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For what is man in the light of Theosophy? He is a spiritual
+intelligence, eternal and uncreate, treading a vast cycle of human
+experience, born and reborn on earth millennium after millennium,
+evolving slowly into the ideal man. He is not the product of matter,
+but is encased in matter, and the forms of matter with which he
+clothes himself are of his own making. For the intelligence and will
+of man are creative forces&mdash;not creative <i>ex nihilo</i>, but creative as
+is the brain of the painter&mdash;and these forces are exercised by man in
+every act of thought. Thus he is ever creating round him
+thought-forms, moulding subtlest matter into shape by these energies,
+forms which persist as tangible realities when the body of the thinker
+has long gone back to earth and air and water. When the time for
+rebirth into this earth-life comes for the soul these thought-forms,
+its own progeny, help to form the tenuous model into which the
+molecules of physical matter are builded for the making of the body,
+and matter is thus moulded for the new body in which the soul is to
+dwell, on the lines laid down by the intelligent and volitional life
+of the previous, or of many previous, incarnations. So does each man
+create for himself in verity the form wherein he functions, and what
+he is in his present is the inevitable outcome of his own creative
+energies in his past. Applying this to the Neo-Malthusian theory, we
+see in sexual love not only a passion which man has in common with the
+brute, and which forms, at the present stage of evolution, a necessary
+part of human nature, but an animal passion that may be trained and
+purified into a human emotion, which may be used as one of the levers
+in human progress, one of the factors in human growth. But, instead of
+this, man in the past has made his intellect the servant of his
+passions; the abnormal development of the sexual instinct in man&mdash;in
+whom it is far greater and more continuous than in any brute&mdash;is due
+to the mingling with it of the intellectual element, all sexual
+thoughts, desires, and imaginations having created thought-forms,
+which have been wrought into the human race, giving rise to a
+continual demand, far beyond nature, and in marked contrast with the
+temperance of normal animal life. Hence it has become one of the most
+fruitful sources of human misery and human degradation, and the
+satisfaction of its imperious cravings in civilised countries lies at
+the root of our worst social evils. This excessive development has to
+be fought against, and the instinct reduced within natural limits, and
+this will certainly never be done by easy-going self-indulgence within
+the marital relation any more than by self-indulgence outside it. By
+none other road than that of self-control and self-denial can men and
+women now set going the causes which will build for them brains and
+bodies of a higher type for their future return to earth-life. They
+have to hold this instinct in complete control, to transmute it from
+passion into tender and self-denying affection, to develop the
+intellectual at the expense of the animal, and thus to raise the whole
+man to the human stage, in which every intellectual and physical
+capacity shall subserve the purposes of the soul. From all this it
+follows that Theosophists should sound the note of self-restraint
+within marriage, and the gradual&mdash;for with the mass it cannot be
+sudden&mdash;restriction of the sexual relation to the perpetuation of the
+race.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such was the bearing of Theosophical teaching on Neo-Malthusianism, as
+laid before me by H.P. Blavatsky, and when I urged, out of my bitter
+knowledge of the miseries endured by the poor, that it surely might,
+for a time at least, be recommended as a palliative, as a defence in
+the hands of a woman against intolerable oppression and enforced
+suffering, she bade me look beyond the moment, and see how the
+suffering must come back and back with every generation, unless we
+sought to remove the roots of wrong. &quot;I do not judge a woman,&quot; she
+said, &quot;who has resort to such means of defence in the midst of
+circumstances so evil, and whose ignorance of the real causes of all
+this misery is her excuse for snatching at any relief. But it is not
+for you, an Occultist, to continue to teach a method which you now
+know must tend to the perpetuation of the sorrow.&quot; I felt that she was
+right, and though I shrank from the decision&mdash;for my heart somewhat
+failed me at withdrawing from the knowledge of the poor, so far as I
+could, a temporary palliative of evils which too often wreck their
+lives and bring many to an early grave, worn old before even middle
+age has touched them&mdash;yet the decision was made. I refused to reprint
+the &quot;Law of Population,&quot; or to sell the copyright, giving pain, as I
+sadly knew, to all the brave and loyal friends who had so generously
+stood by me in that long and bitter struggle, and who saw the results
+of victory thrown away on grounds to them inadequate and mistaken!
+Will it always be, I wonder, in man's climbing upward, that every step
+must be set on his own heart and on the hearts of those he loves?
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHX"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER X.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+AT WAR ALL ROUND.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+Coming back to my work after my long and dangerous illness, I took up
+again its thread, heartsick, but with courage unshaken, and I find
+myself in the <i>National Reformer</i> for September 15, 1878, saying in a
+brief note of thanks that &quot;neither the illness nor the trouble which
+produced it has in any fashion lessened my determination to work for
+the cause.&quot; In truth, I plunged into work with added vigour, for only
+in that did I find any solace, but the pamphlets written at this time
+against Christianity were marked with considerable bitterness, for it
+was Christianity that had robbed me of my child, and I struck
+mercilessly at it in return. In the political struggles of that time,
+when the Beaconsfield Government was in full swing, with its policy of
+annexation and aggression, I played my part with tongue and pen, and
+my articles in defence of an honest and liberty-loving policy in
+India, against the invasion of Afghanistan and other outrages, laid in
+many an Indian heart a foundation of affection for me, and seem to me
+now as a preparation for the work among Indians to which much of my
+time and thought to-day are given. In November of this same year
+(1878) I wrote a little book on &quot;England, India, and Afghanistan&quot; that
+has brought me many a warm letter of thanks, and with this, the
+carrying on of the suit against Mr. Besant before alluded to, two and
+often three lectures every Sunday, to say nothing of the editorial
+work on the <i>National Reformer</i>, the secretarial work on the
+Malthusian League, and stray lectures during the week, my time was
+fairly well filled. But I found that in my reading I developed a
+tendency to let my thoughts wander from the subject in hand, and that
+they would drift after my lost little one, so I resolved to fill up
+the gaps in my scientific education, and to amuse myself by reading up
+for some examinations; I thought it would serve as an absorbing form
+of recreation from my other work, and would at the same time, by
+making my knowledge exact, render me more useful as a speaker on
+behalf of the causes to which my life was given.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the opening of the new year (1879) I met for the first time a man
+to whom I subsequently owed much in this department of work&mdash;Edward B.
+Aveling, a D.Sc. of London University, and a marvellously able teacher
+of scientific subjects, the very ablest, in fact, that I have ever
+met. Clear and accurate in his knowledge, with a singular gift for
+lucid exposition, enthusiastic in his love of science, and taking
+vivid pleasure in imparting his knowledge to others, he was an ideal
+teacher. This young man, in January, 1879, began writing under
+initials for the <i>National Reformer</i>, and in February I became his
+pupil, with the view of matriculating in June at the London
+University, an object which was duly accomplished. And here let me say
+to any one in mental trouble, that they might find an immense relief
+in taking up some intellectual recreation of this kind; during that
+spring, in addition to my ordinary work of writing, lecturing, and
+editing&mdash;and the lecturing meant travelling from one end of England to
+the other&mdash;I translated a fair-sized French volume, and had the
+wear-and-tear of pleading my case for the custody of my daughter in
+the Court of Appeal, as well as the case before the Master of the
+Rolls; and I found it the very greatest relief to turn to algebra,
+geometry, and physics, and forget the harassing legal struggles in
+wrestling with formulae and problems. The full access I gained to my
+children marked a step in the long battle of Freethinkers against
+disabilities, for, as noted in the <i>National Reformer</i> by Mr.
+Bradlaugh, it was &quot;won with a pleading unequalled in any case on
+record for the boldness of its affirmation of Freethought,&quot; a pleading
+of which he generously said that it deserved well of the party as &quot;the
+most powerful pleading for freedom of opinion to which it has ever
+been our good fortune to listen.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the London <i>Daily News</i> some powerful letters of protest appeared,
+one from Lord Harberton, in which he declared that &quot;the Inquisition
+acted on no other principle&quot; than that applied to me; and a second
+from Mr. Band, in which he sarcastically observed that &quot;this Christian
+community has for some time had the pleasure of seeing her Majesty's
+courts repeatedly springing engines of torture upon a young mother&mdash;a
+clergyman's wife who dared to disagree with his creed&mdash;and her evident
+anguish, her long and expensive struggles to save her child, have
+proved that so far as heretical mothers are concerned modern defenders
+of the faith need not envy the past those persuasive instruments which
+so long secured the unity of the Church. In making Mrs. Besant an
+example, the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice James have been
+careful not to allow any of the effect to be lost by confusion of the
+main point&mdash;the intellectual heresy&mdash;with side questions. There was a
+Malthusian matter in the case, but the judges were very clear in
+stating that without any reference whatever to that, they would
+simply, on the ground of Mrs. Besant's 'religious, or anti-religious,
+opinions,' take her child from her.&quot; The great provincial papers took
+a similar tone, the <i>Manchester Examiner</i> going so far as to say of
+the ruling of the judges: &quot;We do not say they have done so wrongly. We
+only say that the effect of their judgment is cruel, and it shows that
+the holding of unpopular opinions is, in the eye of the law, an
+offence which, despite all we had thought to the contrary, may be
+visited with the severest punishment a woman and a mother can be
+possibly called on to bear.&quot; The outcome of all this long struggle and
+of another case of sore injustice&mdash;in which Mrs. Agar-Ellis, a Roman
+Catholic, was separated from her children by a judicial decision
+obtained against her by her husband, a Protestant&mdash;was a change in the
+law which had vested all power over the children in the hands of the
+father, and from thenceforth the rights of the married mother were
+recognised to a limited extent. A small side-fight was with the
+National Sunday League, the president of which, Lord Thurlow, strongly
+objected to me as one of the vice-presidents. Mr. P.A. Taylor and
+others at once resigned their offices, and, on the calling of a
+general meeting, Lord Thurlow was rejected as president. Mr. P.A.
+Taylor was requested to assume the presidency, and the vice-presidents
+who had resigned were, with myself, re-elected. Little battles of this
+sort were a running accompaniment of graver struggles during all these
+battling years.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And through all the struggles the organised strength of the
+Freethought party grew, 650 new members being enrolled in the National
+Secular Society in the year 1878-79, and in July, 1879, the public
+adhesion of Dr. Edward B. Aveling brought into the ranks a pen of rare
+force and power, and gave a strong impulse to the educational side of
+our movement. I presided for him at his first lecture at the Hall of
+Science on August 10, 1879, and he soon paid the penalty of his
+boldness, finding himself, a few months later, dismissed from the
+Chair of Comparative Anatomy at the London Hospital, though the Board
+admitted that all his duties were discharged with punctuality and
+ability. One of the first results of his adhesion was the
+establishment of two classes under the Science and Art Department at
+South Kensington, and these grew year after year, attended by numbers
+of young men and women, till in 1883 we had thirteen classes in full
+swing, as well as Latin, and London University Matriculation classes;
+all these were taught by Dr. Aveling and pupils that he had trained. I
+took advanced certificates, one in honours, and so became qualified as
+a science teacher in eight different sciences, and Alice and Hypatia
+Bradlaugh followed a similar course, so that winter after winter we
+kept these classes going from September to the following May, from
+1879 until the year 1888. In addition to these Miss Bradlaugh carried
+on a choral union.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Personally I found that this study and teaching together with
+attendance at classes held for teachers at South Kensington, the study
+for passing the First B.Sc. and Prel. Sc. Examinations at London
+University, and the study for the B.Sc. degree at London, at which I
+failed in practical chemistry three times&mdash;a thing that puzzled me not
+a little at the time, as I had passed a far more difficult practical
+chemical examination for teachers at South Kensington&mdash;all this gave
+me a knowledge of science that has stood me in good stead in my public
+work. But even here theological and social hatred pursued me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Miss Bradlaugh and myself applied for permission to attend the
+botany class at University College, we were refused, I for my sins,
+and she only for being her father's daughter; when I had qualified as
+teacher, I stood back from claiming recognition from the Department
+for a year in order not to prejudice the claims of Mr. Bradlaugh's
+daughters, and later, when I had been recognised, Sir Henry Tyler in
+the House of Commons attacked the Education Department for accepting
+me, and actually tried to prevent the Government grant being paid to
+the Hall of Science Schools because Dr. Aveling, the Misses Bradlaugh,
+and myself were unbelievers in Christianity. When I asked permission
+to go to the Botanical Gardens in Regent's Park the curator refused
+it, on the ground that his daughters studied there. On every side
+repulse and insult, hard to struggle against, bitter to bear. It was
+against difficulties of this kind on every side that we had to make
+our way, handicapped in every effort by our heresy. Let our work be as
+good as it might&mdash;and our Science School was exceptionally
+successful&mdash;the subtle fragrance of heresy was everywhere
+distinguishable, and when Mr. Bradlaugh and myself are blamed for
+bitterness in our anti-Christian advocacy, this constant gnawing
+annoyance and petty persecution should be taken into account. For him
+it was especially trying, for he saw his daughters&mdash;girls of ability
+and of high character, whose only crime was that they were
+his&mdash;insulted, sneered at, slandered, continually put at a
+disadvantage, because they were his children and loved and honoured
+him beyond all others.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in October, 1879, that I first met Herbert Burrows, though I
+did not become intimately acquainted with him till the Socialist
+troubles of the autumn of 1887 drew us into a common stream of work.
+He came as a delegate from the Tower Hamlets Radical Association to a
+preliminary conference, called by Mr. Bradlaugh, at the Hall of
+Science, on October 11th, to consider the advisability of holding a
+great London Convention on Land Law Reform, to be attended by
+delegates from all parts of the kingdom. He was appointed on the
+Executive Committee with Mr. Bradlaugh, Mr. Mottershead, Mr. Nieass,
+and others. The Convention was successfully held, and an advanced
+platform of Land Law Reform adopted, used later by Mr. Bradlaugh as a
+basis for some of the proposals he laid before Parliament.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHXI"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER XI.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+MR. BRADLAUGH'S STRUGGLE.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+And now dawned the year 1880, the memorable year in which commenced
+Mr. Bradlaugh's long Parliamentary battle. After a long and bitter
+struggle he was elected, with Mr. Labouchere, as member for
+Northampton, at the general election, and so the prize so long fought
+for was won. Shall I ever forget that election day, April 2, 1880? How
+at four o'clock Mr. Bradlaugh came into the room at the &quot;George&quot;,
+where his daughters and I were sitting, flung himself into a chair
+with, &quot;There's nothing more to do; our last man is polled.&quot; Then the
+waiting for the declaration through the long, weary hours of suspense,
+till as the time drew near we knelt by the window listening&mdash;listening
+to the hoarse murmur of the crowd, knowing that presently there would
+be a roar of triumph or a howl of anger when the numbers were read out
+from the steps of the Town Hall. And now silence sank, and we knew the
+moment had come, and we held our breath, and then&mdash;a roar, a wild roar
+of joy and exultation, cheer after cheer, ringing, throbbing, pealing,
+and then the mighty surge of the crowd bringing him back, their member
+at last, waving hats, handkerchiefs, a very madness of tumultuous
+delight, and the shrill strains of &quot;Bradlaugh for Northampton!&quot; with a
+ring of triumph in them they had never had before. And he, very grave,
+somewhat shaken by the outpour of love and exultation, very silent,
+feeling the weight of new responsibility more than the gladness of
+victory. And then the next morning, as he left the town, the mass of
+men and women, one sea of heads from hotel to station, every window
+crowded, his colours waving everywhere, men fighting to get near him,
+to touch him, women sobbing, the cries, &quot;Our Charlie, our Charlie;
+we've got you and we'll keep you.&quot; How they loved him, how they joyed
+in the triumph won after twelve years of strife. Ah me! we thought the
+struggle over, and it was only beginning; we thought our hero
+victorious, and a fiercer, crueller fight lay in front. True, he was
+to win that fight, but his life was to be the price of the winning;
+victory for him was to be final, complete, but the laurel-wreath was
+to fall upon a grave.
+</p>
+
+<a name="06"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="Images/06.jpg" alt="Charles Bradlaugh and Henry Labouchere." height="544" width="385">
+</p>
+<h5><i>From a photograph by T. Westley, 57, Vernon Street,
+Northampton.</i><br>CHARLES BRADLAUGH AND HENRY LABOUCHERE.</h5>
+
+<p>
+The outburst of anger from the more bigoted of the Christian community
+was as savage as the outburst of delight had been exultant, but we
+recked little of it. Was he not member, duly elected, without
+possibility of assailment in his legal right? Parliament was to meet
+on April 29th, the swearing-in beginning on the following day, and Mr.
+Bradlaugh had taken counsel with some other Freethinking members as to
+the right of Freethinkers to affirm. He held that under the Act 29 and
+30 Vict. c. 19, and the Evidence Amendment Acts 1869 and 1870, the
+right to substitute affirmation for oath was clear; he was willing to
+take the oath as a necessary form if obligatory, but, believing it to
+be optional, he preferred affirmation. On May 3rd he presented himself
+and, according to the evidence of Sir Erskine May, the Clerk of the
+House, given before the second Select Committee on his case, he &quot;came
+to the table and delivered the following statement in writing to the
+Clerk: 'To the Right Honourable the Speaker of the House of Commons.
+I, the undersigned, Charles Bradlaugh, beg respectfully to claim to be
+allowed to affirm, as a person for the time being by law permitted to
+make a solemn affirmation or declaration, instead of taking an oath.
+(Signed) Charles Bradlaugh.' And being asked by the Clerk upon what
+grounds he claimed to make an affirmation, he answered: 'By virtue of
+the Evidence Amendment Acts, 1869 and 1870.' Whereupon the Clerk
+reported to Mr. Speaker&quot; the claim, and Mr. Speaker told Mr. Bradlaugh
+that he might address the House on the matter. &quot;Mr. Bradlaugh's
+observations were very short. He repeated that he relied upon the
+Evidence Further Amendment Act, 1869, and the Evidence Amendment Act,
+1870, adding: 'I have repeatedly, for nine years past, made an
+affirmation in the highest courts of jurisdiction in this realm. I am
+ready to make such a declaration or affirmation.' Substantially those
+were the words which he addressed to the Speaker.&quot; This was the
+simple, quiet, and dignified scene which took place in the House. Mr.
+Bradlaugh was directed to withdraw, and he withdrew, and, after
+debate, a Select Committee was appointed to consider whether he could
+make affirmation; that Committee decided against the claim, and gave
+in its report on May 20th. On the following day Mr. Bradlaugh
+presented himself at the table of the House to take the oath in the
+form prescribed by the law, and on the objection of Sir Henry Drummond
+Wolff, who submitted a motion that he should not be allowed to take
+the oath, another Committee was appointed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before this Committee Mr. Bradlaugh stated his case, and pointed out
+that the legal obligation lay on him to take the oath, adding: &quot;Any
+form that I went through, any oath that I took, I should regard as
+binding upon my conscience in the fullest degree. I would go through
+no form, I would take no oath, unless I meant it to be so binding.&quot; He
+wrote in the same sense to the <i>Times</i>, saying that he should regard
+himself &quot;as bound, not by the letter of its words, but by the spirit
+which the affirmation would have conveyed, had I been permitted to use
+it.&quot; The Committee reported against him, and on June 23rd he was heard
+at the Bar of the House, and made a speech so self-restrained, so
+noble, so dignified, that the House, in defiance of all its own rules,
+broke out over and over again into applause. In the debate that
+preceded his speech, members had lost sight of the ordinary rules of
+decency, and had used expressions against myself wholly gratuitous in
+such a quarrel; the grave rebuke to him who &quot;was wanting in chivalry,
+because, while I can answer for myself and am able to answer for
+myself, nothing justified the introduction of any other name beside my
+own to make prejudice against me,&quot; brought irrepressible cheers. His
+appeal was wholly to the law. &quot;I have not yet used&mdash;I trust no passion
+may tempt me into using&mdash;any words that would seem to savour of even a
+desire to enter into conflict with this House. I have always taught,
+preached, and believed the supremacy of Parliament, and it is not
+because for a moment the judgment of one Chamber of Parliament should
+be hostile to me that I am going to deny the ideas I have always held;
+but I submit that one Chamber of Parliament&mdash;even its grandest
+Chamber, as I have always held this to be&mdash;had no right to override
+the law. The law gives me the right to sign that roll, to take and
+subscribe the oath, and to take my seat there [with a gesture towards
+the benches]. I admit that the moment I am in the House, without any
+reason but your own good will, you can send me away. That is your
+right. You have full control over your members. But you cannot send me
+away until I have been heard in my place, not a suppliant as I am now,
+but with the rightful audience that each member has always had.... I
+am ready to admit, if you please, for the sake of argument, that every
+opinion I hold is wrong and deserves punishment. Let the law punish
+it. If you say the law cannot, then you admit that you have no right,
+and I appeal to public opinion against the iniquity of a decision
+which overrides the law and denies me justice. I beg your pardon, sir,
+and that of the House too, if in this warmth there seems to lack
+respect for its dignity. And as I shall have, if your decision be
+against me, to come to that table when your decision is given, I beg
+you, before the step is taken in which we may both lose our
+dignity&mdash;mine is not much, but yours is that of the Commons of
+England&mdash;I beg you, before the gauntlet is fatally thrown, I beg you,
+not in any sort of menace, not in any sort of boast, but as one man
+against six hundred, to give me that justice which on the other side
+of this hall the judges would give me, were I pleading there before
+them.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But no eloquence, no plea for justice, could stay the tide of Tory and
+religious bigotry, and the House voted that he should not be allowed
+to take the oath. Summoned to the table to hear the decision
+communicated by the Speaker, he answered that decision with the words
+firmly spoken: &quot;I respectfully refuse to obey the order of the House,
+because that order was against the law.&quot; The Speaker appealed to the
+House for direction, and on a division&mdash;during which the Speaker and
+Charles Bradlaugh were left together in the chamber&mdash;the House ordered
+the enforcement of Mr. Bradlaugh's withdrawal. Once more the order is
+given, once more the refusal made, and then the Serjeant-at-Arms was
+bidden to remove him. Strange was the scene as little Captain Cosset
+walked up to the member of Herculean proportions, and men wondered how
+the order would be enforced; but Charles Bradlaugh was not the man to
+make a vulgar brawl, and the light touch on his shoulder was to him
+the touch of an authority he admitted and to which he bowed. So he
+gravely accompanied his small captor, and was lodged in the Clock
+Tower of the House as prisoner until the House should further consider
+what to do with him&mdash;the most awkward prisoner it had ever had, in
+that in his person it was imprisoning the law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a special issue of the <i>National Reformer</i>, giving an account of
+the Committee's work and of Mr. Bradlaugh's committal to the Clock
+Tower, I find the following from my own pen: &quot;The Tory party, beaten
+at the polls by the nation, has thus, for the moment, triumphed in the
+House of Commons. The man chosen by the Radicals of Northampton has
+been committed to prison on the motion of the Tory ex-Chancellor of
+the Exchequer, simply because he desires to discharge the duty laid
+upon him by his constituency and by the law of the land. As this paper
+goes to press, I go to Westminster to receive from him his directions
+as to the conduct of the struggle with the nation into which the House
+of Commons has so recklessly plunged.&quot; I found him busily writing,
+prepared for all events, ready for a long imprisonment. On the
+following day a leaflet from my pen, &quot;Law Makers and Law Breakers,&quot;
+appealed to the people; after reciting what had happened, it
+concluded: &quot;Let the people speak. Gladstone and Bright are for
+Liberty, and the help denied them within the House must come to them
+from without. No time must be lost. While we remain idle, a
+representative of the people is illegally held in prison. Northampton
+is insulted, and in this great constituency every constituency is
+threatened. On freedom of election depends our liberty; on freedom of
+conscience depends our progress. Tory squires and lordlings have
+defied the people and measured their strength against the masses. Let
+the masses speak.&quot; But there was no need to make appeals, for the
+outrage itself caused so swiftly a growl of anger that on the very
+next day the prisoner was set free, and there came protest upon
+protest against the high-handed action of the House. In Westminster
+Hall 4,000 people gathered to cheer Mr. Bradlaugh when he came to the
+House on the day after his liberation. In less than a week 200
+meetings had thundered out their protest. Liberal associations, clubs,
+societies, sent up messages of anger and of demand for justice. In
+Trafalgar Square there gathered&mdash;so said the papers&mdash;the largest crowd
+ever seen there, and on the Thursday following&mdash;the meeting was held
+on Monday&mdash;the House of Commons rescinded its resolution, refusing to
+allow Mr. Bradlaugh to affirm, and admitted him on Friday, July 2nd,
+to take his seat after affirmation. &quot;At last the bitter struggle is
+over,&quot; I wrote, &quot;and law and right have triumphed. The House of
+Commons has, by rescinding the resolution passed by Tories and
+Ultramontanes, re-established its good name in the eyes of the world.
+The triumph is not one of Freethought over Christianity, nor is it
+over the House of Commons; it is the triumph of law, brought about by
+good men&mdash;of all shades of opinion, but of one faith in justice&mdash;over
+Tory contempt of law and Ultramontane bigotry. It is the reassertion
+of civil and religious liberty under the most difficult circumstances,
+the declaration that the House of Commons is the creation of the
+people, and not a club of the aristocracy with the right of
+blackballing in its own hands.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The battle between Charles Bradlaugh and his persecutors was now
+transferred to the law courts. As soon as he had taken his seat he was
+served with a writ for having voted without having taken the oath, and
+this began the wearisome proceedings by which his defeated enemies
+boasted that they would make him bankrupt, and so vacate the seat he
+had so hardly gained. Rich men like Mr. Newdegate sued him, putting
+forward a man of straw as nominal plaintiff; for many a weary month
+Mr. Bradlaugh kept all his enemies at bay, fighting each case himself;
+defeated time after time, he fought on, finally carrying the cases to
+the House of Lords, and there winning them triumphantly. But they were
+won at such heavy cost of physical strength and of money, that they
+undermined his strength and burdened him heavily with debt. For all
+this time he had not only to fight in the law courts and to attend
+scrupulously to his Parliamentary duties, but he had to earn his
+living by lecturing and writing, so that his nights away from the
+House were spent in travelling and his days in incessant labour. Many
+of his defeated foes turned their weapons against me, hoping thus to
+give him pain; thus Admiral Sir John Hay, at Wigton, used language of
+me so coarse that the <i>Scotsman</i> and <i>Glasgow Herald</i> refused to print
+it, and the editor of the <i>Scotsman</i> described it as &quot;language so
+coarse that it could have hardly dropped from a yahoo.&quot; August 25th
+found me at Brussels, whither I went, with Miss Hypatia Bradlaugh, to
+represent the English Freethinkers at the International Freethought
+Conference. It was an interesting gathering, attended by men of
+world-wide reputation, including Dr. Ludwig B&uuml;chner, a man of noble
+and kindly nature. An International Federation of Freethinkers was
+there founded, which did something towards bringing together the
+Freethinkers of different countries, and held interesting congresses
+in the following years in London and Amsterdam; but beyond these
+meetings it did little, and lacked energy and vitality. In truth, the
+Freethought party in each country had so much to do in holding its own
+that little time and thought could be given to international
+organisation. For myself, my introduction to Dr. B&uuml;chner, led to much
+interesting correspondence, and I translated, with his approval, his
+&quot;Mind in Animals,&quot; and the enlarged fourteenth edition of &quot;Force and
+Matter,&quot; as well as one or two pamphlets. This autumn of 1880 found
+the so-called Liberal Government in full tilt against the Irish
+leaders, and I worked hard to raise English feeling in defence of
+Irish freedom even against attack by one so much honoured as was Mr.
+Gladstone. It was uphill work, for harsh language had been used
+against England and all things English, but I showed by definite
+figures&mdash;all up and down England&mdash;that life and property were far
+safer in Ireland than in England, that Ireland was singularly free
+from crime save in agrarian disputes, and I argued that these would
+disappear if the law should step in between landlord and tenant, and
+by stopping the crimes of rack-renting and most brutal eviction, put
+an end to the horrible retaliations that were born of despair and
+revenge. A striking point on these evictions I quoted from Mr. T.P.
+O'Connor, who, using Mr. Gladstone's words that a sentence of eviction
+was a sentence of starvation, told of 15,000 processes of eviction
+issued in that one year. The autumn's work was varied by the teaching
+of science classes, a debate with a clergyman of the Church of
+England, and an operation which kept me in bed for three weeks, but
+which, on the other hand, was useful, for I learned to write while
+lying on my back, and accomplished in this fashion a good part of the
+translation of &quot;Mind in Animals.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And here let me point a moral about hard work. Hard work kills no one.
+I find a note in the <i>National Reformer</i> in 1880 from the pen of Mr.
+Bradlaugh: &quot;It is, we fear, useless to add that, in the judgment of
+her best friends, Mrs. Besant has worked far too hard during the last
+two years.&quot; This is 1893, and the thirteen years' interval has been
+full of incessant work, and I am working harder than ever now, and in
+splendid health. Looking over the <i>National Reformer</i> for all these
+years, it seems to me that it did really fine educational work; Mr.
+Bradlaugh's strenuous utterances on political and theological matters;
+Dr. Aveling's luminous and beautiful scientific teachings; and to my
+share fell much of the educative work on questions of political and
+national morality in our dealings with weaker nations. We put all our
+hearts into our work, and the influence exercised was distinctly in
+favour of pure living and high thinking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the spring of 1881 the Court of Appeal decided against Mr.
+Bradlaugh's right to affirm as Member of Parliament, and his seat was
+declared vacant, but he was at once returned again by the borough of
+Northampton, despite the virulence of slander directed against him, so
+that he rightly described the election as &quot;the most bitter I have ever
+fought.&quot; His work in the House had won him golden opinions in the
+country, and he was already recognised as a power there; so Tory fear
+was added to bigoted hatred, and the efforts to keep him out of the
+House were increased.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was introduced to the House as a new member to take his seat by Mr.
+Labouchere and Mr. Burt, but Sir Stafford Northcote intervened, and
+after a lengthy debate, which included a speech from Mr. Bradlaugh at
+the Bar, a majority of thirty-three refused to allow him to take the
+oath. After a prolonged scene, during which Mr. Bradlaugh declined to
+withdraw and the House hesitated to use force, the House adjourned,
+and finally the Government promised to bring in an Affirmation Bill,
+and Mr. Bradlaugh promised, with the consent of his constituents, to
+await the decision of the House on this Bill. Meantime, a League for
+the Defence of Constitutional Rights was formed, and the agitation in
+the country grew: wherever Mr. Bradlaugh went to speak vast crowds
+awaited him, and he travelled from one end of the country to the
+other, the people answering his appeal for justice with no uncertain
+voice. On July 2nd, in consequence of Tory obstruction, Mr. Gladstone
+wrote to Mr. Bradlaugh that the Government were going to drop the
+Affirmation Bill, and Mr. Bradlaugh thereupon determined to present
+himself once more in the House, and fixed on August 3rd as the date of
+such action, so that the Irish Land Bill might get through the House
+ere any delay in business was caused by him. The House was then
+closely guarded with police; the great gates were closed, reserves of
+police were packed in the law courts, and all through July this state
+of siege continued. On August 2nd there was a large meeting in
+Trafalgar Square, at which delegates were present from all parts of
+England, and from as far north as Edinburgh, and on Wednesday, August
+3rd, Mr. Bradlaugh went down to the House. His last words to me were:
+&quot;The people know you better than they know any one, save myself;
+whatever happens, mind, whatever happens, let them do no violence; I
+trust to you to keep them quiet.&quot; He went to the House entrance with
+Dr. Aveling, and into the House alone. His daughters and I went
+together, and with some hundreds of others carrying petitions&mdash;ten
+only with each petition, and the ten rigidly counted and allowed to
+pass through the gate, sufficiently opened to let one through at a
+time&mdash;reached Westminster Hall, where we waited on the steps leading
+to the passage of the lobby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An inspector ordered us off. I gently intimated that we were within
+our rights. Dramatic order: &quot;Four officers this way.&quot; Up they marched
+and looked at us, and we looked at them. &quot;I think you had better
+consult Inspector Denning before you use violence,&quot; I remarked
+placidly. They thought they had, and in a few moments up came the
+inspector, and seeing that we were standing in a place where we had a
+right to be, and were doing no harm, he rebuked his over-zealous
+subordinates, and they retired and left us in peace. A man of much
+tact and discretion was Inspector Denning. Indeed, all through this,
+the House of Commons police behaved admirably well. Even in the attack
+they were ordered to make on Mr. Bradlaugh, the police used as little
+violence as they could. It was Mr. Erskine, the Deputy
+Serjeant-at-Arms, and his ushers, who showed the brutality; as Dr.
+Aveling wrote at the time: &quot;The police disliked their work, and, as
+brave men, had a sympathy for a brave man. Their orders they obeyed
+rigidly. This done, they were kindness itself.&quot; Gradually the crowd of
+petitioners grew and grew; angry murmurs were heard, for no news came
+from the House, and they loved &quot;Charlie,&quot; and were mostly north
+country men, sturdy and independent. They thought they had a right to
+go into the lobby, and suddenly, with the impulse that will sway a
+crowd to a single action there was a roar, &quot;Petition, petition,
+justice, justice,&quot; and they surged up the steps, charging at the
+policemen who held the door. Flashed into my mind my chief's charge,
+his words, &quot;I trust to you to keep them quiet,&quot; and as the police
+sprang forward to meet the crowd I threw myself between them, with all
+the advantage of the position of the top of the steps that I had
+chosen, so that every man in the charging crowd saw me, and as they
+checked themselves in surprise I bade them stop for his sake, and keep
+for him the peace which he had bade us should not be broken. I heard
+afterwards that as I sprang forward the police laughed&mdash;they must have
+thought me a fool to face the rush of the charging men; but I knew his
+friends would never trample me down, and as the crowd stopped the
+laugh died out, and they drew back and left me my own way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sullenly the men drew back, mastering themselves with effort, reining
+in their wrath, still for his sake. Ah! had I known what was going on
+inside, would I have kept his trust unbroken! and, as many a man said
+to me afterwards in northern towns, &quot;Oh! if you had let us go we would
+have carried him into the House up to the Speaker's chair.&quot; We heard a
+crash inside, and listened, and there was sound of breaking glass and
+splintering wood, and in a few minutes a messenger came to me: &quot;He is
+in Palace Yard.&quot; And we went thither and saw him standing, still and
+white, face set like marble, coat torn, motionless, as though carved
+in stone, facing the members' door. Now we know the whole shameful
+story: how as that one man stood alone, on his way to claim his right,
+alone so that he could do no violence, fourteen men, said the Central
+News, police and ushers, flung themselves upon him, pushed and pulled
+him down the stairs, smashing in their violence the glass and wood of
+the passage door; how he struck no blow, but used only his great
+strength in passive resistance&mdash;&quot; Of all I have ever seen, I never saw
+one man struggle with ten like that,&quot; said one of the chiefs, angrily
+disdainful of the wrong he was forced to do&mdash;till they flung him out
+into Palace Yard. An eye-witness thus reported the scene in the Press:
+&quot;The strong, broad, heavy, powerful frame of Mr. Bradlaugh was hard to
+move, with its every nerve and muscle strained to resist the coercion.
+Bending and straining against the overpowering numbers, he held every
+inch with surprising tenacity, and only surrendered it after almost
+superhuman exertions to retain it. The sight&mdash;little of it as was seen
+from the outside&mdash;soon became sickening. The overborne man appeared
+almost at his last gasp. The face, in spite of the warmth of the
+struggle, had an ominous pallor. The limbs barely sustained him....
+The Trafalgar Square phrase that this man might be broken but not bent
+occurred to minds apprehensive at the present appearance of him.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They flung him out, and swift, short words were there interchanged. &quot;I
+nearly did wrong at the door,&quot; he said afterwards, &quot;I was very angry.
+I said to Inspector Denning, 'I shall come again with force enough to
+overcome it,' He said, 'When?' I said, 'Within a minute if I raise my
+hand.'&quot; He stood in Palace Yard, and there outside the gate was a vast
+sea of heads, the men who had journeyed from all parts of England for
+love of him, and in defence of the great right he represented of a
+constituency to send to Parliament the man of its choice. Ah! he was
+never greater than in that moment of outrage and of triumphant wrong;
+with all the passion of a proud man surging within him, insulted by
+physical violence, injured by the cruel wrenching of all his
+muscles&mdash;so that for weeks his arms had to be swathed in bandages&mdash;he
+was never greater than when he conquered his own wrath, crushed down
+his own longing for battle, stirred to flame by the bodily struggle,
+and the bodily injury, and with thousands waiting within sound of his
+voice, longing to leap to his side, he gave the word to tell them to
+meet him that evening away from the scene of conflict, and meanwhile
+to disperse quietly, &quot;no riot, no disorder.&quot; But how he suffered
+mentally no words of mine may tell, and none can understand how it
+wrung his heart who does not know how he reverenced the great
+Parliament of England, how he honoured law, how he believed in justice
+being done; it was the breaking down of his national ideals, of his
+pride in his country, of his belief that faith would be kept with a
+foe by English gentlemen, who with all their faults, he thought,
+held honour and chivalry dear. &quot;No man will sleep in gaol for me
+to-night,&quot; he said to me that day; &quot;no woman can blame me for her
+husband killed or wounded, but&mdash;&quot; A wave of agony swept over his face,
+and from that fatal day Charles Bradlaugh was never the same man.
+Some hold their ideals lightly, but his heart-strings were twined
+round his; some care little for their country&mdash;he was an Englishman,
+law-abiding, liberty-loving, to his heart's core, of the type of the
+seventeenth-century patriot, holding England's honour dear. It was the
+treachery that broke his heart; he had gone alone, believing in the
+honour of his foes, ready to submit to expulsion, to imprisonment, and
+it was the latter that he expected; but he never dreamed that, going
+alone amongst his foes, they would use brutal and cowardly violence,
+and shame every Parliamentary tradition by personal outrage on a
+duly-elected member, outrage more worthy of a slum pot-house than of
+the great Commons House, the House of Hampden and of Vane, the House
+that had guarded its own from Royal violence, and had maintained its
+privileges in the teeth of kings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These stormy scenes brought about a promise of Government aid; Mr.
+Bradlaugh failed to get any legal redress, as, indeed, he expected to
+fail, on the ground that the officials of the House were covered by
+the House's order, but the Government promised to support his claim to
+his seat during the next session, and thus prevented the campaign
+against them on which we had resolved. I had solely on my own
+responsibility organised a great band of people pledged to refrain
+from the use of all excisable articles after a certain date, and to
+withdraw all their moneys in the Savings Bank, thus seriously
+crippling the financial resources of the Government. The response from
+the workers to my appeal to &quot;Stop the supplies&quot; was great and
+touching. One man wrote that as he never drank nor smoked he would
+leave off tea; others that though tobacco was their one luxury, they
+would forego it; and so on. Somewhat reluctantly, I asked the people
+to lay aside this formidable weapon, as &quot;we have no right to embarrass
+the Government financially save when they refuse to do the first duty
+of a Government to maintain law. They have now promised to do justice,
+and we must wait.&quot; Meanwhile the injuries inflicted on Mr. Bradlaugh,
+rupturing the sheaths of some of the muscles of the arm, laid him
+prostrate, and various small fights went on during the temporary truce
+in the great struggle. I turned up in the House two or three times,
+haled thither, though not in person, by the people who kept Mr.
+Bradlaugh out, and a speech of mine became the subject of a question
+by Mr. Ritchie, while Sir Henry Tyler waged war on the science
+classes. Another joy was added to life by the use of my name&mdash;which
+by all these struggles had gained a marketable value&mdash;as author of
+pamphlets I had never seen, and this forgery of my name by
+unscrupulous people in the colonies caused me a good deal of
+annoyance. In the strengthening of the constitutional agitation in the
+country, the holding of an International Congress of Freethinkers in
+London, the studying and teaching of science, the delivering of
+courses of scientific lectures in the Hall of Science, a sharp
+correspondence with the Bishop of Manchester, who had libelled
+Secularists, and which led to a fiery pamphlet, &quot;God's Views on
+Marriage,&quot; as retort&mdash;in all these matters the autumn months sped
+rapidly away. One incident of that autumn I record with regret. I was
+misled by very partial knowledge of the nature of the experiments
+performed, and by my fear that if scientific men were forbidden to
+experiment on animals with drugs they would perforce experiment with
+them on the poor in hospitals, to write two articles, republished as a
+pamphlet, against Sir Eardley Wilmot's Bill for the &quot;Total Suppression
+of Vivisection.&quot; I limited my approval to highly skilled men engaged
+in original investigations, and took the representations made of the
+character of the experiments without sufficient care to verify them.
+Hence the publication of the one thing I ever wrote for which I feel
+deep regret and shame, as against the whole trend and efforts of my
+life. I am thankful to say that Dr. Anna Kingsford answered my
+articles, and I readily inserted her replies in the paper in which
+mine had appeared&mdash;our <i>National Reformer</i>&mdash;and she touched that
+question of the moral sense to which my nature at once responded.
+Ultimately, I looked carefully into the subject, found that
+vivisection abroad was very different from vivisection in England, saw
+that it was in very truth the fiendishly cruel thing that its
+opponents alleged, and destroyed my partial defence of even its less
+brutal form.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+1882 saw no cessation of the struggles in which Mr. Bradlaugh and
+those who stood by him were involved. On February 7th he was heard for
+the third time at the Bar of the House of Commons, and closed his
+speech with an offer that, accepted, would have closed the contest. &quot;I
+am ready to stand aside, say for four or five weeks, without coming to
+that table, if the House within that time, or within such time as its
+great needs might demand, would discuss whether an Affirmation Bill
+should pass or not. I want to obey the law, and I tell you how I might
+meet the House still further, if the House will pardon me for seeming
+to advise it. Hon. members have said that would be a Bradlaugh Relief
+Bill. Bradlaugh is more proud than you are. Let the Bill pass without
+applying to elections that have taken place previously, and I will
+undertake not to claim my seat, and when the Bill has passed I will
+apply for the Chiltern Hundreds. I have no fear. If I am not fit for
+my constituents, they shall dismiss me, but you never shall. The grave
+alone shall make me yield.&quot; But the House would do nothing. He had
+asked for 100,000 signatures in favour of his constitutional right,
+and on February 8th, 9th, and 10th 1,008 petitions, bearing 241,970
+signatures, were presented; the House treated them with contemptuous
+indifference. The House refused to declare his seat vacant, and also
+refused to allow him to fill it, thus half-disfranchising Northampton,
+while closing every avenue to legal redress. Mr. Labouchere&mdash;who did
+all a loyal colleague could do to assist his brother member&mdash;brought
+in an Affirmation Bill; it was blocked. Mr. Gladstone, appealed to
+support the law declared by his own Attorney-General, refused to do
+anything. An <i>impasse</i> was created, and all the enemies of freedom
+rejoiced. Out of this position of what the <i>Globe</i> called &quot;quiet
+omnipotence&quot; the House was shaken by an audacious defiance, for on
+February 21st the member it was trying to hold at arm's length took
+the oath in its startled face, went to his seat, and&mdash;waited events.
+The House then expelled him&mdash;and, indeed, it could scarcely do
+anything else after such defiance&mdash;and Mr. Labouchere moved for a new
+writ, declaring that Northampton was ready, its &quot;candidate was Charles
+Bradlaugh, expelled this House.&quot; Northampton, ever steadfast, returned
+him for the third time&mdash;the vote in his favour showing an increase of
+359 over the second bye-election&mdash;and the triumph was received in all
+the great towns of England with wild enthusiasm. By the small majority
+of fifteen in a House of 599 members&mdash;and this due to the vacillation
+of the Government&mdash;he was again refused the right to take his seat.
+But now the whole Liberal Press took up his quarrel; the oath question
+became a test question for every candidate for Parliament, and the
+Government was warned that it was alienating its best friends. The
+<i>Pall Mall Gazette</i> voiced the general feeling. &quot;What is the evidence
+that an Oaths Bill would injure the Government in the country? Of one
+thing we may be sure, that if they shirk the Bill they will do no good
+to themselves at the elections. Nobody doubts that it will be made a
+test question, and any Liberal who declines to vote for such a Bill
+will certainly lose the support of the Northampton sort of Radicalism
+in every constituency. The Liberal Press throughout the country is
+absolutely unanimous. The political Non-conformists are for it. The
+local clubs are for it. All that is wanted is that the Government
+should pick up a little more moral courage, and recognise that even in
+practice honesty is the best policy.&quot; The Government did not think so,
+and they paid the penalty, for one of the causes that led to their
+defeat at the polls was the disgust felt at their vacillation and
+cowardice in regard to the rights of constituencies. Not untruly did I
+write, in May, 1882, that Charles Bradlaugh was a man &quot;who by the
+infliction of a great wrong had become the incarnation of a great
+principle&quot;; for the agitation in the country grew and grew, until,
+returned again to Parliament at the General Election, he took the oath
+and his seat, brought in and carried an Oaths Bill, not only giving
+Members of Parliament the right to affirm, but making Freethinkers
+competent as jurymen, and relieving witnesses from the insult hitherto
+put upon those who objected to swearing; he thus ended an
+unprecedented struggle by a complete victory, weaving his name for
+ever into the constitutional history of his country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the House of Lords, Lord Redesdale brought in a Bill disqualifying
+Atheists from sitting in Parliament, but in face of the feeling
+aroused in the country, the Lords, with many pathetic expressions of
+regret, declined to pass it. But, meanwhile, Sir Henry Tyler in the
+Commons was calling out for prosecutions for blasphemy to be brought
+against Mr. Bradlaugh and his friends, while he carried on his crusade
+against Mr. Bradlaugh's daughters, Dr. Aveling, and myself, as science
+teachers. I summed up the position in the spring of 1882 in the
+following somewhat strong language: &quot;This short-lived 'Parliamentary
+Declaration Bill' is but one of the many clouds which presage a storm
+of prosecution. The reiterated attempts in the House of Commons to
+force the Government into prosecuting heretics for blasphemy; the
+petty and vicious attacks on the science classes at the Hall; the
+odious and wicked efforts of Mr. Newdegate to drive Mr. Bradlaugh into
+the Bankruptcy Court; all these are but signs that the heterogeneous
+army of pious and bigoted Christians are gathering together their
+forces for a furious attack on those who have silenced them in
+argument, but whom they hope to conquer by main force, by sheer
+brutality. Let them come. Free-thinkers were never so strong, never so
+united, never so well organised as they are to-day. Strong in the
+goodness of our cause, in our faith in the ultimate triumph of Truth,
+in our willingness to give up all save fidelity to the sacred cause of
+liberty of human thought and human speech, we await gravely and
+fearlessly the successors of the men who burned Bruno, who imprisoned
+Galileo, who tortured Vanini&mdash;the men who have in their hands the
+blood-red cross of Jesus of Nazareth, and in their hearts the love of
+God and the hate of man.&quot;
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHXII"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER XII.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+STILL FIGHTING.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+All this hot fighting on the religious field did not render me blind
+to the misery of the Irish land so dear to my heart, writhing in the
+cruel grip of Mr. Forster's Coercion Act. An article &quot;Coercion in
+Ireland and its Results,&quot; exposing the wrongs done under the Act, was
+reprinted as a pamphlet and had a wide circulation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I pleaded against eviction&mdash;7,020 persons had been evicted during the
+quarter ending in March&mdash;for the trial of those imprisoned on
+suspicion, for indemnity for those who before the Land Act had striven
+against wrongs the Land Act had been carried to prevent, and I urged
+that &quot;no chance is given for the healing measures to cure the sore of
+Irish disaffection until not only are the prisoners in Ireland set at
+liberty, but until the brave, unfortunate Michael Davitt stands once
+more a free man on Irish soil.&quot; At last the Government reconsidered
+its policy and resolved on juster dealings; it sent Lord Frederick
+Cavendish over to Ireland, carrying with him the release of the
+&quot;suspects,&quot; and scarcely had he landed ere the knife of assassination
+struck him&mdash;a foul and cowardly murder of an innocent messenger of
+peace. I was at Blackburn, to lecture on &quot;The Irish Question,&quot; and as
+I was walking towards the platform, my heart full of joy for the
+dawning hope of peace, a telegram announcing the assassination was
+placed in my hands. Never shall I forget the shock, the incredulous
+horror, the wave of despair. &quot;It is not only two men they have
+killed,&quot; I wrote, a day or two later; &quot;they have stabbed the new-born
+hope of friendship between two countries, and have reopened the gulf
+of hatred that was just beginning to close.&quot; Alas! the crime succeeded
+in its object, and hurried the Government into new wrong. Hastily a
+new Coercion Bill was brought in, and rushed through its stages in
+Parliament, and, facing the storm of public excitement, I pleaded
+still, &quot;Force no remedy,&quot; despite the hardship of the task. &quot;There is
+excessive difficulty in dealing with the Irish difficulty at the
+present moment. Tories are howling for revenge on a whole nation as
+answer to the crime committed by a few; Whigs are swelling the outcry;
+many Radicals are swept away by the current, and feeling that
+'something must be done,' they endorse the Government action,
+forgetting to ask whether the 'something' proposed is the wisest
+thing. A few stand firm, but they are very few&mdash;too few to prevent the
+new Coercion Bill from passing into law. But few though we be who lift
+up the voice of protest against the wrong which we are powerless to
+prevent, we may yet do much to make the new Act of brief duration, by
+so rousing public opinion as to bring about its early repeal. When the
+measure is understood by the public half the battle will be won; it is
+accepted at the moment from faith in the Government; it will be
+rejected when its true character is grasped. The murders which have
+given birth to this repressive measure came with a shock upon the
+country, which was the more terrible from the sudden change from
+gladness and hope to darkness and despair. The new policy was welcomed
+so joyfully; the messenger of the new policy was slain ere yet the pen
+was dry which had signed the orders of mercy and of liberty. Small
+wonder that cry of horror should be followed by measures of vengeance;
+but the murders were the work of a few criminals, while the measure of
+vengeance strikes the whole of the Irish people. I plead against the
+panic which confounds political agitation and political redressal of
+wrong with crime and its punishment; the Government measure gags every
+mouth in Ireland, and puts, as we shall see, all political effort at
+the mercy of the Lord-Lieutenant, the magistracy, and the police.&quot; I
+then sketched the misery of the peasants in the grip of absentee
+landlords, the turning out on the roadside to die of the mother with
+new-born babe at her breast, the loss of &quot;all thought of the sanctity
+of human life when the lives of the dearest are reckoned as less worth
+than the shillings of overdue rack-rental.&quot; I analysed the new Act:
+&quot;When this Act passes, trial by jury, right of public meeting, liberty
+of press, sanctity of house, will one and all be held at the will of
+the Lord-Lieutenant, the irresponsible autocrat of Ireland, while
+liberty of person will lie at the mercy of every constable. Such is
+England's way of governing Ireland in the year 1882. And this is
+supposed to be a Bill for the 'repression of crime.'&quot; Bluntly, I put
+the bald truth: &quot;The plain fact is that the murderers have succeeded.
+They saw in the new policy the reconciliation of England and Ireland;
+they knew that friendship would follow justice, and that the two
+countries, for the first time in history, would clasp hands. To
+prevent this they dug a new gulf, which they hoped the English nation
+would not span; they sent a river of blood across the road of
+friendship, and they flung two corpses to bar the newly-opened gate of
+reconciliation and peace. They have succeeded.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Into this whirl of political and social strife came the first whisper
+to me of the Theosophical Society, in the shape of a statement of its
+principles, which conveyed, I remarked, &quot;no very definite idea of the
+requirements for membership, beyond a dreamy, emotional, scholarly
+interest in the religio-philosophic fancies of the past.&quot; Also a
+report of an address by Colonel Olcott, which led me to suppose that
+the society held to &quot;some strange theory of 'apparitions' of the dead,
+and to some existence outside the physical and apart from it.&quot; These
+came to me from some Hind&ucirc; Freethinkers, who asked my opinion as to
+Secularists joining the Theosophical Society, and Theosophists being
+admitted to the National Secular Society. I replied, judging from
+these reports, that &quot;while Secularists would have no right to refuse
+to enrol Theosophists, if they desired it, among their members, there
+is a radical difference between the mysticism of Theosophy and the
+scientific materialism of Secularism. The exclusive devotion to this
+world implied in the profession of Secularism leaves no room for
+other-worldism; and consistent members of our body cannot join a
+society which professes belief therein.&quot;<a href="#FN27"><sup>[27]</sup></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+H.P. Blavatsky penned a brief article in the <i>Theosophist</i> for
+August, 1882, in which she commented on my paragraph, remarking, in
+her generous way, that it must have been written &quot;while labouring
+under entirely misconceived notions about the real nature of our
+society. For one so highly intellectual and keen as that renowned
+writer to dogmatise and issue autocratic ukases, after she has herself
+suffered so cruelly and undeservedly at the hands of blind bigotry and
+social prejudice in her lifelong struggle for <i>freedom of thought</i>
+seems, to say the least, absurdly inconsistent.&quot; After quoting my
+paragraph she went on: &quot;Until proofs to the contrary, we prefer to
+believe that the above lines were dictated to Mrs. Besant by some
+crafty misrepresentations from Madras, inspired by a mean personal
+revenge rather than a desire to remain consistent with the principles
+of 'the scientific materialism of Secularism.' We beg to assure the
+Radical editors of the <i>National Reformer</i> that they were both very
+strangely misled by false reports about the Radical editors of the
+<i>Theosophist</i>. The term 'supernaturalists' can no more apply to the
+latter than to Mrs. A. Besant and Mr. C. Bradlaugh.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+H.P. Blavatsky, when she commented, as she occasionally did, on the
+struggles going on in England, took of them a singularly large-hearted
+and generous view. She referred with much admiration to Mr.
+Bradlaugh's work and to his Parliamentary struggle, and spoke warmly
+of the services he had rendered to liberty. Again, in pointing out
+that spiritualistic trance orations by no means transcended speeches
+that made no such claim, I find her first mention of myself: &quot;Another
+lady orator, of deservedly great fame, both for eloquence and
+learning&mdash;the good Mrs. Annie Besant&mdash;without believing in controlling
+spirits, or for that matter in her own spirit, yet speaks and writes
+such sensible and wise things, that we might almost say that one of
+her speeches or chapters contains more matter to benefit humanity than
+would equip a modern trance-speaker for an entire oratorical
+career.&quot;<a href="#FN28"><sup>[28]</sup></a> I have sometimes wondered of late years whether, had I
+met her then or seen any of her writings, I should have become her
+pupil. I fear not; I was still too much dazzled by the triumphs of
+Western Science, too self-assertive, too fond of combat, too much at
+the mercy of my own emotions, too sensitive to praise and blame. I
+needed to sound yet more deeply the depths of human misery, to hear
+yet more loudly the moaning of &quot;the great Orphan,&quot; Humanity, to feel
+yet more keenly the lack of wider knowledge and of clearer light if I
+were to give effective help to man, ere I could bow my pride to crave
+admittance as pupil to the School of Occultism, ere I could put aside
+my prejudices and study the Science of the Soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The long-continued attempts of Sir Henry Tyler and his friends to
+stimulate persecutions for blasphemy at length took practical shape,
+and in July, 1882, Mr. Foote, the editor, Mr. Ramsey, the publisher,
+and Mr. Whittle, the printer of the <i>Freethinker</i>, were summoned for
+blasphemy by Sir Henry Tyler himself. An attempt was made to involve
+Mr. Bradlaugh in the proceedings, and the solicitors promised to drop
+the case against the editor and printer if Mr. Bradlaugh would himself
+sell them some copies of the paper. But however ready Mr. Bradlaugh
+had always shown himself to shield his subordinates by taking his sins
+on his own shoulders, he saw no reason why he should assume
+responsibility for a paper over which he had no control, and which
+was, he thought, by its caricatures, lowering the tone of Freethought
+advocacy and giving an unnecessary handle to its foes. He therefore
+answered that he would sell the solicitors any works published by
+himself or with his authority, and sent them a catalogue of the whole
+of such works. The object of this effort of Sir Henry Tyler's was
+obvious enough, and Mr. Bradlaugh commented: &quot;The above letters make
+it pretty clear that Sir Henry W. Tyler having failed in his endeavour
+to get the science classes stopped at the Hall of Science, having also
+failed in his attempt to induce Sir W. Vernon Harcourt to prosecute
+myself and Mrs. Besant as editors and publishers of this journal,
+desires to make me personally and criminally responsible for the
+contents of a journal I neither edit nor publish, over which I have
+not a shadow of control, and in which I have not the smallest
+interest. Why does Sir H.W. Tyler so ardently desire to prosecute, me
+for blasphemy? Is it because two convictions will under the 9th and
+10th Will. III. cap. 32, render me 'for ever' incapable of sitting in
+Parliament?&quot; The <i>Whitehall Review</i> frankly put this forward as an
+object to be gained, and Mr. Bradlaugh was summoned to the Mansion
+House on a charge of publishing blasphemous libels in the
+<i>Freethinker</i>; meanwhile Sir Henry Tyler put a notice on the Order
+Book to deprive &quot;the daughters of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh&quot; of the grant
+they had earned as science teachers, and got an order which proved to
+be invalid, but which was acted on, to inspect Mr. Bradlaugh's and my
+own private banking accounts, I being no party to the case. Looking
+back, I marvel at the incredible meannesses to which Sir Henry Tyler
+and others stooped in defence of &quot;religion&quot;&mdash;Heaven save the mark! Let
+me add that his motion in the House of Commons was a complete failure,
+and it was emphasised by the publication at the same time of the
+successful work, both as teachers and as students, of the &quot;daughters
+of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh,&quot; and of my being the only student in all
+England who had succeeded in taking honours in botany.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I must pause a moment to chronicle, in September, 1882, the death of
+Dr. Pusey, whom I had sought in the whirl of my early religious
+struggles. I wrote an article on him in the <i>National Reformer</i>, and
+ended by laying a tribute on his grave: &quot;A strong man and a good man.
+Utterly out of harmony with the spirit of his own time, looking with
+sternly-rebuking eyes on all the eager research, the joyous love of
+nature, the earnest inquiry into a world doomed to be burnt up at the
+coming of its Judge. An ascetic, pure in life, stern in faith, harsh
+to unbelievers because sincere in his own cruel creed, generous and
+tender to all who accepted his doctrines and submitted to his Church.
+He never stooped to slander those with whom he disagreed. His hatred
+of heresy led him not to blacken the character of heretics, nor to
+descend to the vulgar abuse used by pettier priests. And therefore I,
+who honour courage and sincerity wherever I find them; I, who do
+homage to steadfastness wherever I find it; I, Atheist, lay my small
+tribute of respect on the bier of this noblest of the Anglo-Catholics,
+Edward Bouverie Pusey.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a practical answer to the numberless attacks made on us, and as a
+result of the enormous increase of circulation given to our
+theological and political writings by these harassing persecutions, we
+moved our publishing business to 63, Fleet Street, at the end of
+September, 1882, a shop facing that at which Richard Carlile had
+carried on his publishing business for a great time, and so seemed
+still redolent with memories of his gallant struggles. Two of the
+first things sold here were a pamphlet of mine, a strong protest
+against our shameful Egyptian policy, and a critical volume on
+&quot;Genesis&quot; which Mr. Bradlaugh found time to write in the intervals of
+his busy life. Here I worked daily, save when out of London, until Mr.
+Bradlaugh's death in 1891, assisted in the conduct of the business by
+Mr. Bradlaugh's elder daughter&mdash;a woman of strong character with many
+noble qualities, who died rather suddenly in December, 1888, and in
+the work on the <i>National Reformer</i>, first by Dr. Aveling, and then by
+Mr. John Robertson, its present editor. Here, too, from 1884 onwards,
+worked with me Thornton Smith, one of Mr. Bradlaugh's most devoted
+disciples, who became one of the leading speakers of the National
+Secular Society; like her well-loved chief, she was ever a good friend
+and a good fighter, and to me the most loyal and loving of colleagues,
+one of the few&mdash;the very few&mdash;Freethinkers who were large-hearted and
+generous enough not to turn against me when I became a Theosophist. A
+second of these&mdash;alas! I could count them on my fingers&mdash;was the John
+Robertson above mentioned, a man of rare ability and wide culture,
+somewhat too scholarly for popular propagandism of the most generally
+effective order, but a man who is a strength to any movement, always
+on the side of noble living and high thinking, loyal-natured as the
+true Scot should be, incapable of meanness or treachery, and the most
+genial and generous of friends.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Among the new literary ventures that followed on our taking the large
+publishing premises in Fleet Street was a sixpenny magazine, edited by
+myself, and entitled <i>Our Corner</i>; its first number was dated January,
+1883, and for six years it appeared regularly, and served me as a
+useful mouthpiece in my Socialist and Labour propagandist work. Among
+its contributors were Moncure D. Conway, Professor Ludwig B&uuml;chner,
+Yves Guyot, Professor Ernst Haeckel, G. Bernard Shaw, Constance Naden,
+Dr. Aveling, J.H. Levy, J.L. Joynes, Mrs. Edgren, John Robertson,
+and many another, Charles Bradlaugh and I writing regularly each
+month.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+1883 broke stormily, fights on every hand, and a huge constitutional
+agitation going on in the country, which forced the Government into
+bringing in an Affirmation Bill; resolutions from Liberal Associations
+all over the land; preparations to oppose the re-election of disloyal
+members; no less than a thousand delegates sent up to London by clubs,
+Trade Unions, associations of every sort; a meeting that packed
+Trafalgar Square; an uneasy crowd in Westminster Hall; a request from
+Inspector Denning that Mr. Bradlaugh would go out to them&mdash;they feared
+for his safety inside; a word from him, &quot;The Government have pledged
+themselves to bring in an Affirmation Bill at once;&quot; roar after roar
+of cheering; a veritable people's victory on that 15th of February,
+1883. It was the answer of the country to the appeal for justice, the
+rebuke of the electors to the House that had defied them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scarcely was this over when a second prosecution for blasphemy against
+Messrs. Foote, Ramsey, and Kemp began, and was hurried on in the
+Central Criminal Court, before Mr. Justice North, a bigot of the
+sternest type. The trial ended in a disagreement of the jury, Mr.
+Foote defending himself in a splendid speech. The judge acted very
+harshly throughout, interrupted Mr. Foote continuously, and even
+refused bail to the defendants during the interval between the first
+and second trial; they were, therefore, confined in Newgate from
+Thursday to Monday, and we were only allowed to see them through iron
+bars and lattice, as they exercised in the prison yard between 8:30
+and 9:30 a.m. Brought up to trial again on Monday, they were
+convicted, and Mr. Foote was sentenced to a year's imprisonment, Mr.
+Ramsey to nine months, and Mr. Kemp to three months. Mr. Foote
+especially behaved with great dignity and courage in a most difficult
+position, and heard his cruel sentence without wincing, and with the
+calm words, &quot;My Lord, I thank you; it is worthy your creed.&quot; A few of
+us at once stepped in, to preserve to Mr. Ramsey his shop, and to Mr.
+Foote his literary property; Dr. Aveling undertook the editing of the
+<i>Freethinker</i> and of Mr. Foote's magazine <i>Progress</i>; the immediate
+necessities of their families were seen to; Mr. and Mrs. Forder took
+charge of the shop, and within a few days all was in working order.
+Disapproving as many of us did of the policy of the paper, there was
+no time to think of that when a blasphemy prosecution had proved
+successful, and we all closed up in the support of men imprisoned for
+conscience' sake. I commenced a series of articles on &quot;The Christian
+Creed; what it is blasphemy to deny,&quot; showing what Christians must
+believe under peril of prosecution. Everywhere a tremendous impulse
+was given to the Freethought movement, as men awakened to the
+knowledge that blasphemy laws were not obsolete.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From over the sea came a word of sympathy from the pen of H.P.
+Blavatsky in the <i>Theosophist</i>. &quot;We prefer Mr. Foote's actual position
+to that of his severe judge. Aye, and were we in his guilty skin, we
+would feel more proud, even in the poor editor's present position,
+than we would under the wig of Mr. Justice North.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In April, 1883, the long legal struggles of Mr. Bradlaugh against Mr.
+Newdegate and his common informer, that had lasted from July 2, 1880,
+till April 9, 1883, ended in his complete victory by the judgment of
+the House of Lords in his favour. &quot;Court after Court decided against
+me,&quot; he wrote; &quot;and Whig and Tory journals alike mocked at me for my
+persistent resistance. Even some good friends thought that my fight
+was hopeless, and that the bigots held me fast in their toils. I have,
+however, at last shaken myself free of Mr. Newdegate and his common
+informer. The judgment of the House of Lords in my favour is final and
+conclusive, and the boasts of the Tories that I should be made
+bankrupt for the penalties, have now, for ever, come to naught. Yet
+but for the many poor folk who have stood by me with their help and
+sympathy, I should have long since been ruined. The days and weeks
+spent in the Law Courts, the harassing work connected with each stage
+of litigation, the watching daily when each hearing was imminent, the
+absolute hindrance of all provincial lecturing&mdash;it is hardly possible
+for any one to judge the terrible mental and pecuniary strain of all
+this long-drawn-out struggle.&quot; Aye! it killed him at last, twenty
+years before his time, sapping his splendid vitality, undermining his
+iron constitution.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The blasphemy trial of Mr. Bradlaugh, Mr. Foote, and Mr. Ramsey now
+came on, but this time in the Queen's Bench, before the Lord Chief
+Justice Coleridge. I had the honour of sitting between Mr. Bradlaugh
+and Mr. Foote, charged with the duty of having ready for the former
+all his references, and with a duplicate brief to mark off point after
+point as he dealt with it. Messrs. Foote and Ramsey were brought up in
+custody, but were brave and bright with courage unbroken. Mr.
+Bradlaugh applied to have his case taken separately, as he denied
+responsibility for the paper, and the judge granted the application;
+it was clearly proved that he and I&mdash;the &quot;Freethought Publishing
+Company&quot;&mdash;had never had anything to do with the production of the
+paper; that until November, 1881, we published it, and then refused to
+publish it any longer; that the reason for the refusal was the
+addition of comic Bible illustrations as a feature of the paper. I was
+called as witness and began with a difficulty; claiming to affirm, I
+was asked by the judge if the oath would not be binding on my
+conscience; I answered that any promise was binding on me whatever the
+form, and after some little argument the judge found a way out of the
+insulting form by asking whether the &quot;invocation of the Deity added
+anything to it of a binding nature&mdash;added any sanction?&quot; &quot;None, my
+Lord,&quot; was the prompt reply, and I was allowed to affirm. Sir Hardinge
+Giffard subjected me to a very stringent cross-examination, doing his
+best to entangle me, but the perfect frankness of my answers broke all
+his weapons of finesse and inuendo.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some of the incidents of the trial were curious; Sir Hardinge
+Giffard's opening speech was very able and very unscrupulous. All
+facts in Mr. Bradlaugh's favour were distorted or hidden; anything
+that could be used against him was tricked out in most seductive
+fashion. Among the many monstrous perversions of the truth made by
+this most pious counsel, was the statement that changes of publisher,
+and of registration of the <i>Freethinker</i> were made in consequence of a
+question as to prosecuting it put in the House of Commons. The change
+of publisher was admittedly made in November; the registration was
+made for the first time in November, and could not be changed, as
+there was no previous one. The House of Commons was not sitting in
+November; the question alluded to was asked in the following February.
+This one deliberate lie of the &quot;defender of the faith&quot; will do as well
+as quoting a score of others to show how wickedly and maliciously he
+endeavoured to secure an unjust verdict.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The speech over, a number of witnesses were called. Sir Hardinge did
+not call witnesses who knew the facts, such as Mr. Norrish, the
+shopman, or Mr. Whittle, the printer. These he carefully avoided,
+although he subpoenaed both, because he did not want the real facts to
+come out. But he put in two solicitor's clerks, who had been hanging
+about the premises, and buying endless <i>National Reformers</i> and
+<i>Freethinkers</i>, sheaves of them which were never used, but by which
+Sir Hardinge hoped to convey the impression of a mass of criminality.
+He put in a gentleman from the British Museum, who produced two large
+books, presumed to be <i>National Reformers</i> and <i>Freethinkers</i>; what
+they were brought for nobody understood, the counsel for the Crown as
+little as any one, and the judge, surveying them over his spectacles,
+treated them with supreme contempt, as utterly irrelevant. Then a man
+came to prove that Mr. Bradlaugh was rated for Stonecutter Street, a
+fact no one disputed. Two policemen came to say they had seen him go
+in. &quot;You saw many people go in, I suppose?&quot; queried the Lord Chief
+Justice. On the whole the most miserably weak and obviously malicious
+case that could be brought into a court of law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One witness, however, must not be forgotten&mdash;Mr. Woodhams, bank
+manager. When he stated that Mr. Maloney, the junior counsel for the
+Crown, had inspected Mr. Bradlaugh's banking account, a murmur of
+surprise and indignation ran round the court. &quot;Oh! Oh!&quot; was heard from
+the crowd of barristers behind. The judge looked down incredulously,
+and for a moment the examination was stopped by the general movement.
+Unless Sir Hardinge Giffard is a splendid actor, he was not aware of
+the infamous proceeding, for he looked as startled as the rest of his
+legal brethren.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another queer incident occurred, showing, perhaps more than aught
+else, Mr. Bradlaugh's swift perception of the situation and adaptation
+to the environment. He wanted to read the Mansion House deposition of
+Norrish, to show why he was not called; the judge objected, and
+declined to allow it to be read. A pause while you might count five;
+then; &quot;Well, I think I may say the learned counsel did not call
+Norrish because ...&quot; and then the whole substance of the deposition
+was given in supposititious form. The judge looked down a minute, and
+then went off into silent laughter impossible to control at the adroit
+change of means and persistent gaining of end; barristers all round
+broke into ripples of laughter unrestrained; a broad smile pervaded
+the jury box; the only unmoved person was the defendant who proceeded
+in his grave statement as to what Norrish &quot;might&quot; have been asked. The
+nature of the defence was very clearly stated by Mr. Bradlaugh: &quot;I
+shall ask you to find that this prosecution is one of the steps in a
+vindictive attempt to oppress and to crush a political opponent&mdash;that
+it was a struggle that commenced on my return to Parliament in 1880.
+If the prosecutor had gone into the box I should have shown you that
+he was one of the first then in the House to use the suggestion of
+blasphemy against me there. Since then I have never had any peace
+until the Monday of this week. Writs for penalties have been served,
+and suits of all kinds have been taken against me. On Monday last the
+House of Lords cleared me from the whole of one set, and, gentlemen, I
+ask you to-day to clear me from another. Three times I have been
+re-elected by my constituents, and what Sir Henry Tyler asks you to do
+is to send me to them branded with the dishonour of a conviction,
+branded not with the conviction for publishing heresy, but branded
+with the conviction, dishonourable to me, of having lied in this
+matter. I have no desire to have a prison's walls closed on me, but I
+would sooner ten times that, than that my constituents should think
+that for one moment I lied to escape the penalties. I am not indicted
+for anything I have ever written or caused to be written. As my Lord
+at the very first stage this morning pointed out, it is no question
+with me, Are the matters indicted blasphemous, or are they not
+blasphemous? Are they defensible, or are they not defensible? That is
+not my duty here. On this I make no comment. I have no duty here of
+even discussing the policy of the blasphemy laws, although I cannot
+help thinking that, if I were here making my defence against them, I
+might say that they were bad laws unfairly revived, doing more
+mischief to those who revive them than to those whom they are revived
+against. But it is not for anything I have said myself; it is not for
+anything I have written myself; it is not for anything I have
+published myself. It is an endeavour to make me technically liable for
+a publication with which I have nothing whatever to do, and I will ask
+you to defeat that here. Every time I have succeeded I have been met
+with some new thing. When I first fought it was hoped to defeat my
+election. When I was re-elected it was sought to make me bankrupt by
+enormous penalties, and when I escaped the suit for enormous penalties
+they hope now to destroy me by this. I have no question here about
+defending my heresy, not because I am not ready to defend it when it
+is challenged in the right way, and it there be anything in it that
+the law can challenge. I have never gone back from anything I have
+ever said; I have never gone back from anything I have ever written; I
+have never gone back from anything I have ever done; and I ask you not
+to allow this Sir Henry Whatley Tyler, who dares not come here to-day,
+to use you as the assassin uses the dagger, to stab a man from behind
+whom he never dares to face.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The summing up by Lord Coleridge was perfect in eloquence, in thought,
+in feeling. Nothing more touching could be imagined than the conflict
+between the real religious feeling, abhorrent of heresy, and the
+determination to be just, despite all prejudice. The earnest effort
+lest the prejudice he felt as a Christian should weigh also in the
+minds of the jury, and should cause them to pervert justice. The
+absolute pleading to them to do what was right and not to admit
+against the unbeliever what they would not admit in ordinary cases.
+Then the protest against prosecution of opinions; the admission of the
+difficulties in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the pathetic fear lest by
+persecution &quot;the sacred truths might be struck through the sides of
+those who are their enemies.&quot; For intellectual clearness and moral
+elevation this exquisite piece of eloquence, delivered in a voice of
+silvery beauty, would be hard to excel, and Lord Coleridge did this
+piece of service to the religion so dear to his heart, that he showed
+that a Christian judge could be just and righteous in dealing with a
+foe of his creed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a time of terrible strain waiting for the verdict, and when
+at last it came, &quot;Not Guilty,&quot; a sharp clap of applause hailed it,
+sternly and rightly reproved by the judge. It was echoed by the
+country, which almost unanimously condemned the prosecution as an
+iniquitous attempt on the part of Mr. Bradlaugh's political enemies to
+put a stop to his political career. Thus the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>
+wrote:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Whatever may be the personal or political or religious aversion which
+is excited by Mr. Bradlaugh, it is impossible for even his bitterest
+opponents to deny the brilliance of the series of victories which he
+has won in the law courts. His acquittal in the blasphemy prosecution
+of Saturday was but the latest of a number of encounters in which he
+has succeeded in turning the tables upon his opponents in the most
+decisive fashion. The policy of baiting Mr. Bradlaugh which has been
+persisted in so long, savours so strongly of a petty and malignant
+species of persecution that it is well that those who indulge in it
+should be made to smart for their pains. The wise and weighty words
+used by the Lord Chief Justice in summing up should be taken seriously
+to heart: 'Those persons are to be deprecated who would pervert the
+law, even with the best intentions, and &quot;do evil that good may come,
+whose damnation&quot; (says the apostle) &quot;is just.&quot;' Without emulating the
+severity of the apostle, we may say that it is satisfactory that the
+promoters of all these prosecutions should be condemned in costs.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the separate trial of Messrs. Foote and Ramsey, Mr. Foote again
+defended himself in a speech of marked ability, and spoken of by the
+judge as &quot;very striking.&quot; Lord Coleridge made a noble charge to the
+jury, in which he strongly condemned prosecutions of unpopular
+opinions, pointing out that no prosecution short of extermination
+could be effective, and caustically remarking on the very easy form of
+virtue indulged in by persecutors. &quot;As a general rule,&quot; he said,
+&quot;persecution, unless far more extreme than in England in the
+nineteenth century is possible, is certain to be in vain. It is also
+true, and I cannot help assenting to it, that it is a very easy form
+of virtue. It is a more difficult form of virtue, quietly and
+unostentatiously to obey what we believe to be God's will in our own
+lives. It is not very easy to do it; and it makes much less noise in
+the world. It is very easy to turn upon somebody else who differs from
+us, and in the guise of zeal of God's honour to attack somebody of a
+difference of opinion, whose life may be more pleasing to God and more
+conducive to His honour than our own. And when it is done by persons
+whose own lives are not free from reproach and who take that
+particular form of zeal for God which consists in putting the criminal
+law in force against others, that, no doubt, does more to create a
+sympathy with the defendant than with the prosecutor. And if it should
+be done by those who enjoy the wit of Voltaire, and who do not turn
+away from the sneers of Gibbon, and rather relish the irony of Hume,
+our feelings do not go with the prosecutors, and we are rather
+disposed to sympathise with the defendant. It is still worse if the
+person who takes such a course takes it, not from a kind of notion
+that God wants his assistance, and that he can give it less on his own
+account than by prosecuting others&mdash;but it is mixed up with anything
+of partisan or political feeling, then nothing can be more foreign to
+what is high-minded, or religious, or noble, in men's conduct; and
+indeed, it seems to me that any one who will do that, not for the
+honour of God but for the purpose of the ban, deserves the most
+disdainful disapprobation.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The jury disagreed, and a <i>nolle prosequi</i> was entered. The net
+results of the trials were a large addition to the membership of the
+National Secular Society, an increase of circulation of Freethought
+literature, the raising of Mr. Foote for a time to a position of great
+influence and popularity, and the placing of his name in history as a
+brave martyr for liberty of speech. The offence against good taste
+will be forgotten; the loyalty to conviction and to courage will
+remain. History does not ask if men who suffered for heresy ever
+published a rough word; it asks, Were they brave in their
+steadfastness; were they faithful to the truth they saw? It may be
+well to place on record Mr. Foote's punishment for blasphemy: he spent
+twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four alone in his cell; his only
+seat was a stool without a back; his employment was picking matting;
+his bed was a plank with a thin mattress. During the latter part of
+his imprisonment he was allowed some books.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHXIII"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER XIII.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+SOCIALISM.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+The rest of 1883 passed in the usual way of hard work; the Affirmation
+Bill was rejected, and the agitation for Constitutional right grew
+steadily; the Liberal Press was won over, and Mr. Bradlaugh was
+beginning to earn golden opinions on all sides for his courage, his
+tenacity, and his self-control. A successful International Congress at
+Amsterdam took some of us over to the Northern Venice, where a most
+successful gathering was held. To me, personally, the year has a
+special interest, as being the one in which my attention was called,
+though only partially, to the Socialist movement. I had heard Louise
+Michelle lecture in the early spring; a brief controversy in the
+<i>National Reformer</i> had interested me, but I had not yet concerned
+myself with the economic basis of Socialism; I had realised that the
+land should be public property, but had not gone into the deeper
+economic causes of poverty, though the question was pressing with
+ever-increasing force on heart and brain. Of Socialist teaching I knew
+nothing, having studied only the older English Economists in my
+younger days. In 1884 a more definite call to consider 299 these
+teachings was to come, and I may perhaps open the record of 1884 with
+the words of greeting spoken by me to our readers in the first number
+of the <i>Reformer</i> for that year: &quot;What tests 1884 may have for our
+courage, what strains on our endurance, what trials of our loyalty,
+none can tell. But this we know&mdash;that every test of courage
+successfully met, every strain of endurance steadily borne, every
+trial of loyalty nobly surmounted, leaves courage braver, endurance
+stronger, loyalty truer, than each was before. And therefore, for our
+own and for the world's sake, I will not wish you, friends, an 1884 in
+which there shall be no toil and no battling; but I will wish you,
+each and all, the hero's heart and the hero's patience, in the
+struggle for the world's raising that will endure through the coming
+year.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On February 3rd I came for the first time across a paper called
+<i>Justice</i>, in which Mr. Bradlaugh was attacked, and which gave an
+account of a meeting of the Democratic Federation&mdash;not yet the Social
+Democratic&mdash;in which a man had, apparently unrebuked, said that &quot;all
+means were justifiable to attain&quot; working-class ends. I protested
+strongly against the advocacy of criminal means, declaring that those
+who urged the use of such means were the worst foes of social
+progress. A few weeks later the <i>Echo</i> repeated a speech of Mr.
+Hyndman's in which a &quot;bloodier revolution&quot; than that of France was
+prophesied, and the extinction of &quot;book-learning&quot; seemed coupled with
+the success of Socialism, and this again I commented on. But I had the
+pleasure, a week later, of reprinting from <i>Justice</i> a sensible
+paragraph, condemning the advocacy of violence so long as free
+agitation was allowed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The spring was marked by two events on which I have not time or space
+to dwell&mdash;the resignation by Mr. Bradlaugh of his seat, on the
+reiteration of the resolution of exclusion, and his triumphant return
+for the fourth time by an increased majority, a vote of 4,032, a
+higher poll than that of the general election; and the release of Mr.
+Foote, on February 25th, from Holloway, whence he was escorted by a
+procession a quarter of a mile in length. On the 12th of March he and
+his fellow-prisoners received a magnificent reception and were
+presented with valuable testimonials at the Hall of Science.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Taking up again the thread of Socialism, the great debate in St.
+James's Hall, London, between Mr. Bradlaugh and Mr. Hyndman on April
+17th, roused me to a serious study of the questions raised. Socialism
+has in England no more devoted, no more self-sacrificing advocate than
+Henry Hyndman. A man of wide and deep reading, wielding most ably a
+singularly fascinating pen, with talents that would have made him
+wealthy in any career he adopted, he has sacrificed himself without a
+murmur to the people's cause. He has borne obloquy from without,
+suspicion and unkindness from those he served, and surrounded by
+temptations to betray the people, he has never swerved from his
+integrity. He has said rash things, has been stirred to passionate
+outbursts and reckless phrases, but love to the people and sympathy
+with suffering lay at the root of his wildest words, and they count
+but little as against his faithful service. Personally, my debt to him
+is of a mixed character; he kept me from Socialism for some time by
+his bitter and very unjust antagonism to Mr. Bradlaugh; but it was the
+debate at St. James's Hall that, while I angrily resented his
+injustice, made me feel that there was something more in practical
+Socialism than I had imagined, especially when I read it over
+afterwards, away from the magic of Mr. Bradlaugh's commanding
+eloquence and personal magnetism. It was a sore pity that English
+Socialists, from the outset of their movement, treated Mr. Bradlaugh
+so unfairly, so that his friends were set against Socialists ere they
+began to examine their arguments. I must confess that my deep
+attachment to him led me into injustice to his Socialist foes in those
+early days, and often made me ascribe to them calculated malignity
+instead of hasty and prejudiced assertion. Added to this, their
+uncurbed violence in discussion, their constant interruptions during
+the speeches of opponents, their reckless inaccuracy in matters of
+fact, were all bars standing in the way of the thoughtful. When I came
+to know them better, I found that the bulk of their speakers were very
+young men, overworked and underpaid, who spent their scanty leisure in
+efforts to learn, to educate themselves, to train themselves, and I
+learned to pardon faults which grew out of the bitter sense of
+injustice, and which were due largely to the terrible pressure of our
+system on characters not yet strong enough&mdash;how few are strong
+enough!&mdash;to bear grinding injustice without loss of balance and of
+impartiality. None save those who have worked with them know how much
+of real nobility, of heroic self-sacrifice, of constant self-denial,
+of brotherly affection, there is among the Social Democrats.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this time also I met George Bernard Shaw, one of the most brilliant
+of Socialist writers and most provoking of men; a man with a perfect
+genius for &quot;aggravating&quot; the enthusiastically earnest, and with a
+passion for representing himself as a scoundrel. On my first
+experience of him on the platform at South Place Institute he
+described himself as a &quot;loafer,&quot; and I gave an angry snarl at him in
+the <i>Reformer</i>, for a loafer was my detestation, and behold! I found
+that he was very poor, because he was a writer with principles and
+preferred starving his body to starving his conscience; that he gave
+time and earnest work to the spreading of Socialism, spending night
+after night in workmen's clubs; and that &quot;a loafer&quot; was only an
+amiable way of describing himself because he did not carry a hod. Of
+course I had to apologise for my sharp criticism as doing him a
+serious injustice, but privately felt somewhat injured at having been
+entrapped into such a blunder. Meanwhile I was more and more turning
+aside from politics and devoting myself to the social condition of the
+people I find myself, in June, protesting against Sir John Lubbock's
+Bill which fixed a twelve-hour day as the limit of a &quot;young person's&quot;
+toil. &quot;A 'day' of twelve hours is brutal,&quot; I wrote; &quot;if the law fixes
+twelve hours as a 'fair day' that law will largely govern custom. I
+declare that a 'legal day' should be eight hours on five days in the
+week and not more than five hours on the sixth. If the labour is of an
+exhausting character these hours are too long.&quot; On every side now the
+Socialist controversy grew, and I listened, read, and thought much,
+but said little. The inclusion of John Robertson in the staff of the
+<i>Reformer</i> brought a highly intellectual Socialist into closer touch
+with us, and slowly I found that the case for Socialism was
+intellectually complete and ethically beautiful. The trend of my
+thought was shown by urging the feeding of Board School children,
+breaking down under the combination of education and starvation, and I
+asked, &quot;Why should people be pauperised by a rate-supported meal, and
+not pauperised by, state-supported police, drainage, road-mending,
+street-lighting, &amp;c? &quot;Socialism in its splendid ideal appealed to my
+heart, while the economic soundness of its basis convinced my head.
+All my life was turned towards the progress of the people, the helping
+of man, and it leaped forward to meet the stronger hope, the lofty
+ideal of social brotherhood, the rendering possible to all of freer
+life; so long had I been striving thitherward, and here there opened
+up a path to the yearned-for goal! How strong were the feelings
+surging in my heart may be seen in a brief extract from an article
+published second week of January, 1885: &quot;Christian charity? We know
+its work. It gives a hundred-weight of coal and five pounds of beef
+once a year to a family whose head could earn a hundred such doles if
+Christian justice allowed him fair wage for the work he performs. It
+plunders the workers of the wealth they make, and then flings back at
+them a thousandth part of their own product as 'charity.' It builds
+hospitals for the poor whom it has poisoned in filthy courts and
+alleys, and workhouses for the worn-out creatures from whom it has
+wrung every energy, every hope, every joy. Miss Cobbe summons us to
+admire Christian civilisation, and we see idlers flaunting in the
+robes woven by the toilers, a glittering tinselled super-structure
+founded on the tears, the strugglings, the grey, hopeless misery of
+the poor.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This first month of January, 1885, brought on me the first attack for
+my Socialistic tendencies, from the pen of Mr. W.P. Ball, who wrote
+to the <i>Reformer</i> complaining of my paragraph, quoted above, in which
+I had advocated rate-supported meals for Board School children. A
+brief controversy thus arose, in which I supported my opinion, waiving
+the question as to my being &quot;at heart a Socialist.&quot; In truth, I
+dreaded to make the plunge of publicly allying myself with the
+advocates of Socialism, because of the attitude of bitter hostility
+they had adopted towards Mr. Bradlaugh. On his strong, tenacious
+nature, nurtured on self-reliant individualism, the arguments of the
+younger generation made no impression. He could not change his methods
+because a new tendency was rising to the surface, and he did not see
+how different was the Socialism of our day to the Socialist dreams of
+the past&mdash;noble ideals of a future not immediately realisable in
+truth, but to be worked towards and rendered possible in the days to
+come. Could I take public action which might bring me into collision
+with the dearest of my friends, which might strain the strong and
+tender tie so long existing between us? My affection, my gratitude,
+all warred against the idea of working with those who wronged him so
+bitterly. But the cry of starving children was ever in my ears; the
+sobs of women poisoned in lead works, exhausted in nail works, driven
+to prostitution by starvation, made old and haggard by ceaseless work.
+I saw their misery was the result of an evil system, was inseparable
+from private ownership of the instruments of wealth production; that
+while the worker was himself but an instrument, selling his labour
+under the law of supply and demand, he must remain helpless in the
+grip of the employing classes, and that trade combinations could only
+mean increased warfare&mdash;necessary, indeed, for the time as weapons of
+defence&mdash;but meaning war, not brotherly co-operation of all for the
+good of all. A conflict which was stripped of all covering, a conflict
+between a personal tie and a call of duty could not last long, and
+with a heavy heart I made up my mind to profess Socialism openly and
+work for it with all my energy. Happily, Mr. Bradlaugh was as tolerant
+as he was strong, and our private friendship remained unbroken; but he
+never again felt the same confidence in my judgment as he felt before,
+nor did he any more consult me on his own policy, as he had done ever
+since we first clasped hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A series of articles in <i>Our Corner</i> on the &quot;Redistribution of
+Political Power,&quot; on the &quot;Evolution of Society,&quot; on &quot;Modern
+Socialism,&quot; made my position clear. &quot;Over against those who laud the
+present state of Society, with its unjustly rich and its unjustly
+poor, with its palaces and its slums, its millionaires and its
+paupers, be it ours to proclaim that there is a higher ideal in life
+than that of being first in the race for wealth, most successful in
+the scramble for gold. Be it ours to declare steadfastly that health,
+comfort, leisure, culture, plenty for every individual are far more
+desirable than breathless struggle for existence, furious trampling
+down of the weak by the strong, huge fortunes accumulated out of the
+toil of others, to be handed down to those who had done nothing to
+earn them. Be it ours to maintain that the greatness of a nation
+depends not on the number of its great proprietors, on the wealth of
+its great capitalists, or the splendour of its great nobles, but on
+the absence of poverty among its people, on the education and
+refinement of its masses, on the universality of enjoyment in life....
+Enough for each of work, of leisure, of joy; too little for none, too
+much for none&mdash;such is the Social ideal. Better to strive after it
+worthily and fail, than to die without striving for it at all.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then I differentiated the methods of the Socialist and the Radical
+Individualist, pleading for union among those who formed the wings of
+the army of Labour, and urging union of all workers against the
+idlers. For the weakness of the people has ever been in their
+divisions, in the readiness of each section to turn its weapons
+against other sections instead of against the common foe. All
+privileged classes, when they are attacked, sink their differences and
+present a serried front to their assailants; the people alone fight
+with each other, while the battle between themselves and the
+privileged is raging.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I strove, as so many others were striving, to sound in the ears of the
+thoughtless and the careless the cry of the sufferings of the poor,
+endeavouring to make articulate their misery. Thus in a description of
+Edinburgh slums came the following: &quot;I saw in a 'house' which was made
+by boarding up part of a passage, which had no window, and in which it
+was necessary to burn an oil lamp all day, thus adding to the burden
+of the rent, a family of three&mdash;man, wife, and child&mdash;whose lot was
+hardly 'of their own making.' The man was tall and bronzed, but he was
+dying of heart disease; he could not do hard work, and he was too
+clumsy for light work; so he sat there, after two days' fruitless
+search, patiently nursing his miserable, scrofulous baby in his dim
+and narrow den. The cases of individual hopeless suffering are
+heartbreaking. In one room lay a dying child, dying of low fever
+brought on by want of food. 'It hae no faither,' sobbed the mother;
+and for a moment I did not catch the meaning that the father had left
+to the mother all the burden of a child unallowed by law. In another
+lay the corpse of a mother, with the children round her, and
+hard-featured, gentle-hearted women came in to take back to their
+overcrowded beds 'the mitherless bairns.' In yet another a woman,
+shrunken and yellow, crouched over a glimmer of fire; &quot;I am dying of
+cancer of the womb,&quot; she said, with that pathetic resignation to the
+inevitable so common among the poor. I sat chatting for a few minutes.
+'Come again, deary,' she said as I rose to go; 'it's gey dull sitting
+here the day through.'&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The article in which these, among other descriptions, occurred was
+closed with the following: &quot;Passing out of the slums into the streets
+of the town, only a few steps separating the horror and the beauty, I
+felt, with a vividness more intense than ever, the fearful contrasts
+between the lots of men; and with more pressing urgency the question
+seemed to ring in my ears, 'Is there no remedy? Must there always be
+rich and poor?' Some say that it must be so; that the palace and the
+slum will for ever exist as the light and the shadow. Not so do I
+believe. I believe that the poverty is the result of ignorance and of
+bad social arrangements, and that therefore it may be eradicated by
+knowledge and by social change. I admit that for many of these adult
+dwellers in the slums there is no hope. Poor victims of a civilisation
+that hides its brutality beneath a veneer of culture and of grace, for
+them individually there is, alas! no salvation. But for their
+children, yes! Healthy surroundings, good food, mental and physical
+training, plenty of play, and carefully chosen work&mdash;these might save
+the young and prepare them for happy life. But they are being left to
+grow up as their parents were, and even when a few hours of school are
+given them the home half-neutralises what the education effects. The
+scanty aid given is generally begrudged, the education is to be but
+elementary, as little as possible is doled out. Yet these children
+have each one of them hopes and fears, possibilities of virtue and of
+crime, a life to be made or marred. We shower money on generals and on
+nobles, we keep high-born paupers living on the national charity, we
+squander wealth with both hands on army and navy, on churches and
+palaces; but we grudge every halfpenny that increases the education
+rate and howl down every proposal to build decent houses for the poor.
+We cover our heartlessness and indifference with fine phrases about
+sapping the independence of the poor and destroying their
+self-respect. With loathsome hypocrisy we repair a prince's palace for
+him, and let him live in it rent-free, without one word about the
+degradation involved in his thus living upon charity; while we refuse
+to 'pauperise' the toiler by erecting decent buildings in which he may
+live&mdash;not rent-free like the prince, but only paying a rent which
+shall cover the cost of erection and maintenance, instead of one which
+gives a yearly profit to a speculator. And so, year after year, the
+misery grows, and every great city has on its womb a cancer; sapping
+its vitality, poisoning its life-blood. Every great city is breeding
+in its slums a race which is reverting through the savage to the
+brute&mdash;a brute more dangerous in that degraded humanity has
+possibilities of evil in it beyond the reach of the mere wild beast.
+If not for Love's sake, then for fear; if not for justice or for human
+pity, then for sheer desire of self-preservation; I appeal to the wise
+and to the wealthy to set their hands to the cure of social evil, ere
+stolidity gives place to passion and dull patience vanishes before
+fury, and they
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;'Learn at last, in some wild hour, how much the wretched dare.'&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Because it was less hotly antagonistic to the Radicals than the two
+other Socialist organisations, I joined the Fabian Society, and worked
+hard with it as a speaker and lecturer. Sidney Webb, G. Bernard Shaw,
+Hubert and Mrs. Bland, Graham Wallas&mdash;these were some of those who
+gave time, thought, incessant work to the popularising of Socialist
+thought, the spreading of sound economics, the effort to turn the
+workers' energy toward social rather than merely political reform. We
+lectured at workmen's clubs wherever we could gain a hearing, till we
+leavened London Radicalism with Socialist thought, and by treating the
+Radical as the unevolved Socialist rather than as the anti-Socialist,
+we gradually won him over to Socialist views. We circulated questions
+to be put to all candidates for parliamentary or other offices,
+stirred up interest in local elections, educated men and women into an
+understanding of the causes of their poverty, won recruits for the
+army of propagandists from the younger of the educated middle class.
+That the London working classes to-day are so largely Socialist is
+greatly due to the years of work done among them by members of the
+Fabian Society, as well to the splendid, if occasionally too militant,
+energy of the Social Democratic Federation, and to the devotion of
+that noble and generous genius, William Morris.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During this same year (1885) a movement was set on foot in England to
+draw attention to the terrible sufferings of the Russian political
+prisoners, and it was decided at a meeting held in my house to form a
+society of the friends of Russia, which should seek to spread accurate
+and careful information about the present condition of Russia. At that
+meeting were present Charles Bradlaugh, &quot;Stepniak,&quot; and many others,
+E.R. Pease acting as honorary secretary. It is noteworthy that some
+of the most prominent Russian exiles&mdash;such as Kropotkin&mdash;take the view
+that the Tzar himself is not allowed to know what occurs, and is very
+largely the victim of the bureaucracy that surrounds him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another matter, that increased as the months went on, was the attempt
+of the police authorities to stop Socialist speaking in the open air.
+Christians, Freethinkers, Salvationists, agitators of all kinds were,
+for the most part, left alone, but there was a regular crusade against
+the Socialists. Liberal and Tory journals alike condemned the way in
+which in Dod Street, in September, the Socialists' meetings were
+attacked. Quiet persistence was shown by the promoters&mdash;members of the
+Social Democratic Federation&mdash;and they were well supported by other
+Socialists and by the Radical clubs. I volunteered to speak on October
+4th (my first Sunday in London after the summoning and imprisoning of
+the speakers had commenced), but the attitude of the people was so
+determined on the preceding Sunday that all interference was
+withdrawn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Herbert Burrows stood for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets in
+the November of this year, and I find a paragraph in the <i>Reformer</i> in
+which I heartily wished him success, especially as the first candidate
+who had put forward a demand for industrial education. In this, as in
+so many practical proposals, Socialists have led the way. He polled
+4,232 votes, despite the furious opposition of the clergy to him as a
+Freethinker, of the publicans to him as a teetotaler, of the
+maintainers of the present social system to him as a Socialist. And
+his fight did much to make possible my own success in 1888.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With this autumn, too, began, in connection with the struggle for the
+right of meeting, the helping of the workmen to fair trial by
+providing of bail and legal defence. The first case that I bailed out
+was that of Lewis Lyons, sent to gaol for two months with hard labour
+by Mr. Saunders, of the Thames Police Court. Oh, the weary, sickening
+waiting in the court for &quot;my prisoner,&quot; the sordid vice, the revolting
+details of human depravity to which my unwilling eyes and ears were
+witnesses. I carried Lyons off in triumph, and the Middlesex
+magistrates quashed the conviction, the evidence being pronounced by
+them to be &quot;confusing, contradictory, and worthless.&quot; Yet but for the
+chance of one of us stepping forward to offer bail and to provide the
+means for an appeal (I acted on Mr. Bradlaugh's suggestion and advice,
+for he acted as counsellor to me all through the weary struggles that
+lasted till 1888, putting his great legal knowledge at my disposal,
+though he often disapproved my action, thinking me Quixotic)&mdash;but for
+this, Lewis Lyons would have had to suffer his heavy sentence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The general election took place this autumn, and Northampton returned
+Mr. Bradlaugh for the fifth time, thus putting an end to the long
+struggle, for he took the oath and his seat in the following January,
+and at once gave notice of an Oaths Bill, to give to all who claimed
+it, under all circumstances, the right to affirm. He was returned with
+the largest vote ever polled for him&mdash;4,315&mdash;and he entered Parliament
+with all the prestige of his great struggle, and went to the front at
+once, one of the recognised forces in the House. The action of Mr.
+Speaker Peel promptly put an end to an attempted obstruction. Sir
+Michael Hicks Beach, Mr. Cecil Raikes, and Sir John Hennaway had
+written to the Speaker asking his interference, but the Speaker
+declared that he had no authority, no right to stand between a duly
+elected member and the duty of taking the oath prescribed by statute.
+Thus ended the constitutional struggle of six years, that left the
+victor well-nigh bankrupt in health and in purse, and sent him to a
+comparatively early grave. He lived long enough to justify his
+election, to prove his value to the House and to his country, but he
+did not live long enough to render to England all the services which
+his long training, his wide knowledge, his courage, and his honesty so
+eminently fitted him to yield.
+</p>
+
+<a name="07"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="Images/07.jpg" alt="Norwich Branch of the Socialist League." width="597" height="412"></p>
+<h5>NORWICH BRANCH OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE.
+</h5>
+
+<p>
+<i>Our Corner</i> now served as a valuable aid in Socialist propaganda, and
+its monthly &quot;Socialist Notes&quot; became a record of Socialist progress in
+all lands. We were busy during the spring in organising a conference
+for the discussion of &quot;The Present Commercial System, and the Better
+Utilisation of National Wealth for the Benefit of the Community,&quot; and
+this was successfully held at South Place Institute on June 9th, 10th,
+11th, the three days being given respectively, to the &quot;Utilisation of
+Land,&quot; the &quot;Utilisation of Capital,&quot; and the &quot;Democratic Policy.&quot; On
+the 9th Mr. Bradlaugh spoke on the utilisation of waste lands, arguing
+that in a thickly populated country no one had the right to keep
+cultivable land uncultivated, and that where land was so kept there
+should be compulsory expropriation, the state taking the land and
+letting it out to cultivating tenants. Among the other speakers were
+Edward Carpenter, William Morris, Sidney Webb, John Robertson, William
+Saunders, W. Donnisthorpe, Edward Aveling, Charlotte Wilson, Mrs.
+Fenwick Miller, Hubert Bland, Dr. Pankhurst, and myself&mdash;men and women
+of many views, met to compare methods, and so help on the cause of
+social regeneration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bitter attacks were made on me for my Socialist advocacy by some of
+the Radicals in the Freethought party, and looking back I find myself
+condemned as a &quot;Saint Athanasius in petticoats,&quot; and as possessing a
+&quot;mind like a milk-jug.&quot; This same courteous critic remarked, &quot;I have
+heard Mrs. Besant described as being, like most women, at the mercy of
+her last male acquaintance for her views on economics.&quot; I was foolish
+enough to break a lance in self-defence with this assailant, not
+having then learned that self-defence was a waste of time that might
+be better employed in doing work for others. I certainly should not
+now take the trouble to write such a paragraph as the following: &quot;The
+moment a man uses a woman's sex to discredit her arguments, the
+thoughtful reader knows that he is unable to answer the arguments
+themselves. But really these silly sneers at woman's ability have lost
+their force, and are best met with a laugh at the stupendous 'male
+self-conceit' of the writer. I may add that such shafts are specially
+pointless against myself. A woman who thought her way out of
+Christianity and Whiggism into Freethought and Radicalism absolutely
+alone; who gave up every old friend, male and female, rather than
+resign the beliefs she had struggled to in solitude; who, again, in
+embracing active Socialism, has run counter to the views of her
+nearest 'male friends'; such a woman may very likely go wrong, but I
+think she may venture, without conceit, to at least claim independence
+of judgment. I did not make the acquaintance of one of my present
+Socialist comrades, male or female, until I had embraced Socialism.&quot; A
+foolish paragraph, as are all self-defences, and a mischievous one, as
+all retort breeds fresh strife. But not yet had come the self-control
+that estimates the judgments of others at their true value, that recks
+not of praise and blame; not yet had I learned that evil should not be
+met with evil, wrath with wrath; not yet were the words of the Buddha
+the law to which I strove to render obedience: &quot;Hatred ceases not by
+hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love.&quot; The year 1886 was a
+terrible one for labour, everywhere reductions of wages, everywhere
+increase of the numbers of the unemployed; turning over the pages of
+<i>Our Corner</i>, I see &quot;Socialist Notes&quot; filled, month after month, with
+a monotonous tale, &quot;there is a reduction of wages at&quot; such and such a
+place; so many &quot;men have been discharged at &mdash;-, owing to the
+slackness of trade.&quot; Our hearts sank lower and lower as summer passed
+into autumn, and the coming winter threatened to add to starvation the
+bitter pains of cold. The agitation for the eight hours' day increased
+in strength as the unemployed grew more numerous week by week &quot;We
+can't stand it,&quot; a sturdy, quiet fellow had said to me during the
+preceding winter; &quot;flesh and blood can't stand it, and two months of
+this bitter cold, too.&quot; &quot;We may as well starve idle as starve
+working,&quot; had said another, with a fierce laugh. And a spirit of
+sullen discontent was spreading everywhere, discontent that was wholly
+justified by facts. But ah! how patient they were for the most part,
+how sadly, pathetically patient, this crucified Christ, Humanity;
+wrongs that would set my heart and my tongue afire would be accepted
+as a matter of course. O blind and mighty people, how my heart went
+out to you; trampled on, abused, derided, asking so little and needing
+so much; so pathetically grateful for the pettiest services; so loving
+and so loyal to those who offered you but their poor services and
+helpless love. Deeper and deeper into my innermost nature ate the
+growing desire to succour, to suffer for, to save. I had long given up
+my social reputation, I now gave up with ever-increasing surrender
+ease, comfort, time; the passion of pity grew stronger and stronger,
+fed by each new sacrifice, and each sacrifice led me nearer and nearer
+to the threshold of that gateway beyond which stretched a path of
+renunciation I had never dreamed of, which those might tread who were
+ready wholly to strip off self for Man's sake, who for Love's sake
+would surrender Love's return from those they served, and would go out
+into the darkness for themselves that they might, with their own souls
+as fuel, feed the Light of the World.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the suffering deepened with the darkening months, the meetings of
+the unemployed grew in number, and the murmurs of discontent became
+louder. The Social Democratic Federation carried on an outdoor
+agitation, not without making blunders, being composed of human
+beings, but with abundant courage and self-sacrifice. The policy of
+breaking up Socialist meetings went on while other meetings were
+winked at, and John Williams, a fiery speaker, but a man with a record
+of pathetic struggle and patient heroism, was imprisoned for two
+months for speaking in the open air, and so nearly starved in gaol
+that he came out with his health broken for life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+1887 dawned, the year that was to close so stormily, and Socialists
+everywhere were busying themselves on behalf of the unemployed, urging
+vestries to provide remunerative work for those applying for relief,
+assailing the Local Government Board with practicable proposals for
+utilising the productive energies of the unemployed, circulating
+suggestions to municipalities and other local representative bodies,
+urging remedial measures. A four days' oral debate with Mr. Foote, and
+a written debate with Mr. Bradlaugh, occupied some of my energies, and
+helped in the process of education to which public opinion was being
+subjected. Both these debates were largely circulated as pamphlets. A
+series of afternoon debates between representative speakers was
+organised at South Place Institute, and Mr. Corrie Grant and myself
+had a lively discussion, I affirming &quot;That the existence of classes
+who live upon unearned incomes is detrimental to the welfare of the
+community, and ought to be put an end to by legislation.&quot; Another
+debate&mdash;in this very quarrelsome spring of 1887&mdash;was a written one in
+the <i>National Reformer</i> between the Rev. G.F. Handel Rowe and myself
+on the proposition, &quot;Is Atheism logically tenable, and is there a
+satisfactory Atheistic System for the guidance of Human Conduct.&quot; And
+so the months went on, and the menace of misery grew louder and
+louder, till in September I find myself writing: &quot;This one thing is
+clear&mdash;Society must deal with the unemployed, or the unemployed will
+deal with Society. Stormier and stormier becomes the social outlook,
+and they at least are not the worst enemies of Society who seek to
+find some way through the breakers by which the ship of the
+Commonwealth may pass into quiet waters.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some amusement turned up in the shape of a Charing Cross Parliament,
+in which we debated with much vigour the &quot;burning questions&quot; of the
+day. We organised a compact Socialist party, defeated a Liberal
+Government, took the reins of office, and&mdash;after a Queen's Speech in
+which her Majesty addressed her loyal Commons with a plainness of
+speech never before (or since) heard from the throne&mdash;we brought in
+several Bills of a decidedly heroic character. G. Bernard Shaw, as
+President of the Local Government Board, and I, as Home Secretary,
+came in for a good deal of criticism in connection with various
+drastic measures. An International Freethought Congress, held in
+London, entailed fairly heavy work, and the science classes were ever
+with us. Another written debate came with October, this time on the
+&quot;Teachings of Christianity,&quot; making the fifth of these set discussions
+held by me during the year. This same month brought a change, painful
+but just: I resigned my much-prized position as co-editor of the
+<i>National Reformer,</i> and the number for October 23rd bore Charles
+Bradlaugh's name alone. The change did not affect my work on the
+paper, but I became merely a subordinate, though remaining, of course,
+joint proprietor. The reason cannot be more accurately given than in
+the paragraph penned at the time: &quot;For a considerable time past, and
+lately in increasing number, complaints have reached me from various
+quarters of the inconvenience and uncertainty that result from the
+divided editorial policy of this paper on the question of Socialism.
+Some months ago I proposed to avoid this difficulty by resigning my
+share in the editorship; but my colleague, with characteristic
+liberality, asked me to let the proposal stand over and see if matters
+would not adjust themselves. But the difficulty, instead of
+disappearing, has only become more pressing; and we both feel that our
+readers have a right to demand that it be solved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;When I became co-editor of this paper I was not a Socialist; and,
+although I regard Socialism as the necessary and logical outcome of
+the Radicalism which for so many years the <i>National Reformer</i> has
+taught, still, as in avowing myself a Socialist I have taken a
+distinct step, the partial separation of my policy in labour questions
+from that of my colleague has been of my own making, and not of his,
+and it is, therefore, for me to go away. Over by far the greater part
+of our sphere of action we are still substantially agreed, and are
+likely to remain so. But since, as Socialism becomes more and more a
+question of practical politics, differences of theory tend to produce
+differences in conduct; and since a political paper must have a single
+editorial programme in practical politics, it would obviously be most
+inconvenient for me to retain my position as co-editor. I therefore
+resume my former position as contributor only, thus clearing the
+<i>National Reformer</i> of all responsibility for the views I hold.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To this Mr. Bradlaugh added the following:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;I need hardly add to this how very deeply I regret the necessity for
+Mrs. Besant's resignation of the joint editorship of this Journal, and
+the real grief I feel in accepting this break in a position in which
+she has rendered such enormous service to the Freethought and Radical
+cause. As a most valued contributor I trust the <i>National Reformer</i>
+may never lose the efficient aid of her brain and pen. For thirteen
+years this paper has been richer for good by the measure of her
+never-ceasing and most useful work. I agree with her that a journal
+must have a distinct editorial policy; and I think this distinctness
+the more necessary when, as in the present case, every contributor has
+the greatest freedom of expression. I recognise in the fullest degree
+the spirit of self-sacrifice in which the lines, to which I add these
+words, have been penned by Mrs. Besant.
+</p>
+<p class="noindent">
+&quot;CHARLES BRADLAUGH.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a wrench, this breaking of a tie for which a heavy price had
+been paid thirteen years before, but it was just. Any one who makes a
+change with which pain is connected is bound, in honour and duty, to
+take that pain as much as possible on himself; he must not put his
+sacrifice on others, nor pay his own ransom with their coin. There
+must be honour kept in the life that reaches towards the Ideal, for
+broken faith to that is the only real infidelity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And there was another reason for the change that I dared not name to
+him, for his quick loyalty would then have made him stubbornly
+determined against change. I saw the swift turning of public opinion,
+the gradual approach to him among Liberals who had hitherto held
+aloof, and I knew that they looked upon me as a clog and a burden, and
+that were I less prominently with him his way would be the easier to
+tread. So I slipped more and more into the background, no longer went
+with him to his meetings; my use to him in public was over, for I had
+become hindrance instead of help. While he was outcast and hated I had
+the pride of standing at his side; when all the fair-weather friends
+came buzzing round him I served him best by self-effacement, and I
+never loved him better than when I stood aside. But I continued all
+the literary work unaltered, and no change of opinions touched his
+kindness to me, although when, a little later, I joined the
+Theosophical Society, he lost his trust in my reasoning powers and
+judgment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this same month of October the unemployed began walking in
+procession through the streets, and harshness on the part of the
+police led to some rioting. Sir Charles Warren thought it his duty to
+dragoon London meetings after the fashion of Continental prefects,
+with the inevitable result that an ill-feeling grew up between the
+people and the police.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last we formed a Socialist Defence Association, in order to help
+poor workmen brought up and sentenced on police evidence only, without
+any chance being given them of proper legal defence, and I organised a
+band of well-to-do men and women, who promised to obey a telegraphic
+summons, night or day, and to bail out any prisoner arrested for
+exercising the ancient right of walking in procession and speaking. To
+take one instance: Mr. Burleigh, the well-known war correspondent, and
+Mr. Winks were arrested and &quot;run in&quot; with Mr. J. Knight, a workman,
+for seditious language. I went down to the police-station to offer
+bail for the latter: Chief-Constable Howard accepted bail for Messrs.
+Burleigh and Winks, but refused it for Mr. Knight. The next day, at
+the police-court, the preposterous bail of &pound;400 was demanded for Mr.
+Knight and supplied by my faithful band, and on the next hearing Mr.
+Poland, solicitor to the Treasury, withdrew the charge against him for
+lack of evidence!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came the closing of Trafalgar Square, and the unexpected and
+high-handed order that cost some men their lives, many their liberty,
+and hundreds the most serious injuries. The Metropolitan Radical
+Federation had called a meeting for November 13th to protest against
+the imprisonment of Mr. O'Brien, and as Mr. Matthews, from his place
+in the House, had stated that there was no intention of interfering
+with <i>bon&acirc; fide</i> political meetings, the Radical clubs did not expect
+police interference. On November 9th Sir Charles Warren had issued an
+order forbidding all meetings in the Square, but the clubs trusted the
+promise of the Home Secretary. On Saturday evening only, November
+12th, when all arrangements were completed, did he issue a peremptory
+order, forbidding processions within a certain area. With this trap
+suddenly sprung upon them, the delegates from the clubs, the Fabian
+Society, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Socialist League,
+met on that same Saturday evening to see to any details that had been
+possibly left unsettled. It was finally decided to go to the Square as
+arranged, and, if challenged by the police, to protest formally
+against the illegal interference, then to break up the processions and
+leave the members to find their own way to the Square. It was also
+decided to go Sunday after Sunday to the Square, until the right of
+public meetings was vindicated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The procession I was in started from Clerkenwell Green, and walked
+with its banner in front, and the chosen speakers, including myself,
+immediately behind the flag. As we were moving slowly and quietly
+along one of the narrow streets debouching on Trafalgar Square,
+wondering whether we should be challenged, there was a sudden charge,
+and without a word the police were upon us with uplifted truncheons;
+the banner was struck down, and men and women were falling under a
+hail of blows. There was no attempt at resistance, the people were too
+much astounded at the unprepared attack. They scattered, leaving some
+of their number on the ground too much injured to move, and then made
+their way in twos and threes to the Square. It was garrisoned by
+police, drawn up in serried rows, that could only have been broken by
+a deliberate charge. Our orders were to attempt no violence, and we
+attempted none. Mr. Cunninghame Graham and Mr. John Burns, arm-in-arm,
+tried to pass through the police, and were savagely cut about the head
+and arrested. Then ensued a scene to be remembered; the horse police
+charged in squadrons at a hand-gallop, rolling men and women over like
+ninepins, while the foot police struck recklessly with their
+truncheons, cutting a road through the crowd that closed immediately
+behind them. I got on a waggonette and tried to persuade the driver to
+pull his trap across one of the roads, and to get others in line, so
+as to break the charges of the mounted police; but he was afraid, and
+drove away to the Embankment, so I jumped out and went back to the
+Square. At last a rattle of cavalry, and up came the Life Guards,
+cleverly handled but hurting none, trotting their horses gently and
+shouldering the crowd apart; and then the Scots Guards with bayonets
+fixed marched through and occupied the north of the Square. Then the
+people retreated as we passed round the word, &quot;Go home, go home.&quot; The
+soldiers were ready to fire, the people unarmed; it would have been
+but a massacre. Slowly the Square emptied and all was still. All other
+processions were treated as ours had been, and the injuries inflicted
+were terrible. Peaceable, law-abiding workmen, who had never dreamed
+of rioting, were left with broken legs, broken arms, wounds of every
+description. One man, Linnell, died almost immediately, others from
+the effect of their injuries. The next day a regular court-martial in
+Bow Street Police Court, witnesses kept out by the police, men dazed
+with their wounds, decent workmen of unblemished character who had
+never been charged in a police-court before, sentenced to imprisonment
+without chance of defence. But a gallant band rallied to their rescue.
+William T. Stead, most chivalrous of journalists, opened a Defence
+Fund, and money rained in; my pledged bail came up by the dozen, and
+we got the men out on appeal. By sheer audacity I got into the
+police-court, addressed the magistrate, too astounded by my profound
+courtesy and calm assurance to remember that I had no right there, and
+then produced bail after bail of the most undeniable character and
+respectability, which no magistrate could refuse. Breathing-time
+gained, a barrister, Mr. W.M. Thompson, worked day after day with
+hearty devotion, and took up the legal defence. Fines we paid, and
+here Mrs. Marx Aveling did eager service. A pretty regiment I led out
+of Millbank Prison, after paying their fines; bruised, clothes torn,
+hatless, we must have looked a disreputable lot. We stopped and bought
+hats, to throw an air of respectability over our <i>cort&egrave;ge</i>, and we
+kept together until I saw the men into train and omnibus, lest, with
+the bitter feelings now roused, conflict should again arise. We formed
+the Law and Liberty League to defend all unjustly assailed by the
+police, and thus rescued many a man from prison; and we gave poor
+Linnell, killed in Trafalgar Square, a public funeral. Sir Charles
+Warren forbade the passing of the hearse through any of the main
+thoroughfares west of Waterloo Bridge, so the processions waited there
+for it. W.T. Stead, R. Cunninghame Graham, Herbert Burrows, and
+myself walked on one side the coffin, William Morris, F. Smith, R.
+Dowling, and J. Seddon on the other; the Rev. Stewart D. Headlam, the
+officiating clergyman, walked in front; fifty stewards carrying long
+wands guarded the coffin. From Wellington Street to Bow Cemetery the
+road was one mass of human beings, who uncovered reverently as the
+slain man went by; at Aldgate the procession took three-quarters of an
+hour to pass one spot, and thus we bore Linnell to his grave, symbol
+of a cruel wrong, the vast orderly, silent crowd, bareheaded, making
+mute protest against the outrage wrought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is pleasant to put on record here Mr. Bradlaugh's grave approval of
+the heavy work done in the police-courts, and the following paragraph
+shows how generously he could praise one not acting on his own lines:
+&quot;As I have on most serious matters of principle recently differed very
+widely from my brave and loyal co-worker, and as the difference has
+been regrettably emphasised by her resignation of her editorial
+functions on this Journal, it is the more necessary that I should say
+how thoroughly I approve, and how grateful I am to her for, her
+conduct in not only obtaining bail and providing legal assistance for
+the helpless unfortunates in the hands of the police, but also for her
+daily personal attendance and wise conduct at the police-stations and
+police-courts, where she has done so much to abate harsh treatment on
+the one hand and rash folly on the other. While I should not have
+marked out this as fitting woman's work, especially in the recent very
+inclement weather, I desire to record my view that it has been bravely
+done, well done, and most usefully done, and I wish to mark this the
+more emphatically as my views and those of Mrs. Besant seem wider
+apart than I could have deemed possible on many of the points of
+principle underlying what is every day growing into a most serious
+struggle.&quot; Ever did I find Charles Bradlaugh thus tolerant of
+difference of opinion, generously eager to approve what to him seemed
+right even in a policy he disapproved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The indignation grew and grew; the police were silently boycotted, but
+the people were so persistent and so tactful that no excuse for
+violence was given, until the strain on the police force began to
+tell, and the Tory Government felt that London was being hopelessly
+alienated; so at last Sir Charles Warren fell, and a wiser hand was
+put at the helm.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHXIV"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER XIV.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+THROUGH STORM TO PEACE.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+Out of all this turmoil and stress rose a Brotherhood that had in it
+the promise of a fairer day. Mr. Stead and I had become close
+friends&mdash;he Christian, I Atheist, burning with one common love for
+man, one common hatred against oppression. And so in <i>Our Corner</i> for
+February, 1888, I wrote:&mdash;&quot;Lately there has been dawning on the minds
+of men far apart in questions of theology, the idea of founding a new
+Brotherhood, in which service of Man should take the place erstwhile
+given to service of God&mdash;a brotherhood in which work should be worship
+and love should be baptism, in which none should be regarded as alien
+who was willing to work for human good. One day as I was walking
+towards Millbank Gaol with the Rev. S.D. Headlam, on the way to
+liberate a prisoner, I said to him: 'Mr. Headlam, we ought to have a
+new Church, which should include all who have the common ground of
+faith in and love for man.' And a little later I found that my friend
+Mr. W.T. Stead, editor of the <i>Pall Mall Gazette,</i> had long been
+brooding over a similar thought, and wondering whether men 'might not
+be persuaded to be as earnest about making this world happy as they
+are over saving their souls.' The teaching of social duty, the
+upholding of social righteousness, the building up of a true
+commonwealth&mdash;such would be among the aims of the Church of the
+future. Is the hope too fair for realisation? Is the winning of such
+beatific vision yet once more the dream of the enthusiast? But surely
+the one fact that persons so deeply differing in theological creeds as
+those who have been toiling for the last three months to aid and
+relieve the oppressed, can work in absolute harmony side by side for
+the one end&mdash;surely this proves that there is a bond which is stronger
+than our antagonisms, a unity which is deeper than the speculative
+theories which divide.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How unconsciously I was marching towards the Theosophy which was to
+become the glory of my life, groping blindly in the darkness for that
+very brotherhood, definitely formulated on these very lines by those
+Elder Brothers of our race, at whose feet I was so soon to throw
+myself. How deeply this longing for something loftier than I had yet
+found had wrought itself into my life, how strong the conviction was
+growing that there was something to be sought to which the service of
+man was the road, may be seen in the following passage from the same
+article:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;It has been thought that in these days of factories and of tramways,
+of shoddy, and of adulteration, that all life must tread with even
+rhythm of measured footsteps, and that the glory of the ideal could no
+longer glow over the greyness of a modern horizon. But signs are not
+awanting that the breath of the older heroism is beginning to stir
+men's breasts, and that the passion for justice and for liberty, which
+thrilled through the veins of the world's greatest in the past, and
+woke our pulses to responsive throb, has not yet died wholly out of
+the hearts of men. Still the quest of the Holy Grail exercises its
+deathless fascination, but the seekers no longer raise eyes to heaven,
+nor search over land and sea, for they know that it waits them in the
+suffering at their doors, that the consecration of the holiest is on
+the agonising masses of the poor and the despairing, the cup is
+crimson with the blood of the
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+&quot;'People, the grey-grown speechless Christ.'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+... If there be a faith that can remove the mountains of ignorance and
+evil, it is surely that faith in the ultimate triumph of Right in the
+final enthronement of Justice, which alone makes life worth the
+living, and which gems the blackest cloud of depression with the
+rainbow-coloured arch of an immortal hope.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a step towards bringing about some such union of those ready to
+work for man, Mr. Stead and I projected the <i>Link</i>, a halfpenny
+weekly, the spirit of which was described in its motto, taken from
+Victor Hugo: &quot;The people are silence. I will be the advocate of this
+silence. I will speak for the dumb. I will speak of the small to the
+great and of the feeble to the strong.... I will speak for all the
+despairing silent ones. I will interpret this stammering; I will
+interpret the grumblings, the murmurs, the tumults of crowds, the
+complaints ill-pronounced, and all these cries of beasts that, through
+ignorance and through suffering, man is forced to utter ... I will be
+the Word of the People. I will be the bleeding mouth whence the gag is
+snatched out. I will say everything.&quot; It announced its object to be
+the &quot;building up&quot; of a &quot;New Church, dedicated to the service of man,&quot;
+and &quot;what we want to do is to establish in every village and in every
+street some man or woman who will sacrifice time and labour as
+systematically and as cheerfully in the temporal service of man as
+others do in what they believe to be the service of God.&quot; Week after
+week we issued our little paper, and it became a real light in the
+darkness. There the petty injustices inflicted on the poor found
+voice; there the starvation wages paid to women found exposure; there
+sweating was brought to public notice. A finisher of boots paid 2s.
+6d. per dozen pairs and &quot;find your own polish and thread&quot;; women
+working for 10&frac12; hours per day, making shirts&mdash;&quot;fancy best&quot;&mdash;at from
+10d. to 3s. per dozen, finding their own cotton and needles, paying
+for gas, towel, and tea (compulsory), earning from 4s. to 10s. per
+week for the most part; a mantle finisher 2s. 2d. a week, out of which
+6d. for materials; &quot;respectable hard-working woman&quot; tried for
+attempted suicide, &quot;driven to rid herself of life from want.&quot; Another
+part of our work was defending people from unjust landlords, exposing
+workhouse scandals, enforcing the Employers' Liability Act, Charles
+Bradlaugh's Truck Act, forming &quot;Vigilance Circles&quot; whose members kept
+watch in their own district over cases of cruelty to children,
+extortion, insanitary workshops, sweating, &amp;c., reporting each case to
+me. Into this work came Herbert Burrows, who had joined hands with me
+over the Trafalgar Square defence, and who wrote some noble articles
+in the <i>Link</i>. A man loving the people with passionate devotion,
+hating oppression and injustice with equal passion, working himself
+with remorseless energy, breaking his heart over wrongs he could not
+remedy. His whole character once came out in a sentence when he was
+lying delirious and thought himself dying: &quot;Tell the people how I have
+loved them always.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In our crusade for the poor we worked for the dockers.&quot; To-morrow
+morning, in London alone 20,000 to 25,000 adult men,&quot; wrote Sidney
+Webb, &quot;will fight like savages for permission to labour in the docks
+for 4d. an hour, and one-third of them will fight in vain, and be
+turned workless away.&quot; We worked for children's dinners. &quot;If we insist
+on these children being educated, is it not necessary that they shall
+be fed? If not, we waste on them knowledge they cannot assimilate, and
+torture many of them to death. Poor waifs of humanity, we drive them
+into the school and bid them learn; and the pitiful, wistful eyes
+question us why we inflict this strange new suffering, and bring into
+their dim lives this new pang. 'Why not leave us alone? 'ask the
+pathetically patient little faces. Why not, indeed, since for these
+child martyrs of the slums, Society has only formulas, not food.&quot; We
+cried out against &quot;cheap goods,&quot; that meant &quot;sweated and therefore
+stolen goods.&quot; &quot;The ethics of buying should surely be simply enough.
+We want a particular thing, and we do not desire to obtain it either
+by begging or by robbery; but if in becoming possessed of it, we
+neither beg it nor steal, we must give for it something equivalent in
+exchange; so much of our neighbour's labour has been put into the
+thing we desire; if we will not yield him fair equivalent for that
+labour, yet take his article, we defraud him, and if we are not
+willing to give that fair equivalent we have no right to become the
+owners of his product.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This branch of our work led to a big fight&mdash;a fight most happy in its
+results. At a meeting of the Fabian Society, Miss Clementina Black
+gave a capital lecture on Female Labour, and urged the formation of a
+Consumers' League, pledged only to buy from shops certificated &quot;clean&quot;
+from unfair wage. H.H. Champion, in the discussion that followed,
+drew attention to the wages paid by Bryant &amp; May (Limited), while
+paying an enormous dividend to their shareholders, so that the value
+of the original &pound;5 shares was quoted at &pound;18 7s. 6d. Herbert Burrows
+and I interviewed some of the girls, got lists of wages, of fines, &amp;c.
+&quot;A typical case is that of a girl of sixteen, a piece-worker; she
+earns 4s. a week, and lives with a sister, employed by the same firm,
+who 'earns good money, as much as 8s. or 9s. a week.' Out of the
+earnings 2s. a week is paid for the rent of one room. The child lives
+only on bread and butter and tea, alike for breakfast and dinner, but
+related with dancing eyes that once a month she went to a meal where
+'you get coffee and bread and butter, and jam and marmalade, and lots
+of it.'&quot; We published the facts under the title of &quot;White Slavery in
+London,&quot; and called for a boycott of Bryant &amp; May's matches. &quot;It is
+time some one came and helped us,&quot; said two pale-faced girls to me;
+and I asked: &quot;Who will help? Plenty of people wish well to any good
+cause; but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still
+fewer will risk anything in its support. 'Some one ought to do it, but
+why should I?' is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability.
+'Some one ought to do it, so why <i>not</i> I?' is the cry of some earnest
+servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty.
+Between those two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was promptly threatened with an action for libel, but nothing came
+of it; it was easier to strike at the girls, and a few days later
+Fleet Street was enlivened by the irruption of a crowd of match-girls,
+demanding Annie Besant. I couldn't speechify to match-girls in Fleet
+Street, so asked that a deputation should come and explain what they
+wanted. Up came three women and told their story: they had been asked
+to sign a paper certifying that they were well treated and contented,
+and that my statements were untrue; they refused. &quot;You had spoke up
+for us,&quot; explained one, &quot;and we weren't going back on you.&quot; A girl,
+pitched on as their leader, was threatened with dismissal; she stood
+firm; next day she was discharged for some trifle, and they all threw
+down their work, some 1,400 of them, and then a crowd of them started
+off to me to ask what to do next. If we ever worked in our lives,
+Herbert Burrows and I worked for the next fortnight. And a pretty
+hubbub we created; we asked for money, and it came pouring in; we
+registered the girls to receive strike pay, wrote articles, roused the
+clubs, held public meetings, got Mr. Bradlaugh to ask questions in
+Parliament, stirred up constituencies in which shareholders were
+members, till the whole country rang with the struggle. Mr. Frederick
+Charrington lent us a hall for registration, Mr. Sidney Webb and
+others moved the National Liberal Club to action; we led a procession
+of the girls to the House of Commons, and interviewed, with a
+deputation of them, Members of Parliament who cross-questioned them.
+The girls behaved splendidly, stuck together, kept brave and bright
+all through. Mr. Hobart of the Social Democratic Federation, Messrs.
+Shaw, Bland, and Oliver, and Headlam of the Fabian Society, Miss
+Clementina Black, and many another helped in the heavy work. The
+London Trades Council finally consented to act as arbitrators and a
+satisfactory settlement was arrived at; the girls went in to work,
+fines and deductions were abolished, better wages paid; the
+Match-makers' Union was established, still the strongest woman's
+Trades Union in England, and for years I acted as secretary, till,
+under press of other duties, I resigned, and my work was given by the
+girls to Mrs. Thornton Smith; Herbert Burrows became, and still is,
+the treasurer. For a time there was friction between the Company and
+the Union, but it gradually disappeared under the influence of common
+sense on both sides, and we have found the manager ready to consider
+any just grievance and to endeavour to remove it, while the Company
+have been liberal supporters of the Working Women's Club at Bow,
+founded by H.P. Blavatsky.
+</p>
+
+<a name="08"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="Images/08.jpg" alt="Strike Committee of the Matchmakers' Union." width="667" height="464">
+</p>
+<h5>STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.</h5>
+
+<p>
+The worst suffering of all was among the box-makers, thrown out of
+work by the strike, and they were hard to reach. Twopence-farthing per
+gross of boxes, and buy your own string and paste, is not wealth, but
+when the work went more rapid starvation came. Oh, those trudges
+through the lanes and alleys round Bethnal Green Junction late at
+night, when our day's work was over; children lying about on shavings,
+rags, anything; famine looking out of baby faces, out of women's eyes,
+out of the tremulous hands of men. Heart grew sick and eyes dim, and
+ever louder sounded the question, &quot;Where is the cure for sorrow, what
+the way of rescue for the world?&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In August I asked for a &quot;match-girls' drawing-room.&quot; &quot;It will want a
+piano, tables for papers, for games, for light literature; so that it
+may offer a bright, homelike refuge to these girls, who now have no
+real homes, no playground save the streets. It is not proposed to
+build an 'institution' with stern and rigid discipline and enforcement
+of prim behaviour, but to open a home, filled with the genial
+atmosphere of cordial comradeship, and self-respecting freedom&mdash;the
+atmosphere so familiar to all who have grown up in the blessed shelter
+of a happy home, so strange, alas! to too many of our East London
+girls.&quot; In the same month of August, two years later, H.P. Blavatsky
+opened such a home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came a cry for help from South London, from tin-box makers,
+illegally fined, and in many cases grievously mutilated by the
+non-fencing of machinery; then aid to shop assistants, also illegally
+fined; legal defences by the score still continued; a vigorous
+agitation for a free meal for children, and for fair wages to be paid
+by all public bodies; work for the dockers and exposure of their
+wrongs; a visit to the Cradley Heath chain-makers, speeches to them,
+writing for them; a contest for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets
+division, and triumphant return at the head of the poll. Such were
+some of the ways in which the autumn days were spent, to say nothing
+of scores of lectures&mdash;Secularist, Labour, Socialist&mdash;and scores of
+articles written for the winning of daily bread. When the School Board
+work was added I felt that I had as much work as one woman's strength
+could do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus was ushered in 1889, the to me never-to-be-forgotten year in
+which I found my way &quot;Home,&quot; and had the priceless good fortune of
+meeting, and of becoming the pupil of, H.P. Blavatsky. Ever more and
+more had been growing on me the feeling that something more than I had
+was needed for the cure of social ills. The Socialist position
+sufficed on the economic side, but where to gain the inspiration, the
+motive, which should lead to the realisation of the Brotherhood of
+Man? Our efforts to really organise bands of unselfish workers had
+failed. Much indeed had been done, but there was not a real movement
+of self-sacrificing devotion, in which men worked for Love's sake
+only, and asked but to give, not to take. Where was the material for
+the nobler Social Order, where the hewn stones for the building of the
+Temple of Man? A great despair would oppress me as I sought for such a
+movement and found it not.
+</p>
+
+<a name="09"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="Images/09.jpg" alt="Members of the Matchmakers' Union." width="464" height="579">
+</p>
+<h5>MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.
+</h5>
+
+<p>
+Not only so; but since 1886 there had been slowly growing up a
+conviction that my philosophy was not sufficient; that life and mind
+were other than, more than, I had dreamed. Psychology was advancing
+with rapid strides; hypnotic experiments were revealing unlooked-for
+complexities in human consciousness, strange riddles of multiplex
+personalities, and, most startling of all, vivid intensities of mental
+action when the brain, that should be the generator of thought, was
+reduced to a comatose state. Fact after fact came hurtling in upon me,
+demanding explanation I was incompetent to give. I studied the
+obscurer sides of consciousness, dreams, hallucinations, illusions,
+insanity. Into the darkness shot a ray of light&mdash;A.P. Sinnett's
+&quot;Occult World,&quot; with its wonderfully suggestive letters, expounding
+not the supernatural but a nature under law, wider than I had dared to
+conceive. I added Spiritualism to my studies, experimenting privately,
+finding the phenomena indubitable, but the spiritualistic explanation
+of them incredible. The phenomena of clairvoyance, clairaudience,
+thought-reading, were found to be real. Under all the rush of the
+outer life, already sketched, these questions were working in my mind,
+their answers were being diligently sought. I read a variety of books,
+but could find little in them that satisfied me. I experimented in
+various ways suggested in them, and got some (to me) curious results.
+I finally convinced myself that there was some hidden thing, some
+hidden power, and resolved to seek until I found, and by the early
+spring of 1889 I had grown desperately determined to find at all
+hazards what I sought. At last, sitting alone in deep thought as I had
+become accustomed to do after the sun had set, filled with an intense
+but nearly hopeless longing to solve the riddle of life and mind, I
+heard a Voice that was later to become to me the holiest sound on
+earth, bidding me take courage for the light was near. A fortnight
+passed, and then Mr. Stead gave into my hands two large volumes. &quot;Can
+you review these? My young men all fight shy of them, but you are
+quite mad enough on these subjects to make something of them.&quot; I took
+the books; they were the two volumes of &quot;The Secret Doctrine,&quot; written
+by H.P. Blavatsky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Home I carried my burden, and sat me down to read. As I turned over
+page after page the interest became absorbing; but how familiar it
+seemed; how my mind leapt forward to presage the conclusions, how
+natural it was, how coherent, how subtle, and yet how intelligible. I
+was dazzled, blinded by the light in which disjointed facts were seen
+as parts of a mighty whole, and all my puzzles, riddles, problems,
+seemed to disappear. The effect was partially illusory in one sense,
+in that they all had to be slowly unravelled later, the brain
+gradually assimilating that which the swift intuition had grasped as
+truth. But the light had been seen, and in that flash of illumination
+I knew that the weary search was over and the very Truth was found.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I wrote the review, and asked Mr. Stead for an introduction to the
+writer, and then sent a note asking to be allowed to call. I received
+the most cordial of notes, bidding me come, and in the soft spring
+evening Herbert Burrows and I&mdash;for his aspirations were as mine on
+this matter&mdash;walked from Netting Hill Station, wondering what we
+should meet, to the door of 17, Lansdowne Road. A pause, a swift
+passing through hall and outer room, through folding-doors thrown
+back, a figure in a large chair before a table, a voice, vibrant,
+compelling, &quot;My dear Mrs. Besant, I have so long wished to see you,&quot;
+and I was standing with my hand in her firm grip, and looking for
+the first time in this life straight into the eyes of &quot;H.P.B.&quot; I
+was conscious of a sudden leaping forth of my heart&mdash;was it
+recognition?&mdash;and then, I am ashamed to say, a fierce rebellion, a
+fierce withdrawal, as of some wild animal when it feels a mastering
+hand. I sat down, after some introductions that conveyed no ideas to
+me, and listened. She talked of travels, of various countries, easy
+brilliant talk, her eyes veiled, her exquisitely moulded fingers
+rolling cigarettes incessantly. Nothing special to record, no word of
+Occultism, nothing mysterious, a woman of the world chatting with her
+evening visitors. We rose to go, and for a moment the veil lifted, and
+two brilliant, piercing eyes met mine, and with a yearning throb in
+the voice: &quot;Oh, my dear Mrs. Besant, if you would only come among us!&quot;
+I felt a well-nigh uncontrollable desire to bend down and kiss her,
+under the compulsion of that yearning voice, those compelling eyes,
+but with a flash of the old unbending pride and an inward jeer at my
+own folly, I said a commonplace polite good-bye, and turned away with
+some inanely courteous and evasive remark. &quot;Child,&quot; she said to me
+long afterwards, &quot;your pride is terrible; you are as proud as Lucifer
+himself.&quot; But truly I think I never showed it to her again after that
+first evening, though it sprang up wrathfully in her defence many and
+many a time, until I learned the pettiness and the worthlessness of
+all criticism, and knew that the blind were objects of compassion not
+of scorn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once again I went, and asked about the Theosophical Society, wishful
+to join, but fighting against it. For I saw, distinct and clear&mdash;with
+painful distinctness, indeed&mdash;what that joining would mean. I had
+largely conquered public prejudice against me by my work on the London
+School Board, and a smoother road stretched before me, whereon effort
+to help should be praised not blamed. Was I to plunge into a new
+vortex of strife, and make myself a mark for ridicule&mdash;worse than
+hatred&mdash;and fight again the weary fight for an unpopular truth? Must I
+turn against Materialism, and face the shame of publicly confessing
+that I had been wrong, misled by intellect to ignore the Soul? Must I
+leave the army that had battled for me so bravely, the friends who
+through all brutality of social ostracism had held me dear and true?
+And he, the strongest and truest friend of all, whose confidence I had
+shaken by my Socialism&mdash;must he suffer the pang of seeing his
+co-worker, his co-fighter, of whom he had been so proud, to whom he
+had been so generous, go over to the opposing hosts, and leave the
+ranks of Materialism? What would be the look in Charles Bradlaugh's
+eyes when I told him that I had become a Theosophist? The struggle was
+sharp and keen, but with none of the anguish of old days in it, for
+the soldier had now fought many fights and was hardened by many
+wounds. And so it came to pass that I went again to Lansdowne Road to
+ask about the Theosophical Society. H.P. Blavatsky looked at me
+piercingly for a moment. &quot;Have you read the report about me of the
+Society for Psychical Research?&quot; &quot;No; I never heard of it, so far as I
+know.&quot; &quot;Go and read it, and if, after reading it, you come
+back&mdash;well.&quot; And nothing more would she say on the subject, but
+branched off to her experiences in many lands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I borrowed a copy of the Report, read and re-read it. Quickly I saw
+how slender was the foundation on which the imposing structure was
+built. The continual assumptions on which conclusions were based; the
+incredible character of the allegations; and&mdash;most damning fact of
+all&mdash;the foul source from which the evidence was derived. Everything
+turned on the veracity of the Coulombs, and they were self-stamped as
+partners in the alleged frauds. Could I put such against the frank,
+fearless nature that I had caught a glimpse of, against the proud
+fiery truthfulness that shone at me from the clear, blue eyes, honest
+and fearless as those of a noble child? Was the writer of &quot;The Secret
+Doctrine&quot; this miserable impostor, this accomplice of tricksters, this
+foul and loathsome deceiver, this conjuror with trap-doors and sliding
+panels? I laughed aloud at the absurdity and flung the Report aside
+with the righteous scorn of an honest nature that knew its own kin
+when it met them, and shrank from the foulness and baseness of a lie.
+The next day saw me at the Theosophical Publishing Company's office at
+7, Duke Street, Adelphi, where Countess Wachtmeister&mdash;one of the
+lealest of H.P.B.'s friends&mdash;was at work, and I signed an
+application to be admitted as fellow of the Theosophical Society.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On receiving my diploma I betook myself to Lansdowne Road, where I
+found H.P.B. alone. I went over to her, bent down and kissed her,
+but said no word. &quot;You have joined the Society?&quot; &quot;Yes.&quot; &quot;You have read
+the report?&quot; &quot;Yes.&quot; &quot;Well?&quot; I knelt down before her and clasped her
+hands in mine, looking straight into her eyes. &quot;My answer is, will you
+accept me as your pupil, and give me the honour of proclaiming you my
+teacher in the face of the world?&quot; Her stern, set face softened, the
+unwonted gleam of tears sprang to her eyes; then, with a dignity more
+than regal, she placed her hand upon my head. &quot;You are a noble woman.
+May Master bless you.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From that day, the 10th of May, 1889, until now&mdash;two years three and
+half months after she left her body on May 8, 1891&mdash;my faith in her
+has never wavered, my trust in her has never been shaken. I gave her
+my faith on an imperious intuition, I proved her true day after day in
+closest intimacy living by her side; and I speak of her with the
+reverence due from a pupil to a teacher who never failed her, with the
+passionate gratitude which, in our School, is the natural meed of the
+one who opens the gateway and points out the path. &quot;Folly!
+fanaticism!&quot; scoffs the Englishman of the nineteenth century. Be it
+so. I have seen, and I can wait. I have been told that I plunged
+headlong into Theosophy and let my enthusiasm carry me away. I think
+the charge is true, in so far as the decision was swiftly taken; but
+it had been long led up to, and realised the dreams of childhood on
+the higher planes of intellectual womanhood. And let me here say that
+more than all I hoped for in that first plunge has been realised, and
+a certainty of knowledge has been gained on doctrines seen as true as
+that swift flash of illumination. I <i>know</i>, by personal experiment,
+that the Soul exists, and that my Soul, not my body, is myself; that
+it can leave the body at will; that it can, disembodied, reach and
+learn from living human teachers, and bring back and impress on the
+physical brain that which it has learned; that this process of
+transferring consciousness from one range of being, as it were, to
+another, is a very slow process, during which the body and brain are
+gradually correlated with the subtler form which is essentially that
+of the Soul, and that my own experience of it, still so imperfect, so
+fragmentary, when compared with the experience of the highly trained,
+is like the first struggles of a child learning to speak compared with
+the perfect oratory of the practised speaker; that consciousness, so
+far from being dependent on the brain, is more active when freed from
+the gross forms of matter than when encased within them; that the
+great Sages spoken of by H.P. Blavatsky exist; that they wield powers
+and possess knowledge before which our control of Nature and knowledge
+of her ways is but as child's play. All this, and much more, have I
+learned, and I am but a pupil of low grade, as it were in the infant
+class of the Occult School; so the first plunge has been successful,
+and the intuition has been justified. This same path of knowledge that
+I am treading is open to all others who will pay the toll demanded at
+the gateway&mdash;and that toll is willingness to renounce everything for
+the sake of spiritual truth, and willingness to give all the truth
+that is won to the service of man, keeping back no shred for self.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On June 23rd, in a review of &quot;The Secret Doctrine&quot; in the <i>National
+Reformer,</i> the following passages occur, and show how swiftly some of
+the main points of the teaching had been grasped. (There is a blunder
+in the statement that of the seven modifications of Matter Science
+knows only four, and till lately knew only three; these four are
+sub-states only, sub-divisions of the lowest plane.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After saying that the nineteenth-century Englishman would be but too
+likely to be repelled if he only skimmed the book, I went on: &quot;With
+telescope and with microscope, with scalpel and with battery, Western
+Science interrogates nature, adding fact to fact, storing experience
+after experience, but coming ever to gulfs unfathomable by its
+plummets, to heights unscalable by its ladders. Wide and masterful in
+its answers to the 'How?' the 'Why?' ever eludes it, and causes remain
+enwrapped in gloom. Eastern Science uses as its scientific instrument
+the penetrating faculties of the mind alone, and regarding the
+material plane as <i>Maya</i>&mdash;illusion&mdash;seeks in the mental and spiritual
+planes of being the causes of the material effects. There, too, is the
+only reality; there the true existence of which the visible universe
+is but the shadow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;It is clear that from such investigations some further mental
+equipment is necessary than that normally afforded by the human body.
+And here comes the parting of the ways between East and West. For the
+study of the material universe, our five senses, aided by the
+instruments invented by Science, may suffice. For all we can hear and
+see, taste and handle, these accustomed servitors, though often
+blundering, are the best available guides to knowledge. But it lies in
+the nature of the case that they are useless when the investigation is
+to be into modes of existence which cannot impress themselves on our
+nerve-ends. For instance, what we know as colour is the vibration
+frequency of etheric waves striking on the retina of the eye, between
+certain definite limits&mdash;759 trillions of blows from the maximum, 436
+trillions from the minimum&mdash;these waves give rise in us to the
+sensation which the brain translates into colour. (Why the 436
+trillion blows at one end of a nerve become 'Red' at the other end we
+do not know; we chronicle the fact but cannot explain it.) But our
+capacity to respond to the vibration cannot limit the vibrational
+capacity of the ether; to <i>us</i> the higher and lower rates of vibration
+do not exist, but if our sense of vision were more sensitive we should
+see where now we are blind. Following this line of thought we realise
+that matter may exist in forms unknown to us, in modifications to
+which our senses are unable to respond. Now steps in the Eastern Sage
+and says: 'That which you say <i>may</i> be, <i>is</i>; we have developed and
+cultivated senses as much superior to yours as your eye is superior to
+that of the jelly-fish; we have evolved mental and spiritual faculties
+which enable us to investigate on the higher planes of being with as
+much certainty as you are investigating on the physical plane; there
+is nothing <i>supernatural</i> in the business, any more than your
+knowledge is supernatural, though much above that accessible to the
+fish; we do not speculate on these higher forms of existence; we
+<i>know</i> them by personal study, just as you know the fauna and flora of
+your world. The powers we possess are not supernatural, they are
+latent in every human being, and will be evolved as the race
+progresses. All that we have done is to evolve them more rapidly than
+our neighbours, by a procedure as open to you as it was to us. Matter
+is everywhere, but it exists in seven modifications of which you only
+know four, and until lately only knew three; in those higher forms
+reside the causes of which you see the effects in the lower, and to
+know these causes you must develop the capacity to take cognisance of
+the higher planes.'&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then followed a brief outline of the cycle of evolution, and I went
+on: &quot;What part does man play in this vast drama of a universe?
+Needless to say, he is not the only living form in a Cosmos, which for
+the most part is uninhabitable by him. As Science has shown living
+forms everywhere on the material plane, races in each drop of water,
+life throbbing in every leaf and blade, so the 'Secret Doctrine'
+points to living forms on higher planes of existence, each suited to
+its environment, till all space thrills with life, and nowhere is
+there death, but only change. Amid these myriads are some evolving
+towards humanity, some evolving away from humanity as we know it,
+divesting themselves of its grosser parts. For man is regarded as a
+sevenfold being, four of these parts belonging to the animal body, and
+perishing at, or soon after, death; while three form his higher self,
+his true individuality, and these persist and are immortal. These form
+the Ego, and it is this which passes through many incarnations,
+learning life's lesson as it goes, working out its own redemption
+within the limits of an inexorable law, sowing seeds of which it ever
+reaps the harvest, building its own fate with tireless fingers, and
+finding nowhere in the measureless time and space around it any that
+can lift for it one weight it has created, one burden it has gathered,
+unravel for it one tangle it has twisted, close for it one gulf it has
+digged.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then after noting the approaches of Western Science to Eastern, came
+the final words: &quot;it is of curious interest to note how some of the
+latest theories seem to catch glimpses of the occult Doctrines, as
+though Science were standing on the very threshold of knowledge which
+shall make all her past seem small. Already her hand is trembling
+towards the grasp of forces beside which all those now at her command
+are insignificant. How soon will her grip fasten on them? Let us hope
+not until social order has been transformed, lest they should only
+give more to those who have, and leave the wretched still wretcheder
+by force of contrast. Knowledge used by selfishness widens the gulf
+that divides man from man and race from race, and we may well shrink
+from the idea of new powers in Nature being yoked to the car of Greed.
+Hence the wisdom of those 'Masters,' in whose name Madame Blavatsky
+speaks, has ever denied the knowledge which is power until Love's
+lesson has been learned, and has given only into the hands of the
+selfless the control of those natural forces which, misused, would
+wreck society.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This review, and the public announcement, demanded by honesty, that I
+had joined the Theosophical Society, naturally raised somewhat of a
+storm of criticism, and the <i>National Reformer</i> of June 30th contained
+the following: &quot;The review of Madame Blavatsky's book in the last
+<i>National Reformer</i>, and an announcement in the <i>Star</i>, have brought
+me several letters on the subject of Theosophy. I am asked for an
+explanation as to what Theosophy is, and as to my own opinion on
+Theosophy&mdash;the word 'theosoph' is old, and was used among the
+Neo-platonists. From the dictionary its new meaning appears to be,
+'one who claims to have a knowledge of God, or of the laws of nature
+by means of internal illumination.' An Atheist certainly cannot be a
+Theosophist. A Deist might be a Theosophist. A Monist cannot be a
+Theosophist. Theosophy must at least involve Dualism. Modern
+Theosophy, according to Madame Blavatsky, as set out in last week's
+issue, asserts much that I do not believe, and alleges some things
+that, to me, are certainly not true. I have not had the opportunity of
+reading Madame Blavatsky's two volumes, but I have read during the
+past ten years many publications from the pen of herself, Colonel
+Olcott, and of other Theosophists. They appear to me to have sought to
+rehabilitate a kind of Spiritualism in Eastern phraseology. I think
+many of their allegations utterly erroneous, and their reasonings
+wholly unsound. I very deeply regret indeed that my colleague and
+co-worker has, with somewhat of suddenness, and without any
+interchange of ideas with myself, adopted as facts matters which seem
+to me to be as unreal as it is possible for any fiction to be. My
+regret is greater as I know Mrs. Besant's devotion to any course she
+believes to be true. I know that she will always be earnest in the
+advocacy of any views she undertakes to defend, and I look to possible
+developments of her Theosophic views with the very gravest misgiving.
+The editorial policy of this paper is unchanged, and is directly
+antagonistic to all forms of Theosophy. I would have preferred on this
+subject to have held my peace, for the public disagreeing with Mrs.
+Besant on her adoption of Socialism has caused pain to both; but on
+reading her article and taking the public announcement made of her
+having joined the Theosophical organisation, I owe it to those who
+look to me for guidance to say this with clearness. &quot;CHARLES BRADLAUGH.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+&quot;It is not possible for me here to state fully my reasons for joining
+the Theosophical Society, the three objects of which are: To found a
+Universal Brotherhood without distinction of race or creed; to forward
+the study of Aryan literature and philosophy; to investigate
+unexplained laws of nature and the physical powers latent in man. On
+matters of religious opinion the members are absolutely free. The
+founders of the society deny a personal God, and a somewhat subtle
+form of Pantheism is taught as the Theosophic view of the universe,
+though even this is not forced on members of the society. I have no
+desire to hide the fact that this form of Pantheism appears to me to
+promise solution of some problems, especially problems in psychology,
+which Atheism leaves untouched.<br><br>
+&quot;ANNIE BESANT.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>
+Theosophy, as its students well know, so far from involving Dualism,
+is based on the One, which becomes Two on manifestation, just as
+Atheism posits one existence, only cognisable in the duality force and
+matter, and as philosophic&mdash;though not popular&mdash;Theism teaches one
+Deity whereof are spirit and matter. Mr. Bradlaugh's temperate
+disapproval was not copied in its temperance by some other Freethought
+leaders, and Mr. Foote especially distinguished himself by the
+bitterness of his attacks. In the midst of the whirl I was called away
+to Paris to attend, with Herbert Burrows, the great Labour Congress
+held there from July 15th to July 20th, and spent a day or two at
+Fontainebleau with H.P. Blavatsky, who had gone abroad for a few
+weeks' rest. There I found her translating the wonderful fragments
+from &quot;The Book of the Golden Precepts,&quot; now so widely known under the
+name of &quot;The Voice of the Silence.&quot; She wrote it swiftly, without any
+material copy before her, and in the evening made me read it aloud to
+see if the &quot;English was decent.&quot; Herbert Burrows was there, and Mrs.
+Candler, a staunch American Theosophist, and we sat round H.P.B. while
+I read. The translation was in perfect and beautiful English, flowing
+and musical; only a word or two could we find to alter, and she looked
+at us like a startled child, wondering at our praises&mdash;praises that
+any one with the literary sense would endorse if they read that
+exquisite prose poem.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A little earlier in the same day I had asked her as to the agencies at
+work in producing the taps so constantly heard at Spiritualistic
+<i>S&eacute;ances</i>. &quot;You don't use spirits to produce taps,&quot; she said; &quot;see
+here.&quot; She put her hand over my head, not touching it, and I heard and
+felt slight taps on the bone of my skull, each sending a little
+electric thrill down the spine. She then carefully explained how such
+taps were producible at any point desired by the operator, and how
+interplay of the currents to which they were due might be caused
+otherwise than by conscious human volition. It was in this fashion
+that she would illustrate her verbal teachings, proving by experiment
+the statements made as to the existence of subtle forces controllable
+by the trained mind. The phenomena all belonged to the scientific side
+of her teaching, and she never committed the folly of claiming
+authority for her philosophic doctrines on the ground that she was a
+wonder-worker. And constantly she would remind us that there was no
+such thing as &quot;miracle&quot;; that all the phenomena she had produced were
+worked by virtue of a knowledge of nature deeper than that of average
+people, and by the force of a well-trained mind and will; some of them
+were what she would describe as &quot;psychological tricks,&quot; the creation
+of images by force of imagination, and in pressing them on others as a
+&quot;collective hallucination&quot;; others, such as the moving of solid
+articles, either by an astral hand projected to draw them towards her,
+or by using an Elemental; others by reading in the Astral Light, and
+so on. But the proof of the reality of her mission from those whom she
+spoke of as Masters lay not in these comparatively trivial physical
+and mental phenomena, but in the splendour of her heroic endurance,
+the depth of her knowledge, the selflessness of her character, the
+lofty spirituality of her teaching, the untiring passion of her
+devotion, the incessant ardour of her work for the enlightening of
+men. It was these, and not her phenomena, that won for her our faith
+and confidence&mdash;we who lived beside her, knowing her daily life&mdash;and
+we gratefully accepted her teaching not because she claimed any
+authority, but because it woke in us powers, the possibility of which
+in ourselves we had not dreamed of, energies of the Soul that
+demonstrated their own existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Returning to London from Paris, it became necessary to make a very
+clear and definite presentment of my change of views, and in the
+<i>Reformer</i> of August 4th I find the following: &quot;Many statements are
+being made just now about me and my beliefs, some of which are
+absurdly, and some of which are maliciously, untrue. I must ask my
+friends not to give credence to them. It would not be fair to my
+friend Mr. Bradlaugh to ask him to open the columns of this Journal to
+an exposition of Theosophy from my pen, and so bring about a long
+controversy on a subject which would not interest the majority of the
+readers of the <i>National Reformer</i>. This being so I cannot here answer
+the attacks made on me. I feel, however, that the party with which I
+have worked for so long has a right to demand of me some explanation
+of the step I have taken, and I am therefore preparing a pamphlet
+dealing fully with the question. Further, I have arranged with Mr.
+R.O. Smith to take as subject of the lectures to be delivered by me at
+the Hall of Science on August 4th and 11th 'Why I became a
+Theosophist.' Meanwhile I think that my years of service in the ranks
+of the Freethought party give me the right to ask that I should not be
+condemned unheard, and I even venture to suggest, in view of the
+praises bestowed on me by Freethinkers in the past, that it is
+possible that there may be something to be said, from the intellectual
+standpoint, in favour of Theosophy. The caricatures of it which have
+appeared from some Freethinkers' pens represent it about as accurately
+as the Christian Evidence caricatures of Atheism represent that
+dignified philosophy of life; and, remembering how much they are
+themselves misrepresented, I ask them to wait before they judge.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lectures were delivered, and were condensed into a pamphlet
+bearing the same title, which has had a very great circulation. It
+closed as follows:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;There remains a great stumblingblock in the minds of many
+Freethinkers which is certain to prejudice them against Theosophy, and
+which offers to opponents a cheap subject for sarcasm&mdash;the assertion
+that there exist other living beings than the men and animals found on
+our own globe. It may be well for people who at once turn away when
+such an assertion is made to stop and ask themselves whether they
+really and seriously believe that throughout this mighty universe, in
+which our little planet is but as a tiny speck of sand in the Sahara,
+this one planet only is inhabited by living things? Is all the
+universe dumb save for <i>our</i> voices? eyeless save for <i>our</i> vision?
+dead save for <i>our</i> life? Such a preposterous belief was well enough
+in the days when Christianity regarded our world as the centre of the
+universe, the human race as the one for which the Creator had deigned
+to die. But now that we are placed in our proper position, one among
+countless myriads of worlds, what ground is there for the preposterous
+conceit which arrogates as ours all sentient existence? Earth, air,
+water, all are teeming with living things suited to their environment;
+our globe is overflowing with life. But the moment we pass in thought
+beyond our atmosphere everything is to be changed. Neither reason nor
+analogy support such a supposition. It was one of Bruno's crimes that
+he dared to teach that other worlds than ours were inhabited; but he
+was wiser than the monks who burned him. All the Theosophists aver is
+that each phase of matter has living things suited to it, and that all
+the universe is pulsing with life. 'Superstition!' shriek the bigoted.
+It is no more superstition than the belief in Bacteria, or in any
+other living thing invisible to the ordinary human eye. 'Spirit' is a
+misleading word, for, historically, it connotes immateriality and a
+supernatural kind of existence, and the Theosophist believes neither
+in the one nor the other. With him all living things act in and
+through a material basis, and 'matter' and 'spirit' are not found
+dissociated. But he alleges that matter exists in states other than
+those at present known to science. To deny this is to be about as
+sensible as was the Hind&ucirc; prince who denied the existence of ice
+because water, in his experience, never became solid. Refusal to
+believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all
+outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;One last word to my Secularist friends. If you say to me, 'Leave our
+ranks,' I will leave them; I force myself on no party, and the moment
+I feel myself unwelcome I will go.<a href="#FN29"><sup>[29]</sup></a> It has cost me pain enough and
+to spare to admit that the Materialism from which I hoped all has
+failed me, and by such admission to bring on myself the disapproval of
+some of my nearest friends. But here, as at other times in my life, I
+dare not purchase peace with a lie. An imperious necessity forces me
+to speak the truth, as I see it, whether the speech please or
+displease, whether it bring praise or blame. That one loyalty to Truth
+I must keep stainless, whatever friendships fail me or human ties be
+broken. She may lead me into the wilderness, yet I must follow her;
+she may strip me of all love, yet I must pursue her; though she slay
+me, yet will I trust in her; and I ask no other epitaph on my tomb but
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;'SHE TRIED TO FOLLOW TRUTH.'&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, with this new controversy on my hands, the School Board
+work went on, rendered possible, I ought to say, by the generous
+assistance of friends unknown to me, who sent me, &pound;150 a year during
+the last year and a half. So also went on the vigorous Socialist work,
+and the continual championship of struggling labour movements,
+prominent here being the organisation of the South London fur-pullers
+into a union, and the aiding of the movement for shortening the hours
+of tram and 'bus men, the meetings for which had to be held after
+midnight. The feeding and clothing of children also occupied much time
+and attention, for the little ones in my district were, thousands of
+them, desperately poor. My studies I pursued as best I could, reading
+in railway carriages, tramcars, omnibuses, and stealing hours for
+listening to H.P.B. by shortening the nights.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In October, Mr. Bradlaugh's shaken strength received its death-blow,
+though he was to live yet another fifteen months. He collapsed
+suddenly under a most severe attack of congestion and lay in imminent
+peril, devotedly nursed by his only remaining child, Mrs. Bonner, his
+elder daughter having died the preceding autumn. Slowly he struggled
+back to life, after four weeks in bed, and, ordered by his physician
+to take rest and if possible a sea voyage, he sailed for India on
+November 28th, to attend the National Congress, where he was
+enthusiastically acclaimed as &quot;Member for India.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In November I argued a libel suit, brought by me against the Rev. Mr.
+Hoskyns, vicar of Stepney, who had selected some vile passages from a
+book which was not mine and had circulated them as representing my
+views, during the School Board election of 1888. I had against me the
+Solicitor-General, Sir Edward Clarke, at the bar, and Baron Huddleston
+on the bench; both counsel and judge did their best to browbeat me and
+to use the coarsest language, endeavouring to prove that by advocating
+the limitation of the family I had condemned chastity as a crime. Five
+hours of brutal cross-examination left my denial of such teachings
+unshaken, and even the pleadings of the judge for the clergyman,
+defending his parishioners against an unbeliever and his laying down
+as law that the statement was privileged, did not avail to win a
+verdict. The jury disagreed, not, as one of them told me afterwards,
+on the question of the libel, but on some feeling that a clergyman
+ought not to be mulcted in damages for his over-zeal in defence of his
+faith against the ravening wolf of unbelief, while others, regarding
+the libel as a very cruel one, would not agree to a verdict that did
+not carry substantial damages. I did not carry the case to a new
+trial, feeling that it was not worth while to waste time over it
+further, my innocence of the charge itself having been fully proved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Busily the months rolled on, and early in the year 1890 H.P.Blavatsky
+had given to her &pound;1,000, to use in her discretion for human service,
+and if she thought well, in the service of women. After a good deal of
+discussion she fixed on the establishment of a club in East London for
+working girls, and with her approval Miss Laura Cooper and I hunted
+for a suitable place. Finally we fixed on a very large and old house,
+193, Bow Road, and some months went in its complete renovation and the
+building of a hall attached to it. On August 15th it was opened by
+Madame Blavatsky, and dedicated by her to the brightening of the lot
+of hardworking and underpaid girls. It has nobly fulfilled its mission
+for the last three years. Very tender was H.P.B.'s heart to human
+suffering, especially to that of women and children. She was very poor
+towards the end of her earthly life, having spent all on her mission,
+and refusing to take time from her Theosophical work to write for the
+Russian papers which were ready to pay highly for her pen. But her
+slender purse was swiftly emptied when any human pain that money could
+relieve came in her way. One day I wrote a letter to a comrade that
+was shown to her, about some little children to whom I had carried a
+quantity of country flowers, and I had spoken of their faces pinched
+with want. The following characteristic note came to me:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;MY DEAREST FRIEND,&mdash;I have just read your letter to &mdash; and my heart
+is sick for the poor little ones! Look here; I have but 30s. of <i>my
+own money</i> of which I can dispose (for as you know I am a pauper, and
+proud of it), but I want you to take them and <i>not say a word</i>. This
+may buy thirty dinners for thirty poor little starving wretches, and I
+may feel happier for thirty minutes at the thought. Now don't say a
+word, and do it; take them to those unfortunate babies who loved your
+flowers and felt happy. Forgive your old uncouth friend, <i>useless</i> in
+this world!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Ever yours,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;H.P.B.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was this tenderness of hers that led us, after she had gone, to
+found the &quot;H.P.B. Home for little children,&quot; and one day we hope to
+fulfil her expressed desire that a large but homelike Refuge for
+outcast children should be opened under the auspices of the
+Theosophical Society.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lease of 17, Lansdowne Road expiring in the early summer of 1890,
+it was decided that 19, Avenue Road should be turned into the
+headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Europe. A hall was built
+for the meetings of the Blavatsky Lodge&mdash;the lodge founded by her&mdash;and
+various alterations made. In July her staff of workers was united
+under one roof; thither came Archibald and Bertram Keightley, who had
+devoted themselves to her service years before, and the Countess
+Wachtmeister, who had thrown aside all the luxuries of wealth and of
+high social rank to give all to the cause she served and the friend
+she loved with deep and faithful loyajty; and George Mead, her
+secretary and earnest disciple, a man of strong brain and strong
+character, a fine scholar and untiring worker; thither, too, Claude
+Wright, most lovable of Irishmen, with keen insight underlying a
+bright and sunny nature, careless on the surface, and Walter Old,
+dreamy and sensitive, a born psychic, and, like many such, easily
+swayed by those around him; Emily Kislingbury also, a studious and
+earnest woman; Isabel Cooper Oakley, intuitional and studious, a rare
+combination, and a most devoted pupil in Occult studies; James Pryse,
+an American, than whom none is more devoted, bringing practical
+knowledge to the help of the work, and making possible the large
+development of our printing department. These, with myself, were at
+first the resident staff, Miss Cooper and Herbert Burrows, who were
+also identified with the work, being prevented by other obligations
+from living always as part of the household.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rules of the house were&mdash;and are&mdash;very simple, but H.P.B.
+insisted on great regularity of life; we breakfasted at 8 a.m.,
+worked till lunch at 1, then again till dinner at 7. After dinner
+the outer work for the Society was put aside, and we gathered in
+H.P.B.'s room where we would sit talking over plans, receiving
+instructions, listening to her explanation of knotty points. By 12
+midnight all the lights had to be extinguished. My public work took me
+away for many hours, unfortunately for myself, but such was the
+regular run of our busy lives. She herself wrote incessantly; always
+suffering, but of indomitable will, she drove her body through its
+tasks, merciless to its weaknesses and its pains. Her pupils she
+treated very variously, adapting herself with nicest accuracy to their
+differing natures; as a teacher she was marvellously patient,
+explaining a thing over and over again in different fashions, until
+sometimes after prolonged failure she would throw herself back in her
+chair: &quot;My God!&quot; (the easy &quot;Mon Dieu&quot; of the foreigner) &quot;am I a fool
+that you can't understand? Here, So-and-so&quot;&mdash;to some one on whose
+countenance a faint gleam of comprehension was discernible&mdash;&quot;tell
+these flapdoodles of the ages what I mean.&quot; With vanity, conceit,
+pretence of knowledge, she was merciless, if the pupil were a
+promising one; keen shafts of irony would pierce the sham. With some
+she would get very angry, lashing them out of their lethargy with
+fiery scorn; and in truth she made herself a mere instrument for the
+training of her pupils, careless what they, or any one else thought of
+her, providing that the resulting benefit to them was secured. And we,
+who lived around her, who in closest intimacy watched her day after
+day, we bear witness to the unselfish beauty of her life, the nobility
+of her character, and we lay at her feet our most reverent gratitude
+for knowledge gained, lives purified, strength developed. O noble and
+heroic Soul, whom the outside purblind world misjudges, but whom your
+pupils partly saw, never through lives and deaths shall we repay the
+debt of gratitude we owe to you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And thus I came through storm to peace, not to the peace of an
+untroubled sea of outer life, which no strong soul can crave, but to
+an inner peace that outer troubles may not avail to ruffle&mdash;a peace
+which belongs to the eternal not to the transitory, to the depths not
+to the shallows of life. It carried me scatheless through the terrible
+spring of 1891, when death struck down Charles Bradlaugh in the
+plenitude of his usefulness, and unlocked the gateway into rest for H.
+P. Blavatsky. Through anxieties and responsibilities heavy and
+numerous it has borne me; every strain makes it stronger; every trial
+makes it serener; every assault leaves it more radiant. Quiet
+confidence has taken the place of doubt; a strong security the place
+of anxious dread. In life, through death, to life, I am but the
+servant of the great Brotherhood, and those on whose heads but for a
+moment the touch of the Master has rested in blessing can never again
+look upon the world save through eyes made luminous with the radiance
+of the Eternal Peace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+PEACE TO ALL BEINGS.
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+
+<h4>
+FOOTNOTES
+</h4>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN1"><sup>1</sup></a>&nbsp;
+This odious law has now been altered, and a married woman
+is a person, not a chattel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN2"><sup>2</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;The Disciples,&quot; p. 14.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN3"><sup>3</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;On the Nature and Existence of God.&quot; 1874.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN4"><sup>4</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;On the Nature and Existence of God.&quot; 1874.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN5"><sup>5</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;The Gospel of Atheism.&quot; 1876.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN6"><sup>6</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;Why I do not Believe in God.&quot; 1887.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN7"><sup>7</sup></a>&nbsp;Ibid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN8"><sup>8</sup></a>&nbsp;Ibid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN9"><sup>9</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;Life, Death, and Immortality.&quot; 1886.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN10"><sup>10</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;Life, Death, and Immortality.&quot; 1886.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN11"><sup>11</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;Life, Death, and Immortality.&quot; 1886.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN12"><sup>12</sup></a>&nbsp;Ibid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN13"><sup>13</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;The Gospel of Atheism.&quot; 1876.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN14"><sup>14</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;On the Nature and Existence of God.&quot; 1874.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN15"><sup>15</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;The True Basis of Morality.&quot; 1874.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN16"><sup>16</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;Gospel of Atheism.&quot; 1876.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN17"><sup>17</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;On the Nature and Existence of God.&quot; 1874.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN18"><sup>18</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;A World without God.&quot; 1885.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN19"><sup>19</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;The Gospel of Atheism.&quot; 1876.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN20"><sup>20</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;The Gospels of Christianity and Freethought.&quot; 1874.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN21"><sup>21</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;A World without God.&quot; 1885.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN22"><sup>22</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;A World without God.&quot; 1885.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN23"><sup>23</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;The Gospel of Atheism.&quot; 1876.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN24"><sup>24</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;A World without God.&quot; 1885.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN25"><sup>25</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;A World without God.&quot; 1885.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN26"><sup>26</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;The Christian Creed.&quot; 1884.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN27"><sup>27</sup></a>&nbsp;<i>National Reformer</i>, June 18, 1882
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN28"><sup>28</sup></a>&nbsp;<i>Theosophist</i>, June, 1882.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN29"><sup>29</sup></a>&nbsp;I leave these words as they were written in 1889. I
+resigned my office in the N.S.S. in 1890, feeling that the N.S.S. was
+so identified with Materialism that it had no longer place for me.
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr>
+
+<a name="LIST"></a>
+<h4>
+LIST OF BOOKS QUOTED.
+</h4>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Autobiography,&quot; J.S. Mill, 184
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Christian Creed, The,&quot; 173
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Freethinkers' Text-book,&quot; 144
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Gospel of Atheism, The,&quot; 145, 152, 158, 168
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Gospels of Christianity and Freethought,&quot; 164
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Life, Death, and Immortality,&quot; 147, 149, 150
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Link</i>, The, 333
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>National Reformer</i>, The, 79, 80, 280, 346-50, 354
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Our Corner</i>, 286, 329
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Theosophist</i>, The, 282, 288
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;True Basis of Morality,&quot; 156
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Why I do Not Believe in God,&quot; 146
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;World without God,&quot; 165, 169, 172
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<a name="INDEX"></a>
+<h4>
+INDEX.</h4>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Affirmation Bill brought in, 287</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;rejected, 299</li>
+<li>Atheist, position as an, 139</li>
+<li>Authorship, first attempts at, 84.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Bennett, D.M., prosecution of, 232</li>
+<li>Blasphemy prosecution, 283, 287, 289</li>
+<li>Blavatsky, H.P., 189, 337</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;meeting with, 341</li>
+<li>&quot;Bloody Sunday,&quot; 324</li>
+<li>Bradlaugh, Charles, first meeting with, 135</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;as friend, 137</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;in the Clock Tower, 258</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and the scene in the House, 265</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>v</i>. Newdegate; result, 289</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;prosecuted for blasphemy, 283, 289</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Confirmation, 51</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Daughter, application to remove, 213</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;denied access to, 219</li>
+<li>Death of father, 21</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;of mother, 126</li>
+<li>Doubt the first, 58</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;Elements of Social Science,&quot; 196</li>
+<li>Engagement, 69</li>
+<li>Essay, first Freethought, 113</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Fenians, the, 73</li>
+<li><i>Freethinker</i> prosecution, 283, 287, 296</li>
+<li>Freethought Publishing Company, the, 285</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Harrow, life at, 30</li>
+<li>Hoskyns, Rev. E., libel action against, 359</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Knowlton pamphlet, the, 205</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;prosecution, 208</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;trial, 210</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;Law of Population, The,&quot; 212, 210</li>
+<li>&quot;Law and Liberty League,&quot; the, 326</li>
+<li>Lecture, the first, 181</li>
+<li>Linnell, the Trafalgar Square victim, 316</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;funeral of, 327</li>
+<li><i>Link</i>, founding of the, 331</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Malthusian League formed, 229</li>
+<li>Malthusianism and Theosophy, 240</li>
+<li>Marriage, 70</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;tie broken, no</li>
+<li>Match-girls' strike, 335</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Union, established, 336</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li><i>National Reformer,</i> the, 134</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;first contribution to, 180</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;resignation of co-editorship, 320</li>
+<li>National Secular Society joined, 135</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;elected vice-president of, 202</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;resignation of, 357</li>
+<li>Northampton Election, 183</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;struggle, 253, 344</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Oaths Bill, the, 314, 329</li>
+<li><i>Our Corner</i>, 286, 314</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Political Opinions, 174</li>
+<li>Pusey, Dr., 109, 284</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Russian politics, 311</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Scientific work, 249</li>
+<li>School Board, election to, 338</li>
+<li>Scott, Thomas, 112, 127</li>
+<li>Socialism, 299</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;debate on, between Messrs. Bradlaugh and Hyndman, 301</li>
+<li>Socialist debates, 318, 319</li>
+<li>Socialists and open-air speaking, 312</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Defence Association, 323</li>
+<li>Stanley, Dean, 23, 122</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Theosophical Society, the, 180</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;joined, 344</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;headquarters established, 361</li>
+<li>Theosophy and Charles Bradlaugh, 350</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the National Secular Society, 357</li>
+<li>Trafalgar Square, closing of, to the public, 323</li>
+<li>Truelove, Edward, trial of, 225</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Voysey, Rev. Charles, 106</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Working Women's Club, 337, 360</li>
+</ul>
+
+<hr>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Annie Besant, by Annie Besant
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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+
+Title: Annie Besant
+       An Autobiography
+
+Author: Annie Besant
+
+Release Date: April 19, 2004 [EBook #12085]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANNIE BESANT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by H.S. Mendelssohn, 27, Cathcart
+Road, South Kensington, London._ ANNIE BESANT. 1885]
+
+
+
+
+ANNIE BESANT
+
+AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+LONDON
+
+SECOND EDITION
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+It is a difficult thing to tell the story of a life, and yet more
+difficult when that life is one's own. At the best, the telling has a
+savour of vanity, and the only excuse for the proceeding is that the
+life, being an average one, reflects many others, and in troublous
+times like ours may give the experience of many rather than of one.
+And so the autobiographer does his work because he thinks that, at the
+cost of some unpleasantness to himself, he may throw light on some of
+the typical problems that are vexing the souls of his contemporaries,
+and perchance may stretch out a helping hand to some brother who is
+struggling in the darkness, and so bring him cheer when despair has
+him in its grip. Since all of us, men and women of this restless and
+eager generation--surrounded by forces we dimly see but cannot as yet
+understand, discontented with old ideas and half afraid of new, greedy
+for the material results of the knowledge brought us by Science but
+looking askance at her agnosticism as regards the soul, fearful of
+superstition but still more fearful of atheism, turning from the husks
+of outgrown creeds but filled with desperate hunger for spiritual
+ideals--since all of us have the same anxieties, the same griefs, the
+same yearning hopes, the same passionate desire for knowledge, it may
+well be that the story of one may help all, and that the tale of one
+should that went out alone into the darkness and on the other side
+found light, that struggled through the Storm and on the other side
+found Peace, may bring some ray of light and of peace into the
+darkness and the storm of other lives.
+
+ANNIE BESANT.
+
+THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY,
+
+17 & 19, AVENUE ROAD, REGENT'S PARK, LONDON.
+
+_August_, 1893.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+CHAP.
+
+I.    "OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE"
+
+II.   EARLY CHILDHOOD
+
+III.  GIRLHOOD
+
+IV.   MARRIAGE
+
+V.    THE STORM OF DOUBT
+
+VI.   CHARLES BRADLAUGH
+
+VII.  ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT
+
+VIII. AT WORK
+
+IX.   THE KNOWLTON PAMPHLET
+
+X.    AT WAR ALL ROUND
+
+XI.   MR. BRADLAUGH'S STRUGGLE
+
+XII.  STILL FIGHTING
+
+XIII. SOCIALISM
+
+XIV.  THROUGH STORM TO PEACE
+
+LIST OF BOOKS QUOTED
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+
+ANNIE BESANT, 1885                          _Frontispiece_
+
+HOROSCOPE OF ANNIE BESANT                   _Page_ 12
+
+ANNIE BESANT, 1869                          _Facing page_ 86
+
+THOMAS SCOTT                                _Facing page_ 112
+
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH, M.P.                     _Facing page_ 212
+
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH AND HENRY LABOUCHERE      _Facing page_ 254
+
+NORWICH BRANCH OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE      _Facing page_ 314
+
+STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION  _Facing page_ 336
+
+MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION           _Facing page_ 338
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+"OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE."
+
+
+On October 1, 1847, I am credibly informed, my baby eyes opened to the
+light(?) of a London afternoon at 5.39.
+
+A friendly astrologer has drawn for me the following chart, showing the
+position of the planets at this, to me fateful, moment; but I know
+nothing of astrology, so feel no wiser as I gaze upon my horoscope.
+
+Keeping in view the way in which sun, moon, and planets influence the
+physical condition of the earth, there is nothing incongruous with the
+orderly course of nature in the view that they also influence the
+physical bodies of men, these being part of the physical earth, and
+largely moulded by its conditions. Any one who knows the
+characteristics ascribed to those who are born under the several signs
+of the Zodiac, may very easily pick out the different types among his
+own acquaintances, and he may then get them to go to some astrologer
+and find out under what signs they were severally born. He will very
+quickly discover that two men of completely opposed types are not born
+under the same sign, and the invariability of the concurrence will
+convince him that law, and not chance, is at work. We are born into
+earthly life under certain conditions, just as we were physically
+affected by them pre-natally, and these will have their bearing on our
+subsequent physical evolution. At the most, astrology, as it is now
+practised, can only calculate the interaction between these physical
+conditions at any given moment, and the conditions brought to them by a
+given person whose general constitution and natal condition are known.
+It cannot say what the person will do, nor what will happen to him, but
+only what will be the physical district, so to speak, in which he will
+find himself, and the impulses that will play upon him from external
+nature and from his own body. Even on those matters modern astrology is
+not quite reliable--judging from the many blunders made--or else its
+professors are very badly instructed; but that there is a real science
+of astrology I have no doubt, and there are some men who are past
+masters in it.
+
+[Illustration: Horoscope of Annie Besant.]
+
+It has always been somewhat of a grievance to me that I was born in
+London, "within the sound of Bow Bells," when three-quarters of my
+blood and all my heart are Irish. My dear mother was of purest Irish
+descent, and my father was Irish on his mother's side, though belonging
+to the Devonshire Woods on his father's. The Woods were yeomen of the
+sturdy English type, farming their own land in honest, independent
+fashion. Of late years they seem to have developed more in the
+direction of brains, from the time, in fact, that Matthew Wood became
+Mayor of London town, fought Queen Caroline's battles against her most
+religious and gracious royal husband, aided the Duke of Kent with no
+niggard hand, and received a baronetcy for his services from the Duke
+of Kent's royal daughter. Since then they have given England a Lord
+Chancellor in the person of the gentle-hearted and pure-living Lord
+Hatherley, while others have distinguished themselves in various ways
+in the service of their country. But I feel playfully inclined to
+grudge the English blood they put into my father's veins, with his
+Irish mother, his Galway birth, and his Trinity College, Dublin,
+education. For the Irish tongue is musical in my ear, and the Irish
+nature dear to my heart. Only in Ireland is it that if you stop to ask
+a worn-out ragged woman the way to some old monument, she will say:
+"Sure, then, my darlin', it's just up the hill and round the corner,
+and then any one will tell you the way. And it's there you'll see the
+place where the blessed Saint Patrick set his foot, and his blessing be
+on yer." Old women as poor as she in other nations would never be as
+bright and as friendly and as garrulous. And where, out of Ireland,
+will you see a whole town crowd into a station to say good-bye to half
+a dozen emigrants, till the platform is a heaving mass of men and
+women, struggling, climbing over each other for a last kiss, crying,
+keening, laughing, all in a breath, till all the air is throbbing and
+there's a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes as the train
+steams out? Where, out of Ireland, will you be bumping along the
+streets on an outside car, beside a taciturn Jarvey, who, on suddenly
+discovering that you are shadowed by "Castle" spies, becomes
+loquaciously friendly, and points out everything that he thinks will
+interest you? Blessings on the quick tongues and warm hearts, on the
+people so easy to lead, so hard to drive. And blessings on the ancient
+land once inhabited by mighty men of wisdom, that in later times became
+the Island of Saints, and shall once again be the Island of Sages, when
+the Wheel turns round.
+
+My maternal grandfather was a typical Irishman, much admired by me and
+somewhat feared also, in the childish days. He belonged to a decayed
+Irish family, the Maurices, and in a gay youth, with a beautiful wife
+as light-hearted as himself, he had merrily run through what remained
+to him in the way of fortune. In his old age, with abundant snow-white
+hair, he still showed the hot Irish blood on the lightest provocation,
+stormily angry for a moment and easily appeased. My mother was the
+second daughter in a large family, in a family that grew more numerous
+as pounds grew fewer, and she was adopted by a maiden aunt, a quaint
+memory of whom came through my mother's childhood into mine, and had
+its moulding effect on both our characters. This maiden aunt was, as
+are most Irish folk of decayed families, very proud of her family tree
+with its roots in the inevitable "kings." Her particular kings were the
+"seven kings of France"--the "Milesian kings"--and the tree grew up a
+parchment, in all its impressive majesty, over the mantelpiece of their
+descendant's modest drawing-room. This heraldic monster was regarded
+with deep respect by child Emily, a respect in no wise deserved, I
+venture to suppose, by the disreputable royalties of whom she was a
+fortunately distant twig. Chased out of France, doubtless for cause
+shown, they had come over the sea to Ireland, and there continued their
+reckless plundering lives. But so strangely turns the wheel of time
+that these ill-doing and barbarous scamps became a kind of moral
+thermometer in the home of the gentle Irish lady in the early half of
+the present century. For my mother has told me that when she had
+committed some act of childish naughtiness, her aunt would say, looking
+gravely over her spectacles at the small culprit, "Emily, your conduct
+is unworthy of the descendant of the seven kings of France." And Emily,
+with her sweet grey Irish eyes and her curling masses of raven black
+hair, would cry in penitent shame over her unworthiness, with some
+vague idea that those royal, and to her very real, ancestors would
+despise her small, sweet, rosebud self, so wholly unworthy of their
+disreputable majesties.
+
+Thus those shadowy forms influenced her in childhood, and exercised
+over her a power that made her shrink from aught that was unworthy,
+petty or mean. To her the lightest breath of dishonour was to be
+avoided at any cost of pain, and she wrought into me, her only
+daughter, that same proud and passionate horror at any taint of shame
+or merited disgrace. To the world always a brave front was to be kept,
+and a stainless reputation, for suffering might be borne but dishonour
+never. A gentlewoman might starve, but she must not run in debt; she
+might break her heart, but it must be with a smile on her face. I have
+often thought that the training in this reticence and pride of honour
+was a strange preparation for my stormy, public, much attacked and
+slandered life; and certain it is that this inwrought shrinking from
+all criticism that touched personal purity and personal honour added a
+keenness of suffering to the fronting of public odium that none can
+appreciate who has not been trained in some similar school of dignified
+self-respect. And yet perhaps there was another result from it that in
+value outweighed the added pain: it was the stubbornly resistant
+feeling that rose and inwardly asserted its own purity in face of
+foulest lie, and turning scornful face against the foe, too proud
+either to justify itself or to defend, said to itself in its own heart,
+when condemnation was loudest: "I am not what you think me, and your
+verdict does not change my own self. You cannot make me vile whatever
+you think of me, and I will never, in my own eyes, be that which you
+deem me to be now." And the very pride became a shield against
+degradation, for, however lost my public reputation, I could never bear
+to become sullied in my own sight--and that is a thing not without its
+use to a woman cut off, as I was at one time, from home, and friends,
+and Society. So peace to the maiden aunt's ashes, and to those of her
+absurd kings, for I owe them something after all. And I keep grateful
+memory of that unknown grand-aunt, for what she did in training my dear
+mother, the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest of women. It is well
+to be able to look back to a mother who served as ideal of all that was
+noblest and dearest during childhood and girlhood, whose face made the
+beauty of home, and whose love was both sun and shield. No other
+experience in life could quite make up for missing the perfect tie
+between mother and child--a tie that in our case never relaxed and
+never weakened. Though her grief at my change of faith and consequent
+social ostracism did much to hasten her death-hour, it never brought a
+cloud between our hearts; though her pleading was the hardest of all to
+face in later days, and brought the bitterest agony, it made no gulf
+between us, it cast no chill upon our mutual love. And I look back at
+her to-day with the same loving gratitude as ever encircled her to me
+in her earthly life. I have never met a woman more selflessly devoted
+to those she loved, more passionately contemptuous of all that was mean
+or base, more keenly sensitive on every question of honour, more iron
+in will, more sweet in tenderness, than the mother who made my girlhood
+sunny as dreamland, who guarded me, until my marriage, from every touch
+of pain that she could ward off or bear for me, who suffered more in
+every trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself, and who
+died in the little house I had taken for our new home in Norwood, worn
+out, ere old age touched her, by sorrow, poverty, and pain, in May,
+1874.
+
+My earliest personal recollections are of a house and garden that we
+lived in when I was three and four years of age, situated in Grove
+Road, St. John's Wood. I can remember my mother hovering round the
+dinner-table to see that all was bright for the home-coming husband; my
+brother--two years older than myself--and I watching "for papa"; the
+loving welcome, the game of romps that always preceded the dinner of
+the elder folks. I can remember on the 1st of October, 1851, jumping up
+in my little cot, and shouting out triumphantly: "Papa! mamma! I am
+four years old!" and the grave demand of my brother, conscious of
+superior age, at dinner-time: "May not Annie have a knife to-day, as
+she is four years old?"
+
+It was a sore grievance during that same year, 1851, that I was not
+judged old enough to go to the Great Exhibition, and I have a faint
+memory of my brother consolingly bringing me home one of those folding
+pictured strips that are sold in the streets, on which were imaged
+glories that I longed only the more to see. Far-away, dusky, trivial
+memories, these. What a pity it is that a baby cannot notice, cannot
+observe, cannot remember, and so throw light on the fashion of the
+dawning of the external world on the human consciousness. If only we
+could remember how things looked when they were first imaged on the
+retinae; what we felt when first we became conscious of the outer world;
+what the feeling was as faces of father and mother grew out of the
+surrounding chaos and became familiar things, greeted with a smile,
+lost with a cry; if only memory would not become a mist when in later
+years we strive to throw our glances backward into the darkness of our
+infancy, what lessons we might learn to help our stumbling psychology,
+how many questions might be solved whose answers we are groping for in
+the West in vain.
+
+The next scene that stands out clearly against the background of the
+past is that of my father's death-bed. The events which led to his
+death I know from my dear mother. He had never lost his fondness for
+the profession for which he had been trained, and having many medical
+friends, he would now and then accompany them on their hospital rounds,
+or share with them the labours of the dissecting-room. It chanced that
+during the dissection of the body of a person who had died of rapid
+consumption, my father cut his finger against the edge of the
+breast-bone. The cut did not heal easily, and the finger became swollen
+and inflamed. "I would have that finger off, Wood, if I were you," said
+one of the surgeons, a day or two afterwards, on seeing the state of
+the wound. But the others laughed at the suggestion, and my father, at
+first inclined to submit to the amputation, was persuaded to "leave
+Nature alone."
+
+About the middle of August, 1852, he got wet through, riding on the top
+of an omnibus, and the wetting resulted in a severe cold, which
+"settled on his chest." One of the most eminent doctors of the day, as
+able as he was rough in manner, was called to see him. He examined him
+carefully, sounded his lungs, and left the room followed by my mother.
+"Well?" she asked, scarcely anxious as to the answer, save as it might
+worry her husband to be kept idly at home. "You must keep up his
+spirits," was the thoughtless answer. "He is in a galloping
+consumption; you will not have him with you six weeks longer." The wife
+staggered back, and fell like a stone on the floor. But love triumphed
+over agony, and half an hour later she was again at her husband's side,
+never to leave it again for ten minutes at a time, night or day, till
+he was lying with closed eyes asleep in death.
+
+I was lifted on to the bed to "say good-bye to dear papa" on the day
+before his death, and I remember being frightened at his eyes which
+looked so large, and his voice which sounded so strange, as he made me
+promise always to be "a very good girl to darling mamma, as papa was
+going right away." I remember insisting that "papa should kiss Cherry,"
+a doll given me on my birthday, three days before, by his direction,
+and being removed, crying and struggling, from the room. He died on the
+following day, October 5th, and I do not think that my elder brother
+and I--who were staying at our maternal grandfather's--went to the
+house again until the day of the funeral. With the death, my mother
+broke down, and when all was over they carried her senseless from the
+room. I remember hearing afterwards how, when she recovered her senses,
+she passionately insisted on being left alone, and locked herself into
+her room for the night; and how on the following morning her mother, at
+last persuading her to open the door, started back at the face she saw
+with the cry: "Good God, Emily! your hair is white!" It was even so;
+her hair, black, glossy and abundant, which, contrasting with her large
+grey eyes, had made her face so strangely attractive, had turned grey
+in that night of agony, and to me my mother's face is ever framed in
+exquisite silver bands of hair as white as the driven unsullied snow.
+
+I have heard that the love between my father and mother was a very
+beautiful thing, and it most certainly stamped her character for life.
+He was keenly intellectual and splendidly educated; a mathematician and
+a good classical scholar, thoroughly master of French, German, Italian,
+Spanish, and Portuguese, with a smattering of Hebrew and Gaelic, the
+treasures of ancient and of modern literature were his daily household
+delight. Nothing pleased him so well as to sit with his wife, reading
+aloud to her while she worked; now translating from some foreign poet,
+now rolling forth melodiously the exquisite cadences of "Queen Mab."
+Student of philosophy as he was, he was deeply and steadily sceptical;
+and a very religious relative has told me that he often drove her from
+the room by his light, playful mockery of the tenets of the Christian
+faith. His mother and sister were strict Roman Catholics, and near the
+end forced a priest into his room, but the priest was promptly ejected
+by the wrath of the dying man, and by the almost fierce resolve of the
+wife that no messenger of the creed he detested should trouble her
+darling at the last.
+
+Deeply read in philosophy, he had outgrown the orthodox beliefs of his
+day, and his wife, who loved him too much to criticise, was wont to
+reconcile her own piety and his scepticism by holding that "women ought
+to be religious," while men had a right to read everything and think as
+they would, provided that they were upright and honourable in their
+lives. But the result of his liberal and unorthodox thought was to
+insensibly modify and partially rationalise her own beliefs, and she
+put on one side as errors the doctrines of eternal punishment, the
+vicarious atonement, the infallibility of the Bible, the equality of
+the Son with the Father in the Trinity, and other orthodox beliefs, and
+rejoiced in her later years in the writings of such men as Jowett,
+Colenso, and Stanley. The last named, indeed, was her ideal Christian
+gentleman, suave, polished, broad-minded, devout in a stately way. The
+baldness of a typical Evangelical service outraged her taste as much as
+the crudity of Evangelical dogmas outraged her intellect; she liked to
+feel herself a Christian in a dignified and artistic manner, and to be
+surrounded by solemn music and splendid architecture when she "attended
+Divine service." Familiarity with celestial personages was detestable
+to her, and she did her duty of saluting them in a courtly and reverent
+fashion. Westminster Abbey was her favourite church, with its dim light
+and shadowy distances; there in a carven stall, with choristers
+chanting in solemn rhythm, with the many-coloured glories of the
+painted windows repeating themselves on upspringing arch and clustering
+pillars, with the rich harmonies of the pealing organ throbbing up
+against screen and monument, with the ashes of the mighty dead around,
+and all the stately memories of the past inwrought into the very
+masonry, there Religion appeared to her to be intellectually dignified
+and emotionally satisfactory.
+
+To me, who took my religion in strenuous fashion, this dainty and
+well-bred piety seemed perilously like Laodicean lukewarmness, while
+my headlong vigour of conviction and practice often jarred on her as
+alien from the delicate balance and absence of extremes that should
+characterise the gentlewoman. She was of the old _regime_; I of the
+stuff from which fanatics are made: and I have often thought, in
+looking back, that she must have had on her lips many a time unspoken
+a phrase that dropped from them when she lay a-dying: "My little one,
+you have never made me sad or sorry except for your own sake; you have
+always been too religious." And then she murmured to herself: "Yes,
+it has been darling Annie's only fault; she has always been too
+religious." Methinks that, as the world judges, the dying voice spake
+truly, and the dying eyes saw with a real insight. For though I was
+then kneeling beside her bed, heretic and outcast, the heart of me was
+religious in its very fervour of repudiation of a religion, and in its
+rebellious uprising against dogmas that crushed the reason and did not
+satisfy the soul. I went out into the darkness alone, not because
+religion was too good for me, but because it was not good enough; it
+was too meagre, too commonplace, too little exacting, too bound up
+with earthly interests, too calculating in its accommodations to
+social conventionalities. The Roman Catholic Church, had it captured
+me, as it nearly did, would have sent me on some mission of danger and
+sacrifice and utilised me as a martyr; the Church established by law
+transformed me into an unbeliever and an antagonist.
+
+For as a child I was mystical and imaginative religious to the very
+finger-tips, and with a certain faculty for seeing visions and
+dreaming dreams. This faculty is not uncommon with the Keltic races,
+and makes them seem "superstitious" to more solidly-built peoples.
+Thus, on the day of my father's funeral, my mother sat with vacant
+eyes and fixed pallid face--the picture comes back to me yet, it so
+impressed my childish imagination--following the funeral service,
+stage after stage, and suddenly, with the words, "It is all over!"
+fell back fainting. She said afterwards that she had followed the
+hearse, had attended the service, had walked behind the coffin to the
+grave. Certain it is that a few weeks later she determined to go to
+the Kensal Green Cemetery, where the body of her husband had been
+laid, and went thither with a relative; he failed to find the grave,
+and while another of the party went in search of an official to
+identify the spot, my mother said, "If you will take me to the chapel
+where the first part of the service was read, I will find the grave."
+The idea seemed to her friend, of course, to be absurd; but he would
+not cross the newly-made widow, so took her to the chapel. She looked
+round, left the chapel door, and followed the path along which the
+corpse had been borne till she reached the grave, where she was
+quietly standing when the caretaker arrived to point it out. The grave
+is at some distance from the chapel, and is not on one of the main
+roads; it had nothing on it to mark it, save the wooden peg with the
+number, and this would be no help to identification at a distance
+since all the graves are thus marked, and at a little way off these
+pegs are not visible. How she found the grave remained a mystery in
+the family, as no one believed her straightforward story that she had
+been present at the funeral. With my present knowledge the matter is
+simple enough, for I now know that the consciousness can leave the
+body, take part in events going on at a distance, and, returning,
+impress on the physical brain what it has experienced. The very fact
+that she asked to be taken to the chapel is significant, showing that
+she was picking up a memory of a previous going from that spot to the
+grave; she could only find the grave if she started from _the place
+from which she had started before_. Another proof of this
+ultra-physical capacity was given a few months later, when her infant
+son, who had been pining himself ill for "papa," was lying one night
+in her arms. On the next morning she said to her sister: "Alf is going
+to die." The child had no definite disease, but was wasting away, and
+it was argued to her that the returning spring would restore the
+health lost during the winter. "No," was her answer. "He was lying
+asleep in my arms last night, and William" (her husband) "came to me
+and said that he wanted Alf with him, but that I might keep the other
+two." In vain she was assured that she had been dreaming, that it was
+quite natural that she should dream about her husband, and that her
+anxiety for the child had given the dream its shape. Nothing would
+persuade her that she had not seen her husband, or that the
+information he had given her was not true. So it was no matter of
+surprise to her when in the following March her arms were empty, and a
+waxen form lay lifeless in the baby's cot.
+
+My brother and I were allowed to see him just before he was placed in
+his coffin; I can see him still, so white and beautiful, with a black
+spot in the middle of the fair, waxen forehead, and I remember the
+deadly cold which startled me when I was told to kiss my little
+brother. It was the first time that I had touched Death. That black
+spot made a curious impression on me, and long afterwards, asking what
+had caused it, I was told that at the moment after his death my mother
+had passionately kissed the baby brow. Pathetic thought, that the
+mother's kiss of farewell should have been marked by the first sign of
+corruption on the child's face!
+
+I do not mention these stories because they are in any fashion
+remarkable or out of the way, but only to show that the sensitiveness
+to impressions other than physical ones, that was a marked feature in
+my own childhood, was present also in the family to which I belonged.
+For the physical nature is inherited from parents, and sensitiveness
+to psychic impressions is a property of the physical body; in our
+family, as in so many Irish ones, belief in "ghosts" of all
+descriptions was general, and my mother has told me of the banshee
+that she had heard wailing when the death-hour of one of the family
+was near. To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were
+very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself
+a child. Punch and Judy were living entities, and the tragedy in which
+they bore part cost me many an agony of tears; to this day I can
+remember running away when I heard the squawk of the coming Punch, and
+burying my head in the pillows that I might shut out the sound of the
+blows and the cry of the ill-used baby. All the objects about me were
+to me alive, the flowers that I kissed as much as the kitten I petted,
+and I used to have a splendid time "making believe" and living out all
+sorts of lovely stories among my treasured and so-called inanimate
+playthings. But there was a more serious side to this dreamful fancy
+when it joined hands with religion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+EARLY CHILDHOOD.
+
+
+And now began my mother's time of struggle and of anxiety. Hitherto,
+since her marriage, she had known no money troubles, for her husband
+was earning a good income; he was apparently vigorous and well: no
+thought of anxiety clouded their future. When he died, he believed
+that he left his wife and children safe, at least, from pecuniary
+distress. It was not so. I know nothing of the details, but the
+outcome of all was that nothing was left for the widow and children,
+save a trifle of ready money. The resolve to which my mother came was
+characteristic. Two of her husband's relatives, Western and Sir
+William Wood, offered to educate her son at a good city school, and to
+start him in commercial life, using their great city influence to push
+him forward. But the young lad's father and mother had talked of a
+different future for their eldest boy; he was to go to a public
+school, and then to the University, and was to enter one of the
+"learned professions"--to take orders, the mother wished; to go to the
+Bar, the father hoped. On his death-bed there was nothing more
+earnestly urged by my father than that Harry should receive the best
+possible education, and the widow was resolute to fulfil that last
+wish. In her eyes, a city school was not "the best possible
+education," and the Irish pride rebelled against the idea of her son
+not being "a University man." Many were the lectures poured out on the
+young widow's head about her "foolish pride," especially by the female
+members of the Wood family; and her persistence in her own way caused
+a considerable alienation between herself and them. But Western and
+William, though half-disapproving, remained her friends, and lent many
+a helping hand to her in her first difficult struggles. After much
+cogitation, she resolved that the boy should be educated at Harrow,
+where the fees are comparatively low to lads living in the town, and
+that he should go thence to Cambridge or to Oxford, as his tastes
+should direct. A bold scheme for a penniless widow, but carried out to
+the letter; for never dwelt in a delicate body a more resolute mind
+and will than that of my dear mother.
+
+In a few months' time--during which we lived, poorly enough, in
+Richmond Terrace, Clapham, close to her father and mother--to Harrow,
+then, she betook herself, into lodgings over a grocer's shop, and set
+herself to look for a house. This grocer was a very pompous man, fond
+of long words, and patronised the young widow exceedingly, and one day
+my mother related with much amusement how he had told her that she was
+sure to get on if she worked hard. "Look at me!" he said, swelling
+visibly with importance; "I was once a poor boy, without a penny of my
+own, and now I am a comfortable man, and have my submarine villa to go
+to every evening." That "submarine villa" was an object of amusement
+when we passed it in our walks for many a long day.
+
+"There is Mr. ----'s submarine villa," some one would say, laughing:
+and I, too, used to laugh merrily, because my elders did, though my
+understanding of the difference between suburban and submarine was on
+a par with that of the honest grocer.
+
+My mother had fortunately found a boy, whose parents were glad to place
+him in her charge, of about the age of her own son, to educate with
+him; and by this means she was able to pay for a tutor, to prepare the
+two boys for school. The tutor had a cork leg, which was a source of
+serious trouble to me, for it stuck out straight behind when we knelt
+down to family prayers--conduct which struck me as irreverent and
+unbecoming, but which I always felt a desire to imitate. After about a
+year my mother found a house which she thought would suit her scheme,
+namely, to obtain permission from Dr. Vaughan, the then head-master of
+Harrow, to take some boys into her house, and so gain means of
+education for her own son. Dr. Vaughan, who must have been won by the
+gentle, strong, little woman, from that time forth became her earnest
+friend and helper; and to the counsel and active assistance both of
+himself and of his wife, was due much of the success that crowned her
+toil. He made only one condition in granting the permission she asked,
+and that was, that she should also have in her house one of the masters
+of the school, so that the boys should not suffer from the want of a
+house-tutor. This condition, of course, she readily accepted, and the
+arrangement lasted for ten years, until after her son had left school
+for Cambridge.
+
+The house she took is now, I am sorry to say, pulled down, and
+replaced by a hideous red-brick structure. It was very old and
+rambling, rose-covered in front, ivy-covered behind; it stood on the
+top of Harrow Hill, between the church and the school, and had once
+been the vicarage of the parish, but the vicar had left it because it
+was so far removed from the part of the village where all his work
+lay. The drawing-room opened by an old-fashioned half-window,
+half-door--which proved a constant source of grief to me, for whenever
+I had on a new frock I always tore it on the bolt as I flew
+through--into a large garden which sloped down one side of the hill,
+and was filled with the most delightful old trees, fir and laurel,
+may, mulberry, hazel, apple, pear, and damson, not to mention currant
+and gooseberry bushes innumerable, and large strawberry beds spreading
+down the sunny slopes. There was not a tree there that I did not
+climb, and one, a widespreading Portugal laurel, was my private
+country house. I had there my bedroom and my sitting-rooms, my study,
+and my larder. The larder was supplied by the fruit-trees, from which
+I was free to pick as I would, and in the study I would sit for hours
+with some favourite book--Milton's "Paradise Lost" the chief favourite
+of all. The birds must often have felt startled, when from the small
+swinging form perching on a branch, came out in childish tones the
+"Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers," of Milton's
+stately and sonorous verse. I liked to personify Satan, and to declaim
+the grand speeches of the hero-rebel, and many a happy hour did I pass
+in Milton's heaven and hell, with for companions Satan and "the Son,"
+Gabriel and Abdiel. Then there was a terrace running by the side of
+the churchyard, always dry in the wettest weather, and bordered by an
+old wooden fence, over which clambered roses of every shade; never was
+such a garden for roses as that of the Old Vicarage. At the end of the
+terrace was a little summer-house, and in this a trap-door in the
+fence, which swung open and displayed one of the fairest views in
+England. Sheer from your feet downwards went the hill, and then far
+below stretched the wooded country till your eye reached the towers of
+Windsor Castle, far away on the horizon. It was the view at which
+Byron was never tired of gazing, as he lay on the flat tombstone close
+by--Byron's tomb, as it is still called--of which he wrote:--
+
+  "Again I behold where for hours I have pondered,
+     As reclining, at eve, on yon tombstone I lay,
+  Or round the steep brow of the churchyard I wandered,
+     To catch the last gleam of the sun's setting ray."
+
+Reader mine, if ever you go to Harrow, ask permission to enter the old
+garden, and try the effect of that sudden burst of beauty, as you
+swing back the small trap-door at the terrace end.
+
+Into this house we moved on my eighth birthday, and for eleven years it
+was "home" to me, left always with regret, returned to always with joy.
+
+Almost immediately afterwards I left my mother for the first time; for
+one day, visiting a family who lived close by, I found a stranger
+sitting in the drawing-room, a lame lady with a strong face, which
+softened marvellously as she smiled at the child who came dancing in;
+she called me to her presently, and took me on her lap and talked to
+me, and on the following day our friend came to see my mother, to ask
+if she would let me go away and be educated with this lady's niece,
+coming home for the holidays regularly, but leaving my education in
+her hands. At first my mother would not hear of it, for she and I
+scarcely ever left each other; my love for her was an idolatry, hers
+for me a devotion. (A foolish little story, about which I was
+unmercifully teased for years, marked that absolute idolatry of her,
+which has not yet faded from my heart. In tenderest rallying one day
+of the child who trotted after her everywhere, content to sit, or
+stand, or wait, if only she might touch hand or dress of "mamma," she
+said: "Little one" (the name by which she always called me), "if you
+cling to mamma in this way, I must really get a string and tie you to
+my apron, and how will you like that?" "O mamma, darling," came the
+fervent answer, "do let it be in a knot." And, indeed, the tie of love
+between us was so tightly knotted that nothing ever loosened it till
+the sword of Death cut that which pain and trouble never availed to
+slacken in the slightest degree.) But it was urged upon her that the
+advantages of education offered were such as no money could purchase
+for me; that it would be a disadvantage for me to grow up in a
+houseful of boys--and, in truth, I was as good a cricketer and climber
+as the best of them--that my mother would soon be obliged to send me
+to school, unless she accepted an offer which gave me every advantage
+of school without its disadvantages. At last she yielded, and it was
+decided that Miss Marryat, on returning home, should take me with her.
+
+Miss Marryat--the favourite sister of Captain Marryat, the famous
+novelist--was a maiden lady of large means. She had nursed her brother
+through the illness that ended in his death, and had been living with
+her mother at Wimbledon Park. On her mother's death she looked round
+for work which would make her useful in the world, and finding that one
+of her brothers had a large family of girls, she offered to take charge
+of one of them, and to educate her thoroughly. Chancing to come to
+Harrow, my good fortune threw me in her way, and she took a fancy to
+me and thought she would like to teach two little girls rather than
+one. Hence her offer to my mother.
+
+Miss Marryat had a perfect genius for teaching, and took in it the
+greatest delight. From time to time she added another child to our
+party, sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl. At first, with Amy Marryat
+and myself, there was a little boy, Walter Powys, son of a clergyman
+with a large family, and him she trained for some years, and then sent
+him on to school admirably prepared. She chose "her children"--as she
+loved to call us--in very definite fashion. Each must be gently born
+and gently trained, but in such position that the education freely
+given should be a relief and aid to a slender parental purse. It was
+her delight to seek out and aid those on whom poverty presses most
+heavily, when the need for education for the children weighs on the
+proud and the poor. "Auntie" we all called her, for she thought "Miss
+Marryat" seemed too cold and stiff. She taught us everything herself
+except music, and for this she had a master, practising us in
+composition, in recitation, in reading aloud English and French, and
+later, German, devoting herself to training us in the soundest, most
+thorough fashion. No words of mine can tell how much I owe her, not
+only of knowledge, but of that love of knowledge which has remained
+with me ever since as a constant spur to study.
+
+Her method of teaching may be of interest to some, who desire to train
+children with least pain, and the most enjoyment to the little ones
+themselves. First, we never used a spelling-book--that torment of the
+small child--nor an English grammar. But we wrote letters, telling of
+the things we had seen in our walks, or told again some story we had
+read; these childish compositions she would read over with us,
+correcting all faults of spelling, of grammar, of style, of cadence; a
+clumsy sentence would be read aloud, that we might hear how unmusical
+it sounded, an error in observation or expression pointed out. Then, as
+the letters recorded what we had seen the day before, the faculty of
+observation was drawn out and trained. "Oh, dear! I have nothing to
+say!" would come from a small child, hanging over a slate. "Did you not
+go out for a walk yesterday?" Auntie would question. "Yes," would be
+sighed out; "but there's nothing to say about it." "Nothing to say! And
+you walked in the lanes for an hour and saw nothing, little No-eyes?
+You must use your eyes better to-day." Then there was a very favourite
+"lesson," which proved an excellent way of teaching spelling. We used
+to write out lists of all the words we could think of which sounded the
+same but were differently spelt. Thus: "key, quay," "knight, night,"
+and so on, and great was the glory of the child who found the largest
+number. Our French lessons--as the German later--included reading from
+the very first. On the day on which we began German we began reading
+Schiller's "Wilhelm Tell," and the verbs given to us to copy out were
+those that had occurred in the reading. We learned much by heart, but
+always things that in themselves were worthy to be learned. We were
+never given the dry questions and answers which lazy teachers so much
+affect. We were taught history by one reading aloud while the others
+worked--the boys as well as the girls learning the use of the needle.
+"It's like a girl to sew," said a little fellow, indignantly, one day.
+"It is like a baby to have to run after a girl if you want a button
+sewn on," quoth Auntie. Geography was learned by painting skeleton
+maps--an exercise much delighted in by small fingers--and by putting
+together puzzle maps, in which countries in the map of a continent, or
+counties in the map of a country, were always cut out in their proper
+shapes. I liked big empires in those days; there was a solid
+satisfaction in putting down Russia, and seeing what a large part of
+the map was filled up thereby.
+
+The only grammar that we ever learned as grammar was the Latin, and
+that not until composition had made us familiar with the use of the
+rules therein given. Auntie had a great horror of children learning by
+rote things they did not understand, and then fancying they knew them.
+"What do you mean by that expression, Annie?" she would ask me. After
+feeble attempts to explain, I would answer: "Indeed, Auntie, I know in
+my own head, but I can't explain." "Then, indeed, Annie, you do not
+know in your own head, or you could explain, so that I might know in my
+own head." And so a healthy habit was fostered of clearness of thought
+and of expression. The Latin grammar was used because it was more
+perfect than the modern grammars, and served as a solid foundation for
+modern languages.
+
+Miss Marryat took a beautiful place, Fern Hill, near Charmouth, in
+Dorsetshire, on the borders of Devon, and there she lived for some five
+years, a centre of beneficence in the district. She started a Sunday
+School, and a Bible Class after awhile for the lads too old for the
+school, who clamoured for admission to her class in it. She visited the
+poor, taking help wherever she went, and sending food from her own
+table to the sick. It was characteristic of her that she would never
+give "scraps" to the poor, but would have a basin brought in at dinner,
+and would cut the best slice to tempt the invalid appetite. Money she
+rarely, if ever, gave, but she would find a day's work, or busy herself
+to seek permanent employment for any one seeking aid. Stern in
+rectitude herself, and iron to the fawning or the dishonest, her
+influence, whether she was feared or loved, was always for good. Of the
+strictest sect of the Evangelicals, she was an Evangelical. On the
+Sunday no books were allowed save the Bible or the "Sunday at Home";
+but she would try to make the day bright by various little devices; by
+a walk with her in the garden; by the singing of hymns, always
+attractive to children; by telling us wonderful missionary stories of
+Moffat and Livingstone, whose adventures with savages and wild beasts
+were as exciting as any tale of Mayne Reid's. We used to learn passages
+from the Bible and hymns for repetition; a favourite amusement was a
+"Bible puzzle," such as a description of some Bible scene, which was to
+be recognised by the description. Then we taught in the Sunday School,
+for Auntie would tell us that it was useless for us to learn if we did
+not try to help those who had no one to teach them. The Sunday-school
+lessons had to be carefully prepared on the Saturday, for we were
+always taught that work given to the poor should be work that cost
+something to the giver. This principle, regarded by her as an
+illustration of the text, "Shall I give unto the Lord my God that which
+has cost me nothing?" ran through all her precept and her practice.
+When in some public distress we children went to her crying, and asking
+whether we could not help the little children who were starving, her
+prompt reply was, "What will you give up for them?" And then she said
+that if we liked to give up the use of sugar, we might thus each save
+sixpence a week to give away. I doubt if a healthier lesson can be
+given to children than that of personal self-denial for the good of
+others.
+
+Daily, when our lessons were over, we had plenty of fun; long walks and
+rides, rides on a lovely pony, who found small children most amusing,
+and on which the coachman taught us to stick firmly, whatever his
+eccentricities of the moment; delightful all-day picnics in the lovely
+country round Charmouth, Auntie our merriest playfellow. Never was a
+healthier home, physically and mentally, made for young things than in
+that quiet village. And then the delight of the holidays! The pride of
+my mother at the good report of her darling's progress, and the renewal
+of acquaintance with every nook and corner in the dear old house and
+garden.
+
+The dreamy tendency in the child, that on its worldly side is fancy,
+imagination, on its religious side is the germ of mysticism, and I
+believe it to be far more common than many people think. But the
+remorseless materialism of the day--not the philosophic materialism of
+the few, but the religious materialism of the many--crushes out all the
+delicate buddings forth of the childish thought, and bandages the eyes
+that might otherwise see. At first the child does not distinguish
+between what it "sees" and what it "fancies"; the one is as real, as
+objective, to it as the other, and it will talk to and play with its
+dream-comrades as merrily as with children like itself. As a child, I
+myself very much preferred the former, and never knew what it was to be
+lonely. But clumsy grown-ups come along and tramp right through the
+dream-garden, and crush the dream-flowers, and push the dream-children
+aside, and then say, in their loud, harsh voices--not soft and singable
+like the dream-voices--"You must not tell such naughty stories, Miss
+Annie; you give me the shivers, and your mamma will be very vexed with
+you." But this tendency in me was too strong to be stifled, and it
+found its food in the fairy tales I loved, and in the religious
+allegories that I found yet more entrancing. How or when I learned to
+read, I do not know, for I cannot remember the time when a book was not
+a delight. At five years of age I must have read easily, for I remember
+being often unswathed from a delightful curtain, in which I used to
+roll myself with a book, and told to "go and play," while I was still a
+five-years'-old dot. And I had a habit of losing myself so completely
+in the book that my name might be called in the room where I was, and I
+never hear it, so that I used to be blamed for wilfully hiding myself,
+when I had simply been away in fairyland, or lying trembling beneath
+some friendly cabbage-leaf as a giant went by.
+
+I was between seven and eight years of age when I first came across
+some children's allegories of a religious kind, and a very little
+later came "Pilgrim's Progress," and Milton's "Paradise Lost."
+Thenceforth my busy fancies carried me ever into the fascinating world
+where boy-soldiers kept some outpost for their absent Prince, bearing
+a shield with his sign of a red cross on it; where devils shaped as
+dragons came swooping down on the pilgrim, but were driven away
+defeated after hard struggle; where angels came and talked with little
+children, and gave them some talisman which warned them of coming
+danger, and lost its light if they were leaving the right path. What a
+dull, tire-some world it was that I had to live in, I used to think to
+myself, when I was told to be a good child, and not to lose my temper,
+and to be tidy, and not mess my pinafore at dinner. How much easier to
+be a Christian if one could have a red-cross shield and a white
+banner, and have a real devil to fight with, and a beautiful Divine
+Prince to smile at you when the battle was over. How much more
+exciting to struggle with a winged and clawed dragon, that you knew
+meant mischief, than to look after your temper, that you never
+remembered you ought to keep until you had lost it. If I had been Eve
+in the garden, that old serpent would never have got the better of me;
+but how was a little girl to know that she might not pick out the
+rosiest, prettiest apple from a tree that had no serpent to show it
+was a forbidden one? And as I grew older the dreams and fancies grew
+less fantastic, but more tinged with real enthusiasm. I read tales of
+the early Christian martyrs, and passionately regretted I was born so
+late when no suffering for religion was practicable; I would spend
+many an hour in daydreams, in which I stood before Roman judges,
+before Dominican Inquisitors, was flung to lions, tortured on the
+rack, burned at the stake; one day I saw myself preaching some great
+new faith to a vast crowd of people, and they listened and were
+converted, and I became a great religious leader. But always, with a
+shock, I was brought back to earth, where there were no heroic deeds
+to do, no lions to face, no judges to defy, but only some dull duty to
+be performed. And I used to fret that I was born so late, when all the
+grand things had been done, and when there was no chance of preaching
+and suffering for a new religion.
+
+From the age of eight my education accented the religious side of my
+character. Under Miss Marryat's training my religious feeling received
+a strongly Evangelical bent, but it was a subject of some distress to
+me that I could never look back to an hour of "conversion"; when
+others gave their experiences, and spoke of the sudden change they had
+felt, I used to be sadly conscious that no such change had occurred in
+me, and I felt that my dreamy longings were very poor things compared
+with the vigorous "sense of sin" spoken of by the preachers, and used
+dolefully to wonder if I were "saved." Then I had an uneasy sense that
+I was often praised for my piety when emulation and vanity were more
+to the front than religion; as when I learned by heart the Epistle of
+James, far more to distinguish myself for my good memory than from any
+love of the text itself; the sonorous cadences of many parts of the
+Old and New Testaments pleased my ear, and I took a dreamy pleasure in
+repeating them aloud, just as I would recite for my own amusement
+hundreds of lines of Milton's "Paradise Lost," as I sat swinging on
+some branch of a tree, lying back often on some swaying bough and
+gazing into the unfathomable blue of the sky, till I lost myself in an
+ecstasy of sound and colour, half chanting the melodious sentences and
+peopling all the blue with misty forms. This facility of learning by
+heart, and the habit of dreamy recitation, made me very familiar with
+the Bible and very apt with its phrases. This stood me in good stead
+at the prayer-meetings dear to the Evangelical, in which we all took
+part; in turn we were called on to pray aloud--a terrible ordeal to
+me, for I was painfully shy when attention was called to me; I used to
+suffer agonies while I waited for the dreaded words, "Now, Annie dear,
+will you speak to our Lord." But when my trembling lips had forced
+themselves into speech, all the nervousness used to vanish and I was
+swept away by an enthusiasm that readily clothed itself in balanced
+sentences, and alack! at the end, I too often hoped that God and
+Auntie had noticed that I prayed very nicely--a vanity certainly not
+intended to be fostered by the pious exercise. On the whole, the
+somewhat Calvinistic teaching tended, I think, to make me a little
+morbid, especially as I always fretted silently after my mother. I
+remember she was surprised on one of my home-comings, when Miss
+Marryat noted "cheerfulness" as a want in my character, for at home I
+was ever the blithest of children, despite my love of solitude; but
+away, there was always an aching for home, and the stern religion cast
+somewhat of a shadow over me, though, strangely enough, hell never
+came into my dreamings except in the interesting shape it took in
+"Paradise Lost." After reading that, the devil was to me no horned and
+hoofed horror, but the beautiful shadowed archangel, and I always
+hoped that Jesus, my ideal Prince, would save him in the end. The
+things that really frightened me were vague, misty presences that I
+felt were near, but could not see; they were so real that I knew just
+where they were in the room, and the peculiar terror they excited lay
+largely in the feeling that I was just going to see them. If by chance
+I came across a ghost story it haunted me for months, for I saw
+whatever unpleasant spectre was described; and there was one horrid
+old woman in a tale by Sir Walter Scott, who glided up to the foot of
+your bed and sprang on it in some eerie fashion and glared at you, and
+who made my going to bed a terror to me for many weeks. I can still
+recall the feeling so vividly that it almost frightens me now!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+GIRLHOOD.
+
+
+In the spring of 1861 Miss Marryat announced her intention of going
+abroad, and asked my dear mother to let me accompany her. A little
+nephew whom she had adopted was suffering from cataract, and she
+desired to place him under the care of the famous Duesseldorf oculist.
+Amy Marryat had been recalled home soon after the death of her mother,
+who had died in giving birth to the child adopted by Miss Marryat, and
+named at her desire after her favourite brother Frederick (Captain
+Marryat). Her place had been taken by a girl a few months older than
+myself, Emma Mann, one of the daughters of a clergyman, who had
+married Miss Stanley, closely related, indeed, if I remember rightly,
+a sister of the Miss Mary Stanley who did such noble work in nursing
+in the Crimea.
+
+For some months we had been diligently studying German, for Miss
+Marryat thought it wise that we should know a language fairly well
+before we visited the country of which it was the native tongue. We
+had been trained also to talk French daily during dinner, so we were
+not quite "helpless foreigners" when we steamed away from St.
+Catherine's Docks, and found ourselves on the following day in
+Antwerp, amid what seemed to us a very Babel of conflicting tongues.
+Alas for our carefully spoken French, articulated laboriously! We were
+lost in that swirl of disputing luggage-porters, and could not
+understand a word! But Miss Marryat was quite equal to the occasion,
+being by no means new to travelling, and her French stood the test
+triumphantly, and steered us safely to a hotel. On the morrow we
+started again through Aix-la-Chapelle to Bonn, the town which lies on
+the borders of the exquisite scenery of which the Siebengebirge and
+Rolandseck serve as the magic portal. Our experiences in Bonn were not
+wholly satisfactory. Dear Auntie was a maiden lady, looking on all
+young men as wolves to be kept far from her growing lambs. Bonn was a
+university town, and there was a mania just then prevailing there for
+all things English. Emma was a plump, rosy, fair-haired typical
+English maiden, full of frolic and harmless fun; I a very slight,
+pale, black-haired girl, alternating between wild fun and extreme
+pensiveness. In the boarding-house to which we went at first--the
+"Chateau du Rhin," a beautiful place overhanging the broad, blue
+Rhine--there chanced to be staying the two sons of the late Duke of
+Hamilton, the Marquis of Douglas and Lord Charles, with their tutor.
+They had the whole drawing-room floor: we a sitting-room on the ground
+floor and bedrooms above. The lads discovered that Miss Marryat did
+not like her "children" to be on speaking terms with any of the "male
+sect."
+
+Here was a fine source of amusement. They would make their horses
+caracole on the gravel in front of our window; they would be just
+starting for their ride as we went for walk or drive, and would salute
+us with doffed hat and low bow; they would waylay us on our way
+downstairs with demure "Good morning"; they would go to church and
+post themselves so that they could survey our pew, and Lord
+Charles--who possessed the power of moving at will the whole skin of
+the scalp--would wriggle his hair up and down till we were choking
+with laughter, to our own imminent risk. After a month of this Auntie
+was literally driven out of the pretty chateau, and took refuge in a
+girls' school, much to our disgust; but still she was not allowed to
+be at rest. Mischievous students would pursue us wherever we went;
+sentimental Germans, with gashed cheeks, would whisper complimentary
+phrases as we passed; mere boyish nonsense of most harmless kind, but
+the rather stern English lady thought it "not proper," and after three
+months of Bonn we were sent home for the holidays, somewhat in
+disgrace. But we had some lovely excursions during those months; such
+clambering up mountains, such rows on the swift-flowing Rhine, such
+wanderings in exquisite valleys. I have a long picture-gallery to
+retire into when I want to think of something fair, in recalling the
+moon as it silvered the Rhine at the foot of Drachenfels, or the soft,
+mist-veiled island where dwelt the lady who is consecrated for ever by
+Roland's love.
+
+A couple of months later we rejoined Miss Marryat in Paris, where we
+spent seven happy, workful months. On Wednesdays and Saturdays we were
+free from lessons, and many a long afternoon was passed in the
+galleries of the Louvre, till we became familiar with the masterpieces
+of art gathered there from all lands. I doubt if there was a beautiful
+church in Paris that we did not visit during those weekly wanderings;
+that of St. Germain de l'Auxerrois was my favourite--the church whose
+bell gave the signal for the massacre of St. Bartholomew--for it
+contained such marvellous stained glass, deepest, purest glory of
+colour that I had ever seen. The solemn beauty of Notre Dame, the
+somewhat gaudy magnificence of La Sainte Chapelle, the stateliness of
+La Madeleine, the impressive gloom of St. Roch, were all familiar to
+us. Other delights were found in mingling with the bright crowds which
+passed along the Champs Elysees and sauntered in the Bois de Boulogne,
+in strolling in the garden of the Tuileries, in climbing to the top of
+every monument whence view of Paris could be gained. The Empire was
+then in its heyday of glitter, and we much enjoyed seeing the
+brilliant escort of the imperial carriage, with plumes and gold and
+silver dancing and glistening in the sunlight, while in the carriage
+sat the exquisitely lovely empress, with the little boy beside her,
+touching his cap shyly, but with something of her own grace, in answer
+to a greeting--the boy who was thought to be born to an imperial
+crown, but whose brief career was to find an ending from the spears of
+savages in a quarrel in which he had no concern.
+
+In the spring of 1862 it chanced that the Bishop of Ohio visited
+Paris, and Mr. Forbes, then English chaplain at the Church of the Rue
+d'Aguesseau, arranged to have a confirmation. As said above, I was
+under deep "religious impressions," and, in fact, with the exception
+of that little aberration in Germany, I was decidedly a pious girl. I
+looked on theatres (never having been to one) as traps set by Satan
+for the destruction of foolish souls; I was quite determined never to
+go to a ball, and was prepared to "suffer for conscience' sake
+"--little prig that I was--if I was desired to go to one. I was
+consequently quite prepared to take upon myself the vows made in my
+name at my baptism, and to renounce the world, the flesh, and the
+devil, with a heartiness and sincerity only equalled by my profound
+ignorance of the things I so readily resigned. That confirmation was
+to me a very solemn matter; the careful preparation, the prolonged
+prayers, the wondering awe as to the "seven-fold gifts of the Spirit,"
+which were to be given by "the laying on of hands," all tended to
+excitement. I could scarcely control myself as I knelt at the altar
+rails, and felt as though the gentle touch of the aged bishop, which
+fluttered for an instant on my bowed head, were the very touch of the
+wing of that "Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove," whose presence had been so
+earnestly invoked. Is there anything easier, I wonder, than to make a
+young and sensitive girl "intensely religious"? This stay in Paris
+roused into activity an aspect of my religious nature that had
+hitherto been latent. I discovered the sensuous enjoyment that lay in
+introducing colour and fragrance and pomp into religious services, so
+that the gratification of the aesthetic emotions became dignified with
+the garb of piety. The picture-galleries of the Louvre, crowded with
+Madonnas and saints, the Roman Catholic churches with their
+incense-laden air and exquisite music, brought a new joy into my life,
+a more vivid colour to my dreams. Insensibly, the colder, cruder
+Evangelicalism that I had never thoroughly assimilated, grew warmer
+and more brilliant, and the ideal Divine Prince of my childhood took
+on the more pathetic lineaments of the Man of Sorrows, the deeper
+attractiveness of the suffering Saviour of Men. Keble's "Christian
+Year" took the place of "Paradise Lost," and as my girlhood began to
+bud towards womanhood, all its deeper currents set in the direction of
+religious devotion. My mother did not allow me to read love stories,
+and my daydreams of the future were scarcely touched by any of the
+ordinary hopes and fears of a girl lifting her eyes towards the world
+she is shortly to enter. They were filled with broodings over the days
+when girl-martyrs were blessed with visions of the King of Martyrs,
+when sweet St. Agnes saw her celestial Bridegroom, and angels stooped
+to whisper melodies in St. Cecilia's raptured ear. "Why then and not
+now?" my heart would question, and I would lose myself in these
+fancies, never happier than when alone.
+
+The summer of 1862 was spent with Miss Marryat at Sidmouth, and, wise
+woman that she was, she now carefully directed our studies with a view
+to our coming enfranchisement from the "schoolroom." More and more
+were we trained to work alone; our leading-strings were slackened, so
+that we never felt them save when we blundered; and I remember that
+when I once complained, in loving fashion, that she was "teaching me
+so little," she told me that I was getting old enough to be trusted to
+work by myself, and that I must not expect to "have Auntie for a
+crutch all through life." And I venture to say that this gentle
+withdrawal of constant supervision and teaching was one of the wisest
+and kindest things that this noble-hearted woman ever did for us. It
+is the usual custom to keep girls in the schoolroom until they "come
+out"; then, suddenly, they are left to their own devices, and,
+bewildered by their unaccustomed freedom, they waste time that might
+be priceless for their intellectual growth. Lately, the opening of
+universities to women has removed this danger for the more ambitious;
+but at the time of which I am writing no one dreamed of the changes
+soon to be made in the direction of the "higher education of women."
+
+During the winter of 1862-63 Miss Marryat was in London, and for a few
+months I remained there with her, attending the admirable French
+classes of M. Roche. In the spring I returned home to Harrow, going up
+each week to the classes; and when these were over, Auntie told me
+that she thought all she could usefully do was done, and that it was
+time that I should try my wings alone. So well, however, had she
+succeeded in her aims, that my emancipation from the schoolroom was
+but the starting-point of more eager study, though now the study
+turned into the lines of thought towards which my personal tendencies
+most attracted me. German I continued to read with a master, and
+music, under the marvellously able teaching of Mr. John Farmer,
+musical director of Harrow School, took up much of my time. My dear
+mother had a passion for music, and Beethoven and Bach were her
+favourite composers. There was scarcely a sonata of Beethoven's that I
+did not learn, scarcely a fugue of Bach's that I did not master.
+Mendelssohn's "Lieder" gave a lighter recreation, and many a happy
+evening did we spend, my mother and I, over the stately strains of the
+blind Titan, and the sweet melodies of the German wordless orator.
+Musical "At Homes," too, were favourite amusements at Harrow, and at
+these my facile fingers made me a welcome guest.
+
+Thus set free from the schoolroom at 161/2, an only daughter, I could do
+with my time as I would, save for the couple of hours a day given to
+music, for the satisfaction of my mother. From then till I became
+engaged, just before I was 19, my life flowed on smoothly, one current
+visible to all and dancing in the sunlight, the other running
+underground, but full and deep and strong. As regards my outer life,
+no girl had a brighter, happier life than mine; studying all the
+mornings and most of the afternoons in my own way, and spending the
+latter part of the day in games and walks and rides--varied with
+parties at which I was one of the merriest of guests. I practised
+archery so zealously that I carried up triumphantly as prize for the
+best score the first ring I ever possessed, while croquet found me a
+most eager devotee. My darling mother certainly "spoiled" me, so far
+as were concerned all the small roughnesses of life. She never allowed
+a trouble of any kind to touch me, and cared only that all worries
+should fall on her, all joys on me. I know now what I never dreamed
+then, that her life was one of serious anxiety. The heavy burden of my
+brother's school and college life pressed on her constantly, and her
+need of money was often serious. A lawyer whom she trusted absolutely
+cheated her systematically, using for his own purposes the remittances
+she made for payment of liabilities, thus keeping upon her a constant
+drain. Yet for me all that was wanted was ever there. Was it a ball to
+which we were going? I need never think of what I would wear till the
+time for dressing arrived, and there laid out ready for me was all I
+wanted, every detail complete from top to toe. No hand but hers must
+dress my hair, which, loosed, fell in dense curly masses nearly to my
+knees; no hand but hers must fasten dress and deck with flowers, and
+if I sometimes would coaxingly ask if I might not help by sewing in
+laces, or by doing some trifle in aid, she would kiss me and bid me
+run to my books or my play, telling me that her only pleasure in life
+was caring for her "treasure." Alas! how lightly we take the
+self-denying labour that makes life so easy, ere yet we have known
+what life means when the protecting motherwing is withdrawn. So
+guarded and shielded had been my childhood and youth from every touch
+of pain and anxiety that love could bear for me, that I never dreamed
+that life might be a heavy burden, save as I saw it in the poor I was
+sent to help; all the joy of those happy years I took, not
+ungratefully I hope, but certainly with as glad unconsciousness of
+anything rare in it as I took the sunlight. Passionate love, indeed, I
+gave to my darling, but I never knew all I owed her till I passed out
+of her tender guardianship, till I left my mother's home. Is such
+training wise? I am not sure. It makes the ordinary roughnesses of
+life come with so stunning a shock, when one goes out into the world,
+that one is apt to question whether some earlier initiation into
+life's sterner mysteries would not be wiser for the young. Yet it is a
+fair thing to have that joyous youth to look back upon, and at least
+it is a treasury of memory that no thief can steal in the struggles of
+later life. "Sunshine" they called me in those bright days of merry
+play and earnest study. But that study showed the bent of my thought
+and linked itself to the hidden life; for the Fathers of the early
+Christian Church now became my chief companions, and I pored over the
+Shepherd of Hernias, the Epistles of Polycarp, Barnabas, Ignatius, and
+Clement, the commentaries of Chrysostom, the confessions of Augustine.
+With these I studied the writings of Pusey, Liddon, and Keble, with
+many another smaller light, joying in the great conception of a
+Catholic Church, lasting through the centuries, built on the
+foundations of apostles and of martyrs, stretching from the days of
+Christ Himself down to our own--"One Lord, one Faith one Baptism," and
+I myself a child of that Holy Church. The hidden life grew stronger,
+constantly fed by these streams of study; weekly communion became the
+centre round which my devotional life revolved, with its ecstatic
+meditation, its growing intensity of conscious contact with the
+Divine; I fasted, according to the ordinances of the Church;
+occasionally flagellated myself to see if I could bear physical pain,
+should I be fortunate enough ever to tread the pathway trodden by the
+saints; and ever the Christ was the figure round which clustered all
+my hopes and longings, till I often felt that the very passion of, my
+devotion would draw Him down from His throne in heaven, present
+visibly in form as I felt Him invisibly in spirit. To serve Him
+through His Church became more and more a definite ideal in my life,
+and my thoughts began to turn towards some kind of "religious life,"
+in which I might prove my love by sacrifice and turn my passionate
+gratitude into active service.
+
+Looking back to-day over my life, I see that its keynote--through all
+the blunders, and the blind mistakes, and clumsy follies--has been
+this longing for sacrifice to something felt as greater than the self.
+It has been so strong and so persistent that I recognise it now as a
+tendency brought over from a previous life and dominating the present
+one; and this is shown by the fact that to follow it is not the act of
+a deliberate and conscious will, forcing self into submission and
+giving up with pain something the heart desires, but the following it
+is a joyous springing forward along the easiest path, the "sacrifice"
+being the supremely attractive thing, not to make which would be to
+deny the deepest longings of the soul, and to feel oneself polluted
+and dishonoured. And it is here that the misjudgment comes in of many
+generous hearts who have spoken sometimes lately so strongly in my
+praise. For the efforts to serve have not been painful acts of
+self-denial, but the yielding to an overmastering desire. We do not
+praise the mother who, impelled by her protecting love, feeds her
+crying infant and stills its wailings at her breast; rather should we
+blame her if she turned aside from its weeping to play with some toy.
+And so with all those whose ears are opened to the wailings of the
+great orphan Humanity; they are less to be praised for helping than
+they would be to be blamed if they stood aside. I now know that it is
+those wailings that have stirred my heart through life, and that I
+brought with me the ears open to hear them from previous lives of
+service paid to men. It was those lives that drew for the child the
+alluring pictures of martyrdom, breathed into the girl the passion of
+devotion, sent the woman out to face scoff and odium, and drove her
+finally into the Theosophy that rationalises sacrifice, while opening
+up possibilities of service beside which all other hopes grow pale.
+
+The Easter of 1866 was a memorable date in my life. I was introduced
+to the clergyman I married, and I met and conquered my first religious
+doubt. A little mission church had been opened the preceding Christmas
+in a very poor district of Clapham. My grandfather's house was near at
+hand, in Albert Square, and a favourite aunt and myself devoted
+ourselves a good deal to this little church, as enthusiastic girls and
+women will. At Easter we decorated it with spring flowers, with dewy
+primroses and fragrant violets, and with the yellow bells of the wild
+daffodil, to the huge delight of the poor who crowded in, and of the
+little London children who had, many of them, never seen a flower.
+Here I met the Rev. Frank Besant, a young Cambridge man, who had just
+taken orders, and was serving the little mission church as deacon;
+strange that at the same time I should meet the man I was to marry,
+and the doubts which were to break the marriage tie. For in the Holy
+Week preceding that Easter Eve, I had been--as English and Roman
+Catholics are wont to do--trying to throw the mind back to the time
+when the commemorated events occurred, and to follow, step by step,
+the last days of the Son of Man, living, as it were, through those
+last hours, so that I might be ready to kneel before the cross on Good
+Friday, to stand beside the sepulchre on Easter Day. In order to
+facilitate the realisation of those last sacred days of God incarnate
+on earth, working out man's salvation, I resolved to write a brief
+history of that week, compiled from the Four Gospels, meaning them to
+try and realise each day the occurrences that had happened on the
+corresponding date in A.D. 33, and so to follow those "blessed feet"
+step by step, till they were
+
+"... nailed for our advantage to the bitter cross."
+
+With the fearlessness which springs from ignorance I sat down to my
+task. My method was as follows:--
+
+    MATTHEW.         |    MARK.     |    LUKE.      |    JOHN.
+                     |              |               |
+  PALM SUNDAY.       | PALM SUNDAY. | PALM SUNDAY.  | PALM SUNDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Rode into          | Rode into    | Rode into     | Rode into
+  Jerusalem.         | Jerusalem.   | Jerusalem.    | Jerusalem.
+  Purified the       | Returned to  | Purified the  | Spoke in
+  Temple. Returned   | Bethany.     | Temple.       | the Temple.
+  to Bethany.        |              | Note: "Taught |
+                     |              | daily in the  |
+                     |              | temple."      |
+                     |              |               |
+    MONDAY.          |    MONDAY.   |    MONDAY.    |    MONDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Cursed the         | Cursed the   | Like Matthew. |    ----
+  fig-tree.          | fig-tree.    |               |
+  Taught in the      | Purified the |               |
+  Temple, and spake  | Temple. Went |               |
+  many parables.     | out of city. |               |
+  No breaks shown,   |              |               |
+  but the fig-tree   |              |               |
+  (xxi.19) did not   |              |               |
+  wither till        |              |               |
+  Tuesday (see       |              |               |
+  Mark).             |              |               |
+                     |              |               |
+    TUESDAY.         |    TUESDAY.  |   TUESDAY.    |   TUESDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  All chaps. xxi.    | Saw fig-tree | Discourses    |   ----
+  20, xxii.-xxv.,    | withered up. | No date       |
+  spoken on          | Then .       | shown.        |
+  Tuesday, for xxvi. | discourses   |               |
+  2 gives Passover   |              |               |
+  as "after two      |              |               |
+  days."             |              |               |
+                     |              |               |
+  WEDNESDAY.         |   WEDNESDAY. |  WEDNESDAY.   |  WEDNESDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Blank.             |   ----       |   ----        |  ----
+  (Possibly remained in Bethany; the alabaster box of oinment.)
+                     |              |               |
+  THURSDAY.          |   THURSDAY.  |   THURSDAY.   |   THURSDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Preparation of     | Same as Matt.| Same as Matt. | Discourses
+  Passover. Eating   |              |               | with disciples,
+  of Passover, and   |              |               | but _before_ the
+  institution of the |              |               | Passover. Washes
+  Holy Eucharist.    |              |               | the disciples'
+  Gethsemane.        |              |               | feet. Nothing
+  Betrayal by Judas. |              |               | said of Holy
+  Led captive to     |              |               | Eucharist, nor
+  Caiaphas. Denied   |              |               | of agony in
+  by St. Peter.      |              |               | Gethsemane.
+                     |              |               | Malchus' ear.
+                     |              |               | Led captive to
+                     |              |               | Annas first.
+                     |              |               | Then to Caiaphas.
+                     |              |               | Denied
+                     |              |               | by St. Peter.
+                     |              |               |
+  FRIDAY.            |   FRIDAY.    |   FRIDAY.     |   FRIDAY
+                     |              |               |
+  Led to Pilate.     | As Matthew,  | Led to        | Taken to
+  Judas hangs        | but hour of  | Pilate. Sent  | Pilate. Jews
+  himself. Tried.    | crucifixion  | to Herod.     | would not enter,
+  Condemned to       | given,       | Sent back to  | that they
+  death. Scourged    | 9 a.m.       | Pilate. Rest  | might eat
+  and mocked. Led    |              | as in         | the Passover.
+  to crucifixion.    |              | Matthew; but  | Scourged by
+  Darkness from 12   |              | _one_         | Pilate before
+  to 3. Died at 3.   |              | malefactor    | condemnation,
+                     |              | repents.      | and mocked. Shown
+                     |              |               | by Pilate to
+                     |              |               | Jews at 12.
+
+I became uneasy as I proceeded with my task, for discrepancies leaped
+at me from my four columns; the uneasiness grew as the contradictions
+increased, until I saw with a shock of horror that my "harmony" was a
+discord, and a doubt of the veracity of the story sprang up like a
+serpent hissing in my face. It was struck down in a moment, for to me
+to doubt was sin, and to have doubted on the very eve of the Passion
+was an added crime. Quickly I assured myself that these apparent
+contradictions were necessary as tests of faith, and I forced myself
+to repeat Tertullian's famous "Credo quia impossible," till, from a
+wooden recital, it became a triumphant affirmation. I reminded myself
+that St. Peter had said of the Pauline Epistles that in them were
+"some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and
+unstable wrest ... unto their own destruction." I shudderingly
+recognised that I must be very unlearned and unstable to find discord
+among the Holy Evangelists, and imposed on myself an extra fast as
+penance for my ignorance and lack of firmness in the faith. For my
+mental position was one to which doubt was one of the worst of sins. I
+knew that there were people like Colenso, who questioned the
+infallibility of the Bible, but I remembered how the Apostle John had
+fled from the Baths when Cerinthus entered them, lest the roof should
+fall on the heretic, and crush any one in his neighbourhood, and I
+looked on all heretics with holy horror. Pusey had indoctrinated me
+with his stern hatred of all heresy, and I was content to rest with
+him on that faith, "which must be old because it is eternal, and must
+be unchangeable because it is true." I would not even read the works
+of my mothers favourite Stanley, because he was "unsound," and because
+Pusey had condemned his "variegated use of words which destroys all
+definiteness of meaning"--a clever and pointed description, be it said
+in passing, of the Dean's exquisite phrases, capable of so many
+readings. It can then be imagined with what a stab of pain this first
+doubt struck me, and with what haste I smothered it up, buried it, and
+smoothed the turf over its grave. _But it had been there_, and it left
+its mark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+MARRIAGE.
+
+
+The last year of my girlish freedom was drawing to its close; how shall
+I hope to make commonsense readers understand how I became betrothed
+maiden ere yet nineteen, girl-wife when twenty years had struck?
+Looking back over twenty-five years, I feel a profound pity for the
+girl standing at that critical point of life, so utterly, hopelessly
+ignorant of all that marriage meant, so filled with impossible dreams,
+so unfitted for the _role_ of wife. As I have said, my day-dreams held
+little place for love, partly from the absence of love novels from my
+reading, partly from the mystic fancies that twined themselves round
+the figure of the Christ. Catholic books of devotion--English or Roman,
+it matters not, for to a large extent they are translations of the same
+hymns and prayers--are exceedingly glowing in their language, and the
+dawning feelings of womanhood unconsciously lend to them a passionate
+fervour. I longed to spend my time in worshipping Jesus, and was, as
+far as my inner life was concerned, absorbed in that passionate love of
+"the Saviour" which, among emotional Catholics, really is the human
+passion of love transferred to an ideal--for women to Jesus, for men to
+the Virgin Mary. In order to show that I am not here exaggerating, I
+subjoin a few of the prayers in which I found daily delight, and I do
+this in order to show how an emotional girl may be attracted by these
+so-called devotional exercises:--
+
+"O crucified Love, raise in me fresh ardours of love and consolation,
+that it may henceforth be the greatest torment I can endure ever to
+offend Thee; that it may be my greatest delight to please Thee."
+
+"Let the remembrance of Thy death, O Lord Jesu, make me to desire and
+pant after Thee, that I may delight in Thy gracious presence."
+
+"O most sweet Jesu Christ, I, unworthy sinner, yet redeemed by Thy
+precious blood.... Thine I am and will be, in life and in death."
+
+"O Jesu, beloved, fairer than the sons of men, draw me after Thee with
+the cords of Thy love."
+
+"Blessed are Thou, O most merciful God, who didst vouchsafe to espouse
+me to the heavenly Bridegroom in the waters of baptism, and hast
+imparted Thy body and blood as a new gift of espousal and the meet
+consummation of Thy love."
+
+"O most sweet Lord Jesu, transfix the affections of my inmost soul with
+that most joyous and most healthful wound of Thy love, with true,
+serene, most holy, apostolical charity; that my soul may ever languish
+and melt with entire love and longing for Thee. Let it desire Thee and
+faint for Thy courts; long to be dissolved and be with Thee."
+
+"Oh, that I could embrace Thee with that most burning love of angels."
+
+"Let Him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth; for Thy love is better
+than wine. Draw me, we will run after Thee. The king hath brought me
+into his chambers.... Let my soul, O Lord, feel the sweetness of Thy
+presence. May it taste how sweet Thou art.... May the sweet and burning
+power of Thy love, I beseech Thee, absorb my soul."
+
+All girls have in them the germ of passion, and the line of its
+development depends on the character brought into the world, and the
+surrounding influences of education. I had but two ideals in my
+childhood and youth, round whom twined these budding tendrils of
+passion; they were my mother and the Christ. I know this may seem
+strange, but I am trying to state things as they were in this
+life-story, and not give mere conventionalisms, and so it was. I had
+men friends, but no lovers--at least, to my knowledge, for I have since
+heard that my mother received two or three offers of marriage for me,
+but declined them on account of my youth and my childishness--friends
+with whom I liked to talk, because they knew more than I did; but they
+had no place in my day-dreams. These were more and more filled with the
+one Ideal Man, and my hopes turned towards the life of the Sister of
+Mercy, who ever worships the Christ, and devotes her life to the
+service of His poor. I knew my dear mother would set herself against
+this idea, but it nestled warm at my heart, for ever that idea of
+escaping from the humdrum of ordinary life by some complete sacrifice
+lured me onwards with its overmastering fascination.
+
+Now one unlucky result of this view of religion is the idealisation of
+the clergyman, the special messenger and chosen servant of the Lord.
+Far more lofty than any title bestowed by earthly monarch is that
+patent of nobility straight from the hand of the "King of kings," that
+seems to give to the mortal something of the authority of the immortal,
+and to crown the head of the priest with the diadem that belongs to
+those who are "kings and priests unto God." Viewed in this way, the
+position of the priest's wife seems second only to that of the nun, and
+has, therefore, a wonderful attractiveness, an attractiveness in which
+the particular clergyman affected plays a very subordinate part; it is
+the "sacred office," the nearness to "holy things," the consecration
+which seems to include the wife--it is these things that shed a glamour
+over the clerical life which attracts most those who are most apt to
+self-devotion, most swayed by imagination. And the saddest pity of all
+this is that the glamour is most over those whose brains are quick,
+whose hearts are pure, who are responsive to all forms of noble
+emotions, all suggestions of personal self-sacrifice; if such in later
+life rise to the higher emotions whose shadows have attracted them, and
+to that higher self-sacrifice whose whispers reached them in their
+early youth, then the false prophet's veil is raised, the poverty of
+the conception seen, and the life is either wrecked, or through
+storm-wind and surge of battling billows, with loss of mast and sail,
+is steered by firm hand into the port of a nobler faith.
+
+That summer of 1866 saw me engaged to the young clergyman I had met at
+the mission church in the spring, our knowledge of each other being an
+almost negligeable quantity. We were thrown together for a week, the
+only two young ones in a small party of holiday-makers, and in our
+walks, rides, and drives we were naturally companions; an hour or two
+before he left he asked me to marry him, taking my consent for granted
+as I had allowed him such full companionship--a perfectly fair
+assumption with girls accustomed to look on all men as possible
+husbands, but wholly mistaken as regarded myself, whose thoughts were
+in quite other directions. Startled, and my sensitive pride touched by
+what seemed to my strict views an assumption that I had been flirting,
+I hesitated, did not follow my first impulse of refusal, but took
+refuge in silence; my suitor had to catch his train, and bound me
+over to silence till he could himself speak to my mother, urging
+authoritatively that it would be dishonourable of me to break his
+confidence, and left me--the most upset and distressed little person
+on the Sussex coast. The fortnight that followed was the first unhappy
+one of my life, for I had a secret from my mother, a secret which I
+passionately longed to tell her, but dared not speak at the risk of
+doing a dishonourable thing. On meeting my suitor on our return to
+town I positively refused to keep silence any longer, and then out
+of sheer weakness and fear of inflicting pain I drifted into an
+engagement with a man I did not pretend to love. "Drifted" is the
+right word, for two or three months passed, on the ground that I was
+so much of a child, before my mother would consent to a definite
+engagement; my dislike of the thought of marriage faded before the
+idea of becoming the wife of a priest, working ever in the Church and
+among the poor. I had no outlet for my growing desire for usefulness
+in my happy and peaceful home-life, where all religious enthusiasm was
+regarded as unbalanced and unbecoming; all that was deepest and truest
+in my nature chafed against my easy, useless days, longed for work,
+yearned to devote itself, as I had read women saints had done, to the
+service of the Church and of the poor, to the battling against sin and
+misery--what empty names sin and misery then were to me! "You will
+have more opportunities for doing good as a clergyman's wife than as
+anything else," was one of the pleas urged on my reluctance.
+
+In the autumn I was definitely betrothed, and I married fourteen months
+later. Once, in the interval, I tried to break the engagement, but, on
+my broaching the subject to my mother, all her pride rose up in revolt.
+Would I, her daughter, break my word, would I dishonour myself by
+jilting a man I had pledged myself to marry? She could be stern where
+honour was involved, that sweet mother of mine, and I yielded to her
+wish as I had been ever wont to do, for a look or a word from her had
+ever been my law, save where religion was concerned. So I married in
+the winter of 1867 with no more idea of the marriage relation than if I
+had been four years old instead of twenty. My dreamy life, into which
+no knowledge of evil had been allowed to penetrate, in which I had been
+guarded from all pain, shielded from all anxiety, kept, innocent on all
+questions of sex, was no preparation for married existence, and left me
+defenceless to face a rude awakening. Looking back on it all, I
+deliberately say that no more fatal blunder can be made than to train a
+girl to womanhood in ignorance of all life's duties and burdens, and
+then to let her face them for the first time away from all the old
+associations, the old helps, the old refuge on the mother's breast.
+That "perfect innocence" may be very beautiful, but it is a perilous
+possession, and Eve should have the knowledge of good and evil ere she
+wanders forth from the paradise of a mother's love. Many an unhappy
+marriage dates from its very beginning, from the terrible shock to a
+young girl's sensitive modesty and pride, her helpless bewilderment and
+fear. Men, with their public school and college education, or the
+knowledge that comes by living in the outside world, may find it hard
+to realise the possibility of such infantile ignorance in many girls.
+None the less, such ignorance is a fact in the case of some girls at
+least, and no mother should let her daughter, blindfold, slip her neck
+under the marriage yoke.
+
+Before leaving the harbourage of girlhood to set sail on the troublous
+sea of life, there is an occurrence of which I must make mention, as
+it marks my first awakening of interest in the outer world of
+political struggle. In the autumn of 1867 my mother and I were staying
+with some dear friends of ours, the Robertses, at Pendleton, near
+Manchester. Mr. Roberts was "the poor man's lawyer," in the
+affectionate phrase used of him by many a hundred men. He was a close
+friend of Ernest Jones, and was always ready to fight a poor man's
+battle without fee. He worked hard in the agitation which saved women
+from working in the mines, and I have heard him tell how he had seen
+them toiling, naked to the waist, with short petticoats barely
+reaching to their knees, rough, foul-tongued, brutalised out of all
+womanly decency and grace; and how he had seen little children working
+there too, babies of three and four set to watch a door, and falling
+asleep at their work to be roused by curse and kick to the unfair
+toil. The old man's eye would begin to flash and his voice to rise as
+he told of these horrors, and then his face would soften as he added
+that, after it was all over and the slavery was put an end to, as he
+went through a coal district the women standing at their doors would
+lift up their children to see "Lawyer Roberts" go by, and would bid
+"God bless him" for what he had done. This dear old man was my first
+tutor in Radicalism, and I was an apt pupil. I had taken no interest
+in politics, but had unconsciously reflected more or less the decorous
+Whiggism which had always surrounded me. I regarded "the poor" as folk
+to be educated, looked after, charitably dealt with, and always
+treated with most perfect courtesy, the courtesy being due from me, as
+a lady, to all equally, whether they were rich or poor. But to Mr.
+Roberts "the poor" were the working-bees, the wealth producers, with a
+right to self-rule not to looking after, with a right to justice, not
+to charity, and he preached his doctrines to me in season and out of
+season. I was a pet of his, and used often to drive him to his office
+in the morning, glorying much in the fact that my skill was trusted in
+guiding a horse through the crowded Manchester streets. During these
+drives, and on all other available occasions, Mr. Roberts would preach
+to me the cause of the people. "What do you think of John Bright?" he
+demanded suddenly one day, looking at me with fiery eyes from under
+heavy brows. "I have never thought of him at all," was the careless
+answer. "Isn't he a rather rough sort of man, who goes about making
+rows?" "There, I thought so!" he thundered at me fiercely. "That's
+just what I say. I believe some of you fine ladies would not go to
+heaven if you had to rub shoulders with John Bright, the noblest man
+God ever gave to the cause of the poor."
+
+This was the hot-tempered and lovable "demagogue," as he was called,
+with whom we were staying when Colonel Kelly and Captain Deasy, two
+Fenian leaders, were arrested in Manchester and put on their trial. The
+whole Irish population became seething with excitement, and on
+September 18th the police van carrying them to Salford Gaol was stopped
+at the Bellevue Railway Arch by the sudden fall of one of the horses,
+shot from the side of the road. In a moment the van was surrounded, and
+crowbars were wrenching at the van door. It resisted; a body of police
+was rapidly approaching, and if the rescue was to be effective the door
+must be opened. The rescuers shouted to Brett, the constable inside, to
+pass out his keys; he refused, and some one exclaimed, "Blow off the
+lock!" In a moment the muzzle of a revolver was against the lock, and
+it was blown off; but Brett, stooping down to look through the keyhole,
+received the bullet in his head, and fell dying as the door flew open.
+Another moment, and Allen, a lad of seventeen, had wrenched open the
+doors of the compartments occupied by Kelly and Deasy, dragged them
+out, and while two or three hurried them off to a place of safety, the
+others threw themselves between the fugitives and the police, and with
+levelled revolvers guarded their flight. The Fenian leaders once safe,
+they scattered, and young William Allen, whose one thought had been for
+his chiefs, seeing them safe, fired his revolver in the air, for he
+would not shed blood in his own defence. Disarmed by his own act, he
+was set on by the police, brutally struck down, kicked and stoned, and
+was dragged off to gaol, faint and bleeding, to meet there some of his
+comrades in much the same plight as himself. Then Manchester went mad,
+and race-passions flared up into flame; no Irish workman was safe in a
+crowd of Englishmen, no Englishman safe in the Irish quarter. The
+friends of the prisoners besieged "Lawyer Roberts's" house, praying his
+aid, and he threw his whole fiery soul into their defence. The man who
+had fired the accidentally fatal shot was safely out of the way, and
+none of the others had hurt a human being. A Special Commission was
+issued, with Mr. Justice Blackburn at its head--"the hanging judge,"
+groaned Mr. Roberts--and it was soon in Manchester, for all Mr.
+Roberts's efforts to get the venue of the trial changed were futile,
+though of fair trial then in Manchester there was no chance. On October
+25th the prisoners were actually brought up before the magistrates in
+irons, and Mr. Ernest Jones, their counsel, failing in his protest
+against this outrage, threw down his brief and left the court. So great
+was the haste with which the trial was hurried on that on the 29th
+Allen, Larkin, Gould (O'Brien), Maguire, and Condon were standing in
+the dock before the Commission charged with murder.
+
+My first experience of an angry crowd was on that day as we drove to
+the court; the streets were barricaded, the soldiers were under arms,
+every approach to the court crowded with surging throngs. At last our
+carriage was stopped as we were passing at a foot's pace through an
+Irish section of the crowd, and various vehement fists came through the
+window, with hearty curses at the "d----d English who were going to see
+the boys murdered." The situation was critical, for we were two women
+and three girls, when I bethought myself that we were unknown, and
+gently touched the nearest fist: "Friends, these are Mr. Roberts' wife
+and daughters." "Roberts! Lawyer Roberts! God bless Roberts! Let his
+carriage through." And all the scowling faces became smile-wreathen,
+and curses changed to cheers, as a road to the court steps was cleared
+for us.
+
+Alas! if there was passion on behalf of the prisoners outside, there
+was passion against them within, and the very opening of the trial
+showed the spirit that animated the prosecution and the bench. Digby
+Seymour, Q.C., and Ernest Jones, were briefed for the defence, and Mr.
+Roberts did not think that they exercised sufficiently their right of
+challenge; he knew, as we all did, that many on the panel had loudly
+proclaimed their hostility to the Irish, and Mr. Roberts persisted in
+challenging them as his counsel would not. In vain Judge Blackburn
+threatened to commit the rebellious solicitor: "These men's lives are
+at stake, my lord," was his indignant plea. "Remove that man!" cried
+the angry judge, but as the officers of the court came forward very
+slowly--for all poor men loved and honoured the sturdy fighter--he
+changed his mind and let him stay. Despite all his efforts, the jury
+contained a man who had declared that he "didn't care what the evidence
+was, he would hang every d----d Irishman of the lot." And the result
+showed that he was not alone in his view, for evidence of the most
+disreputable kind was admitted; women of the lowest type were put into
+the box as witnesses, and their word taken as unchallengeable; thus was
+destroyed an _alibi_ for Maguire, afterwards accepted by the Crown, a
+free pardon being issued on the strength of it. Nothing could save the
+doomed men from the determined verdict, and I could see from where I
+was sitting into a little room behind the bench, where an official was
+quietly preparing the black caps before the verdict had been delivered.
+The foregone "Guilty" was duly repeated as verdict on each of the five
+cases, and the prisoners asked if they had anything to say why sentence
+of death should not be passed on them. Allen, boy as he was, made a
+very brave and manly speech; he had not fired, save in the air--if he
+had done so he might have escaped; he had helped to free Kelly and
+Deasy, and did not regret it; he was willing to die for Ireland.
+Maguire and Condon (he also was reprieved) declared they were not
+present, but, like Allen, were ready to die for their country. Sentence
+of death was passed, and, as echo to the sardonic "The Lord have mercy
+on your souls," rang back from the dock in five clear voices, with
+never a quiver of fear in them, "God save Ireland!" and the men passed
+one by one from the sight of my tear-dimmed eyes.
+
+It was a sorrowful time that followed; the despair of the heart-broken
+girl who was Allen's sweetheart, and who cried to us on her knees,
+"Save my William!" was hard to see; nothing we or any one could do
+availed to avert the doom, and on November 23rd Allen, Larkin, and
+O'Brien were hanged outside Salford Gaol. Had they striven for freedom
+in Italy England would have honoured them; here she buried them as
+common murderers in quicklime in the prison yard.
+
+I have found, with a keen sense of pleasure, that Mr. Bradlaugh and
+myself were in 1867 to some extent co-workers, although we knew not of
+each other's existence, and although he was doing much, and I only
+giving such poor sympathy as a young girl might, who was only just
+awakening to the duty of political work. I read in the _National
+Reformer_ for November 24, 1867, that in the preceding week he was
+pleading on Clerkenwell Green for these men's lives:--"According to
+the evidence at the trial, Deasy and Kelly were illegally arrested.
+They had been arrested for vagrancy of which no evidence was given, and
+apparently remanded for felony without a shadow of justification. He
+had yet to learn that in England the same state of things existed as in
+Ireland; he had yet to learn that an illegal arrest was sufficient
+ground to detain any of the citizens of any country in the prisons of
+this one. If he were illegally held, he was justified in using enough
+force to procure his release. Wearing a policeman's coat gave no
+authority when the officer exceeded his jurisdiction. He had argued
+this before Lord Chief Justice Erie in the Court of Common Pleas, and
+that learned judge did not venture to contradict the argument which he
+submitted. There was another reason why they should spare these men,
+although he hardly expected the Government to listen, because the
+Government sent down one of the judges who was predetermined to convict
+the prisoners; it was that the offence was purely a political one. The
+death of Brett was a sad mischance, but no one who read the evidence
+could regard the killing of Brett as an intentional murder. Legally, it
+was murder; morally, it was homicide in the rescue of a political
+captive. If it were a question of the rescue of the political captives
+of Varignano, or of political captives in Bourbon, in Naples, or in
+Poland, or in Paris, even earls might be found so to argue. Wherein is
+our sister Ireland less than these? In executing these men, they would
+throw down the gauntlet for terrible reprisals. It was a grave and
+solemn question. It had been said by a previous speaker that they were
+prepared to go to any lengths to save these Irishmen. They were not. He
+wished they were. If they were, if the men of England, from one end to
+the other, were prepared to say, 'These men shall not be executed,'
+they would not be. He was afraid they had not pluck enough for that.
+Their moral courage was not equal to their physical strength. Therefore
+he would not say that they were prepared to do so. They must plead _ad
+misericordiam_. He appealed to the press, which represented the power
+of England; to that press which in its panic-stricken moments had done
+much harm, and which ought now to save these four doomed men. If the
+press demanded it, no Government would be mad enough to resist. The
+memory of the blood which was shed in 1798 rose up like a bloody ghost
+against them to-day. He only feared that what they said upon the
+subject might do the poor men more harm than good. If it were not so,
+he would coin words that should speak in words of fire. As it was, he
+could only say to the Government: You are strong to-day; you hold these
+men's lives in your hands; but if you want to reconcile their country
+to you, if you want to win back Ireland, if you want to make her
+children love you--then do not embitter their hearts still more by
+taking the lives of these men. Temper your strength with mercy; do not
+use the sword of justice like one of vengeance, for the day may come
+when it shall be broken in your hands, and you yourselves brained by
+the hilt of the weapon you have so wickedly wielded." In October he
+had printed a plea for Ireland, strong and earnest, asking:--
+
+"Where is our boasted English freedom when you cross to Kingstown pier?
+Where has it been for near two years? The Habeas Corpus Act suspended,
+the gaols crowded, the steamers searched, spies listening at shebeen
+shops for sedition, and the end of it a Fenian panic in England. Oh,
+before it be too late, before more blood stain the pages of our present
+history, before we exasperate and arouse bitter animosities, let us try
+and do justice to our sister land. Abolish once and for all the land
+laws, which in their iniquitous operation have ruined her peasantry.
+Sweep away the leech-like Church which has sucked her vitality, and has
+given her back no word even of comfort in her degradation. Turn her
+barracks into flax mills, encourage a spirit of independence in her
+citizens, restore to her people the protection of the law, so that they
+may speak without fear of arrest, and beg them to plainly and boldly
+state their grievances. Let a commission of the best and wisest amongst
+Irishmen, with some of our highest English judges added, sit solemnly
+to hear all complaints, and then let us honestly legislate, not for the
+punishment of the discontented, but to remove the causes of the
+discontent. It is not the Fenians who have depopulated Ireland's
+strength and increased her misery. It is not the Fenians who have
+evicted tenants by the score. It is not the Fenians who have checked
+cultivation. Those who have caused the wrong at least should frame the
+remedy."
+
+In December, 1867, I sailed out of the safe harbour of my happy and
+peaceful girlhood on to the wide sea of life, and the waves broke
+roughly as soon as the bar was crossed. We were an ill-matched pair, my
+husband and I, from the very outset; he, with very high ideas of a
+husband's authority and a wife's submission, holding strongly to the
+"master-in-my-own-house theory," thinking much of the details of home
+arrangements, precise, methodical, easily angered and with difficulty
+appeased. I, accustomed to freedom, indifferent to home details,
+impulsive, very hot-tempered, and proud as Lucifer. I had never had a
+harsh word spoken to me, never been ordered to do anything, had had my
+way smoothed for my feet, and never a worry had touched me. Harshness
+roused first incredulous wonder, then a storm of indignant tears, and
+after a time a proud, defiant resistance, cold and hard as iron. The
+easy-going, sunshiny, enthusiastic girl changed--and changed pretty
+rapidly--into a grave, proud, reticent woman, burying deep in her own
+heart all her hopes, her fears, and her disillusions. I must have been
+a very unsatisfactory wife from the beginning, though I think other
+treatment might gradually have turned me into a fair imitation of the
+proper conventional article. Beginning with the ignorance before
+alluded to, and so scared and outraged at heart from the very first;
+knowing nothing of household management or economical use of money--I
+had never had an allowance or even bought myself a pair of
+gloves--though eager to perform my new duties creditably; unwilling to
+potter over little things, and liking to do swiftly what I had to do,
+and then turn to my beloved books; at heart fretting for my mother but
+rarely speaking of her, as I found my longing for her presence raised
+jealous vexation; with strangers about me with whom I had no sympathy;
+visited by ladies who talked to me only about babies and
+servants--troubles of which I knew nothing and which bored me
+unutterably--and who were as uninterested in all that had filled my
+life, in theology, in politics, in science, as I was uninterested in
+the discussions on the housemaid's young man and on the cook's
+extravagance in using "butter, when dripping would have done perfectly
+well, my dear"; was it wonderful that I became timid, dull, and
+depressed?
+
+All my eager, passionate enthusiasm, so attractive to men in a young
+girl, were doubtless incompatible with "the solid comfort of a wife,"
+and I must have been inexpressibly tiring to the Rev. Frank Besant.
+And, in truth, I ought never to have married, for under the soft,
+loving, pliable girl there lay hidden, as much unknown to herself as to
+her surroundings, a woman of strong dominant will, strength that panted
+for expression and rebelled against restraint, fiery and passionate
+emotions that were seething under compression--a most undesirable
+partner to sit in the lady's arm-chair on the domestic rug before the
+fire. [_Que le diable faisait-elle dans cette galere,_] I have often
+thought, looking back at my past self, and asking, Why did that foolish
+girl make her bed so foolishly? But self-analysis shows the
+contradictories in my nature that led me into so mistaken a course. I
+have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have
+paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to suffer tortures of
+shyness, and if my shoe-lace was untied would feel shamefacedly that
+every eye was fixed on the unlucky string; as a girl I would shrink
+away from strangers and think myself unwanted and unliked, so that I
+was full of eager gratitude to any one who noticed me kindly; as the
+young mistress of a house, I was afraid of my servants, and would let
+careless work pass rather than bear the pain of reproving the ill-doer;
+when I have been lecturing and debating with no lack of spirit on the
+platform, I have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel
+rather than to ring and make the waiter fetch it; combative on the
+platform in defence of any cause I cared for, I shrink from quarrel or
+disapproval in the home, and am a coward at heart in private while a
+good fighter in public. How often have I passed unhappy quarters of an
+hour screwing up my courage to find fault with some subordinate whom my
+duty compelled me to reprove, and how often have I jeered at myself for
+a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming
+some lad or lass for doing their work badly! An unkind look or word has
+availed to make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while
+on the platform opposition makes me speak my best. So I slid into
+marriage blindly and stupidly, fearing to give pain; fretted my heart
+out for a year; then, roused by harshness and injustice, stiffened and
+hardened, and lived with a wall of ice round me within which I waged
+mental conflicts that nearly killed me; and learned at last how to live
+and work in armour that turned the edge of the weapons that struck it,
+and left the flesh beneath unwounded, armour laid aside, but in the
+presence of a very few.
+
+My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up
+two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of
+a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character,
+"The Lives of the Black Letter Saints." For the sake of the
+unecclesiastically trained it may be as well to mention that in the
+Calendar of the Church of England there are a number of Saints' Days;
+some of these are printed in red, and are Red Letter Days, for which
+services are appointed by the Church; others are printed in black, and
+are Black Letter Days, and have no special services fixed for them. It
+seemed to me that it would be interesting to take each of these days
+and write a sketch of the life of the saint belonging to it, and
+accordingly I set to work to do so, and gathered various books of
+history and legend where-from to collect my "facts." I do not in the
+least know what became of that valuable book; I tried Macmillans with
+it, and it was sent on by them to some one who was preparing a series
+of Church books for the young; later I had a letter from a Church
+brotherhood offering to publish it, if I would give it as "an act of
+piety" to their order; its ultimate fate is to me unknown.
+
+The short stories were more fortunate. I sent the first to the _Family
+Herald_, and some weeks afterwards received a letter from which dropped
+a cheque as I opened it. Dear me! I have earned a good deal of money
+since by my pen, but never any that gave me the intense delight of that
+first thirty shillings. It was the first money I had ever earned, and
+the pride of the earning was added to the pride of authorship. In my
+childish delight and practical religion, I went down on my knees and
+thanked God for sending it to me, and I saw myself earning heaps of
+golden guineas, and becoming quite a support of the household. Besides,
+it was "my very own," I thought, and a delightful sense of independence
+came over me. I had not then realised the beauty of the English law,
+and the dignified position in which it placed the married woman; I did
+not understand that all a married woman earned by law belonged to her
+owner, and that she could have nothing that belonged to her of
+right.[1] I did not want the money: I was only so glad to have
+something of my own to give, and it was rather a shock to learn that it
+was not really mine at all.
+
+From time to time after that I earned a few pounds for stories in the
+same journal; and the _Family Herald_, let me say, has one peculiarity
+which should render it beloved by poor authors; it pays its contributor
+when it accepts the paper, whether it prints it immediately or not;
+thus my first story was not printed for some weeks after I received the
+cheque, and it was the same with all the others accepted by the same
+journal. Encouraged by these small successes, I began writing a novel!
+It took a long time to do, but was at last finished, and sent off to
+the _Family Herald_. The poor thing came back, but with a kind note,
+telling me that it was too political for their pages, but that if I
+would write one of "purely domestic interest," and up to the same
+level, it would probably be accepted. But by that time I was in the
+full struggle of theological doubt, and that novel of "purely domestic
+interest" never got itself written.
+
+I contributed further to the literature of my country a theological
+pamphlet, of which I forget the exact title, but it dealt with the duty
+of fasting incumbent on all faithful Christians, and was very patristic
+in its tone.
+
+In January, 1869, my little son was born, and as I was very ill for
+some months before, and was far too much interested in the tiny
+creature afterwards, to devote myself to pen and paper, my literary
+career was checked for a while. The baby gave a new interest and a new
+pleasure to life, and as we could not afford a nurse I had plenty to do
+in looking after his small majesty. My energy in reading became less
+feverish when it was done by the side of the baby's cradle, and the
+little one's presence almost healed the abiding pain of my mother's
+loss.
+
+I may pass very quickly over the next two years. In August, 1870, a
+little sister was born to my son, and the recovery was slow and
+tedious, for my general health had been failing for some time.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by Dighton's Art Studio, Cheltenham_.
+ANNIE BESANT 1869.]
+
+The boy was a bright, healthy little fellow, but the girl was delicate
+from birth, suffering from her mother's unhappiness, and born somewhat
+prematurely in consequence of a shock. When, in the spring of 1871, the
+two children caught the whooping cough, my Mabel's delicacy made the
+ordeal well-nigh fatal to her. She was very young for so trying a
+disease, and after a while bronchitis set in and was followed by
+congestion of the lungs. For weeks she lay in hourly peril of death We
+arranged a screen round the fire like a tent, and kept it full of steam
+to ease the panting breath; and there I sat, day and night, all through
+those weary weeks, the tortured baby on my knees. I loved my little
+ones passionately, for their clinging love soothed the aching at my
+heart, and their baby eyes could not critically scan the unhappiness
+that grew deeper month by month; and that steam-filled tent became my
+world, and there, alone, I fought with Death for my child. The doctor
+said that recovery was impossible, and that in one of the paroxysms of
+coughing she must die; the most distressing thing was that, at last,
+even a drop or two of milk would bring on the terrible convulsive
+choking, and it seemed cruel to add to the pain of the apparently dying
+child. At length, one morning the doctor said she could not last
+through the day; I had sent for him hurriedly, for the body had
+suddenly swollen up as a result of the perforation of one of the
+pleurae, and the consequent escape of air into the cavity of the chest.
+While he was there one of the fits of coughing came on, and it seemed
+as though it must be the last. He took a small bottle of chloroform out
+of his pocket, and putting a drop on a handkerchief held it near the
+child's face, till the drug soothed the convulsive struggle. "It can't
+do any harm at this stage," he said, "and it checks the suffering." He
+went away, saying that he feared he would never see the child alive
+again. One of the kindest friends I had in my married life was that
+same doctor, Mr. Lauriston Winterbotham; he was as good as he was
+clever, and, like so many of his noble profession, he had the merits of
+discretion and silence. He never breathed a word as to my unhappiness,
+until in 1878 he came up to town to give evidence as to cruelty
+which--had the deed of separation not been held as condonation--would
+have secured me a divorce _a mensa et thoro._
+
+The child, however, recovered, and her recovery was due, I think, to
+that chance thought of Mr. Winterbotham's about the chloroform, for I
+used it whenever the first sign of a fit of coughing appeared, and so
+warded off the convulsive attack and the profound exhaustion that
+followed, in which a mere flicker of breath at the top of the throat
+was the only sign of life, and sometimes even that disappeared, and I
+thought her gone. For years the child remained ailing and delicate,
+requiring the tenderest care, but those weeks of anguish left a deeper
+trace on mother than on child. Once she was out of danger I collapsed
+physically, and lay in bed for a week unmoving, and then rose to face a
+struggle which lasted for three years and two months, and nearly cost
+me my life, the struggle which transformed me from a Christian into an
+Atheist. The agony of the struggle was in the first nineteen months--a
+time to be looked back upon with shrinking, as it was a hell to live
+through at the time. For no one who has not felt it knows the fearful
+anguish inflicted by doubt on the earnestly religious soul. There is in
+life no other pain so horrible, so keen in its torture, so crushing in
+its weight. It seems to shipwreck everything, to destroy the one steady
+gleam of happiness "on the other side" that no earthly storm could
+obscure; to make all life gloomy with a horror of despair, a darkness
+that verily may be felt. Nothing but an imperious intellectual and
+moral necessity can drive into doubt a religious mind, for it is as
+though an earthquake shook the foundations of the soul, and the very
+being quivers and sways under the shock. No life in the empty sky; no
+gleam in the blackness of the night; no voice to break the deadly
+silence; no hand outstretched to save. Empty-brained triflers who have
+never tried to think, who take their creed as they take their fashions,
+speak of Atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious desires. In
+their shallow heartlessness and shallower thought they cannot even
+dimly imagine the anguish of entering the mere penumbra of the Eclipse
+of Faith, much less the horror of that great darkness in which the
+orphaned soul cries out into the infinite emptiness: "Is it a Devil
+that has made the world? Is the echo, 'Children, ye have no Father,'
+true? Is all blind chance, is all the clash of unconscious forces, or
+are we the sentient toys of an Almighty Power that sports with our
+agony, whose peals of awful mockery of laughter ring back answer to the
+wailings of our despair?"
+
+How true are the noble words of Mrs. Hamilton King:--
+
+  "For some may follow Truth from dawn to dark,
+  As a child follows by his mother's hand,
+  Knowing no fear, rejoicing all the way;
+  And unto some her face is as a Star
+  Set through an avenue of thorns and fires,
+  And waving branches black without a leaf;
+  And still It draws them, though the feet must bleed,
+  Though garments must be rent, and eyes be scorched:
+  And if the valley of the shadow of death
+  Be passed, and to the level road they come,
+  Still with their faces to the polar star,
+  It is not with the same looks, the same limbs,
+  But halt, and maimed, and of infirmity.
+  And for the rest of the way they have to go
+  It is not day but night, and oftentimes
+  A night of clouds wherein the stars are lost."[2]
+
+Aye! but never lost is the Star of Truth to which the face is set, and
+while that shines all lesser lights may go. It was the long months of
+suffering through which I had been passing, with the seemingly
+purposeless torturing of my little one as a climax, that struck the
+first stunning blow at my belief in God as a merciful Father of men. I
+had been visiting the poor a good deal, and had marked the patient
+suffering of their lives; my idolised mother had been defrauded by a
+lawyer she had trusted, and was plunged into debt by his non-payment of
+the sums that should have passed through his hands to others; my own
+bright life had been enshrouded by pain and rendered to me degraded by
+an intolerable sense of bondage; and here was my helpless, sinless babe
+tortured for weeks and left frail and suffering. The smooth brightness
+of my previous life made all the disillusionment more startling, and
+the sudden plunge into conditions so new and so unfavourable dazed and
+stunned me. My religious past became the worst enemy of the suffering
+present. All my personal belief in Christ, all my intense faith in His
+constant direction of affairs, all my habit of continual prayer and of
+realisation of His Presence--all were against me now. The very height
+of my trust was the measure of the shock when the trust gave way. To me
+He was no abstract idea, but a living reality, and all my heart rose up
+against this Person in whom I believed, and whose individual finger I
+saw in my baby's agony, my own misery, the breaking of my mother's
+proud heart under a load of debt, and all the bitter suffering of the
+poor. The presence of pain and evil in a world made by a good God; the
+pain falling on the innocent, as on my seven months' old babe; the pain
+begun here reaching on into eternity unhealed; a sorrow-laden world; a
+lurid, hopeless hell; all these, while I still believed, drove me
+desperate, and instead of like the devils believing and trembling, I
+believed and hated. All the hitherto dormant and unsuspected strength
+of my nature rose up in rebellion; I did not yet dream of denial, but I
+would no longer kneel.
+
+As the first stirrings of this hot rebellion moved in my heart I met a
+clergyman of a very noble type, who did much to help me by his ready
+and wise sympathy. Mr. Besant brought him to see me during the crisis
+of the child's illness; he said little, but on the following day I
+received from him the following note:--
+
+"_April_ 21, 1871.
+
+"My Dear Mrs. Besant,--I am painfully conscious that I gave you but
+little help in your trouble yesterday. It is needless to say that it
+was not from want of sympathy. Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to
+say that it was from excess of sympathy. I shrink intensely from
+meddling with the sorrow of any one whom I feel to be of a sensitive
+nature. 'The heart hath its own bitterness, and the stranger meddleth
+not therewith.' It is to me a positively fearful thought that I might
+awaken such a reflection as
+
+  "'And common was the commonplace,
+  And vacant chaff well meant for grain.'
+
+Conventional consolations, conventional verses out of the Bible, and
+conventional prayers are, it seems to me, an intolerable aggravation of
+suffering. And so I acted on a principle that I mentioned to your
+husband that 'there is no power so great as that of one human faith
+looking upon another human faith.' The promises of God, the love of
+Christ for little children, and all that has been given to us of hope
+and comfort, are as deeply planted in your heart as in mine, and I did
+not care to quote them. But when I talk face to face with one who is in
+sore need of them, my faith in them suddenly becomes so vast and
+heart-stirring that I think I must help most by talking naturally, and
+letting the faith find its own way from soul to soul. Indeed, I could
+not find words for it if I tried. And yet I am compelled, as a
+messenger of the glad tidings of God, to solemnly assure you that all
+is well. We have no key to the 'mystery of pain' excepting the Cross of
+Christ. But there is another and a deeper solution in the hands of our
+Father; and it will be ours when we can understand it. There is--in the
+place to which we travelsome blessed explanation of your baby's pain
+and your grief, which will fill with light the darkest heart. Now you
+must believe without having seen; that is true faith. You must
+
+  "'Reach a hand through time to catch
+  The far-off interest of tears.'
+
+That you may have strength so to do is part of your share in the
+prayers of
+
+"Yours very faithfully,
+
+"W. D----."
+
+A noble letter, but the storm was beating too fiercely to be stilled,
+and one night in that summer of 1871 stands out clearly before me. Mr.
+Besant was away, and there had been a fierce quarrel before he left. I
+was outraged, desperate, with no door of escape from a life that,
+losing its hope in God, had not yet learned to live for hope for man.
+No door of escape? The thought came like a flash: "There is one!" And
+before me there swung open, with lure of peace and of safety, the
+gateway into silence and security, the gateway of the tomb. I was
+standing by the drawing-room window, staring hopelessly at the evening
+sky; with the thought came the remembrance that the means was at
+hand--the chloroform that had soothed my baby's pain, and that I had
+locked away upstairs. I ran up to my room, took out the bottle, and
+carried it downstairs, standing again at the window in the summer
+twilight, glad that the struggle was over and peace at hand. I uncorked
+the bottle, and was raising it to my lips, when, as though the words
+were spoken softly and clearly, I heard: "O coward, coward, who used to
+dream of martyrdom, and cannot bear a few short years of pain!" A rush
+of shame swept over me, and I flung the bottle far away among the
+shrubs in the garden at my feet, and for a moment I felt strong as for
+a struggle, and then fell fainting on the floor. Only once again in all
+the strifes of my career did the thought of suicide recur, and then it
+was but for a moment, to be put aside as unworthy a strong soul.
+
+My new friend, Mr. D----, proved a very real help. The endless torture
+of hell, the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, the trustworthiness of
+revelation, doubts on all these hitherto accepted doctrines grew and
+heaped themselves on my bewildered soul. My questionings were neither
+shirked nor discouraged by Mr. D----; he was not horrified nor was he
+sanctimoniously rebukeful, but met them all with a wide comprehension
+inexpressibly soothing to one writhing in the first agonies of doubt.
+He left Cheltenham in the early autumn of 1871, but the following
+extracts from a letter written in November will show the kind of net in
+which I was struggling (I had been reading M'Leod Campbell's work "On
+the Atonement"):--
+
+"You forget one great principle--that God is impassive, cannot suffer.
+Christ, _qua_ God, did not suffer, but as Son of _Man_ and in His
+humanity. Still, it may be correctly stated that He felt to sin and
+sinners 'as God eternally feels'--_i.e., abhorrence of sin, and love of
+the sinner_. But to infer from that that the Father in His Godhead
+feels the sufferings which Christ experienced solely in humanity, and
+because incarnate is, I think, wrong.
+
+"(2) I felt strongly inclined to blow you up for the last part of your
+letter. You assume, I think quite gratuitously, that God condemns the
+major part of His children to objectless future suffering. You say that
+if He does not, He places a book in their hands which threatens what He
+does not mean to inflict. But how utterly this seems to me opposed to
+the gospel of Christ! All Christ's references to eternal punishment may
+be resolved into references to the Valley of Hinnom, by way of imagery;
+with the exception of the Dives parable, where is distinctly inferred a
+moral amendment beyond the grave. I speak of the unselfish desire of
+Dives to save his brothers. The more I see of the controversy, the more
+baseless does the eternal punishment theory appear. It seems then, to
+me, that instead of feeling aggrieved and shaken, you ought to feel
+encouraged and thankful that God is so much better than you were taught
+to believe Him. You will have discovered by this time in Maurice's
+'What is Revelation?' (I suppose you have the 'Sequel,' too?), that
+God's truth is our truth, and His love is our love, only more perfect
+and full. There is no position more utterly defeated in modern
+philosophy and theology than Dean Mansel's attempt to show that God's
+love, justice, &c., are different in kind from ours. Mill and Maurice,
+from totally alien points of view, have shown up the preposterous
+nature of the notion.
+
+"(3) A good deal of what you have thought is, I fancy, based on a
+strange forgetfulness of your former experience. If you have known
+Christ--(whom to know is eternal life)--and that you have known Him I
+am certain--can you really say that a few intellectual difficulties,
+nay, a few moral difficulties if you will, are able at once to
+obliterate the testimony of that higher state of being?
+
+"Why, the keynote of all my theology is that Christ is lovable because,
+and _just_ because, He is the perfection of all that I know to be noble
+and generous, and loving, and tender, and true. If an angel from heaven
+brought me a gospel which contained doctrines that would not stand the
+test of such perfect lovableness--doctrines hard, or cruel, or
+unjust--I should reject him and his trumpery gospel with scorn, knowing
+that neither could be Christ's. Know Christ and judge religions by Him;
+don't judge Him by religions, and then complain because they find
+yourself looking at Him through a blood-coloured glass."
+
+"I am saturating myself with Maurice, who is the antidote given by God
+to this age against all dreary doublings and temptings of the devil to
+despair."
+
+Many a one, in this age of controversy over all things once held
+sacred, has found peace and new light on this line of thought, and has
+succeeded in thus reconciling theological doctrines with the demands of
+the conscience for love and justice in a world made by a just and
+loving God. I could not do so. The awakening to what the world was, to
+the facts of human misery, to the ruthless tramp of nature and of
+events over the human heart, making no difference between innocent and
+guilty--the shock had been too great for the equilibrium to be restored
+by arguments that appealed to the emotions and left the intellect
+unconvinced. Months of this long-drawn-out mental anguish wrought their
+natural effects on physical health, and at last I broke down
+completely, and lay for weeks helpless and prostrate, in raging and
+unceasing head-pain, unable to sleep, unable to bear the light, lying
+like a log on the bed, not unconscious, but indifferent to everything,
+consciousness centred, as it were, in the ceaseless pain. The doctor
+tried every form of relief, but, entrenched in its citadel, the pain
+defied his puny efforts. He covered my head with ice, he gave me
+opium--which only drove me mad--he did all that skill and kindness
+could do, but all in vain. Finally the pain wore itself out, and the
+moment he dared to do so, he tried mental diversion; he brought me
+books on anatomy, on science, and persuaded me to study them; and out
+of his busy life would steal an hour to explain to me knotty points on
+physiology. He saw that if I were to be brought back to reasonable
+life, it could only be by diverting thought from the channels in which
+the current had been running to a dangerous extent. I have often felt
+that I owed life and sanity to that good man, who felt for the
+helpless, bewildered child-woman, beaten down by the cyclone of doubt
+and misery.
+
+So it will easily be understood that my religious wretchedness only
+increased the unhappiness of homelife, for how absurd it was that any
+reasonable human being should be so tossed with anguish over
+intellectual and moral difficulties on religious matters, and should
+make herself ill over these unsubstantial troubles. Surely it was a
+woman's business to attend to her husband's comforts and to see after
+her children, and not to break her heart over misery here and hell
+hereafter, and distract her brain with questions that had puzzled the
+greatest thinkers and still remained unsolved! And, truly, women or men
+who get themselves concerned about the universe at large, would do well
+not to plunge hastily into marriage, for they do not run smoothly in
+the double-harness of that honourable estate. _Sturm und Drang_ should
+be faced alone, and the soul should go out alone into the wilderness to
+be tempted of the devil, and not bring his majesty and all his imps
+into the placid circle of the home. Unhappy they who go into marriage
+with the glamour of youth upon them and the destiny of conflict
+imprinted on their nature, for they make misery for their partner in
+marriage as well as for themselves. And if that partner, strong in
+traditional authority and conventional habits, seeks to "break in" the
+turbulent and storm-tossed creature--well, it comes to a mere trial of
+strength and endurance, whether that driven creature will fall panting
+and crushed, or whether it will turn in its despair, assert its Divine
+right to intellectual liberty, rend its fetters in pieces, and,
+discovering its own strength in its extremity, speak at all risks its
+"No" when bidden to live a lie.
+
+When that physical crisis was over I decided on my line of action. I
+resolved to take Christianity as it had been taught in the Churches,
+and carefully and thoroughly examine its dogmas one by one, so that I
+should never again say "I believe" where I had not proved, and that,
+however diminished my area of belief, what was left of it might at
+least be firm under my feet. I found that four chief problems were
+pressing for solution, and to these I addressed myself. How many are
+to-day the souls facing just these problems, and disputing every inch
+of their old ground of faith with the steadily advancing waves of
+historical and scientific criticism! Alas! for the many Canutes, as the
+waves wash over their feet. These problems were:--
+
+(1) The eternity of punishment after death.
+
+(2) The meaning of "goodness" and "love," as applied to a God who had
+made this world, with all its sin and misery.
+
+(3) The nature of the atonement of Christ, and the "justice" of God in
+accepting a vicarious suffering from Christ, and a vicarious
+righteousness from the sinner.
+
+(4) The meaning of "inspiration" as applied to the Bible, and the
+reconciliation of the perfections of the author with the blunders and
+immoralities of the work.
+
+It will be seen that the deeper problems of religion--the deity of
+Christ, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul--were not yet
+brought into question, and, looking back, I cannot but see how orderly
+was the progression of thought, how steady the growth, after that first
+terrible earthquake, and the first wild swirl of agony. The points that
+I set myself to study were those which would naturally be first faced
+by any one whose first rebellion against the dogmas of the Churches was
+a rebellion of the moral nature rather than of the intellectual, a
+protest of the conscience rather than of the brain. It was not a desire
+for moral licence which gave me the impulse that finally landed me in
+Atheism; it was the sense of outraged justice and insulted right. I was
+a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty
+and a proud self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me,
+and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of
+outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity.
+My education, my mother's example, my inner timidity and self-distrust,
+all fenced me in from temptations from without. It was the uprising of
+an outraged conscience that made me a rebel against the Churches and
+finally an unbeliever in God. And I place this on record, because the
+progress of Materialism will never be checked by diatribes against
+unbelievers, as though they became unbelievers from desire for vice and
+for licence to do evil. What Religion has to face in the controversies
+of to-day is not the unbelief of the sty, but the unbelief of the
+educated conscience and of the soaring intellect; and unless it can arm
+itself with a loftier ethic and a grander philosophy than its opponent,
+it will lose its hold over the purest and the strongest of the younger
+generation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE STORM OF DOUBT.
+
+
+My reading of heretical and Broad Church works on one side, and of
+orthodox ones on the other, now occupied a large part of my time, and
+our removal to Sibsey, in Lincolnshire, an agricultural village with a
+scattered population, increased my leisure. I read the works of
+Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Stanley, Greg, Matthew Arnold, Liddon,
+Mansel, and many another, and my scepticism grew deeper and deeper as
+I read. The Broad Church arguments appeared to me to be of the nature
+of special pleading, skilful evasions of difficulties rather than the
+real meeting and solving of them. For the problem was: Given a good
+God, how can He have created mankind, knowing beforehand that the vast
+majority of those whom He created were to be tortured for ever? Given
+a just God, how can He punish people for being sinful, when they have
+inherited a sinful nature without their own choice and of necessity?
+Given a righteous God, how can He allow sin to exist for ever, so that
+evil shall be as eternal as good, and Satan shall reign in hell as
+long as Christ in heaven? Worst of all puzzles, perhaps, was that of
+the existence of evil and of misery, and the racking doubt whether God
+_could_ be good, and yet look on the evil and the misery of the world
+unmoved and untouched. It seemed so impossible to believe that a
+Creator could be either cruel enough to be indifferent to the misery,
+or weak enough to be unable to stop it. The old dilemma faced me
+incessantly: "If He can prevent it and does not, He is not good; if He
+wishes to prevent it and cannot, He is not almighty." I racked my
+brains for an answer. I searched writings of believers for a clue, but
+I found no way of escape. Not yet had any doubt of the existence of
+God crossed my mind.
+
+Mr. D---- continued to write me, striving to guide me along the path
+which had led his own soul to contentment, but I can only find room
+here for two brief extracts, which will show how to himself he solved
+the problem. He thought me mistaken in my view
+
+"Of the nature of the _sin_ and _error_ which is supposed to grieve
+God. I take it that sin is an absolutely necessary factor in the
+production of the perfect man. It was foreseen and allowed as means to
+an end--as, in fact, an education. The view of all the sin and misery
+in the world cannot grieve God any more than it can grieve you to see
+Digby fail in his first attempt to build a card-castle or a
+rabbit-hutch. All is part of the training. God looks at the ideal man
+to which all tends.... "No, Mrs. Besant; I never feel at all inclined
+to give up the search, or to suppose that the other side may be right.
+I claim no merit for it, but I have an invincible faith in the
+morality of God and the moral order of the world. I have no more doubt
+about the falsehood of the popular theology than I have about the
+unreality of six robbers who attacked me three nights ago in a horrid
+dream. I exult and rejoice in the grandeur and freedom of the little
+bit of truth it has been given me to see. I am told that 'Present-day
+Papers,' by Bishop Ewing (edited), are a wonderful help, many of them,
+to puzzled people; I mean to get them. But I am sure you will find
+that the truth will (even so little as we may be able to find out)
+grow on you, make you free, light your path, and dispel, at no distant
+time, your _painful_ difficulties and doubts. I should say on no
+account give up your reading. I think with you that you could not do
+without it. It will be a wonderful source of help and peace to you.
+For there are struggles far more fearful than those of intellectual
+doubt. I am keenly alive to the gathered-up sadness of which your last
+two pages are an expression. I was sorrier than I can say to read
+them. They reminded me of a long and very dark time in my own life,
+when I thought the light never would come. Thank God it came, or I
+think I could not have held out much longer. But you have evidently
+strength to bear it now. The more dangerous time, I should fancy, has
+passed. You will have to mind that the fermentation leaves clear
+spiritual wine, and not (as too often) vinegar. I wish I could write
+something more helpful to you in this great matter. But as I sit in
+front of my large bay window and see the shadows on the grass and the
+sunlight on the leaves, and the soft glimmer of the rosebuds left by
+the storms, I can but believe that all will be very well. 'Trust in
+the Lord, wait patiently for Him'--they are trite words. But He made
+the grass, the leaves, the rosebuds, and the sunshine, and He is the
+Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And now the trite words have swelled
+into a mighty argument."
+
+I found more help in Theistic writers like Grey, and Agnostic like
+Arnold, than I did in the Broad Church teachers, but these, of course,
+served to make return to the old faith more and more impossible. The
+Church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was
+only a doubter, I kept my doubts to myself. It was possible, I felt,
+that all my difficulties might be cleared up, and I had no right to
+shake the faith of others while in uncertainty myself. Others had
+doubted and had afterwards recovered their faith; for the doubter
+silence was a duty; the blinded had better keep their misery to
+themselves.
+
+During these weary months of anxiety and torment I found some relief
+from the mental strain in practical parish work, nursing the sick,
+trying to brighten the lot of the poor. I learned then some of the
+lessons as to the agricultural labourer and the land that I was able
+in after-years to teach from the platform. The movement among the
+agricultural labourers, due to the energy and devotion of Joseph Arch,
+was beginning to be discussed in the fens, and my sympathies went
+strongly with the claims of the labourers, for I knew their
+life-conditions. In one cottage I had found four generations sleeping
+in one room--the great-grandfather and his wife, the unmarried
+grandmother, the unmarried mother, the little child; three men lodgers
+completed the tale of eight human beings crowded into that narrow,
+ill-ventilated garret. Other cottages were hovels, through the broken
+roofs of which poured the rain, and wherein rheumatism and ague lived
+with the human dwellers. How could I do aught but sympathise with any
+combination that aimed at the raising of these poor? But the
+Agricultural Labourers' Union was bitterly opposed by the farmers, and
+they would give no work to a "Union man." One example may serve for
+all. There was a young married man with two small children, who was
+sinful enough to go to a Union meeting and sinful enough to talk of it
+on his return home. No farmer would employ him in all the district
+round. He tramped about vainly looking for work, grew reckless, and
+took to drink. Visiting his cottage, consisting of one room and a
+"lean-to," I found his wife ill with fever, a fever-stricken babe in
+her arms, the second child lying dead on the bed. In answer to my
+soft-spoken questions: Yes, she was pining (starving), there was no
+work. Why did she leave the dead child on the bed? Because she had no
+other place for it till the coffin came. And at night the unhappy,
+driven man, the fever-stricken wife, the fever-stricken child, the
+dead child, all lay in the one bed. The farmers hated the Union
+because its success meant higher wages for the men, and it never
+struck them that they might well pay less rent to the absent landlord
+and higher wage to the men who tilled their fields. They had only
+civil words for the burden that crushed them, hard words for the
+mowers of their harvests and the builders-up of their ricks; they made
+common cause with their enemies instead of with their friends, and
+instead of leaguing themselves together with the labourers as forming
+together the true agricultural interest, they leagued themselves with
+the landlords against the labourers, and so made ruinous fratricidal
+strife instead of easy victory over the common foe. And, seeing all
+this, I learned some useful lessons, and the political education
+progressed while the theological strife went on within.
+
+In the early autumn a ray of light broke the darkness. I was in London
+with my mother, and wandered one Sunday morning into St. George's
+Hall, where the Rev. Charles Voysey was preaching. There to my delight
+I found, on listening to the sermon and buying some literature on sale
+in the ante-room, that there were people who had passed through my own
+difficulties, and had given up the dogmas that I found so revolting. I
+went again on the following Sunday, and when the service was over I
+noticed that the outgoing stream of people were passing by Mr. and
+Mrs. Voysey, and that many who were evidently strangers spoke a word
+of thanks to him as they went on. Moved by a strong desire, after the
+long months of lonely striving, to speak to one who had struggled out
+of Christian difficulties, I said to Mr. Voysey, as I passed in my
+turn, "I must thank you for very great help in what you said this
+morning," for in truth, never having yet doubted the existence of God,
+the teaching of Mr. Voysey that He was "loving unto _every_ man, and
+His tender mercy over _all_ His works," came like a gleam of light
+across the stormy sea of doubt and distress on which I had so long
+been tossing. The next Sunday saw me again at the Hall, and Mrs.
+Voysey gave me a cordial invitation to visit them in their Dulwich
+home. I found their Theism was free from the defects that had revolted
+me in Christianity, and they opened up to me new views of religion. I
+read Theodore Parker's "Discourse on Religion," Francis Newman's
+works, those of Miss Frances Power Cobbe, and of others; the anguish
+of the tension relaxed; the nightmare of an Almighty Evil passed away;
+my belief in God, not yet touched, was cleared from all the dark spots
+that had sullied it, and I no longer doubted whether the dogmas that
+had shocked my conscience were true or false. I shook them off, once
+for all, with all their pain and horror and darkness, and felt, with
+joy and relief inexpressible, that they were delusions of the
+ignorance of man, not the revelations of a God.
+
+But there was one belief that had not been definitely challenged, but
+of which the _rationale_ was gone with the orthodox dogmas now
+definitely renounced--the doctrine of the Deity of Christ. The whole
+teaching of the Broad Church school tends, of course, to emphasise the
+humanity of Christ at the expense of His Deity, and when eternal
+punishment and the substitutionary atonement had gone there seemed no
+reason remaining sufficient to account for so tremendous a miracle as
+the incarnation of the Deity. In the course of my reading I had become
+familiar with the idea of Avataras in Eastern creeds, and I saw that
+the incarnate God was put forward as a fact by all ancient religions,
+and thus the way was paved for challenging the especially Christian
+teaching, when the doctrines morally repulsive were cleared away. But
+I shrank from the thought of placing in the crucible a doctrine so
+dear from all the associations of the past; there was so much that was
+soothing and ennobling in the idea of a union between Man and God,
+between a perfect man and a Divine life, between a human heart and an
+almighty strength. Jesus as God was interwoven with all art and all
+beauty in religion; to break with the Deity of Jesus was to break with
+music, with painting, with literature; the Divine Babe in His Mother's
+arms; the Divine Man in His Passion and His Triumph; the Friend of Man
+encircled with the majesty of the Godhead. Did inexorable Truth demand
+that this ideal Figure, with all its pathos, its beauty, its human
+love, should pass away into the Pantheon of the dead Gods of the Past?
+
+Nor was this all. If I gave up belief in Christ as God, I must give up
+Christianity as creed. Once challenge the unique position of the
+Christ, and the name Christian seemed to me to be a hypocrisy, and its
+renouncement a duty binding on the upright mind. I was a clergyman's
+wife; what would be the effect of such a step? Hitherto mental pain
+alone had been the price demanded inexorably from the searcher after
+truth; but with the renouncing of Christ outer warfare would be added
+to the inner, and who might guess the result upon my life? The
+struggle was keen but short; I decided to carefully review the
+evidence for and against the Deity of Christ, with the result that
+that belief followed the others, and I stood, no longer Christian,
+face to face with a dim future in which I sensed the coming conflict.
+
+One effort I made to escape it; I appealed to Dr. Pusey, thinking that
+if he could not answer my questionings, no answer to them could be
+reasonably hoped for. I had a brief correspondence with him, but was
+referred only to lines of argument familiar to me--as those of Liddon
+in his "Bampton Lectures"--and finally, on his invitation, went down
+to Oxford to see him. I found a short, stout gentleman, dressed in a
+cassock, looking like a comfortable monk; but keen eyes, steadfastly
+gazing straight into mine, told of the force and subtlety enshrined in
+the fine, impressive head. But the learned doctor took the wrong line
+of treatment; he probably saw I was anxious, shy, and nervous, and he
+treated me as a penitent going to confession and seeking the advice of
+a director, instead of as an inquirer struggling after truth, and
+resolute to obtain some firm standing-ground in the sea of doubt. He
+would not deal with the question of the Deity of Jesus as a question
+for argument. "You are speaking of your Judge," he retorted sternly,
+when I pressed a difficulty. The mere suggestion of an imperfection in
+the character of Jesus made him shudder, and he checked me with raised
+hand. "You are blaspheming. The very thought is a terrible sin." Would
+he recommend me any books that might throw light on the subject? "No,
+no; you have read too much already. You must pray; you must pray."
+When I urged that I could not believe without proof, I was told,
+"Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed"; and my
+further questioning was checked by the murmur, "O my child, how
+undisciplined! how impatient!" Truly, he must have found in me--hot,
+eager, passionate in my determination to _know_, resolute not to
+profess belief while belief was absent--nothing of the meek,
+chastened, submissive spirit with which he was wont to deal in
+penitents seeking his counsel as their spiritual guide. In vain did he
+bid me pray as though I believed; in vain did he urge the duty of
+blind submission to the authority of the Church, of blind, unreasoning
+faith that questioned not. I had not trodden the thorny path of doubt
+to come to the point from which I had started; I needed, and would
+have, solid grounds ere I believed. He had no conception of the
+struggles of a sceptical spirit; he had evidently never felt the pangs
+of doubt; his own faith was solid as a rock, firm, satisfied,
+unshakable; he would as soon have committed suicide as have doubted of
+the infallibility of the "Universal Church."
+
+"It is not your duty to ascertain the truth," he told me, sternly. "It
+is your duty to accept and believe the truth as laid down by the
+Church. At your peril you reject it. The responsibility is not yours
+so long as you dutifully accept that which the Church has laid down
+for your acceptance. Did not the Lord promise that the presence of the
+Spirit should be ever with His Church, to guide her into all truth?"
+
+"But the fact of the promise and its value are just the very points on
+which I am doubtful," I answered.
+
+He shuddered. "Pray, pray," he said. "Father, forgive her, for she
+knows not what she says."
+
+It was in vain that I urged on him the sincerity of my seeking,
+pointing out that I had everything to gain by following his
+directions, everything to lose by going my own way, but that it seemed
+to me untruthful to pretend to accept what was not really believed.
+
+"Everything to lose? Yes, indeed. You will be lost for time and lost
+for eternity."
+
+"Lost or not," I rejoined, "I must and will try to find out what is
+true, and I will not believe till I am sure."
+
+"You have no right to make terms with God," he retorted, "as to what
+you will believe or what you will not believe. You are full of
+intellectual pride."
+
+I sighed hopelessly. Little feeling of pride was there in me just
+then, but only a despairful feeling that in this rigid, unyielding
+dogmatism there was no comprehension of my difficulties, no help for
+me in my strugglings. I rose, and, thanking him for his courtesy, said
+that I would not waste his time further, that I must go home and face
+the difficulties, openly leaving the Church and taking the
+consequences. Then for the first time his serenity was ruffled.
+
+"I forbid you to speak of your disbelief," he cried. "I forbid you to
+lead into your own lost state the souls for whom Christ died."
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS SCOTT.]
+
+Slowly and sadly I took my way back to the station, knowing that my
+last chance of escape had failed me. I recognised in this famous
+divine the spirit of priest-craft, that could be tender and pitiful to
+the sinner, repentant, humble, submissive; but that was iron to the
+doubter, the heretic, and would crush out all questionings of
+"revealed truth," silencing by force, not by argument, all challenge
+of the traditions of the Church. Out of such men were made the
+Inquisitors of the Middle Ages, perfectly conscientious, perfectly
+rigid, perfectly merciless to the heretic. To them heretics are
+centres of infectious disease, and charity to the heretic is "the
+worst cruelty to the souls of men." Certain that they hold, "by no
+merit of our own, but by the mercy of our God, the one truth which He
+has revealed," they can permit no questionings, they can accept nought
+but the most complete submission. But while man aspires after truth,
+while his mind yearns after knowledge, while his intellect soars
+upward into the empyrean of speculation and "beats the air with
+tireless wing," so long shall those who demand faith from him be met
+by challenge for proof, and those who would blind him shall be
+defeated by his resolve to gaze unblenching on the face of Truth, even
+though her eyes should turn him into stone. It was during this same
+autumn of 1872 that I first met Mr. and Mrs. Scott, introduced to them
+by Mr. Voysey. At that time Thomas Scott was an old man, with
+beautiful white hair, and eyes like those of a hawk gleaming from
+under shaggy eyebrows. He had been a man of magnificent physique, and,
+though his frame was then enfeebled, the splendid lion-like head kept
+its impressive strength and beauty, and told of a unique personality.
+Well born and wealthy, he had spent his earlier life in adventure in
+all parts of the world, and after his marriage he had settled down at
+Ramsgate, and had made his home a centre of heretical thought. His
+wife, "his right hand," as he justly called her, was young enough to
+be his daughter--a sweet, strong, gentle, noble woman, worthy of her
+husband, and than that no higher praise could be spoken. Mr. Scott for
+many years issued monthly a series of pamphlets, all heretical, though
+very varying in their shades of thought; all were well written,
+cultured, and polished in tone, and to this rule Mr. Scott made no
+exception; his writers might say what they liked, but they must have
+something to say, and must say it in good English. His correspondence
+was enormous, from Prime Ministers downwards. At his house met people
+of the most varied opinions; it was a veritable heretical _salon_.
+Colenso of Natal, Edward Maitland, E. Vansittart Neale, Charles Bray,
+Sarah Hennell, and hundreds more, clerics and laymen, scholars and
+thinkers, all coming to this one house, to which the _entree_ was
+gained only by love of Truth and desire to spread Freedom among men.
+For Thomas Scott my first Freethought essay was written a few months
+after, "On the Deity of Jesus of Nazareth," by the wife of a benefited
+clergyman. My name was not mine to use, so it was agreed that any
+essays from my pen should be anonymous.
+
+And now came the return to Sibsey, and with it the need for definite
+steps as to the Church. For now I no longer doubted, I had rejected,
+and the time for silence was past. I was willing to attend the Church
+services, taking no part in any not directed to God Himself, but I
+could no longer attend the Holy Communion, for in that service, full
+of recognition of Jesus as Deity and of His atoning sacrifice, I could
+no longer take part without hypocrisy. This was agreed to, and well do
+I remember the pain and trembling wherewith on the first "Sacrament
+Sunday" after my return I rose and left the church. That the vicar's
+wife should "communicate" was as much a matter of course as that the
+vicar should "administer"; I had never done anything in public that
+would draw attention to me, and a feeling of deadly sickness nearly
+overcame me as I made my exit, conscious that every eye was on me, and
+that my non-participation would be the cause of unending comment. As a
+matter of fact, every one naturally thought I was taken suddenly ill,
+and I was overwhelmed with calls and inquiries. To any direct question
+I answered quietly that I was unable to take part in the profession of
+faith required by an honest communicant, but the statement was rarely
+necessary, as the idea of heresy in a vicar's wife is slow to suggest
+itself to the ordinary bucolic mind, and I proffered no information
+where no question was asked.
+
+It happened that, shortly after that (to me) memorable Christmas of
+1872, a sharp epidemic of typhoid fever broke out in the village of
+Sibsey. The drainage there was of the most primitive type, and the
+contagion spread rapidly. Naturally fond of nursing, I found in this
+epidemic work just fitted to my hand, and I was fortunate enough to be
+able to lend personal help that made me welcome in the homes of the
+stricken poor. The mothers who slept exhausted while I watched beside
+their darlings' bedsides will never, I like to fancy, think
+over-harshly of the heretic whose hand was as tender and often more
+skilful than their own. I think Mother Nature meant me for a nurse,
+for I take a sheer delight in nursing any one, provided only that
+there is peril in the sickness, so that there is the strange and
+solemn feeling of the struggle between the human skill one wields and
+the supreme enemy, Death. There is a strange fascination in fighting
+Death, step by step, and this is of course felt to the full where one
+fights for life as life, and not for a life one loves. When the
+patient is beloved the struggle is touched with agony, but where one
+fights with Death over the body of a stranger there is a weird
+enchantment in the contest without personal pain, and as one forces
+back the hated foe there is a curious triumph in the feeling which
+marks the death-grip yielding up its prey, as one snatches back to
+earth the life which had well-nigh perished.
+
+The spring of 1873 brought me knowledge of a power that was to mould
+much of my future life. I delivered my first lecture, but delivered it
+to rows of empty pews in Sibsey Church. A queer whim took me that I
+would like to know how "it felt" to preach, and vague fancies stirred
+in me that I could speak if I had the chance. I saw no platform in the
+distance, nor had any idea of possible speaking in the future dawned
+upon me. But the longing to find outlet in words came upon me, and I
+felt as though I had something to say and was able to say it. So
+locked alone in the great, silent church, whither I had gone to
+practise some organ exercises, I ascended the pulpit steps and
+delivered my first lecture on the Inspiration of the Bible. I shall
+never forget the feeling of power and delight--but especially of
+power--that came upon me as I sent my voice ringing down the aisles,
+and the passion in me broke into balanced sentences and never paused
+for musical cadence or for rhythmical expression. All I wanted then
+was to see the church full of upturned faces, alive with throbbing
+sympathy, instead of the dreary emptiness of silent pews. And as
+though in a dream the solitude was peopled, and I saw the listening
+faces and the eager eyes, and as the sentences flowed unbidden from my
+lips and my own tones echoed back to me from the pillars of the
+ancient church, I knew of a verity that the gift of speech was mine,
+and that if ever--and then it seemed so impossible!--if ever the
+chance came to me of public work, this power of melodious utterance
+should at least win hearing for any message I had to bring.
+
+But the knowledge remained a secret all to my own self for many a long
+month, for I quickly felt ashamed of that foolish speechifying in an
+empty church; but, foolish as it was, I note it here, as it was the
+first effort of that expression in spoken words which later became to
+me one of the deepest delights of life. And, indeed, none can know,
+save they who have felt it, what joy there is in the full rush of
+language that moves and sways; to feel a crowd respond to the lightest
+touch; to see the faces brighten or darken at your bidding; to know
+that the sources of human emotion and human passion gush forth at the
+word of the speaker as the stream from the riven rock; to feel that
+the thought which thrills through a thousand hearers has its impulse
+from you, and throbs back to you the fuller from a thousand
+heart-beats. Is there any emotional joy in life more brilliant than
+this, fuller of passionate triumph, and of the very essence of
+intellectual delight?
+
+In 1873 my marriage tie was broken. I took no new step, but my absence
+from the Communion led to some gossip, and a relative of Mr. Besant
+pressed on him highly-coloured views of the social and professional
+dangers which would accrue if my heresy became known. My health, never
+really restored since the autumn of 1871, grew worse and worse,
+serious heart trouble having arisen from the constant strain under
+which I lived. At last, in July or August, 1873, the crisis came. I
+was told that I must conform to the outward observances of the Church,
+and attend the Communion; I refused. Then came the distinct
+alternative; conformity or exclusion from home--in other words,
+hypocrisy or expulsion. I chose the latter.
+
+A bitterly sad time followed. My dear mother was heart-broken. To her,
+with her wide and vague form of Christianity, loosely held, the
+intensity of my feeling that where I did not believe I would not
+pretend belief, was incomprehensible. She recognised far more fully
+than I did all that a separation from my home meant for me, and the
+difficulties that would surround a young woman, not yet twenty-six,
+living alone. She knew how brutally the world judges, and how the mere
+fact that a woman was young and alone justified any coarseness of
+slander. Then I did not guess how cruel men and women could be, how
+venomous their tongues; now, knowing it, having faced slander and
+lived it down, I deliberately say that were the choice again before me
+I would choose as I chose then; I would rather go through it all again
+than live "in Society" under the burden of an acted lie.
+
+The hardest struggle was against my mother's tears and pleading; to
+cause her pain was tenfold pain to me. Against harshness I had been
+rigid as steel, but it was hard to remain steadfast when my darling
+mother, whom I loved as I loved nothing else on earth, threw herself
+on her knees before me, imploring me to yield. It seemed like a crime
+to bring such anguish on her; and I felt as a murderer as the snowy
+head was pressed against my knees. And yet--to live a lie? Not even
+for her was that shame possible; in that worst crisis of blinding
+agony my will clung fast to Truth. And it is true now as it ever was
+that he who loves father or mother better than Truth is not worthy of
+her, and the flint-strewn path of honesty is the way to Light and
+Peace.
+
+Then there were the children, the two little ones who worshipped me,
+who was to them mother, nurse, and playfellow. Were they, too,
+demanded at my hands? Not wholly--for a time. Facts which I need not
+touch on here enabled my brother to obtain for me a legal separation,
+and when everything was arranged, I found myself guardian of my little
+daughter, and possessor of a small monthly income sufficient for
+respectable starvation. With a great price I had obtained my freedom,
+but--I was free. Home, friends, social position, were the price
+demanded and paid, and, being free, I wondered what to do with my
+freedom. I could have had a home with my brother if I would give up my
+heretical friends and keep quiet, but I had no mind to put my limbs
+into fetters again, and in my youthful inexperience I determined to
+find something to do. The difficulty was the "something," and I spent
+various shillings in agencies, with a quite wonderful unanimity of
+failures. I tried fancy needle-work, offered to "ladies in reduced
+circumstances," and earned 4s. 6d. by some weeks of stitching. I
+experimented with a Birmingham firm, who generously offered every one
+the opportunity of adding to their incomes, and on sending the small
+fee demanded, received a pencil-case, with an explanation that I was
+to sell little articles of that description, going as far as
+cruet-stands, to my friends. I did not feel equal to springing
+pencil-cases and cruet-stands on my acquaintances, so did not enter on
+that line of business, and similar failures in numerous efforts made
+me feel, as so many others have found, that the world-oyster is hard
+to open. However, I was resolute to build a nest for my wee daughter,
+my mother, and myself, and the first thing to do was to save my
+monthly pittance to buy furniture. I found a tiny house in Colby Road,
+Upper Norwood, near the Scotts, who were more than good to me, and
+arranged to take it in the spring, and then accepted a loving
+invitation to Folkestone, where my grandmother and two aunts were
+living, to look for work there. And found it. The vicar wanted a
+governess, and one of my aunts suggested me as a stop-gap, and thither
+I went with my little Mabel, our board and lodging being payment for
+my work. I became head cook, governess, and nurse, glad enough to have
+found "something to do" that enabled me to save my little income. But
+I do not think I will ever take to cooking for a permanence; broiling
+and frying are all right, and making pie-crust is rather pleasant; but
+saucepans and kettles blister your hands. There is a charm in making a
+stew, to the unaccustomed cook, from the excitement of wondering what
+the result will be, and whether any flavour save that of onions will
+survive the competition in the mixture. On the whole, my cooking
+(strictly by cookery book) was a success, but my sweeping was bad, for
+I lacked muscle. This curious episode came to an abrupt end, for one
+of my little pupils fell ill with diphtheria, and I was transformed
+from cook to nurse. Mabel I despatched to her grandmother, who adored
+her with a love condescendingly returned by the little fairy of three,
+and never was there a prettier picture than the red-gold curls nestled
+against the white, the baby-grace in exquisite contrast with the worn
+stateliness of her tender nurse. Scarcely was my little patient out of
+danger when the youngest boy fell ill of scarlet fever; we decided to
+isolate him on the top floor, and I cleared away carpets and curtains,
+hung sheets over the doorways and kept them wet with chloride of lime,
+shut myself up there with the boy, having my meals left on the
+landing; and when all risk was over, proudly handed back my charge,
+the disease touching no one else in the house.
+
+And now the spring of 1874 had come, and in a few weeks my mother and
+I were to set up house together. How we had planned all, and had
+knitted on the new life together we anticipated to the old one we
+remembered! How we had discussed Mabel's education, and the share
+which should fall to each! Day-dreams; day-dreams! never to be
+realised.
+
+My mother went up to town, and in a week or two I received a telegram,
+saying she was dangerously ill, and as fast as express train would
+take me I was beside her. Dying, the doctor said; three days she might
+live--no more. I told her the death-sentence, but she said resolutely,
+"I do not feel that I am going to die just yet," and she was right.
+There was an attack of fearful prostration--the valves of the heart
+had failed--a very wrestling with Death, and then the grim shadow drew
+backwards. I nursed her day and night with a very desperation of
+tenderness, for now Fate had touched the thing dearest to me in life.
+A second horrible crisis came, and for the second time her tenacity
+and my love beat back the death-stroke. She did not wish to die, the
+love of life was strong in her; I would not let her die; between us we
+kept the foe at bay. Then dropsy supervened, and the end loomed slowly
+sure.
+
+It was then, after eighteen months' abstention, that I took the
+Sacrament for the last time. My mother had an intense longing to
+communicate before she died, but absolutely refused to do so unless I
+took it with her. "If it be necessary to salvation," she persisted,
+doggedly, "I will not take it if darling Annie is to be shut out. I
+would rather be lost with her than saved without her." I went to a
+clergyman I knew well, and laid the case before him; as I expected, he
+refused to allow me to communicate. I tried a second, with the same
+result. At last a thought struck me. There was Dean Stanley, my
+mother's favourite, a man known to be of the broadest school within
+the Church of England; suppose I asked him? I did not know him, and I
+felt the request would be an impertinence; but there was just the
+chance that he might consent, and what would I not do to make my
+darling's death-bed easier? I said nothing to any one, but set out to
+the Deanery, Westminster, timidly asked for the Dean, and followed the
+servant upstairs with a sinking heart. I was left for a moment alone
+in the library, and then the Dean came in. I don't think I ever in my
+life felt more intensely uncomfortable than I did in that minute's
+interval as he stood waiting for me to speak, his clear, grave,
+piercing eyes gazing questioningly into mine. Very falteringly--it
+must have been very clumsily--I preferred my request, stating boldly,
+with abrupt honesty, that I was not a Christian, that my mother was
+dying, that she was fretting to take the Sacrament, that she would not
+take it unless I took it with her, that two clergymen had refused to
+allow me to take part in the service, that I had come to him in
+despair, feeling how great was the intrusion, but--she was dying.
+
+His face changed to a great softness. "You were quite right to come to
+me," he answered, in that low, musical voice of his, his keen gaze
+having altered into one no less direct, but marvellously gentle. "Of
+course I will go and see your mother, and I have little doubt that, if
+you will not mind talking over your position with me, we may see our
+way clear to doing as your mother wishes."
+
+I could barely speak my thanks, so much did the kindly sympathy move
+me; the revulsion from the anxiety and fear of rebuff was strong
+enough to be almost pain. But Dean Stanley did more than I asked. He
+suggested that he should call that afternoon, and have a quiet chat
+with my mother, and then come again on the following day to administer
+the Sacrament.
+
+"A stranger's presence is always trying to a sick person," he said,
+with rare delicacy of thought, "and, joined to the excitement of the
+service, it might be too much for your dear mother. If I spend half an
+hour with her to-day, and administer the Sacrament to-morrow, it will,
+I think, be better for her."
+
+So Dean Stanley came that afternoon, all the way to Brompton, and
+remained talking with my mother for about half an hour, and then set
+himself to understand my own position. He finally told me that conduct
+was far more important than theory, and that he regarded all as
+"Christians" who recognised and tried to follow the moral law of
+Christ. On the question of the absolute Deity of Jesus he laid but
+little stress; Jesus was "in a special sense the Son of God," but it
+was folly to quarrel over words with only human meanings when dealing
+with the mystery of the Divine existence, and, above all, it was folly
+to make such words into dividing walls between earnest souls. The one
+important matter was the recognition of "duty to God and man," and all
+who were one in that recognition might rightfully join in an act of
+worship, the essence of which was not acceptance of dogma, but love of
+God and self-sacrifice for man. "The Holy Communion," he concluded, in
+his soft tones, "was never meant to divide from each other hearts that
+are searching after the one true God. It was meant by its founder as a
+symbol of unity, not of strife."
+
+On the following day Dean Stanley celebrated the Holy Communion by the
+bedside of my dear mother, and well was I repaid for the struggle it
+had cost me to ask so great a kindness from a stranger, when I saw the
+comfort that gentle, noble heart had given to her. He soothed away all
+her anxiety about my heresy with tactful wisdom, bidding her have no
+fear of differences of opinion where the heart was set on truth.
+"Remember," she told me he said to her--"remember that our God is the
+God of truth, and that therefore the honest search for truth can never
+be displeasing in His eyes." Once again after that he came, and after
+his visit to my mother we had another long talk. I ventured to ask
+him, the conversation having turned that way, how, with views so broad
+as his, he found it possible to remain in communion with the Church of
+England. "I think," he answered, gently, "that I am of more service to
+true religion by remaining in the Church and striving to widen its
+boundaries from within, than if I left it and worked from without."
+And he went on to explain how, as Dean of Westminster, he was in a
+rarely independent position, and could make the Abbey of a wider
+national service than would otherwise be possible. In all he said on
+this his love for and his pride in the glorious Abbey were manifest,
+and it was easy to see that old historical associations, love of
+music, of painting, of stately architecture, were the bonds that held
+him bound to the "old historic Church of England." His emotions, not
+his intellect, kept him Churchman, and he shrank, with the
+over-sensitiveness of the cultured scholar, from the idea of allowing
+the old traditions to be handled roughly by inartistic hands.
+Naturally of a refined and delicate nature, he had been rendered yet
+more exquisitely sensitive by the training of the college and the
+court; the polished courtesy of his manners was but the natural
+expression of a noble and lofty mind--a mind whose very gentleness
+sometimes veiled its strength. I have often heard Dean Stanley harshly
+spoken of, I have heard his honesty roughly challenged; but never has
+he been attacked in my presence that I have not uttered my protest
+against the injustice done him, and thus striven to repay some small
+fraction of that great debt of gratitude which I shall ever owe his
+memory.
+
+And now the end came swiftly. I had hurriedly furnished a couple of
+rooms in the little house, now ours, that I might take my mother into
+the purer air of Norwood, and permission was given to drive her down
+in an invalid carriage. The following evening she was suddenly taken
+worse; we lifted her into bed, and telegraphed for the doctor. But he
+could do nothing, and she herself felt that the hand of Death had
+gripped her. Selfless to the last, she thought but for my loneliness.
+"I am leaving you alone," she sighed from time to time; and truly I
+felt, with an anguish I did not dare to realise, that when she died I
+should indeed be alone on earth.
+
+For two days longer she was with me, my beloved, and I never left her
+side for five minutes. On May 10th the weakness passed into gentle
+delirium, but even then the faithful eyes followed me about the room,
+until at length they closed for ever, and as the sun sank low in the
+heavens, the breath came slower and slower, till the silence of Death
+came down upon us and she was gone.
+
+Stunned and dazed with the loss, I went mechanically through the next
+few days. I would have none touch my dead save myself and her
+favourite sister, who was with us at the last. Cold and dry-eyed I
+remained, even when they hid her from me with the coffin-lid, even all
+the dreary way to Kensal Green where her husband and her baby-son were
+sleeping, and when we left her alone in the chill earth, damp with the
+rains of spring. I could not believe that our day-dream was dead and
+buried, and the home in ruins ere yet it was fairly built. Truly, my
+"house was left unto me desolate," and the rooms, filled with sunshine
+but unlighted by her presence, seemed to echo from their bare walls,
+"You are all alone."
+
+But my little daughter was there, and her sweet face and dancing feet
+broke the solitude, while her imperious claims for love and tendance
+forced me into attention to the daily needs of life. And life was hard
+in those days of spring and summer, resources small, and work
+difficult to find. In truth, the two months after my mother's death
+were the dreariest my life has known, and they were months of
+tolerably hard struggle. The little house in Colby Road taxed my
+slender resources heavily, and the search for work was not yet
+successful. I do not know how I should have managed but for the help
+ever at hand, of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Scott. During this time I wrote
+for Mr. Scott pamphlets on Inspiration, Atonement, Mediation and
+Salvation, Eternal Torture, Religious Education of Children, Natural
+_v_. Revealed Religion, and the few guineas thus earned were very
+valuable. Their house, too, was always open to me, and this was no
+small help, for often in those days the little money I had was enough
+to buy food for two but not enough to buy it for three, and I would go
+out and study all day at the British Museum, so as to "have my dinner
+in town," the said dinner being conspicuous by its absence. If I was
+away for two evenings running from the hospitable house in the
+terrace, Mrs. Scott would come down to see what had happened, and many
+a time the supper there was of real physical value to me. Well might I
+write, in 1879, when Thomas Scott lay dead: "It was Thomas Scott whose
+house was open to me when my need was sorest, and he never knew, this
+generous, noble heart, how sometimes, when I went in, weary and
+overdone, from a long day's study in the British Museum, with scarce
+food to struggle through the day--he never knew how his genial, 'Well,
+little lady,' in welcoming tone, cheered the then utter loneliness of
+my life. To no living man--save one--do I owe the debt of gratitude
+that I owe to Thomas Scott."
+
+The small amount of jewellery I possessed, and all my superfluous
+clothes, were turned into more necessary articles, and the child, at
+least, never suffered a solitary touch of want. My servant Mary was a
+wonderful contriver, and kept house on the very slenderest funds that
+could be put into a servant's hands, and she also made the little
+place so bright and fresh-looking that it was always a pleasure to go
+into it. Recalling those days of "hard living," I can now look on them
+without regret. More, I am glad to have passed through them, for they
+have taught me how to sympathise with those who are struggling as I
+struggled then, and I never can hear the words fall from pale lips, "I
+am hungry," without remembering how painful a thing hunger is, and
+without curing that pain, at least for the moment.
+
+The presence of the child was good for me, keeping alive my aching,
+lonely heart: she would play contentedly for hours while I was
+working, a word now and again being enough for happiness; when I had
+to go out without her, she would run to the door with me, and the
+"good-bye" would come from down-curved lips; she was ever watching at
+the window for my return, and the sunny face was always the first to
+welcome me home. Many and many a time have I been coming home, weary,
+hungry, and heart-sick, and the glimpse of the little face watching
+has reminded me that I must not carry in a grave face to sadden my
+darling, and the effort to throw off the depression for her sake threw
+it off altogether, and brought back the sunshine. She was the
+sweetness and joy of my life, my curly-headed darling, with her
+red-gold hair and glorious eyes, and passionate, wilful, loving
+nature. The torn, bruised tendrils of my heart gradually twined round
+this little life; she gave something to love and to tend, and thus
+gratified one of the strongest impulses of my nature.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH.
+
+
+During all these months the intellectual life had not stood still; I
+was slowly, cautiously feeling my way onward. And in the intellectual
+and social side of my life I found a delight unknown in the old days
+of bondage. First, there was the joy of freedom, the joy of speaking
+out frankly and honestly each thought. Truly, I had a right to say:
+"With a great price obtained I this freedom," and having paid the
+price, I revelled in the liberty I had bought. Mr. Scott's valuable
+library was at my service; his keen brain challenged my opinions,
+probed my assertions, and suggested phases of thought hitherto
+untouched. I studied harder than ever, and the study now was unchecked
+by any fear of possible consequences. I had nothing left of the old
+faith save belief in "a God," and that began slowly to melt away. The
+Theistic axiom: "If there be a God at all He must be at least as good
+as His highest creature," began with an "if," and to that "if" I
+turned my attention. "Of all impossible things," writes Miss Frances
+Power Cobbe, "the most impossible must surely be that a man should
+dream something of the good and the noble, and that it should prove at
+last that his Creator was less good and less noble than he had
+dreamed." But, I questioned, are we sure that there is a Creator?
+Granted that, if there is, He must be above His highest creature,
+but--is there such a being? "The ground," says the Rev. Charles
+Voysey, "on which our belief in God rests is man. Man, parent of
+Bibles and Churches, inspirer of all good thoughts and good deeds.
+Man, the masterpiece of God's thought on earth. Man, the text-book of
+all spiritual knowledge. Neither miraculous nor infallible, man is
+nevertheless the only trustworthy record of the Divine mind in things
+pertaining to God. Man's reason, conscience, and affections are the
+only true revelation of his Maker." But what if God were only man's
+own image reflected in the mirror of man's mind? What if man were the
+creator, not the revelation of his God?
+
+It was inevitable that such thoughts should arise after the more
+palpably indefensible doctrines of Christianity had been discarded.
+Once encourage the human mind to think, and bounds to the thinking can
+never again be set by authority. Once challenge traditional beliefs,
+and the challenge will ring on every shield which is hanging in the
+intellectual arena. Around me was the atmosphere of conflict, and,
+freed from its long repression, my mind leapt up to share in the
+strife with a joy in the intellectual tumult, the intellectual strain.
+
+I often attended South Place Chapel, where Moncure D. Conway was then
+preaching, and discussion with him did something towards widening my
+views on the deeper religious problems; I re-read Dean Mansel's
+"Bampton Lectures," and they did much towards turning me in the
+direction of Atheism; I re-read Mill's "Examination of Sir William
+Hamilton's Philosophy," and studied carefully Comte's "Philosophie
+Positive." Gradually I recognised the limitations of human intelligence
+and its incapacity for understanding the nature of God, presented as
+infinite and absolute; I had given up the use of prayer as a
+blasphemous absurdity, since an all-wise God could not need my
+suggestions, nor an all-good God require my promptings. But God fades
+out of the daily life of those who never pray; a personal God who is
+not a Providence is a superfluity; when from the heaven does not smile
+a listening Father, it soon becomes an empty space, whence resounds no
+echo of man's cry. I could then reach no loftier conception of the
+Divine than that offered by the orthodox, and that broke hopelessly
+away as I analysed it.
+
+At last I said to Mr. Scott, "Mr. Scott, may I write a tract on the
+nature and existence of God?"
+
+He glanced at me keenly. "Ah, little lady, you are facing, then, that
+problem at last? I thought it must come. Write away."
+
+While this pamphlet was in MS. an event occurred which coloured all my
+succeeding life. I met Charles Bradlaugh. One day in the late spring,
+talking with Mrs. Conway--one of the sweetest and steadiest natures
+whom it has been my lot to meet, and to whom, as to her husband, I owe
+much for kindness generously shown when I was poor and had but few
+friends--she asked me if I had been to the Hall of Science, Old
+Street. I answered, with the stupid, ignorant reflection of other
+people's prejudices so sadly common, "No, I have never been there. Mr.
+Bradlaugh is rather a rough sort of speaker, is he not?"
+
+"He is the finest speaker of Saxon-English that I have ever heard,"
+she answered, "except, perhaps, John Bright, and his power over a
+crowd is something marvellous. Whether you agree with him or not, you
+should hear him."
+
+In the following July I went into the shop of Mr. Edward Truelove,
+256, High Holborn, in search of some Comtist publications, having come
+across his name as a publisher in the course of my study at the
+British Museum. On the counter was a copy of the _National Reformer_,
+and, attracted by the title, I bought it. I read it placidly in the
+omnibus on my way to Victoria Station, and found it excellent, and was
+sent into convulsions of inward merriment when, glancing up, I saw an
+old gentleman gazing at me, with horror speaking from every line of
+his countenance. To see a young woman, respectably dressed in crape,
+reading an Atheistic journal, had evidently upset his peace of mind,
+and he looked so hard at the paper that I was tempted to offer it to
+him, but repressed the mischievous inclination.
+
+This first copy of the paper with which I was to be so closely
+connected bore date July 19, 1874, and contained two long letters from
+a Mr. Arnold of Northampton, attacking Mr. Bradlaugh, and a brief and
+singularly self-restrained answer from the latter. There was also an
+article on the National Secular Society, which made me aware that
+there was an organisation devoted to the propagandism of Free Thought.
+I felt that if such a society existed, I ought to belong to it, and I
+consequently wrote a short note to the editor of the _National
+Reformer_, asking whether it was necessary for a person to profess
+Atheism before being admitted to the Society. The answer appeared in
+the _National Reformer_:--
+
+"S.E.--To be a member of the National Secular Society it is only
+necessary to be able honestly to accept the four principles, as given
+in the _National Reformer_ of June 14th. This any person may do
+without being required to avow himself an Atheist. Candidly, we can
+see no logical resting-place between the entire acceptance of
+authority, as in the Roman Catholic Church, and the most extreme
+Rationalism. If, on again looking to the Principles of the Society,
+you can accept them, we repeat to you our invitation."
+
+I sent my name in as an active member, and find it is recorded in the
+_National Reformer_ of August 9th. Having received an intimation that
+Londoners could receive their certificates at the Hall of Science from
+Mr. Bradlaugh on any Sunday evening, I betook myself thither, and it
+was on August 2, 1874, that I first set foot in a Freethought hall.
+The Hall was crowded to suffocation, and, at the very moment announced
+for the lecture, a roar of cheering burst forth, a tall figure passed
+swiftly up the Hall to the platform, and, with a slight bow in answer
+to the voluminous greeting, Charles Bradlaugh took his seat. I looked
+at him with interest, impressed and surprised. The grave, quiet,
+stern, strong face, the massive head, the keen eyes, the magnificent
+breadth and height of forehead--was this the man I had heard described
+as a blatant agitator, an ignorant demagogue?
+
+He began quietly and simply, tracing out the resemblances between the
+Krishna and the Christ myths, and as he went from point to point his
+voice grew in force and resonance, till it rang round the hall like a
+trumpet. Familiar with the subject, I could test the value of his
+treatment of it, and saw that his knowledge was as sound as his
+language was splendid. Eloquence, fire, sarcasm, pathos, passion, all
+in turn were bent against Christian superstition, till the great
+audience, carried away by the torrent of the orator's force, hung
+silent, breathing soft, as he went on, till the silence that followed
+a magnificent peroration broke the spell, and a hurricane of cheers
+relieved the tension.
+
+He came down the Hall with some certificates in his hand, glanced
+round, and handed me mine with a questioning "Mrs. Besant?" Then he
+said, referring to my question as to a profession of Atheism, that he
+would willingly talk over the subject of Atheism with me if I would
+make an appointment, and offered me a book he had been using in his
+lecture. Long afterwards I asked him how he knew me, whom he had never
+seen, that he came straight to me in such fashion. He laughed and said
+he did not know, but, glancing over the faces, he felt sure that I was
+Annie Besant.
+
+From that first meeting in the Hall of Science dated a friendship that
+lasted unbroken till Death severed the earthly bond, and that to me
+stretches through Death's gateway and links us together still. As
+friends, not as strangers, we met--swift recognition, as it were,
+leaping from eye to eye; and I know now that the instinctive
+friendliness was in very truth an outgrowth of strong friendship in
+other lives, and that on that August day we took up again an ancient
+tie, we did not begin a new one. And so in lives to come we shall meet
+again, and help each other as we helped each other in this. And let me
+here place on record, as I have done before, some word of what I owe
+him for his true friendship; though, indeed, how great is my debt to
+him I can never tell. Some of his wise phrases have ever remained in
+my memory. "You should never say you have an opinion on a subject
+until you have tried to study the strongest things said against the
+view to which you are inclined." "You must not think you know a
+subject until you are acquainted with all that the best minds have
+said about it." "No steady work can be done in public unless the
+worker study at home far more than he talks outside." "Be your own
+harshest judge, listen to your own speech and criticise it; read abuse
+of yourself and see what grains of truth are in it." "Do not waste
+time by reading opinions that are mere echoes of your own; read
+opinions you disagree with, and you will catch aspects of truth you do
+not readily see." Through our long comradeship he was my sternest as
+well as gentlest critic, pointing out to me that in a party like ours,
+where our own education and knowledge were above those whom we led, it
+was very easy to gain indiscriminate praise and unstinted admiration;
+on the other hand, we received from Christians equally indiscriminate
+abuse and hatred. It was, therefore, needful that we should be our own
+harshest judges, and that we should be sure that we knew thoroughly
+every subject that we taught. He saved me from the superficiality that
+my "fatal facility" of speech might so easily have induced; and when I
+began to taste the intoxication of easily won applause, his criticism
+of weak points, his challenge of weak arguments, his trained judgment,
+were of priceless service to me, and what of value there is in my work
+is very largely due to his influence, which at once stimulated and
+restrained.
+
+One very charming characteristic of his was his extreme courtesy in
+private life, especially to women. This outward polish, which sat so
+gracefully on his massive frame and stately presence, was foreign
+rather than English--for the English, as a rule, save such as go to
+Court, are a singularly unpolished people--and it gave his manner a
+peculiar charm. I asked him once where he had learned his gracious
+fashions that were so un-English--he would stand with uplifted hat as
+he asked a question of a maidservant, or handed a woman into a
+carriage--and he answered, with a half-smile, half-scoff, that it was
+only in England he was an outcast from society. In France, in Spain,
+in Italy, he was always welcomed among men and women of the highest
+social rank, and he supposed that he had unconsciously caught the
+foreign tricks of manner. Moreover, he was absolutely indifferent to
+all questions of social position; peer or artisan, it was to him
+exactly the same; he never seemed conscious of the distinctions of
+which men make so much.
+
+Our first conversation, after the meeting at the Hall of Science, took
+place a day or two later in his little study in 29, Turner Street,
+Commercial Road, a wee room overflowing with books, in which he looked
+singularly out of place. Later I learned that he had failed in
+business in consequence of Christian persecution, and, resolute to
+avoid bankruptcy, he had sold everything he possessed, save his books,
+had sent his wife and daughters to live in the country with his
+father-in-law, had taken two tiny rooms in Turner Street, where he
+could live for a mere trifle, and had bent himself to the task of
+paying off the liabilities he had incurred--incurred in consequence of
+his battling for political and religious liberty. I took with me my
+MS. essay "On the Nature and Existence of God," and it served as the
+basis for our conversation; we found there was little difference in
+our views. "You have thought yourself into Atheism without knowing
+it," he said, and all that I changed in the essay was the correction
+of the vulgar error that the Atheist says "there is no God," by the
+insertion of a passage disclaiming this position from an essay pointed
+out to me by Mr. Bradlaugh. And at this stage of my life-story, it is
+necessary to put very clearly the position I took up and held so many
+years as Atheist, because otherwise the further evolution into
+Theosophist will be wholly incomprehensible. It will lead me into
+metaphysics, and to some readers these are dry, but if any one would
+understand the evolution of a Soul he must be willing to face the
+questions which the Soul faces in its growth. And the position of the
+philosophic Atheist is so misunderstood that it is the more necessary
+to put it plainly, and Theosophists, at least, in reading it, will see
+how Theosophy stepped in finally as a further evolution towards
+knowledge, rendering rational, and therefore acceptable, the loftiest
+spirituality that the human mind can as yet conceive.
+
+In order that I may not colour my past thinkings by my present
+thought, I take my statements from pamphlets written when I adopted
+the Atheistic philosophy and while I continued an adherent thereof. No
+charge can then be made that I have softened my old opinions for the
+sake of reconciling them with those now held.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT.
+
+
+The first step which leaves behind the idea of a limited and personal
+God, an extra-cosmic Creator, and leads the student to the point
+whence Atheism and Pantheism diverge, is the recognition that a
+profound unity of substance underlies the infinite diversities of
+natural phenomena, the discernment of the One beneath the Many. This
+was the step I had taken ere my first meeting with Charles Bradlaugh,
+and I had written:--
+
+"It is manifest to all who will take the trouble to think steadily,
+that there can be only one eternal and underived substance, and that
+matter and spirit must, therefore, only be varying manifestations of
+this one substance. The distinction made between matter and spirit is,
+then, simply made for the sake of convenience and clearness, just as
+we may distinguish perception from judgment, both of which, however,
+are alike processes of thought. Matter is, in its constituent elements,
+the same as spirit; existence is _one_, however manifold in its
+phenomena; life is one, however multiform in its evolution. As the
+heat of the coal differs from the coal itself, so do memory,
+perception, judgment, emotion, and will differ from the brain which is
+the instrument of thought. But nevertheless they are all equally
+products of the one sole substance, varying only in their
+conditions.... I find myself, then, compelled to believe that one only
+substance exists in all around me; that the universe is eternal, or at
+least eternal so far as our faculties are concerned, since we cannot,
+as some one has quaintly put it, 'get to the outside of everywhere';
+that a Deity cannot be conceived of as apart from the universe; that
+the Worker and the Work are inextricably interwoven, and in some sense
+eternally and indissolubly combined. Having got so far, we will
+proceed to examine into the possibility of proving the existence of
+that one essence popularly called by the name of _God_, under the
+conditions strictly defined by the orthodox. Having demonstrated, as I
+hope to do, that the orthodox idea of God is unreasonable and absurd,
+we will endeavour to ascertain whether _any_ idea of God, worthy to be
+called an idea, is attainable in the present state of our faculties."
+"The Deity must of necessity be that one and only substance out of
+which all things are evolved, under the uncreated conditions and
+eternal laws of the universe; He must be, as Theodore Parker somewhat
+oddly puts it, 'the materiality of matter as well as the spirituality
+of spirit'--_i.e._, these must both be products of this one substance;
+a truth which is readily accepted as soon as spirit and matter are
+seen to be but different modes of one essence. Thus we identify
+substance with the all-comprehending and vivifying force of nature,
+and in so doing we simply reduce to a physical impossibility the
+existence of the Being described by the orthodox as a God possessing
+the attributes of personality. The Deity becomes identified with
+nature, co-extensive with the universe, but the _God_ of the orthodox
+no longer exists; we may change the signification of God, and use the
+word to express a different idea, but we can no longer mean by it a
+Personal Being in the orthodox sense, possessing an individuality
+which divides Him from the rest of the universe."[3]
+
+Proceeding to search whether _any_ idea of God was attainable, I came
+to the conclusion that evidence of the existence of a conscious Power
+was lacking, and that the ordinary proofs offered were inconclusive;
+that we could grasp phenomena and no more. "There appears, also, to
+be a possibility of a mind in nature, though we have seen that
+intelligence is, strictly speaking, impossible. There cannot be
+perception, memory, comparison, or judgment, but may there not be a
+perfect mind, unchanging, calm, and still? Our faculties fail us when
+we try to estimate the Deity, and we are betrayed into contradictions
+and absurdities; but does it therefore follow that He _is_ not? It
+seems to me that to deny His existence is to overstep the boundaries
+of our thought-power almost as much as to try and define it. We
+pretend to know the Unknown if we declare Him to be the Unknowable.
+Unknowable to us at present, yes! Unknowable for ever, in other
+possible stages of existence? We have reached a region into which we
+cannot penetrate; here all human faculties fail us; we bow our heads
+on 'the threshold of the unknown.'
+
+  "'And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see,
+  But if we could see and hear, this vision--were it not He?'
+
+Thus sings Alfred Tennyson, the poet of metaphysics: '_if_ we could
+see and hear.' Alas! it is always an 'if!'[4]
+
+This refusal to believe without evidence, and the declaration that
+anything "behind phenomena" is unknowable to man as at present
+constituted--these are the two chief planks of the Atheistic platform,
+as Atheism was held by Charles Bradlaugh and myself. In 1876 this
+position was clearly reaffirmed. "It is necessary to put briefly the
+Atheistic position, for no position is more continuously and more
+persistently misrepresented. Atheism is _without_ God. It does not
+assert _no_ God. 'The Atheist does not say "There is no God," but he
+says, "I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the
+word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation.
+I do not deny God, because I cannot deny that of which I have no
+conception, and the conception of which, by its affirmer, is so
+imperfect that he is unable to define it to me."' (Charles Bradlaugh,
+"Freethinker's Text-book," p. 118.) The Atheist neither affirms nor
+denies the possibility of phenomena differing from those recognised by
+human experience.... As his knowledge of the universe is extremely
+limited and very imperfect, the Atheist declines either to deny or to
+affirm anything with regard to modes of existence of which he knows
+nothing. Further, he refuses to believe anything concerning that of
+which he knows nothing, and affirms that that which can never be the
+subject of knowledge ought never to be the object of belief. While the
+Atheist, then, neither affirms nor denies the unknown, he _does_ deny
+all which conflicts with the knowledge to which he has already
+attained. For example, he _knows_ that one is one, and that three
+times one are three; he _denies_ that three times one are, or can be,
+one. The position of the Atheist is a clear and a reasonable one: I
+know nothing about 'God,' and therefore I do not believe in Him or in
+it; what you tell me about your God is self-contradictory, and is
+therefore incredible. I do not deny 'God,' which is an unknown tongue
+to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without
+God."[5] Up to 1887 I find myself writing on the same lines: "No man
+can rationally affirm 'There is no God,' until the word 'God' has for
+him a definite meaning, and until everything that exists is known to
+him, and known with what Leibnitz calls 'perfect knowledge.' The
+Atheist's denial of the Gods begins only when these Gods are defined
+or described. Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not
+palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been
+described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human
+thought--Nor is anything gained by the assertors of Deity when they
+allege that He is incomprehensible. If 'God' exists and is
+incomprehensible, His incomprehensibility is an admirable reason for
+being silent about Him, but can never justify the affirmation of
+self-contradictory propositions, and the threatening of people with
+damnation if they do not accept them."[6] "The belief of the Atheist
+stops where his evidence stops. He believes in the existence of the
+universe, judging the accessible proof thereof to be adequate, and he
+finds in this universe sufficient cause for the happening of all
+phenomena. He finds no intellectual satisfaction in placing a gigantic
+conundrum behind the universe, which only adds its own
+unintelligibility to the already sufficiently difficult problem of
+existence. Our lungs are not fitted to breathe beyond the atmosphere
+which surrounds our globe, and our faculties cannot breathe outside
+the atmosphere of the phenomenal."[7] And I summed up this essay with
+the words: "I do not believe in God. My mind finds no grounds on which
+to build up a reasonable faith. My heart revolts against the spectre
+of an Almighty Indifference to the pain of sentient beings. My
+conscience rebels against the injustice, the cruelty, the inequality,
+which surround me on every side. But I believe in Man. In man's
+redeeming power; in man's remoulding energy; in man's approaching
+triumph, through knowledge, love, and work."[8]
+
+These views of existence naturally colour all views of life and of the
+existence of the Soul. And here steps in the profound difference
+between Atheism and Pantheism; both posit an Existence at present
+inscrutable by human faculties, of which all phenomena are modes; but
+to the Atheist that Existence manifests as Force-Matter, unconscious,
+unintelligent, while to the Pantheist it manifests as Life-Matter,
+conscious, intelligent. To the one, life and consciousness are
+attributes, properties, dependent upon arrangements of matter; to the
+other they are fundamental, essential, and only limited in their
+manifestation by arrangements of matter. Despite the attraction held
+for me in Spinoza's luminous arguments, the over-mastering sway which
+Science was beginning to exercise over me drove me to seek for the
+explanation of all problems of life and mind at the hands of the
+biologist and the chemist. They had done so much, explained so much,
+could they not explain all? Surely, I thought, the one safe ground is
+that of experiment, and the remembered agony of doubt made me very
+slow to believe where I could not prove. So I was fain to regard life
+as an attribute, and this again strengthened the Atheistic position.
+"Scientifically regarded, life is not an entity but a property; it is
+not a mode of existence, but a characteristic of certain modes. Life
+is the result of an arrangement of matter, and when rearrangement
+occurs the former result can no longer be present; we call the result
+of the changed arrangement death. Life and death are two convenient
+words for expressing the general outcome of two arrangements of
+matter, one of which is always found to precede the other."[9] And
+then, having resorted to chemistry for one illustration, I took
+another from one of those striking and easily grasped analogies,
+facility for seeing and presenting which has ever been one of the
+secrets of my success as a propagandist. Like pictures, they impress
+the mind of the hearer with a vivid sense of reality. "Every one knows
+the exquisite iridiscence of mother-of-pearl, the tender, delicate
+hues which melt into each other, glowing with soft radiance. How
+different is the dull, dead surface of a piece of wax. Yet take that
+dull, black wax and mould it so closely to the surface of the
+mother-of-pearl that it shall take every delicate marking of the
+shell, and when you raise it the seven-hued glory shall smile at you
+from the erstwhile colourless surface. For, though it be to the naked
+eye imperceptible, all the surface of the mother-of-pearl is in
+delicate ridges and furrows, like the surface of a newly-ploughed
+field; and when the waves of light come dashing up against the ridged
+surface, they are broken like the waves on a shingly shore, and are
+flung backwards, so that they cross each other and the oncoming waves;
+and, as every ray of white light is made up of waves of seven colours,
+and these waves differ in length each from the others, the fairy
+ridges fling them backward separately, and each ray reaches the eye by
+itself; so that the colour of the mother-of-pearl is really the spray
+of the light waves, and comes from arrangement of matter once again.
+Give the dull, black wax the same ridges and furrows, and its glory
+shall differ in nothing from that of the shell. To apply our
+illustration: as the colour belongs to one arrangement of matter and
+the dead surface to another, so life belongs to some arrangements of
+matter and is their resultant, while the resultant of other
+arrangements is death."[10]
+
+The same line of reasoning naturally was applied to the existence of
+"spirit" in man, and it was argued that mental activity, the domain of
+the "spirit," was dependent on bodily organisation. "When the babe is
+born it shows no sign of mind. For a brief space hunger and repletion,
+cold and warmth are its only sensations. Slowly the specialised senses
+begin to function; still more slowly muscular movements, at first
+aimless and reflex, become co-ordinated and consciously directed.
+There is no sign here of an intelligent spirit controlling a
+mechanism; there is every sign of a learning and developing
+intelligence, developing _pari passu_ with the organism of which it is
+a function. As the body grows, the mind grows with it, and the
+childish mind of the child develops into the hasty, quickly-judging,
+half-informed, unbalanced youthful mind of the youth; with maturity of
+years comes maturity of mind, and body and mind are vigorous and in
+their prime. As old age comes on and the bodily functions decay, the
+mind decays also, until age passes into senility, and body and mind
+sink into second childhood. Has the immortal spirit decayed with the
+organisation, or is it dwelling in sorrow, bound in its 'house of
+clay'? If this be so, the 'spirit' must be unconscious, or else
+separate from the very individual whose essence it is supposed to be,
+for the old man does not suffer when his mind is senile, but is
+contented as a little child. And not only is this constant,
+simultaneous growth and decay of body and mind to be observed, but we
+know that mental functions are disordered and suspended by various
+physical conditions. Alcohol, many drugs, fever, disorder the mind; a
+blow on the cranium suspends its functions, and the 'spirit' returns
+with the surgeon's trepanning. Does the 'spirit' take part in dreams?
+Is it absent from the idiot, from the lunatic? Is it guilty of
+manslaughter when the madman murders, or does it helplessly watch its
+own instrument performing actions at which it shudders? If it can only
+work here through an organism, is its nature changed in its
+independent life, severed from all with which it was identified? Can
+it, in its 'disembodied state,' have anything in common with its
+past?"[11]
+
+It will be seen that my unbelief in the existence of the Soul or
+Spirit was a matter of cold, calm reasoning. As I wrote in 1885: "For
+many of us evidence must precede belief. I would gladly believe in a
+happy immortality for all, as I would gladly believe that all misery
+and crime and poverty will disappear in 1885--_if I could_. But I am
+unable to believe an improbable proposition unless convincing evidence
+is brought in support of it. Immortality is most improbable; no
+evidence is brought forward in its favour. I cannot believe only
+because I wish."[12] Such was the philosophy by which I lived from
+1874 to 1886, when first some researches that will be dealt with in
+their proper place, and which led me ultimately to the evidence I had
+before vainly demanded, began to shake my confidence in its adequacy.
+Amid outer storm and turmoil and conflict, I found it satisfy my
+intellect, while lofty ideals of morality fed my emotions. I called
+myself Atheist, and rightly so, for I was without God, and my horizon
+was bounded by life on earth; I gloried in the name then, as it is
+dear to my heart now, for all the associations with which it is
+connected. "Atheist is one of the grandest titles a man can wear; it
+is the Order of Merit of the world's heroes. Most great discoverers,
+most deep-thinking philosophers, most earnest reformers, most toiling
+pioneers of progress, have in their turn had flung at them the name of
+Atheist. It was howled over the grave of Copernicus; it was clamoured
+round the death-pile of Bruno; it was yelled at Vanini, at Spinoza, at
+Priestley, at Voltaire, at Paine; it has become the laurel-bay of the
+hero, the halo of the martyr; in the world's history it has meant the
+pioneer of progress, and where the cry of 'Atheist' is raised there
+may we be sure that another step is being taken towards the redemption
+of humanity. The saviours of the world are too often howled at as
+Atheists, and then worshipped as Deities. The Atheists are the
+vanguard of the army of Freethought, on whom falls the brunt of the
+battle, and are shivered the hardest of the blows; their feet trample
+down the thorns that others may tread unwounded; their bodies fill up
+the ditch that, by the bridge thus made, others may pass to victory.
+Honour to the pioneers of progress, honour to the vanguard of
+Liberty's army, honour to those who to improve earth have forgotten
+heaven, and who in their zeal for man have forgotten God."[13]
+
+This poor sketch of the conception of the universe, to which I had
+conquered my way at the cost of so much pain, and which was the inner
+centre round which my life revolved for twelve years, may perhaps show
+that the Atheistic Philosophy is misjudged sorely when it is scouted
+as vile or condemned as intellectually degraded. It has outgrown
+anthropomorphic deities, and it leaves us face to face with Nature,
+open to all her purifying, strengthening inspirations. "There is only
+one kind of prayer," it says, "which is reasonable, and that is the
+deep, silent adoration of the greatness and beauty and order around
+us, as revealed in the realms of non-rational life and in Humanity; as
+we bow our heads before the laws of the universe, and mould our lives
+into obedience to their voice, we find a strong, calm peace steal over
+our hearts, a perfect trust in the ultimate triumph of the right, a
+quiet determination to 'make our lives sublime.' Before our own high
+ideals, before those lives which show us 'how high the tides of Divine
+life have risen in the human world,' we stand with hushed voice and
+veiled face; from them we draw strength to emulate, and even dare
+struggle to excel. The contemplation of the ideal is true prayer; it
+inspires, it strengthens, it ennobles. The other part of prayer is
+work; from contemplation to labour, from the forest to the street.
+Study nature's laws, conform to them, work in harmony with them, and
+work becomes a prayer and a thanksgiving, an adoration of the
+universal wisdom, and a true obedience to the universal law."[14]
+
+To a woman of my temperament, filled with passionate desire for the
+bettering of the world, the elevation of humanity, a lofty system of
+ethics was of even more importance than a logical, intellectual
+conception of the universe; and the total loss of all faith in a
+righteous God only made me more strenuously assertive of the binding
+nature of duty and the overwhelming importance of conduct. In 1874
+this conviction found voice in a pamphlet on the "True Basis of
+Morality," and in all the years of my propaganda on the platform of
+the National Secular Society no subject was more frequently dealt with
+in my lectures than that of human ethical growth and the duty of man
+to man. No thought was more constantly in my mind than that of the
+importance of morals, and it was voiced at the very outset of my
+public career. Speaking of the danger lest "in these stirring times of
+inquiry," old sanctions of right conduct should be cast aside ere new
+ones were firmly established, I wrote: "It therefore becomes the duty
+of every one who fights in the ranks of Freethought, and who ventures
+to attack the dogmas of the Churches, and to strike down the
+superstitions which enslave men's intellect, to beware how he uproots
+sanctions of morality which he is too weak to replace, or how, before
+he is prepared with better ones, he removes the barriers which do yet,
+however poorly, to some extent check vice and repress crime.... That
+which touches morality touches the heart of society; a high and pure
+morality is the life-blood of humanity; mistakes in belief are
+inevitable, and are of little moment; mistakes in life destroy
+happiness, and their destructive consequences spread far and wide. It
+is, then, a very important question whether we, who are endeavouring
+to take away from the world the authority on which has hitherto been
+based all its morality, can offer a new and firm ground whereupon may
+safely be built up the fair edifice of a noble life."
+
+I then proceeded to analyse revelation and intuition as a basis for
+morals, and, discarding both, I asserted: "The true basis of morality
+is utility; that is, the adaptation of our actions to the promotion of
+the general welfare and happiness; the endeavour so to rule our lives
+that we may serve and bless mankind." And I argued for this basis,
+showing that the effort after virtue was implied in the search for
+happiness: "Virtue is an indispensable part of all true and solid
+happiness.... But it is, after all, only reasonable that happiness
+should be the ultimate test of right and wrong, if we live, as we do,
+in a realm of law. Obedience to law must necessarily result in
+harmony, and disobedience in discord. But if obedience to law result
+in harmony it must also result in happiness--all through nature
+obedience to law results in happiness, and through obedience each
+living thing fulfils the perfection of its being, and in that
+perfection finds its true happiness." It seemed to me most important
+to remove morality from the controversies about religion, and to give
+it a basis of its own: "As, then, the grave subject of the existence
+of Deity is a matter of dispute, it is evidently of deep importance to
+society that morality should not be dragged into this battlefield, to
+stand or totter with the various theories of the Divine nature which
+human thought creates and destroys. If we can found morality on a
+basis apart from theology, we shall do humanity a service which can
+scarcely be overestimated." A study of the facts of nature, of the
+consequences of man in society, seemed sufficient for such a basis.
+"Our faculties do not suffice to tell us about God; they do suffice to
+study phenomena, and to deduce laws from correlated facts. Surely,
+then, we should do wisely to concentrate our strength and our energies
+on the discovery of the attainable, instead of on the search after the
+unknowable. If we are told that morality consists in obedience to the
+supposed will of a supposed perfectly moral being, because in so doing
+we please God, then we are at once placed in a region where our
+faculties are useless to us, and where our judgment is at fault. But
+if we are told that we are to lead noble lives, because nobility of
+life is desirable for itself alone, because in so doing we are acting
+in harmony with the laws of Nature, because in so doing we spread
+happiness around our pathway and gladden our fellow-men--then, indeed,
+motives are appealed to which spring forward to meet the call, and
+chords are struck in our hearts which respond in music to the touch."
+It was to the establishment of this secure basis that I bent my
+energies, this that was to me of supreme moment. "Amid the fervid
+movement of society, with its wild theories and crude social reforms,
+with its righteous fury against oppression and its unconsidered
+notions of wider freedom and gladder life, it is of vital importance
+that morality should stand on a foundation unshakable; that so through
+all political and religious revolutions human life may grow purer and
+nobler, may rise upwards into settled freedom, and not sink downwards
+into anarchy. Only utility can afford us a sure basis, the
+reasonableness of which will be accepted alike by thoughtful student
+and hard-headed artisan. Utility appeals to all alike, and sets in
+action motives which are found equally in every human heart. Well
+shall it be for humanity that creeds and dogmas pass away, that
+superstition vanishes, and the clear light of freedom and science
+dawns on a regenerated earth--but well only if men draw tighter and
+closer the links of trustworthiness, of honour, and of truth. Equality
+before the law is necessary and just; liberty is the birthright of
+every man and woman; free individual development will elevate and
+glorify the race. But little worth these priceless jewels, little
+worth liberty and equality with all their promise for mankind, little
+worth even wider happiness, if that happiness be selfish, if true
+fraternity, true brotherhood, do not knit man to man, and heart to
+heart, in loyal service to the common need, and generous
+self-sacrifice to the common good."[15]
+
+To the forwarding of this moral growth of man, two things seemed to me
+necessary--an Ideal which should stir the emotions and impel to
+action, and a clear understanding of the sources of evil and of the
+methods by which they might be drained. Into the drawing of the first
+I threw all the passion of my nature, striving to paint the Ideal in
+colours which should enthral and fascinate, so that love and desire to
+realise might stir man to effort. If "morality touched by emotion" be
+religion, then truly was I the most religious of Atheists, finding in
+this dwelling on and glorifying of the Ideal full satisfaction for the
+loftiest emotions. To meet the fascination exercised over men's hearts
+by the Man of Sorrows, I raised the image of man triumphant, man
+perfected. "Rightly is the ideal Christian type of humanity a Man of
+Sorrows. Jesus, with worn and wasted body; with sad, thin lips, curved
+into a mournful droop of penitence for human sin; with weary eyes
+gazing up to heaven because despairing of earth; bowed down and aged
+with grief and pain, broken-hearted with long anguish, broken-spirited
+with unresisted ill-usage--such is the ideal man of the Christian
+creed. Beautiful with a certain pathetic beauty, telling of the long
+travail of earth, eloquent of the sufferings of humanity, but not the
+model type to which men should conform their lives, if they would make
+humanity glorious. And, therefore, in radiant contrast with this,
+stands out in the sunshine and under the blue summer sky, far from
+graveyards and torture of death agony, the fair ideal Humanity of the
+Atheist. In form strong and fair, perfect in physical development as
+the Hercules of Grecian art, radiant with love, glorious in
+self-reliant power; with lips bent firm to resist oppression, and
+melting into soft curves of passion and of pity; with deep, far-seeing
+eyes, gazing piercingly into the secrets of the unknown, and resting
+lovingly on the beauties around him; with hands strong to work in the
+present; with heart full of hope which the future shall realise;
+making earth glad with his labour and beautiful with his skill--this,
+this is the Ideal Man, enshrined in the Atheist's heart. The ideal
+humanity of the Christian is the humanity of the slave, poor, meek,
+broken-spirited, humble, submissive to authority, however oppressive
+and unjust; the ideal humanity of the Atheist is the humanity of the
+free man who knows no lord, who brooks no tyranny, who relies on his
+own strength, who makes his brother's quarrel his, proud,
+true-hearted, loyal, brave."[16]
+
+A one-sided view? Yes. But a very natural outcome of a sunny nature,
+for years held down by unhappiness and the harshness of an outgrown
+creed. It was the rebound of such a nature suddenly set free,
+rejoicing in its liberty and self-conscious strength, and it carried
+with it a great power of rousing the sympathetic enthusiasm of men and
+women, deeply conscious of their own restrictions and their own
+longings. It was the cry of the freed soul that had found articulate
+expression, and the many inarticulate and prisoned souls answered to
+it tumultously, with fluttering of caged wings. With hot insistence I
+battled for the inspiration to be drawn from the beauty and grandeur
+of which human life was capable. "Will any one exclaim, 'You are
+taking all beauty out of human life, all hope, all warmth, all
+inspiration; you give us cold duty for filial obedience, and
+inexorable law in the place of God'? All beauty from life? Is there,
+then, no beauty in the idea of forming part of the great life of the
+universe, no beauty in conscious harmony with Nature, no beauty in
+faithful service, no beauty in ideals of every virtue? 'All hope'?
+Why, I give you more than hope, I give you certainty; if I bid you
+labour for this world, it is with the knowledge that this world will
+repay you a, thousand-fold, because society will grow purer, freedom
+more settled, law more honoured, life more full and glad. What is your
+heaven? A heaven in the clouds! I point to a heaven attainable on
+earth. 'All warmth'? What! you serve warmly a God unknown and
+invisible, in a sense the projected shadow of your own imaginings, and
+can only serve coldly your brother whom you see at your side? There is
+no warmth in brightening the lot of the sad, in reforming abuses, in
+establishing equal justice for rich and poor? You find warmth in the
+church, but none in the home? Warmth in imagining the cloud glories of
+heaven, but none in creating substantial glories on earth?' All
+inspiration'? If you want inspiration to feeling, to sentiment,
+perhaps you had better keep to your Bible and your creeds; if you want
+inspiration to work, go and walk through the East of London, or the
+back streets of Manchester. You are inspired to tenderness as you gaze
+at the wounds of Jesus, dead in Judaea long ago, and find no
+inspiration in the wounds of men and women, dying in the England of
+to-day? You 'have tears to shed for Him,' but none for the sufferer at
+your doors? His passion arouses your sympathies, but you see no pathos
+in the passion of the poor? Duty is colder than 'filial obedience'?
+What do you mean by filial obedience? Obedience to your ideal of
+goodness and love--is it not so? Then how is duty cold? I offer you
+ideals for your homage: here is Truth for your Mistress, to whose
+exaltation you shall devote your intellect; here is Freedom for your
+General, for whose triumph you shall fight; here is Love for your
+Inspirer, who shall influence your every thought; here is Man for your
+Master--not in heaven, but on earth--to whose service you shall
+consecrate every faculty of your being. 'Inexorable law in the place
+of God'? Yes; a stern certainty that you shall not waste your life,
+yet gather a rich reward at the close; that you shall not sow misery,
+yet reap gladness; that you shall not be selfish, yet be crowned with
+love; nor shall you sin, yet find safety in repentance. True, our
+creed _is_ a stern one, stern with the beautiful sternness of Nature.
+But if we be in the right, look to yourselves; laws do not check their
+action for your ignorance; fire will not cease to scorch, because you
+'did not know.'"[17]
+
+With equal vigour did I maintain that "virtue was its own reward," and
+that payment on the other side of the grave was unnecessary as an
+incentive to right living. "What shall we say to Miss Cobbe's
+contention that duty will 'grow grey and cold' without God and
+immortality? Yes, for those with whom duty is a matter of selfish
+calculation, and who are virtuous only because they look for a 'golden
+crown' in payment on the other side the grave. Those of us who find
+joy in right-doing, who work because work is useful to our fellows,
+who live well because in such living we pay our contribution to the
+world's wealth, leaving earth richer than we found it--we need no
+paltry payment after death for our life's labour, for in that labour
+is its own 'exceeding great reward.'"[18] But did any one yearn for
+immortality, that "not all of me shall die"? "Is it true that Atheism
+has no immortality? What is true immortality? Is Beethoven's true
+immortality in his continued personal consciousness, or in his
+glorious music deathless while the world endures? Is Shelley's true
+life in his existence in some far-off heaven, or in the pulsing
+liberty his lyrics send through men's hearts, when they respond to the
+strains of his lyre? Music does not die, though one instrument be
+broken; thought does not die, though one brain be shivered; love does
+not die, though one heart's strings be rent; and no great thinker dies
+so long as his thought re-echoes through the ages, its melody the
+fuller-toned the more human brains send its music on. Not only to the
+hero and the sage is this immortality given; it belongs to each
+according to the measure of his deeds; world-wide life for world-wide
+service; straitened life for straitened work; each reaps as he sows,
+and the harvest is gathered by each in his rightful order."[19]
+
+This longing to leave behind a name that will live among men by right
+of service done them, this yearning for human love and approval that
+springs naturally from the practical and intense realisation of human
+brotherhood--these will be found as strong motives in the breasts of
+the most earnest men and women who have in our generation identified
+themselves with the Freethought cause. They shine through the written
+and spoken words of Charles Bradlaugh all through his life, and every
+friend of his knows how often he has expressed the longing that "when
+the grass grows green over my grave, men may love me a little for the
+work I tried to do."
+
+Needless to say that, in the many controversies in which I took part,
+it was often urged against me that such motives were insufficient,
+that they appealed only to natures already ethically developed, and
+left the average man, and, above all, the man below the average, with
+no sufficiently constraining motive for right conduct. I resolutely
+held to my faith in human nature, and the inherent response of the
+human heart when appealed to from the highest grounds; strange--I
+often think now--this instinctive certainty I had of man's innate
+grandeur, that governed all my thought, inconsistent as that certainty
+was with my belief in his purely animal ancestry. Pressed too hard, I
+would take refuge in a passionate disdain for all who did not hear the
+thrilling voice of Virtue and love her for her own sweet sake. "I have
+myself heard the question asked: 'Why should I seek for truth, and why
+should I lead a good life, if there be no immortality in which to reap
+a reward?' To this question the Freethinker has one clear and short
+answer: 'There is no reason why you should seek Truth, if to you the
+search has no attracting power. There is no reason why you should lead
+a noble life, if you find your happiness in leading a poor and a base
+one.' Friends, no one can enjoy a happiness which is too high for his
+capabilities; a book may be of intensest interest, but a dog will very
+much prefer being given a bone. To him whose highest interest is
+centred in his own miserable self, to him who cares only to gain his
+own ends, to him who seeks only his own individual comfort, to that
+man Freethought can have no attraction. Such a man may indeed be made
+religious by a bribe of heaven; he may be led to seek for truth,
+because he hopes to gain his reward hereafter by the search; but Truth
+disdains the service of the self-seeker; she cannot be grasped by a
+hand that itches for reward. If Truth is not loved for her own pure
+sake, if to lead a noble life, if to make men happier, if to spread
+brightness around us, if to leave the world better than we found
+it--if these aims have no attraction for us, if these thoughts do not
+inspire us, then we are not worthy to be Secularists, we have no right
+to the proud title of Freethinkers. If you want to be paid for your
+good lives by living for ever in a lazy and useless fashion in an idle
+heaven; if you want to be bribed into nobility of life; if, like silly
+children, you learn your lesson not to gain knowledge but to win
+sugar-plums, then you had better go back to your creeds and your
+churches; they are all you are fit for; you are not worthy to be free.
+But we--who, having caught a glimpse of the beauty of Truth, deem the
+possession of her worth more than all the world beside; who have made
+up our minds to do our work ungrudgingly, asking for no reward beyond
+the results which spring up from our labour--we will spread the Gospel
+of Freethought among men, until the sad minor melodies of Christianity
+have sobbed out their last mournful notes on the dying evening breeze,
+and on the fresh morning winds shall ring out the chorus of hope and
+joyfulness, from the glad lips of men whom the Truth has at last set
+free."[20]
+
+The intellectual comprehension of the sources of evil and the method
+of its extinction was the second great plank in my ethical platform.
+The study of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, of Huxley, Buechner and
+Haeckel, had not only convinced me of the truth of evolution, but,
+with help from W.H. Clifford, Lubbock, Buckle, Lecky, and many
+another, had led me to see in the evolution of the social instinct the
+explanation of the growth of conscience and of the strengthening of
+man's mental and moral nature. If man by study of the conditions
+surrounding him and by the application of intelligence to the subdual
+of external nature, had already accomplished so much, why should not
+further persistence along the same road lead to his complete
+emancipation? All the evil, anti-social side of his nature was an
+inheritance from his brute ancestry, and could be gradually
+eradicated; he could not only "let the ape and tiger die," but he
+could kill them out." It may be frankly acknowledged that man inherits
+from his brute progenitors various bestial tendencies which are in
+course of elimination. The wild-beast desire to fight is one of these,
+and this has been encouraged, not checked, by religion.... Another
+bestial tendency is the lust of the male for the female apart from
+love, duty, and loyalty; this again has been encouraged by religion,
+as witness the polygamy and concubinage of the Hebrews--as in Abraham,
+David, and Solomon, not to mention the precepts of the Mosaic
+laws--the bands of male and female prostitutes in connection with
+Pagan temples, and the curious outbursts of sexual passion in
+connection with religious revivals and missions. Another bestial
+tendency is greed, the strongest grabbing all he can and trampling
+down the weak, in the mad struggle for wealth; how and when has
+religion modified this tendency, sanctified as it is in our present
+civilisation? All these bestial tendencies will be eradicated only by
+the recognition of human duty, of the social bond. Religion has not
+eradicated them, but science, by tracing them to their source in our
+brute ancestry, has explained them and has shown them in their true
+light. As each recognises that the anti-social tendencies are the
+bestial tendencies in man, and that man in evolving further must
+evolve out of these, each also feels it part of his personal duty to
+curb these in himself, and so to rise further from the brute. This
+rational 'co-operation with Nature' distinguishes the scientific from
+the religious person, and this constraining sense of obligation is
+becoming stronger and stronger in all those who, in losing faith in
+God, have gained hope for man."[21]
+
+For this rational setting of oneself on the side of the forces working
+for evolution implied active co-operation by personal purity and
+nobility." To the Atheist it seems that the knowledge that the
+perfecting of the race is only possible by the improvement of the
+individual, supplies the most constraining motive which can be
+imagined for efforts after personal perfection. The Theist may desire
+personal perfection, but his desire is self-centred; each righteous
+individual is righteous, as it were, alone, and his righteousness does
+not benefit his fellows save as it may make him helpful and loving in
+his dealings with them. The Atheist desires personal perfection not
+only for his joy in it as beautiful in itself, but because science has
+taught him the unity of the race, and he knows that each fresh
+conquest of his over the baser parts of his nature, and each
+strengthening of the higher, is a gain for all, and not for himself
+alone."[22]
+
+Besides all this, the struggle against evil, regarded as transitory
+and as a necessary concomitant of evolution, loses its bitterness. "In
+dealing with evil, Atheism is full of hope instead of despair. To the
+Christian, evil is as everlasting as good; it exists by the permission
+of God, and, therefore, by the will of God. Our nature is corrupt,
+inclined to evil; the devil is ever near us, working all sin and all
+misery. What hope has the Christian face to face with a world's
+wickedness? what answer to the question, Whence comes sin? To the
+Atheist the terrible problem has in it no figure of despair. Evil
+comes from ignorance, we say; ignorance of physical and of moral
+facts. Primarily, from ignorance of physical order; parents who dwell
+in filthy, unventilated, unweathertight houses, who live on
+insufficient, innutritious, unwholesome food, will necessarily be
+unhealthy, will lack vitality, will probably have disease lurking in
+their veins; such parents will bring into the world ill-nurtured
+children, in whom the brain will generally be the least developed part
+of the body; such children, by their very formation, will incline to
+the animal rather than to the human, and by leading an animal, or
+natural, life will be deficient in those qualities which are necessary
+in social life. Their surroundings as they grow up, the home, the
+food, the associates, all are bad. They are trained into vice,
+educated into criminality; so surely as from the sown corn rises the
+wheat-ear, so from the sowing of misery, filth, and starvation shall
+arise crime. And the root of all is poverty and ignorance. Educate the
+children, and give them fair wage for fair work in their maturity, and
+crime will gradually diminish and ultimately disappear. Man is
+God-made, says Theism; man is circumstance-made, says Atheism. Man is
+the resultant of what his parents were, of what his surroundings have
+been and are, and of what they have made him; himself the result of
+the past he modifies the actual, and so the action and reaction go on,
+he himself the effect of what is past, and one of the causes of what
+is to come. Make the circumstances good and the results will be good,
+for healthy bodies and healthy brains may be built up, and from a
+State composed of such the disease of crime will have disappeared.
+Thus is our work full of hope; no terrible will of God have we to
+struggle against; no despairful future to look forward to, of a world
+growing more and more evil, until it is, at last, to burned up; but a
+glad, fair future of an ever-rising race, where more equal laws, more
+general education, more just division, shall eradicate pauperism,
+destroy ignorance, nourish independence, a future to be made the
+grander by our struggles, a future to be made the nearer by our
+toil."[23]
+
+This joyous, self-reliant facing of the world with the resolute
+determination to improve it is characteristic of the noblest Atheism
+of our day. And it is thus a distintly elevating factor in the midst
+of the selfishness, luxury, and greed of modern civilisation. It is a
+virile virtue in the midst of the calculating and slothful spirit
+which too ofter veils itself under the pretence or religion. It will
+have no putting off of justice to a far-off day of reckoning, and it
+is ever spurred on by the feeling, "The night cometh, when no man can
+work." Bereft of all hope of a personal future, it binds up its hopes
+with that of the race; unbelieving in any aid from Deity, it struggles
+the more strenuously to work out man's salvation by his own strength.
+"To us there is but small comfort in Miss Cobbe's assurance that
+'earth's wrongs and agonies' 'will be righted hereafter.' Granting for
+a moment that man survives death what certainty have we that 'the next
+world' will be any improvement on this? Miss Cobbe assures us that
+this is 'God's world'; whose world will the next be, if not also His?
+Will He be stronger there or better, that He should set right in that
+world the wrongs He has permitted here? Will He have changed His mind,
+or have become weary of the contemplation of suffering? To me the
+thought that the world was in the hands of a God who permitted all the
+present wrongs and pains to exist would be intolerable, maddening in
+its hopelessness. There is every hope of righting earth's wrongs and
+of curing earth's pains if the reason and skill of man which have
+already done so much are free to do the rest; but if they are to
+strive against omnipotence, hopeless indeed is the future of the
+world. It is in this sense that the Atheist looks on good as 'the
+final goal of ill,' and believing that that goal will be reached the
+sooner the more strenuous the efforts of each individual, he works in
+the glad certainty that he is aiding the world's progress thitherward.
+Not dreaming of a personal reward hereafter, not craving a personal
+payment from heavenly treasury, he works and loves, content that he is
+building a future fairer than his present, joyous that he is creating
+a new earth for a happier race."[24]
+
+Such was the creed and such the morality which governed my life and
+thoughts from 1874 to 1886, and with some misgivings to 1889, and from
+which I drew strength and happiness amid all outer struggles and
+distress. And I shall ever remain grateful for the intellectual and
+moral training it gave me, for the self-reliance it nurtured, for the
+altruism it inculcated, for the deep feeling of the unity of man that
+it fostered, for the inspiration to work that it lent. And perhaps the
+chief debt of gratitude I owe to Freethought is that it left the mind
+ever open to new truth, encouraged the most unshrinking questioning of
+Nature, and shrank from no new conclusions, however adverse to the
+old, that were based on solid evidence. I admit sorrowfully that all
+Freethinkers do not learn this lesson, but I worked side by side with
+Charles Bradlaugh, and the Freethought we strove to spread was
+strong-headed and broad-hearted.
+
+The antagonism which, as we shall see in a few moments, blazed out
+against me from the commencement of my platform work, was based partly
+on ignorance, was partly aroused by my direct attacks on Christianity,
+and by the combative spirit I myself showed in those attacks, and very
+largely by my extreme Radicalism in politics. I had against me all the
+conventional beliefs and traditions of society in general, and I
+attacked them, not with bated breath and abundant apologies, but
+joyously and defiantly, with sheer delight in the intellectual strife.
+I was fired, too, with passionate sympathy for the sufferings of the
+poor, for the overburdened, overdriven masses of the people, not only
+here but in every land, and wherever a blow was struck at Liberty or
+Justice my pen or tongue brake silence. It was a perpetual carrying of
+the fiery cross, and the comfortable did not thank me for shaking them
+out of their soft repose.
+
+The antagonism that grew out of ignorance regarded Atheism as implying
+degraded morality and bestial life, and they assailed my conduct not
+on evidence that it was evil, but on the presumption that an Atheist
+must be immoral. Thus a Christian opponent at Leicester assailed me as
+a teacher of free love, fathering on me views which were maintained in
+a book that I had not read, but which, before I had ever seen the
+_National Reformer_, had been reviewed in its columns--as it was
+reviewed in other London papers--and had been commended for its clear
+statement of the Malthusian position, but not for its contention as to
+free love, a theory to which Mr. Bradlaugh was very strongly opposed.
+Nor were the attacks confined to the ascription to me of theories
+which I did not hold, but agents of the Christian Evidence Society, in
+their street preaching, made the foulest accusations against me of
+personal immorality. Remonstrances addressed to the Rev. Mr. Engstroem,
+the secretary of the society, brought voluble protestations of
+disavowal and disapproval; but as the peccant agents were continued in
+their employment, the apologies were of small value. No accusation was
+too coarse, no slander too baseless, for circulation by these men; and
+for a long time these indignities caused me bitter suffering,
+outraging my pride, and soiling my good name. The time was to come
+when I should throw that good name to the winds for the sake of the
+miserable, but in those early days I had done nothing to merit, even
+ostensibly, such attacks. Even by educated writers, who should have
+known better, the most wanton accusations of violence and would-be
+destructiveness were brought against Atheists; thus Miss Frances Power
+Cobbe wrote in the _Contemporary Review_ that loss of faith in God
+would bring about the secularisation _or destruction_ of all
+cathedrals, churches, and chapels. "Why," I wrote in answer, "should
+cathedrals, churches, and chapels be destroyed? Atheism will utilise,
+not destroy, the beautiful edifices which, once wasted on God, shall
+hereafter be consecrated for man. Destroy Westminster Abbey, with its
+exquisite arches, its glorious tones of soft, rich colour, its
+stonework light as if of cloud, its dreamy, subdued twilight, soothing
+as the 'shadow of a great rock in a weary land'? Nay, but reconsecrate
+it to humanity. The fat cherubs who tumble over guns and banners on
+soldiers' graves will fitly be removed to some spot where their clumsy
+forms will no longer mar the upward-springing grace of lines of pillar
+and of arch; but the glorious building wherein now barbaric psalms are
+chanted and droning canons preach of Eastern follies, shall hereafter
+echo the majestic music of Wagner and Beethoven, and the teachers of
+the future shall there unveil to thronging multitudes the beauties and
+the wonders of the world. The 'towers and spires' will not be effaced,
+but they will no longer be symbols of a religion which sacrifices
+earth to heaven and Man to God."[25] Between the cultured and the
+uncultured burlesques of Atheism we came off pretty badly, being for
+the most part regarded, as the late Cardinal Manning termed us, as
+mere "cattle."
+
+The moral purity and elevation of Atheistic teaching were overlooked
+by many who heard only of my bitter attacks on Christian theology.
+Against the teachings of eternal torture, of the vicarious atonement,
+of the infallibility of the Bible, I levelled all the strength of my
+brain and tongue, and I exposed the history of the Christian Church
+with unsparing hand, its persecutions, its religious wars, its
+cruelties, its oppressions. Smarting under the suffering inflicted on
+myself, and wroth with the cruel pressure continually put on
+Freethinkers by Christian employers, speaking under constant threats
+of prosecution, identifying Christianity with the political and social
+tyrannies of Christendom, I used every weapon that history, science,
+criticism, scholarship could give me against the Churches; eloquence,
+sarcasm, mockery, all were called on to make breaches in the wall of
+traditional belief and crass superstition.
+
+To argument and reason I was ever ready to listen, but I turned a
+front of stubborn defiance to all attempts to compel assent to
+Christianity by appeals to force. "The threat and the enforcement of
+legal and social penalties against unbelief can never compel belief.
+Belief must be gained by demonstration; it can never be forced by
+punishment. Persecution makes the stronger among us bitter; the weaker
+among us hypocrites; it never has made and never can make an honest
+convert."[26]
+
+That men and women are now able to speak and think as openly as they
+do, that a broader spirit is visible in the Churches, that heresy is
+no longer regarded as morally disgraceful--these things are very
+largely due to the active and militant propaganda carried on under the
+leadership of Charles Bradlaugh, whose nearest and most trusted friend
+I was. That my tongue was in the early days bitterer than it should
+have been, I frankly acknowledge; that I ignored the services done by
+Christianity and threw light only on its crimes, thus committing
+injustice, I am ready to admit. But these faults were conquered long
+ere I left the Atheistic camp, and they were the faults of my
+personality, not of the Atheistic philosophy. And my main contentions
+were true, and needed to be made; from many a Christian pulpit to-day
+may be heard the echo of the Freethought teachings; men's minds have
+been awakened, their knowledge enlarged; and while I condemn the
+unnecessary harshness of some of my language, I rejoice that I played
+my part in that educating of England which has made impossible for
+evermore the crude superstitions of the past, and the repetition of
+the cruelties and injustices under which preceding heretics suffered.
+
+But my extreme political views had also much to do with the general
+feeling of hatred with which I was regarded. Politics, as such, I
+cared not for at all, for the necessary compromises of political life
+were intolerable to me; but wherever they touched on the life of the
+people they became to me of burning interest. The land question, the
+incidence of taxation, the cost of Royalty, the obstructive power of
+the House of Lords--these were the matters to which I put my hand; I
+was a Home Ruler, too, of course, and a passionate opponent of all
+injustice to nations weaker than ourselves, so that I found myself
+always in opposition to the Government of the day. Against our
+aggressive and oppressive policy in Ireland, in the Transvaal, in
+India, in Afghanistan, in Burmah, in Egypt, I lifted up my voice in
+all our great towns, trying to touch the consciences of the people,
+and to make them feel the immorality of a land-stealing, piratical
+policy. Against war, against capital punishment, against flogging,
+demanding national education instead of big guns, public libraries
+instead of warships--no wonder I was denounced as an agitator, a
+firebrand, and that all orthodox society turned up at me its most
+respectable nose.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+AT WORK.
+
+
+From this sketch of the inner sources of action let me turn to the
+actions themselves, and see how the outer life was led which fed
+itself at these springs.
+
+I have said that the friendship between Mr. Bradlaugh and myself dated
+from our first meeting, and a few days after our talk in Turner Street
+he came down to see me at Norwood. It was characteristic of the man
+that he refused my first invitation, and bade me to think well ere I
+asked him to my house. He told me that he was so hated by English
+society that any friend of his would be certain to suffer, and that I
+should pay heavily for any friendship extended to him. When, however,
+I wrote to him, repeating my invitation, and telling him that I had
+counted the cost, he came to see me. His words came true; my
+friendship for him alienated from me even many professed Freethinkers,
+but the strength and the happiness of it outweighed a thousand times
+the loss it brought, and never has a shadow of regret touched me that
+I clasped hands with him in 1874, and won the noblest friend that
+woman ever had. He never spoke to me a harsh word; where we differed,
+he never tried to override my judgment, nor force on me his views; we
+discussed all points of difference as equal friends; he guarded me
+from all suffering as far as friend might, and shared with me all the
+pain he could not turn aside; all the brightness of my stormy life
+came to me through him, from his tender thoughtfulness, his ever-ready
+sympathy, his generous love. He was the most unselfish man I ever
+knew, and as patient as he was strong. My quick, impulsive nature
+found in him the restful strength it needed, and learned from him the
+self-control it lacked.
+
+He was the merriest of companions in our rare hours of relaxation; for
+many years he was wont to come to my house in the morning, after the
+hours always set aside by him for receiving poor men who wanted advice
+on legal and other matters--for he was a veritable poor man's lawyer,
+always ready to help and counsel--and, bringing his books and papers,
+he would sit writing, hour after hour, I equally busy with my own
+work, now and then, perhaps, exchanging a word, breaking off just for
+lunch and dinner, and working on again in the evening till about ten
+o'clock--he always went early to bed when at home--he would take
+himself off again to his lodgings, about three-quarters of a mile
+away. Sometimes he would play cards for an hour, euchre being our
+favourite game. But while we were mostly busy and grave, we would make
+holiday sometimes, and then he was like a boy, brimming over with
+mirth, full of quaint turns of thought and speech; all the country
+round London has for me bright memories of our wanderings--Richmond,
+where we tramped across the park, and sat under its mighty trees;
+Windsor, with its groves of bracken; Kew, where we had tea in a funny
+little room, with watercress _ad libitum_; Hampton Court, with its
+dishevelled beauties; Maidenhead and Taplow, where the river was the
+attraction; and, above all, Broxbourne, where he delighted to spend
+the day with his fishing-rod, wandering along the river, of which he
+knew every eddy. For he was a great fisherman, and he taught me all
+the mysteries of the craft, mirthfully disdainful of my dislike of the
+fish when I had caught them. And in those days he would talk of all
+his hopes of the future, of his work, of his duty to the thousands who
+looked to him for guidance, of the time when he would sit in
+Parliament as member for Northampton, and help to pass into laws the
+projects of reform for which he was battling with pen and tongue. How
+often he would voice his love of England, his admiration of her
+Parliament, his pride in her history. Keenly alive to the blots upon
+it in her sinful wars of conquest, in the cruel wrongs inflicted upon
+subject peoples, he was yet an Englishman to the heart's core, but
+feeling above all the Englishman's duty, as one of a race that had
+gripped power and held it, to understand the needs of those he ruled,
+and to do justice willingly, since compulsion to justice there was
+none. His service to India in the latest years of his life was no
+suddenly accepted task. He had spoken for her, pleaded for her, for
+many a long year, through press and on platform, and his spurs as
+member for India were won long ere he was member of Parliament.
+
+A place on the staff of the _National Reformer_ was offered me by Mr.
+Bradlaugh a few days after our first meeting, and the small weekly
+salary thus earned--it was only a guinea, for national reformers are
+always poor--was a very welcome addition to my resources. My first
+contribution appeared in the number for August 30, 1874, over the
+signature of "Ajax," and I wrote in it regularly until Mr. Bradlaugh
+died; from 1877 until his death I sub-edited it, so as to free him
+from all the technical trouble and the weary reading of copy, and for
+part of this period was also co-editor. I wrote at first under a _nom
+de guerre_, because the work I was doing for Mr. Scott would have been
+prejudiced had my name appeared in the columns of the terrible
+_National Reformer_, and until this work--commenced and paid for--was
+concluded I did not feel at liberty to use my own name. Afterwards, I
+signed my _National Reformer_ articles, and the tracts written for Mr.
+Scott appeared anonymously.
+
+  The name was suggested by the famous statue of
+  "Ajax Crying for Light," a cast of which may be seen
+  in the centre walk by any visitor to the Crystal Palace,
+  Sydenham. The cry through the darkness for light,
+  even though light should bring destruction, was one
+  that awoke the keenest sympathy of response from my
+  heart:
+
+  "If our fate be death
+  Give light, and let us die!"
+
+To see, to know, to understand, even though the seeing blind, though
+the knowledge sadden, though the understanding shatter the dearest
+hopes--such has ever been the craving of the upward-striving mind in
+man. Some regard it as a weakness, as a folly, but I am sure that it
+exists most strongly in some of the noblest of our race; that from the
+lips of those who have done most in lifting the burden of ignorance
+from the overstrained and bowed shoulders of a stumbling world has
+gone out most often into the empty darkness the pleading, impassioned
+cry:
+
+"Give light!"
+
+The light may come with a blinding flash, but it is light none the
+less, and we can see.
+
+And now the time had come when I was to use that gift of speech which
+I had discovered in Sibsey Church that I possessed, and to use it to
+move hearts and brains all over the English land. In 1874, tentatively, and in 1875 definitely, I took up this keen weapon, and have used it ever
+since. My first attempt was at a garden party, in a brief informal
+debate, and I found that words came readily and smoothly: the second
+in a discussion at the Liberal Social Union on the opening of museums
+and art galleries on Sunday. My first lecture was given at the
+Co-operative Institute, 55, Castle Street, Oxford Street, on August
+25, 1874. Mr. Greening--then, I think, the secretary--had invited me
+to read a paper before the society, and had left me the choice of the
+subject. I resolved that my first public lecture should be on behalf
+of my own sex, so I selected for my theme, "The Political Status of
+Women," and wrote thereon a paper. But it was a very nervous person
+who presented herself at the Co-operative Institute on that August
+evening. When a visit to the dentist is made, and one stands on the
+steps outside, desiring to run away ere the neat little boy in buttons
+opens the door and beams on one with a smile of compassionate
+superiority and implike triumph, then the world seems dark and life is
+as a huge blunder. But all such feelings are poor and weak as compared
+with the sinking of the heart and the trembling of the knees which
+seize upon the unhappy lecturer as he advances towards his first
+audience, and as before his eyes rises a ghastly vision of a
+tongue-tied would-be lecturer, facing rows of listening faces,
+listening to--silence. But to my surprise all this miserable feeling
+vanished the moment I was on my feet and was looking at the faces
+before me. I felt no tremor of nervousness from the first word to the
+last, and as I heard my own voice ring out over the attentive
+listeners I was conscious of power and of pleasure, not of fear. And
+from that day to this my experience has been the same; before a
+lecture I am horribly nervous, wishing myself at the ends of the
+earth, heart beating violently, and sometimes overcome by deadly
+sickness. Once on my feet, I feel perfectly at my ease, ruler of the
+crowd, master of myself. I often jeer at myself mentally as I feel
+myself throbbing and fearful, knowing that when I stand up I shall be
+all right, and yet I cannot conquer the physical terror and trembling,
+illusory as I know them to be. People often say to me, "You look too
+ill to go on the platform." And I smile feebly and say I am all right,
+and I often fancy that the more miserably nervous I am in the
+ante-room, the better I speak when once on the platform. My second
+lecture was delivered on September 27th, at Mr. Moncure D. Conway's
+Chapel, in St. Paul's Road, Camden Town, and redelivered a few weeks
+later at a Unitarian Chapel, where the Rev. Peter Dean was minister.
+This was on the "True Basis of Morality," and was later printed as a
+pamphlet, which attained a wide circulation. This was all I did in the
+way of speaking in 1874, but I took silent part in an electioneering
+struggle at Northampton, where a seat for the House of Commons had
+fallen vacant by the death of Mr. Charles Gilpin. Mr. Bradlaugh had
+contested the borough as a Radical in 1868, obtaining 1,086 votes, and
+again in February, 1874, when he received 1,653; of these no less than
+1,060 were plumpers, while his four opponents had only 113, 64, 21 and
+12 plumpers respectively; this band formed the compact and personally
+loyal following which was to win the seat for its chief in 1880, after
+twelve years of steady struggle, and to return him over and over again
+to Parliament during the long contest which followed his election, and
+which ended in his final triumph. They never wavered in their
+allegiance to "our Charlie," but stood by him through evil report and
+good report, when he was outcast as when he was triumphant, loving him
+with a deep, passionate devotion, as honourable to them as it was
+precious to him. I have seen him cry like a child at evidences of
+their love for him, he whose courage no danger could daunt, and who
+was never seen to blench before hatred nor change his stern immobility
+in the face of his foes. Iron to enmity, he was soft as a woman to
+kindness; unbending as steel to pressure, he was ductile as wax to
+love. John Stuart Mill had the insight in 1868 to see his value, and
+the courage to recognise it. He strongly supported his candidature,
+and sent a donation to his election expenses. In his "Autobiography"
+he wrote (pp. 311, 312):--
+
+"He had the support of the working classes; having heard him speak I
+knew him to be a man of ability, and he had proved that he was the
+reverse of a demagogue by placing himself in strong opposition to the
+prevailing opinion of the Democratic party on two such important
+subjects as Malthusianism and Proportional Representation. Men of this
+sort, who, while sharing the democratic feeling of the working
+classes, judge political questions for themselves, and have the
+courage to assert their individual convictions against popular
+opposition, were needed, as it seemed to me, in Parliament; and I did
+not think that Mr. Bradlaugh's anti-religious opinions (even though he
+had been intemperate in the expression of them) ought to exclude him."
+
+It has been said that Mr. Mill's support of Mr. Bradlaugh's
+candidature at Northampton cost him his own seat at Westminster, and
+so bitter was bigotry at that time that the statement is very likely
+to be true. On this, Mr. Mill himself said: "It was the right thing to
+do, and if the election were yet to take place, I would do it again."
+
+At this election of September, 1874--the second in the year, for the
+general election had taken place in the February, and Mr. Bradlaugh
+had been put up and defeated during his absence in America--I went
+down to Northampton to report electioneering incidents for the
+_National Reformer_, and spent some days there in the whirl of the
+struggle. The Whig party was more bitter against Mr. Bradlaugh than
+was the Tory. Strenuous efforts were made to procure a Liberal
+candidate, who would be able at least to prevent Mr. Bradlaugh's
+return, and, by dividing the Liberal and Radical party, should let in
+a Tory rather than the detested Radical. Messrs. Bell and James and
+Dr. Pearce came on the scene only to disappear. Mr. Jacob Bright and
+Mr. Arnold Morley were vainly suggested. Mr. Ayrton's name was
+whispered. Major Lumley was recommended by Mr. Bernal Osborne. Dr.
+Kenealy proclaimed himself ready to come to the rescue of the Whigs.
+Mr. Tillett, of Norwich, Mr. Cox, of Belper, were invited, but neither
+would consent to oppose a good Radical who had fought two elections at
+Northampton and had been the chosen of the Radical workers for six
+years. At last Mr. William Fowler, a banker, accepted the task of
+handing over the representation of a Liberal and Radical borough to a
+Tory, and duly succeeded in giving the seat to Mr. Mereweather, a very
+reputable Tory lawyer. Mr. Bradlaugh polled 1,766, thus adding another
+133 voters to those who had polled for him in the previous February.
+
+That election gave me my first experience of anything in the nature of
+rioting. The violent abuse levelled against Mr. Bradlaugh by the
+Whigs, and the foul and wicked slanders circulated against him,
+assailing his private life and family relations, had angered almost to
+madness those who knew and loved him; and when it was found that the
+unscrupulous Whig devices had triumphed, had turned the election
+against him, and given over the borough to a Tory, the fury broke out
+into open violence. One illustration may be given as a type of these
+cruel slanders. It was known that Mr. Bradlaugh was separated from his
+wife, and it was alleged that being an Atheist, and, (therefore!) an
+opponent of marriage, he had deserted his wife and children, and left
+them to the workhouse. The cause of the separation was known to very
+few, for Mr. Bradlaugh was chivalrously honourable to women, and he
+would not shield his own good name at the cost of that of the wife of
+his youth and the mother of his children. But since his death his only
+remaining child has, in devotion to her father's memory, stated the
+melancholy truth: that Mrs. Bradlaugh gave way to drink; that for long
+years he bore with her and did all that man could do to save her; that
+finally, hopeless of cure, he broke up his home, and placed his wife
+in the care of her parents in the country, leaving her daughters with
+her, while he worked for their support. No man could have acted more
+generously and wisely under these cruel circumstances than he did, but
+it was, perhaps, going to an extreme of Quixotism, that he concealed
+the real state of the case, and let the public blame him as it would.
+His Northampton followers did not know the facts, but they knew him as
+an upright, noble man, and these brutal attacks on his personal
+character drove them wild. Stray fights had taken place during the
+election over these slanders, and, defeated by such foul weapons, the
+people lost control of their passions. As Mr. Bradlaugh was sitting
+well-nigh exhausted in the hotel, after the declaration of the poll,
+the landlord rushed in, crying to him to go out and try to stop the
+people, or there would be murder done at the "Palmerston," Mr.
+Fowler's headquarters; the crowd was charging the door, and the
+windows were being broken with showers of stones. Weary as he was, Mr.
+Bradlaugh sprang to his feet, and swiftly made his way to the rescue
+of those who had maligned and defeated him. Flinging himself before
+the doorway, from which the door had just been battered down, he
+knocked down one or two of the most violent, drove the crowd back,
+argued and scolded them into quietness, and finally dispersed them.
+But at nine o'clock he had to leave Northampton to catch the mail
+steamer for America at Queenstown, and after he had left, word went
+round that he had gone, and the riot he had quelled broke out afresh.
+The Riot Act was at last read, the soldiers were called out, stones
+flew freely, heads and windows were broken, but no very serious harm
+was done. The "Palmerston" and the printing-office of the _Mercury_,
+the Whig organ, were the principal sufferers; doors and windows
+disappearing somewhat completely. The day after the election I
+returned home, and soon after fell ill with a severe attack of
+congestion of the lungs. Soon after my recovery I left Norwood and
+settled in a house in Westbourne Terrace, Bayswater, where I remained
+till 1876.
+
+In the following January (1875), after much thought and self-analysis,
+I resolved to give myself wholly to propagandist work, as a
+Freethinker and a Social Reformer, and to use my tongue as well as my
+pen in the struggle. I counted the cost ere I determined on this step,
+for I knew that it would not only outrage the feelings of such new
+friends as I had already made, but would be likely to imperil my
+custody of my little girl. I knew that an Atheist was outside the law,
+obnoxious to its penalties, but deprived of its protection, and that
+the step I contemplated might carry me into conflicts in which
+everything might be lost and nothing could be gained. But the desire
+to spread liberty and truer thought among men, to war against bigotry
+and superstition, to make the world freer and better than I found
+it--all this impelled me with a force that would not be denied. I
+seemed to hear the voice of Truth ringing over the battlefield: "Who
+will go? Who will speak for me?" And I sprang forward with passionate
+enthusiasm, with resolute cry: "Here am I, send me!" Nor have I ever
+regretted for one hour that resolution, come to in solitude, carried
+out amid the surging life of men, to devote to that sacred cause every
+power of brain and tongue that I possessed. Very solemn to me is the
+responsibility of the public teacher, standing forth in Press and on
+platform to partly mould the thought of his time, swaying thousands of
+readers and hearers year after year. No weighter responsibility can
+any take, no more sacred charge. The written and the spoken word start
+forces none may measure, set working brain after brain, influence
+numbers unknown to the forthgiver of the word, work for good or for
+evil all down the stream of time. Feeling the greatness of the career,
+the solemnity of the duty, I pledged my word then to the cause I loved
+that no effort on my part should be wanted to render myself worthy of
+the privilege of service that I took; that I would read and study, and
+would train every faculty that I had; that I would polish my language,
+discipline my thought, widen my knowledge; and this, at least, I may
+say, that if I have written and spoken much, I have studied and
+thought more, and that I have not given to my mistress Truth that
+"which hath cost me nothing."
+
+This same year (1875) that saw me launched on the world as a public
+advocate of Freethought, saw also the founding of the Theosophical
+Society to which my Freethought was to lead me. I have often since
+thought with pleasure that at the very time I began lecturing in
+England, H.P. Blavatsky was at work in the United States, preparing
+the foundation on which in November, 1875, the Theosophical Society
+was to be raised. And with deeper pleasure yet have I found her
+writing of what she called the noble work against superstition done by
+Charles Bradlaugh and myself, rendering the propaganda of Theosophy
+far more practicable and safer than it would otherwise have been. The
+fight soon began, and with some queer little skirmishes. I was a
+member of the "Liberal Social Union," and one night a discussion arose
+as to the admissibility of Atheists to the Society. Dr. Zerffi
+declared that he would not remain a member if avowed Atheists were
+admitted. I promptly declared that I was an Atheist, and that the
+basis of the union was liberty of opinion. The result was that I found
+myself cold-shouldered, and those that had been warmly cordial to me
+merely as a non-Christian looked askance at me when I had avowed that
+my scepticism had advanced beyond their "limits of religious thought."
+The Liberal Social Union soon knew me no more, but in the wider field
+of work open before me, the narrow-mindedness of this petty clique
+troubled me not at all.
+
+I started my definite lecturing work at South Place Chapel in January,
+1875, Mr. Moncure D. Conway presiding for me, and I find in the
+_National Reformer_ for January 17th, the announcement that "Mrs.
+Annie Besant ('Ajax') will lecture at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, on
+'Civil and Religious Liberty.'" Thus I threw off my pseudonym, and
+rode into the field of battle with uplifted visor. The identification
+led to an odd little exhibition of bigotry. I had been invited by the
+Dialectical Society to read a paper, and had selected for subject,
+"The Existence of God." (It may be noted, in passing, that young
+students and speakers always select the most tremendous subjects for
+their discourses. One advances in modesty as one advances in
+knowledge, and after eighteen years of platform work, I am far more
+dubious than I was at their beginning as to my power of dealing in any
+sense adequately with the problems of life.) The Dialectical Society
+had for some years held their meetings in a room in Adam Street,
+rented from the Social Science Association. When the members gathered
+as usual on February 17th, the door was found to be locked, and they
+had to gather on the stairs; they found that "Ajax's" as yet
+undelivered paper was too much for Social Science nerves, and that
+entrance to their ordinary meeting-room was then and thenceforth
+denied them. So they, with "Ajax," found refuge at the Charing Cross
+Hotel, and speculated merrily on the eccentricities of religious
+bigotry.
+
+On February 12th I started on my first provincial lecturing tour, and
+after speaking at Birkenhead that evening went on by the night mail to
+Glasgow. Some races--dog races--I think, had been going on, and very
+unpleasant were many of the passengers waiting on the platform. Some
+Birkenhead friends had secured me a compartment, and watched over me
+till the train began to move. Then, after we had fairly started, the
+door was flung open by a porter, and a man was thrust in who half
+tumbled on to the seat. As he slowly recovered he stood up, and as his
+money rolled out of his hand on to the floor, and he gazed vaguely at
+it, I saw to my horror that he was drunk. The position was not
+pleasant, for the train was an express, and was not timed to stop for
+a considerable time. My odious fellow-passenger spent some time on the
+floor, hunting after his scattered coins; then he slowly gathered
+himself up and presently became conscious of my presence. He studied
+me for some time, and then proposed to shut the window. I assented
+quietly, not wanting to discuss a trifle and feeling in deadly
+terror--alone at night in an express with a man not drunk enough to be
+helpless, but too drunk to be controlled. Never before nor since have
+I felt so thoroughly frightened. I can see him still, swaying as he
+stood, with eyes bleared and pendulous lips--but I sat there quiet and
+outwardly unmoved, as is always my impulse in danger till I see some
+way of escape, only grasping a penknife in my pocket, with a desperate
+resolve to use my feeble weapon as soon as the need arose. The man
+came towards me with a fatuous leer, when a jarring noise was heard
+and the train began to slacken.
+
+"What is that?" stammered my drunken companion.
+
+"They are putting on the brakes to stop the train," I answered very
+slowly and distinctly, though a very passion of relief made it hard to
+say quietly the measured words.
+
+The man sat down stupidly, staring at me, and in a minute or two the
+train pulled up at a station--it had been stopped by signal. My
+immobility was gone. In a moment I was at the window, called the
+guard, and explained rapidly that I was a woman travelling alone, and
+that a half-drunken man was in the carriage. With the usual kindness
+of a railway official, he at once moved me and my baggage into another
+compartment, into which he locked me, and he kept a friendly watch
+over me at every station at which we stopped until he landed me safely
+at Glasgow.
+
+At Glasgow a room had been taken for me at a temperance hotel, and it
+seemed to me so new and lonely a thing to be "all on my own account"
+in a strange hotel in a strange city, that I wanted to sit down and
+cry. This feeling, to which I was too proud to yield, was probably
+partly due to the extreme greyness and grubbiness of my surroundings.
+Things are better now, but in those days temperance hotels were for
+the most part lacking in cleanliness. Abstinence from alcohol and a
+superfluity of "matter in the wrong place" do not seem necessary
+correlatives, yet I rarely went to a temperance hotel in which water
+was liberally used for other purposes than that of drinking. From
+Glasgow I went north to Aberdeen, where I found a very stern and
+critical audience. Not a sound broke the stillness as I walked up the
+hall; not a sound as I ascended the platform and faced the people; the
+canny Scot was not going to applaud a stranger at sight; he was going
+to see what she was like first. In grim silence they listened; I could
+not move them; they were granite like their own granite city, and I
+felt I would like to take off my head and throw it at them, if only to
+break that hard wall. After about twenty minutes, a fortunate phrase
+drew a hiss from some child of the Covenanters. I made a quick retort,
+there was a burst of cheering, and the granite vanished. Never after
+that did I have to complain of the coldness of an Aberdeen audience.
+Back to London from Aberdeen, and a long, weary journey it was, in a
+third-class carriage in the cold month of February; but the labour had
+in it a joy that outpaid all physical discomfort, and the feeling that
+I had found my work in the world gave a new happiness to life.
+
+On February 28th I stood for the first time on the platform of the
+Hall of Science, Old Street, St. Luke's, London, and was received with
+that warmth of greeting which Secularists are always so ready to
+extend to any who sacrifice aught to join their ranks. That hall is
+identified in my mind with many a bitter struggle, with both victory
+and defeat, but whether in victory or in defeat I found there always
+welcome; and the love and the courage wherewith Secularists stood by
+me have overpaid a thousandfold any poor services I was fortunate
+enough to render, while in their ranks, to the cause of Liberty, and
+wholly prevent any bitterness arising in my mind for any
+unfriendliness shown me by some, who have perhaps overstepped kindness
+and justice in their sorrowful wrath at my renunciation of Materialism
+and Atheism. So far as health was concerned, the lecturing acted as a
+tonic. My chest had always been a little delicate, and when I
+consulted a doctor on the possibility of my standing platform work, he
+answered, "It will either kill you or cure you." It entirely cured the
+lung weakness, and I grew strong and vigorous instead of being frail
+and delicate, as of old.
+
+It would be wearisome to go step by step over eighteen years of
+platform work, so I will only select here and there incidents
+illustrative of the whole. And here let me say that the frequent
+attacks made on myself and others, that we were attracted to
+Free-thought propaganda by the gains it offered, formed a somewhat
+grotesque contrast to the facts. On one occasion I spent eight days in
+Northumberland and Durham, gave twelve lectures, and made a deficit of
+eleven shillings on the whole. Of course such a thing could not happen
+in later years, when I had made my name by sheer hard work, but I
+fancy that every Secularist lecturer could tell of similar experiences
+in the early days of "winning his way." The fact is that from Mr.
+Bradlaugh downwards every one of us could have earned a competence
+with comparative ease in any other line of work, and could have earned
+it with public approval instead of amid popular reproach. Much of my
+early lecturing was done in Northumberland and Durham; the miners
+there are, as a rule, shrewd and hard-headed men, and very cordial is
+the greeting given by them to those they have reason to trust. At
+Seghill and at Bedlington I have slept in their cottages and have been
+welcomed to their tables, and I have a vivid memory of one evening at
+Seghill, after a lecture, when my host, himself a miner, invited about
+a dozen of his comrades to supper to meet me; the talk ran on
+politics, and I soon found that my companions knew more of English
+politics, had a far shrewder notion of political methods, and were,
+therefore, much better worth talking to, than most of the ordinary men
+met at dinner parties "in society." They were of the "uneducated"
+class despised by "gentlemen," and had not then the franchise, but
+politically they were far better educated than their social superiors,
+and were far better fitted to discharge the duties of citizenship. How
+well, too, do I remember a ten-mile drive in a butcher's cart, to give
+a lecture in an out-of-the-way spot, unapproached by railway. Such was
+the jolting as we rattled over rough roads and stony places, that I
+felt as though all my bones were broken, and as though I should
+collapse on the platform like a bag half-filled with stones. How kind
+they were to me, those genial, cordial miners, how careful for my
+comfort, and how motherly were the women! Ah! if opponents of my views
+who did not know me were often cruel and malignant, there was
+compensation in the love and honour in which good men and women all
+the country over held me, and their devotion outweighed the hatred,
+and many a time and often soothed a weary and aching heart.
+
+Lecturing in June, 1875, at Leicester, I came for the first time
+across a falsehood that brought sore trouble and cost me more pain
+than I care to tell. An irate Christian opponent, in the discussion
+that followed the lecture, declared that I was responsible for a book
+entitled, "The Elements of Social Science," which was, he averred,
+"The Bible of Secularists." I had never heard of the book, but as he
+stated that it was in favour of the abolition of marriage, and that
+Mr. Bradlaugh agreed with it, I promptly contradicted him; for while I
+knew nothing about the book, I knew a great deal about Mr. Bradlaugh,
+and I knew that on the marriage question he was conservative rather
+than revolutionary. He detested "Free Love" doctrines, and had thrown
+himself strongly on the side of the agitation led so heroically for
+many years by Mrs. Josephine Butler. On my return to London after the
+lecture I naturally made inquiry as to the volume and its contents,
+and I found that it had been written by a Doctor of Medicine some
+years before, and sent to the _National Reformer_ for review, as to
+other journals, in ordinary course of business. It consisted of three
+parts--the first advocated, from the standpoint of medical science,
+what is roughly known as "Free Love"; the second was entirely medical;
+the third consisted of a clear and able exposition of the law of
+population as laid down by the Rev. Mr. Malthus, and--following the
+lines of John Stuart Mill--insisted that it was the duty of married
+persons to voluntarily limit their families within their means of
+subsistence. Mr. Bradlaugh, in reviewing the book, said that it was
+written "with honest and pure intent and purpose," and recommended to
+working men the exposition of the law of population. His enemies took
+hold of this recommendation, declared that he shared the author's
+views on the impermanence of the marriage tie, and, despite his
+reiterated contradictions, they used extracts against marriage from
+the book as containing his views. Anything more meanly vile it would
+be difficult to conceive, but such were the weapons used against him
+all his life, and used often by men whose own lives contrasted most
+unfavourably with his own. Unable to find anything in his own writings
+to serve their purpose, they used this book to damage him with those
+who knew nothing at first-hand of his views. What his enemies feared
+were not his views on marriage--which, as I have said, was
+conservative--but his Radicalism and his Atheism. To discredit him as
+politician they maligned him socially, and the idea that a man desires
+"to abolish marriage and the home," is a most convenient poniard, and
+the one most certain to wound. This was the origin of his worst
+difficulties, to be intensified, ere long, by his defence of
+Malthusianism. On me also fell the same lash, and I found myself held
+up to hatred as upholder of views that I abhorred.
+
+I may add that far warmer praise than that bestowed on this book by
+Mr. Bradlaugh was given by other writers, who were never attacked in
+the same way.
+
+In the _Reasoner_, edited by Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, I find warmer
+praise of it than in the _National Reformer_; in the review the
+following passage appears:--
+
+"In some respects all books of this class are evils: but it would be
+weakness and criminal prudery--a prudery as criminal as vice
+itself--not to say that such a book as the one in question is not only
+a far lesser evil than the one that it combats, but in one sense a
+book which it is a mercy to issue and courage to publish."
+
+The _Examiner_, reviewing the same book, declared it to be--
+
+"A very valuable, though rather heterogeneous book.... This is, we
+believe, the only book that has fully, honestly, and in a scientific
+spirit recognised all the elements in the problem--How are mankind to
+triumph over poverty, with its train of attendant evils?--and
+fearlessly endeavoured to find a practical solution."
+
+The _British Journal of Homoeopathy_ wrote:--
+
+"Though quite out of the province of our journal, we cannot refrain
+from stating that this work is unquestionably the most remarkable one,
+in many respects, we have ever met with. Though we differ _toto coelo_
+from the author in his views of religion and morality, and hold some
+of his remedies to tend rather to a dissolution than a reconstruction
+of society, yet we are bound to admit the benevolence and philanthropy
+of his motives. The scope of the work is nothing less than the whole
+field of political economy."
+
+Ernest Jones and others wrote yet more strongly, but out of all these
+Charles Bradlaugh alone has been selected for reproach, and has had
+the peculiar views of the anonymous author fathered on himself.
+
+Some of the lecture work in those days was pretty rough. In Darwen,
+Lancashire, in June, 1875, stone-throwing was regarded as a fair
+argument addressed to the Atheist lecturer. At Swansea, in March,
+1876, the fear of violence was so great that a guarantee against
+damage to the hall was exacted by the proprietor, and no local friend
+had the courage to take the chair for me. In September, 1876, at
+Hoyland, thanks to the exertions of Mr. Hebblethwaite, a Primitive
+Methodist, and two Protestant missionaries, I found the hall packed
+with a crowd that yelled at me with great vigour, stood on forms,
+shook fists at me, and otherwise showed feelings more warm than
+friendly. Taking advantage of a lull in the noise, I began to speak,
+and the tumult sank into quietness; but as I was leaving the hall it
+broke out afresh, and I walked slowly through a crowd that yelled and
+swore and struck at me, but somehow those nearest always shrank back
+and let me pass. In the dark, outside the hall, they took to kicking,
+but only one kick reached me, and the attempts to overturn the cab
+were foiled by the driver, who put his horse at a gallop. Later in the
+same month Mr. Bradlaugh and I visited Congleton together, having been
+invited there by Mr. and Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy. Mr. Bradlaugh
+lectured on the first evening to an accompaniment of broken windows,
+and I, sitting with Mrs. Elmy facing the platform, received a rather
+heavy blow on the back of the head from a stone thrown by some one in
+the room. We had a mile and a half to walk from the hall to the house,
+and were accompanied all the way by a stone-throwing crowd, who sang
+hymns at the tops of their voices, with interludes of curses and foul
+words. On the following evening I lectured, and our stone-throwing
+admirers escorted us to the hall; in the middle of the lecture a man
+shouted, "Put her out!" and a well-known wrestler of the
+neighbourhood, named Burbery, who had come to the hall with some
+friends to break up the meeting, stood up as at a signal in front of
+the platform and loudly interrupted. Mr. Bradlaugh, who was in the
+chair, told him to sit down, and, as he persisted in interrupting,
+informed him that he must either be quiet or go out. "Put me out!"
+shouted Mr. Burbery, striking an attitude. Mr. Bradlaugh left the
+platform and walked up to the noisy swashbuckler, who at once grappled
+with him and tried to throw him. But Mr. Burbery had not reckoned on
+the massive strength of his opponent, and when the "throw" was
+complete Mr. Burbery was underneath. Amid much excitement Mr. Burbery
+was propelled towards the door, being gently used on the way as a
+battering-ram against his friends who rushed to the rescue, and at the
+door was handed over to the police. The chairman then resumed his
+normal duties, with a brief "Go on" to me, and I promptly went on,
+finishing the lecture in peace. But outside the hall there was plenty
+of stone-throwing, and Mrs. Elmy received a cut on the temple from a
+flint. This stormy work gradually lessened, and my experience of it
+was a mere trifle compared to that which my predecessors had faced.
+Mr. Bradlaugh's early experiences involved much serious rioting, and
+Mrs. Harriet Law, a woman of much courage and of strong natural
+ability, had many a rough meeting in her lecturing days.
+
+In September, 1875, Mr. Bradlaugh again sailed for America, still to
+earn money there to pay his debts. Unhappily he was struck down by
+typhoid fever, and all his hopes of freeing himself thus were
+destroyed. His life was well-nigh despaired of, but the admirable
+skill of physician and nurse pulled him through. Said the _Baltimore
+Advertiser_:--
+
+"This long and severe illness has disappointed the hopes and retarded
+the object for which he came to this country; but he is gentleness and
+patience itself in his sickness in this strange land, and has endeared
+himself greatly to his physicians and attendants by his gratitude and
+appreciation of the slightest attention."
+
+His fortitude in face of death was also much commented on, lying there
+as he did far from home and from all he loved best. Never a quiver of
+fear touched him as he walked down into the valley of the shadow of
+death; the Rev. Mr. Frothingham bore public and admiring testimony in
+his own church to Mr. Bradlaugh's noble serenity, at once fearless and
+unpretending, and, himself a Theist, gave willing witness to the
+Atheist's calm strength. He came back to us at the end of September,
+worn to a shadow, weak as a child, and for many a long month he bore
+the traces of his wrestle with death.
+
+One part of my autumn's work during his absence was the delivery and
+subsequent publication of six lectures on the French Revolution. That
+stormy time had for me an intense fascination. I brooded over it,
+dreamed over it, and longed to tell the story from the people's point
+of view. I consequently read a large amount of the current literature
+of the time, as well as Louis Blanc's monumental work and the
+histories of Michelet, Lamartine, and others. Fortunately for me, Mr.
+Bradlaugh had a splendid collection of books on the subject, and ere
+we left England he brought me two cabs-full of volumes, aristocratic,
+ecclesiastical, democratic, and I studied all these diligently, and
+lived in them, till the French Revolution became to me as a drama in
+which I had myself taken part, and the actors were to me as personal
+friends and foes. In this, again, as in so much of my public work, I
+have to thank Mr. Bradlaugh for the influence which led me to read
+fully all sides of a question, and to read most carefully those from
+which I differed most, ere I considered myself competent to write or
+to speak thereon. From 1875 onwards I held office as one of the
+vice-presidents of the National Secular Society--a society founded on
+a broad basis of liberty, with the inspiring motto, "We Search for
+Truth." Mr. Bradlaugh was president, and I held office under him till
+he resigned his post in February, 1890, nine months after I had joined
+the Theosophical Society. The N.S.S., under his judicious and
+far-sighted leadership, became a real force in the country,
+theologically and politically, embracing large numbers of men and
+women who were Freethinkers as well as Radicals, and forming a nucleus
+of earnest workers, able to gather round them still larger numbers of
+others, and thus to powerfully affect public opinion. Once a year the
+society met in conference, and many a strong and lasting friendship
+between men living far apart dated from these yearly gatherings, so
+that all over the country spread a net-work of comradeship between the
+staunch followers of "our Charlie." These were the men and women who
+paid his election expenses over and over again, supported him in his
+Parliamentary struggle, came up to London to swell the demonstrations
+in his favour. And round them grew up a huge party--"the largest
+personal following of any public man since Mr. Gladstone," it was once
+said by an eminent man--who differed from him in theology, but
+passionately supported him in politics; miners, cutlers, weavers,
+spinners, shoemakers, operatives of every trade, strong, sturdy,
+self-reliant men who loved him to the last.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE KNOWLTON PAMPHLET.
+
+
+The year 1877 dawned, and in its early days began a struggle which,
+ending in victory all along the line, brought with it pain and anguish
+that I scarcely care to recall. An American physician, Dr. Charles
+Knowlton, convinced of the truth of the teaching of the Rev. Mr.
+Malthus, and seeing that that teaching had either no practical value
+or tended to the great increase of prostitution, unless married
+people were taught to limit their families within their means of
+livelihood--wrote a pamphlet on the voluntary limitation of the
+family. It was published somewhere in the Thirties--about 1835, I
+think--and was sold unchallenged in England as well as in America for
+some forty years. Philosophers of the Bentham school, like John Stuart
+Mill, endorsed its teachings, and the bearing of population on poverty
+was an axiom in economic literature. Dr. Knowlton's work was a
+physiological treatise, advocating conjugal prudence and parental
+responsibility; it argued in favour of early marriage, with a view to
+the purity of social life; but as early marriage between persons of
+small means generally implies a large family, leading either to
+pauperism or to lack of necessary food, clothing, education, and fair
+start in life for the children, Dr. Knowlton advocated the restriction
+of the number of the family within the means of subsistence, and
+stated the methods by which this restriction could be carried out. The
+book was never challenged till a disreputable Bristol bookseller put
+some copies on sale to which he added some improper pictures, and he
+was prosecuted and convicted. The publisher of the _National Reformer_
+and of Mr. Bradlaugh's and my books and pamphlets had taken over a
+stock of Knowlton's pamphlets among other literature he bought, and he
+was prosecuted and, to our great dismay, pleaded guilty. We at once
+removed our publishing from his hands, and after careful deliberation
+we decided to publish the incriminated pamphlet in order to test the
+right of discussion on the population question, when, with the advice
+to limit the family, information was given as to how that advice could
+be followed. We took a little shop, printed the pamphlet, and sent
+notice to the police that we would commence the sale at a certain day
+and hour, and ourselves sell the pamphlet, so that no one else might
+be endangered by our action. We resigned our offices in the National
+Secular Society that we might not injure the society, but the
+executive first, and then the Annual Conference, refused to accept the
+resignations. Our position as regarded the pamphlet was simple and
+definite; had it been brought to us for publication, we stated, we
+should not have published it, for it was not a treatise of high merit;
+but, prosecuted as immoral because it advised the limitation of the
+family, it at once embodied the right of publication. In a preface to
+the republished edition, we wrote:--
+
+"We republish this pamphlet, honestly believing that on all questions
+affecting the happiness of the people, whether they be theological,
+political, or social, fullest right of free discussion ought to be
+maintained at all hazards. We do not personally endorse all that Dr.
+Knowlton says: his 'Philosophical Proem' seems to us full of
+philosophical mistakes, and--as we are neither of us doctors--we are
+not prepared to endorse his medical views; but since progress can only
+be made through discussion, and no discussion is possible where
+differing opinions are suppressed, we claim the right to publish all
+opinions, so that the public, enabled to see all sides of a question,
+may have the materials for forming a sound judgment."
+
+We were not blind to the danger to which this defiance of the
+authorities exposed us, but it was not the danger of failure, with the
+prison as penalty, that gave us pause. It was the horrible
+misconceptions that we saw might arise; the odious imputations on
+honour and purity that would follow. Could we, the teachers of a lofty
+morality, venture to face a prosecution for publishing what would be
+technically described as an obscene book, and risk the ruin of our
+future, dependent as that was on our fair fame? To Mr. Bradlaugh it
+meant, as he felt, the almost certain destruction of his Parliamentary
+position, the forging by his own hands of a weapon that in the hands
+of his foes would be well-nigh fatal. To me it meant the loss of the
+pure reputation I prized, the good name I had guarded--scandal the
+most terrible a woman could face. But I had seen the misery of the
+poor, of my sister-women with children crying for bread; the wages of
+the workmen were often sufficient for four, but eight or ten they
+could not maintain. Should I set my own safety, my own good name,
+against the helping of these? Did it matter that my reputation should
+be ruined, if its ruin helped to bring remedy to this otherwise
+hopeless wretchedness of thousands? What was worth all my talk about
+self-sacrifice and self-surrender, if, brought to the test, I failed?
+So, with heart aching but steady, I came to my resolution; and though
+I know now that I was wrong intellectually, and blundered in the
+remedy, I was right morally in the will to sacrifice all to help the
+poor, and I can rejoice that I faced a storm of obloquy fiercer and
+harder to bear than any other which can ever touch me again. I learned
+a lesson of stern indifference to all judgments from without that were
+not endorsed by condemnation from within. The long suffering that
+followed was a splendid school for the teaching of endurance.
+
+The day before the pamphlet was put on sale we ourselves delivered
+copies to the Chief Clerk of the Magistrates at Guildhall, to the
+officer in charge at the City Police Office in Old Jewry, and to the
+Solicitor for the City of London. With each pamphlet was a notice that
+we would attend and sell the book from 4 to 5 p.m. on the following
+day, Saturday, March 24th. This we accordingly did, and in order to
+save trouble we offered to attend daily at the shop from 10 to 11 a.m.
+to facilitate our arrest, should the authorities determine to
+prosecute. The offer was readily accepted, and after some little
+delay--during which a deputation from the Christian Evidence Society
+waited upon Mr. Cross to urge the Tory Government to prosecute
+us--warrants were issued against us and we were arrested on April 6th.
+Letters of approval and encouragement came from the most diverse
+quarters, including among their writers General Garibaldi, the
+well-known economist, Yves Guyot, the great French constitutional
+lawyer, Emile Acollas, together with letters literally by the hundred
+from poor men and women thanking and blessing us for the stand taken.
+Noticeable were the numbers of letters from clergymen's wives, and
+wives of ministers of all denominations.
+
+After our arrest we were taken to the police-station in Bridewell
+Place, and thence to the Guildhall, where Alderman Figgins was
+sitting, before whom we duly appeared, while in the back of the court
+waited what an official described as "a regular waggon-load of bail."
+We were quickly released, the preliminary investigation being fixed
+for ten days later--April 17th. At the close of the day the magistrate
+released us on our own recognisances, without bail; and it was so
+fully seen on all sides that we were fighting for a principle that no
+bail was asked for during the various stages of the trial. Two days
+later we were committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court, but
+Mr. Bradlaugh moved for a writ of _certiorari_ to remove the trial to
+the Court of Queen's Bench; Lord Chief Justice Cockburn said he would
+grant the writ if "upon looking at it (the book), we think its object
+is the legitimate one of promoting knowledge on a matter of human
+interest," but not if the science were only a cover for impurity, and
+he directed that copies of the book should be handed in for perusal by
+himself and Mr. Justice Mellor. Having read the book they granted the
+writ.
+
+The trial commenced on June 18th before the Lord Chief Justice of
+England and a special jury, Sir Hardinge Giffard, the
+Solicitor-General of the Tory Government, leading against us, and we
+defending ourselves. The Lord Chief Justice "summed up strongly for an
+acquittal," as a morning paper said; he declared that "a more
+ill-advised and more injudicious proceeding in the way of a
+prosecution was probably never brought into a court of justice," and
+described us as "two enthusiasts who have been actuated by a desire to
+do good in a particular department of society." He then went on to a
+splendid statement of the law of population, and ended by praising our
+straightforwardness and asserting Knowlton's honesty of intention.
+Every one in court thought that we had won our case, but they had not
+taken into account the religious and political hatred against us and
+the presence on the jury of such men as Mr. Walter, of the _Times_.
+After an hour and thirty-five minutes of delay the verdict was a
+compromise: "We are unanimously of opinion that the book in question
+is calculated to deprave public morals, but at the same time we
+entirely exonerate the defendants from any corrupt motive in
+publishing it." The Lord Chief Justice looked troubled, and said that
+he should have to translate the verdict into one of guilty, and on
+that some of the jury turned to leave the box, it having been
+agreed--we heard later from one of them--that if the verdict were not
+accepted in that form they should retire again, as six of the jury
+were against convicting us; but the foreman, who was bitterly hostile,
+jumped at the chance of snatching a conviction, and none of those in
+our favour had the courage to contradict him on the spur of the
+moment, so the foreman's "Guilty" passed, and the judge set us free,
+on Mr. Bradlaugh's recognisances to come up for judgment that day
+week.
+
+On that day we moved to quash the indictment and for a new trial,
+partly on a technical ground and partly on the ground that the
+verdict, having acquitted us of wrong motive, was in our favour, not
+against us. On this the Court did not agree with us, holding that the
+part of the indictment alleging corrupt motive was superfluous. Then
+came the question of sentence, and on this the Lord Chief Justice did
+his best to save us; we were acquitted of any intent to violate the
+law; would we submit to the verdict of the jury and promise not to
+sell the book? No, we would not; we claimed the right to sell, and
+meant to vindicate it. The judge pleaded, argued, finally got angry
+with us, and, at last, compelled to pass sentence, he stated that if
+we would have yielded he would have let us go free without penalty,
+but that as we would set ourselves against the law, break it and defy
+it--a sore offence from the judge's point of view--he could only pass
+a heavy sentence on each of six months' imprisonment, a fine of L200,
+and recognisances of L500 for two years, and this, as he again
+repeated, upon the assumption "that they do intend to set the law at
+defiance." Even despite this he made us first-class misdemeanants.
+Then, as Mr. Bradlaugh stated that we should move for a writ of error,
+he liberated us on Mr. Bradlaugh's recognisance for L100, the queerest
+comment on his view of the case and of our characters, since we were
+liable jointly to L1,400 under the sentence, to say nothing of the
+imprisonment. But prison and money penalties vanished into thin air,
+for the writ of error was granted, proved successful, and the verdict
+was quashed.
+
+Then ensued a somewhat anxious time. We were resolute to continue
+selling; were our opponents equally resolved to prosecute us? We could
+not tell. I wrote a pamphlet entitled "The Law of Population," giving
+the arguments which had convinced me of its truth, the terrible
+distress and degradation entailed on families by overcrowding and the
+lack of the necessaries of life, pleading for early marriages that
+prostitution might be destroyed, and limitation of the family that
+pauperism might be avoided; finally, giving the information which
+rendered early marriage without these evils possible. This pamphlet
+was put in circulation as representing our view of the subject, and we
+again took up the sale of Knowlton's. Mr. Bradlaugh carried the war
+into the enemy's country, and commenced an action against the police
+for the recovery of some pamphlets they had seized; he carried the
+action to a successful issue, recovered the pamphlets, bore them off
+in triumph, and we sold them all with an inscription across them,
+"Recovered from the police." We continued the sale of Knowlton's tract
+for some time, until we received an intimation that no further
+prosecution would be attempted, and on this we at once dropped its
+publication, substituting for it my "Law of Population."
+
+[Illustration: CHARLES BRADLAUGH M.P.]
+
+But the worst part of the fight, for me, was to come. Prosecution of
+the "Law of Population" was threatened, but never commenced; a worse
+weapon against me was in store. An attempt had been made in August,
+1875, to deprive me of the custody of my little girl by hiding her
+away when she went on her annual visit of one month to her father, but
+I had promptly recovered her by threatening to issue a writ of _habeas
+corpus._ Now it was felt that the Knowlton trial might be added to the
+charges of blasphemy that could be urged against me, and that this
+double-barrelled gun might be discharged with effect. I received
+notice in January, 1878, that an application was to be made to the
+High Court of Chancery to deprive me of the child, but the petition
+was not filed till the following April. Mabel was dangerously ill with
+scarlet fever at the time, and though this fact was communicated to
+her father I received a copy of the petition while sitting at her
+bedside. The petition alleged that, "The said Annie Besant is, by
+addresses, lectures, and writings, endeavouring to propagate the
+principles of Atheism, and has published a book entitled 'The Gospel
+of Atheism.' She has also associated herself with an infidel lecturer
+and author named Charles Bradlaugh in giving lectures and in
+publishing books and pamphlets, whereby the truth of the Christian
+religion is impeached, and disbelief in all religion inculcated."
+
+It further alleged against me the publication of the Knowlton
+pamphlet, and the writing of the "Law of Population." Unhappily, the
+petition came for hearing before the then Master of the Rolls, Sir
+George Jessel, a man animated by the old spirit of Hebrew bigotry, to
+which he had added the time-serving morality of a "man of the world,"
+sceptical as to all sincerity, and contemptuous of all devotion to an
+unpopular cause. The treatment I received at his hands on my first
+appearance in court told me what I had to expect. I had already had
+some experience of English judges, the stately kindness and gentleness
+of the Lord Chief Justice, the perfect impartiality and dignified
+courtesy of the Lords Justices of Appeal. My astonishment, then, can
+be imagined when, in answer to a statement by Mr. Ince, Q.C., that I
+appeared in person, I heard a harsh, loud voice exclaim:
+
+"Appear in person? A lady appear in person? Never heard of such a
+thing! Does the lady really appear in person?"
+
+As the London papers had been full of my appearing in person in the
+other courts and had contained the high compliments of the Lord Chief
+Justice on my conduct of my own case, Sir George Jessel's pretended
+astonishment seemed a little overdone. After a variety of similar
+remarks delivered in the most grating tones and in the roughest
+manner, Sir George Jessel tried to obtain his object by browbeating me
+directly. "Is this the lady?"
+
+"I am the respondent, my lord, Mrs. Besant."
+
+"Then I advise you, Mrs. Besant, to employ counsel to represent you,
+if you can afford it; and I suppose you can."
+
+"With all submission to your lordship, I am afraid I must claim my
+right of arguing my case in person."
+
+"You will do so if you please, of course, but I think you had much
+better appear by counsel. I give you notice that, if you do not, you
+must not expect to be shown any consideration. You will not be heard
+by me at any greater length than the case requires, nor allowed to go
+into irrelevant matter, as persons who argue their own cases usually
+do."
+
+"I trust I shall not do so, my lord; but in any case I shall be
+arguing under your lordship's complete control."
+
+This encouraging beginning may be taken as a sample of the case--it
+was one long fight against clever counsel, aided by a counsel instead
+of a judge on the bench. Only once did judge and counsel fall out. Mr.
+Ince and Mr. Bardswell had been arguing that my Atheism and
+Malthusianism made me an unfit guardian for my child; Mr. Ince
+declared that Mabel, educated by me, would "be helpless for good in
+this world," and "hopeless for good hereafter, outcast in this life
+and damned in the next." Mr. Bardswell implored the judge to consider
+that my custody of her "would be detrimental to the future prospects
+of the child in society, to say nothing of her eternal prospects." Had
+not the matter been to me of such heart-breaking importance, I could
+have laughed at the mixture of Mrs. Grundy, marriage establishment,
+and hell, presented as an argument for robbing a mother of her child.
+But Mr. Bardswell carelessly forgot that Sir George Jessel was a Jew,
+and lifting eyes to heaven in horrified appeal, he gasped out:
+
+"Your lordship, I think, will scarcely credit it, but Mrs. Besant
+says, in a later affidavit, that she took away the Testament from the
+child because it contained coarse passages unfit for a child to read."
+
+The opportunity was too tempting for a Jew to refrain from striking at
+a book written by apostate Jews, and Sir George Jessel answered
+sharply:
+
+"It is not true to say there are no passages unfit for a child's
+reading, because I think there are a great many."
+
+"I do not know of any passages that could fairly be called coarse."
+
+"I cannot quite assent to that."
+
+Barring this little episode judge and counsel showed a charming
+unanimity. I distinctly said I was an Atheist, that I had withdrawn
+the child from religious instruction at the day-school she attended,
+that I had written various anti-Christian books, and so on; but I
+claimed the child's custody on the ground that the deed of separation
+distinctly gave it to me, and had been executed by her father after I
+had left the Christian Church, and that my opinions were not
+sufficient to invalidate it. It was admitted on the other side that
+the child was admirably cared for, and there was no attempt at
+attacking my personal character. The judge stated that I had taken the
+greatest possible care of the child, but decided that the mere fact of
+my refusing to give the child religious instruction was sufficient
+ground for depriving me of her custody. Secular education he regarded
+as "not only reprehensible, but detestable, and likely to work utter
+ruin to the child, and I certainly should upon this ground alone
+decide that this child ought not to remain another day under the care
+of her mother."
+
+Sir George Jessel denounced also my Malthusian views in a fashion at
+once so brutal and so untruthful as to facts, that some years later
+another judge, the senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court of New
+South Wales, declared in a judgment delivered in his own court that
+there was "no language used by Lord Cockburn which justified the
+Master of the Rolls in assuming that Lord Cockburn regarded the book
+as obscene," and that "little weight is to be attached to his opinion
+on a point not submitted for his decision"; he went on to administer a
+sharp rebuke for the way in which Sir George Jessel travelled outside
+the case, and remarked that "abuse, however, of an unpopular opinion,
+whether indulged in by judges or other people, is not argument, nor
+can the vituperation of opponents in opinion prove them to be
+immoral." However, Sir George Jessel was all-powerful in his own
+court, and he deprived me of my child, refusing to stay the order even
+until the hearing of my appeal against his decision. A messenger from
+the father came to my house, and the little child was carried away by
+main force, shrieking and struggling, still weak from the fever, and
+nearly frantic with fear and passionate resistance. No access to her
+was given me, and I gave notice that if access were denied me, I would
+sue for a restitution of conjugal rights, merely that I might see my
+children. But the strain had been too great, and I nearly went mad,
+spending hours pacing up and down the empty rooms, striving to weary
+myself to exhaustion that I might forget. The loneliness and silence
+of the house, of which my darling had always been the sunshine and the
+music, weighed on me like an evil dream; I listened for the patter of
+the dancing feet, and merry, thrilling laughter that rang through the
+garden, the sweet music of the childish voice; during my sleepless
+nights I missed in the darkness the soft breathing of the little
+child; each morning I longed in vain for the clinging arms and soft,
+sweet kisses. At last health broke down, and fever struck me, and
+mercifully gave me the rest of pain and delirium instead of the agony
+of conscious loss. Through that terrible illness, day after day, Mr.
+Bradlaugh came to me, and sat writing beside me, feeding me with ice
+and milk, refused from all others, and behaving more like a tender
+mother than a man friend; he saved my life, though it seemed to me for
+awhile of little value, till the first months of lonely pain were
+over. When recovered, I took steps to set aside an order obtained by
+Mr. Besant during my illness, forbidding me to bring any suit against
+him, and even the Master of the Rolls, on hearing that all access had
+been denied to me, and the money due to me stopped, uttered words of
+strong condemnation of the way in which I had been treated. Finally
+the deed of separation executed in 1873 was held to be good as
+protecting Mr. Besant from any suit brought by me, whether for divorce
+or for restitution of conjugal rights, while the clauses giving me the
+custody of the child were set aside. The Court of Appeal in April,
+1879, upheld the decision, the absolute right of the father as against
+a married mother being upheld. This ignoring of all right to her
+children on the part of the married mother is a scandal and a wrong
+that has since been redressed by Parliament, and the husband has no
+longer in his grasp this instrument of torture, whose power to agonise
+depends on the tenderness and strength of the motherliness of the
+wife. In the days when the law took my child from me, it virtually
+said to all women: "Choose which of these two positions, as wife and
+mother, you will occupy. If you are legally your husband's wife, you
+can have no legal claim to your children; if legally you are your
+husband's mistress, your rights as mother are secure." That stigma on
+marriage is now removed.
+
+One thing I gained in the Court of Appeal. The Court expressed a
+strong view as to my right of access, and directed me to apply to Sir
+George Jessel for it, adding that it could not doubt he would grant
+it. Under cover of this I applied to the Master of the Rolls, and
+obtained liberal access to the children; but I found that my visits
+kept Mabel in a continual state of longing and fretting for me, while
+the ingenious forms of petty insult that were devised against me and
+used in the children's presence would soon become palpable to them and
+cause continual pain. So, after a painful struggle with myself, I
+resolved to give up the right of seeing them, feeling that thus only
+could I save them from constantly recurring conflict, destructive of
+all happiness and of all respect for one or the other parent.
+Resolutely I turned my back on them that I might spare them trouble,
+and determined that, robbed of my own, I would be a mother to all
+helpless children I could aid, and cure the pain at my own heart by
+soothing the pain of others.
+
+As far as regards this whole struggle over the Knowlton pamphlet,
+victory was finally won all along the line. Not only did we, as
+related, recover all our seized pamphlets, and continue the sale till
+all prosecution and threat of prosecution were definitely surrendered;
+but my own tract had an enormous sale, so that when I withdrew it from
+sale in June, 1891, I was offered a large sum for the copyright, an
+offer which I, of course, refused. Since that time not a copy has been
+sold with my knowledge or permission, but long ere that the pamphlet
+had received a very complete legal vindication. For while it
+circulated untouched in England, a prosecution was attempted against
+it in New South Wales, but was put an end to by an eloquent and
+luminous judgment by the senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court, Mr.
+Justice Windmeyer, in December, 1888. This judge, the most respected
+in the great Australian colony, spoke out plainly and strongly on the
+morality of such teaching. "Take the case," he said, "of a woman
+married to a drunken husband, steadily ruining his constitution and
+hastening to the drunkard's doom, loss of employment for himself,
+semi-starvation for his family, and finally death, without a shilling
+to leave those whom he has brought into the world, but armed with the
+authority of the law to treat his wife as his slave, ever brutally
+insisting on the indulgence of his marital rights. Where is the
+immorality, if, already broken in health from unresting maternity,
+having already a larger family than she can support when the miserable
+breadwinner has drunk himself to death, the woman avails herself of
+the information given in this book, and so averts the consequences of
+yielding to her husband's brutal insistence on his marital rights?
+Already weighted with a family that she is unable to decently bring
+up, the immorality, it seems to me, would be in the reckless and
+criminal disregard of precautions which would prevent her bringing
+into the world daughters whose future outlook as a career would be
+prostitution, or sons whose inherited taint of alcoholism would soon
+drag them down with their sisters to herd with the seething mass of
+degenerate and criminal humanity that constitutes the dangerous
+classes of great cities. In all these cases the appeal is from
+thoughtless, unreasoning prejudice to conscience, and, if listened to,
+its voice will be heard unmistakably indicating where the path of duty
+lies."
+
+The judge forcibly refused to be any party to the prohibition of such
+a pamphlet, regarding it as of high service to the community. He said:
+"So strong is the dread of the world's censure upon this topic that
+few have the courage openly to express their views upon it; and its
+nature is such that it is only amongst thinkers who discuss all
+subjects, or amongst intimate acquaintances, that community of thought
+upon the question is discovered. But let any one inquire amongst those
+who have sufficient education and ability to think for themselves, and
+who do not idly float, slaves to the current of conventional opinion,
+and he will discover that numbers of men and women of purest lives, of
+noblest aspirations, pious, cultivated, and refined, see no wrong in
+teaching the ignorant that it is wrong to bring into the world
+children to whom they cannot do justice, and who think it folly to
+stop short in telling them simply and plainly how to prevent it. A
+more robust view of morals teaches that it is puerile to ignore human
+passions and human physiology. A clearer perception of truth and the
+safety of trusting to it teaches that in law, as in religion, it is
+useless trying to limit the knowledge of mankind by any inquisitorial
+attempts to place upon a judicial Index Expurgatorius works written
+with an earnest purpose, and commending themselves to thinkers of
+well-balanced minds. I will be no party to any such attempt. I do not
+believe that it was ever meant that the Obscene Publication Act should
+apply to cases of this kind, but only to the publication of such
+matter as all good men would regard as lewd and filthy, to lewd and
+bawdy novels, pictures and exhibitions, evidently published and given
+for lucre's sake. It could never have been intended to stifle the
+expression of thought by the earnest-minded on a subject of
+transcendent national importance like the present, and I will not
+strain it for that purpose. As pointed out by Lord Cockburn in the
+case of the Queen v. Bradlaugh and Besant, all prosecutions of this
+kind should be regarded as mischievous, even by those who disapprove
+the opinions sought to be stifled, inasmuch as they only tend more
+widely to diffuse the teaching objected to. To those, on the other
+hand, who desire its promulgation, it must be a matter of
+congratulation that this, like all attempted persecutions of thinkers,
+will defeat its own object, and that truth, like a torch, 'the more
+it's shook it shines.'"
+
+The argument of Mr. Justice Windmeyer for the Neo-Malthusian position
+was (as any one may see who reads the full text of the judgment) one
+of the most luminous and cogent I have ever read. The judgment was
+spoken of at the time in the English press as a "brilliant triumph for
+Mrs. Besant," and so I suppose it was; but no legal judgment could
+undo the harm wrought on the public mind in England by malignant and
+persistent misrepresentation. What that trial and its results cost me
+in pain no one but myself will ever know; on the other hand, there was
+the passionate gratitude evidenced by letters from thousands of poor
+married women--many from the wives of country clergymen and
+curates--thanking and blessing me for showing them how to escape from
+the veritable hell in which they lived. The "upper classes" of society
+know nothing about the way in which the poor live; how their
+overcrowding destroys all sense of personal dignity, of modesty, of
+outward decency, till human life, as Bishop Fraser justly said, is
+"degraded below the level of the swine." To such, and among such I
+went, and I could not grudge the price that then seemed to me as the
+ransom for their redemption. To me, indeed, it meant the losing of all
+that made life dear, but for them it seemed to be the gaining of all
+that gave hope of a better future. So how could I hesitate--I whose
+heart had been fired by devotion to an ideal Humanity, inspired by
+that Materialism that is of love and not of hate?
+
+And now, in August, 1893, we find the _Christian World,_ the
+representative organ of orthodox Christian Protestantism, proclaiming
+the right and the duty of voluntary limitation of the family. In a
+leading article, after a number of letters had been inserted, it
+said:--
+
+"The conditions are assuredly wrong which bring one member of the
+married partnership into a bondage so cruel. It is no less evident
+that the cause of the bondage in such cases lies in the too rapid
+multiplication of the family. There was a time when any idea of
+voluntary limitation was regarded by pious people as interfering with
+Providence. We are beyond that now, and have become capable of
+recognising that Providence works through the common sense of
+individual brains. We limit population just as much by deferring
+marriage from prudential motives as by any action that may be taken
+after it.... Apart from certain methods of limitation, the morality of
+which is gravely questioned by many, there are certain
+easily-understood physiological laws of the subject, the failure to
+know and to observe which is inexcusable on the part either of men or
+women in these circumstances. It is worth noting in this connection
+that Dr. Billings, in his article in this month's _Forum_, on the
+diminishing birth-rate of the United States, gives as one of the
+reasons the greater diffusion of intelligence, by means of popular and
+school treatises on physiology, than formerly prevailed."
+
+Thus has opinion changed in sixteen years, and all the obloquy poured
+on us is seen to have been the outcome of ignorance and bigotry.
+
+As for the children, what was gained by their separation from me? The
+moment they were old enough to free themselves, they came back to me,
+my little girl's too brief stay with me being ended by her happy
+marriage, and I fancy the fears expressed for her eternal future will
+prove as groundless as the fears for her temporal ruin have proved to
+be! Not only so, but both are treading in my steps as regards their
+views of the nature and destiny of man, and have joined in their
+bright youth the Theosophical Society to which, after so many
+struggles, I won my way.
+
+The struggle on the right to discuss the prudential restraint of
+population did not, however, conclude without a martyr. Mr. Edward
+Truelove, alluded to above, was prosecuted for selling a treatise by
+Robert Dale Owen on "Moral Physiology," and a pamphlet entitled,
+"Individual, Family, and National Poverty." He was tried on February
+1, 1878, before the Lord Chief Justice in the Court of Queen's Bench,
+and was most ably defended by Professor W.A. Hunter. The jury spent
+two hours in considering their verdict, and returned into court and
+stated that they were unable to agree. The majority of the jury were
+ready to convict, if they felt sure that Mr. Truelove would not be
+punished, but one of them boldly declared in court: "As to the book,
+it is written in plain language for plain people, and I think that
+many more persons ought to know what the contents of the book are."
+The jury was discharged, in consequence of this one man's courage, but
+Mr. Truelove's persecutors--the Vice Society--were determined not to
+let their victim free. They proceeded to trial a second time, and
+wisely endeavoured to secure a special jury, feeling that as
+prudential restraint would raise wages by limiting the supply of
+labour, they would be more likely to obtain a verdict from a jury of
+"gentlemen" than from one composed of workers. This attempt was
+circumvented by Mr. Truelove's legal advisers, who let a _procedendo_
+go which sent back the trial to the Old Bailey. The second trial was
+held on May 16th at the Central Criminal Court before Baron Pollock
+and a common jury, Professor Hunter and Mr. J.M. Davidson appearing
+for the defence. The jury convicted, and the brave old man,
+sixty-eight years of age, was condemned to four months' imprisonment
+and L50 fine for selling a pamphlet which had been sold unchallenged,
+during a period of forty-five years, by James Watson, George Jacob
+Holyoake, Austin Holyoake, and Charles Watts. Mr. Grain, the counsel
+employed by the Vice Society, most unfairly used against Mr. Truelove
+my "Law of Population," a pamphlet which contained, Baron Pollock
+said, "the head and front of the offence in the other [the Knowlton]
+case." I find an indignant protest against this odious unfairness in
+the _National Reformer_ for May 19th: "My 'Law of Population' was used
+against Mr. Truelove as an aggravation of his offence, passing over
+the utter meanness--worthy only of Collette--of using against a
+prisoner a book whose author has never been attacked for writing
+it--does Mr. Collette, or do the authorities, imagine that the
+severity shown to Mr. Truelove will in any fashion deter me from
+continuing the Malthusian propaganda? Let me here assure them, one and
+all, that it will do nothing of the kind; I shall continue to sell the
+'Law of Population' and to advocate scientific checks to population,
+just as though Mr. Collette and his Vice Society were all dead and
+buried. In commonest justice they are bound to prosecute me, and if
+they get, and keep, a verdict against me, and succeed in sending me to
+prison, they will only make people more anxious to read my book, and
+make me more personally powerful as a teacher of the views which they
+attack."
+
+A persistent attempt was made to obtain a writ of error in Mr.
+Truelove's case, but the Tory Attorney-General, Sir John Holker,
+refused it, although the ground on which it was asked was one of the
+grounds on which a similar writ had been granted to Mr. Bradlaugh and
+myself. Mr. Truelove was therefore compelled to suffer his sentence,
+but memorials, signed by 11,000 persons, asking for his release, were
+sent to the Home Secretary from every part of the country, and a
+crowded meeting in St. James's Hall, London, demanded his liberation
+with only six dissentients. The whole agitation did not shorten Mr.
+Truelove's sentence by a single day, and he was not released from
+Coldbath Fields Prison until September 5th. On the 12th of the same
+month the Hall of Science was crowded with enthusiastic friends, who
+assembled to do him honour, and he was presented with a
+beautifully-illuminated address and a purse containing L177
+(subsequent subscriptions raised the amount to L197 16s. 6d.).
+
+It is scarcely necessary to say that one of the results of the
+prosecution was a great agitation throughout the country, and a wide
+popularisation of Malthusian views. Some huge demonstrations were held
+in favour of free discussion; on one occasion the Free Trade Hall,
+Manchester, was crowded to the doors; on another the Star Music Hall,
+Bradford, was crammed in every corner; on another the Town Hall,
+Birmingham, had not a seat or a bit of standing-room unoccupied.
+Wherever we went, separately or together, it was the same story, and
+not only were Malthusian lectures eagerly attended, and Malthusian
+literature eagerly bought, but curiosity brought many to listen to our
+Radical and Freethought lectures, and thousands heard for the first
+time what Secularism really meant. The Press, both London and
+provincial, agreed in branding the prosecution as foolish, and it was
+generally remarked that it resulted only in the wider circulation of
+the indicted book, and the increased popularity of those who had stood
+for the right of publication. The furious attacks since made upon us
+have been made chiefly by those who differ from us in theological
+creed, and who have found a misrepresentation of our prosecution
+served them as a convenient weapon of attack. During the last few
+years public opinion has been gradually coming round to our side, in
+consequence of the pressure of poverty resulting from widespread
+depression of trade, and during the sensation caused in 1884 by "The
+Bitter Cry of Outcast London," many writers in the _Daily
+News_--notably Mr. G.R. Sims--boldly alleged that the distress was to
+a great extent due to the large families of the poor, and mentioned
+that we had been prosecuted for giving the very knowledge which would
+bring salvation to the sufferers in our great cities.
+
+Among the useful results of the prosecution was the establishment of
+the Malthusian League, "to agitate for the abolition of all penalties
+on the public discussion of the population question," and "to spread
+among the people, by all practicable means, a knowledge of the law of
+population, of its consequences, and of its bearing upon human conduct
+and morals." The first general meeting of the League was held at the
+Hall of Science on July 26, 1877, and a council of twenty persons was
+elected, and this council on August 2nd elected Dr. C.R. Drysdale,
+M.D., President; Mr. Swaagman, Treasurer; Mrs. Besant, Secretary; Mr.
+Shearer, Assistant-Secretary; and Mr. Hember, Financial Secretary.
+Since 1877 the League, under the same indefatigable president, has
+worked hard to carry out its objects; it has issued a large number of
+leaflets and tracts; it supports a monthly journal, the _Malthusian;_
+numerous lectures have been delivered under its auspices in all parts
+of the country; and it has now a medical branch, into which none but
+duly qualified medical men and women are admitted, with members in all
+European countries.
+
+Another result of the prosecution was the accession of "D." to the
+staff of the _National Reformer_. This able and thoughtful writer came
+forward and joined our ranks as soon as he heard of the attack on us,
+and he further volunteered to conduct the journal during our expected
+imprisonment. From that time to this--a period of fifteen
+years--articles from his pen appeared in its columns week by week, and
+during all that time not one solitary difficulty arose between editors
+and contributor. In public a trustworthy colleague, in private a warm
+and sincere friend, "D." proved an unmixed benefit bestowed upon us by
+the prosecution.
+
+Nor was "D." the only friend brought to us by our foes. I cannot ever
+think of that time without remembering that the prosecution brought me
+first into close intimacy with Mrs. Annie Parris--the wife of Mr.
+Touzeau Parris, the Secretary of the Defence Committee throughout all
+the fight--a lady who, during that long struggle, and during the, for
+me, far worse struggle that succeeded it, over the custody of my
+daughter, proved to me the most loving and sisterly of friends. One or
+two other friendships which will, I hope, last my life, date from that
+same time of strife and anxiety.
+
+The amount of money subscribed by the public during the Knowlton and
+succeeding prosecutions gives some idea of the interest felt in the
+struggle. The Defence Fund Committee in March, 1878, presented a
+balance-sheet, showing subscriptions amounting to L1,292 5s. 4d., and
+total expenditure in the Queen v. Bradlaugh and Besant, the Queen v.
+Truelove, and the appeal against Mr. Vaughan's order (the last two up
+to date) of L1,274 10s. This account was then closed and the balance
+of L17 15s. 4d. passed on to a new fund for the defence of Mr.
+Truelove, the carrying on of the appeal against the destruction of the
+Knowlton pamphlet, and the bearing of the costs incident on the
+petition lodged against myself. In July this new fund had reached L196
+16s. 7d., and after paying the remainder of the costs in Mr.
+Truelove's case, a balance of L26 15s. 2d. was carried on. This again
+rose to L247 15s. 2-1/2d., and the fund bore the expenses of Mr.
+Bradlaugh's successful appeal on the Knowlton pamphlet, the petition
+and subsequent proceedings in which I was concerned in the Court of
+Chancery, and an appeal on Mr. Truelove's behalf, unfortunately
+unsuccessful, against an order for the destruction of the Dale Owen
+pamphlet. This last decision was given on February 21, 1880, and on
+this the Defence Fund was closed. On Mr. Truelove's release, as
+mentioned above, a testimonial to the amount of L197 16s. 6d. was
+presented to him, and after the close of the struggle some anonymous
+friend sent to me personally L200 as "thanks for the courage and
+ability shown." In addition to all this, the Malthusian League
+received no less than L455 11s. 9d. during the first year of its life,
+and started on its second year with a balance in hand of L77 5s. 8d.
+
+A somewhat similar prosecution in America, in which the bookseller,
+Mr. D.M. Bennett, sold a book with which he did not agree, and was
+imprisoned, led to our giving him a warm welcome when, after his
+release, he visited England. We entertained him at the Hall of Science
+at a crowded gathering, and I was deputed as spokesman to present him
+with a testimonial. This I did in the following speech, quoted here in
+order to show the spirit then animating me:--
+
+"Friends, Mr. Bradlaugh has spoken of the duty that calls us here
+to-night. It is pleasant to think that in our work that duty is one to
+which we are not unaccustomed. In our army there are more true
+soldiers than traitors, more that are faithful to the trust of keeping
+the truth than those who shrink when the hour of danger comes. And I
+would ask Mr. Bennett to-night not to measure English feeling towards
+him by the mere number of those present. They that are here are
+representatives of many thousands of our fellow-countrymen. Glance
+down this middle table, and you will see that it is not without some
+right that we claim to welcome you in the name of multitudes of the
+citizens of England. There are those who taunt us with want of
+loyalty, and with the name of infidels. In what church will they find
+men and women more loyal to truth and conscience? The name infidel is
+not for us so long as we are faithful to the truth we know. If I
+speak, as I have done, of national representation in this hall this
+evening, tell me, you who know those who sit here, who have watched
+some of them for years, others of them but for a brief time, do I not
+speak truth? Take them one by one. Your President but a little while
+ago in circumstances similar to those wherein our guest himself was
+placed, with the true lover's keenness that recognises the mistress
+under all disguise, beholding his mistress Liberty in danger, under
+circumstances that would have blinded less sure eyes, leapt to her
+rescue. He risked the ambition of his life rather than be disloyal to
+liberty. And next is seated a woman, who, student of a noble
+profession, thought that liberty had greater claim upon her than even
+her work. When we stood in worse peril than even loss of liberty, she
+risked her own good name for the truth's sake. One also is here who,
+eminent in his own profession, came with the weight of his position
+and his right to speak, and gave a kindred testimony. One step
+further, and you see one who, soldier to liberty, throughout a long
+and spotless life, when the task was far harder than it is to-day,
+when there were no greetings, no welcomes, when to serve was to peril
+name as well as liberty, never flinched from the first until now. He
+is crowned with the glory of the jail, that was his for no crime but
+for claiming the right to publish that wherein the noblest thought is
+uttered in the bravest words. And next to him is another who speaks
+for liberty, who has brought culture, university degree, position in
+men's sight, and many friends, and cast them all at her beloved feet.
+Sir, not alone the past and the present greet you to-night. The future
+also greets you with us. We have here also those who are training
+themselves to walk in the footsteps of the one most dear to them, who
+shall carry on, when we have passed away, the work which we shall have
+dropped from our hands. But he whom we delight to honour at this hour
+in truth honours us, in that he allows us to offer him the welcome
+that it is our glory and our pleasure to give. He has fought bravely.
+The Christian creed had in its beginning more traitors and less true
+hearts than the creed of to-day. We are happy to-day not only in the
+thought of what manner of men we have for leaders, but in the thought
+of what manner of men we have as soldiers in our army. Jesus had
+twelve apostles. One betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver; a
+second denied Him. They all forsook Him and fled. We can scarcely
+point to one who has thus deserted our sacred cause. The traditions of
+our party tell us of many who went to jail because they claimed for
+all that right of free speech which is the heritage of all. One of the
+most famous members of our body in England, Richard Carlile, turned
+bookseller to sell books that were prosecuted. This man became
+Free-thinker, driven thereto by the bigotry and wickedness of the
+Churches. He sold the books of Hone not because he agreed with them,
+but because Hone was prosecuted. He saw that the book in whose
+prosecution freedom was attacked was the book for the freeman to sell;
+and the story of our guest shows that in all this England and America
+are one. Those who gave Milton to the world can yet bring forth men of
+the same stamp in continents leagues asunder. Because our friend was
+loyal and true, prison had to him no dread. It was far, far less of
+dishonour to wear the garb of the convict than to wear that of the
+hypocrite. The society we represent, like his society in America,
+pleads for free thought, speaks for free speech, claims for every one,
+however antagonistic, the right to speak the thought he feels. It is
+better that this should be, even though the thought be wrong, for thus
+the sooner will its error be discovered--better if the thought be
+right, for then the sooner does the gladness of a new truth find place
+in the heart of man. As the mouthpiece, Sir, of our National Secular
+Society, and of its thousands of members, I speak to you now:--
+
+"'ADDRESS.
+
+"'_We seek for Truth_.'
+
+"'To D.M. Bennett.
+
+"'In asking you to accept at the hands of the National Secular Society
+of England this symbol of cordial sympathy and brotherly welcome, we
+are but putting into act the motto of our Society. "We seek for Truth"
+is our badge, and it is as Truthseeker that we do you homage to-night.
+Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free
+speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without free speech progress
+is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards the nobler
+life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of
+free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the
+denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race.
+
+"'In your own country you have pleaded for free speech, and when,
+under a wicked and an odious law, one of your fellow-citizens was
+imprisoned for the publication of his opinions, you, not sharing the
+opinions but faithful to liberty, sprang forward to defend in him the
+principle of free speech which you claimed for yourself, and sold his
+book while he lay in prison. For this act you were in turn arrested
+and sent to jail, and the country which won its freedom by the aid of
+Paine in the eighteenth century disgraced itself in the nineteenth by
+the imprisonment of a heretic. The Republic of the United States
+dishonoured herself, and not you, in Albany penitentiary. Two hundred
+thousand of your countrymen pleaded for your release, but bigotry was
+too strong. We sent you greeting in your captivity; we rejoiced when
+the time came for your release. We offer you to-night our thanks and
+our hope--thanks for the heroism which never flinched in the hour of
+battle, hope for a more peaceful future, in which the memory of a past
+pain may be a sacred heritage and not a regret.
+
+"'Charles Bradlaugh, _President_.'
+
+"Soldier of liberty, we give you this. Do in the future the same good
+service that you have done in the past, and your reward shall be in
+the love that true men shall bear to you."
+
+That, however, which no force could compel me to do, which I refused
+to threats of fine and prison, to separation from my children, to
+social ostracism, and to insults and ignominy worse to bear than
+death, I surrendered freely when all the struggle was over, and a
+great part of society and of public opinion had adopted the view that
+cost Mr. Bradlaugh and myself so dear. I may as well complete the
+story here, so as not to have to refer to it again. I gave up
+Neo-Malthusianism in April, 1891, its renunciation being part of the
+outcome of two years' instruction from Mdme. H.P. Blavatsky, who
+showed me that however justifiable Neo-Malthusianism might be while
+man was regarded only as the most perfect outcome of physical
+evolution, it was wholly incompatible with the view of man as a
+spiritual being, whose material form and environment were the results
+of his own mental activity. Why and how I embraced Theosophy, and
+accepted H.P. Blavatsky as teacher, will soon be told in its proper
+place. Here I am concerned only with the why and how of my
+renunciation of the Neo-Malthusian teaching, for which I had fought so
+hard and suffered so much.
+
+When I built my life on the basis of Materialism I judged all actions
+by their effect on human happiness in this world now and in future
+generations, regarding man as an organism that lived on earth and
+there perished, with activities confined to earth and limited by
+physical laws. The object of life was the ultimate building-up of a
+physically, mentally, morally perfect man by the cumulative effects of
+heredity--mental and moral tendencies being regarded as the outcome of
+material conditions, to be slowly but surely evolved by rational
+selection and the transmission to offspring of qualities carefully
+acquired by, and developed in, parents. The most characteristic note
+of this serious and lofty Materialism had been struck by Professor W.
+K. Clifford in his noble article on the "Ethics of Belief."
+
+Taking this view of human duty in regard to the rational co-operation
+with nature in the evolution of the human race, it became of the first
+importance to rescue the control of the generation of offspring from
+mere blind brute passion, and to transfer it to the reason and to the
+intelligence; to impress on parents the sacredness of the parental
+office, the tremendous responsibility of the exercise of the creative
+function. And since, further, one of the most pressing problems for
+solution in the older countries is that of poverty, the horrible slums
+and dens into which are crowded and in which are festering families of
+eight and ten children, whose parents are earning an uncertain 10s.,
+12s., 15s., and 20s. a week; since an immediate palliative is wanted,
+if popular risings impelled by starvation are to be avoided; since the
+lives of men and women of the poorer classes, and of the worst paid
+professional classes, are one long, heart-breaking struggle "to make
+both ends meet and keep respectable"; since in the middle class
+marriage is often avoided, or delayed till late in life, from the
+dread of the large family, and late marriage is followed by its
+shadow, the prevalence of vice and the moral and social ruin of
+thousands of women; for these, and many other reasons, the teaching of
+the duty of limiting the family within the means of subsistence is the
+logical outcome of Materialism linked with the scientific view of
+evolution, and with a knowledge of the physical law, by which
+evolution is accelerated or retarded. Seeking to improve the physical
+type, scientific Materialism, it seemed to me, must forbid parentage
+to any but healthy married couples; it must restrict childbearing
+within the limits consistent with the thorough health and physical
+well-being of the mother; it must impose it as a duty never to bring
+children into the world unless the conditions for their fair nurture
+and development are present. Regarding it as hopeless, as well as
+mischievous, to preach asceticism, and looking on the conjunction of
+nominal celibacy with widespread prostitution as inevitable, from the
+constitution of human nature, scientific Materialism--quite rationally
+and logically--advises deliberate restriction of the production of
+offspring, while sanctioning the exercise of the sexual instinct
+within the limits imposed by temperance, the highest physical and
+mental efficiency, the good order and dignity of society, and the
+self-respect of the individual.
+
+In all this there is nothing which for one moment implies approval of
+licentiousness, profligacy, unbridled self-indulgence. On the
+contrary, it is a well-considered and intellectually-defensible scheme
+of human evolution, regarding all natural instincts as matters for
+regulation, not for destruction, and seeking to develop the perfectly
+healthy and well-balanced physical body as the necessary basis for the
+healthy and well-balanced mind. If the premises of Materialism be
+true, there is no answer to the Neo-Malthusian conclusions; for even
+those Socialists who have bitterly opposed the promulgation of
+Neo-Malthusianism--regarding it as a "red herring intended to draw the
+attention of the proletariat away from the real cause of poverty, the
+monopoly of land and capital by a class"--admit that when society is
+built on the foundation of common property in all that is necessary
+for the production of wealth, the time will come for the consideration
+of the population question. Nor do I now see, any more than I saw
+then, how any Materialist can rationally avoid the Neo-Malthusian
+position. For if man be the outcome of purely physical causes, it is
+with these that we must deal in guiding his future evolution. If he be
+related but to terrestrial existence, he is but the loftiest organism
+of earth; and, failing to see his past and his future, how should my
+eyes not have been then blinded to the deep-lying causes of his
+present woe? I brought a material cure to a disease which appeared to
+me to be of material origin; but how when the evil came from a subtler
+source, and its causes lay not on the material plane? How if the
+remedy only set up new causes for a future evil, and, while
+immediately a palliative, strengthened the disease itself, and ensured
+its reappearance in the future? This was the view of the problem set
+before me by H.P. Blavatsky when she unrolled the story of man, told
+of his origin and his destiny, showed me the forces that went to the
+making of man, and the true relation between his past, his present,
+and his future.
+
+For what is man in the light of Theosophy? He is a spiritual
+intelligence, eternal and uncreate, treading a vast cycle of human
+experience, born and reborn on earth millennium after millennium,
+evolving slowly into the ideal man. He is not the product of matter,
+but is encased in matter, and the forms of matter with which he
+clothes himself are of his own making. For the intelligence and will
+of man are creative forces--not creative _ex nihilo_, but creative as
+is the brain of the painter--and these forces are exercised by man in
+every act of thought. Thus he is ever creating round him
+thought-forms, moulding subtlest matter into shape by these energies,
+forms which persist as tangible realities when the body of the thinker
+has long gone back to earth and air and water. When the time for
+rebirth into this earth-life comes for the soul these thought-forms,
+its own progeny, help to form the tenuous model into which the
+molecules of physical matter are builded for the making of the body,
+and matter is thus moulded for the new body in which the soul is to
+dwell, on the lines laid down by the intelligent and volitional life
+of the previous, or of many previous, incarnations. So does each man
+create for himself in verity the form wherein he functions, and what
+he is in his present is the inevitable outcome of his own creative
+energies in his past. Applying this to the Neo-Malthusian theory, we
+see in sexual love not only a passion which man has in common with the
+brute, and which forms, at the present stage of evolution, a necessary
+part of human nature, but an animal passion that may be trained and
+purified into a human emotion, which may be used as one of the levers
+in human progress, one of the factors in human growth. But, instead of
+this, man in the past has made his intellect the servant of his
+passions; the abnormal development of the sexual instinct in man--in
+whom it is far greater and more continuous than in any brute--is due
+to the mingling with it of the intellectual element, all sexual
+thoughts, desires, and imaginations having created thought-forms,
+which have been wrought into the human race, giving rise to a
+continual demand, far beyond nature, and in marked contrast with the
+temperance of normal animal life. Hence it has become one of the most
+fruitful sources of human misery and human degradation, and the
+satisfaction of its imperious cravings in civilised countries lies at
+the root of our worst social evils. This excessive development has to
+be fought against, and the instinct reduced within natural limits, and
+this will certainly never be done by easy-going self-indulgence within
+the marital relation any more than by self-indulgence outside it. By
+none other road than that of self-control and self-denial can men and
+women now set going the causes which will build for them brains and
+bodies of a higher type for their future return to earth-life. They
+have to hold this instinct in complete control, to transmute it from
+passion into tender and self-denying affection, to develop the
+intellectual at the expense of the animal, and thus to raise the whole
+man to the human stage, in which every intellectual and physical
+capacity shall subserve the purposes of the soul. From all this it
+follows that Theosophists should sound the note of self-restraint
+within marriage, and the gradual--for with the mass it cannot be
+sudden--restriction of the sexual relation to the perpetuation of the
+race.
+
+Such was the bearing of Theosophical teaching on Neo-Malthusianism, as
+laid before me by H.P. Blavatsky, and when I urged, out of my bitter
+knowledge of the miseries endured by the poor, that it surely might,
+for a time at least, be recommended as a palliative, as a defence in
+the hands of a woman against intolerable oppression and enforced
+suffering, she bade me look beyond the moment, and see how the
+suffering must come back and back with every generation, unless we
+sought to remove the roots of wrong. "I do not judge a woman," she
+said, "who has resort to such means of defence in the midst of
+circumstances so evil, and whose ignorance of the real causes of all
+this misery is her excuse for snatching at any relief. But it is not
+for you, an Occultist, to continue to teach a method which you now
+know must tend to the perpetuation of the sorrow." I felt that she was
+right, and though I shrank from the decision--for my heart somewhat
+failed me at withdrawing from the knowledge of the poor, so far as I
+could, a temporary palliative of evils which too often wreck their
+lives and bring many to an early grave, worn old before even middle
+age has touched them--yet the decision was made. I refused to reprint
+the "Law of Population," or to sell the copyright, giving pain, as I
+sadly knew, to all the brave and loyal friends who had so generously
+stood by me in that long and bitter struggle, and who saw the results
+of victory thrown away on grounds to them inadequate and mistaken!
+Will it always be, I wonder, in man's climbing upward, that every step
+must be set on his own heart and on the hearts of those he loves?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+AT WAR ALL ROUND.
+
+
+Coming back to my work after my long and dangerous illness, I took up
+again its thread, heartsick, but with courage unshaken, and I find
+myself in the _National Reformer_ for September 15, 1878, saying in a
+brief note of thanks that "neither the illness nor the trouble which
+produced it has in any fashion lessened my determination to work for
+the cause." In truth, I plunged into work with added vigour, for only
+in that did I find any solace, but the pamphlets written at this time
+against Christianity were marked with considerable bitterness, for it
+was Christianity that had robbed me of my child, and I struck
+mercilessly at it in return. In the political struggles of that time,
+when the Beaconsfield Government was in full swing, with its policy of
+annexation and aggression, I played my part with tongue and pen, and
+my articles in defence of an honest and liberty-loving policy in
+India, against the invasion of Afghanistan and other outrages, laid in
+many an Indian heart a foundation of affection for me, and seem to me
+now as a preparation for the work among Indians to which much of my
+time and thought to-day are given. In November of this same year
+(1878) I wrote a little book on "England, India, and Afghanistan" that
+has brought me many a warm letter of thanks, and with this, the
+carrying on of the suit against Mr. Besant before alluded to, two and
+often three lectures every Sunday, to say nothing of the editorial
+work on the _National Reformer_, the secretarial work on the
+Malthusian League, and stray lectures during the week, my time was
+fairly well filled. But I found that in my reading I developed a
+tendency to let my thoughts wander from the subject in hand, and that
+they would drift after my lost little one, so I resolved to fill up
+the gaps in my scientific education, and to amuse myself by reading up
+for some examinations; I thought it would serve as an absorbing form
+of recreation from my other work, and would at the same time, by
+making my knowledge exact, render me more useful as a speaker on
+behalf of the causes to which my life was given.
+
+At the opening of the new year (1879) I met for the first time a man
+to whom I subsequently owed much in this department of work--Edward B.
+Aveling, a D.Sc. of London University, and a marvellously able teacher
+of scientific subjects, the very ablest, in fact, that I have ever
+met. Clear and accurate in his knowledge, with a singular gift for
+lucid exposition, enthusiastic in his love of science, and taking
+vivid pleasure in imparting his knowledge to others, he was an ideal
+teacher. This young man, in January, 1879, began writing under
+initials for the _National Reformer_, and in February I became his
+pupil, with the view of matriculating in June at the London
+University, an object which was duly accomplished. And here let me say
+to any one in mental trouble, that they might find an immense relief
+in taking up some intellectual recreation of this kind; during that
+spring, in addition to my ordinary work of writing, lecturing, and
+editing--and the lecturing meant travelling from one end of England to
+the other--I translated a fair-sized French volume, and had the
+wear-and-tear of pleading my case for the custody of my daughter in
+the Court of Appeal, as well as the case before the Master of the
+Rolls; and I found it the very greatest relief to turn to algebra,
+geometry, and physics, and forget the harassing legal struggles in
+wrestling with formulae and problems. The full access I gained to my
+children marked a step in the long battle of Freethinkers against
+disabilities, for, as noted in the _National Reformer_ by Mr.
+Bradlaugh, it was "won with a pleading unequalled in any case on
+record for the boldness of its affirmation of Freethought," a pleading
+of which he generously said that it deserved well of the party as "the
+most powerful pleading for freedom of opinion to which it has ever
+been our good fortune to listen."
+
+In the London _Daily News_ some powerful letters of protest appeared,
+one from Lord Harberton, in which he declared that "the Inquisition
+acted on no other principle" than that applied to me; and a second
+from Mr. Band, in which he sarcastically observed that "this Christian
+community has for some time had the pleasure of seeing her Majesty's
+courts repeatedly springing engines of torture upon a young mother--a
+clergyman's wife who dared to disagree with his creed--and her evident
+anguish, her long and expensive struggles to save her child, have
+proved that so far as heretical mothers are concerned modern defenders
+of the faith need not envy the past those persuasive instruments which
+so long secured the unity of the Church. In making Mrs. Besant an
+example, the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice James have been
+careful not to allow any of the effect to be lost by confusion of the
+main point--the intellectual heresy--with side questions. There was a
+Malthusian matter in the case, but the judges were very clear in
+stating that without any reference whatever to that, they would
+simply, on the ground of Mrs. Besant's 'religious, or anti-religious,
+opinions,' take her child from her." The great provincial papers took
+a similar tone, the _Manchester Examiner_ going so far as to say of
+the ruling of the judges: "We do not say they have done so wrongly. We
+only say that the effect of their judgment is cruel, and it shows that
+the holding of unpopular opinions is, in the eye of the law, an
+offence which, despite all we had thought to the contrary, may be
+visited with the severest punishment a woman and a mother can be
+possibly called on to bear." The outcome of all this long struggle and
+of another case of sore injustice--in which Mrs. Agar-Ellis, a Roman
+Catholic, was separated from her children by a judicial decision
+obtained against her by her husband, a Protestant--was a change in the
+law which had vested all power over the children in the hands of the
+father, and from thenceforth the rights of the married mother were
+recognised to a limited extent. A small side-fight was with the
+National Sunday League, the president of which, Lord Thurlow, strongly
+objected to me as one of the vice-presidents. Mr. P.A. Taylor and
+others at once resigned their offices, and, on the calling of a
+general meeting, Lord Thurlow was rejected as president. Mr. P.A.
+Taylor was requested to assume the presidency, and the vice-presidents
+who had resigned were, with myself, re-elected. Little battles of this
+sort were a running accompaniment of graver struggles during all these
+battling years.
+
+And through all the struggles the organised strength of the
+Freethought party grew, 650 new members being enrolled in the National
+Secular Society in the year 1878-79, and in July, 1879, the public
+adhesion of Dr. Edward B. Aveling brought into the ranks a pen of rare
+force and power, and gave a strong impulse to the educational side of
+our movement. I presided for him at his first lecture at the Hall of
+Science on August 10, 1879, and he soon paid the penalty of his
+boldness, finding himself, a few months later, dismissed from the
+Chair of Comparative Anatomy at the London Hospital, though the Board
+admitted that all his duties were discharged with punctuality and
+ability. One of the first results of his adhesion was the
+establishment of two classes under the Science and Art Department at
+South Kensington, and these grew year after year, attended by numbers
+of young men and women, till in 1883 we had thirteen classes in full
+swing, as well as Latin, and London University Matriculation classes;
+all these were taught by Dr. Aveling and pupils that he had trained. I
+took advanced certificates, one in honours, and so became qualified as
+a science teacher in eight different sciences, and Alice and Hypatia
+Bradlaugh followed a similar course, so that winter after winter we
+kept these classes going from September to the following May, from
+1879 until the year 1888. In addition to these Miss Bradlaugh carried
+on a choral union.
+
+Personally I found that this study and teaching together with
+attendance at classes held for teachers at South Kensington, the study
+for passing the First B.Sc. and Prel. Sc. Examinations at London
+University, and the study for the B.Sc. degree at London, at which I
+failed in practical chemistry three times--a thing that puzzled me not
+a little at the time, as I had passed a far more difficult practical
+chemical examination for teachers at South Kensington--all this gave
+me a knowledge of science that has stood me in good stead in my public
+work. But even here theological and social hatred pursued me.
+
+When Miss Bradlaugh and myself applied for permission to attend the
+botany class at University College, we were refused, I for my sins,
+and she only for being her father's daughter; when I had qualified as
+teacher, I stood back from claiming recognition from the Department
+for a year in order not to prejudice the claims of Mr. Bradlaugh's
+daughters, and later, when I had been recognised, Sir Henry Tyler in
+the House of Commons attacked the Education Department for accepting
+me, and actually tried to prevent the Government grant being paid to
+the Hall of Science Schools because Dr. Aveling, the Misses Bradlaugh,
+and myself were unbelievers in Christianity. When I asked permission
+to go to the Botanical Gardens in Regent's Park the curator refused
+it, on the ground that his daughters studied there. On every side
+repulse and insult, hard to struggle against, bitter to bear. It was
+against difficulties of this kind on every side that we had to make
+our way, handicapped in every effort by our heresy. Let our work be as
+good as it might--and our Science School was exceptionally
+successful--the subtle fragrance of heresy was everywhere
+distinguishable, and when Mr. Bradlaugh and myself are blamed for
+bitterness in our anti-Christian advocacy, this constant gnawing
+annoyance and petty persecution should be taken into account. For him
+it was especially trying, for he saw his daughters--girls of ability
+and of high character, whose only crime was that they were
+his--insulted, sneered at, slandered, continually put at a
+disadvantage, because they were his children and loved and honoured
+him beyond all others.
+
+It was in October, 1879, that I first met Herbert Burrows, though I
+did not become intimately acquainted with him till the Socialist
+troubles of the autumn of 1887 drew us into a common stream of work.
+He came as a delegate from the Tower Hamlets Radical Association to a
+preliminary conference, called by Mr. Bradlaugh, at the Hall of
+Science, on October 11th, to consider the advisability of holding a
+great London Convention on Land Law Reform, to be attended by
+delegates from all parts of the kingdom. He was appointed on the
+Executive Committee with Mr. Bradlaugh, Mr. Mottershead, Mr. Nieass,
+and others. The Convention was successfully held, and an advanced
+platform of Land Law Reform adopted, used later by Mr. Bradlaugh as a
+basis for some of the proposals he laid before Parliament.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+MR. BRADLAUGH'S STRUGGLE.
+
+
+And now dawned the year 1880, the memorable year in which commenced
+Mr. Bradlaugh's long Parliamentary battle. After a long and bitter
+struggle he was elected, with Mr. Labouchere, as member for
+Northampton, at the general election, and so the prize so long fought
+for was won. Shall I ever forget that election day, April 2, 1880? How
+at four o'clock Mr. Bradlaugh came into the room at the "George",
+where his daughters and I were sitting, flung himself into a chair
+with, "There's nothing more to do; our last man is polled." Then the
+waiting for the declaration through the long, weary hours of suspense,
+till as the time drew near we knelt by the window listening--listening
+to the hoarse murmur of the crowd, knowing that presently there would
+be a roar of triumph or a howl of anger when the numbers were read out
+from the steps of the Town Hall. And now silence sank, and we knew the
+moment had come, and we held our breath, and then--a roar, a wild roar
+of joy and exultation, cheer after cheer, ringing, throbbing, pealing,
+and then the mighty surge of the crowd bringing him back, their member
+at last, waving hats, handkerchiefs, a very madness of tumultuous
+delight, and the shrill strains of "Bradlaugh for Northampton!" with a
+ring of triumph in them they had never had before. And he, very grave,
+somewhat shaken by the outpour of love and exultation, very silent,
+feeling the weight of new responsibility more than the gladness of
+victory. And then the next morning, as he left the town, the mass of
+men and women, one sea of heads from hotel to station, every window
+crowded, his colours waving everywhere, men fighting to get near him,
+to touch him, women sobbing, the cries, "Our Charlie, our Charlie;
+we've got you and we'll keep you." How they loved him, how they joyed
+in the triumph won after twelve years of strife. Ah me! we thought the
+struggle over, and it was only beginning; we thought our hero
+victorious, and a fiercer, crueller fight lay in front. True, he was
+to win that fight, but his life was to be the price of the winning;
+victory for him was to be final, complete, but the laurel-wreath was
+to fall upon a grave.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by T. Westley, 57, Vernon Street,
+Northampton._ CHARLES BRADLAUGH AND HENRY LABOUCHERE.]
+
+The outburst of anger from the more bigoted of the Christian community
+was as savage as the outburst of delight had been exultant, but we
+recked little of it. Was he not member, duly elected, without
+possibility of assailment in his legal right? Parliament was to meet
+on April 29th, the swearing-in beginning on the following day, and Mr.
+Bradlaugh had taken counsel with some other Freethinking members as to
+the right of Freethinkers to affirm. He held that under the Act 29 and
+30 Vict. c. 19, and the Evidence Amendment Acts 1869 and 1870, the
+right to substitute affirmation for oath was clear; he was willing to
+take the oath as a necessary form if obligatory, but, believing it to
+be optional, he preferred affirmation. On May 3rd he presented himself
+and, according to the evidence of Sir Erskine May, the Clerk of the
+House, given before the second Select Committee on his case, he "came
+to the table and delivered the following statement in writing to the
+Clerk: 'To the Right Honourable the Speaker of the House of Commons.
+I, the undersigned, Charles Bradlaugh, beg respectfully to claim to be
+allowed to affirm, as a person for the time being by law permitted to
+make a solemn affirmation or declaration, instead of taking an oath.
+(Signed) Charles Bradlaugh.' And being asked by the Clerk upon what
+grounds he claimed to make an affirmation, he answered: 'By virtue of
+the Evidence Amendment Acts, 1869 and 1870.' Whereupon the Clerk
+reported to Mr. Speaker" the claim, and Mr. Speaker told Mr. Bradlaugh
+that he might address the House on the matter. "Mr. Bradlaugh's
+observations were very short. He repeated that he relied upon the
+Evidence Further Amendment Act, 1869, and the Evidence Amendment Act,
+1870, adding: 'I have repeatedly, for nine years past, made an
+affirmation in the highest courts of jurisdiction in this realm. I am
+ready to make such a declaration or affirmation.' Substantially those
+were the words which he addressed to the Speaker." This was the
+simple, quiet, and dignified scene which took place in the House. Mr.
+Bradlaugh was directed to withdraw, and he withdrew, and, after
+debate, a Select Committee was appointed to consider whether he could
+make affirmation; that Committee decided against the claim, and gave
+in its report on May 20th. On the following day Mr. Bradlaugh
+presented himself at the table of the House to take the oath in the
+form prescribed by the law, and on the objection of Sir Henry Drummond
+Wolff, who submitted a motion that he should not be allowed to take
+the oath, another Committee was appointed.
+
+Before this Committee Mr. Bradlaugh stated his case, and pointed out
+that the legal obligation lay on him to take the oath, adding: "Any
+form that I went through, any oath that I took, I should regard as
+binding upon my conscience in the fullest degree. I would go through
+no form, I would take no oath, unless I meant it to be so binding." He
+wrote in the same sense to the _Times_, saying that he should regard
+himself "as bound, not by the letter of its words, but by the spirit
+which the affirmation would have conveyed, had I been permitted to use
+it." The Committee reported against him, and on June 23rd he was heard
+at the Bar of the House, and made a speech so self-restrained, so
+noble, so dignified, that the House, in defiance of all its own rules,
+broke out over and over again into applause. In the debate that
+preceded his speech, members had lost sight of the ordinary rules of
+decency, and had used expressions against myself wholly gratuitous in
+such a quarrel; the grave rebuke to him who "was wanting in chivalry,
+because, while I can answer for myself and am able to answer for
+myself, nothing justified the introduction of any other name beside my
+own to make prejudice against me," brought irrepressible cheers. His
+appeal was wholly to the law. "I have not yet used--I trust no passion
+may tempt me into using--any words that would seem to savour of even a
+desire to enter into conflict with this House. I have always taught,
+preached, and believed the supremacy of Parliament, and it is not
+because for a moment the judgment of one Chamber of Parliament should
+be hostile to me that I am going to deny the ideas I have always held;
+but I submit that one Chamber of Parliament--even its grandest
+Chamber, as I have always held this to be--had no right to override
+the law. The law gives me the right to sign that roll, to take and
+subscribe the oath, and to take my seat there [with a gesture towards
+the benches]. I admit that the moment I am in the House, without any
+reason but your own good will, you can send me away. That is your
+right. You have full control over your members. But you cannot send me
+away until I have been heard in my place, not a suppliant as I am now,
+but with the rightful audience that each member has always had.... I
+am ready to admit, if you please, for the sake of argument, that every
+opinion I hold is wrong and deserves punishment. Let the law punish
+it. If you say the law cannot, then you admit that you have no right,
+and I appeal to public opinion against the iniquity of a decision
+which overrides the law and denies me justice. I beg your pardon, sir,
+and that of the House too, if in this warmth there seems to lack
+respect for its dignity. And as I shall have, if your decision be
+against me, to come to that table when your decision is given, I beg
+you, before the step is taken in which we may both lose our
+dignity--mine is not much, but yours is that of the Commons of
+England--I beg you, before the gauntlet is fatally thrown, I beg you,
+not in any sort of menace, not in any sort of boast, but as one man
+against six hundred, to give me that justice which on the other side
+of this hall the judges would give me, were I pleading there before
+them."
+
+But no eloquence, no plea for justice, could stay the tide of Tory and
+religious bigotry, and the House voted that he should not be allowed
+to take the oath. Summoned to the table to hear the decision
+communicated by the Speaker, he answered that decision with the words
+firmly spoken: "I respectfully refuse to obey the order of the House,
+because that order was against the law." The Speaker appealed to the
+House for direction, and on a division--during which the Speaker and
+Charles Bradlaugh were left together in the chamber--the House ordered
+the enforcement of Mr. Bradlaugh's withdrawal. Once more the order is
+given, once more the refusal made, and then the Serjeant-at-Arms was
+bidden to remove him. Strange was the scene as little Captain Cosset
+walked up to the member of Herculean proportions, and men wondered how
+the order would be enforced; but Charles Bradlaugh was not the man to
+make a vulgar brawl, and the light touch on his shoulder was to him
+the touch of an authority he admitted and to which he bowed. So he
+gravely accompanied his small captor, and was lodged in the Clock
+Tower of the House as prisoner until the House should further consider
+what to do with him--the most awkward prisoner it had ever had, in
+that in his person it was imprisoning the law.
+
+In a special issue of the _National Reformer_, giving an account of
+the Committee's work and of Mr. Bradlaugh's committal to the Clock
+Tower, I find the following from my own pen: "The Tory party, beaten
+at the polls by the nation, has thus, for the moment, triumphed in the
+House of Commons. The man chosen by the Radicals of Northampton has
+been committed to prison on the motion of the Tory ex-Chancellor of
+the Exchequer, simply because he desires to discharge the duty laid
+upon him by his constituency and by the law of the land. As this paper
+goes to press, I go to Westminster to receive from him his directions
+as to the conduct of the struggle with the nation into which the House
+of Commons has so recklessly plunged." I found him busily writing,
+prepared for all events, ready for a long imprisonment. On the
+following day a leaflet from my pen, "Law Makers and Law Breakers,"
+appealed to the people; after reciting what had happened, it
+concluded: "Let the people speak. Gladstone and Bright are for
+Liberty, and the help denied them within the House must come to them
+from without. No time must be lost. While we remain idle, a
+representative of the people is illegally held in prison. Northampton
+is insulted, and in this great constituency every constituency is
+threatened. On freedom of election depends our liberty; on freedom of
+conscience depends our progress. Tory squires and lordlings have
+defied the people and measured their strength against the masses. Let
+the masses speak." But there was no need to make appeals, for the
+outrage itself caused so swiftly a growl of anger that on the very
+next day the prisoner was set free, and there came protest upon
+protest against the high-handed action of the House. In Westminster
+Hall 4,000 people gathered to cheer Mr. Bradlaugh when he came to the
+House on the day after his liberation. In less than a week 200
+meetings had thundered out their protest. Liberal associations, clubs,
+societies, sent up messages of anger and of demand for justice. In
+Trafalgar Square there gathered--so said the papers--the largest crowd
+ever seen there, and on the Thursday following--the meeting was held
+on Monday--the House of Commons rescinded its resolution, refusing to
+allow Mr. Bradlaugh to affirm, and admitted him on Friday, July 2nd,
+to take his seat after affirmation. "At last the bitter struggle is
+over," I wrote, "and law and right have triumphed. The House of
+Commons has, by rescinding the resolution passed by Tories and
+Ultramontanes, re-established its good name in the eyes of the world.
+The triumph is not one of Freethought over Christianity, nor is it
+over the House of Commons; it is the triumph of law, brought about by
+good men--of all shades of opinion, but of one faith in justice--over
+Tory contempt of law and Ultramontane bigotry. It is the reassertion
+of civil and religious liberty under the most difficult circumstances,
+the declaration that the House of Commons is the creation of the
+people, and not a club of the aristocracy with the right of
+blackballing in its own hands."
+
+The battle between Charles Bradlaugh and his persecutors was now
+transferred to the law courts. As soon as he had taken his seat he was
+served with a writ for having voted without having taken the oath, and
+this began the wearisome proceedings by which his defeated enemies
+boasted that they would make him bankrupt, and so vacate the seat he
+had so hardly gained. Rich men like Mr. Newdegate sued him, putting
+forward a man of straw as nominal plaintiff; for many a weary month
+Mr. Bradlaugh kept all his enemies at bay, fighting each case himself;
+defeated time after time, he fought on, finally carrying the cases to
+the House of Lords, and there winning them triumphantly. But they were
+won at such heavy cost of physical strength and of money, that they
+undermined his strength and burdened him heavily with debt. For all
+this time he had not only to fight in the law courts and to attend
+scrupulously to his Parliamentary duties, but he had to earn his
+living by lecturing and writing, so that his nights away from the
+House were spent in travelling and his days in incessant labour. Many
+of his defeated foes turned their weapons against me, hoping thus to
+give him pain; thus Admiral Sir John Hay, at Wigton, used language of
+me so coarse that the _Scotsman_ and _Glasgow Herald_ refused to print
+it, and the editor of the _Scotsman_ described it as "language so
+coarse that it could have hardly dropped from a yahoo." August 25th
+found me at Brussels, whither I went, with Miss Hypatia Bradlaugh, to
+represent the English Freethinkers at the International Freethought
+Conference. It was an interesting gathering, attended by men of
+world-wide reputation, including Dr. Ludwig Buechner, a man of noble
+and kindly nature. An International Federation of Freethinkers was
+there founded, which did something towards bringing together the
+Freethinkers of different countries, and held interesting congresses
+in the following years in London and Amsterdam; but beyond these
+meetings it did little, and lacked energy and vitality. In truth, the
+Freethought party in each country had so much to do in holding its own
+that little time and thought could be given to international
+organisation. For myself, my introduction to Dr. Buechner, led to much
+interesting correspondence, and I translated, with his approval, his
+"Mind in Animals," and the enlarged fourteenth edition of "Force and
+Matter," as well as one or two pamphlets. This autumn of 1880 found
+the so-called Liberal Government in full tilt against the Irish
+leaders, and I worked hard to raise English feeling in defence of
+Irish freedom even against attack by one so much honoured as was Mr.
+Gladstone. It was uphill work, for harsh language had been used
+against England and all things English, but I showed by definite
+figures--all up and down England--that life and property were far
+safer in Ireland than in England, that Ireland was singularly free
+from crime save in agrarian disputes, and I argued that these would
+disappear if the law should step in between landlord and tenant, and
+by stopping the crimes of rack-renting and most brutal eviction, put
+an end to the horrible retaliations that were born of despair and
+revenge. A striking point on these evictions I quoted from Mr. T.P.
+O'Connor, who, using Mr. Gladstone's words that a sentence of eviction
+was a sentence of starvation, told of 15,000 processes of eviction
+issued in that one year. The autumn's work was varied by the teaching
+of science classes, a debate with a clergyman of the Church of
+England, and an operation which kept me in bed for three weeks, but
+which, on the other hand, was useful, for I learned to write while
+lying on my back, and accomplished in this fashion a good part of the
+translation of "Mind in Animals."
+
+And here let me point a moral about hard work. Hard work kills no one.
+I find a note in the _National Reformer_ in 1880 from the pen of Mr.
+Bradlaugh: "It is, we fear, useless to add that, in the judgment of
+her best friends, Mrs. Besant has worked far too hard during the last
+two years." This is 1893, and the thirteen years' interval has been
+full of incessant work, and I am working harder than ever now, and in
+splendid health. Looking over the _National Reformer_ for all these
+years, it seems to me that it did really fine educational work; Mr.
+Bradlaugh's strenuous utterances on political and theological matters;
+Dr. Aveling's luminous and beautiful scientific teachings; and to my
+share fell much of the educative work on questions of political and
+national morality in our dealings with weaker nations. We put all our
+hearts into our work, and the influence exercised was distinctly in
+favour of pure living and high thinking.
+
+In the spring of 1881 the Court of Appeal decided against Mr.
+Bradlaugh's right to affirm as Member of Parliament, and his seat was
+declared vacant, but he was at once returned again by the borough of
+Northampton, despite the virulence of slander directed against him, so
+that he rightly described the election as "the most bitter I have ever
+fought." His work in the House had won him golden opinions in the
+country, and he was already recognised as a power there; so Tory fear
+was added to bigoted hatred, and the efforts to keep him out of the
+House were increased.
+
+He was introduced to the House as a new member to take his seat by Mr.
+Labouchere and Mr. Burt, but Sir Stafford Northcote intervened, and
+after a lengthy debate, which included a speech from Mr. Bradlaugh at
+the Bar, a majority of thirty-three refused to allow him to take the
+oath. After a prolonged scene, during which Mr. Bradlaugh declined to
+withdraw and the House hesitated to use force, the House adjourned,
+and finally the Government promised to bring in an Affirmation Bill,
+and Mr. Bradlaugh promised, with the consent of his constituents, to
+await the decision of the House on this Bill. Meantime, a League for
+the Defence of Constitutional Rights was formed, and the agitation in
+the country grew: wherever Mr. Bradlaugh went to speak vast crowds
+awaited him, and he travelled from one end of the country to the
+other, the people answering his appeal for justice with no uncertain
+voice. On July 2nd, in consequence of Tory obstruction, Mr. Gladstone
+wrote to Mr. Bradlaugh that the Government were going to drop the
+Affirmation Bill, and Mr. Bradlaugh thereupon determined to present
+himself once more in the House, and fixed on August 3rd as the date of
+such action, so that the Irish Land Bill might get through the House
+ere any delay in business was caused by him. The House was then
+closely guarded with police; the great gates were closed, reserves of
+police were packed in the law courts, and all through July this state
+of siege continued. On August 2nd there was a large meeting in
+Trafalgar Square, at which delegates were present from all parts of
+England, and from as far north as Edinburgh, and on Wednesday, August
+3rd, Mr. Bradlaugh went down to the House. His last words to me were:
+"The people know you better than they know any one, save myself;
+whatever happens, mind, whatever happens, let them do no violence; I
+trust to you to keep them quiet." He went to the House entrance with
+Dr. Aveling, and into the House alone. His daughters and I went
+together, and with some hundreds of others carrying petitions--ten
+only with each petition, and the ten rigidly counted and allowed to
+pass through the gate, sufficiently opened to let one through at a
+time--reached Westminster Hall, where we waited on the steps leading
+to the passage of the lobby.
+
+An inspector ordered us off. I gently intimated that we were within
+our rights. Dramatic order: "Four officers this way." Up they marched
+and looked at us, and we looked at them. "I think you had better
+consult Inspector Denning before you use violence," I remarked
+placidly. They thought they had, and in a few moments up came the
+inspector, and seeing that we were standing in a place where we had a
+right to be, and were doing no harm, he rebuked his over-zealous
+subordinates, and they retired and left us in peace. A man of much
+tact and discretion was Inspector Denning. Indeed, all through this,
+the House of Commons police behaved admirably well. Even in the attack
+they were ordered to make on Mr. Bradlaugh, the police used as little
+violence as they could. It was Mr. Erskine, the Deputy
+Serjeant-at-Arms, and his ushers, who showed the brutality; as Dr.
+Aveling wrote at the time: "The police disliked their work, and, as
+brave men, had a sympathy for a brave man. Their orders they obeyed
+rigidly. This done, they were kindness itself." Gradually the crowd of
+petitioners grew and grew; angry murmurs were heard, for no news came
+from the House, and they loved "Charlie," and were mostly north
+country men, sturdy and independent. They thought they had a right to
+go into the lobby, and suddenly, with the impulse that will sway a
+crowd to a single action there was a roar, "Petition, petition,
+justice, justice," and they surged up the steps, charging at the
+policemen who held the door. Flashed into my mind my chief's charge,
+his words, "I trust to you to keep them quiet," and as the police
+sprang forward to meet the crowd I threw myself between them, with all
+the advantage of the position of the top of the steps that I had
+chosen, so that every man in the charging crowd saw me, and as they
+checked themselves in surprise I bade them stop for his sake, and keep
+for him the peace which he had bade us should not be broken. I heard
+afterwards that as I sprang forward the police laughed--they must have
+thought me a fool to face the rush of the charging men; but I knew his
+friends would never trample me down, and as the crowd stopped the
+laugh died out, and they drew back and left me my own way.
+
+Sullenly the men drew back, mastering themselves with effort, reining
+in their wrath, still for his sake. Ah! had I known what was going on
+inside, would I have kept his trust unbroken! and, as many a man said
+to me afterwards in northern towns, "Oh! if you had let us go we would
+have carried him into the House up to the Speaker's chair." We heard a
+crash inside, and listened, and there was sound of breaking glass and
+splintering wood, and in a few minutes a messenger came to me: "He is
+in Palace Yard." And we went thither and saw him standing, still and
+white, face set like marble, coat torn, motionless, as though carved
+in stone, facing the members' door. Now we know the whole shameful
+story: how as that one man stood alone, on his way to claim his right,
+alone so that he could do no violence, fourteen men, said the Central
+News, police and ushers, flung themselves upon him, pushed and pulled
+him down the stairs, smashing in their violence the glass and wood of
+the passage door; how he struck no blow, but used only his great
+strength in passive resistance--" Of all I have ever seen, I never saw
+one man struggle with ten like that," said one of the chiefs, angrily
+disdainful of the wrong he was forced to do--till they flung him out
+into Palace Yard. An eye-witness thus reported the scene in the Press:
+"The strong, broad, heavy, powerful frame of Mr. Bradlaugh was hard to
+move, with its every nerve and muscle strained to resist the coercion.
+Bending and straining against the overpowering numbers, he held every
+inch with surprising tenacity, and only surrendered it after almost
+superhuman exertions to retain it. The sight--little of it as was seen
+from the outside--soon became sickening. The overborne man appeared
+almost at his last gasp. The face, in spite of the warmth of the
+struggle, had an ominous pallor. The limbs barely sustained him....
+The Trafalgar Square phrase that this man might be broken but not bent
+occurred to minds apprehensive at the present appearance of him."
+
+They flung him out, and swift, short words were there interchanged. "I
+nearly did wrong at the door," he said afterwards, "I was very angry.
+I said to Inspector Denning, 'I shall come again with force enough to
+overcome it,' He said, 'When?' I said, 'Within a minute if I raise my
+hand.'" He stood in Palace Yard, and there outside the gate was a vast
+sea of heads, the men who had journeyed from all parts of England for
+love of him, and in defence of the great right he represented of a
+constituency to send to Parliament the man of its choice. Ah! he was
+never greater than in that moment of outrage and of triumphant wrong;
+with all the passion of a proud man surging within him, insulted by
+physical violence, injured by the cruel wrenching of all his
+muscles--so that for weeks his arms had to be swathed in bandages--he
+was never greater than when he conquered his own wrath, crushed down
+his own longing for battle, stirred to flame by the bodily struggle,
+and the bodily injury, and with thousands waiting within sound of his
+voice, longing to leap to his side, he gave the word to tell them to
+meet him that evening away from the scene of conflict, and meanwhile
+to disperse quietly, "no riot, no disorder." But how he suffered
+mentally no words of mine may tell, and none can understand how it
+wrung his heart who does not know how he reverenced the great
+Parliament of England, how he honoured law, how he believed in justice
+being done; it was the breaking down of his national ideals, of his
+pride in his country, of his belief that faith would be kept with a
+foe by English gentlemen, who with all their faults, he thought,
+held honour and chivalry dear. "No man will sleep in gaol for me
+to-night," he said to me that day; "no woman can blame me for her
+husband killed or wounded, but--" A wave of agony swept over his face,
+and from that fatal day Charles Bradlaugh was never the same man.
+Some hold their ideals lightly, but his heart-strings were twined
+round his; some care little for their country--he was an Englishman,
+law-abiding, liberty-loving, to his heart's core, of the type of the
+seventeenth-century patriot, holding England's honour dear. It was the
+treachery that broke his heart; he had gone alone, believing in the
+honour of his foes, ready to submit to expulsion, to imprisonment, and
+it was the latter that he expected; but he never dreamed that, going
+alone amongst his foes, they would use brutal and cowardly violence,
+and shame every Parliamentary tradition by personal outrage on a
+duly-elected member, outrage more worthy of a slum pot-house than of
+the great Commons House, the House of Hampden and of Vane, the House
+that had guarded its own from Royal violence, and had maintained its
+privileges in the teeth of kings.
+
+These stormy scenes brought about a promise of Government aid; Mr.
+Bradlaugh failed to get any legal redress, as, indeed, he expected to
+fail, on the ground that the officials of the House were covered by
+the House's order, but the Government promised to support his claim to
+his seat during the next session, and thus prevented the campaign
+against them on which we had resolved. I had solely on my own
+responsibility organised a great band of people pledged to refrain
+from the use of all excisable articles after a certain date, and to
+withdraw all their moneys in the Savings Bank, thus seriously
+crippling the financial resources of the Government. The response from
+the workers to my appeal to "Stop the supplies" was great and
+touching. One man wrote that as he never drank nor smoked he would
+leave off tea; others that though tobacco was their one luxury, they
+would forego it; and so on. Somewhat reluctantly, I asked the people
+to lay aside this formidable weapon, as "we have no right to embarrass
+the Government financially save when they refuse to do the first duty
+of a Government to maintain law. They have now promised to do justice,
+and we must wait." Meanwhile the injuries inflicted on Mr. Bradlaugh,
+rupturing the sheaths of some of the muscles of the arm, laid him
+prostrate, and various small fights went on during the temporary truce
+in the great struggle. I turned up in the House two or three times,
+haled thither, though not in person, by the people who kept Mr.
+Bradlaugh out, and a speech of mine became the subject of a question
+by Mr. Ritchie, while Sir Henry Tyler waged war on the science
+classes. Another joy was added to life by the use of my name--which
+by all these struggles had gained a marketable value--as author of
+pamphlets I had never seen, and this forgery of my name by
+unscrupulous people in the colonies caused me a good deal of
+annoyance. In the strengthening of the constitutional agitation in the
+country, the holding of an International Congress of Freethinkers in
+London, the studying and teaching of science, the delivering of
+courses of scientific lectures in the Hall of Science, a sharp
+correspondence with the Bishop of Manchester, who had libelled
+Secularists, and which led to a fiery pamphlet, "God's Views on
+Marriage," as retort--in all these matters the autumn months sped
+rapidly away. One incident of that autumn I record with regret. I was
+misled by very partial knowledge of the nature of the experiments
+performed, and by my fear that if scientific men were forbidden to
+experiment on animals with drugs they would perforce experiment with
+them on the poor in hospitals, to write two articles, republished as a
+pamphlet, against Sir Eardley Wilmot's Bill for the "Total Suppression
+of Vivisection." I limited my approval to highly skilled men engaged
+in original investigations, and took the representations made of the
+character of the experiments without sufficient care to verify them.
+Hence the publication of the one thing I ever wrote for which I feel
+deep regret and shame, as against the whole trend and efforts of my
+life. I am thankful to say that Dr. Anna Kingsford answered my
+articles, and I readily inserted her replies in the paper in which
+mine had appeared--our _National Reformer_--and she touched that
+question of the moral sense to which my nature at once responded.
+Ultimately, I looked carefully into the subject, found that
+vivisection abroad was very different from vivisection in England, saw
+that it was in very truth the fiendishly cruel thing that its
+opponents alleged, and destroyed my partial defence of even its less
+brutal form.
+
+1882 saw no cessation of the struggles in which Mr. Bradlaugh and
+those who stood by him were involved. On February 7th he was heard for
+the third time at the Bar of the House of Commons, and closed his
+speech with an offer that, accepted, would have closed the contest. "I
+am ready to stand aside, say for four or five weeks, without coming to
+that table, if the House within that time, or within such time as its
+great needs might demand, would discuss whether an Affirmation Bill
+should pass or not. I want to obey the law, and I tell you how I might
+meet the House still further, if the House will pardon me for seeming
+to advise it. Hon. members have said that would be a Bradlaugh Relief
+Bill. Bradlaugh is more proud than you are. Let the Bill pass without
+applying to elections that have taken place previously, and I will
+undertake not to claim my seat, and when the Bill has passed I will
+apply for the Chiltern Hundreds. I have no fear. If I am not fit for
+my constituents, they shall dismiss me, but you never shall. The grave
+alone shall make me yield." But the House would do nothing. He had
+asked for 100,000 signatures in favour of his constitutional right,
+and on February 8th, 9th, and 10th 1,008 petitions, bearing 241,970
+signatures, were presented; the House treated them with contemptuous
+indifference. The House refused to declare his seat vacant, and also
+refused to allow him to fill it, thus half-disfranchising Northampton,
+while closing every avenue to legal redress. Mr. Labouchere--who did
+all a loyal colleague could do to assist his brother member--brought
+in an Affirmation Bill; it was blocked. Mr. Gladstone, appealed to
+support the law declared by his own Attorney-General, refused to do
+anything. An _impasse_ was created, and all the enemies of freedom
+rejoiced. Out of this position of what the _Globe_ called "quiet
+omnipotence" the House was shaken by an audacious defiance, for on
+February 21st the member it was trying to hold at arm's length took
+the oath in its startled face, went to his seat, and--waited events.
+The House then expelled him--and, indeed, it could scarcely do
+anything else after such defiance--and Mr. Labouchere moved for a new
+writ, declaring that Northampton was ready, its "candidate was Charles
+Bradlaugh, expelled this House." Northampton, ever steadfast, returned
+him for the third time--the vote in his favour showing an increase of
+359 over the second bye-election--and the triumph was received in all
+the great towns of England with wild enthusiasm. By the small majority
+of fifteen in a House of 599 members--and this due to the vacillation
+of the Government--he was again refused the right to take his seat.
+But now the whole Liberal Press took up his quarrel; the oath question
+became a test question for every candidate for Parliament, and the
+Government was warned that it was alienating its best friends. The
+_Pall Mall Gazette_ voiced the general feeling. "What is the evidence
+that an Oaths Bill would injure the Government in the country? Of one
+thing we may be sure, that if they shirk the Bill they will do no good
+to themselves at the elections. Nobody doubts that it will be made a
+test question, and any Liberal who declines to vote for such a Bill
+will certainly lose the support of the Northampton sort of Radicalism
+in every constituency. The Liberal Press throughout the country is
+absolutely unanimous. The political Non-conformists are for it. The
+local clubs are for it. All that is wanted is that the Government
+should pick up a little more moral courage, and recognise that even in
+practice honesty is the best policy." The Government did not think so,
+and they paid the penalty, for one of the causes that led to their
+defeat at the polls was the disgust felt at their vacillation and
+cowardice in regard to the rights of constituencies. Not untruly did I
+write, in May, 1882, that Charles Bradlaugh was a man "who by the
+infliction of a great wrong had become the incarnation of a great
+principle"; for the agitation in the country grew and grew, until,
+returned again to Parliament at the General Election, he took the oath
+and his seat, brought in and carried an Oaths Bill, not only giving
+Members of Parliament the right to affirm, but making Freethinkers
+competent as jurymen, and relieving witnesses from the insult hitherto
+put upon those who objected to swearing; he thus ended an
+unprecedented struggle by a complete victory, weaving his name for
+ever into the constitutional history of his country.
+
+In the House of Lords, Lord Redesdale brought in a Bill disqualifying
+Atheists from sitting in Parliament, but in face of the feeling
+aroused in the country, the Lords, with many pathetic expressions of
+regret, declined to pass it. But, meanwhile, Sir Henry Tyler in the
+Commons was calling out for prosecutions for blasphemy to be brought
+against Mr. Bradlaugh and his friends, while he carried on his crusade
+against Mr. Bradlaugh's daughters, Dr. Aveling, and myself, as science
+teachers. I summed up the position in the spring of 1882 in the
+following somewhat strong language: "This short-lived 'Parliamentary
+Declaration Bill' is but one of the many clouds which presage a storm
+of prosecution. The reiterated attempts in the House of Commons to
+force the Government into prosecuting heretics for blasphemy; the
+petty and vicious attacks on the science classes at the Hall; the
+odious and wicked efforts of Mr. Newdegate to drive Mr. Bradlaugh into
+the Bankruptcy Court; all these are but signs that the heterogeneous
+army of pious and bigoted Christians are gathering together their
+forces for a furious attack on those who have silenced them in
+argument, but whom they hope to conquer by main force, by sheer
+brutality. Let them come. Free-thinkers were never so strong, never so
+united, never so well organised as they are to-day. Strong in the
+goodness of our cause, in our faith in the ultimate triumph of Truth,
+in our willingness to give up all save fidelity to the sacred cause of
+liberty of human thought and human speech, we await gravely and
+fearlessly the successors of the men who burned Bruno, who imprisoned
+Galileo, who tortured Vanini--the men who have in their hands the
+blood-red cross of Jesus of Nazareth, and in their hearts the love of
+God and the hate of man."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+STILL FIGHTING.
+
+
+All this hot fighting on the religious field did not render me blind
+to the misery of the Irish land so dear to my heart, writhing in the
+cruel grip of Mr. Forster's Coercion Act. An article "Coercion in
+Ireland and its Results," exposing the wrongs done under the Act, was
+reprinted as a pamphlet and had a wide circulation.
+
+I pleaded against eviction--7,020 persons had been evicted during the
+quarter ending in March--for the trial of those imprisoned on
+suspicion, for indemnity for those who before the Land Act had striven
+against wrongs the Land Act had been carried to prevent, and I urged
+that "no chance is given for the healing measures to cure the sore of
+Irish disaffection until not only are the prisoners in Ireland set at
+liberty, but until the brave, unfortunate Michael Davitt stands once
+more a free man on Irish soil." At last the Government reconsidered
+its policy and resolved on juster dealings; it sent Lord Frederick
+Cavendish over to Ireland, carrying with him the release of the
+"suspects," and scarcely had he landed ere the knife of assassination
+struck him--a foul and cowardly murder of an innocent messenger of
+peace. I was at Blackburn, to lecture on "The Irish Question," and as
+I was walking towards the platform, my heart full of joy for the
+dawning hope of peace, a telegram announcing the assassination was
+placed in my hands. Never shall I forget the shock, the incredulous
+horror, the wave of despair. "It is not only two men they have
+killed," I wrote, a day or two later; "they have stabbed the new-born
+hope of friendship between two countries, and have reopened the gulf
+of hatred that was just beginning to close." Alas! the crime succeeded
+in its object, and hurried the Government into new wrong. Hastily a
+new Coercion Bill was brought in, and rushed through its stages in
+Parliament, and, facing the storm of public excitement, I pleaded
+still, "Force no remedy," despite the hardship of the task. "There is
+excessive difficulty in dealing with the Irish difficulty at the
+present moment. Tories are howling for revenge on a whole nation as
+answer to the crime committed by a few; Whigs are swelling the outcry;
+many Radicals are swept away by the current, and feeling that
+'something must be done,' they endorse the Government action,
+forgetting to ask whether the 'something' proposed is the wisest
+thing. A few stand firm, but they are very few--too few to prevent the
+new Coercion Bill from passing into law. But few though we be who lift
+up the voice of protest against the wrong which we are powerless to
+prevent, we may yet do much to make the new Act of brief duration, by
+so rousing public opinion as to bring about its early repeal. When the
+measure is understood by the public half the battle will be won; it is
+accepted at the moment from faith in the Government; it will be
+rejected when its true character is grasped. The murders which have
+given birth to this repressive measure came with a shock upon the
+country, which was the more terrible from the sudden change from
+gladness and hope to darkness and despair. The new policy was welcomed
+so joyfully; the messenger of the new policy was slain ere yet the pen
+was dry which had signed the orders of mercy and of liberty. Small
+wonder that cry of horror should be followed by measures of vengeance;
+but the murders were the work of a few criminals, while the measure of
+vengeance strikes the whole of the Irish people. I plead against the
+panic which confounds political agitation and political redressal of
+wrong with crime and its punishment; the Government measure gags every
+mouth in Ireland, and puts, as we shall see, all political effort at
+the mercy of the Lord-Lieutenant, the magistracy, and the police." I
+then sketched the misery of the peasants in the grip of absentee
+landlords, the turning out on the roadside to die of the mother with
+new-born babe at her breast, the loss of "all thought of the sanctity
+of human life when the lives of the dearest are reckoned as less worth
+than the shillings of overdue rack-rental." I analysed the new Act:
+"When this Act passes, trial by jury, right of public meeting, liberty
+of press, sanctity of house, will one and all be held at the will of
+the Lord-Lieutenant, the irresponsible autocrat of Ireland, while
+liberty of person will lie at the mercy of every constable. Such is
+England's way of governing Ireland in the year 1882. And this is
+supposed to be a Bill for the 'repression of crime.'" Bluntly, I put
+the bald truth: "The plain fact is that the murderers have succeeded.
+They saw in the new policy the reconciliation of England and Ireland;
+they knew that friendship would follow justice, and that the two
+countries, for the first time in history, would clasp hands. To
+prevent this they dug a new gulf, which they hoped the English nation
+would not span; they sent a river of blood across the road of
+friendship, and they flung two corpses to bar the newly-opened gate of
+reconciliation and peace. They have succeeded."
+
+Into this whirl of political and social strife came the first whisper
+to me of the Theosophical Society, in the shape of a statement of its
+principles, which conveyed, I remarked, "no very definite idea of the
+requirements for membership, beyond a dreamy, emotional, scholarly
+interest in the religio-philosophic fancies of the past." Also a
+report of an address by Colonel Olcott, which led me to suppose that
+the society held to "some strange theory of 'apparitions' of the dead,
+and to some existence outside the physical and apart from it." These
+came to me from some Hindu Freethinkers, who asked my opinion as to
+Secularists joining the Theosophical Society, and Theosophists being
+admitted to the National Secular Society. I replied, judging from
+these reports, that "while Secularists would have no right to refuse
+to enrol Theosophists, if they desired it, among their members, there
+is a radical difference between the mysticism of Theosophy and the
+scientific materialism of Secularism. The exclusive devotion to this
+world implied in the profession of Secularism leaves no room for
+other-worldism; and consistent members of our body cannot join a
+society which professes belief therein."[27]
+
+H.P. Blavatsky penned a brief article in the _Theosophist_ for
+August, 1882, in which she commented on my paragraph, remarking, in
+her generous way, that it must have been written "while labouring
+under entirely misconceived notions about the real nature of our
+society. For one so highly intellectual and keen as that renowned
+writer to dogmatise and issue autocratic ukases, after she has herself
+suffered so cruelly and undeservedly at the hands of blind bigotry and
+social prejudice in her lifelong struggle for _freedom of thought_
+seems, to say the least, absurdly inconsistent." After quoting my
+paragraph she went on: "Until proofs to the contrary, we prefer to
+believe that the above lines were dictated to Mrs. Besant by some
+crafty misrepresentations from Madras, inspired by a mean personal
+revenge rather than a desire to remain consistent with the principles
+of 'the scientific materialism of Secularism.' We beg to assure the
+Radical editors of the _National Reformer_ that they were both very
+strangely misled by false reports about the Radical editors of the
+_Theosophist_. The term 'supernaturalists' can no more apply to the
+latter than to Mrs. A. Besant and Mr. C. Bradlaugh."
+
+H.P. Blavatsky, when she commented, as she occasionally did, on the
+struggles going on in England, took of them a singularly large-hearted
+and generous view. She referred with much admiration to Mr.
+Bradlaugh's work and to his Parliamentary struggle, and spoke warmly
+of the services he had rendered to liberty. Again, in pointing out
+that spiritualistic trance orations by no means transcended speeches
+that made no such claim, I find her first mention of myself: "Another
+lady orator, of deservedly great fame, both for eloquence and
+learning--the good Mrs. Annie Besant--without believing in controlling
+spirits, or for that matter in her own spirit, yet speaks and writes
+such sensible and wise things, that we might almost say that one of
+her speeches or chapters contains more matter to benefit humanity than
+would equip a modern trance-speaker for an entire oratorical
+career."[28] I have sometimes wondered of late years whether, had I
+met her then or seen any of her writings, I should have become her
+pupil. I fear not; I was still too much dazzled by the triumphs of
+Western Science, too self-assertive, too fond of combat, too much at
+the mercy of my own emotions, too sensitive to praise and blame. I
+needed to sound yet more deeply the depths of human misery, to hear
+yet more loudly the moaning of "the great Orphan," Humanity, to feel
+yet more keenly the lack of wider knowledge and of clearer light if I
+were to give effective help to man, ere I could bow my pride to crave
+admittance as pupil to the School of Occultism, ere I could put aside
+my prejudices and study the Science of the Soul.
+
+The long-continued attempts of Sir Henry Tyler and his friends to
+stimulate persecutions for blasphemy at length took practical shape,
+and in July, 1882, Mr. Foote, the editor, Mr. Ramsey, the publisher,
+and Mr. Whittle, the printer of the _Freethinker_, were summoned for
+blasphemy by Sir Henry Tyler himself. An attempt was made to involve
+Mr. Bradlaugh in the proceedings, and the solicitors promised to drop
+the case against the editor and printer if Mr. Bradlaugh would himself
+sell them some copies of the paper. But however ready Mr. Bradlaugh
+had always shown himself to shield his subordinates by taking his sins
+on his own shoulders, he saw no reason why he should assume
+responsibility for a paper over which he had no control, and which
+was, he thought, by its caricatures, lowering the tone of Freethought
+advocacy and giving an unnecessary handle to its foes. He therefore
+answered that he would sell the solicitors any works published by
+himself or with his authority, and sent them a catalogue of the whole
+of such works. The object of this effort of Sir Henry Tyler's was
+obvious enough, and Mr. Bradlaugh commented: "The above letters make
+it pretty clear that Sir Henry W. Tyler having failed in his endeavour
+to get the science classes stopped at the Hall of Science, having also
+failed in his attempt to induce Sir W. Vernon Harcourt to prosecute
+myself and Mrs. Besant as editors and publishers of this journal,
+desires to make me personally and criminally responsible for the
+contents of a journal I neither edit nor publish, over which I have
+not a shadow of control, and in which I have not the smallest
+interest. Why does Sir H.W. Tyler so ardently desire to prosecute, me
+for blasphemy? Is it because two convictions will under the 9th and
+10th Will. III. cap. 32, render me 'for ever' incapable of sitting in
+Parliament?" The _Whitehall Review_ frankly put this forward as an
+object to be gained, and Mr. Bradlaugh was summoned to the Mansion
+House on a charge of publishing blasphemous libels in the
+_Freethinker_; meanwhile Sir Henry Tyler put a notice on the Order
+Book to deprive "the daughters of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh" of the grant
+they had earned as science teachers, and got an order which proved to
+be invalid, but which was acted on, to inspect Mr. Bradlaugh's and my
+own private banking accounts, I being no party to the case. Looking
+back, I marvel at the incredible meannesses to which Sir Henry Tyler
+and others stooped in defence of "religion"--Heaven save the mark! Let
+me add that his motion in the House of Commons was a complete failure,
+and it was emphasised by the publication at the same time of the
+successful work, both as teachers and as students, of the "daughters
+of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh," and of my being the only student in all
+England who had succeeded in taking honours in botany.
+
+I must pause a moment to chronicle, in September, 1882, the death of
+Dr. Pusey, whom I had sought in the whirl of my early religious
+struggles. I wrote an article on him in the _National Reformer_, and
+ended by laying a tribute on his grave: "A strong man and a good man.
+Utterly out of harmony with the spirit of his own time, looking with
+sternly-rebuking eyes on all the eager research, the joyous love of
+nature, the earnest inquiry into a world doomed to be burnt up at the
+coming of its Judge. An ascetic, pure in life, stern in faith, harsh
+to unbelievers because sincere in his own cruel creed, generous and
+tender to all who accepted his doctrines and submitted to his Church.
+He never stooped to slander those with whom he disagreed. His hatred
+of heresy led him not to blacken the character of heretics, nor to
+descend to the vulgar abuse used by pettier priests. And therefore I,
+who honour courage and sincerity wherever I find them; I, who do
+homage to steadfastness wherever I find it; I, Atheist, lay my small
+tribute of respect on the bier of this noblest of the Anglo-Catholics,
+Edward Bouverie Pusey."
+
+As a practical answer to the numberless attacks made on us, and as a
+result of the enormous increase of circulation given to our
+theological and political writings by these harassing persecutions, we
+moved our publishing business to 63, Fleet Street, at the end of
+September, 1882, a shop facing that at which Richard Carlile had
+carried on his publishing business for a great time, and so seemed
+still redolent with memories of his gallant struggles. Two of the
+first things sold here were a pamphlet of mine, a strong protest
+against our shameful Egyptian policy, and a critical volume on
+"Genesis" which Mr. Bradlaugh found time to write in the intervals of
+his busy life. Here I worked daily, save when out of London, until Mr.
+Bradlaugh's death in 1891, assisted in the conduct of the business by
+Mr. Bradlaugh's elder daughter--a woman of strong character with many
+noble qualities, who died rather suddenly in December, 1888, and in
+the work on the _National Reformer_, first by Dr. Aveling, and then by
+Mr. John Robertson, its present editor. Here, too, from 1884 onwards,
+worked with me Thornton Smith, one of Mr. Bradlaugh's most devoted
+disciples, who became one of the leading speakers of the National
+Secular Society; like her well-loved chief, she was ever a good friend
+and a good fighter, and to me the most loyal and loving of colleagues,
+one of the few--the very few--Freethinkers who were large-hearted and
+generous enough not to turn against me when I became a Theosophist. A
+second of these--alas! I could count them on my fingers--was the John
+Robertson above mentioned, a man of rare ability and wide culture,
+somewhat too scholarly for popular propagandism of the most generally
+effective order, but a man who is a strength to any movement, always
+on the side of noble living and high thinking, loyal-natured as the
+true Scot should be, incapable of meanness or treachery, and the most
+genial and generous of friends.
+
+Among the new literary ventures that followed on our taking the large
+publishing premises in Fleet Street was a sixpenny magazine, edited by
+myself, and entitled _Our Corner_; its first number was dated January,
+1883, and for six years it appeared regularly, and served me as a
+useful mouthpiece in my Socialist and Labour propagandist work. Among
+its contributors were Moncure D. Conway, Professor Ludwig Buechner,
+Yves Guyot, Professor Ernst Haeckel, G. Bernard Shaw, Constance Naden,
+Dr. Aveling, J.H. Levy, J.L. Joynes, Mrs. Edgren, John Robertson,
+and many another, Charles Bradlaugh and I writing regularly each
+month.
+
+1883 broke stormily, fights on every hand, and a huge constitutional
+agitation going on in the country, which forced the Government into
+bringing in an Affirmation Bill; resolutions from Liberal Associations
+all over the land; preparations to oppose the re-election of disloyal
+members; no less than a thousand delegates sent up to London by clubs,
+Trade Unions, associations of every sort; a meeting that packed
+Trafalgar Square; an uneasy crowd in Westminster Hall; a request from
+Inspector Denning that Mr. Bradlaugh would go out to them--they feared
+for his safety inside; a word from him, "The Government have pledged
+themselves to bring in an Affirmation Bill at once;" roar after roar
+of cheering; a veritable people's victory on that 15th of February,
+1883. It was the answer of the country to the appeal for justice, the
+rebuke of the electors to the House that had defied them.
+
+Scarcely was this over when a second prosecution for blasphemy against
+Messrs. Foote, Ramsey, and Kemp began, and was hurried on in the
+Central Criminal Court, before Mr. Justice North, a bigot of the
+sternest type. The trial ended in a disagreement of the jury, Mr.
+Foote defending himself in a splendid speech. The judge acted very
+harshly throughout, interrupted Mr. Foote continuously, and even
+refused bail to the defendants during the interval between the first
+and second trial; they were, therefore, confined in Newgate from
+Thursday to Monday, and we were only allowed to see them through iron
+bars and lattice, as they exercised in the prison yard between 8:30
+and 9:30 a.m. Brought up to trial again on Monday, they were
+convicted, and Mr. Foote was sentenced to a year's imprisonment, Mr.
+Ramsey to nine months, and Mr. Kemp to three months. Mr. Foote
+especially behaved with great dignity and courage in a most difficult
+position, and heard his cruel sentence without wincing, and with the
+calm words, "My Lord, I thank you; it is worthy your creed." A few of
+us at once stepped in, to preserve to Mr. Ramsey his shop, and to Mr.
+Foote his literary property; Dr. Aveling undertook the editing of the
+_Freethinker_ and of Mr. Foote's magazine _Progress_; the immediate
+necessities of their families were seen to; Mr. and Mrs. Forder took
+charge of the shop, and within a few days all was in working order.
+Disapproving as many of us did of the policy of the paper, there was
+no time to think of that when a blasphemy prosecution had proved
+successful, and we all closed up in the support of men imprisoned for
+conscience' sake. I commenced a series of articles on "The Christian
+Creed; what it is blasphemy to deny," showing what Christians must
+believe under peril of prosecution. Everywhere a tremendous impulse
+was given to the Freethought movement, as men awakened to the
+knowledge that blasphemy laws were not obsolete.
+
+From over the sea came a word of sympathy from the pen of H.P.
+Blavatsky in the _Theosophist_. "We prefer Mr. Foote's actual position
+to that of his severe judge. Aye, and were we in his guilty skin, we
+would feel more proud, even in the poor editor's present position,
+than we would under the wig of Mr. Justice North."
+
+In April, 1883, the long legal struggles of Mr. Bradlaugh against Mr.
+Newdegate and his common informer, that had lasted from July 2, 1880,
+till April 9, 1883, ended in his complete victory by the judgment of
+the House of Lords in his favour. "Court after Court decided against
+me," he wrote; "and Whig and Tory journals alike mocked at me for my
+persistent resistance. Even some good friends thought that my fight
+was hopeless, and that the bigots held me fast in their toils. I have,
+however, at last shaken myself free of Mr. Newdegate and his common
+informer. The judgment of the House of Lords in my favour is final and
+conclusive, and the boasts of the Tories that I should be made
+bankrupt for the penalties, have now, for ever, come to naught. Yet
+but for the many poor folk who have stood by me with their help and
+sympathy, I should have long since been ruined. The days and weeks
+spent in the Law Courts, the harassing work connected with each stage
+of litigation, the watching daily when each hearing was imminent, the
+absolute hindrance of all provincial lecturing--it is hardly possible
+for any one to judge the terrible mental and pecuniary strain of all
+this long-drawn-out struggle." Aye! it killed him at last, twenty
+years before his time, sapping his splendid vitality, undermining his
+iron constitution.
+
+The blasphemy trial of Mr. Bradlaugh, Mr. Foote, and Mr. Ramsey now
+came on, but this time in the Queen's Bench, before the Lord Chief
+Justice Coleridge. I had the honour of sitting between Mr. Bradlaugh
+and Mr. Foote, charged with the duty of having ready for the former
+all his references, and with a duplicate brief to mark off point after
+point as he dealt with it. Messrs. Foote and Ramsey were brought up in
+custody, but were brave and bright with courage unbroken. Mr.
+Bradlaugh applied to have his case taken separately, as he denied
+responsibility for the paper, and the judge granted the application;
+it was clearly proved that he and I--the "Freethought Publishing
+Company"--had never had anything to do with the production of the
+paper; that until November, 1881, we published it, and then refused to
+publish it any longer; that the reason for the refusal was the
+addition of comic Bible illustrations as a feature of the paper. I was
+called as witness and began with a difficulty; claiming to affirm, I
+was asked by the judge if the oath would not be binding on my
+conscience; I answered that any promise was binding on me whatever the
+form, and after some little argument the judge found a way out of the
+insulting form by asking whether the "invocation of the Deity added
+anything to it of a binding nature--added any sanction?" "None, my
+Lord," was the prompt reply, and I was allowed to affirm. Sir Hardinge
+Giffard subjected me to a very stringent cross-examination, doing his
+best to entangle me, but the perfect frankness of my answers broke all
+his weapons of finesse and inuendo.
+
+Some of the incidents of the trial were curious; Sir Hardinge
+Giffard's opening speech was very able and very unscrupulous. All
+facts in Mr. Bradlaugh's favour were distorted or hidden; anything
+that could be used against him was tricked out in most seductive
+fashion. Among the many monstrous perversions of the truth made by
+this most pious counsel, was the statement that changes of publisher,
+and of registration of the _Freethinker_ were made in consequence of a
+question as to prosecuting it put in the House of Commons. The change
+of publisher was admittedly made in November; the registration was
+made for the first time in November, and could not be changed, as
+there was no previous one. The House of Commons was not sitting in
+November; the question alluded to was asked in the following February.
+This one deliberate lie of the "defender of the faith" will do as well
+as quoting a score of others to show how wickedly and maliciously he
+endeavoured to secure an unjust verdict.
+
+The speech over, a number of witnesses were called. Sir Hardinge did
+not call witnesses who knew the facts, such as Mr. Norrish, the
+shopman, or Mr. Whittle, the printer. These he carefully avoided,
+although he subpoenaed both, because he did not want the real facts to
+come out. But he put in two solicitor's clerks, who had been hanging
+about the premises, and buying endless _National Reformers_ and
+_Freethinkers_, sheaves of them which were never used, but by which
+Sir Hardinge hoped to convey the impression of a mass of criminality.
+He put in a gentleman from the British Museum, who produced two large
+books, presumed to be _National Reformers_ and _Freethinkers_; what
+they were brought for nobody understood, the counsel for the Crown as
+little as any one, and the judge, surveying them over his spectacles,
+treated them with supreme contempt, as utterly irrelevant. Then a man
+came to prove that Mr. Bradlaugh was rated for Stonecutter Street, a
+fact no one disputed. Two policemen came to say they had seen him go
+in. "You saw many people go in, I suppose?" queried the Lord Chief
+Justice. On the whole the most miserably weak and obviously malicious
+case that could be brought into a court of law.
+
+One witness, however, must not be forgotten--Mr. Woodhams, bank
+manager. When he stated that Mr. Maloney, the junior counsel for the
+Crown, had inspected Mr. Bradlaugh's banking account, a murmur of
+surprise and indignation ran round the court. "Oh! Oh!" was heard from
+the crowd of barristers behind. The judge looked down incredulously,
+and for a moment the examination was stopped by the general movement.
+Unless Sir Hardinge Giffard is a splendid actor, he was not aware of
+the infamous proceeding, for he looked as startled as the rest of his
+legal brethren.
+
+Another queer incident occurred, showing, perhaps more than aught
+else, Mr. Bradlaugh's swift perception of the situation and adaptation
+to the environment. He wanted to read the Mansion House deposition of
+Norrish, to show why he was not called; the judge objected, and
+declined to allow it to be read. A pause while you might count five;
+then; "Well, I think I may say the learned counsel did not call
+Norrish because ..." and then the whole substance of the deposition
+was given in supposititious form. The judge looked down a minute, and
+then went off into silent laughter impossible to control at the adroit
+change of means and persistent gaining of end; barristers all round
+broke into ripples of laughter unrestrained; a broad smile pervaded
+the jury box; the only unmoved person was the defendant who proceeded
+in his grave statement as to what Norrish "might" have been asked. The
+nature of the defence was very clearly stated by Mr. Bradlaugh: "I
+shall ask you to find that this prosecution is one of the steps in a
+vindictive attempt to oppress and to crush a political opponent--that
+it was a struggle that commenced on my return to Parliament in 1880.
+If the prosecutor had gone into the box I should have shown you that
+he was one of the first then in the House to use the suggestion of
+blasphemy against me there. Since then I have never had any peace
+until the Monday of this week. Writs for penalties have been served,
+and suits of all kinds have been taken against me. On Monday last the
+House of Lords cleared me from the whole of one set, and, gentlemen, I
+ask you to-day to clear me from another. Three times I have been
+re-elected by my constituents, and what Sir Henry Tyler asks you to do
+is to send me to them branded with the dishonour of a conviction,
+branded not with the conviction for publishing heresy, but branded
+with the conviction, dishonourable to me, of having lied in this
+matter. I have no desire to have a prison's walls closed on me, but I
+would sooner ten times that, than that my constituents should think
+that for one moment I lied to escape the penalties. I am not indicted
+for anything I have ever written or caused to be written. As my Lord
+at the very first stage this morning pointed out, it is no question
+with me, Are the matters indicted blasphemous, or are they not
+blasphemous? Are they defensible, or are they not defensible? That is
+not my duty here. On this I make no comment. I have no duty here of
+even discussing the policy of the blasphemy laws, although I cannot
+help thinking that, if I were here making my defence against them, I
+might say that they were bad laws unfairly revived, doing more
+mischief to those who revive them than to those whom they are revived
+against. But it is not for anything I have said myself; it is not for
+anything I have written myself; it is not for anything I have
+published myself. It is an endeavour to make me technically liable for
+a publication with which I have nothing whatever to do, and I will ask
+you to defeat that here. Every time I have succeeded I have been met
+with some new thing. When I first fought it was hoped to defeat my
+election. When I was re-elected it was sought to make me bankrupt by
+enormous penalties, and when I escaped the suit for enormous penalties
+they hope now to destroy me by this. I have no question here about
+defending my heresy, not because I am not ready to defend it when it
+is challenged in the right way, and it there be anything in it that
+the law can challenge. I have never gone back from anything I have
+ever said; I have never gone back from anything I have ever written; I
+have never gone back from anything I have ever done; and I ask you not
+to allow this Sir Henry Whatley Tyler, who dares not come here to-day,
+to use you as the assassin uses the dagger, to stab a man from behind
+whom he never dares to face."
+
+The summing up by Lord Coleridge was perfect in eloquence, in thought,
+in feeling. Nothing more touching could be imagined than the conflict
+between the real religious feeling, abhorrent of heresy, and the
+determination to be just, despite all prejudice. The earnest effort
+lest the prejudice he felt as a Christian should weigh also in the
+minds of the jury, and should cause them to pervert justice. The
+absolute pleading to them to do what was right and not to admit
+against the unbeliever what they would not admit in ordinary cases.
+Then the protest against prosecution of opinions; the admission of the
+difficulties in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the pathetic fear lest by
+persecution "the sacred truths might be struck through the sides of
+those who are their enemies." For intellectual clearness and moral
+elevation this exquisite piece of eloquence, delivered in a voice of
+silvery beauty, would be hard to excel, and Lord Coleridge did this
+piece of service to the religion so dear to his heart, that he showed
+that a Christian judge could be just and righteous in dealing with a
+foe of his creed.
+
+There was a time of terrible strain waiting for the verdict, and when
+at last it came, "Not Guilty," a sharp clap of applause hailed it,
+sternly and rightly reproved by the judge. It was echoed by the
+country, which almost unanimously condemned the prosecution as an
+iniquitous attempt on the part of Mr. Bradlaugh's political enemies to
+put a stop to his political career. Thus the _Pall Mall Gazette_
+wrote:--
+
+"Whatever may be the personal or political or religious aversion which
+is excited by Mr. Bradlaugh, it is impossible for even his bitterest
+opponents to deny the brilliance of the series of victories which he
+has won in the law courts. His acquittal in the blasphemy prosecution
+of Saturday was but the latest of a number of encounters in which he
+has succeeded in turning the tables upon his opponents in the most
+decisive fashion. The policy of baiting Mr. Bradlaugh which has been
+persisted in so long, savours so strongly of a petty and malignant
+species of persecution that it is well that those who indulge in it
+should be made to smart for their pains. The wise and weighty words
+used by the Lord Chief Justice in summing up should be taken seriously
+to heart: 'Those persons are to be deprecated who would pervert the
+law, even with the best intentions, and "do evil that good may come,
+whose damnation" (says the apostle) "is just."' Without emulating the
+severity of the apostle, we may say that it is satisfactory that the
+promoters of all these prosecutions should be condemned in costs."
+
+In the separate trial of Messrs. Foote and Ramsey, Mr. Foote again
+defended himself in a speech of marked ability, and spoken of by the
+judge as "very striking." Lord Coleridge made a noble charge to the
+jury, in which he strongly condemned prosecutions of unpopular
+opinions, pointing out that no prosecution short of extermination
+could be effective, and caustically remarking on the very easy form of
+virtue indulged in by persecutors. "As a general rule," he said,
+"persecution, unless far more extreme than in England in the
+nineteenth century is possible, is certain to be in vain. It is also
+true, and I cannot help assenting to it, that it is a very easy form
+of virtue. It is a more difficult form of virtue, quietly and
+unostentatiously to obey what we believe to be God's will in our own
+lives. It is not very easy to do it; and it makes much less noise in
+the world. It is very easy to turn upon somebody else who differs from
+us, and in the guise of zeal of God's honour to attack somebody of a
+difference of opinion, whose life may be more pleasing to God and more
+conducive to His honour than our own. And when it is done by persons
+whose own lives are not free from reproach and who take that
+particular form of zeal for God which consists in putting the criminal
+law in force against others, that, no doubt, does more to create a
+sympathy with the defendant than with the prosecutor. And if it should
+be done by those who enjoy the wit of Voltaire, and who do not turn
+away from the sneers of Gibbon, and rather relish the irony of Hume,
+our feelings do not go with the prosecutors, and we are rather
+disposed to sympathise with the defendant. It is still worse if the
+person who takes such a course takes it, not from a kind of notion
+that God wants his assistance, and that he can give it less on his own
+account than by prosecuting others--but it is mixed up with anything
+of partisan or political feeling, then nothing can be more foreign to
+what is high-minded, or religious, or noble, in men's conduct; and
+indeed, it seems to me that any one who will do that, not for the
+honour of God but for the purpose of the ban, deserves the most
+disdainful disapprobation."
+
+The jury disagreed, and a _nolle prosequi_ was entered. The net
+results of the trials were a large addition to the membership of the
+National Secular Society, an increase of circulation of Freethought
+literature, the raising of Mr. Foote for a time to a position of great
+influence and popularity, and the placing of his name in history as a
+brave martyr for liberty of speech. The offence against good taste
+will be forgotten; the loyalty to conviction and to courage will
+remain. History does not ask if men who suffered for heresy ever
+published a rough word; it asks, Were they brave in their
+steadfastness; were they faithful to the truth they saw? It may be
+well to place on record Mr. Foote's punishment for blasphemy: he spent
+twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four alone in his cell; his only
+seat was a stool without a back; his employment was picking matting;
+his bed was a plank with a thin mattress. During the latter part of
+his imprisonment he was allowed some books.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+SOCIALISM.
+
+
+The rest of 1883 passed in the usual way of hard work; the Affirmation
+Bill was rejected, and the agitation for Constitutional right grew
+steadily; the Liberal Press was won over, and Mr. Bradlaugh was
+beginning to earn golden opinions on all sides for his courage, his
+tenacity, and his self-control. A successful International Congress at
+Amsterdam took some of us over to the Northern Venice, where a most
+successful gathering was held. To me, personally, the year has a
+special interest, as being the one in which my attention was called,
+though only partially, to the Socialist movement. I had heard Louise
+Michelle lecture in the early spring; a brief controversy in the
+_National Reformer_ had interested me, but I had not yet concerned
+myself with the economic basis of Socialism; I had realised that the
+land should be public property, but had not gone into the deeper
+economic causes of poverty, though the question was pressing with
+ever-increasing force on heart and brain. Of Socialist teaching I knew
+nothing, having studied only the older English Economists in my
+younger days. In 1884 a more definite call to consider 299 these
+teachings was to come, and I may perhaps open the record of 1884 with
+the words of greeting spoken by me to our readers in the first number
+of the _Reformer_ for that year: "What tests 1884 may have for our
+courage, what strains on our endurance, what trials of our loyalty,
+none can tell. But this we know--that every test of courage
+successfully met, every strain of endurance steadily borne, every
+trial of loyalty nobly surmounted, leaves courage braver, endurance
+stronger, loyalty truer, than each was before. And therefore, for our
+own and for the world's sake, I will not wish you, friends, an 1884 in
+which there shall be no toil and no battling; but I will wish you,
+each and all, the hero's heart and the hero's patience, in the
+struggle for the world's raising that will endure through the coming
+year."
+
+On February 3rd I came for the first time across a paper called
+_Justice_, in which Mr. Bradlaugh was attacked, and which gave an
+account of a meeting of the Democratic Federation--not yet the Social
+Democratic--in which a man had, apparently unrebuked, said that "all
+means were justifiable to attain" working-class ends. I protested
+strongly against the advocacy of criminal means, declaring that those
+who urged the use of such means were the worst foes of social
+progress. A few weeks later the _Echo_ repeated a speech of Mr.
+Hyndman's in which a "bloodier revolution" than that of France was
+prophesied, and the extinction of "book-learning" seemed coupled with
+the success of Socialism, and this again I commented on. But I had the
+pleasure, a week later, of reprinting from _Justice_ a sensible
+paragraph, condemning the advocacy of violence so long as free
+agitation was allowed.
+
+The spring was marked by two events on which I have not time or space
+to dwell--the resignation by Mr. Bradlaugh of his seat, on the
+reiteration of the resolution of exclusion, and his triumphant return
+for the fourth time by an increased majority, a vote of 4,032, a
+higher poll than that of the general election; and the release of Mr.
+Foote, on February 25th, from Holloway, whence he was escorted by a
+procession a quarter of a mile in length. On the 12th of March he and
+his fellow-prisoners received a magnificent reception and were
+presented with valuable testimonials at the Hall of Science.
+
+Taking up again the thread of Socialism, the great debate in St.
+James's Hall, London, between Mr. Bradlaugh and Mr. Hyndman on April
+17th, roused me to a serious study of the questions raised. Socialism
+has in England no more devoted, no more self-sacrificing advocate than
+Henry Hyndman. A man of wide and deep reading, wielding most ably a
+singularly fascinating pen, with talents that would have made him
+wealthy in any career he adopted, he has sacrificed himself without a
+murmur to the people's cause. He has borne obloquy from without,
+suspicion and unkindness from those he served, and surrounded by
+temptations to betray the people, he has never swerved from his
+integrity. He has said rash things, has been stirred to passionate
+outbursts and reckless phrases, but love to the people and sympathy
+with suffering lay at the root of his wildest words, and they count
+but little as against his faithful service. Personally, my debt to him
+is of a mixed character; he kept me from Socialism for some time by
+his bitter and very unjust antagonism to Mr. Bradlaugh; but it was the
+debate at St. James's Hall that, while I angrily resented his
+injustice, made me feel that there was something more in practical
+Socialism than I had imagined, especially when I read it over
+afterwards, away from the magic of Mr. Bradlaugh's commanding
+eloquence and personal magnetism. It was a sore pity that English
+Socialists, from the outset of their movement, treated Mr. Bradlaugh
+so unfairly, so that his friends were set against Socialists ere they
+began to examine their arguments. I must confess that my deep
+attachment to him led me into injustice to his Socialist foes in those
+early days, and often made me ascribe to them calculated malignity
+instead of hasty and prejudiced assertion. Added to this, their
+uncurbed violence in discussion, their constant interruptions during
+the speeches of opponents, their reckless inaccuracy in matters of
+fact, were all bars standing in the way of the thoughtful. When I came
+to know them better, I found that the bulk of their speakers were very
+young men, overworked and underpaid, who spent their scanty leisure in
+efforts to learn, to educate themselves, to train themselves, and I
+learned to pardon faults which grew out of the bitter sense of
+injustice, and which were due largely to the terrible pressure of our
+system on characters not yet strong enough--how few are strong
+enough!--to bear grinding injustice without loss of balance and of
+impartiality. None save those who have worked with them know how much
+of real nobility, of heroic self-sacrifice, of constant self-denial,
+of brotherly affection, there is among the Social Democrats.
+
+At this time also I met George Bernard Shaw, one of the most brilliant
+of Socialist writers and most provoking of men; a man with a perfect
+genius for "aggravating" the enthusiastically earnest, and with a
+passion for representing himself as a scoundrel. On my first
+experience of him on the platform at South Place Institute he
+described himself as a "loafer," and I gave an angry snarl at him in
+the _Reformer_, for a loafer was my detestation, and behold! I found
+that he was very poor, because he was a writer with principles and
+preferred starving his body to starving his conscience; that he gave
+time and earnest work to the spreading of Socialism, spending night
+after night in workmen's clubs; and that "a loafer" was only an
+amiable way of describing himself because he did not carry a hod. Of
+course I had to apologise for my sharp criticism as doing him a
+serious injustice, but privately felt somewhat injured at having been
+entrapped into such a blunder. Meanwhile I was more and more turning
+aside from politics and devoting myself to the social condition of the
+people I find myself, in June, protesting against Sir John Lubbock's
+Bill which fixed a twelve-hour day as the limit of a "young person's"
+toil. "A 'day' of twelve hours is brutal," I wrote; "if the law fixes
+twelve hours as a 'fair day' that law will largely govern custom. I
+declare that a 'legal day' should be eight hours on five days in the
+week and not more than five hours on the sixth. If the labour is of an
+exhausting character these hours are too long." On every side now the
+Socialist controversy grew, and I listened, read, and thought much,
+but said little. The inclusion of John Robertson in the staff of the
+_Reformer_ brought a highly intellectual Socialist into closer touch
+with us, and slowly I found that the case for Socialism was
+intellectually complete and ethically beautiful. The trend of my
+thought was shown by urging the feeding of Board School children,
+breaking down under the combination of education and starvation, and I
+asked, "Why should people be pauperised by a rate-supported meal, and
+not pauperised by, state-supported police, drainage, road-mending,
+street-lighting, &c? "Socialism in its splendid ideal appealed to my
+heart, while the economic soundness of its basis convinced my head.
+All my life was turned towards the progress of the people, the helping
+of man, and it leaped forward to meet the stronger hope, the lofty
+ideal of social brotherhood, the rendering possible to all of freer
+life; so long had I been striving thitherward, and here there opened
+up a path to the yearned-for goal! How strong were the feelings
+surging in my heart may be seen in a brief extract from an article
+published second week of January, 1885: "Christian charity? We know
+its work. It gives a hundred-weight of coal and five pounds of beef
+once a year to a family whose head could earn a hundred such doles if
+Christian justice allowed him fair wage for the work he performs. It
+plunders the workers of the wealth they make, and then flings back at
+them a thousandth part of their own product as 'charity.' It builds
+hospitals for the poor whom it has poisoned in filthy courts and
+alleys, and workhouses for the worn-out creatures from whom it has
+wrung every energy, every hope, every joy. Miss Cobbe summons us to
+admire Christian civilisation, and we see idlers flaunting in the
+robes woven by the toilers, a glittering tinselled super-structure
+founded on the tears, the strugglings, the grey, hopeless misery of
+the poor."
+
+This first month of January, 1885, brought on me the first attack for
+my Socialistic tendencies, from the pen of Mr. W.P. Ball, who wrote
+to the _Reformer_ complaining of my paragraph, quoted above, in which
+I had advocated rate-supported meals for Board School children. A
+brief controversy thus arose, in which I supported my opinion, waiving
+the question as to my being "at heart a Socialist." In truth, I
+dreaded to make the plunge of publicly allying myself with the
+advocates of Socialism, because of the attitude of bitter hostility
+they had adopted towards Mr. Bradlaugh. On his strong, tenacious
+nature, nurtured on self-reliant individualism, the arguments of the
+younger generation made no impression. He could not change his methods
+because a new tendency was rising to the surface, and he did not see
+how different was the Socialism of our day to the Socialist dreams of
+the past--noble ideals of a future not immediately realisable in
+truth, but to be worked towards and rendered possible in the days to
+come. Could I take public action which might bring me into collision
+with the dearest of my friends, which might strain the strong and
+tender tie so long existing between us? My affection, my gratitude,
+all warred against the idea of working with those who wronged him so
+bitterly. But the cry of starving children was ever in my ears; the
+sobs of women poisoned in lead works, exhausted in nail works, driven
+to prostitution by starvation, made old and haggard by ceaseless work.
+I saw their misery was the result of an evil system, was inseparable
+from private ownership of the instruments of wealth production; that
+while the worker was himself but an instrument, selling his labour
+under the law of supply and demand, he must remain helpless in the
+grip of the employing classes, and that trade combinations could only
+mean increased warfare--necessary, indeed, for the time as weapons of
+defence--but meaning war, not brotherly co-operation of all for the
+good of all. A conflict which was stripped of all covering, a conflict
+between a personal tie and a call of duty could not last long, and
+with a heavy heart I made up my mind to profess Socialism openly and
+work for it with all my energy. Happily, Mr. Bradlaugh was as tolerant
+as he was strong, and our private friendship remained unbroken; but he
+never again felt the same confidence in my judgment as he felt before,
+nor did he any more consult me on his own policy, as he had done ever
+since we first clasped hands.
+
+A series of articles in _Our Corner_ on the "Redistribution of
+Political Power," on the "Evolution of Society," on "Modern
+Socialism," made my position clear. "Over against those who laud the
+present state of Society, with its unjustly rich and its unjustly
+poor, with its palaces and its slums, its millionaires and its
+paupers, be it ours to proclaim that there is a higher ideal in life
+than that of being first in the race for wealth, most successful in
+the scramble for gold. Be it ours to declare steadfastly that health,
+comfort, leisure, culture, plenty for every individual are far more
+desirable than breathless struggle for existence, furious trampling
+down of the weak by the strong, huge fortunes accumulated out of the
+toil of others, to be handed down to those who had done nothing to
+earn them. Be it ours to maintain that the greatness of a nation
+depends not on the number of its great proprietors, on the wealth of
+its great capitalists, or the splendour of its great nobles, but on
+the absence of poverty among its people, on the education and
+refinement of its masses, on the universality of enjoyment in life....
+Enough for each of work, of leisure, of joy; too little for none, too
+much for none--such is the Social ideal. Better to strive after it
+worthily and fail, than to die without striving for it at all."
+
+Then I differentiated the methods of the Socialist and the Radical
+Individualist, pleading for union among those who formed the wings of
+the army of Labour, and urging union of all workers against the
+idlers. For the weakness of the people has ever been in their
+divisions, in the readiness of each section to turn its weapons
+against other sections instead of against the common foe. All
+privileged classes, when they are attacked, sink their differences and
+present a serried front to their assailants; the people alone fight
+with each other, while the battle between themselves and the
+privileged is raging.
+
+I strove, as so many others were striving, to sound in the ears of the
+thoughtless and the careless the cry of the sufferings of the poor,
+endeavouring to make articulate their misery. Thus in a description of
+Edinburgh slums came the following: "I saw in a 'house' which was made
+by boarding up part of a passage, which had no window, and in which it
+was necessary to burn an oil lamp all day, thus adding to the burden
+of the rent, a family of three--man, wife, and child--whose lot was
+hardly 'of their own making.' The man was tall and bronzed, but he was
+dying of heart disease; he could not do hard work, and he was too
+clumsy for light work; so he sat there, after two days' fruitless
+search, patiently nursing his miserable, scrofulous baby in his dim
+and narrow den. The cases of individual hopeless suffering are
+heartbreaking. In one room lay a dying child, dying of low fever
+brought on by want of food. 'It hae no faither,' sobbed the mother;
+and for a moment I did not catch the meaning that the father had left
+to the mother all the burden of a child unallowed by law. In another
+lay the corpse of a mother, with the children round her, and
+hard-featured, gentle-hearted women came in to take back to their
+overcrowded beds 'the mitherless bairns.' In yet another a woman,
+shrunken and yellow, crouched over a glimmer of fire; "I am dying of
+cancer of the womb," she said, with that pathetic resignation to the
+inevitable so common among the poor. I sat chatting for a few minutes.
+'Come again, deary,' she said as I rose to go; 'it's gey dull sitting
+here the day through.'"
+
+The article in which these, among other descriptions, occurred was
+closed with the following: "Passing out of the slums into the streets
+of the town, only a few steps separating the horror and the beauty, I
+felt, with a vividness more intense than ever, the fearful contrasts
+between the lots of men; and with more pressing urgency the question
+seemed to ring in my ears, 'Is there no remedy? Must there always be
+rich and poor?' Some say that it must be so; that the palace and the
+slum will for ever exist as the light and the shadow. Not so do I
+believe. I believe that the poverty is the result of ignorance and of
+bad social arrangements, and that therefore it may be eradicated by
+knowledge and by social change. I admit that for many of these adult
+dwellers in the slums there is no hope. Poor victims of a civilisation
+that hides its brutality beneath a veneer of culture and of grace, for
+them individually there is, alas! no salvation. But for their
+children, yes! Healthy surroundings, good food, mental and physical
+training, plenty of play, and carefully chosen work--these might save
+the young and prepare them for happy life. But they are being left to
+grow up as their parents were, and even when a few hours of school are
+given them the home half-neutralises what the education effects. The
+scanty aid given is generally begrudged, the education is to be but
+elementary, as little as possible is doled out. Yet these children
+have each one of them hopes and fears, possibilities of virtue and of
+crime, a life to be made or marred. We shower money on generals and on
+nobles, we keep high-born paupers living on the national charity, we
+squander wealth with both hands on army and navy, on churches and
+palaces; but we grudge every halfpenny that increases the education
+rate and howl down every proposal to build decent houses for the poor.
+We cover our heartlessness and indifference with fine phrases about
+sapping the independence of the poor and destroying their
+self-respect. With loathsome hypocrisy we repair a prince's palace for
+him, and let him live in it rent-free, without one word about the
+degradation involved in his thus living upon charity; while we refuse
+to 'pauperise' the toiler by erecting decent buildings in which he may
+live--not rent-free like the prince, but only paying a rent which
+shall cover the cost of erection and maintenance, instead of one which
+gives a yearly profit to a speculator. And so, year after year, the
+misery grows, and every great city has on its womb a cancer; sapping
+its vitality, poisoning its life-blood. Every great city is breeding
+in its slums a race which is reverting through the savage to the
+brute--a brute more dangerous in that degraded humanity has
+possibilities of evil in it beyond the reach of the mere wild beast.
+If not for Love's sake, then for fear; if not for justice or for human
+pity, then for sheer desire of self-preservation; I appeal to the wise
+and to the wealthy to set their hands to the cure of social evil, ere
+stolidity gives place to passion and dull patience vanishes before
+fury, and they
+
+"'Learn at last, in some wild hour, how much the wretched dare.'"
+
+Because it was less hotly antagonistic to the Radicals than the two
+other Socialist organisations, I joined the Fabian Society, and worked
+hard with it as a speaker and lecturer. Sidney Webb, G. Bernard Shaw,
+Hubert and Mrs. Bland, Graham Wallas--these were some of those who
+gave time, thought, incessant work to the popularising of Socialist
+thought, the spreading of sound economics, the effort to turn the
+workers' energy toward social rather than merely political reform. We
+lectured at workmen's clubs wherever we could gain a hearing, till we
+leavened London Radicalism with Socialist thought, and by treating the
+Radical as the unevolved Socialist rather than as the anti-Socialist,
+we gradually won him over to Socialist views. We circulated questions
+to be put to all candidates for parliamentary or other offices,
+stirred up interest in local elections, educated men and women into an
+understanding of the causes of their poverty, won recruits for the
+army of propagandists from the younger of the educated middle class.
+That the London working classes to-day are so largely Socialist is
+greatly due to the years of work done among them by members of the
+Fabian Society, as well to the splendid, if occasionally too militant,
+energy of the Social Democratic Federation, and to the devotion of
+that noble and generous genius, William Morris.
+
+During this same year (1885) a movement was set on foot in England to
+draw attention to the terrible sufferings of the Russian political
+prisoners, and it was decided at a meeting held in my house to form a
+society of the friends of Russia, which should seek to spread accurate
+and careful information about the present condition of Russia. At that
+meeting were present Charles Bradlaugh, "Stepniak," and many others,
+E.R. Pease acting as honorary secretary. It is noteworthy that some
+of the most prominent Russian exiles--such as Kropotkin--take the view
+that the Tzar himself is not allowed to know what occurs, and is very
+largely the victim of the bureaucracy that surrounds him.
+
+Another matter, that increased as the months went on, was the attempt
+of the police authorities to stop Socialist speaking in the open air.
+Christians, Freethinkers, Salvationists, agitators of all kinds were,
+for the most part, left alone, but there was a regular crusade against
+the Socialists. Liberal and Tory journals alike condemned the way in
+which in Dod Street, in September, the Socialists' meetings were
+attacked. Quiet persistence was shown by the promoters--members of the
+Social Democratic Federation--and they were well supported by other
+Socialists and by the Radical clubs. I volunteered to speak on October
+4th (my first Sunday in London after the summoning and imprisoning of
+the speakers had commenced), but the attitude of the people was so
+determined on the preceding Sunday that all interference was
+withdrawn.
+
+Herbert Burrows stood for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets in
+the November of this year, and I find a paragraph in the _Reformer_ in
+which I heartily wished him success, especially as the first candidate
+who had put forward a demand for industrial education. In this, as in
+so many practical proposals, Socialists have led the way. He polled
+4,232 votes, despite the furious opposition of the clergy to him as a
+Freethinker, of the publicans to him as a teetotaler, of the
+maintainers of the present social system to him as a Socialist. And
+his fight did much to make possible my own success in 1888.
+
+With this autumn, too, began, in connection with the struggle for the
+right of meeting, the helping of the workmen to fair trial by
+providing of bail and legal defence. The first case that I bailed out
+was that of Lewis Lyons, sent to gaol for two months with hard labour
+by Mr. Saunders, of the Thames Police Court. Oh, the weary, sickening
+waiting in the court for "my prisoner," the sordid vice, the revolting
+details of human depravity to which my unwilling eyes and ears were
+witnesses. I carried Lyons off in triumph, and the Middlesex
+magistrates quashed the conviction, the evidence being pronounced by
+them to be "confusing, contradictory, and worthless." Yet but for the
+chance of one of us stepping forward to offer bail and to provide the
+means for an appeal (I acted on Mr. Bradlaugh's suggestion and advice,
+for he acted as counsellor to me all through the weary struggles that
+lasted till 1888, putting his great legal knowledge at my disposal,
+though he often disapproved my action, thinking me Quixotic)--but for
+this, Lewis Lyons would have had to suffer his heavy sentence.
+
+The general election took place this autumn, and Northampton returned
+Mr. Bradlaugh for the fifth time, thus putting an end to the long
+struggle, for he took the oath and his seat in the following January,
+and at once gave notice of an Oaths Bill, to give to all who claimed
+it, under all circumstances, the right to affirm. He was returned with
+the largest vote ever polled for him--4,315--and he entered Parliament
+with all the prestige of his great struggle, and went to the front at
+once, one of the recognised forces in the House. The action of Mr.
+Speaker Peel promptly put an end to an attempted obstruction. Sir
+Michael Hicks Beach, Mr. Cecil Raikes, and Sir John Hennaway had
+written to the Speaker asking his interference, but the Speaker
+declared that he had no authority, no right to stand between a duly
+elected member and the duty of taking the oath prescribed by statute.
+Thus ended the constitutional struggle of six years, that left the
+victor well-nigh bankrupt in health and in purse, and sent him to a
+comparatively early grave. He lived long enough to justify his
+election, to prove his value to the House and to his country, but he
+did not live long enough to render to England all the services which
+his long training, his wide knowledge, his courage, and his honesty so
+eminently fitted him to yield.
+
+[Illustration: NORWICH BRANCH OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE.]
+
+_Our Corner_ now served as a valuable aid in Socialist propaganda, and
+its monthly "Socialist Notes" became a record of Socialist progress in
+all lands. We were busy during the spring in organising a conference
+for the discussion of "The Present Commercial System, and the Better
+Utilisation of National Wealth for the Benefit of the Community," and
+this was successfully held at South Place Institute on June 9th, 10th,
+11th, the three days being given respectively, to the "Utilisation of
+Land," the "Utilisation of Capital," and the "Democratic Policy." On
+the 9th Mr. Bradlaugh spoke on the utilisation of waste lands, arguing
+that in a thickly populated country no one had the right to keep
+cultivable land uncultivated, and that where land was so kept there
+should be compulsory expropriation, the state taking the land and
+letting it out to cultivating tenants. Among the other speakers were
+Edward Carpenter, William Morris, Sidney Webb, John Robertson, William
+Saunders, W. Donnisthorpe, Edward Aveling, Charlotte Wilson, Mrs.
+Fenwick Miller, Hubert Bland, Dr. Pankhurst, and myself--men and women
+of many views, met to compare methods, and so help on the cause of
+social regeneration.
+
+Bitter attacks were made on me for my Socialist advocacy by some of
+the Radicals in the Freethought party, and looking back I find myself
+condemned as a "Saint Athanasius in petticoats," and as possessing a
+"mind like a milk-jug." This same courteous critic remarked, "I have
+heard Mrs. Besant described as being, like most women, at the mercy of
+her last male acquaintance for her views on economics." I was foolish
+enough to break a lance in self-defence with this assailant, not
+having then learned that self-defence was a waste of time that might
+be better employed in doing work for others. I certainly should not
+now take the trouble to write such a paragraph as the following: "The
+moment a man uses a woman's sex to discredit her arguments, the
+thoughtful reader knows that he is unable to answer the arguments
+themselves. But really these silly sneers at woman's ability have lost
+their force, and are best met with a laugh at the stupendous 'male
+self-conceit' of the writer. I may add that such shafts are specially
+pointless against myself. A woman who thought her way out of
+Christianity and Whiggism into Freethought and Radicalism absolutely
+alone; who gave up every old friend, male and female, rather than
+resign the beliefs she had struggled to in solitude; who, again, in
+embracing active Socialism, has run counter to the views of her
+nearest 'male friends'; such a woman may very likely go wrong, but I
+think she may venture, without conceit, to at least claim independence
+of judgment. I did not make the acquaintance of one of my present
+Socialist comrades, male or female, until I had embraced Socialism." A
+foolish paragraph, as are all self-defences, and a mischievous one, as
+all retort breeds fresh strife. But not yet had come the self-control
+that estimates the judgments of others at their true value, that recks
+not of praise and blame; not yet had I learned that evil should not be
+met with evil, wrath with wrath; not yet were the words of the Buddha
+the law to which I strove to render obedience: "Hatred ceases not by
+hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love." The year 1886 was a
+terrible one for labour, everywhere reductions of wages, everywhere
+increase of the numbers of the unemployed; turning over the pages of
+_Our Corner_, I see "Socialist Notes" filled, month after month, with
+a monotonous tale, "there is a reduction of wages at" such and such a
+place; so many "men have been discharged at -----, owing to the
+slackness of trade." Our hearts sank lower and lower as summer passed
+into autumn, and the coming winter threatened to add to starvation the
+bitter pains of cold. The agitation for the eight hours' day increased
+in strength as the unemployed grew more numerous week by week "We
+can't stand it," a sturdy, quiet fellow had said to me during the
+preceding winter; "flesh and blood can't stand it, and two months of
+this bitter cold, too." "We may as well starve idle as starve
+working," had said another, with a fierce laugh. And a spirit of
+sullen discontent was spreading everywhere, discontent that was wholly
+justified by facts. But ah! how patient they were for the most part,
+how sadly, pathetically patient, this crucified Christ, Humanity;
+wrongs that would set my heart and my tongue afire would be accepted
+as a matter of course. O blind and mighty people, how my heart went
+out to you; trampled on, abused, derided, asking so little and needing
+so much; so pathetically grateful for the pettiest services; so loving
+and so loyal to those who offered you but their poor services and
+helpless love. Deeper and deeper into my innermost nature ate the
+growing desire to succour, to suffer for, to save. I had long given up
+my social reputation, I now gave up with ever-increasing surrender
+ease, comfort, time; the passion of pity grew stronger and stronger,
+fed by each new sacrifice, and each sacrifice led me nearer and nearer
+to the threshold of that gateway beyond which stretched a path of
+renunciation I had never dreamed of, which those might tread who were
+ready wholly to strip off self for Man's sake, who for Love's sake
+would surrender Love's return from those they served, and would go out
+into the darkness for themselves that they might, with their own souls
+as fuel, feed the Light of the World.
+
+As the suffering deepened with the darkening months, the meetings of
+the unemployed grew in number, and the murmurs of discontent became
+louder. The Social Democratic Federation carried on an outdoor
+agitation, not without making blunders, being composed of human
+beings, but with abundant courage and self-sacrifice. The policy of
+breaking up Socialist meetings went on while other meetings were
+winked at, and John Williams, a fiery speaker, but a man with a record
+of pathetic struggle and patient heroism, was imprisoned for two
+months for speaking in the open air, and so nearly starved in gaol
+that he came out with his health broken for life.
+
+1887 dawned, the year that was to close so stormily, and Socialists
+everywhere were busying themselves on behalf of the unemployed, urging
+vestries to provide remunerative work for those applying for relief,
+assailing the Local Government Board with practicable proposals for
+utilising the productive energies of the unemployed, circulating
+suggestions to municipalities and other local representative bodies,
+urging remedial measures. A four days' oral debate with Mr. Foote, and
+a written debate with Mr. Bradlaugh, occupied some of my energies, and
+helped in the process of education to which public opinion was being
+subjected. Both these debates were largely circulated as pamphlets. A
+series of afternoon debates between representative speakers was
+organised at South Place Institute, and Mr. Corrie Grant and myself
+had a lively discussion, I affirming "That the existence of classes
+who live upon unearned incomes is detrimental to the welfare of the
+community, and ought to be put an end to by legislation." Another
+debate--in this very quarrelsome spring of 1887--was a written one in
+the _National Reformer_ between the Rev. G.F. Handel Rowe and myself
+on the proposition, "Is Atheism logically tenable, and is there a
+satisfactory Atheistic System for the guidance of Human Conduct." And
+so the months went on, and the menace of misery grew louder and
+louder, till in September I find myself writing: "This one thing is
+clear--Society must deal with the unemployed, or the unemployed will
+deal with Society. Stormier and stormier becomes the social outlook,
+and they at least are not the worst enemies of Society who seek to
+find some way through the breakers by which the ship of the
+Commonwealth may pass into quiet waters."
+
+Some amusement turned up in the shape of a Charing Cross Parliament,
+in which we debated with much vigour the "burning questions" of the
+day. We organised a compact Socialist party, defeated a Liberal
+Government, took the reins of office, and--after a Queen's Speech in
+which her Majesty addressed her loyal Commons with a plainness of
+speech never before (or since) heard from the throne--we brought in
+several Bills of a decidedly heroic character. G. Bernard Shaw, as
+President of the Local Government Board, and I, as Home Secretary,
+came in for a good deal of criticism in connection with various
+drastic measures. An International Freethought Congress, held in
+London, entailed fairly heavy work, and the science classes were ever
+with us. Another written debate came with October, this time on the
+"Teachings of Christianity," making the fifth of these set discussions
+held by me during the year. This same month brought a change, painful
+but just: I resigned my much-prized position as co-editor of the
+_National Reformer,_ and the number for October 23rd bore Charles
+Bradlaugh's name alone. The change did not affect my work on the
+paper, but I became merely a subordinate, though remaining, of course,
+joint proprietor. The reason cannot be more accurately given than in
+the paragraph penned at the time: "For a considerable time past, and
+lately in increasing number, complaints have reached me from various
+quarters of the inconvenience and uncertainty that result from the
+divided editorial policy of this paper on the question of Socialism.
+Some months ago I proposed to avoid this difficulty by resigning my
+share in the editorship; but my colleague, with characteristic
+liberality, asked me to let the proposal stand over and see if matters
+would not adjust themselves. But the difficulty, instead of
+disappearing, has only become more pressing; and we both feel that our
+readers have a right to demand that it be solved.
+
+"When I became co-editor of this paper I was not a Socialist; and,
+although I regard Socialism as the necessary and logical outcome of
+the Radicalism which for so many years the _National Reformer_ has
+taught, still, as in avowing myself a Socialist I have taken a
+distinct step, the partial separation of my policy in labour questions
+from that of my colleague has been of my own making, and not of his,
+and it is, therefore, for me to go away. Over by far the greater part
+of our sphere of action we are still substantially agreed, and are
+likely to remain so. But since, as Socialism becomes more and more a
+question of practical politics, differences of theory tend to produce
+differences in conduct; and since a political paper must have a single
+editorial programme in practical politics, it would obviously be most
+inconvenient for me to retain my position as co-editor. I therefore
+resume my former position as contributor only, thus clearing the
+_National Reformer_ of all responsibility for the views I hold."
+
+To this Mr. Bradlaugh added the following:--
+
+"I need hardly add to this how very deeply I regret the necessity for
+Mrs. Besant's resignation of the joint editorship of this Journal, and
+the real grief I feel in accepting this break in a position in which
+she has rendered such enormous service to the Freethought and Radical
+cause. As a most valued contributor I trust the _National Reformer_
+may never lose the efficient aid of her brain and pen. For thirteen
+years this paper has been richer for good by the measure of her
+never-ceasing and most useful work. I agree with her that a journal
+must have a distinct editorial policy; and I think this distinctness
+the more necessary when, as in the present case, every contributor has
+the greatest freedom of expression. I recognise in the fullest degree
+the spirit of self-sacrifice in which the lines, to which I add these
+words, have been penned by Mrs. Besant. "CHARLES BRADLAUGH."
+
+It was a wrench, this breaking of a tie for which a heavy price had
+been paid thirteen years before, but it was just. Any one who makes a
+change with which pain is connected is bound, in honour and duty, to
+take that pain as much as possible on himself; he must not put his
+sacrifice on others, nor pay his own ransom with their coin. There
+must be honour kept in the life that reaches towards the Ideal, for
+broken faith to that is the only real infidelity.
+
+And there was another reason for the change that I dared not name to
+him, for his quick loyalty would then have made him stubbornly
+determined against change. I saw the swift turning of public opinion,
+the gradual approach to him among Liberals who had hitherto held
+aloof, and I knew that they looked upon me as a clog and a burden, and
+that were I less prominently with him his way would be the easier to
+tread. So I slipped more and more into the background, no longer went
+with him to his meetings; my use to him in public was over, for I had
+become hindrance instead of help. While he was outcast and hated I had
+the pride of standing at his side; when all the fair-weather friends
+came buzzing round him I served him best by self-effacement, and I
+never loved him better than when I stood aside. But I continued all
+the literary work unaltered, and no change of opinions touched his
+kindness to me, although when, a little later, I joined the
+Theosophical Society, he lost his trust in my reasoning powers and
+judgment.
+
+In this same month of October the unemployed began walking in
+procession through the streets, and harshness on the part of the
+police led to some rioting. Sir Charles Warren thought it his duty to
+dragoon London meetings after the fashion of Continental prefects,
+with the inevitable result that an ill-feeling grew up between the
+people and the police.
+
+At last we formed a Socialist Defence Association, in order to help
+poor workmen brought up and sentenced on police evidence only, without
+any chance being given them of proper legal defence, and I organised a
+band of well-to-do men and women, who promised to obey a telegraphic
+summons, night or day, and to bail out any prisoner arrested for
+exercising the ancient right of walking in procession and speaking. To
+take one instance: Mr. Burleigh, the well-known war correspondent, and
+Mr. Winks were arrested and "run in" with Mr. J. Knight, a workman,
+for seditious language. I went down to the police-station to offer
+bail for the latter: Chief-Constable Howard accepted bail for Messrs.
+Burleigh and Winks, but refused it for Mr. Knight. The next day, at
+the police-court, the preposterous bail of L400 was demanded for Mr.
+Knight and supplied by my faithful band, and on the next hearing Mr.
+Poland, solicitor to the Treasury, withdrew the charge against him for
+lack of evidence!
+
+Then came the closing of Trafalgar Square, and the unexpected and
+high-handed order that cost some men their lives, many their liberty,
+and hundreds the most serious injuries. The Metropolitan Radical
+Federation had called a meeting for November 13th to protest against
+the imprisonment of Mr. O'Brien, and as Mr. Matthews, from his place
+in the House, had stated that there was no intention of interfering
+with _bona fide_ political meetings, the Radical clubs did not expect
+police interference. On November 9th Sir Charles Warren had issued an
+order forbidding all meetings in the Square, but the clubs trusted the
+promise of the Home Secretary. On Saturday evening only, November
+12th, when all arrangements were completed, did he issue a peremptory
+order, forbidding processions within a certain area. With this trap
+suddenly sprung upon them, the delegates from the clubs, the Fabian
+Society, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Socialist League,
+met on that same Saturday evening to see to any details that had been
+possibly left unsettled. It was finally decided to go to the Square as
+arranged, and, if challenged by the police, to protest formally
+against the illegal interference, then to break up the processions and
+leave the members to find their own way to the Square. It was also
+decided to go Sunday after Sunday to the Square, until the right of
+public meetings was vindicated.
+
+The procession I was in started from Clerkenwell Green, and walked
+with its banner in front, and the chosen speakers, including myself,
+immediately behind the flag. As we were moving slowly and quietly
+along one of the narrow streets debouching on Trafalgar Square,
+wondering whether we should be challenged, there was a sudden charge,
+and without a word the police were upon us with uplifted truncheons;
+the banner was struck down, and men and women were falling under a
+hail of blows. There was no attempt at resistance, the people were too
+much astounded at the unprepared attack. They scattered, leaving some
+of their number on the ground too much injured to move, and then made
+their way in twos and threes to the Square. It was garrisoned by
+police, drawn up in serried rows, that could only have been broken by
+a deliberate charge. Our orders were to attempt no violence, and we
+attempted none. Mr. Cunninghame Graham and Mr. John Burns, arm-in-arm,
+tried to pass through the police, and were savagely cut about the head
+and arrested. Then ensued a scene to be remembered; the horse police
+charged in squadrons at a hand-gallop, rolling men and women over like
+ninepins, while the foot police struck recklessly with their
+truncheons, cutting a road through the crowd that closed immediately
+behind them. I got on a waggonette and tried to persuade the driver to
+pull his trap across one of the roads, and to get others in line, so
+as to break the charges of the mounted police; but he was afraid, and
+drove away to the Embankment, so I jumped out and went back to the
+Square. At last a rattle of cavalry, and up came the Life Guards,
+cleverly handled but hurting none, trotting their horses gently and
+shouldering the crowd apart; and then the Scots Guards with bayonets
+fixed marched through and occupied the north of the Square. Then the
+people retreated as we passed round the word, "Go home, go home." The
+soldiers were ready to fire, the people unarmed; it would have been
+but a massacre. Slowly the Square emptied and all was still. All other
+processions were treated as ours had been, and the injuries inflicted
+were terrible. Peaceable, law-abiding workmen, who had never dreamed
+of rioting, were left with broken legs, broken arms, wounds of every
+description. One man, Linnell, died almost immediately, others from
+the effect of their injuries. The next day a regular court-martial in
+Bow Street Police Court, witnesses kept out by the police, men dazed
+with their wounds, decent workmen of unblemished character who had
+never been charged in a police-court before, sentenced to imprisonment
+without chance of defence. But a gallant band rallied to their rescue.
+William T. Stead, most chivalrous of journalists, opened a Defence
+Fund, and money rained in; my pledged bail came up by the dozen, and
+we got the men out on appeal. By sheer audacity I got into the
+police-court, addressed the magistrate, too astounded by my profound
+courtesy and calm assurance to remember that I had no right there, and
+then produced bail after bail of the most undeniable character and
+respectability, which no magistrate could refuse. Breathing-time
+gained, a barrister, Mr. W.M. Thompson, worked day after day with
+hearty devotion, and took up the legal defence. Fines we paid, and
+here Mrs. Marx Aveling did eager service. A pretty regiment I led out
+of Millbank Prison, after paying their fines; bruised, clothes torn,
+hatless, we must have looked a disreputable lot. We stopped and bought
+hats, to throw an air of respectability over our _cortege_, and we
+kept together until I saw the men into train and omnibus, lest, with
+the bitter feelings now roused, conflict should again arise. We formed
+the Law and Liberty League to defend all unjustly assailed by the
+police, and thus rescued many a man from prison; and we gave poor
+Linnell, killed in Trafalgar Square, a public funeral. Sir Charles
+Warren forbade the passing of the hearse through any of the main
+thoroughfares west of Waterloo Bridge, so the processions waited there
+for it. W.T. Stead, R. Cunninghame Graham, Herbert Burrows, and
+myself walked on one side the coffin, William Morris, F. Smith, R.
+Dowling, and J. Seddon on the other; the Rev. Stewart D. Headlam, the
+officiating clergyman, walked in front; fifty stewards carrying long
+wands guarded the coffin. From Wellington Street to Bow Cemetery the
+road was one mass of human beings, who uncovered reverently as the
+slain man went by; at Aldgate the procession took three-quarters of an
+hour to pass one spot, and thus we bore Linnell to his grave, symbol
+of a cruel wrong, the vast orderly, silent crowd, bareheaded, making
+mute protest against the outrage wrought.
+
+It is pleasant to put on record here Mr. Bradlaugh's grave approval of
+the heavy work done in the police-courts, and the following paragraph
+shows how generously he could praise one not acting on his own lines:
+"As I have on most serious matters of principle recently differed very
+widely from my brave and loyal co-worker, and as the difference has
+been regrettably emphasised by her resignation of her editorial
+functions on this Journal, it is the more necessary that I should say
+how thoroughly I approve, and how grateful I am to her for, her
+conduct in not only obtaining bail and providing legal assistance for
+the helpless unfortunates in the hands of the police, but also for her
+daily personal attendance and wise conduct at the police-stations and
+police-courts, where she has done so much to abate harsh treatment on
+the one hand and rash folly on the other. While I should not have
+marked out this as fitting woman's work, especially in the recent very
+inclement weather, I desire to record my view that it has been bravely
+done, well done, and most usefully done, and I wish to mark this the
+more emphatically as my views and those of Mrs. Besant seem wider
+apart than I could have deemed possible on many of the points of
+principle underlying what is every day growing into a most serious
+struggle." Ever did I find Charles Bradlaugh thus tolerant of
+difference of opinion, generously eager to approve what to him seemed
+right even in a policy he disapproved.
+
+The indignation grew and grew; the police were silently boycotted, but
+the people were so persistent and so tactful that no excuse for
+violence was given, until the strain on the police force began to
+tell, and the Tory Government felt that London was being hopelessly
+alienated; so at last Sir Charles Warren fell, and a wiser hand was
+put at the helm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+THROUGH STORM TO PEACE.
+
+
+Out of all this turmoil and stress rose a Brotherhood that had in it
+the promise of a fairer day. Mr. Stead and I had become close
+friends--he Christian, I Atheist, burning with one common love for
+man, one common hatred against oppression. And so in _Our Corner_ for
+February, 1888, I wrote:--"Lately there has been dawning on the minds
+of men far apart in questions of theology, the idea of founding a new
+Brotherhood, in which service of Man should take the place erstwhile
+given to service of God--a brotherhood in which work should be worship
+and love should be baptism, in which none should be regarded as alien
+who was willing to work for human good. One day as I was walking
+towards Millbank Gaol with the Rev. S.D. Headlam, on the way to
+liberate a prisoner, I said to him: 'Mr. Headlam, we ought to have a
+new Church, which should include all who have the common ground of
+faith in and love for man.' And a little later I found that my friend
+Mr. W.T. Stead, editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette,_ had long been
+brooding over a similar thought, and wondering whether men 'might not
+be persuaded to be as earnest about making this world happy as they
+are over saving their souls.' The teaching of social duty, the
+upholding of social righteousness, the building up of a true
+commonwealth--such would be among the aims of the Church of the
+future. Is the hope too fair for realisation? Is the winning of such
+beatific vision yet once more the dream of the enthusiast? But surely
+the one fact that persons so deeply differing in theological creeds as
+those who have been toiling for the last three months to aid and
+relieve the oppressed, can work in absolute harmony side by side for
+the one end--surely this proves that there is a bond which is stronger
+than our antagonisms, a unity which is deeper than the speculative
+theories which divide."
+
+How unconsciously I was marching towards the Theosophy which was to
+become the glory of my life, groping blindly in the darkness for that
+very brotherhood, definitely formulated on these very lines by those
+Elder Brothers of our race, at whose feet I was so soon to throw
+myself. How deeply this longing for something loftier than I had yet
+found had wrought itself into my life, how strong the conviction was
+growing that there was something to be sought to which the service of
+man was the road, may be seen in the following passage from the same
+article:--
+
+"It has been thought that in these days of factories and of tramways,
+of shoddy, and of adulteration, that all life must tread with even
+rhythm of measured footsteps, and that the glory of the ideal could no
+longer glow over the greyness of a modern horizon. But signs are not
+awanting that the breath of the older heroism is beginning to stir
+men's breasts, and that the passion for justice and for liberty, which
+thrilled through the veins of the world's greatest in the past, and
+woke our pulses to responsive throb, has not yet died wholly out of
+the hearts of men. Still the quest of the Holy Grail exercises its
+deathless fascination, but the seekers no longer raise eyes to heaven,
+nor search over land and sea, for they know that it waits them in the
+suffering at their doors, that the consecration of the holiest is on
+the agonising masses of the poor and the despairing, the cup is
+crimson with the blood of the
+
+"'People, the grey-grown speechless Christ.'
+
+... If there be a faith that can remove the mountains of ignorance and
+evil, it is surely that faith in the ultimate triumph of Right in the
+final enthronement of Justice, which alone makes life worth the
+living, and which gems the blackest cloud of depression with the
+rainbow-coloured arch of an immortal hope."
+
+As a step towards bringing about some such union of those ready to
+work for man, Mr. Stead and I projected the _Link_, a halfpenny
+weekly, the spirit of which was described in its motto, taken from
+Victor Hugo: "The people are silence. I will be the advocate of this
+silence. I will speak for the dumb. I will speak of the small to the
+great and of the feeble to the strong.... I will speak for all the
+despairing silent ones. I will interpret this stammering; I will
+interpret the grumblings, the murmurs, the tumults of crowds, the
+complaints ill-pronounced, and all these cries of beasts that, through
+ignorance and through suffering, man is forced to utter ... I will be
+the Word of the People. I will be the bleeding mouth whence the gag is
+snatched out. I will say everything." It announced its object to be
+the "building up" of a "New Church, dedicated to the service of man,"
+and "what we want to do is to establish in every village and in every
+street some man or woman who will sacrifice time and labour as
+systematically and as cheerfully in the temporal service of man as
+others do in what they believe to be the service of God." Week after
+week we issued our little paper, and it became a real light in the
+darkness. There the petty injustices inflicted on the poor found
+voice; there the starvation wages paid to women found exposure; there
+sweating was brought to public notice. A finisher of boots paid 2s.
+6d. per dozen pairs and "find your own polish and thread"; women
+working for 10-1/2 hours per day, making shirts--"fancy best"--at from
+10d. to 3s. per dozen, finding their own cotton and needles, paying
+for gas, towel, and tea (compulsory), earning from 4s. to 10s. per
+week for the most part; a mantle finisher 2s. 2d. a week, out of which
+6d. for materials; "respectable hard-working woman" tried for
+attempted suicide, "driven to rid herself of life from want." Another
+part of our work was defending people from unjust landlords, exposing
+workhouse scandals, enforcing the Employers' Liability Act, Charles
+Bradlaugh's Truck Act, forming "Vigilance Circles" whose members kept
+watch in their own district over cases of cruelty to children,
+extortion, insanitary workshops, sweating, &c., reporting each case to
+me. Into this work came Herbert Burrows, who had joined hands with me
+over the Trafalgar Square defence, and who wrote some noble articles
+in the _Link_. A man loving the people with passionate devotion,
+hating oppression and injustice with equal passion, working himself
+with remorseless energy, breaking his heart over wrongs he could not
+remedy. His whole character once came out in a sentence when he was
+lying delirious and thought himself dying: "Tell the people how I have
+loved them always."
+
+In our crusade for the poor we worked for the dockers." To-morrow
+morning, in London alone 20,000 to 25,000 adult men," wrote Sidney
+Webb, "will fight like savages for permission to labour in the docks
+for 4d. an hour, and one-third of them will fight in vain, and be
+turned workless away." We worked for children's dinners. "If we insist
+on these children being educated, is it not necessary that they shall
+be fed? If not, we waste on them knowledge they cannot assimilate, and
+torture many of them to death. Poor waifs of humanity, we drive them
+into the school and bid them learn; and the pitiful, wistful eyes
+question us why we inflict this strange new suffering, and bring into
+their dim lives this new pang. 'Why not leave us alone? 'ask the
+pathetically patient little faces. Why not, indeed, since for these
+child martyrs of the slums, Society has only formulas, not food." We
+cried out against "cheap goods," that meant "sweated and therefore
+stolen goods." "The ethics of buying should surely be simply enough.
+We want a particular thing, and we do not desire to obtain it either
+by begging or by robbery; but if in becoming possessed of it, we
+neither beg it nor steal, we must give for it something equivalent in
+exchange; so much of our neighbour's labour has been put into the
+thing we desire; if we will not yield him fair equivalent for that
+labour, yet take his article, we defraud him, and if we are not
+willing to give that fair equivalent we have no right to become the
+owners of his product."
+
+This branch of our work led to a big fight--a fight most happy in its
+results. At a meeting of the Fabian Society, Miss Clementina Black
+gave a capital lecture on Female Labour, and urged the formation of a
+Consumers' League, pledged only to buy from shops certificated "clean"
+from unfair wage. H.H. Champion, in the discussion that followed,
+drew attention to the wages paid by Bryant & May (Limited), while
+paying an enormous dividend to their shareholders, so that the value
+of the original L5 shares was quoted at L18 7s. 6d. Herbert Burrows
+and I interviewed some of the girls, got lists of wages, of fines, &c.
+"A typical case is that of a girl of sixteen, a piece-worker; she
+earns 4s. a week, and lives with a sister, employed by the same firm,
+who 'earns good money, as much as 8s. or 9s. a week.' Out of the
+earnings 2s. a week is paid for the rent of one room. The child lives
+only on bread and butter and tea, alike for breakfast and dinner, but
+related with dancing eyes that once a month she went to a meal where
+'you get coffee and bread and butter, and jam and marmalade, and lots
+of it.'" We published the facts under the title of "White Slavery in
+London," and called for a boycott of Bryant & May's matches. "It is
+time some one came and helped us," said two pale-faced girls to me;
+and I asked: "Who will help? Plenty of people wish well to any good
+cause; but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still
+fewer will risk anything in its support. 'Some one ought to do it, but
+why should I?' is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability.
+'Some one ought to do it, so why _not_ I?' is the cry of some earnest
+servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty.
+Between those two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution."
+
+I was promptly threatened with an action for libel, but nothing came
+of it; it was easier to strike at the girls, and a few days later
+Fleet Street was enlivened by the irruption of a crowd of match-girls,
+demanding Annie Besant. I couldn't speechify to match-girls in Fleet
+Street, so asked that a deputation should come and explain what they
+wanted. Up came three women and told their story: they had been asked
+to sign a paper certifying that they were well treated and contented,
+and that my statements were untrue; they refused. "You had spoke up
+for us," explained one, "and we weren't going back on you." A girl,
+pitched on as their leader, was threatened with dismissal; she stood
+firm; next day she was discharged for some trifle, and they all threw
+down their work, some 1,400 of them, and then a crowd of them started
+off to me to ask what to do next. If we ever worked in our lives,
+Herbert Burrows and I worked for the next fortnight. And a pretty
+hubbub we created; we asked for money, and it came pouring in; we
+registered the girls to receive strike pay, wrote articles, roused the
+clubs, held public meetings, got Mr. Bradlaugh to ask questions in
+Parliament, stirred up constituencies in which shareholders were
+members, till the whole country rang with the struggle. Mr. Frederick
+Charrington lent us a hall for registration, Mr. Sidney Webb and
+others moved the National Liberal Club to action; we led a procession
+of the girls to the House of Commons, and interviewed, with a
+deputation of them, Members of Parliament who cross-questioned them.
+The girls behaved splendidly, stuck together, kept brave and bright
+all through. Mr. Hobart of the Social Democratic Federation, Messrs.
+Shaw, Bland, and Oliver, and Headlam of the Fabian Society, Miss
+Clementina Black, and many another helped in the heavy work. The
+London Trades Council finally consented to act as arbitrators and a
+satisfactory settlement was arrived at; the girls went in to work,
+fines and deductions were abolished, better wages paid; the
+Match-makers' Union was established, still the strongest woman's
+Trades Union in England, and for years I acted as secretary, till,
+under press of other duties, I resigned, and my work was given by the
+girls to Mrs. Thornton Smith; Herbert Burrows became, and still is,
+the treasurer. For a time there was friction between the Company and
+the Union, but it gradually disappeared under the influence of common
+sense on both sides, and we have found the manager ready to consider
+any just grievance and to endeavour to remove it, while the Company
+have been liberal supporters of the Working Women's Club at Bow,
+founded by H.P. Blavatsky.
+
+[Illustration: STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.]
+
+The worst suffering of all was among the box-makers, thrown out of
+work by the strike, and they were hard to reach. Twopence-farthing per
+gross of boxes, and buy your own string and paste, is not wealth, but
+when the work went more rapid starvation came. Oh, those trudges
+through the lanes and alleys round Bethnal Green Junction late at
+night, when our day's work was over; children lying about on shavings,
+rags, anything; famine looking out of baby faces, out of women's eyes,
+out of the tremulous hands of men. Heart grew sick and eyes dim, and
+ever louder sounded the question, "Where is the cure for sorrow, what
+the way of rescue for the world?"
+
+In August I asked for a "match-girls' drawing-room." "It will want a
+piano, tables for papers, for games, for light literature; so that it
+may offer a bright, homelike refuge to these girls, who now have no
+real homes, no playground save the streets. It is not proposed to
+build an 'institution' with stern and rigid discipline and enforcement
+of prim behaviour, but to open a home, filled with the genial
+atmosphere of cordial comradeship, and self-respecting freedom--the
+atmosphere so familiar to all who have grown up in the blessed shelter
+of a happy home, so strange, alas! to too many of our East London
+girls." In the same month of August, two years later, H.P. Blavatsky
+opened such a home.
+
+Then came a cry for help from South London, from tin-box makers,
+illegally fined, and in many cases grievously mutilated by the
+non-fencing of machinery; then aid to shop assistants, also illegally
+fined; legal defences by the score still continued; a vigorous
+agitation for a free meal for children, and for fair wages to be paid
+by all public bodies; work for the dockers and exposure of their
+wrongs; a visit to the Cradley Heath chain-makers, speeches to them,
+writing for them; a contest for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets
+division, and triumphant return at the head of the poll. Such were
+some of the ways in which the autumn days were spent, to say nothing
+of scores of lectures--Secularist, Labour, Socialist--and scores of
+articles written for the winning of daily bread. When the School Board
+work was added I felt that I had as much work as one woman's strength
+could do.
+
+Thus was ushered in 1889, the to me never-to-be-forgotten year in
+which I found my way "Home," and had the priceless good fortune of
+meeting, and of becoming the pupil of, H.P. Blavatsky. Ever more and
+more had been growing on me the feeling that something more than I had
+was needed for the cure of social ills. The Socialist position
+sufficed on the economic side, but where to gain the inspiration, the
+motive, which should lead to the realisation of the Brotherhood of
+Man? Our efforts to really organise bands of unselfish workers had
+failed. Much indeed had been done, but there was not a real movement
+of self-sacrificing devotion, in which men worked for Love's sake
+only, and asked but to give, not to take. Where was the material for
+the nobler Social Order, where the hewn stones for the building of the
+Temple of Man? A great despair would oppress me as I sought for such a
+movement and found it not.
+
+[Illustration: MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.]
+
+Not only so; but since 1886 there had been slowly growing up a
+conviction that my philosophy was not sufficient; that life and mind
+were other than, more than, I had dreamed. Psychology was advancing
+with rapid strides; hypnotic experiments were revealing unlooked-for
+complexities in human consciousness, strange riddles of multiplex
+personalities, and, most startling of all, vivid intensities of mental
+action when the brain, that should be the generator of thought, was
+reduced to a comatose state. Fact after fact came hurtling in upon me,
+demanding explanation I was incompetent to give. I studied the
+obscurer sides of consciousness, dreams, hallucinations, illusions,
+insanity. Into the darkness shot a ray of light--A.P. Sinnett's
+"Occult World," with its wonderfully suggestive letters, expounding
+not the supernatural but a nature under law, wider than I had dared to
+conceive. I added Spiritualism to my studies, experimenting privately,
+finding the phenomena indubitable, but the spiritualistic explanation
+of them incredible. The phenomena of clairvoyance, clairaudience,
+thought-reading, were found to be real. Under all the rush of the
+outer life, already sketched, these questions were working in my mind,
+their answers were being diligently sought. I read a variety of books,
+but could find little in them that satisfied me. I experimented in
+various ways suggested in them, and got some (to me) curious results.
+I finally convinced myself that there was some hidden thing, some
+hidden power, and resolved to seek until I found, and by the early
+spring of 1889 I had grown desperately determined to find at all
+hazards what I sought. At last, sitting alone in deep thought as I had
+become accustomed to do after the sun had set, filled with an intense
+but nearly hopeless longing to solve the riddle of life and mind, I
+heard a Voice that was later to become to me the holiest sound on
+earth, bidding me take courage for the light was near. A fortnight
+passed, and then Mr. Stead gave into my hands two large volumes. "Can
+you review these? My young men all fight shy of them, but you are
+quite mad enough on these subjects to make something of them." I took
+the books; they were the two volumes of "The Secret Doctrine," written
+by H.P. Blavatsky.
+
+Home I carried my burden, and sat me down to read. As I turned over
+page after page the interest became absorbing; but how familiar it
+seemed; how my mind leapt forward to presage the conclusions, how
+natural it was, how coherent, how subtle, and yet how intelligible. I
+was dazzled, blinded by the light in which disjointed facts were seen
+as parts of a mighty whole, and all my puzzles, riddles, problems,
+seemed to disappear. The effect was partially illusory in one sense,
+in that they all had to be slowly unravelled later, the brain
+gradually assimilating that which the swift intuition had grasped as
+truth. But the light had been seen, and in that flash of illumination
+I knew that the weary search was over and the very Truth was found.
+
+I wrote the review, and asked Mr. Stead for an introduction to the
+writer, and then sent a note asking to be allowed to call. I received
+the most cordial of notes, bidding me come, and in the soft spring
+evening Herbert Burrows and I--for his aspirations were as mine on
+this matter--walked from Netting Hill Station, wondering what we
+should meet, to the door of 17, Lansdowne Road. A pause, a swift
+passing through hall and outer room, through folding-doors thrown
+back, a figure in a large chair before a table, a voice, vibrant,
+compelling, "My dear Mrs. Besant, I have so long wished to see you,"
+and I was standing with my hand in her firm grip, and looking for
+the first time in this life straight into the eyes of "H.P.B." I
+was conscious of a sudden leaping forth of my heart--was it
+recognition?--and then, I am ashamed to say, a fierce rebellion, a
+fierce withdrawal, as of some wild animal when it feels a mastering
+hand. I sat down, after some introductions that conveyed no ideas to
+me, and listened. She talked of travels, of various countries, easy
+brilliant talk, her eyes veiled, her exquisitely moulded fingers
+rolling cigarettes incessantly. Nothing special to record, no word of
+Occultism, nothing mysterious, a woman of the world chatting with her
+evening visitors. We rose to go, and for a moment the veil lifted, and
+two brilliant, piercing eyes met mine, and with a yearning throb in
+the voice: "Oh, my dear Mrs. Besant, if you would only come among us!"
+I felt a well-nigh uncontrollable desire to bend down and kiss her,
+under the compulsion of that yearning voice, those compelling eyes,
+but with a flash of the old unbending pride and an inward jeer at my
+own folly, I said a commonplace polite good-bye, and turned away with
+some inanely courteous and evasive remark. "Child," she said to me
+long afterwards, "your pride is terrible; you are as proud as Lucifer
+himself." But truly I think I never showed it to her again after that
+first evening, though it sprang up wrathfully in her defence many and
+many a time, until I learned the pettiness and the worthlessness of
+all criticism, and knew that the blind were objects of compassion not
+of scorn.
+
+Once again I went, and asked about the Theosophical Society, wishful
+to join, but fighting against it. For I saw, distinct and clear--with
+painful distinctness, indeed--what that joining would mean. I had
+largely conquered public prejudice against me by my work on the London
+School Board, and a smoother road stretched before me, whereon effort
+to help should be praised not blamed. Was I to plunge into a new
+vortex of strife, and make myself a mark for ridicule--worse than
+hatred--and fight again the weary fight for an unpopular truth? Must I
+turn against Materialism, and face the shame of publicly confessing
+that I had been wrong, misled by intellect to ignore the Soul? Must I
+leave the army that had battled for me so bravely, the friends who
+through all brutality of social ostracism had held me dear and true?
+And he, the strongest and truest friend of all, whose confidence I had
+shaken by my Socialism--must he suffer the pang of seeing his
+co-worker, his co-fighter, of whom he had been so proud, to whom he
+had been so generous, go over to the opposing hosts, and leave the
+ranks of Materialism? What would be the look in Charles Bradlaugh's
+eyes when I told him that I had become a Theosophist? The struggle was
+sharp and keen, but with none of the anguish of old days in it, for
+the soldier had now fought many fights and was hardened by many
+wounds. And so it came to pass that I went again to Lansdowne Road to
+ask about the Theosophical Society. H.P. Blavatsky looked at me
+piercingly for a moment. "Have you read the report about me of the
+Society for Psychical Research?" "No; I never heard of it, so far as I
+know." "Go and read it, and if, after reading it, you come
+back--well." And nothing more would she say on the subject, but
+branched off to her experiences in many lands.
+
+I borrowed a copy of the Report, read and re-read it. Quickly I saw
+how slender was the foundation on which the imposing structure was
+built. The continual assumptions on which conclusions were based; the
+incredible character of the allegations; and--most damning fact of
+all--the foul source from which the evidence was derived. Everything
+turned on the veracity of the Coulombs, and they were self-stamped as
+partners in the alleged frauds. Could I put such against the frank,
+fearless nature that I had caught a glimpse of, against the proud
+fiery truthfulness that shone at me from the clear, blue eyes, honest
+and fearless as those of a noble child? Was the writer of "The Secret
+Doctrine" this miserable impostor, this accomplice of tricksters, this
+foul and loathsome deceiver, this conjuror with trap-doors and sliding
+panels? I laughed aloud at the absurdity and flung the Report aside
+with the righteous scorn of an honest nature that knew its own kin
+when it met them, and shrank from the foulness and baseness of a lie.
+The next day saw me at the Theosophical Publishing Company's office at
+7, Duke Street, Adelphi, where Countess Wachtmeister--one of the
+lealest of H.P.B.'s friends--was at work, and I signed an
+application to be admitted as fellow of the Theosophical Society.
+
+On receiving my diploma I betook myself to Lansdowne Road, where I
+found H.P.B. alone. I went over to her, bent down and kissed her,
+but said no word. "You have joined the Society?" "Yes." "You have read
+the report?" "Yes." "Well?" I knelt down before her and clasped her
+hands in mine, looking straight into her eyes. "My answer is, will you
+accept me as your pupil, and give me the honour of proclaiming you my
+teacher in the face of the world?" Her stern, set face softened, the
+unwonted gleam of tears sprang to her eyes; then, with a dignity more
+than regal, she placed her hand upon my head. "You are a noble woman.
+May Master bless you."
+
+From that day, the 10th of May, 1889, until now--two years three and
+half months after she left her body on May 8, 1891--my faith in her
+has never wavered, my trust in her has never been shaken. I gave her
+my faith on an imperious intuition, I proved her true day after day in
+closest intimacy living by her side; and I speak of her with the
+reverence due from a pupil to a teacher who never failed her, with the
+passionate gratitude which, in our School, is the natural meed of the
+one who opens the gateway and points out the path. "Folly!
+fanaticism!" scoffs the Englishman of the nineteenth century. Be it
+so. I have seen, and I can wait. I have been told that I plunged
+headlong into Theosophy and let my enthusiasm carry me away. I think
+the charge is true, in so far as the decision was swiftly taken; but
+it had been long led up to, and realised the dreams of childhood on
+the higher planes of intellectual womanhood. And let me here say that
+more than all I hoped for in that first plunge has been realised, and
+a certainty of knowledge has been gained on doctrines seen as true as
+that swift flash of illumination. I _know_, by personal experiment,
+that the Soul exists, and that my Soul, not my body, is myself; that
+it can leave the body at will; that it can, disembodied, reach and
+learn from living human teachers, and bring back and impress on the
+physical brain that which it has learned; that this process of
+transferring consciousness from one range of being, as it were, to
+another, is a very slow process, during which the body and brain are
+gradually correlated with the subtler form which is essentially that
+of the Soul, and that my own experience of it, still so imperfect, so
+fragmentary, when compared with the experience of the highly trained,
+is like the first struggles of a child learning to speak compared with
+the perfect oratory of the practised speaker; that consciousness, so
+far from being dependent on the brain, is more active when freed from
+the gross forms of matter than when encased within them; that the
+great Sages spoken of by H.P. Blavatsky exist; that they wield powers
+and possess knowledge before which our control of Nature and knowledge
+of her ways is but as child's play. All this, and much more, have I
+learned, and I am but a pupil of low grade, as it were in the infant
+class of the Occult School; so the first plunge has been successful,
+and the intuition has been justified. This same path of knowledge that
+I am treading is open to all others who will pay the toll demanded at
+the gateway--and that toll is willingness to renounce everything for
+the sake of spiritual truth, and willingness to give all the truth
+that is won to the service of man, keeping back no shred for self.
+
+On June 23rd, in a review of "The Secret Doctrine" in the _National
+Reformer,_ the following passages occur, and show how swiftly some of
+the main points of the teaching had been grasped. (There is a blunder
+in the statement that of the seven modifications of Matter Science
+knows only four, and till lately knew only three; these four are
+sub-states only, sub-divisions of the lowest plane.)
+
+After saying that the nineteenth-century Englishman would be but too
+likely to be repelled if he only skimmed the book, I went on: "With
+telescope and with microscope, with scalpel and with battery, Western
+Science interrogates nature, adding fact to fact, storing experience
+after experience, but coming ever to gulfs unfathomable by its
+plummets, to heights unscalable by its ladders. Wide and masterful in
+its answers to the 'How?' the 'Why?' ever eludes it, and causes remain
+enwrapped in gloom. Eastern Science uses as its scientific instrument
+the penetrating faculties of the mind alone, and regarding the
+material plane as _Maya_--illusion--seeks in the mental and spiritual
+planes of being the causes of the material effects. There, too, is the
+only reality; there the true existence of which the visible universe
+is but the shadow.
+
+"It is clear that from such investigations some further mental
+equipment is necessary than that normally afforded by the human body.
+And here comes the parting of the ways between East and West. For the
+study of the material universe, our five senses, aided by the
+instruments invented by Science, may suffice. For all we can hear and
+see, taste and handle, these accustomed servitors, though often
+blundering, are the best available guides to knowledge. But it lies in
+the nature of the case that they are useless when the investigation is
+to be into modes of existence which cannot impress themselves on our
+nerve-ends. For instance, what we know as colour is the vibration
+frequency of etheric waves striking on the retina of the eye, between
+certain definite limits--759 trillions of blows from the maximum, 436
+trillions from the minimum--these waves give rise in us to the
+sensation which the brain translates into colour. (Why the 436
+trillion blows at one end of a nerve become 'Red' at the other end we
+do not know; we chronicle the fact but cannot explain it.) But our
+capacity to respond to the vibration cannot limit the vibrational
+capacity of the ether; to _us_ the higher and lower rates of vibration
+do not exist, but if our sense of vision were more sensitive we should
+see where now we are blind. Following this line of thought we realise
+that matter may exist in forms unknown to us, in modifications to
+which our senses are unable to respond. Now steps in the Eastern Sage
+and says: 'That which you say _may_ be, _is_; we have developed and
+cultivated senses as much superior to yours as your eye is superior to
+that of the jelly-fish; we have evolved mental and spiritual faculties
+which enable us to investigate on the higher planes of being with as
+much certainty as you are investigating on the physical plane; there
+is nothing _supernatural_ in the business, any more than your
+knowledge is supernatural, though much above that accessible to the
+fish; we do not speculate on these higher forms of existence; we
+_know_ them by personal study, just as you know the fauna and flora of
+your world. The powers we possess are not supernatural, they are
+latent in every human being, and will be evolved as the race
+progresses. All that we have done is to evolve them more rapidly than
+our neighbours, by a procedure as open to you as it was to us. Matter
+is everywhere, but it exists in seven modifications of which you only
+know four, and until lately only knew three; in those higher forms
+reside the causes of which you see the effects in the lower, and to
+know these causes you must develop the capacity to take cognisance of
+the higher planes.'"
+
+Then followed a brief outline of the cycle of evolution, and I went
+on: "What part does man play in this vast drama of a universe?
+Needless to say, he is not the only living form in a Cosmos, which for
+the most part is uninhabitable by him. As Science has shown living
+forms everywhere on the material plane, races in each drop of water,
+life throbbing in every leaf and blade, so the 'Secret Doctrine'
+points to living forms on higher planes of existence, each suited to
+its environment, till all space thrills with life, and nowhere is
+there death, but only change. Amid these myriads are some evolving
+towards humanity, some evolving away from humanity as we know it,
+divesting themselves of its grosser parts. For man is regarded as a
+sevenfold being, four of these parts belonging to the animal body, and
+perishing at, or soon after, death; while three form his higher self,
+his true individuality, and these persist and are immortal. These form
+the Ego, and it is this which passes through many incarnations,
+learning life's lesson as it goes, working out its own redemption
+within the limits of an inexorable law, sowing seeds of which it ever
+reaps the harvest, building its own fate with tireless fingers, and
+finding nowhere in the measureless time and space around it any that
+can lift for it one weight it has created, one burden it has gathered,
+unravel for it one tangle it has twisted, close for it one gulf it has
+digged."
+
+Then after noting the approaches of Western Science to Eastern, came
+the final words: "it is of curious interest to note how some of the
+latest theories seem to catch glimpses of the occult Doctrines, as
+though Science were standing on the very threshold of knowledge which
+shall make all her past seem small. Already her hand is trembling
+towards the grasp of forces beside which all those now at her command
+are insignificant. How soon will her grip fasten on them? Let us hope
+not until social order has been transformed, lest they should only
+give more to those who have, and leave the wretched still wretcheder
+by force of contrast. Knowledge used by selfishness widens the gulf
+that divides man from man and race from race, and we may well shrink
+from the idea of new powers in Nature being yoked to the car of Greed.
+Hence the wisdom of those 'Masters,' in whose name Madame Blavatsky
+speaks, has ever denied the knowledge which is power until Love's
+lesson has been learned, and has given only into the hands of the
+selfless the control of those natural forces which, misused, would
+wreck society."
+
+This review, and the public announcement, demanded by honesty, that I
+had joined the Theosophical Society, naturally raised somewhat of a
+storm of criticism, and the _National Reformer_ of June 30th contained
+the following: "The review of Madame Blavatsky's book in the last
+_National Reformer_, and an announcement in the _Star_, have brought
+me several letters on the subject of Theosophy. I am asked for an
+explanation as to what Theosophy is, and as to my own opinion on
+Theosophy--the word 'theosoph' is old, and was used among the
+Neo-platonists. From the dictionary its new meaning appears to be,
+'one who claims to have a knowledge of God, or of the laws of nature
+by means of internal illumination.' An Atheist certainly cannot be a
+Theosophist. A Deist might be a Theosophist. A Monist cannot be a
+Theosophist. Theosophy must at least involve Dualism. Modern
+Theosophy, according to Madame Blavatsky, as set out in last week's
+issue, asserts much that I do not believe, and alleges some things
+that, to me, are certainly not true. I have not had the opportunity of
+reading Madame Blavatsky's two volumes, but I have read during the
+past ten years many publications from the pen of herself, Colonel
+Olcott, and of other Theosophists. They appear to me to have sought to
+rehabilitate a kind of Spiritualism in Eastern phraseology. I think
+many of their allegations utterly erroneous, and their reasonings
+wholly unsound. I very deeply regret indeed that my colleague and
+co-worker has, with somewhat of suddenness, and without any
+interchange of ideas with myself, adopted as facts matters which seem
+to me to be as unreal as it is possible for any fiction to be. My
+regret is greater as I know Mrs. Besant's devotion to any course she
+believes to be true. I know that she will always be earnest in the
+advocacy of any views she undertakes to defend, and I look to possible
+developments of her Theosophic views with the very gravest misgiving.
+The editorial policy of this paper is unchanged, and is directly
+antagonistic to all forms of Theosophy. I would have preferred on this
+subject to have held my peace, for the public disagreeing with Mrs.
+Besant on her adoption of Socialism has caused pain to both; but on
+reading her article and taking the public announcement made of her
+having joined the Theosophical organisation, I owe it to those who
+look to me for guidance to say this with clearness.
+
+"CHARLES BRADLAUGH."
+
+"It is not possible for me here to state fully my reasons for joining
+the Theosophical Society, the three objects of which are: To found a
+Universal Brotherhood without distinction of race or creed; to forward
+the study of Aryan literature and philosophy; to investigate
+unexplained laws of nature and the physical powers latent in man. On
+matters of religious opinion the members are absolutely free. The
+founders of the society deny a personal God, and a somewhat subtle
+form of Pantheism is taught as the Theosophic view of the universe,
+though even this is not forced on members of the society. I have no
+desire to hide the fact that this form of Pantheism appears to me to
+promise solution of some problems, especially problems in psychology,
+which Atheism leaves untouched.
+
+"ANNIE BESANT."
+
+Theosophy, as its students well know, so far from involving Dualism,
+is based on the One, which becomes Two on manifestation, just as
+Atheism posits one existence, only cognisable in the duality force and
+matter, and as philosophic--though not popular--Theism teaches one
+Deity whereof are spirit and matter. Mr. Bradlaugh's temperate
+disapproval was not copied in its temperance by some other Freethought
+leaders, and Mr. Foote especially distinguished himself by the
+bitterness of his attacks. In the midst of the whirl I was called away
+to Paris to attend, with Herbert Burrows, the great Labour Congress
+held there from July 15th to July 20th, and spent a day or two at
+Fontainebleau with H.P. Blavatsky, who had gone abroad for a few
+weeks' rest. There I found her translating the wonderful fragments
+from "The Book of the Golden Precepts," now so widely known under the
+name of "The Voice of the Silence." She wrote it swiftly, without any
+material copy before her, and in the evening made me read it aloud to
+see if the "English was decent." Herbert Burrows was there, and Mrs.
+Candler, a staunch American Theosophist, and we sat round H.P.B. while
+I read. The translation was in perfect and beautiful English, flowing
+and musical; only a word or two could we find to alter, and she looked
+at us like a startled child, wondering at our praises--praises that
+any one with the literary sense would endorse if they read that
+exquisite prose poem.
+
+A little earlier in the same day I had asked her as to the agencies at
+work in producing the taps so constantly heard at Spiritualistic
+_Seances_. "You don't use spirits to produce taps," she said; "see
+here." She put her hand over my head, not touching it, and I heard and
+felt slight taps on the bone of my skull, each sending a little
+electric thrill down the spine. She then carefully explained how such
+taps were producible at any point desired by the operator, and how
+interplay of the currents to which they were due might be caused
+otherwise than by conscious human volition. It was in this fashion
+that she would illustrate her verbal teachings, proving by experiment
+the statements made as to the existence of subtle forces controllable
+by the trained mind. The phenomena all belonged to the scientific side
+of her teaching, and she never committed the folly of claiming
+authority for her philosophic doctrines on the ground that she was a
+wonder-worker. And constantly she would remind us that there was no
+such thing as "miracle"; that all the phenomena she had produced were
+worked by virtue of a knowledge of nature deeper than that of average
+people, and by the force of a well-trained mind and will; some of them
+were what she would describe as "psychological tricks," the creation
+of images by force of imagination, and in pressing them on others as a
+"collective hallucination"; others, such as the moving of solid
+articles, either by an astral hand projected to draw them towards her,
+or by using an Elemental; others by reading in the Astral Light, and
+so on. But the proof of the reality of her mission from those whom she
+spoke of as Masters lay not in these comparatively trivial physical
+and mental phenomena, but in the splendour of her heroic endurance,
+the depth of her knowledge, the selflessness of her character, the
+lofty spirituality of her teaching, the untiring passion of her
+devotion, the incessant ardour of her work for the enlightening of
+men. It was these, and not her phenomena, that won for her our faith
+and confidence--we who lived beside her, knowing her daily life--and
+we gratefully accepted her teaching not because she claimed any
+authority, but because it woke in us powers, the possibility of which
+in ourselves we had not dreamed of, energies of the Soul that
+demonstrated their own existence.
+
+Returning to London from Paris, it became necessary to make a very
+clear and definite presentment of my change of views, and in the
+_Reformer_ of August 4th I find the following: "Many statements are
+being made just now about me and my beliefs, some of which are
+absurdly, and some of which are maliciously, untrue. I must ask my
+friends not to give credence to them. It would not be fair to my
+friend Mr. Bradlaugh to ask him to open the columns of this Journal to
+an exposition of Theosophy from my pen, and so bring about a long
+controversy on a subject which would not interest the majority of the
+readers of the _National Reformer_. This being so I cannot here answer
+the attacks made on me. I feel, however, that the party with which I
+have worked for so long has a right to demand of me some explanation
+of the step I have taken, and I am therefore preparing a pamphlet
+dealing fully with the question. Further, I have arranged with Mr.
+R.O. Smith to take as subject of the lectures to be delivered by me at
+the Hall of Science on August 4th and 11th 'Why I became a
+Theosophist.' Meanwhile I think that my years of service in the ranks
+of the Freethought party give me the right to ask that I should not be
+condemned unheard, and I even venture to suggest, in view of the
+praises bestowed on me by Freethinkers in the past, that it is
+possible that there may be something to be said, from the intellectual
+standpoint, in favour of Theosophy. The caricatures of it which have
+appeared from some Freethinkers' pens represent it about as accurately
+as the Christian Evidence caricatures of Atheism represent that
+dignified philosophy of life; and, remembering how much they are
+themselves misrepresented, I ask them to wait before they judge."
+
+The lectures were delivered, and were condensed into a pamphlet
+bearing the same title, which has had a very great circulation. It
+closed as follows:--
+
+"There remains a great stumblingblock in the minds of many
+Freethinkers which is certain to prejudice them against Theosophy, and
+which offers to opponents a cheap subject for sarcasm--the assertion
+that there exist other living beings than the men and animals found on
+our own globe. It may be well for people who at once turn away when
+such an assertion is made to stop and ask themselves whether they
+really and seriously believe that throughout this mighty universe, in
+which our little planet is but as a tiny speck of sand in the Sahara,
+this one planet only is inhabited by living things? Is all the
+universe dumb save for _our_ voices? eyeless save for _our_ vision?
+dead save for _our_ life? Such a preposterous belief was well enough
+in the days when Christianity regarded our world as the centre of the
+universe, the human race as the one for which the Creator had deigned
+to die. But now that we are placed in our proper position, one among
+countless myriads of worlds, what ground is there for the preposterous
+conceit which arrogates as ours all sentient existence? Earth, air,
+water, all are teeming with living things suited to their environment;
+our globe is overflowing with life. But the moment we pass in thought
+beyond our atmosphere everything is to be changed. Neither reason nor
+analogy support such a supposition. It was one of Bruno's crimes that
+he dared to teach that other worlds than ours were inhabited; but he
+was wiser than the monks who burned him. All the Theosophists aver is
+that each phase of matter has living things suited to it, and that all
+the universe is pulsing with life. 'Superstition!' shriek the bigoted.
+It is no more superstition than the belief in Bacteria, or in any
+other living thing invisible to the ordinary human eye. 'Spirit' is a
+misleading word, for, historically, it connotes immateriality and a
+supernatural kind of existence, and the Theosophist believes neither
+in the one nor the other. With him all living things act in and
+through a material basis, and 'matter' and 'spirit' are not found
+dissociated. But he alleges that matter exists in states other than
+those at present known to science. To deny this is to be about as
+sensible as was the Hindu prince who denied the existence of ice
+because water, in his experience, never became solid. Refusal to
+believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all
+outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
+
+"One last word to my Secularist friends. If you say to me, 'Leave our
+ranks,' I will leave them; I force myself on no party, and the moment
+I feel myself unwelcome I will go.[29] It has cost me pain enough and
+to spare to admit that the Materialism from which I hoped all has
+failed me, and by such admission to bring on myself the disapproval of
+some of my nearest friends. But here, as at other times in my life, I
+dare not purchase peace with a lie. An imperious necessity forces me
+to speak the truth, as I see it, whether the speech please or
+displease, whether it bring praise or blame. That one loyalty to Truth
+I must keep stainless, whatever friendships fail me or human ties be
+broken. She may lead me into the wilderness, yet I must follow her;
+she may strip me of all love, yet I must pursue her; though she slay
+me, yet will I trust in her; and I ask no other epitaph on my tomb but
+
+"'SHE TRIED TO FOLLOW TRUTH.'"
+
+Meanwhile, with this new controversy on my hands, the School Board
+work went on, rendered possible, I ought to say, by the generous
+assistance of friends unknown to me, who sent me, L150 a year during
+the last year and a half. So also went on the vigorous Socialist work,
+and the continual championship of struggling labour movements,
+prominent here being the organisation of the South London fur-pullers
+into a union, and the aiding of the movement for shortening the hours
+of tram and 'bus men, the meetings for which had to be held after
+midnight. The feeding and clothing of children also occupied much time
+and attention, for the little ones in my district were, thousands of
+them, desperately poor. My studies I pursued as best I could, reading
+in railway carriages, tramcars, omnibuses, and stealing hours for
+listening to H.P.B. by shortening the nights.
+
+In October, Mr. Bradlaugh's shaken strength received its death-blow,
+though he was to live yet another fifteen months. He collapsed
+suddenly under a most severe attack of congestion and lay in imminent
+peril, devotedly nursed by his only remaining child, Mrs. Bonner, his
+elder daughter having died the preceding autumn. Slowly he struggled
+back to life, after four weeks in bed, and, ordered by his physician
+to take rest and if possible a sea voyage, he sailed for India on
+November 28th, to attend the National Congress, where he was
+enthusiastically acclaimed as "Member for India."
+
+In November I argued a libel suit, brought by me against the Rev. Mr.
+Hoskyns, vicar of Stepney, who had selected some vile passages from a
+book which was not mine and had circulated them as representing my
+views, during the School Board election of 1888. I had against me the
+Solicitor-General, Sir Edward Clarke, at the bar, and Baron Huddleston
+on the bench; both counsel and judge did their best to browbeat me and
+to use the coarsest language, endeavouring to prove that by advocating
+the limitation of the family I had condemned chastity as a crime. Five
+hours of brutal cross-examination left my denial of such teachings
+unshaken, and even the pleadings of the judge for the clergyman,
+defending his parishioners against an unbeliever and his laying down
+as law that the statement was privileged, did not avail to win a
+verdict. The jury disagreed, not, as one of them told me afterwards,
+on the question of the libel, but on some feeling that a clergyman
+ought not to be mulcted in damages for his over-zeal in defence of his
+faith against the ravening wolf of unbelief, while others, regarding
+the libel as a very cruel one, would not agree to a verdict that did
+not carry substantial damages. I did not carry the case to a new
+trial, feeling that it was not worth while to waste time over it
+further, my innocence of the charge itself having been fully proved.
+
+Busily the months rolled on, and early in the year 1890 H.P.Blavatsky
+had given to her L1,000, to use in her discretion for human service,
+and if she thought well, in the service of women. After a good deal of
+discussion she fixed on the establishment of a club in East London for
+working girls, and with her approval Miss Laura Cooper and I hunted
+for a suitable place. Finally we fixed on a very large and old house,
+193, Bow Road, and some months went in its complete renovation and the
+building of a hall attached to it. On August 15th it was opened by
+Madame Blavatsky, and dedicated by her to the brightening of the lot
+of hardworking and underpaid girls. It has nobly fulfilled its mission
+for the last three years. Very tender was H.P.B.'s heart to human
+suffering, especially to that of women and children. She was very poor
+towards the end of her earthly life, having spent all on her mission,
+and refusing to take time from her Theosophical work to write for the
+Russian papers which were ready to pay highly for her pen. But her
+slender purse was swiftly emptied when any human pain that money could
+relieve came in her way. One day I wrote a letter to a comrade that
+was shown to her, about some little children to whom I had carried a
+quantity of country flowers, and I had spoken of their faces pinched
+with want. The following characteristic note came to me:--
+
+"MY DEAREST FRIEND,--I have just read your letter to ---- and my heart
+is sick for the poor little ones! Look here; I have but 30s. of _my
+own money_ of which I can dispose (for as you know I am a pauper, and
+proud of it), but I want you to take them and _not say a word_. This
+may buy thirty dinners for thirty poor little starving wretches, and I
+may feel happier for thirty minutes at the thought. Now don't say a
+word, and do it; take them to those unfortunate babies who loved your
+flowers and felt happy. Forgive your old uncouth friend, _useless_ in
+this world!
+
+"Ever yours,
+
+"H.P.B."
+
+It was this tenderness of hers that led us, after she had gone, to
+found the "H.P.B. Home for little children," and one day we hope to
+fulfil her expressed desire that a large but homelike Refuge for
+outcast children should be opened under the auspices of the
+Theosophical Society.
+
+The lease of 17, Lansdowne Road expiring in the early summer of 1890,
+it was decided that 19, Avenue Road should be turned into the
+headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Europe. A hall was built
+for the meetings of the Blavatsky Lodge--the lodge founded by her--and
+various alterations made. In July her staff of workers was united
+under one roof; thither came Archibald and Bertram Keightley, who had
+devoted themselves to her service years before, and the Countess
+Wachtmeister, who had thrown aside all the luxuries of wealth and of
+high social rank to give all to the cause she served and the friend
+she loved with deep and faithful loyajty; and George Mead, her
+secretary and earnest disciple, a man of strong brain and strong
+character, a fine scholar and untiring worker; thither, too, Claude
+Wright, most lovable of Irishmen, with keen insight underlying a
+bright and sunny nature, careless on the surface, and Walter Old,
+dreamy and sensitive, a born psychic, and, like many such, easily
+swayed by those around him; Emily Kislingbury also, a studious and
+earnest woman; Isabel Cooper Oakley, intuitional and studious, a rare
+combination, and a most devoted pupil in Occult studies; James Pryse,
+an American, than whom none is more devoted, bringing practical
+knowledge to the help of the work, and making possible the large
+development of our printing department. These, with myself, were at
+first the resident staff, Miss Cooper and Herbert Burrows, who were
+also identified with the work, being prevented by other obligations
+from living always as part of the household.
+
+The rules of the house were--and are--very simple, but H.P.B.
+insisted on great regularity of life; we breakfasted at 8 a.m.,
+worked till lunch at 1, then again till dinner at 7. After dinner
+the outer work for the Society was put aside, and we gathered in
+H.P.B.'s room where we would sit talking over plans, receiving
+instructions, listening to her explanation of knotty points. By 12
+midnight all the lights had to be extinguished. My public work took me
+away for many hours, unfortunately for myself, but such was the
+regular run of our busy lives. She herself wrote incessantly; always
+suffering, but of indomitable will, she drove her body through its
+tasks, merciless to its weaknesses and its pains. Her pupils she
+treated very variously, adapting herself with nicest accuracy to their
+differing natures; as a teacher she was marvellously patient,
+explaining a thing over and over again in different fashions, until
+sometimes after prolonged failure she would throw herself back in her
+chair: "My God!" (the easy "Mon Dieu" of the foreigner) "am I a fool
+that you can't understand? Here, So-and-so"--to some one on whose
+countenance a faint gleam of comprehension was discernible--"tell
+these flapdoodles of the ages what I mean." With vanity, conceit,
+pretence of knowledge, she was merciless, if the pupil were a
+promising one; keen shafts of irony would pierce the sham. With some
+she would get very angry, lashing them out of their lethargy with
+fiery scorn; and in truth she made herself a mere instrument for the
+training of her pupils, careless what they, or any one else thought of
+her, providing that the resulting benefit to them was secured. And we,
+who lived around her, who in closest intimacy watched her day after
+day, we bear witness to the unselfish beauty of her life, the nobility
+of her character, and we lay at her feet our most reverent gratitude
+for knowledge gained, lives purified, strength developed. O noble and
+heroic Soul, whom the outside purblind world misjudges, but whom your
+pupils partly saw, never through lives and deaths shall we repay the
+debt of gratitude we owe to you.
+
+And thus I came through storm to peace, not to the peace of an
+untroubled sea of outer life, which no strong soul can crave, but to
+an inner peace that outer troubles may not avail to ruffle--a peace
+which belongs to the eternal not to the transitory, to the depths not
+to the shallows of life. It carried me scatheless through the terrible
+spring of 1891, when death struck down Charles Bradlaugh in the
+plenitude of his usefulness, and unlocked the gateway into rest for H.
+P. Blavatsky. Through anxieties and responsibilities heavy and
+numerous it has borne me; every strain makes it stronger; every trial
+makes it serener; every assault leaves it more radiant. Quiet
+confidence has taken the place of doubt; a strong security the place
+of anxious dread. In life, through death, to life, I am but the
+servant of the great Brotherhood, and those on whose heads but for a
+moment the touch of the Master has rested in blessing can never again
+look upon the world save through eyes made luminous with the radiance
+of the Eternal Peace.
+
+PEACE TO ALL BEINGS.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: This odious law has now been altered, and a married woman
+is a person, not a chattel.]
+
+[Footnote 2: "The Disciples," p. 14.]
+
+[Footnote 3: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 4: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 5: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 6: "Why I do not Believe in God." 1887.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 9: "Life, Death, and Immortality." 1886.]
+
+[Footnote 10: "Life, Death, and Immortality." 1886.]
+
+[Footnote 11: "Life, Death, and Immortality." 1886.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 13: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 14: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 15: "The True Basis of Morality." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 16: "Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 17: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 18: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 19: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 20: "The Gospels of Christianity and Freethought." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 21: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 22: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 23: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 24: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 25: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 26: "The Christian Creed." 1884.]
+
+[Footnote 27: _National Reformer_, June 18, 1882]
+
+[Footnote 28: _Theosophist_, June, 1882.]
+
+[Footnote 29: I leave these words as they were written in 1889. I
+resigned my office in the N.S.S. in 1890, feeling that the N.S.S. was
+so identified with Materialism that it had no longer place for me.]
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF BOOKS QUOTED.
+
+"Autobiography," J.S. Mill, 184
+
+"Christian Creed, The," 173
+
+"Freethinkers' Text-book," 144
+
+"Gospel of Atheism, The," 145, 152, 158, 168
+
+"Gospels of Christianity and Freethought," 164
+
+"Life, Death, and Immortality," 147, 149, 150
+
+_Link_, The, 333
+
+_National Reformer_, The, 79, 80, 280, 346-50, 354
+
+_Our Corner, _286, 329
+
+_Theosophist_, The, 282, 288
+
+"True Basis of Morality," 156
+
+"Why I do Not Believe in God," 146
+
+"World without God," 165, 169, 172
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+Affirmation Bill brought in, 287
+  rejected, 299
+Atheist, position as an, 139
+Authorship, first attempts at, 84.
+
+Bennett, D.M., prosecution of, 232
+Blasphemy prosecution, 283, 287, 289
+Blavatsky, H.P., 189, 337
+  meeting with, 341
+"Bloody Sunday," 324
+Bradlaugh, Charles, first meeting with, 135
+  as friend, 137
+  in the Clock Tower, 258
+  and the scene in the House, 265
+  _v_. Newdegate; result, 289
+  prosecuted for blasphemy, 283, 289
+
+Confirmation, 51
+
+Daughter, application to remove, 213
+  denied access to, 219
+Death of father, 21
+  of mother, 126
+Doubt the first, 58
+
+"Elements of Social Science," 196
+Engagement, 69
+Essay, first Freethought, 113
+
+Fenians, the, 73
+_Freethinker_ prosecution, 283, 287, 296
+Freethought Publishing Company, the, 285
+
+Harrow, life at, 30
+Hoskyns, Rev. E., libel action against, 359
+
+Knowlton pamphlet, the, 205
+  prosecution, 208
+  trial, 210
+
+"Law of Population, The," 212, 210
+"Law and Liberty League," the, 326
+Lecture, the first, 181
+Linnell, the Trafalgar Square victim, 316
+  funeral of, 327
+_Link_, founding of the, 331
+
+Malthusian League formed, 229
+Malthusianism and Theosophy, 240
+Marriage, 70
+  tie broken, no
+Match-girls' strike, 335
+  Union, established, 336
+
+_National Reformer,_ the, 134
+  first contribution to, 180
+  resignation of co-editorship, 320
+National Secular Society joined, 135
+  elected vice-president of, 202
+  resignation of, 357
+Northampton Election, 183
+  struggle, 253, 344
+
+Oaths Bill, the, 314, 329
+_Our Corner_, 286, 314
+
+Political Opinions, 174
+Pusey, Dr., 109, 284
+
+Russian politics, 311
+
+Scientific work, 249
+School Board, election to, 338
+Scott, Thomas, 112, 127
+Socialism, 299
+  debate on, between Messrs. Bradlaugh and Hyndman, 301
+Socialist debates, 318, 319
+Socialists and open-air speaking, 312
+  Defence Association, 323
+Stanley, Dean, 23, 122
+
+Theosophical Society, the, 180
+  joined, 344
+  headquarters established, 361
+Theosophy and Charles Bradlaugh, 350
+  the National Secular Society, 357
+Trafalgar Square, closing of, to the public, 323
+Truelove, Edward, trial of, 225
+
+Voysey, Rev. Charles, 106
+
+Working Women's Club, 337, 360
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Annie Besant, by Annie Besant
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #12085 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12085)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Annie Besant, by Annie Besant
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Annie Besant
+       An Autobiography
+
+Author: Annie Besant
+
+Release Date: April 19, 2004 [EBook #12085]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANNIE BESANT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by H.S. Mendelssohn, 27, Cathcart
+Road, South Kensington, London._ ANNIE BESANT. 1885]
+
+
+
+
+ANNIE BESANT
+
+AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+LONDON
+
+SECOND EDITION
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+It is a difficult thing to tell the story of a life, and yet more
+difficult when that life is one's own. At the best, the telling has a
+savour of vanity, and the only excuse for the proceeding is that the
+life, being an average one, reflects many others, and in troublous
+times like ours may give the experience of many rather than of one.
+And so the autobiographer does his work because he thinks that, at the
+cost of some unpleasantness to himself, he may throw light on some of
+the typical problems that are vexing the souls of his contemporaries,
+and perchance may stretch out a helping hand to some brother who is
+struggling in the darkness, and so bring him cheer when despair has
+him in its grip. Since all of us, men and women of this restless and
+eager generation--surrounded by forces we dimly see but cannot as yet
+understand, discontented with old ideas and half afraid of new, greedy
+for the material results of the knowledge brought us by Science but
+looking askance at her agnosticism as regards the soul, fearful of
+superstition but still more fearful of atheism, turning from the husks
+of outgrown creeds but filled with desperate hunger for spiritual
+ideals--since all of us have the same anxieties, the same griefs, the
+same yearning hopes, the same passionate desire for knowledge, it may
+well be that the story of one may help all, and that the tale of one
+should that went out alone into the darkness and on the other side
+found light, that struggled through the Storm and on the other side
+found Peace, may bring some ray of light and of peace into the
+darkness and the storm of other lives.
+
+ANNIE BESANT.
+
+THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY,
+
+17 & 19, AVENUE ROAD, REGENT'S PARK, LONDON.
+
+_August_, 1893.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+CHAP.
+
+I.    "OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE"
+
+II.   EARLY CHILDHOOD
+
+III.  GIRLHOOD
+
+IV.   MARRIAGE
+
+V.    THE STORM OF DOUBT
+
+VI.   CHARLES BRADLAUGH
+
+VII.  ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT
+
+VIII. AT WORK
+
+IX.   THE KNOWLTON PAMPHLET
+
+X.    AT WAR ALL ROUND
+
+XI.   MR. BRADLAUGH'S STRUGGLE
+
+XII.  STILL FIGHTING
+
+XIII. SOCIALISM
+
+XIV.  THROUGH STORM TO PEACE
+
+LIST OF BOOKS QUOTED
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+
+ANNIE BESANT, 1885                          _Frontispiece_
+
+HOROSCOPE OF ANNIE BESANT                   _Page_ 12
+
+ANNIE BESANT, 1869                          _Facing page_ 86
+
+THOMAS SCOTT                                _Facing page_ 112
+
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH, M.P.                     _Facing page_ 212
+
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH AND HENRY LABOUCHERE      _Facing page_ 254
+
+NORWICH BRANCH OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE      _Facing page_ 314
+
+STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION  _Facing page_ 336
+
+MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION           _Facing page_ 338
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+"OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE."
+
+
+On October 1, 1847, I am credibly informed, my baby eyes opened to the
+light(?) of a London afternoon at 5.39.
+
+A friendly astrologer has drawn for me the following chart, showing the
+position of the planets at this, to me fateful, moment; but I know
+nothing of astrology, so feel no wiser as I gaze upon my horoscope.
+
+Keeping in view the way in which sun, moon, and planets influence the
+physical condition of the earth, there is nothing incongruous with the
+orderly course of nature in the view that they also influence the
+physical bodies of men, these being part of the physical earth, and
+largely moulded by its conditions. Any one who knows the
+characteristics ascribed to those who are born under the several signs
+of the Zodiac, may very easily pick out the different types among his
+own acquaintances, and he may then get them to go to some astrologer
+and find out under what signs they were severally born. He will very
+quickly discover that two men of completely opposed types are not born
+under the same sign, and the invariability of the concurrence will
+convince him that law, and not chance, is at work. We are born into
+earthly life under certain conditions, just as we were physically
+affected by them pre-natally, and these will have their bearing on our
+subsequent physical evolution. At the most, astrology, as it is now
+practised, can only calculate the interaction between these physical
+conditions at any given moment, and the conditions brought to them by a
+given person whose general constitution and natal condition are known.
+It cannot say what the person will do, nor what will happen to him, but
+only what will be the physical district, so to speak, in which he will
+find himself, and the impulses that will play upon him from external
+nature and from his own body. Even on those matters modern astrology is
+not quite reliable--judging from the many blunders made--or else its
+professors are very badly instructed; but that there is a real science
+of astrology I have no doubt, and there are some men who are past
+masters in it.
+
+[Illustration: Horoscope of Annie Besant.]
+
+It has always been somewhat of a grievance to me that I was born in
+London, "within the sound of Bow Bells," when three-quarters of my
+blood and all my heart are Irish. My dear mother was of purest Irish
+descent, and my father was Irish on his mother's side, though belonging
+to the Devonshire Woods on his father's. The Woods were yeomen of the
+sturdy English type, farming their own land in honest, independent
+fashion. Of late years they seem to have developed more in the
+direction of brains, from the time, in fact, that Matthew Wood became
+Mayor of London town, fought Queen Caroline's battles against her most
+religious and gracious royal husband, aided the Duke of Kent with no
+niggard hand, and received a baronetcy for his services from the Duke
+of Kent's royal daughter. Since then they have given England a Lord
+Chancellor in the person of the gentle-hearted and pure-living Lord
+Hatherley, while others have distinguished themselves in various ways
+in the service of their country. But I feel playfully inclined to
+grudge the English blood they put into my father's veins, with his
+Irish mother, his Galway birth, and his Trinity College, Dublin,
+education. For the Irish tongue is musical in my ear, and the Irish
+nature dear to my heart. Only in Ireland is it that if you stop to ask
+a worn-out ragged woman the way to some old monument, she will say:
+"Sure, then, my darlin', it's just up the hill and round the corner,
+and then any one will tell you the way. And it's there you'll see the
+place where the blessed Saint Patrick set his foot, and his blessing be
+on yer." Old women as poor as she in other nations would never be as
+bright and as friendly and as garrulous. And where, out of Ireland,
+will you see a whole town crowd into a station to say good-bye to half
+a dozen emigrants, till the platform is a heaving mass of men and
+women, struggling, climbing over each other for a last kiss, crying,
+keening, laughing, all in a breath, till all the air is throbbing and
+there's a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes as the train
+steams out? Where, out of Ireland, will you be bumping along the
+streets on an outside car, beside a taciturn Jarvey, who, on suddenly
+discovering that you are shadowed by "Castle" spies, becomes
+loquaciously friendly, and points out everything that he thinks will
+interest you? Blessings on the quick tongues and warm hearts, on the
+people so easy to lead, so hard to drive. And blessings on the ancient
+land once inhabited by mighty men of wisdom, that in later times became
+the Island of Saints, and shall once again be the Island of Sages, when
+the Wheel turns round.
+
+My maternal grandfather was a typical Irishman, much admired by me and
+somewhat feared also, in the childish days. He belonged to a decayed
+Irish family, the Maurices, and in a gay youth, with a beautiful wife
+as light-hearted as himself, he had merrily run through what remained
+to him in the way of fortune. In his old age, with abundant snow-white
+hair, he still showed the hot Irish blood on the lightest provocation,
+stormily angry for a moment and easily appeased. My mother was the
+second daughter in a large family, in a family that grew more numerous
+as pounds grew fewer, and she was adopted by a maiden aunt, a quaint
+memory of whom came through my mother's childhood into mine, and had
+its moulding effect on both our characters. This maiden aunt was, as
+are most Irish folk of decayed families, very proud of her family tree
+with its roots in the inevitable "kings." Her particular kings were the
+"seven kings of France"--the "Milesian kings"--and the tree grew up a
+parchment, in all its impressive majesty, over the mantelpiece of their
+descendant's modest drawing-room. This heraldic monster was regarded
+with deep respect by child Emily, a respect in no wise deserved, I
+venture to suppose, by the disreputable royalties of whom she was a
+fortunately distant twig. Chased out of France, doubtless for cause
+shown, they had come over the sea to Ireland, and there continued their
+reckless plundering lives. But so strangely turns the wheel of time
+that these ill-doing and barbarous scamps became a kind of moral
+thermometer in the home of the gentle Irish lady in the early half of
+the present century. For my mother has told me that when she had
+committed some act of childish naughtiness, her aunt would say, looking
+gravely over her spectacles at the small culprit, "Emily, your conduct
+is unworthy of the descendant of the seven kings of France." And Emily,
+with her sweet grey Irish eyes and her curling masses of raven black
+hair, would cry in penitent shame over her unworthiness, with some
+vague idea that those royal, and to her very real, ancestors would
+despise her small, sweet, rosebud self, so wholly unworthy of their
+disreputable majesties.
+
+Thus those shadowy forms influenced her in childhood, and exercised
+over her a power that made her shrink from aught that was unworthy,
+petty or mean. To her the lightest breath of dishonour was to be
+avoided at any cost of pain, and she wrought into me, her only
+daughter, that same proud and passionate horror at any taint of shame
+or merited disgrace. To the world always a brave front was to be kept,
+and a stainless reputation, for suffering might be borne but dishonour
+never. A gentlewoman might starve, but she must not run in debt; she
+might break her heart, but it must be with a smile on her face. I have
+often thought that the training in this reticence and pride of honour
+was a strange preparation for my stormy, public, much attacked and
+slandered life; and certain it is that this inwrought shrinking from
+all criticism that touched personal purity and personal honour added a
+keenness of suffering to the fronting of public odium that none can
+appreciate who has not been trained in some similar school of dignified
+self-respect. And yet perhaps there was another result from it that in
+value outweighed the added pain: it was the stubbornly resistant
+feeling that rose and inwardly asserted its own purity in face of
+foulest lie, and turning scornful face against the foe, too proud
+either to justify itself or to defend, said to itself in its own heart,
+when condemnation was loudest: "I am not what you think me, and your
+verdict does not change my own self. You cannot make me vile whatever
+you think of me, and I will never, in my own eyes, be that which you
+deem me to be now." And the very pride became a shield against
+degradation, for, however lost my public reputation, I could never bear
+to become sullied in my own sight--and that is a thing not without its
+use to a woman cut off, as I was at one time, from home, and friends,
+and Society. So peace to the maiden aunt's ashes, and to those of her
+absurd kings, for I owe them something after all. And I keep grateful
+memory of that unknown grand-aunt, for what she did in training my dear
+mother, the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest of women. It is well
+to be able to look back to a mother who served as ideal of all that was
+noblest and dearest during childhood and girlhood, whose face made the
+beauty of home, and whose love was both sun and shield. No other
+experience in life could quite make up for missing the perfect tie
+between mother and child--a tie that in our case never relaxed and
+never weakened. Though her grief at my change of faith and consequent
+social ostracism did much to hasten her death-hour, it never brought a
+cloud between our hearts; though her pleading was the hardest of all to
+face in later days, and brought the bitterest agony, it made no gulf
+between us, it cast no chill upon our mutual love. And I look back at
+her to-day with the same loving gratitude as ever encircled her to me
+in her earthly life. I have never met a woman more selflessly devoted
+to those she loved, more passionately contemptuous of all that was mean
+or base, more keenly sensitive on every question of honour, more iron
+in will, more sweet in tenderness, than the mother who made my girlhood
+sunny as dreamland, who guarded me, until my marriage, from every touch
+of pain that she could ward off or bear for me, who suffered more in
+every trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself, and who
+died in the little house I had taken for our new home in Norwood, worn
+out, ere old age touched her, by sorrow, poverty, and pain, in May,
+1874.
+
+My earliest personal recollections are of a house and garden that we
+lived in when I was three and four years of age, situated in Grove
+Road, St. John's Wood. I can remember my mother hovering round the
+dinner-table to see that all was bright for the home-coming husband; my
+brother--two years older than myself--and I watching "for papa"; the
+loving welcome, the game of romps that always preceded the dinner of
+the elder folks. I can remember on the 1st of October, 1851, jumping up
+in my little cot, and shouting out triumphantly: "Papa! mamma! I am
+four years old!" and the grave demand of my brother, conscious of
+superior age, at dinner-time: "May not Annie have a knife to-day, as
+she is four years old?"
+
+It was a sore grievance during that same year, 1851, that I was not
+judged old enough to go to the Great Exhibition, and I have a faint
+memory of my brother consolingly bringing me home one of those folding
+pictured strips that are sold in the streets, on which were imaged
+glories that I longed only the more to see. Far-away, dusky, trivial
+memories, these. What a pity it is that a baby cannot notice, cannot
+observe, cannot remember, and so throw light on the fashion of the
+dawning of the external world on the human consciousness. If only we
+could remember how things looked when they were first imaged on the
+retinae; what we felt when first we became conscious of the outer world;
+what the feeling was as faces of father and mother grew out of the
+surrounding chaos and became familiar things, greeted with a smile,
+lost with a cry; if only memory would not become a mist when in later
+years we strive to throw our glances backward into the darkness of our
+infancy, what lessons we might learn to help our stumbling psychology,
+how many questions might be solved whose answers we are groping for in
+the West in vain.
+
+The next scene that stands out clearly against the background of the
+past is that of my father's death-bed. The events which led to his
+death I know from my dear mother. He had never lost his fondness for
+the profession for which he had been trained, and having many medical
+friends, he would now and then accompany them on their hospital rounds,
+or share with them the labours of the dissecting-room. It chanced that
+during the dissection of the body of a person who had died of rapid
+consumption, my father cut his finger against the edge of the
+breast-bone. The cut did not heal easily, and the finger became swollen
+and inflamed. "I would have that finger off, Wood, if I were you," said
+one of the surgeons, a day or two afterwards, on seeing the state of
+the wound. But the others laughed at the suggestion, and my father, at
+first inclined to submit to the amputation, was persuaded to "leave
+Nature alone."
+
+About the middle of August, 1852, he got wet through, riding on the top
+of an omnibus, and the wetting resulted in a severe cold, which
+"settled on his chest." One of the most eminent doctors of the day, as
+able as he was rough in manner, was called to see him. He examined him
+carefully, sounded his lungs, and left the room followed by my mother.
+"Well?" she asked, scarcely anxious as to the answer, save as it might
+worry her husband to be kept idly at home. "You must keep up his
+spirits," was the thoughtless answer. "He is in a galloping
+consumption; you will not have him with you six weeks longer." The wife
+staggered back, and fell like a stone on the floor. But love triumphed
+over agony, and half an hour later she was again at her husband's side,
+never to leave it again for ten minutes at a time, night or day, till
+he was lying with closed eyes asleep in death.
+
+I was lifted on to the bed to "say good-bye to dear papa" on the day
+before his death, and I remember being frightened at his eyes which
+looked so large, and his voice which sounded so strange, as he made me
+promise always to be "a very good girl to darling mamma, as papa was
+going right away." I remember insisting that "papa should kiss Cherry,"
+a doll given me on my birthday, three days before, by his direction,
+and being removed, crying and struggling, from the room. He died on the
+following day, October 5th, and I do not think that my elder brother
+and I--who were staying at our maternal grandfather's--went to the
+house again until the day of the funeral. With the death, my mother
+broke down, and when all was over they carried her senseless from the
+room. I remember hearing afterwards how, when she recovered her senses,
+she passionately insisted on being left alone, and locked herself into
+her room for the night; and how on the following morning her mother, at
+last persuading her to open the door, started back at the face she saw
+with the cry: "Good God, Emily! your hair is white!" It was even so;
+her hair, black, glossy and abundant, which, contrasting with her large
+grey eyes, had made her face so strangely attractive, had turned grey
+in that night of agony, and to me my mother's face is ever framed in
+exquisite silver bands of hair as white as the driven unsullied snow.
+
+I have heard that the love between my father and mother was a very
+beautiful thing, and it most certainly stamped her character for life.
+He was keenly intellectual and splendidly educated; a mathematician and
+a good classical scholar, thoroughly master of French, German, Italian,
+Spanish, and Portuguese, with a smattering of Hebrew and Gaelic, the
+treasures of ancient and of modern literature were his daily household
+delight. Nothing pleased him so well as to sit with his wife, reading
+aloud to her while she worked; now translating from some foreign poet,
+now rolling forth melodiously the exquisite cadences of "Queen Mab."
+Student of philosophy as he was, he was deeply and steadily sceptical;
+and a very religious relative has told me that he often drove her from
+the room by his light, playful mockery of the tenets of the Christian
+faith. His mother and sister were strict Roman Catholics, and near the
+end forced a priest into his room, but the priest was promptly ejected
+by the wrath of the dying man, and by the almost fierce resolve of the
+wife that no messenger of the creed he detested should trouble her
+darling at the last.
+
+Deeply read in philosophy, he had outgrown the orthodox beliefs of his
+day, and his wife, who loved him too much to criticise, was wont to
+reconcile her own piety and his scepticism by holding that "women ought
+to be religious," while men had a right to read everything and think as
+they would, provided that they were upright and honourable in their
+lives. But the result of his liberal and unorthodox thought was to
+insensibly modify and partially rationalise her own beliefs, and she
+put on one side as errors the doctrines of eternal punishment, the
+vicarious atonement, the infallibility of the Bible, the equality of
+the Son with the Father in the Trinity, and other orthodox beliefs, and
+rejoiced in her later years in the writings of such men as Jowett,
+Colenso, and Stanley. The last named, indeed, was her ideal Christian
+gentleman, suave, polished, broad-minded, devout in a stately way. The
+baldness of a typical Evangelical service outraged her taste as much as
+the crudity of Evangelical dogmas outraged her intellect; she liked to
+feel herself a Christian in a dignified and artistic manner, and to be
+surrounded by solemn music and splendid architecture when she "attended
+Divine service." Familiarity with celestial personages was detestable
+to her, and she did her duty of saluting them in a courtly and reverent
+fashion. Westminster Abbey was her favourite church, with its dim light
+and shadowy distances; there in a carven stall, with choristers
+chanting in solemn rhythm, with the many-coloured glories of the
+painted windows repeating themselves on upspringing arch and clustering
+pillars, with the rich harmonies of the pealing organ throbbing up
+against screen and monument, with the ashes of the mighty dead around,
+and all the stately memories of the past inwrought into the very
+masonry, there Religion appeared to her to be intellectually dignified
+and emotionally satisfactory.
+
+To me, who took my religion in strenuous fashion, this dainty and
+well-bred piety seemed perilously like Laodicean lukewarmness, while
+my headlong vigour of conviction and practice often jarred on her as
+alien from the delicate balance and absence of extremes that should
+characterise the gentlewoman. She was of the old _régime_; I of the
+stuff from which fanatics are made: and I have often thought, in
+looking back, that she must have had on her lips many a time unspoken
+a phrase that dropped from them when she lay a-dying: "My little one,
+you have never made me sad or sorry except for your own sake; you have
+always been too religious." And then she murmured to herself: "Yes,
+it has been darling Annie's only fault; she has always been too
+religious." Methinks that, as the world judges, the dying voice spake
+truly, and the dying eyes saw with a real insight. For though I was
+then kneeling beside her bed, heretic and outcast, the heart of me was
+religious in its very fervour of repudiation of a religion, and in its
+rebellious uprising against dogmas that crushed the reason and did not
+satisfy the soul. I went out into the darkness alone, not because
+religion was too good for me, but because it was not good enough; it
+was too meagre, too commonplace, too little exacting, too bound up
+with earthly interests, too calculating in its accommodations to
+social conventionalities. The Roman Catholic Church, had it captured
+me, as it nearly did, would have sent me on some mission of danger and
+sacrifice and utilised me as a martyr; the Church established by law
+transformed me into an unbeliever and an antagonist.
+
+For as a child I was mystical and imaginative religious to the very
+finger-tips, and with a certain faculty for seeing visions and
+dreaming dreams. This faculty is not uncommon with the Keltic races,
+and makes them seem "superstitious" to more solidly-built peoples.
+Thus, on the day of my father's funeral, my mother sat with vacant
+eyes and fixed pallid face--the picture comes back to me yet, it so
+impressed my childish imagination--following the funeral service,
+stage after stage, and suddenly, with the words, "It is all over!"
+fell back fainting. She said afterwards that she had followed the
+hearse, had attended the service, had walked behind the coffin to the
+grave. Certain it is that a few weeks later she determined to go to
+the Kensal Green Cemetery, where the body of her husband had been
+laid, and went thither with a relative; he failed to find the grave,
+and while another of the party went in search of an official to
+identify the spot, my mother said, "If you will take me to the chapel
+where the first part of the service was read, I will find the grave."
+The idea seemed to her friend, of course, to be absurd; but he would
+not cross the newly-made widow, so took her to the chapel. She looked
+round, left the chapel door, and followed the path along which the
+corpse had been borne till she reached the grave, where she was
+quietly standing when the caretaker arrived to point it out. The grave
+is at some distance from the chapel, and is not on one of the main
+roads; it had nothing on it to mark it, save the wooden peg with the
+number, and this would be no help to identification at a distance
+since all the graves are thus marked, and at a little way off these
+pegs are not visible. How she found the grave remained a mystery in
+the family, as no one believed her straightforward story that she had
+been present at the funeral. With my present knowledge the matter is
+simple enough, for I now know that the consciousness can leave the
+body, take part in events going on at a distance, and, returning,
+impress on the physical brain what it has experienced. The very fact
+that she asked to be taken to the chapel is significant, showing that
+she was picking up a memory of a previous going from that spot to the
+grave; she could only find the grave if she started from _the place
+from which she had started before_. Another proof of this
+ultra-physical capacity was given a few months later, when her infant
+son, who had been pining himself ill for "papa," was lying one night
+in her arms. On the next morning she said to her sister: "Alf is going
+to die." The child had no definite disease, but was wasting away, and
+it was argued to her that the returning spring would restore the
+health lost during the winter. "No," was her answer. "He was lying
+asleep in my arms last night, and William" (her husband) "came to me
+and said that he wanted Alf with him, but that I might keep the other
+two." In vain she was assured that she had been dreaming, that it was
+quite natural that she should dream about her husband, and that her
+anxiety for the child had given the dream its shape. Nothing would
+persuade her that she had not seen her husband, or that the
+information he had given her was not true. So it was no matter of
+surprise to her when in the following March her arms were empty, and a
+waxen form lay lifeless in the baby's cot.
+
+My brother and I were allowed to see him just before he was placed in
+his coffin; I can see him still, so white and beautiful, with a black
+spot in the middle of the fair, waxen forehead, and I remember the
+deadly cold which startled me when I was told to kiss my little
+brother. It was the first time that I had touched Death. That black
+spot made a curious impression on me, and long afterwards, asking what
+had caused it, I was told that at the moment after his death my mother
+had passionately kissed the baby brow. Pathetic thought, that the
+mother's kiss of farewell should have been marked by the first sign of
+corruption on the child's face!
+
+I do not mention these stories because they are in any fashion
+remarkable or out of the way, but only to show that the sensitiveness
+to impressions other than physical ones, that was a marked feature in
+my own childhood, was present also in the family to which I belonged.
+For the physical nature is inherited from parents, and sensitiveness
+to psychic impressions is a property of the physical body; in our
+family, as in so many Irish ones, belief in "ghosts" of all
+descriptions was general, and my mother has told me of the banshee
+that she had heard wailing when the death-hour of one of the family
+was near. To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were
+very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself
+a child. Punch and Judy were living entities, and the tragedy in which
+they bore part cost me many an agony of tears; to this day I can
+remember running away when I heard the squawk of the coming Punch, and
+burying my head in the pillows that I might shut out the sound of the
+blows and the cry of the ill-used baby. All the objects about me were
+to me alive, the flowers that I kissed as much as the kitten I petted,
+and I used to have a splendid time "making believe" and living out all
+sorts of lovely stories among my treasured and so-called inanimate
+playthings. But there was a more serious side to this dreamful fancy
+when it joined hands with religion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+EARLY CHILDHOOD.
+
+
+And now began my mother's time of struggle and of anxiety. Hitherto,
+since her marriage, she had known no money troubles, for her husband
+was earning a good income; he was apparently vigorous and well: no
+thought of anxiety clouded their future. When he died, he believed
+that he left his wife and children safe, at least, from pecuniary
+distress. It was not so. I know nothing of the details, but the
+outcome of all was that nothing was left for the widow and children,
+save a trifle of ready money. The resolve to which my mother came was
+characteristic. Two of her husband's relatives, Western and Sir
+William Wood, offered to educate her son at a good city school, and to
+start him in commercial life, using their great city influence to push
+him forward. But the young lad's father and mother had talked of a
+different future for their eldest boy; he was to go to a public
+school, and then to the University, and was to enter one of the
+"learned professions"--to take orders, the mother wished; to go to the
+Bar, the father hoped. On his death-bed there was nothing more
+earnestly urged by my father than that Harry should receive the best
+possible education, and the widow was resolute to fulfil that last
+wish. In her eyes, a city school was not "the best possible
+education," and the Irish pride rebelled against the idea of her son
+not being "a University man." Many were the lectures poured out on the
+young widow's head about her "foolish pride," especially by the female
+members of the Wood family; and her persistence in her own way caused
+a considerable alienation between herself and them. But Western and
+William, though half-disapproving, remained her friends, and lent many
+a helping hand to her in her first difficult struggles. After much
+cogitation, she resolved that the boy should be educated at Harrow,
+where the fees are comparatively low to lads living in the town, and
+that he should go thence to Cambridge or to Oxford, as his tastes
+should direct. A bold scheme for a penniless widow, but carried out to
+the letter; for never dwelt in a delicate body a more resolute mind
+and will than that of my dear mother.
+
+In a few months' time--during which we lived, poorly enough, in
+Richmond Terrace, Clapham, close to her father and mother--to Harrow,
+then, she betook herself, into lodgings over a grocer's shop, and set
+herself to look for a house. This grocer was a very pompous man, fond
+of long words, and patronised the young widow exceedingly, and one day
+my mother related with much amusement how he had told her that she was
+sure to get on if she worked hard. "Look at me!" he said, swelling
+visibly with importance; "I was once a poor boy, without a penny of my
+own, and now I am a comfortable man, and have my submarine villa to go
+to every evening." That "submarine villa" was an object of amusement
+when we passed it in our walks for many a long day.
+
+"There is Mr. ----'s submarine villa," some one would say, laughing:
+and I, too, used to laugh merrily, because my elders did, though my
+understanding of the difference between suburban and submarine was on
+a par with that of the honest grocer.
+
+My mother had fortunately found a boy, whose parents were glad to place
+him in her charge, of about the age of her own son, to educate with
+him; and by this means she was able to pay for a tutor, to prepare the
+two boys for school. The tutor had a cork leg, which was a source of
+serious trouble to me, for it stuck out straight behind when we knelt
+down to family prayers--conduct which struck me as irreverent and
+unbecoming, but which I always felt a desire to imitate. After about a
+year my mother found a house which she thought would suit her scheme,
+namely, to obtain permission from Dr. Vaughan, the then head-master of
+Harrow, to take some boys into her house, and so gain means of
+education for her own son. Dr. Vaughan, who must have been won by the
+gentle, strong, little woman, from that time forth became her earnest
+friend and helper; and to the counsel and active assistance both of
+himself and of his wife, was due much of the success that crowned her
+toil. He made only one condition in granting the permission she asked,
+and that was, that she should also have in her house one of the masters
+of the school, so that the boys should not suffer from the want of a
+house-tutor. This condition, of course, she readily accepted, and the
+arrangement lasted for ten years, until after her son had left school
+for Cambridge.
+
+The house she took is now, I am sorry to say, pulled down, and
+replaced by a hideous red-brick structure. It was very old and
+rambling, rose-covered in front, ivy-covered behind; it stood on the
+top of Harrow Hill, between the church and the school, and had once
+been the vicarage of the parish, but the vicar had left it because it
+was so far removed from the part of the village where all his work
+lay. The drawing-room opened by an old-fashioned half-window,
+half-door--which proved a constant source of grief to me, for whenever
+I had on a new frock I always tore it on the bolt as I flew
+through--into a large garden which sloped down one side of the hill,
+and was filled with the most delightful old trees, fir and laurel,
+may, mulberry, hazel, apple, pear, and damson, not to mention currant
+and gooseberry bushes innumerable, and large strawberry beds spreading
+down the sunny slopes. There was not a tree there that I did not
+climb, and one, a widespreading Portugal laurel, was my private
+country house. I had there my bedroom and my sitting-rooms, my study,
+and my larder. The larder was supplied by the fruit-trees, from which
+I was free to pick as I would, and in the study I would sit for hours
+with some favourite book--Milton's "Paradise Lost" the chief favourite
+of all. The birds must often have felt startled, when from the small
+swinging form perching on a branch, came out in childish tones the
+"Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers," of Milton's
+stately and sonorous verse. I liked to personify Satan, and to declaim
+the grand speeches of the hero-rebel, and many a happy hour did I pass
+in Milton's heaven and hell, with for companions Satan and "the Son,"
+Gabriel and Abdiel. Then there was a terrace running by the side of
+the churchyard, always dry in the wettest weather, and bordered by an
+old wooden fence, over which clambered roses of every shade; never was
+such a garden for roses as that of the Old Vicarage. At the end of the
+terrace was a little summer-house, and in this a trap-door in the
+fence, which swung open and displayed one of the fairest views in
+England. Sheer from your feet downwards went the hill, and then far
+below stretched the wooded country till your eye reached the towers of
+Windsor Castle, far away on the horizon. It was the view at which
+Byron was never tired of gazing, as he lay on the flat tombstone close
+by--Byron's tomb, as it is still called--of which he wrote:--
+
+  "Again I behold where for hours I have pondered,
+     As reclining, at eve, on yon tombstone I lay,
+  Or round the steep brow of the churchyard I wandered,
+     To catch the last gleam of the sun's setting ray."
+
+Reader mine, if ever you go to Harrow, ask permission to enter the old
+garden, and try the effect of that sudden burst of beauty, as you
+swing back the small trap-door at the terrace end.
+
+Into this house we moved on my eighth birthday, and for eleven years it
+was "home" to me, left always with regret, returned to always with joy.
+
+Almost immediately afterwards I left my mother for the first time; for
+one day, visiting a family who lived close by, I found a stranger
+sitting in the drawing-room, a lame lady with a strong face, which
+softened marvellously as she smiled at the child who came dancing in;
+she called me to her presently, and took me on her lap and talked to
+me, and on the following day our friend came to see my mother, to ask
+if she would let me go away and be educated with this lady's niece,
+coming home for the holidays regularly, but leaving my education in
+her hands. At first my mother would not hear of it, for she and I
+scarcely ever left each other; my love for her was an idolatry, hers
+for me a devotion. (A foolish little story, about which I was
+unmercifully teased for years, marked that absolute idolatry of her,
+which has not yet faded from my heart. In tenderest rallying one day
+of the child who trotted after her everywhere, content to sit, or
+stand, or wait, if only she might touch hand or dress of "mamma," she
+said: "Little one" (the name by which she always called me), "if you
+cling to mamma in this way, I must really get a string and tie you to
+my apron, and how will you like that?" "O mamma, darling," came the
+fervent answer, "do let it be in a knot." And, indeed, the tie of love
+between us was so tightly knotted that nothing ever loosened it till
+the sword of Death cut that which pain and trouble never availed to
+slacken in the slightest degree.) But it was urged upon her that the
+advantages of education offered were such as no money could purchase
+for me; that it would be a disadvantage for me to grow up in a
+houseful of boys--and, in truth, I was as good a cricketer and climber
+as the best of them--that my mother would soon be obliged to send me
+to school, unless she accepted an offer which gave me every advantage
+of school without its disadvantages. At last she yielded, and it was
+decided that Miss Marryat, on returning home, should take me with her.
+
+Miss Marryat--the favourite sister of Captain Marryat, the famous
+novelist--was a maiden lady of large means. She had nursed her brother
+through the illness that ended in his death, and had been living with
+her mother at Wimbledon Park. On her mother's death she looked round
+for work which would make her useful in the world, and finding that one
+of her brothers had a large family of girls, she offered to take charge
+of one of them, and to educate her thoroughly. Chancing to come to
+Harrow, my good fortune threw me in her way, and she took a fancy to
+me and thought she would like to teach two little girls rather than
+one. Hence her offer to my mother.
+
+Miss Marryat had a perfect genius for teaching, and took in it the
+greatest delight. From time to time she added another child to our
+party, sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl. At first, with Amy Marryat
+and myself, there was a little boy, Walter Powys, son of a clergyman
+with a large family, and him she trained for some years, and then sent
+him on to school admirably prepared. She chose "her children"--as she
+loved to call us--in very definite fashion. Each must be gently born
+and gently trained, but in such position that the education freely
+given should be a relief and aid to a slender parental purse. It was
+her delight to seek out and aid those on whom poverty presses most
+heavily, when the need for education for the children weighs on the
+proud and the poor. "Auntie" we all called her, for she thought "Miss
+Marryat" seemed too cold and stiff. She taught us everything herself
+except music, and for this she had a master, practising us in
+composition, in recitation, in reading aloud English and French, and
+later, German, devoting herself to training us in the soundest, most
+thorough fashion. No words of mine can tell how much I owe her, not
+only of knowledge, but of that love of knowledge which has remained
+with me ever since as a constant spur to study.
+
+Her method of teaching may be of interest to some, who desire to train
+children with least pain, and the most enjoyment to the little ones
+themselves. First, we never used a spelling-book--that torment of the
+small child--nor an English grammar. But we wrote letters, telling of
+the things we had seen in our walks, or told again some story we had
+read; these childish compositions she would read over with us,
+correcting all faults of spelling, of grammar, of style, of cadence; a
+clumsy sentence would be read aloud, that we might hear how unmusical
+it sounded, an error in observation or expression pointed out. Then, as
+the letters recorded what we had seen the day before, the faculty of
+observation was drawn out and trained. "Oh, dear! I have nothing to
+say!" would come from a small child, hanging over a slate. "Did you not
+go out for a walk yesterday?" Auntie would question. "Yes," would be
+sighed out; "but there's nothing to say about it." "Nothing to say! And
+you walked in the lanes for an hour and saw nothing, little No-eyes?
+You must use your eyes better to-day." Then there was a very favourite
+"lesson," which proved an excellent way of teaching spelling. We used
+to write out lists of all the words we could think of which sounded the
+same but were differently spelt. Thus: "key, quay," "knight, night,"
+and so on, and great was the glory of the child who found the largest
+number. Our French lessons--as the German later--included reading from
+the very first. On the day on which we began German we began reading
+Schiller's "Wilhelm Tell," and the verbs given to us to copy out were
+those that had occurred in the reading. We learned much by heart, but
+always things that in themselves were worthy to be learned. We were
+never given the dry questions and answers which lazy teachers so much
+affect. We were taught history by one reading aloud while the others
+worked--the boys as well as the girls learning the use of the needle.
+"It's like a girl to sew," said a little fellow, indignantly, one day.
+"It is like a baby to have to run after a girl if you want a button
+sewn on," quoth Auntie. Geography was learned by painting skeleton
+maps--an exercise much delighted in by small fingers--and by putting
+together puzzle maps, in which countries in the map of a continent, or
+counties in the map of a country, were always cut out in their proper
+shapes. I liked big empires in those days; there was a solid
+satisfaction in putting down Russia, and seeing what a large part of
+the map was filled up thereby.
+
+The only grammar that we ever learned as grammar was the Latin, and
+that not until composition had made us familiar with the use of the
+rules therein given. Auntie had a great horror of children learning by
+rote things they did not understand, and then fancying they knew them.
+"What do you mean by that expression, Annie?" she would ask me. After
+feeble attempts to explain, I would answer: "Indeed, Auntie, I know in
+my own head, but I can't explain." "Then, indeed, Annie, you do not
+know in your own head, or you could explain, so that I might know in my
+own head." And so a healthy habit was fostered of clearness of thought
+and of expression. The Latin grammar was used because it was more
+perfect than the modern grammars, and served as a solid foundation for
+modern languages.
+
+Miss Marryat took a beautiful place, Fern Hill, near Charmouth, in
+Dorsetshire, on the borders of Devon, and there she lived for some five
+years, a centre of beneficence in the district. She started a Sunday
+School, and a Bible Class after awhile for the lads too old for the
+school, who clamoured for admission to her class in it. She visited the
+poor, taking help wherever she went, and sending food from her own
+table to the sick. It was characteristic of her that she would never
+give "scraps" to the poor, but would have a basin brought in at dinner,
+and would cut the best slice to tempt the invalid appetite. Money she
+rarely, if ever, gave, but she would find a day's work, or busy herself
+to seek permanent employment for any one seeking aid. Stern in
+rectitude herself, and iron to the fawning or the dishonest, her
+influence, whether she was feared or loved, was always for good. Of the
+strictest sect of the Evangelicals, she was an Evangelical. On the
+Sunday no books were allowed save the Bible or the "Sunday at Home";
+but she would try to make the day bright by various little devices; by
+a walk with her in the garden; by the singing of hymns, always
+attractive to children; by telling us wonderful missionary stories of
+Moffat and Livingstone, whose adventures with savages and wild beasts
+were as exciting as any tale of Mayne Reid's. We used to learn passages
+from the Bible and hymns for repetition; a favourite amusement was a
+"Bible puzzle," such as a description of some Bible scene, which was to
+be recognised by the description. Then we taught in the Sunday School,
+for Auntie would tell us that it was useless for us to learn if we did
+not try to help those who had no one to teach them. The Sunday-school
+lessons had to be carefully prepared on the Saturday, for we were
+always taught that work given to the poor should be work that cost
+something to the giver. This principle, regarded by her as an
+illustration of the text, "Shall I give unto the Lord my God that which
+has cost me nothing?" ran through all her precept and her practice.
+When in some public distress we children went to her crying, and asking
+whether we could not help the little children who were starving, her
+prompt reply was, "What will you give up for them?" And then she said
+that if we liked to give up the use of sugar, we might thus each save
+sixpence a week to give away. I doubt if a healthier lesson can be
+given to children than that of personal self-denial for the good of
+others.
+
+Daily, when our lessons were over, we had plenty of fun; long walks and
+rides, rides on a lovely pony, who found small children most amusing,
+and on which the coachman taught us to stick firmly, whatever his
+eccentricities of the moment; delightful all-day picnics in the lovely
+country round Charmouth, Auntie our merriest playfellow. Never was a
+healthier home, physically and mentally, made for young things than in
+that quiet village. And then the delight of the holidays! The pride of
+my mother at the good report of her darling's progress, and the renewal
+of acquaintance with every nook and corner in the dear old house and
+garden.
+
+The dreamy tendency in the child, that on its worldly side is fancy,
+imagination, on its religious side is the germ of mysticism, and I
+believe it to be far more common than many people think. But the
+remorseless materialism of the day--not the philosophic materialism of
+the few, but the religious materialism of the many--crushes out all the
+delicate buddings forth of the childish thought, and bandages the eyes
+that might otherwise see. At first the child does not distinguish
+between what it "sees" and what it "fancies"; the one is as real, as
+objective, to it as the other, and it will talk to and play with its
+dream-comrades as merrily as with children like itself. As a child, I
+myself very much preferred the former, and never knew what it was to be
+lonely. But clumsy grown-ups come along and tramp right through the
+dream-garden, and crush the dream-flowers, and push the dream-children
+aside, and then say, in their loud, harsh voices--not soft and singable
+like the dream-voices--"You must not tell such naughty stories, Miss
+Annie; you give me the shivers, and your mamma will be very vexed with
+you." But this tendency in me was too strong to be stifled, and it
+found its food in the fairy tales I loved, and in the religious
+allegories that I found yet more entrancing. How or when I learned to
+read, I do not know, for I cannot remember the time when a book was not
+a delight. At five years of age I must have read easily, for I remember
+being often unswathed from a delightful curtain, in which I used to
+roll myself with a book, and told to "go and play," while I was still a
+five-years'-old dot. And I had a habit of losing myself so completely
+in the book that my name might be called in the room where I was, and I
+never hear it, so that I used to be blamed for wilfully hiding myself,
+when I had simply been away in fairyland, or lying trembling beneath
+some friendly cabbage-leaf as a giant went by.
+
+I was between seven and eight years of age when I first came across
+some children's allegories of a religious kind, and a very little
+later came "Pilgrim's Progress," and Milton's "Paradise Lost."
+Thenceforth my busy fancies carried me ever into the fascinating world
+where boy-soldiers kept some outpost for their absent Prince, bearing
+a shield with his sign of a red cross on it; where devils shaped as
+dragons came swooping down on the pilgrim, but were driven away
+defeated after hard struggle; where angels came and talked with little
+children, and gave them some talisman which warned them of coming
+danger, and lost its light if they were leaving the right path. What a
+dull, tire-some world it was that I had to live in, I used to think to
+myself, when I was told to be a good child, and not to lose my temper,
+and to be tidy, and not mess my pinafore at dinner. How much easier to
+be a Christian if one could have a red-cross shield and a white
+banner, and have a real devil to fight with, and a beautiful Divine
+Prince to smile at you when the battle was over. How much more
+exciting to struggle with a winged and clawed dragon, that you knew
+meant mischief, than to look after your temper, that you never
+remembered you ought to keep until you had lost it. If I had been Eve
+in the garden, that old serpent would never have got the better of me;
+but how was a little girl to know that she might not pick out the
+rosiest, prettiest apple from a tree that had no serpent to show it
+was a forbidden one? And as I grew older the dreams and fancies grew
+less fantastic, but more tinged with real enthusiasm. I read tales of
+the early Christian martyrs, and passionately regretted I was born so
+late when no suffering for religion was practicable; I would spend
+many an hour in daydreams, in which I stood before Roman judges,
+before Dominican Inquisitors, was flung to lions, tortured on the
+rack, burned at the stake; one day I saw myself preaching some great
+new faith to a vast crowd of people, and they listened and were
+converted, and I became a great religious leader. But always, with a
+shock, I was brought back to earth, where there were no heroic deeds
+to do, no lions to face, no judges to defy, but only some dull duty to
+be performed. And I used to fret that I was born so late, when all the
+grand things had been done, and when there was no chance of preaching
+and suffering for a new religion.
+
+From the age of eight my education accented the religious side of my
+character. Under Miss Marryat's training my religious feeling received
+a strongly Evangelical bent, but it was a subject of some distress to
+me that I could never look back to an hour of "conversion"; when
+others gave their experiences, and spoke of the sudden change they had
+felt, I used to be sadly conscious that no such change had occurred in
+me, and I felt that my dreamy longings were very poor things compared
+with the vigorous "sense of sin" spoken of by the preachers, and used
+dolefully to wonder if I were "saved." Then I had an uneasy sense that
+I was often praised for my piety when emulation and vanity were more
+to the front than religion; as when I learned by heart the Epistle of
+James, far more to distinguish myself for my good memory than from any
+love of the text itself; the sonorous cadences of many parts of the
+Old and New Testaments pleased my ear, and I took a dreamy pleasure in
+repeating them aloud, just as I would recite for my own amusement
+hundreds of lines of Milton's "Paradise Lost," as I sat swinging on
+some branch of a tree, lying back often on some swaying bough and
+gazing into the unfathomable blue of the sky, till I lost myself in an
+ecstasy of sound and colour, half chanting the melodious sentences and
+peopling all the blue with misty forms. This facility of learning by
+heart, and the habit of dreamy recitation, made me very familiar with
+the Bible and very apt with its phrases. This stood me in good stead
+at the prayer-meetings dear to the Evangelical, in which we all took
+part; in turn we were called on to pray aloud--a terrible ordeal to
+me, for I was painfully shy when attention was called to me; I used to
+suffer agonies while I waited for the dreaded words, "Now, Annie dear,
+will you speak to our Lord." But when my trembling lips had forced
+themselves into speech, all the nervousness used to vanish and I was
+swept away by an enthusiasm that readily clothed itself in balanced
+sentences, and alack! at the end, I too often hoped that God and
+Auntie had noticed that I prayed very nicely--a vanity certainly not
+intended to be fostered by the pious exercise. On the whole, the
+somewhat Calvinistic teaching tended, I think, to make me a little
+morbid, especially as I always fretted silently after my mother. I
+remember she was surprised on one of my home-comings, when Miss
+Marryat noted "cheerfulness" as a want in my character, for at home I
+was ever the blithest of children, despite my love of solitude; but
+away, there was always an aching for home, and the stern religion cast
+somewhat of a shadow over me, though, strangely enough, hell never
+came into my dreamings except in the interesting shape it took in
+"Paradise Lost." After reading that, the devil was to me no horned and
+hoofed horror, but the beautiful shadowed archangel, and I always
+hoped that Jesus, my ideal Prince, would save him in the end. The
+things that really frightened me were vague, misty presences that I
+felt were near, but could not see; they were so real that I knew just
+where they were in the room, and the peculiar terror they excited lay
+largely in the feeling that I was just going to see them. If by chance
+I came across a ghost story it haunted me for months, for I saw
+whatever unpleasant spectre was described; and there was one horrid
+old woman in a tale by Sir Walter Scott, who glided up to the foot of
+your bed and sprang on it in some eerie fashion and glared at you, and
+who made my going to bed a terror to me for many weeks. I can still
+recall the feeling so vividly that it almost frightens me now!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+GIRLHOOD.
+
+
+In the spring of 1861 Miss Marryat announced her intention of going
+abroad, and asked my dear mother to let me accompany her. A little
+nephew whom she had adopted was suffering from cataract, and she
+desired to place him under the care of the famous Düsseldorf oculist.
+Amy Marryat had been recalled home soon after the death of her mother,
+who had died in giving birth to the child adopted by Miss Marryat, and
+named at her desire after her favourite brother Frederick (Captain
+Marryat). Her place had been taken by a girl a few months older than
+myself, Emma Mann, one of the daughters of a clergyman, who had
+married Miss Stanley, closely related, indeed, if I remember rightly,
+a sister of the Miss Mary Stanley who did such noble work in nursing
+in the Crimea.
+
+For some months we had been diligently studying German, for Miss
+Marryat thought it wise that we should know a language fairly well
+before we visited the country of which it was the native tongue. We
+had been trained also to talk French daily during dinner, so we were
+not quite "helpless foreigners" when we steamed away from St.
+Catherine's Docks, and found ourselves on the following day in
+Antwerp, amid what seemed to us a very Babel of conflicting tongues.
+Alas for our carefully spoken French, articulated laboriously! We were
+lost in that swirl of disputing luggage-porters, and could not
+understand a word! But Miss Marryat was quite equal to the occasion,
+being by no means new to travelling, and her French stood the test
+triumphantly, and steered us safely to a hotel. On the morrow we
+started again through Aix-la-Chapelle to Bonn, the town which lies on
+the borders of the exquisite scenery of which the Siebengebirge and
+Rolandseck serve as the magic portal. Our experiences in Bonn were not
+wholly satisfactory. Dear Auntie was a maiden lady, looking on all
+young men as wolves to be kept far from her growing lambs. Bonn was a
+university town, and there was a mania just then prevailing there for
+all things English. Emma was a plump, rosy, fair-haired typical
+English maiden, full of frolic and harmless fun; I a very slight,
+pale, black-haired girl, alternating between wild fun and extreme
+pensiveness. In the boarding-house to which we went at first--the
+"Château du Rhin," a beautiful place overhanging the broad, blue
+Rhine--there chanced to be staying the two sons of the late Duke of
+Hamilton, the Marquis of Douglas and Lord Charles, with their tutor.
+They had the whole drawing-room floor: we a sitting-room on the ground
+floor and bedrooms above. The lads discovered that Miss Marryat did
+not like her "children" to be on speaking terms with any of the "male
+sect."
+
+Here was a fine source of amusement. They would make their horses
+caracole on the gravel in front of our window; they would be just
+starting for their ride as we went for walk or drive, and would salute
+us with doffed hat and low bow; they would waylay us on our way
+downstairs with demure "Good morning"; they would go to church and
+post themselves so that they could survey our pew, and Lord
+Charles--who possessed the power of moving at will the whole skin of
+the scalp--would wriggle his hair up and down till we were choking
+with laughter, to our own imminent risk. After a month of this Auntie
+was literally driven out of the pretty château, and took refuge in a
+girls' school, much to our disgust; but still she was not allowed to
+be at rest. Mischievous students would pursue us wherever we went;
+sentimental Germans, with gashed cheeks, would whisper complimentary
+phrases as we passed; mere boyish nonsense of most harmless kind, but
+the rather stern English lady thought it "not proper," and after three
+months of Bonn we were sent home for the holidays, somewhat in
+disgrace. But we had some lovely excursions during those months; such
+clambering up mountains, such rows on the swift-flowing Rhine, such
+wanderings in exquisite valleys. I have a long picture-gallery to
+retire into when I want to think of something fair, in recalling the
+moon as it silvered the Rhine at the foot of Drachenfels, or the soft,
+mist-veiled island where dwelt the lady who is consecrated for ever by
+Roland's love.
+
+A couple of months later we rejoined Miss Marryat in Paris, where we
+spent seven happy, workful months. On Wednesdays and Saturdays we were
+free from lessons, and many a long afternoon was passed in the
+galleries of the Louvre, till we became familiar with the masterpieces
+of art gathered there from all lands. I doubt if there was a beautiful
+church in Paris that we did not visit during those weekly wanderings;
+that of St. Germain de l'Auxerrois was my favourite--the church whose
+bell gave the signal for the massacre of St. Bartholomew--for it
+contained such marvellous stained glass, deepest, purest glory of
+colour that I had ever seen. The solemn beauty of Notre Dame, the
+somewhat gaudy magnificence of La Sainte Chapelle, the stateliness of
+La Madeleine, the impressive gloom of St. Roch, were all familiar to
+us. Other delights were found in mingling with the bright crowds which
+passed along the Champs Elysees and sauntered in the Bois de Boulogne,
+in strolling in the garden of the Tuileries, in climbing to the top of
+every monument whence view of Paris could be gained. The Empire was
+then in its heyday of glitter, and we much enjoyed seeing the
+brilliant escort of the imperial carriage, with plumes and gold and
+silver dancing and glistening in the sunlight, while in the carriage
+sat the exquisitely lovely empress, with the little boy beside her,
+touching his cap shyly, but with something of her own grace, in answer
+to a greeting--the boy who was thought to be born to an imperial
+crown, but whose brief career was to find an ending from the spears of
+savages in a quarrel in which he had no concern.
+
+In the spring of 1862 it chanced that the Bishop of Ohio visited
+Paris, and Mr. Forbes, then English chaplain at the Church of the Rue
+d'Aguesseau, arranged to have a confirmation. As said above, I was
+under deep "religious impressions," and, in fact, with the exception
+of that little aberration in Germany, I was decidedly a pious girl. I
+looked on theatres (never having been to one) as traps set by Satan
+for the destruction of foolish souls; I was quite determined never to
+go to a ball, and was prepared to "suffer for conscience' sake
+"--little prig that I was--if I was desired to go to one. I was
+consequently quite prepared to take upon myself the vows made in my
+name at my baptism, and to renounce the world, the flesh, and the
+devil, with a heartiness and sincerity only equalled by my profound
+ignorance of the things I so readily resigned. That confirmation was
+to me a very solemn matter; the careful preparation, the prolonged
+prayers, the wondering awe as to the "seven-fold gifts of the Spirit,"
+which were to be given by "the laying on of hands," all tended to
+excitement. I could scarcely control myself as I knelt at the altar
+rails, and felt as though the gentle touch of the aged bishop, which
+fluttered for an instant on my bowed head, were the very touch of the
+wing of that "Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove," whose presence had been so
+earnestly invoked. Is there anything easier, I wonder, than to make a
+young and sensitive girl "intensely religious"? This stay in Paris
+roused into activity an aspect of my religious nature that had
+hitherto been latent. I discovered the sensuous enjoyment that lay in
+introducing colour and fragrance and pomp into religious services, so
+that the gratification of the aesthetic emotions became dignified with
+the garb of piety. The picture-galleries of the Louvre, crowded with
+Madonnas and saints, the Roman Catholic churches with their
+incense-laden air and exquisite music, brought a new joy into my life,
+a more vivid colour to my dreams. Insensibly, the colder, cruder
+Evangelicalism that I had never thoroughly assimilated, grew warmer
+and more brilliant, and the ideal Divine Prince of my childhood took
+on the more pathetic lineaments of the Man of Sorrows, the deeper
+attractiveness of the suffering Saviour of Men. Keble's "Christian
+Year" took the place of "Paradise Lost," and as my girlhood began to
+bud towards womanhood, all its deeper currents set in the direction of
+religious devotion. My mother did not allow me to read love stories,
+and my daydreams of the future were scarcely touched by any of the
+ordinary hopes and fears of a girl lifting her eyes towards the world
+she is shortly to enter. They were filled with broodings over the days
+when girl-martyrs were blessed with visions of the King of Martyrs,
+when sweet St. Agnes saw her celestial Bridegroom, and angels stooped
+to whisper melodies in St. Cecilia's raptured ear. "Why then and not
+now?" my heart would question, and I would lose myself in these
+fancies, never happier than when alone.
+
+The summer of 1862 was spent with Miss Marryat at Sidmouth, and, wise
+woman that she was, she now carefully directed our studies with a view
+to our coming enfranchisement from the "schoolroom." More and more
+were we trained to work alone; our leading-strings were slackened, so
+that we never felt them save when we blundered; and I remember that
+when I once complained, in loving fashion, that she was "teaching me
+so little," she told me that I was getting old enough to be trusted to
+work by myself, and that I must not expect to "have Auntie for a
+crutch all through life." And I venture to say that this gentle
+withdrawal of constant supervision and teaching was one of the wisest
+and kindest things that this noble-hearted woman ever did for us. It
+is the usual custom to keep girls in the schoolroom until they "come
+out"; then, suddenly, they are left to their own devices, and,
+bewildered by their unaccustomed freedom, they waste time that might
+be priceless for their intellectual growth. Lately, the opening of
+universities to women has removed this danger for the more ambitious;
+but at the time of which I am writing no one dreamed of the changes
+soon to be made in the direction of the "higher education of women."
+
+During the winter of 1862-63 Miss Marryat was in London, and for a few
+months I remained there with her, attending the admirable French
+classes of M. Roche. In the spring I returned home to Harrow, going up
+each week to the classes; and when these were over, Auntie told me
+that she thought all she could usefully do was done, and that it was
+time that I should try my wings alone. So well, however, had she
+succeeded in her aims, that my emancipation from the schoolroom was
+but the starting-point of more eager study, though now the study
+turned into the lines of thought towards which my personal tendencies
+most attracted me. German I continued to read with a master, and
+music, under the marvellously able teaching of Mr. John Farmer,
+musical director of Harrow School, took up much of my time. My dear
+mother had a passion for music, and Beethoven and Bach were her
+favourite composers. There was scarcely a sonata of Beethoven's that I
+did not learn, scarcely a fugue of Bach's that I did not master.
+Mendelssohn's "Lieder" gave a lighter recreation, and many a happy
+evening did we spend, my mother and I, over the stately strains of the
+blind Titan, and the sweet melodies of the German wordless orator.
+Musical "At Homes," too, were favourite amusements at Harrow, and at
+these my facile fingers made me a welcome guest.
+
+Thus set free from the schoolroom at 16½, an only daughter, I could do
+with my time as I would, save for the couple of hours a day given to
+music, for the satisfaction of my mother. From then till I became
+engaged, just before I was 19, my life flowed on smoothly, one current
+visible to all and dancing in the sunlight, the other running
+underground, but full and deep and strong. As regards my outer life,
+no girl had a brighter, happier life than mine; studying all the
+mornings and most of the afternoons in my own way, and spending the
+latter part of the day in games and walks and rides--varied with
+parties at which I was one of the merriest of guests. I practised
+archery so zealously that I carried up triumphantly as prize for the
+best score the first ring I ever possessed, while croquet found me a
+most eager devotee. My darling mother certainly "spoiled" me, so far
+as were concerned all the small roughnesses of life. She never allowed
+a trouble of any kind to touch me, and cared only that all worries
+should fall on her, all joys on me. I know now what I never dreamed
+then, that her life was one of serious anxiety. The heavy burden of my
+brother's school and college life pressed on her constantly, and her
+need of money was often serious. A lawyer whom she trusted absolutely
+cheated her systematically, using for his own purposes the remittances
+she made for payment of liabilities, thus keeping upon her a constant
+drain. Yet for me all that was wanted was ever there. Was it a ball to
+which we were going? I need never think of what I would wear till the
+time for dressing arrived, and there laid out ready for me was all I
+wanted, every detail complete from top to toe. No hand but hers must
+dress my hair, which, loosed, fell in dense curly masses nearly to my
+knees; no hand but hers must fasten dress and deck with flowers, and
+if I sometimes would coaxingly ask if I might not help by sewing in
+laces, or by doing some trifle in aid, she would kiss me and bid me
+run to my books or my play, telling me that her only pleasure in life
+was caring for her "treasure." Alas! how lightly we take the
+self-denying labour that makes life so easy, ere yet we have known
+what life means when the protecting motherwing is withdrawn. So
+guarded and shielded had been my childhood and youth from every touch
+of pain and anxiety that love could bear for me, that I never dreamed
+that life might be a heavy burden, save as I saw it in the poor I was
+sent to help; all the joy of those happy years I took, not
+ungratefully I hope, but certainly with as glad unconsciousness of
+anything rare in it as I took the sunlight. Passionate love, indeed, I
+gave to my darling, but I never knew all I owed her till I passed out
+of her tender guardianship, till I left my mother's home. Is such
+training wise? I am not sure. It makes the ordinary roughnesses of
+life come with so stunning a shock, when one goes out into the world,
+that one is apt to question whether some earlier initiation into
+life's sterner mysteries would not be wiser for the young. Yet it is a
+fair thing to have that joyous youth to look back upon, and at least
+it is a treasury of memory that no thief can steal in the struggles of
+later life. "Sunshine" they called me in those bright days of merry
+play and earnest study. But that study showed the bent of my thought
+and linked itself to the hidden life; for the Fathers of the early
+Christian Church now became my chief companions, and I pored over the
+Shepherd of Hernias, the Epistles of Polycarp, Barnabas, Ignatius, and
+Clement, the commentaries of Chrysostom, the confessions of Augustine.
+With these I studied the writings of Pusey, Liddon, and Keble, with
+many another smaller light, joying in the great conception of a
+Catholic Church, lasting through the centuries, built on the
+foundations of apostles and of martyrs, stretching from the days of
+Christ Himself down to our own--"One Lord, one Faith one Baptism," and
+I myself a child of that Holy Church. The hidden life grew stronger,
+constantly fed by these streams of study; weekly communion became the
+centre round which my devotional life revolved, with its ecstatic
+meditation, its growing intensity of conscious contact with the
+Divine; I fasted, according to the ordinances of the Church;
+occasionally flagellated myself to see if I could bear physical pain,
+should I be fortunate enough ever to tread the pathway trodden by the
+saints; and ever the Christ was the figure round which clustered all
+my hopes and longings, till I often felt that the very passion of, my
+devotion would draw Him down from His throne in heaven, present
+visibly in form as I felt Him invisibly in spirit. To serve Him
+through His Church became more and more a definite ideal in my life,
+and my thoughts began to turn towards some kind of "religious life,"
+in which I might prove my love by sacrifice and turn my passionate
+gratitude into active service.
+
+Looking back to-day over my life, I see that its keynote--through all
+the blunders, and the blind mistakes, and clumsy follies--has been
+this longing for sacrifice to something felt as greater than the self.
+It has been so strong and so persistent that I recognise it now as a
+tendency brought over from a previous life and dominating the present
+one; and this is shown by the fact that to follow it is not the act of
+a deliberate and conscious will, forcing self into submission and
+giving up with pain something the heart desires, but the following it
+is a joyous springing forward along the easiest path, the "sacrifice"
+being the supremely attractive thing, not to make which would be to
+deny the deepest longings of the soul, and to feel oneself polluted
+and dishonoured. And it is here that the misjudgment comes in of many
+generous hearts who have spoken sometimes lately so strongly in my
+praise. For the efforts to serve have not been painful acts of
+self-denial, but the yielding to an overmastering desire. We do not
+praise the mother who, impelled by her protecting love, feeds her
+crying infant and stills its wailings at her breast; rather should we
+blame her if she turned aside from its weeping to play with some toy.
+And so with all those whose ears are opened to the wailings of the
+great orphan Humanity; they are less to be praised for helping than
+they would be to be blamed if they stood aside. I now know that it is
+those wailings that have stirred my heart through life, and that I
+brought with me the ears open to hear them from previous lives of
+service paid to men. It was those lives that drew for the child the
+alluring pictures of martyrdom, breathed into the girl the passion of
+devotion, sent the woman out to face scoff and odium, and drove her
+finally into the Theosophy that rationalises sacrifice, while opening
+up possibilities of service beside which all other hopes grow pale.
+
+The Easter of 1866 was a memorable date in my life. I was introduced
+to the clergyman I married, and I met and conquered my first religious
+doubt. A little mission church had been opened the preceding Christmas
+in a very poor district of Clapham. My grandfather's house was near at
+hand, in Albert Square, and a favourite aunt and myself devoted
+ourselves a good deal to this little church, as enthusiastic girls and
+women will. At Easter we decorated it with spring flowers, with dewy
+primroses and fragrant violets, and with the yellow bells of the wild
+daffodil, to the huge delight of the poor who crowded in, and of the
+little London children who had, many of them, never seen a flower.
+Here I met the Rev. Frank Besant, a young Cambridge man, who had just
+taken orders, and was serving the little mission church as deacon;
+strange that at the same time I should meet the man I was to marry,
+and the doubts which were to break the marriage tie. For in the Holy
+Week preceding that Easter Eve, I had been--as English and Roman
+Catholics are wont to do--trying to throw the mind back to the time
+when the commemorated events occurred, and to follow, step by step,
+the last days of the Son of Man, living, as it were, through those
+last hours, so that I might be ready to kneel before the cross on Good
+Friday, to stand beside the sepulchre on Easter Day. In order to
+facilitate the realisation of those last sacred days of God incarnate
+on earth, working out man's salvation, I resolved to write a brief
+history of that week, compiled from the Four Gospels, meaning them to
+try and realise each day the occurrences that had happened on the
+corresponding date in A.D. 33, and so to follow those "blessed feet"
+step by step, till they were
+
+"... nailed for our advantage to the bitter cross."
+
+With the fearlessness which springs from ignorance I sat down to my
+task. My method was as follows:--
+
+    MATTHEW.         |    MARK.     |    LUKE.      |    JOHN.
+                     |              |               |
+  PALM SUNDAY.       | PALM SUNDAY. | PALM SUNDAY.  | PALM SUNDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Rode into          | Rode into    | Rode into     | Rode into
+  Jerusalem.         | Jerusalem.   | Jerusalem.    | Jerusalem.
+  Purified the       | Returned to  | Purified the  | Spoke in
+  Temple. Returned   | Bethany.     | Temple.       | the Temple.
+  to Bethany.        |              | Note: "Taught |
+                     |              | daily in the  |
+                     |              | temple."      |
+                     |              |               |
+    MONDAY.          |    MONDAY.   |    MONDAY.    |    MONDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Cursed the         | Cursed the   | Like Matthew. |    ----
+  fig-tree.          | fig-tree.    |               |
+  Taught in the      | Purified the |               |
+  Temple, and spake  | Temple. Went |               |
+  many parables.     | out of city. |               |
+  No breaks shown,   |              |               |
+  but the fig-tree   |              |               |
+  (xxi.19) did not   |              |               |
+  wither till        |              |               |
+  Tuesday (see       |              |               |
+  Mark).             |              |               |
+                     |              |               |
+    TUESDAY.         |    TUESDAY.  |   TUESDAY.    |   TUESDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  All chaps. xxi.    | Saw fig-tree | Discourses    |   ----
+  20, xxii.-xxv.,    | withered up. | No date       |
+  spoken on          | Then .       | shown.        |
+  Tuesday, for xxvi. | discourses   |               |
+  2 gives Passover   |              |               |
+  as "after two      |              |               |
+  days."             |              |               |
+                     |              |               |
+  WEDNESDAY.         |   WEDNESDAY. |  WEDNESDAY.   |  WEDNESDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Blank.             |   ----       |   ----        |  ----
+  (Possibly remained in Bethany; the alabaster box of oinment.)
+                     |              |               |
+  THURSDAY.          |   THURSDAY.  |   THURSDAY.   |   THURSDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Preparation of     | Same as Matt.| Same as Matt. | Discourses
+  Passover. Eating   |              |               | with disciples,
+  of Passover, and   |              |               | but _before_ the
+  institution of the |              |               | Passover. Washes
+  Holy Eucharist.    |              |               | the disciples'
+  Gethsemane.        |              |               | feet. Nothing
+  Betrayal by Judas. |              |               | said of Holy
+  Led captive to     |              |               | Eucharist, nor
+  Caiaphas. Denied   |              |               | of agony in
+  by St. Peter.      |              |               | Gethsemane.
+                     |              |               | Malchus' ear.
+                     |              |               | Led captive to
+                     |              |               | Annas first.
+                     |              |               | Then to Caiaphas.
+                     |              |               | Denied
+                     |              |               | by St. Peter.
+                     |              |               |
+  FRIDAY.            |   FRIDAY.    |   FRIDAY.     |   FRIDAY
+                     |              |               |
+  Led to Pilate.     | As Matthew,  | Led to        | Taken to
+  Judas hangs        | but hour of  | Pilate. Sent  | Pilate. Jews
+  himself. Tried.    | crucifixion  | to Herod.     | would not enter,
+  Condemned to       | given,       | Sent back to  | that they
+  death. Scourged    | 9 a.m.       | Pilate. Rest  | might eat
+  and mocked. Led    |              | as in         | the Passover.
+  to crucifixion.    |              | Matthew; but  | Scourged by
+  Darkness from 12   |              | _one_         | Pilate before
+  to 3. Died at 3.   |              | malefactor    | condemnation,
+                     |              | repents.      | and mocked. Shown
+                     |              |               | by Pilate to
+                     |              |               | Jews at 12.
+
+I became uneasy as I proceeded with my task, for discrepancies leaped
+at me from my four columns; the uneasiness grew as the contradictions
+increased, until I saw with a shock of horror that my "harmony" was a
+discord, and a doubt of the veracity of the story sprang up like a
+serpent hissing in my face. It was struck down in a moment, for to me
+to doubt was sin, and to have doubted on the very eve of the Passion
+was an added crime. Quickly I assured myself that these apparent
+contradictions were necessary as tests of faith, and I forced myself
+to repeat Tertullian's famous "Credo quia impossible," till, from a
+wooden recital, it became a triumphant affirmation. I reminded myself
+that St. Peter had said of the Pauline Epistles that in them were
+"some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and
+unstable wrest ... unto their own destruction." I shudderingly
+recognised that I must be very unlearned and unstable to find discord
+among the Holy Evangelists, and imposed on myself an extra fast as
+penance for my ignorance and lack of firmness in the faith. For my
+mental position was one to which doubt was one of the worst of sins. I
+knew that there were people like Colenso, who questioned the
+infallibility of the Bible, but I remembered how the Apostle John had
+fled from the Baths when Cerinthus entered them, lest the roof should
+fall on the heretic, and crush any one in his neighbourhood, and I
+looked on all heretics with holy horror. Pusey had indoctrinated me
+with his stern hatred of all heresy, and I was content to rest with
+him on that faith, "which must be old because it is eternal, and must
+be unchangeable because it is true." I would not even read the works
+of my mothers favourite Stanley, because he was "unsound," and because
+Pusey had condemned his "variegated use of words which destroys all
+definiteness of meaning"--a clever and pointed description, be it said
+in passing, of the Dean's exquisite phrases, capable of so many
+readings. It can then be imagined with what a stab of pain this first
+doubt struck me, and with what haste I smothered it up, buried it, and
+smoothed the turf over its grave. _But it had been there_, and it left
+its mark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+MARRIAGE.
+
+
+The last year of my girlish freedom was drawing to its close; how shall
+I hope to make commonsense readers understand how I became betrothed
+maiden ere yet nineteen, girl-wife when twenty years had struck?
+Looking back over twenty-five years, I feel a profound pity for the
+girl standing at that critical point of life, so utterly, hopelessly
+ignorant of all that marriage meant, so filled with impossible dreams,
+so unfitted for the _rôle_ of wife. As I have said, my day-dreams held
+little place for love, partly from the absence of love novels from my
+reading, partly from the mystic fancies that twined themselves round
+the figure of the Christ. Catholic books of devotion--English or Roman,
+it matters not, for to a large extent they are translations of the same
+hymns and prayers--are exceedingly glowing in their language, and the
+dawning feelings of womanhood unconsciously lend to them a passionate
+fervour. I longed to spend my time in worshipping Jesus, and was, as
+far as my inner life was concerned, absorbed in that passionate love of
+"the Saviour" which, among emotional Catholics, really is the human
+passion of love transferred to an ideal--for women to Jesus, for men to
+the Virgin Mary. In order to show that I am not here exaggerating, I
+subjoin a few of the prayers in which I found daily delight, and I do
+this in order to show how an emotional girl may be attracted by these
+so-called devotional exercises:--
+
+"O crucified Love, raise in me fresh ardours of love and consolation,
+that it may henceforth be the greatest torment I can endure ever to
+offend Thee; that it may be my greatest delight to please Thee."
+
+"Let the remembrance of Thy death, O Lord Jesu, make me to desire and
+pant after Thee, that I may delight in Thy gracious presence."
+
+"O most sweet Jesu Christ, I, unworthy sinner, yet redeemed by Thy
+precious blood.... Thine I am and will be, in life and in death."
+
+"O Jesu, beloved, fairer than the sons of men, draw me after Thee with
+the cords of Thy love."
+
+"Blessed are Thou, O most merciful God, who didst vouchsafe to espouse
+me to the heavenly Bridegroom in the waters of baptism, and hast
+imparted Thy body and blood as a new gift of espousal and the meet
+consummation of Thy love."
+
+"O most sweet Lord Jesu, transfix the affections of my inmost soul with
+that most joyous and most healthful wound of Thy love, with true,
+serene, most holy, apostolical charity; that my soul may ever languish
+and melt with entire love and longing for Thee. Let it desire Thee and
+faint for Thy courts; long to be dissolved and be with Thee."
+
+"Oh, that I could embrace Thee with that most burning love of angels."
+
+"Let Him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth; for Thy love is better
+than wine. Draw me, we will run after Thee. The king hath brought me
+into his chambers.... Let my soul, O Lord, feel the sweetness of Thy
+presence. May it taste how sweet Thou art.... May the sweet and burning
+power of Thy love, I beseech Thee, absorb my soul."
+
+All girls have in them the germ of passion, and the line of its
+development depends on the character brought into the world, and the
+surrounding influences of education. I had but two ideals in my
+childhood and youth, round whom twined these budding tendrils of
+passion; they were my mother and the Christ. I know this may seem
+strange, but I am trying to state things as they were in this
+life-story, and not give mere conventionalisms, and so it was. I had
+men friends, but no lovers--at least, to my knowledge, for I have since
+heard that my mother received two or three offers of marriage for me,
+but declined them on account of my youth and my childishness--friends
+with whom I liked to talk, because they knew more than I did; but they
+had no place in my day-dreams. These were more and more filled with the
+one Ideal Man, and my hopes turned towards the life of the Sister of
+Mercy, who ever worships the Christ, and devotes her life to the
+service of His poor. I knew my dear mother would set herself against
+this idea, but it nestled warm at my heart, for ever that idea of
+escaping from the humdrum of ordinary life by some complete sacrifice
+lured me onwards with its overmastering fascination.
+
+Now one unlucky result of this view of religion is the idealisation of
+the clergyman, the special messenger and chosen servant of the Lord.
+Far more lofty than any title bestowed by earthly monarch is that
+patent of nobility straight from the hand of the "King of kings," that
+seems to give to the mortal something of the authority of the immortal,
+and to crown the head of the priest with the diadem that belongs to
+those who are "kings and priests unto God." Viewed in this way, the
+position of the priest's wife seems second only to that of the nun, and
+has, therefore, a wonderful attractiveness, an attractiveness in which
+the particular clergyman affected plays a very subordinate part; it is
+the "sacred office," the nearness to "holy things," the consecration
+which seems to include the wife--it is these things that shed a glamour
+over the clerical life which attracts most those who are most apt to
+self-devotion, most swayed by imagination. And the saddest pity of all
+this is that the glamour is most over those whose brains are quick,
+whose hearts are pure, who are responsive to all forms of noble
+emotions, all suggestions of personal self-sacrifice; if such in later
+life rise to the higher emotions whose shadows have attracted them, and
+to that higher self-sacrifice whose whispers reached them in their
+early youth, then the false prophet's veil is raised, the poverty of
+the conception seen, and the life is either wrecked, or through
+storm-wind and surge of battling billows, with loss of mast and sail,
+is steered by firm hand into the port of a nobler faith.
+
+That summer of 1866 saw me engaged to the young clergyman I had met at
+the mission church in the spring, our knowledge of each other being an
+almost negligeable quantity. We were thrown together for a week, the
+only two young ones in a small party of holiday-makers, and in our
+walks, rides, and drives we were naturally companions; an hour or two
+before he left he asked me to marry him, taking my consent for granted
+as I had allowed him such full companionship--a perfectly fair
+assumption with girls accustomed to look on all men as possible
+husbands, but wholly mistaken as regarded myself, whose thoughts were
+in quite other directions. Startled, and my sensitive pride touched by
+what seemed to my strict views an assumption that I had been flirting,
+I hesitated, did not follow my first impulse of refusal, but took
+refuge in silence; my suitor had to catch his train, and bound me
+over to silence till he could himself speak to my mother, urging
+authoritatively that it would be dishonourable of me to break his
+confidence, and left me--the most upset and distressed little person
+on the Sussex coast. The fortnight that followed was the first unhappy
+one of my life, for I had a secret from my mother, a secret which I
+passionately longed to tell her, but dared not speak at the risk of
+doing a dishonourable thing. On meeting my suitor on our return to
+town I positively refused to keep silence any longer, and then out
+of sheer weakness and fear of inflicting pain I drifted into an
+engagement with a man I did not pretend to love. "Drifted" is the
+right word, for two or three months passed, on the ground that I was
+so much of a child, before my mother would consent to a definite
+engagement; my dislike of the thought of marriage faded before the
+idea of becoming the wife of a priest, working ever in the Church and
+among the poor. I had no outlet for my growing desire for usefulness
+in my happy and peaceful home-life, where all religious enthusiasm was
+regarded as unbalanced and unbecoming; all that was deepest and truest
+in my nature chafed against my easy, useless days, longed for work,
+yearned to devote itself, as I had read women saints had done, to the
+service of the Church and of the poor, to the battling against sin and
+misery--what empty names sin and misery then were to me! "You will
+have more opportunities for doing good as a clergyman's wife than as
+anything else," was one of the pleas urged on my reluctance.
+
+In the autumn I was definitely betrothed, and I married fourteen months
+later. Once, in the interval, I tried to break the engagement, but, on
+my broaching the subject to my mother, all her pride rose up in revolt.
+Would I, her daughter, break my word, would I dishonour myself by
+jilting a man I had pledged myself to marry? She could be stern where
+honour was involved, that sweet mother of mine, and I yielded to her
+wish as I had been ever wont to do, for a look or a word from her had
+ever been my law, save where religion was concerned. So I married in
+the winter of 1867 with no more idea of the marriage relation than if I
+had been four years old instead of twenty. My dreamy life, into which
+no knowledge of evil had been allowed to penetrate, in which I had been
+guarded from all pain, shielded from all anxiety, kept, innocent on all
+questions of sex, was no preparation for married existence, and left me
+defenceless to face a rude awakening. Looking back on it all, I
+deliberately say that no more fatal blunder can be made than to train a
+girl to womanhood in ignorance of all life's duties and burdens, and
+then to let her face them for the first time away from all the old
+associations, the old helps, the old refuge on the mother's breast.
+That "perfect innocence" may be very beautiful, but it is a perilous
+possession, and Eve should have the knowledge of good and evil ere she
+wanders forth from the paradise of a mother's love. Many an unhappy
+marriage dates from its very beginning, from the terrible shock to a
+young girl's sensitive modesty and pride, her helpless bewilderment and
+fear. Men, with their public school and college education, or the
+knowledge that comes by living in the outside world, may find it hard
+to realise the possibility of such infantile ignorance in many girls.
+None the less, such ignorance is a fact in the case of some girls at
+least, and no mother should let her daughter, blindfold, slip her neck
+under the marriage yoke.
+
+Before leaving the harbourage of girlhood to set sail on the troublous
+sea of life, there is an occurrence of which I must make mention, as
+it marks my first awakening of interest in the outer world of
+political struggle. In the autumn of 1867 my mother and I were staying
+with some dear friends of ours, the Robertses, at Pendleton, near
+Manchester. Mr. Roberts was "the poor man's lawyer," in the
+affectionate phrase used of him by many a hundred men. He was a close
+friend of Ernest Jones, and was always ready to fight a poor man's
+battle without fee. He worked hard in the agitation which saved women
+from working in the mines, and I have heard him tell how he had seen
+them toiling, naked to the waist, with short petticoats barely
+reaching to their knees, rough, foul-tongued, brutalised out of all
+womanly decency and grace; and how he had seen little children working
+there too, babies of three and four set to watch a door, and falling
+asleep at their work to be roused by curse and kick to the unfair
+toil. The old man's eye would begin to flash and his voice to rise as
+he told of these horrors, and then his face would soften as he added
+that, after it was all over and the slavery was put an end to, as he
+went through a coal district the women standing at their doors would
+lift up their children to see "Lawyer Roberts" go by, and would bid
+"God bless him" for what he had done. This dear old man was my first
+tutor in Radicalism, and I was an apt pupil. I had taken no interest
+in politics, but had unconsciously reflected more or less the decorous
+Whiggism which had always surrounded me. I regarded "the poor" as folk
+to be educated, looked after, charitably dealt with, and always
+treated with most perfect courtesy, the courtesy being due from me, as
+a lady, to all equally, whether they were rich or poor. But to Mr.
+Roberts "the poor" were the working-bees, the wealth producers, with a
+right to self-rule not to looking after, with a right to justice, not
+to charity, and he preached his doctrines to me in season and out of
+season. I was a pet of his, and used often to drive him to his office
+in the morning, glorying much in the fact that my skill was trusted in
+guiding a horse through the crowded Manchester streets. During these
+drives, and on all other available occasions, Mr. Roberts would preach
+to me the cause of the people. "What do you think of John Bright?" he
+demanded suddenly one day, looking at me with fiery eyes from under
+heavy brows. "I have never thought of him at all," was the careless
+answer. "Isn't he a rather rough sort of man, who goes about making
+rows?" "There, I thought so!" he thundered at me fiercely. "That's
+just what I say. I believe some of you fine ladies would not go to
+heaven if you had to rub shoulders with John Bright, the noblest man
+God ever gave to the cause of the poor."
+
+This was the hot-tempered and lovable "demagogue," as he was called,
+with whom we were staying when Colonel Kelly and Captain Deasy, two
+Fenian leaders, were arrested in Manchester and put on their trial. The
+whole Irish population became seething with excitement, and on
+September 18th the police van carrying them to Salford Gaol was stopped
+at the Bellevue Railway Arch by the sudden fall of one of the horses,
+shot from the side of the road. In a moment the van was surrounded, and
+crowbars were wrenching at the van door. It resisted; a body of police
+was rapidly approaching, and if the rescue was to be effective the door
+must be opened. The rescuers shouted to Brett, the constable inside, to
+pass out his keys; he refused, and some one exclaimed, "Blow off the
+lock!" In a moment the muzzle of a revolver was against the lock, and
+it was blown off; but Brett, stooping down to look through the keyhole,
+received the bullet in his head, and fell dying as the door flew open.
+Another moment, and Allen, a lad of seventeen, had wrenched open the
+doors of the compartments occupied by Kelly and Deasy, dragged them
+out, and while two or three hurried them off to a place of safety, the
+others threw themselves between the fugitives and the police, and with
+levelled revolvers guarded their flight. The Fenian leaders once safe,
+they scattered, and young William Allen, whose one thought had been for
+his chiefs, seeing them safe, fired his revolver in the air, for he
+would not shed blood in his own defence. Disarmed by his own act, he
+was set on by the police, brutally struck down, kicked and stoned, and
+was dragged off to gaol, faint and bleeding, to meet there some of his
+comrades in much the same plight as himself. Then Manchester went mad,
+and race-passions flared up into flame; no Irish workman was safe in a
+crowd of Englishmen, no Englishman safe in the Irish quarter. The
+friends of the prisoners besieged "Lawyer Roberts's" house, praying his
+aid, and he threw his whole fiery soul into their defence. The man who
+had fired the accidentally fatal shot was safely out of the way, and
+none of the others had hurt a human being. A Special Commission was
+issued, with Mr. Justice Blackburn at its head--"the hanging judge,"
+groaned Mr. Roberts--and it was soon in Manchester, for all Mr.
+Roberts's efforts to get the venue of the trial changed were futile,
+though of fair trial then in Manchester there was no chance. On October
+25th the prisoners were actually brought up before the magistrates in
+irons, and Mr. Ernest Jones, their counsel, failing in his protest
+against this outrage, threw down his brief and left the court. So great
+was the haste with which the trial was hurried on that on the 29th
+Allen, Larkin, Gould (O'Brien), Maguire, and Condon were standing in
+the dock before the Commission charged with murder.
+
+My first experience of an angry crowd was on that day as we drove to
+the court; the streets were barricaded, the soldiers were under arms,
+every approach to the court crowded with surging throngs. At last our
+carriage was stopped as we were passing at a foot's pace through an
+Irish section of the crowd, and various vehement fists came through the
+window, with hearty curses at the "d----d English who were going to see
+the boys murdered." The situation was critical, for we were two women
+and three girls, when I bethought myself that we were unknown, and
+gently touched the nearest fist: "Friends, these are Mr. Roberts' wife
+and daughters." "Roberts! Lawyer Roberts! God bless Roberts! Let his
+carriage through." And all the scowling faces became smile-wreathen,
+and curses changed to cheers, as a road to the court steps was cleared
+for us.
+
+Alas! if there was passion on behalf of the prisoners outside, there
+was passion against them within, and the very opening of the trial
+showed the spirit that animated the prosecution and the bench. Digby
+Seymour, Q.C., and Ernest Jones, were briefed for the defence, and Mr.
+Roberts did not think that they exercised sufficiently their right of
+challenge; he knew, as we all did, that many on the panel had loudly
+proclaimed their hostility to the Irish, and Mr. Roberts persisted in
+challenging them as his counsel would not. In vain Judge Blackburn
+threatened to commit the rebellious solicitor: "These men's lives are
+at stake, my lord," was his indignant plea. "Remove that man!" cried
+the angry judge, but as the officers of the court came forward very
+slowly--for all poor men loved and honoured the sturdy fighter--he
+changed his mind and let him stay. Despite all his efforts, the jury
+contained a man who had declared that he "didn't care what the evidence
+was, he would hang every d----d Irishman of the lot." And the result
+showed that he was not alone in his view, for evidence of the most
+disreputable kind was admitted; women of the lowest type were put into
+the box as witnesses, and their word taken as unchallengeable; thus was
+destroyed an _alibi_ for Maguire, afterwards accepted by the Crown, a
+free pardon being issued on the strength of it. Nothing could save the
+doomed men from the determined verdict, and I could see from where I
+was sitting into a little room behind the bench, where an official was
+quietly preparing the black caps before the verdict had been delivered.
+The foregone "Guilty" was duly repeated as verdict on each of the five
+cases, and the prisoners asked if they had anything to say why sentence
+of death should not be passed on them. Allen, boy as he was, made a
+very brave and manly speech; he had not fired, save in the air--if he
+had done so he might have escaped; he had helped to free Kelly and
+Deasy, and did not regret it; he was willing to die for Ireland.
+Maguire and Condon (he also was reprieved) declared they were not
+present, but, like Allen, were ready to die for their country. Sentence
+of death was passed, and, as echo to the sardonic "The Lord have mercy
+on your souls," rang back from the dock in five clear voices, with
+never a quiver of fear in them, "God save Ireland!" and the men passed
+one by one from the sight of my tear-dimmed eyes.
+
+It was a sorrowful time that followed; the despair of the heart-broken
+girl who was Allen's sweetheart, and who cried to us on her knees,
+"Save my William!" was hard to see; nothing we or any one could do
+availed to avert the doom, and on November 23rd Allen, Larkin, and
+O'Brien were hanged outside Salford Gaol. Had they striven for freedom
+in Italy England would have honoured them; here she buried them as
+common murderers in quicklime in the prison yard.
+
+I have found, with a keen sense of pleasure, that Mr. Bradlaugh and
+myself were in 1867 to some extent co-workers, although we knew not of
+each other's existence, and although he was doing much, and I only
+giving such poor sympathy as a young girl might, who was only just
+awakening to the duty of political work. I read in the _National
+Reformer_ for November 24, 1867, that in the preceding week he was
+pleading on Clerkenwell Green for these men's lives:--"According to
+the evidence at the trial, Deasy and Kelly were illegally arrested.
+They had been arrested for vagrancy of which no evidence was given, and
+apparently remanded for felony without a shadow of justification. He
+had yet to learn that in England the same state of things existed as in
+Ireland; he had yet to learn that an illegal arrest was sufficient
+ground to detain any of the citizens of any country in the prisons of
+this one. If he were illegally held, he was justified in using enough
+force to procure his release. Wearing a policeman's coat gave no
+authority when the officer exceeded his jurisdiction. He had argued
+this before Lord Chief Justice Erie in the Court of Common Pleas, and
+that learned judge did not venture to contradict the argument which he
+submitted. There was another reason why they should spare these men,
+although he hardly expected the Government to listen, because the
+Government sent down one of the judges who was predetermined to convict
+the prisoners; it was that the offence was purely a political one. The
+death of Brett was a sad mischance, but no one who read the evidence
+could regard the killing of Brett as an intentional murder. Legally, it
+was murder; morally, it was homicide in the rescue of a political
+captive. If it were a question of the rescue of the political captives
+of Varignano, or of political captives in Bourbon, in Naples, or in
+Poland, or in Paris, even earls might be found so to argue. Wherein is
+our sister Ireland less than these? In executing these men, they would
+throw down the gauntlet for terrible reprisals. It was a grave and
+solemn question. It had been said by a previous speaker that they were
+prepared to go to any lengths to save these Irishmen. They were not. He
+wished they were. If they were, if the men of England, from one end to
+the other, were prepared to say, 'These men shall not be executed,'
+they would not be. He was afraid they had not pluck enough for that.
+Their moral courage was not equal to their physical strength. Therefore
+he would not say that they were prepared to do so. They must plead _ad
+misericordiam_. He appealed to the press, which represented the power
+of England; to that press which in its panic-stricken moments had done
+much harm, and which ought now to save these four doomed men. If the
+press demanded it, no Government would be mad enough to resist. The
+memory of the blood which was shed in 1798 rose up like a bloody ghost
+against them to-day. He only feared that what they said upon the
+subject might do the poor men more harm than good. If it were not so,
+he would coin words that should speak in words of fire. As it was, he
+could only say to the Government: You are strong to-day; you hold these
+men's lives in your hands; but if you want to reconcile their country
+to you, if you want to win back Ireland, if you want to make her
+children love you--then do not embitter their hearts still more by
+taking the lives of these men. Temper your strength with mercy; do not
+use the sword of justice like one of vengeance, for the day may come
+when it shall be broken in your hands, and you yourselves brained by
+the hilt of the weapon you have so wickedly wielded." In October he
+had printed a plea for Ireland, strong and earnest, asking:--
+
+"Where is our boasted English freedom when you cross to Kingstown pier?
+Where has it been for near two years? The Habeas Corpus Act suspended,
+the gaols crowded, the steamers searched, spies listening at shebeen
+shops for sedition, and the end of it a Fenian panic in England. Oh,
+before it be too late, before more blood stain the pages of our present
+history, before we exasperate and arouse bitter animosities, let us try
+and do justice to our sister land. Abolish once and for all the land
+laws, which in their iniquitous operation have ruined her peasantry.
+Sweep away the leech-like Church which has sucked her vitality, and has
+given her back no word even of comfort in her degradation. Turn her
+barracks into flax mills, encourage a spirit of independence in her
+citizens, restore to her people the protection of the law, so that they
+may speak without fear of arrest, and beg them to plainly and boldly
+state their grievances. Let a commission of the best and wisest amongst
+Irishmen, with some of our highest English judges added, sit solemnly
+to hear all complaints, and then let us honestly legislate, not for the
+punishment of the discontented, but to remove the causes of the
+discontent. It is not the Fenians who have depopulated Ireland's
+strength and increased her misery. It is not the Fenians who have
+evicted tenants by the score. It is not the Fenians who have checked
+cultivation. Those who have caused the wrong at least should frame the
+remedy."
+
+In December, 1867, I sailed out of the safe harbour of my happy and
+peaceful girlhood on to the wide sea of life, and the waves broke
+roughly as soon as the bar was crossed. We were an ill-matched pair, my
+husband and I, from the very outset; he, with very high ideas of a
+husband's authority and a wife's submission, holding strongly to the
+"master-in-my-own-house theory," thinking much of the details of home
+arrangements, precise, methodical, easily angered and with difficulty
+appeased. I, accustomed to freedom, indifferent to home details,
+impulsive, very hot-tempered, and proud as Lucifer. I had never had a
+harsh word spoken to me, never been ordered to do anything, had had my
+way smoothed for my feet, and never a worry had touched me. Harshness
+roused first incredulous wonder, then a storm of indignant tears, and
+after a time a proud, defiant resistance, cold and hard as iron. The
+easy-going, sunshiny, enthusiastic girl changed--and changed pretty
+rapidly--into a grave, proud, reticent woman, burying deep in her own
+heart all her hopes, her fears, and her disillusions. I must have been
+a very unsatisfactory wife from the beginning, though I think other
+treatment might gradually have turned me into a fair imitation of the
+proper conventional article. Beginning with the ignorance before
+alluded to, and so scared and outraged at heart from the very first;
+knowing nothing of household management or economical use of money--I
+had never had an allowance or even bought myself a pair of
+gloves--though eager to perform my new duties creditably; unwilling to
+potter over little things, and liking to do swiftly what I had to do,
+and then turn to my beloved books; at heart fretting for my mother but
+rarely speaking of her, as I found my longing for her presence raised
+jealous vexation; with strangers about me with whom I had no sympathy;
+visited by ladies who talked to me only about babies and
+servants--troubles of which I knew nothing and which bored me
+unutterably--and who were as uninterested in all that had filled my
+life, in theology, in politics, in science, as I was uninterested in
+the discussions on the housemaid's young man and on the cook's
+extravagance in using "butter, when dripping would have done perfectly
+well, my dear"; was it wonderful that I became timid, dull, and
+depressed?
+
+All my eager, passionate enthusiasm, so attractive to men in a young
+girl, were doubtless incompatible with "the solid comfort of a wife,"
+and I must have been inexpressibly tiring to the Rev. Frank Besant.
+And, in truth, I ought never to have married, for under the soft,
+loving, pliable girl there lay hidden, as much unknown to herself as to
+her surroundings, a woman of strong dominant will, strength that panted
+for expression and rebelled against restraint, fiery and passionate
+emotions that were seething under compression--a most undesirable
+partner to sit in the lady's arm-chair on the domestic rug before the
+fire. [_Que le diable faisait-elle dans cette galère,_] I have often
+thought, looking back at my past self, and asking, Why did that foolish
+girl make her bed so foolishly? But self-analysis shows the
+contradictories in my nature that led me into so mistaken a course. I
+have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have
+paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to suffer tortures of
+shyness, and if my shoe-lace was untied would feel shamefacedly that
+every eye was fixed on the unlucky string; as a girl I would shrink
+away from strangers and think myself unwanted and unliked, so that I
+was full of eager gratitude to any one who noticed me kindly; as the
+young mistress of a house, I was afraid of my servants, and would let
+careless work pass rather than bear the pain of reproving the ill-doer;
+when I have been lecturing and debating with no lack of spirit on the
+platform, I have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel
+rather than to ring and make the waiter fetch it; combative on the
+platform in defence of any cause I cared for, I shrink from quarrel or
+disapproval in the home, and am a coward at heart in private while a
+good fighter in public. How often have I passed unhappy quarters of an
+hour screwing up my courage to find fault with some subordinate whom my
+duty compelled me to reprove, and how often have I jeered at myself for
+a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming
+some lad or lass for doing their work badly! An unkind look or word has
+availed to make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while
+on the platform opposition makes me speak my best. So I slid into
+marriage blindly and stupidly, fearing to give pain; fretted my heart
+out for a year; then, roused by harshness and injustice, stiffened and
+hardened, and lived with a wall of ice round me within which I waged
+mental conflicts that nearly killed me; and learned at last how to live
+and work in armour that turned the edge of the weapons that struck it,
+and left the flesh beneath unwounded, armour laid aside, but in the
+presence of a very few.
+
+My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up
+two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of
+a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character,
+"The Lives of the Black Letter Saints." For the sake of the
+unecclesiastically trained it may be as well to mention that in the
+Calendar of the Church of England there are a number of Saints' Days;
+some of these are printed in red, and are Red Letter Days, for which
+services are appointed by the Church; others are printed in black, and
+are Black Letter Days, and have no special services fixed for them. It
+seemed to me that it would be interesting to take each of these days
+and write a sketch of the life of the saint belonging to it, and
+accordingly I set to work to do so, and gathered various books of
+history and legend where-from to collect my "facts." I do not in the
+least know what became of that valuable book; I tried Macmillans with
+it, and it was sent on by them to some one who was preparing a series
+of Church books for the young; later I had a letter from a Church
+brotherhood offering to publish it, if I would give it as "an act of
+piety" to their order; its ultimate fate is to me unknown.
+
+The short stories were more fortunate. I sent the first to the _Family
+Herald_, and some weeks afterwards received a letter from which dropped
+a cheque as I opened it. Dear me! I have earned a good deal of money
+since by my pen, but never any that gave me the intense delight of that
+first thirty shillings. It was the first money I had ever earned, and
+the pride of the earning was added to the pride of authorship. In my
+childish delight and practical religion, I went down on my knees and
+thanked God for sending it to me, and I saw myself earning heaps of
+golden guineas, and becoming quite a support of the household. Besides,
+it was "my very own," I thought, and a delightful sense of independence
+came over me. I had not then realised the beauty of the English law,
+and the dignified position in which it placed the married woman; I did
+not understand that all a married woman earned by law belonged to her
+owner, and that she could have nothing that belonged to her of
+right.[1] I did not want the money: I was only so glad to have
+something of my own to give, and it was rather a shock to learn that it
+was not really mine at all.
+
+From time to time after that I earned a few pounds for stories in the
+same journal; and the _Family Herald_, let me say, has one peculiarity
+which should render it beloved by poor authors; it pays its contributor
+when it accepts the paper, whether it prints it immediately or not;
+thus my first story was not printed for some weeks after I received the
+cheque, and it was the same with all the others accepted by the same
+journal. Encouraged by these small successes, I began writing a novel!
+It took a long time to do, but was at last finished, and sent off to
+the _Family Herald_. The poor thing came back, but with a kind note,
+telling me that it was too political for their pages, but that if I
+would write one of "purely domestic interest," and up to the same
+level, it would probably be accepted. But by that time I was in the
+full struggle of theological doubt, and that novel of "purely domestic
+interest" never got itself written.
+
+I contributed further to the literature of my country a theological
+pamphlet, of which I forget the exact title, but it dealt with the duty
+of fasting incumbent on all faithful Christians, and was very patristic
+in its tone.
+
+In January, 1869, my little son was born, and as I was very ill for
+some months before, and was far too much interested in the tiny
+creature afterwards, to devote myself to pen and paper, my literary
+career was checked for a while. The baby gave a new interest and a new
+pleasure to life, and as we could not afford a nurse I had plenty to do
+in looking after his small majesty. My energy in reading became less
+feverish when it was done by the side of the baby's cradle, and the
+little one's presence almost healed the abiding pain of my mother's
+loss.
+
+I may pass very quickly over the next two years. In August, 1870, a
+little sister was born to my son, and the recovery was slow and
+tedious, for my general health had been failing for some time.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by Dighton's Art Studio, Cheltenham_.
+ANNIE BESANT 1869.]
+
+The boy was a bright, healthy little fellow, but the girl was delicate
+from birth, suffering from her mother's unhappiness, and born somewhat
+prematurely in consequence of a shock. When, in the spring of 1871, the
+two children caught the whooping cough, my Mabel's delicacy made the
+ordeal well-nigh fatal to her. She was very young for so trying a
+disease, and after a while bronchitis set in and was followed by
+congestion of the lungs. For weeks she lay in hourly peril of death We
+arranged a screen round the fire like a tent, and kept it full of steam
+to ease the panting breath; and there I sat, day and night, all through
+those weary weeks, the tortured baby on my knees. I loved my little
+ones passionately, for their clinging love soothed the aching at my
+heart, and their baby eyes could not critically scan the unhappiness
+that grew deeper month by month; and that steam-filled tent became my
+world, and there, alone, I fought with Death for my child. The doctor
+said that recovery was impossible, and that in one of the paroxysms of
+coughing she must die; the most distressing thing was that, at last,
+even a drop or two of milk would bring on the terrible convulsive
+choking, and it seemed cruel to add to the pain of the apparently dying
+child. At length, one morning the doctor said she could not last
+through the day; I had sent for him hurriedly, for the body had
+suddenly swollen up as a result of the perforation of one of the
+pleurae, and the consequent escape of air into the cavity of the chest.
+While he was there one of the fits of coughing came on, and it seemed
+as though it must be the last. He took a small bottle of chloroform out
+of his pocket, and putting a drop on a handkerchief held it near the
+child's face, till the drug soothed the convulsive struggle. "It can't
+do any harm at this stage," he said, "and it checks the suffering." He
+went away, saying that he feared he would never see the child alive
+again. One of the kindest friends I had in my married life was that
+same doctor, Mr. Lauriston Winterbotham; he was as good as he was
+clever, and, like so many of his noble profession, he had the merits of
+discretion and silence. He never breathed a word as to my unhappiness,
+until in 1878 he came up to town to give evidence as to cruelty
+which--had the deed of separation not been held as condonation--would
+have secured me a divorce _a mensa et thoro._
+
+The child, however, recovered, and her recovery was due, I think, to
+that chance thought of Mr. Winterbotham's about the chloroform, for I
+used it whenever the first sign of a fit of coughing appeared, and so
+warded off the convulsive attack and the profound exhaustion that
+followed, in which a mere flicker of breath at the top of the throat
+was the only sign of life, and sometimes even that disappeared, and I
+thought her gone. For years the child remained ailing and delicate,
+requiring the tenderest care, but those weeks of anguish left a deeper
+trace on mother than on child. Once she was out of danger I collapsed
+physically, and lay in bed for a week unmoving, and then rose to face a
+struggle which lasted for three years and two months, and nearly cost
+me my life, the struggle which transformed me from a Christian into an
+Atheist. The agony of the struggle was in the first nineteen months--a
+time to be looked back upon with shrinking, as it was a hell to live
+through at the time. For no one who has not felt it knows the fearful
+anguish inflicted by doubt on the earnestly religious soul. There is in
+life no other pain so horrible, so keen in its torture, so crushing in
+its weight. It seems to shipwreck everything, to destroy the one steady
+gleam of happiness "on the other side" that no earthly storm could
+obscure; to make all life gloomy with a horror of despair, a darkness
+that verily may be felt. Nothing but an imperious intellectual and
+moral necessity can drive into doubt a religious mind, for it is as
+though an earthquake shook the foundations of the soul, and the very
+being quivers and sways under the shock. No life in the empty sky; no
+gleam in the blackness of the night; no voice to break the deadly
+silence; no hand outstretched to save. Empty-brained triflers who have
+never tried to think, who take their creed as they take their fashions,
+speak of Atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious desires. In
+their shallow heartlessness and shallower thought they cannot even
+dimly imagine the anguish of entering the mere penumbra of the Eclipse
+of Faith, much less the horror of that great darkness in which the
+orphaned soul cries out into the infinite emptiness: "Is it a Devil
+that has made the world? Is the echo, 'Children, ye have no Father,'
+true? Is all blind chance, is all the clash of unconscious forces, or
+are we the sentient toys of an Almighty Power that sports with our
+agony, whose peals of awful mockery of laughter ring back answer to the
+wailings of our despair?"
+
+How true are the noble words of Mrs. Hamilton King:--
+
+  "For some may follow Truth from dawn to dark,
+  As a child follows by his mother's hand,
+  Knowing no fear, rejoicing all the way;
+  And unto some her face is as a Star
+  Set through an avenue of thorns and fires,
+  And waving branches black without a leaf;
+  And still It draws them, though the feet must bleed,
+  Though garments must be rent, and eyes be scorched:
+  And if the valley of the shadow of death
+  Be passed, and to the level road they come,
+  Still with their faces to the polar star,
+  It is not with the same looks, the same limbs,
+  But halt, and maimed, and of infirmity.
+  And for the rest of the way they have to go
+  It is not day but night, and oftentimes
+  A night of clouds wherein the stars are lost."[2]
+
+Aye! but never lost is the Star of Truth to which the face is set, and
+while that shines all lesser lights may go. It was the long months of
+suffering through which I had been passing, with the seemingly
+purposeless torturing of my little one as a climax, that struck the
+first stunning blow at my belief in God as a merciful Father of men. I
+had been visiting the poor a good deal, and had marked the patient
+suffering of their lives; my idolised mother had been defrauded by a
+lawyer she had trusted, and was plunged into debt by his non-payment of
+the sums that should have passed through his hands to others; my own
+bright life had been enshrouded by pain and rendered to me degraded by
+an intolerable sense of bondage; and here was my helpless, sinless babe
+tortured for weeks and left frail and suffering. The smooth brightness
+of my previous life made all the disillusionment more startling, and
+the sudden plunge into conditions so new and so unfavourable dazed and
+stunned me. My religious past became the worst enemy of the suffering
+present. All my personal belief in Christ, all my intense faith in His
+constant direction of affairs, all my habit of continual prayer and of
+realisation of His Presence--all were against me now. The very height
+of my trust was the measure of the shock when the trust gave way. To me
+He was no abstract idea, but a living reality, and all my heart rose up
+against this Person in whom I believed, and whose individual finger I
+saw in my baby's agony, my own misery, the breaking of my mother's
+proud heart under a load of debt, and all the bitter suffering of the
+poor. The presence of pain and evil in a world made by a good God; the
+pain falling on the innocent, as on my seven months' old babe; the pain
+begun here reaching on into eternity unhealed; a sorrow-laden world; a
+lurid, hopeless hell; all these, while I still believed, drove me
+desperate, and instead of like the devils believing and trembling, I
+believed and hated. All the hitherto dormant and unsuspected strength
+of my nature rose up in rebellion; I did not yet dream of denial, but I
+would no longer kneel.
+
+As the first stirrings of this hot rebellion moved in my heart I met a
+clergyman of a very noble type, who did much to help me by his ready
+and wise sympathy. Mr. Besant brought him to see me during the crisis
+of the child's illness; he said little, but on the following day I
+received from him the following note:--
+
+"_April_ 21, 1871.
+
+"My Dear Mrs. Besant,--I am painfully conscious that I gave you but
+little help in your trouble yesterday. It is needless to say that it
+was not from want of sympathy. Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to
+say that it was from excess of sympathy. I shrink intensely from
+meddling with the sorrow of any one whom I feel to be of a sensitive
+nature. 'The heart hath its own bitterness, and the stranger meddleth
+not therewith.' It is to me a positively fearful thought that I might
+awaken such a reflection as
+
+  "'And common was the commonplace,
+  And vacant chaff well meant for grain.'
+
+Conventional consolations, conventional verses out of the Bible, and
+conventional prayers are, it seems to me, an intolerable aggravation of
+suffering. And so I acted on a principle that I mentioned to your
+husband that 'there is no power so great as that of one human faith
+looking upon another human faith.' The promises of God, the love of
+Christ for little children, and all that has been given to us of hope
+and comfort, are as deeply planted in your heart as in mine, and I did
+not care to quote them. But when I talk face to face with one who is in
+sore need of them, my faith in them suddenly becomes so vast and
+heart-stirring that I think I must help most by talking naturally, and
+letting the faith find its own way from soul to soul. Indeed, I could
+not find words for it if I tried. And yet I am compelled, as a
+messenger of the glad tidings of God, to solemnly assure you that all
+is well. We have no key to the 'mystery of pain' excepting the Cross of
+Christ. But there is another and a deeper solution in the hands of our
+Father; and it will be ours when we can understand it. There is--in the
+place to which we travelsome blessed explanation of your baby's pain
+and your grief, which will fill with light the darkest heart. Now you
+must believe without having seen; that is true faith. You must
+
+  "'Reach a hand through time to catch
+  The far-off interest of tears.'
+
+That you may have strength so to do is part of your share in the
+prayers of
+
+"Yours very faithfully,
+
+"W. D----."
+
+A noble letter, but the storm was beating too fiercely to be stilled,
+and one night in that summer of 1871 stands out clearly before me. Mr.
+Besant was away, and there had been a fierce quarrel before he left. I
+was outraged, desperate, with no door of escape from a life that,
+losing its hope in God, had not yet learned to live for hope for man.
+No door of escape? The thought came like a flash: "There is one!" And
+before me there swung open, with lure of peace and of safety, the
+gateway into silence and security, the gateway of the tomb. I was
+standing by the drawing-room window, staring hopelessly at the evening
+sky; with the thought came the remembrance that the means was at
+hand--the chloroform that had soothed my baby's pain, and that I had
+locked away upstairs. I ran up to my room, took out the bottle, and
+carried it downstairs, standing again at the window in the summer
+twilight, glad that the struggle was over and peace at hand. I uncorked
+the bottle, and was raising it to my lips, when, as though the words
+were spoken softly and clearly, I heard: "O coward, coward, who used to
+dream of martyrdom, and cannot bear a few short years of pain!" A rush
+of shame swept over me, and I flung the bottle far away among the
+shrubs in the garden at my feet, and for a moment I felt strong as for
+a struggle, and then fell fainting on the floor. Only once again in all
+the strifes of my career did the thought of suicide recur, and then it
+was but for a moment, to be put aside as unworthy a strong soul.
+
+My new friend, Mr. D----, proved a very real help. The endless torture
+of hell, the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, the trustworthiness of
+revelation, doubts on all these hitherto accepted doctrines grew and
+heaped themselves on my bewildered soul. My questionings were neither
+shirked nor discouraged by Mr. D----; he was not horrified nor was he
+sanctimoniously rebukeful, but met them all with a wide comprehension
+inexpressibly soothing to one writhing in the first agonies of doubt.
+He left Cheltenham in the early autumn of 1871, but the following
+extracts from a letter written in November will show the kind of net in
+which I was struggling (I had been reading M'Leod Campbell's work "On
+the Atonement"):--
+
+"You forget one great principle--that God is impassive, cannot suffer.
+Christ, _quâ_ God, did not suffer, but as Son of _Man_ and in His
+humanity. Still, it may be correctly stated that He felt to sin and
+sinners 'as God eternally feels'--_i.e., abhorrence of sin, and love of
+the sinner_. But to infer from that that the Father in His Godhead
+feels the sufferings which Christ experienced solely in humanity, and
+because incarnate is, I think, wrong.
+
+"(2) I felt strongly inclined to blow you up for the last part of your
+letter. You assume, I think quite gratuitously, that God condemns the
+major part of His children to objectless future suffering. You say that
+if He does not, He places a book in their hands which threatens what He
+does not mean to inflict. But how utterly this seems to me opposed to
+the gospel of Christ! All Christ's references to eternal punishment may
+be resolved into references to the Valley of Hinnom, by way of imagery;
+with the exception of the Dives parable, where is distinctly inferred a
+moral amendment beyond the grave. I speak of the unselfish desire of
+Dives to save his brothers. The more I see of the controversy, the more
+baseless does the eternal punishment theory appear. It seems then, to
+me, that instead of feeling aggrieved and shaken, you ought to feel
+encouraged and thankful that God is so much better than you were taught
+to believe Him. You will have discovered by this time in Maurice's
+'What is Revelation?' (I suppose you have the 'Sequel,' too?), that
+God's truth is our truth, and His love is our love, only more perfect
+and full. There is no position more utterly defeated in modern
+philosophy and theology than Dean Mansel's attempt to show that God's
+love, justice, &c., are different in kind from ours. Mill and Maurice,
+from totally alien points of view, have shown up the preposterous
+nature of the notion.
+
+"(3) A good deal of what you have thought is, I fancy, based on a
+strange forgetfulness of your former experience. If you have known
+Christ--(whom to know is eternal life)--and that you have known Him I
+am certain--can you really say that a few intellectual difficulties,
+nay, a few moral difficulties if you will, are able at once to
+obliterate the testimony of that higher state of being?
+
+"Why, the keynote of all my theology is that Christ is lovable because,
+and _just_ because, He is the perfection of all that I know to be noble
+and generous, and loving, and tender, and true. If an angel from heaven
+brought me a gospel which contained doctrines that would not stand the
+test of such perfect lovableness--doctrines hard, or cruel, or
+unjust--I should reject him and his trumpery gospel with scorn, knowing
+that neither could be Christ's. Know Christ and judge religions by Him;
+don't judge Him by religions, and then complain because they find
+yourself looking at Him through a blood-coloured glass."
+
+"I am saturating myself with Maurice, who is the antidote given by God
+to this age against all dreary doublings and temptings of the devil to
+despair."
+
+Many a one, in this age of controversy over all things once held
+sacred, has found peace and new light on this line of thought, and has
+succeeded in thus reconciling theological doctrines with the demands of
+the conscience for love and justice in a world made by a just and
+loving God. I could not do so. The awakening to what the world was, to
+the facts of human misery, to the ruthless tramp of nature and of
+events over the human heart, making no difference between innocent and
+guilty--the shock had been too great for the equilibrium to be restored
+by arguments that appealed to the emotions and left the intellect
+unconvinced. Months of this long-drawn-out mental anguish wrought their
+natural effects on physical health, and at last I broke down
+completely, and lay for weeks helpless and prostrate, in raging and
+unceasing head-pain, unable to sleep, unable to bear the light, lying
+like a log on the bed, not unconscious, but indifferent to everything,
+consciousness centred, as it were, in the ceaseless pain. The doctor
+tried every form of relief, but, entrenched in its citadel, the pain
+defied his puny efforts. He covered my head with ice, he gave me
+opium--which only drove me mad--he did all that skill and kindness
+could do, but all in vain. Finally the pain wore itself out, and the
+moment he dared to do so, he tried mental diversion; he brought me
+books on anatomy, on science, and persuaded me to study them; and out
+of his busy life would steal an hour to explain to me knotty points on
+physiology. He saw that if I were to be brought back to reasonable
+life, it could only be by diverting thought from the channels in which
+the current had been running to a dangerous extent. I have often felt
+that I owed life and sanity to that good man, who felt for the
+helpless, bewildered child-woman, beaten down by the cyclone of doubt
+and misery.
+
+So it will easily be understood that my religious wretchedness only
+increased the unhappiness of homelife, for how absurd it was that any
+reasonable human being should be so tossed with anguish over
+intellectual and moral difficulties on religious matters, and should
+make herself ill over these unsubstantial troubles. Surely it was a
+woman's business to attend to her husband's comforts and to see after
+her children, and not to break her heart over misery here and hell
+hereafter, and distract her brain with questions that had puzzled the
+greatest thinkers and still remained unsolved! And, truly, women or men
+who get themselves concerned about the universe at large, would do well
+not to plunge hastily into marriage, for they do not run smoothly in
+the double-harness of that honourable estate. _Sturm und Drang_ should
+be faced alone, and the soul should go out alone into the wilderness to
+be tempted of the devil, and not bring his majesty and all his imps
+into the placid circle of the home. Unhappy they who go into marriage
+with the glamour of youth upon them and the destiny of conflict
+imprinted on their nature, for they make misery for their partner in
+marriage as well as for themselves. And if that partner, strong in
+traditional authority and conventional habits, seeks to "break in" the
+turbulent and storm-tossed creature--well, it comes to a mere trial of
+strength and endurance, whether that driven creature will fall panting
+and crushed, or whether it will turn in its despair, assert its Divine
+right to intellectual liberty, rend its fetters in pieces, and,
+discovering its own strength in its extremity, speak at all risks its
+"No" when bidden to live a lie.
+
+When that physical crisis was over I decided on my line of action. I
+resolved to take Christianity as it had been taught in the Churches,
+and carefully and thoroughly examine its dogmas one by one, so that I
+should never again say "I believe" where I had not proved, and that,
+however diminished my area of belief, what was left of it might at
+least be firm under my feet. I found that four chief problems were
+pressing for solution, and to these I addressed myself. How many are
+to-day the souls facing just these problems, and disputing every inch
+of their old ground of faith with the steadily advancing waves of
+historical and scientific criticism! Alas! for the many Canutes, as the
+waves wash over their feet. These problems were:--
+
+(1) The eternity of punishment after death.
+
+(2) The meaning of "goodness" and "love," as applied to a God who had
+made this world, with all its sin and misery.
+
+(3) The nature of the atonement of Christ, and the "justice" of God in
+accepting a vicarious suffering from Christ, and a vicarious
+righteousness from the sinner.
+
+(4) The meaning of "inspiration" as applied to the Bible, and the
+reconciliation of the perfections of the author with the blunders and
+immoralities of the work.
+
+It will be seen that the deeper problems of religion--the deity of
+Christ, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul--were not yet
+brought into question, and, looking back, I cannot but see how orderly
+was the progression of thought, how steady the growth, after that first
+terrible earthquake, and the first wild swirl of agony. The points that
+I set myself to study were those which would naturally be first faced
+by any one whose first rebellion against the dogmas of the Churches was
+a rebellion of the moral nature rather than of the intellectual, a
+protest of the conscience rather than of the brain. It was not a desire
+for moral licence which gave me the impulse that finally landed me in
+Atheism; it was the sense of outraged justice and insulted right. I was
+a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty
+and a proud self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me,
+and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of
+outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity.
+My education, my mother's example, my inner timidity and self-distrust,
+all fenced me in from temptations from without. It was the uprising of
+an outraged conscience that made me a rebel against the Churches and
+finally an unbeliever in God. And I place this on record, because the
+progress of Materialism will never be checked by diatribes against
+unbelievers, as though they became unbelievers from desire for vice and
+for licence to do evil. What Religion has to face in the controversies
+of to-day is not the unbelief of the sty, but the unbelief of the
+educated conscience and of the soaring intellect; and unless it can arm
+itself with a loftier ethic and a grander philosophy than its opponent,
+it will lose its hold over the purest and the strongest of the younger
+generation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE STORM OF DOUBT.
+
+
+My reading of heretical and Broad Church works on one side, and of
+orthodox ones on the other, now occupied a large part of my time, and
+our removal to Sibsey, in Lincolnshire, an agricultural village with a
+scattered population, increased my leisure. I read the works of
+Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Stanley, Greg, Matthew Arnold, Liddon,
+Mansel, and many another, and my scepticism grew deeper and deeper as
+I read. The Broad Church arguments appeared to me to be of the nature
+of special pleading, skilful evasions of difficulties rather than the
+real meeting and solving of them. For the problem was: Given a good
+God, how can He have created mankind, knowing beforehand that the vast
+majority of those whom He created were to be tortured for ever? Given
+a just God, how can He punish people for being sinful, when they have
+inherited a sinful nature without their own choice and of necessity?
+Given a righteous God, how can He allow sin to exist for ever, so that
+evil shall be as eternal as good, and Satan shall reign in hell as
+long as Christ in heaven? Worst of all puzzles, perhaps, was that of
+the existence of evil and of misery, and the racking doubt whether God
+_could_ be good, and yet look on the evil and the misery of the world
+unmoved and untouched. It seemed so impossible to believe that a
+Creator could be either cruel enough to be indifferent to the misery,
+or weak enough to be unable to stop it. The old dilemma faced me
+incessantly: "If He can prevent it and does not, He is not good; if He
+wishes to prevent it and cannot, He is not almighty." I racked my
+brains for an answer. I searched writings of believers for a clue, but
+I found no way of escape. Not yet had any doubt of the existence of
+God crossed my mind.
+
+Mr. D---- continued to write me, striving to guide me along the path
+which had led his own soul to contentment, but I can only find room
+here for two brief extracts, which will show how to himself he solved
+the problem. He thought me mistaken in my view
+
+"Of the nature of the _sin_ and _error_ which is supposed to grieve
+God. I take it that sin is an absolutely necessary factor in the
+production of the perfect man. It was foreseen and allowed as means to
+an end--as, in fact, an education. The view of all the sin and misery
+in the world cannot grieve God any more than it can grieve you to see
+Digby fail in his first attempt to build a card-castle or a
+rabbit-hutch. All is part of the training. God looks at the ideal man
+to which all tends.... "No, Mrs. Besant; I never feel at all inclined
+to give up the search, or to suppose that the other side may be right.
+I claim no merit for it, but I have an invincible faith in the
+morality of God and the moral order of the world. I have no more doubt
+about the falsehood of the popular theology than I have about the
+unreality of six robbers who attacked me three nights ago in a horrid
+dream. I exult and rejoice in the grandeur and freedom of the little
+bit of truth it has been given me to see. I am told that 'Present-day
+Papers,' by Bishop Ewing (edited), are a wonderful help, many of them,
+to puzzled people; I mean to get them. But I am sure you will find
+that the truth will (even so little as we may be able to find out)
+grow on you, make you free, light your path, and dispel, at no distant
+time, your _painful_ difficulties and doubts. I should say on no
+account give up your reading. I think with you that you could not do
+without it. It will be a wonderful source of help and peace to you.
+For there are struggles far more fearful than those of intellectual
+doubt. I am keenly alive to the gathered-up sadness of which your last
+two pages are an expression. I was sorrier than I can say to read
+them. They reminded me of a long and very dark time in my own life,
+when I thought the light never would come. Thank God it came, or I
+think I could not have held out much longer. But you have evidently
+strength to bear it now. The more dangerous time, I should fancy, has
+passed. You will have to mind that the fermentation leaves clear
+spiritual wine, and not (as too often) vinegar. I wish I could write
+something more helpful to you in this great matter. But as I sit in
+front of my large bay window and see the shadows on the grass and the
+sunlight on the leaves, and the soft glimmer of the rosebuds left by
+the storms, I can but believe that all will be very well. 'Trust in
+the Lord, wait patiently for Him'--they are trite words. But He made
+the grass, the leaves, the rosebuds, and the sunshine, and He is the
+Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And now the trite words have swelled
+into a mighty argument."
+
+I found more help in Theistic writers like Grey, and Agnostic like
+Arnold, than I did in the Broad Church teachers, but these, of course,
+served to make return to the old faith more and more impossible. The
+Church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was
+only a doubter, I kept my doubts to myself. It was possible, I felt,
+that all my difficulties might be cleared up, and I had no right to
+shake the faith of others while in uncertainty myself. Others had
+doubted and had afterwards recovered their faith; for the doubter
+silence was a duty; the blinded had better keep their misery to
+themselves.
+
+During these weary months of anxiety and torment I found some relief
+from the mental strain in practical parish work, nursing the sick,
+trying to brighten the lot of the poor. I learned then some of the
+lessons as to the agricultural labourer and the land that I was able
+in after-years to teach from the platform. The movement among the
+agricultural labourers, due to the energy and devotion of Joseph Arch,
+was beginning to be discussed in the fens, and my sympathies went
+strongly with the claims of the labourers, for I knew their
+life-conditions. In one cottage I had found four generations sleeping
+in one room--the great-grandfather and his wife, the unmarried
+grandmother, the unmarried mother, the little child; three men lodgers
+completed the tale of eight human beings crowded into that narrow,
+ill-ventilated garret. Other cottages were hovels, through the broken
+roofs of which poured the rain, and wherein rheumatism and ague lived
+with the human dwellers. How could I do aught but sympathise with any
+combination that aimed at the raising of these poor? But the
+Agricultural Labourers' Union was bitterly opposed by the farmers, and
+they would give no work to a "Union man." One example may serve for
+all. There was a young married man with two small children, who was
+sinful enough to go to a Union meeting and sinful enough to talk of it
+on his return home. No farmer would employ him in all the district
+round. He tramped about vainly looking for work, grew reckless, and
+took to drink. Visiting his cottage, consisting of one room and a
+"lean-to," I found his wife ill with fever, a fever-stricken babe in
+her arms, the second child lying dead on the bed. In answer to my
+soft-spoken questions: Yes, she was pining (starving), there was no
+work. Why did she leave the dead child on the bed? Because she had no
+other place for it till the coffin came. And at night the unhappy,
+driven man, the fever-stricken wife, the fever-stricken child, the
+dead child, all lay in the one bed. The farmers hated the Union
+because its success meant higher wages for the men, and it never
+struck them that they might well pay less rent to the absent landlord
+and higher wage to the men who tilled their fields. They had only
+civil words for the burden that crushed them, hard words for the
+mowers of their harvests and the builders-up of their ricks; they made
+common cause with their enemies instead of with their friends, and
+instead of leaguing themselves together with the labourers as forming
+together the true agricultural interest, they leagued themselves with
+the landlords against the labourers, and so made ruinous fratricidal
+strife instead of easy victory over the common foe. And, seeing all
+this, I learned some useful lessons, and the political education
+progressed while the theological strife went on within.
+
+In the early autumn a ray of light broke the darkness. I was in London
+with my mother, and wandered one Sunday morning into St. George's
+Hall, where the Rev. Charles Voysey was preaching. There to my delight
+I found, on listening to the sermon and buying some literature on sale
+in the ante-room, that there were people who had passed through my own
+difficulties, and had given up the dogmas that I found so revolting. I
+went again on the following Sunday, and when the service was over I
+noticed that the outgoing stream of people were passing by Mr. and
+Mrs. Voysey, and that many who were evidently strangers spoke a word
+of thanks to him as they went on. Moved by a strong desire, after the
+long months of lonely striving, to speak to one who had struggled out
+of Christian difficulties, I said to Mr. Voysey, as I passed in my
+turn, "I must thank you for very great help in what you said this
+morning," for in truth, never having yet doubted the existence of God,
+the teaching of Mr. Voysey that He was "loving unto _every_ man, and
+His tender mercy over _all_ His works," came like a gleam of light
+across the stormy sea of doubt and distress on which I had so long
+been tossing. The next Sunday saw me again at the Hall, and Mrs.
+Voysey gave me a cordial invitation to visit them in their Dulwich
+home. I found their Theism was free from the defects that had revolted
+me in Christianity, and they opened up to me new views of religion. I
+read Theodore Parker's "Discourse on Religion," Francis Newman's
+works, those of Miss Frances Power Cobbe, and of others; the anguish
+of the tension relaxed; the nightmare of an Almighty Evil passed away;
+my belief in God, not yet touched, was cleared from all the dark spots
+that had sullied it, and I no longer doubted whether the dogmas that
+had shocked my conscience were true or false. I shook them off, once
+for all, with all their pain and horror and darkness, and felt, with
+joy and relief inexpressible, that they were delusions of the
+ignorance of man, not the revelations of a God.
+
+But there was one belief that had not been definitely challenged, but
+of which the _rationale_ was gone with the orthodox dogmas now
+definitely renounced--the doctrine of the Deity of Christ. The whole
+teaching of the Broad Church school tends, of course, to emphasise the
+humanity of Christ at the expense of His Deity, and when eternal
+punishment and the substitutionary atonement had gone there seemed no
+reason remaining sufficient to account for so tremendous a miracle as
+the incarnation of the Deity. In the course of my reading I had become
+familiar with the idea of Avatâras in Eastern creeds, and I saw that
+the incarnate God was put forward as a fact by all ancient religions,
+and thus the way was paved for challenging the especially Christian
+teaching, when the doctrines morally repulsive were cleared away. But
+I shrank from the thought of placing in the crucible a doctrine so
+dear from all the associations of the past; there was so much that was
+soothing and ennobling in the idea of a union between Man and God,
+between a perfect man and a Divine life, between a human heart and an
+almighty strength. Jesus as God was interwoven with all art and all
+beauty in religion; to break with the Deity of Jesus was to break with
+music, with painting, with literature; the Divine Babe in His Mother's
+arms; the Divine Man in His Passion and His Triumph; the Friend of Man
+encircled with the majesty of the Godhead. Did inexorable Truth demand
+that this ideal Figure, with all its pathos, its beauty, its human
+love, should pass away into the Pantheon of the dead Gods of the Past?
+
+Nor was this all. If I gave up belief in Christ as God, I must give up
+Christianity as creed. Once challenge the unique position of the
+Christ, and the name Christian seemed to me to be a hypocrisy, and its
+renouncement a duty binding on the upright mind. I was a clergyman's
+wife; what would be the effect of such a step? Hitherto mental pain
+alone had been the price demanded inexorably from the searcher after
+truth; but with the renouncing of Christ outer warfare would be added
+to the inner, and who might guess the result upon my life? The
+struggle was keen but short; I decided to carefully review the
+evidence for and against the Deity of Christ, with the result that
+that belief followed the others, and I stood, no longer Christian,
+face to face with a dim future in which I sensed the coming conflict.
+
+One effort I made to escape it; I appealed to Dr. Pusey, thinking that
+if he could not answer my questionings, no answer to them could be
+reasonably hoped for. I had a brief correspondence with him, but was
+referred only to lines of argument familiar to me--as those of Liddon
+in his "Bampton Lectures"--and finally, on his invitation, went down
+to Oxford to see him. I found a short, stout gentleman, dressed in a
+cassock, looking like a comfortable monk; but keen eyes, steadfastly
+gazing straight into mine, told of the force and subtlety enshrined in
+the fine, impressive head. But the learned doctor took the wrong line
+of treatment; he probably saw I was anxious, shy, and nervous, and he
+treated me as a penitent going to confession and seeking the advice of
+a director, instead of as an inquirer struggling after truth, and
+resolute to obtain some firm standing-ground in the sea of doubt. He
+would not deal with the question of the Deity of Jesus as a question
+for argument. "You are speaking of your Judge," he retorted sternly,
+when I pressed a difficulty. The mere suggestion of an imperfection in
+the character of Jesus made him shudder, and he checked me with raised
+hand. "You are blaspheming. The very thought is a terrible sin." Would
+he recommend me any books that might throw light on the subject? "No,
+no; you have read too much already. You must pray; you must pray."
+When I urged that I could not believe without proof, I was told,
+"Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed"; and my
+further questioning was checked by the murmur, "O my child, how
+undisciplined! how impatient!" Truly, he must have found in me--hot,
+eager, passionate in my determination to _know_, resolute not to
+profess belief while belief was absent--nothing of the meek,
+chastened, submissive spirit with which he was wont to deal in
+penitents seeking his counsel as their spiritual guide. In vain did he
+bid me pray as though I believed; in vain did he urge the duty of
+blind submission to the authority of the Church, of blind, unreasoning
+faith that questioned not. I had not trodden the thorny path of doubt
+to come to the point from which I had started; I needed, and would
+have, solid grounds ere I believed. He had no conception of the
+struggles of a sceptical spirit; he had evidently never felt the pangs
+of doubt; his own faith was solid as a rock, firm, satisfied,
+unshakable; he would as soon have committed suicide as have doubted of
+the infallibility of the "Universal Church."
+
+"It is not your duty to ascertain the truth," he told me, sternly. "It
+is your duty to accept and believe the truth as laid down by the
+Church. At your peril you reject it. The responsibility is not yours
+so long as you dutifully accept that which the Church has laid down
+for your acceptance. Did not the Lord promise that the presence of the
+Spirit should be ever with His Church, to guide her into all truth?"
+
+"But the fact of the promise and its value are just the very points on
+which I am doubtful," I answered.
+
+He shuddered. "Pray, pray," he said. "Father, forgive her, for she
+knows not what she says."
+
+It was in vain that I urged on him the sincerity of my seeking,
+pointing out that I had everything to gain by following his
+directions, everything to lose by going my own way, but that it seemed
+to me untruthful to pretend to accept what was not really believed.
+
+"Everything to lose? Yes, indeed. You will be lost for time and lost
+for eternity."
+
+"Lost or not," I rejoined, "I must and will try to find out what is
+true, and I will not believe till I am sure."
+
+"You have no right to make terms with God," he retorted, "as to what
+you will believe or what you will not believe. You are full of
+intellectual pride."
+
+I sighed hopelessly. Little feeling of pride was there in me just
+then, but only a despairful feeling that in this rigid, unyielding
+dogmatism there was no comprehension of my difficulties, no help for
+me in my strugglings. I rose, and, thanking him for his courtesy, said
+that I would not waste his time further, that I must go home and face
+the difficulties, openly leaving the Church and taking the
+consequences. Then for the first time his serenity was ruffled.
+
+"I forbid you to speak of your disbelief," he cried. "I forbid you to
+lead into your own lost state the souls for whom Christ died."
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS SCOTT.]
+
+Slowly and sadly I took my way back to the station, knowing that my
+last chance of escape had failed me. I recognised in this famous
+divine the spirit of priest-craft, that could be tender and pitiful to
+the sinner, repentant, humble, submissive; but that was iron to the
+doubter, the heretic, and would crush out all questionings of
+"revealed truth," silencing by force, not by argument, all challenge
+of the traditions of the Church. Out of such men were made the
+Inquisitors of the Middle Ages, perfectly conscientious, perfectly
+rigid, perfectly merciless to the heretic. To them heretics are
+centres of infectious disease, and charity to the heretic is "the
+worst cruelty to the souls of men." Certain that they hold, "by no
+merit of our own, but by the mercy of our God, the one truth which He
+has revealed," they can permit no questionings, they can accept nought
+but the most complete submission. But while man aspires after truth,
+while his mind yearns after knowledge, while his intellect soars
+upward into the empyrean of speculation and "beats the air with
+tireless wing," so long shall those who demand faith from him be met
+by challenge for proof, and those who would blind him shall be
+defeated by his resolve to gaze unblenching on the face of Truth, even
+though her eyes should turn him into stone. It was during this same
+autumn of 1872 that I first met Mr. and Mrs. Scott, introduced to them
+by Mr. Voysey. At that time Thomas Scott was an old man, with
+beautiful white hair, and eyes like those of a hawk gleaming from
+under shaggy eyebrows. He had been a man of magnificent physique, and,
+though his frame was then enfeebled, the splendid lion-like head kept
+its impressive strength and beauty, and told of a unique personality.
+Well born and wealthy, he had spent his earlier life in adventure in
+all parts of the world, and after his marriage he had settled down at
+Ramsgate, and had made his home a centre of heretical thought. His
+wife, "his right hand," as he justly called her, was young enough to
+be his daughter--a sweet, strong, gentle, noble woman, worthy of her
+husband, and than that no higher praise could be spoken. Mr. Scott for
+many years issued monthly a series of pamphlets, all heretical, though
+very varying in their shades of thought; all were well written,
+cultured, and polished in tone, and to this rule Mr. Scott made no
+exception; his writers might say what they liked, but they must have
+something to say, and must say it in good English. His correspondence
+was enormous, from Prime Ministers downwards. At his house met people
+of the most varied opinions; it was a veritable heretical _salon_.
+Colenso of Natal, Edward Maitland, E. Vansittart Neale, Charles Bray,
+Sarah Hennell, and hundreds more, clerics and laymen, scholars and
+thinkers, all coming to this one house, to which the _entrée_ was
+gained only by love of Truth and desire to spread Freedom among men.
+For Thomas Scott my first Freethought essay was written a few months
+after, "On the Deity of Jesus of Nazareth," by the wife of a benefited
+clergyman. My name was not mine to use, so it was agreed that any
+essays from my pen should be anonymous.
+
+And now came the return to Sibsey, and with it the need for definite
+steps as to the Church. For now I no longer doubted, I had rejected,
+and the time for silence was past. I was willing to attend the Church
+services, taking no part in any not directed to God Himself, but I
+could no longer attend the Holy Communion, for in that service, full
+of recognition of Jesus as Deity and of His atoning sacrifice, I could
+no longer take part without hypocrisy. This was agreed to, and well do
+I remember the pain and trembling wherewith on the first "Sacrament
+Sunday" after my return I rose and left the church. That the vicar's
+wife should "communicate" was as much a matter of course as that the
+vicar should "administer"; I had never done anything in public that
+would draw attention to me, and a feeling of deadly sickness nearly
+overcame me as I made my exit, conscious that every eye was on me, and
+that my non-participation would be the cause of unending comment. As a
+matter of fact, every one naturally thought I was taken suddenly ill,
+and I was overwhelmed with calls and inquiries. To any direct question
+I answered quietly that I was unable to take part in the profession of
+faith required by an honest communicant, but the statement was rarely
+necessary, as the idea of heresy in a vicar's wife is slow to suggest
+itself to the ordinary bucolic mind, and I proffered no information
+where no question was asked.
+
+It happened that, shortly after that (to me) memorable Christmas of
+1872, a sharp epidemic of typhoid fever broke out in the village of
+Sibsey. The drainage there was of the most primitive type, and the
+contagion spread rapidly. Naturally fond of nursing, I found in this
+epidemic work just fitted to my hand, and I was fortunate enough to be
+able to lend personal help that made me welcome in the homes of the
+stricken poor. The mothers who slept exhausted while I watched beside
+their darlings' bedsides will never, I like to fancy, think
+over-harshly of the heretic whose hand was as tender and often more
+skilful than their own. I think Mother Nature meant me for a nurse,
+for I take a sheer delight in nursing any one, provided only that
+there is peril in the sickness, so that there is the strange and
+solemn feeling of the struggle between the human skill one wields and
+the supreme enemy, Death. There is a strange fascination in fighting
+Death, step by step, and this is of course felt to the full where one
+fights for life as life, and not for a life one loves. When the
+patient is beloved the struggle is touched with agony, but where one
+fights with Death over the body of a stranger there is a weird
+enchantment in the contest without personal pain, and as one forces
+back the hated foe there is a curious triumph in the feeling which
+marks the death-grip yielding up its prey, as one snatches back to
+earth the life which had well-nigh perished.
+
+The spring of 1873 brought me knowledge of a power that was to mould
+much of my future life. I delivered my first lecture, but delivered it
+to rows of empty pews in Sibsey Church. A queer whim took me that I
+would like to know how "it felt" to preach, and vague fancies stirred
+in me that I could speak if I had the chance. I saw no platform in the
+distance, nor had any idea of possible speaking in the future dawned
+upon me. But the longing to find outlet in words came upon me, and I
+felt as though I had something to say and was able to say it. So
+locked alone in the great, silent church, whither I had gone to
+practise some organ exercises, I ascended the pulpit steps and
+delivered my first lecture on the Inspiration of the Bible. I shall
+never forget the feeling of power and delight--but especially of
+power--that came upon me as I sent my voice ringing down the aisles,
+and the passion in me broke into balanced sentences and never paused
+for musical cadence or for rhythmical expression. All I wanted then
+was to see the church full of upturned faces, alive with throbbing
+sympathy, instead of the dreary emptiness of silent pews. And as
+though in a dream the solitude was peopled, and I saw the listening
+faces and the eager eyes, and as the sentences flowed unbidden from my
+lips and my own tones echoed back to me from the pillars of the
+ancient church, I knew of a verity that the gift of speech was mine,
+and that if ever--and then it seemed so impossible!--if ever the
+chance came to me of public work, this power of melodious utterance
+should at least win hearing for any message I had to bring.
+
+But the knowledge remained a secret all to my own self for many a long
+month, for I quickly felt ashamed of that foolish speechifying in an
+empty church; but, foolish as it was, I note it here, as it was the
+first effort of that expression in spoken words which later became to
+me one of the deepest delights of life. And, indeed, none can know,
+save they who have felt it, what joy there is in the full rush of
+language that moves and sways; to feel a crowd respond to the lightest
+touch; to see the faces brighten or darken at your bidding; to know
+that the sources of human emotion and human passion gush forth at the
+word of the speaker as the stream from the riven rock; to feel that
+the thought which thrills through a thousand hearers has its impulse
+from you, and throbs back to you the fuller from a thousand
+heart-beats. Is there any emotional joy in life more brilliant than
+this, fuller of passionate triumph, and of the very essence of
+intellectual delight?
+
+In 1873 my marriage tie was broken. I took no new step, but my absence
+from the Communion led to some gossip, and a relative of Mr. Besant
+pressed on him highly-coloured views of the social and professional
+dangers which would accrue if my heresy became known. My health, never
+really restored since the autumn of 1871, grew worse and worse,
+serious heart trouble having arisen from the constant strain under
+which I lived. At last, in July or August, 1873, the crisis came. I
+was told that I must conform to the outward observances of the Church,
+and attend the Communion; I refused. Then came the distinct
+alternative; conformity or exclusion from home--in other words,
+hypocrisy or expulsion. I chose the latter.
+
+A bitterly sad time followed. My dear mother was heart-broken. To her,
+with her wide and vague form of Christianity, loosely held, the
+intensity of my feeling that where I did not believe I would not
+pretend belief, was incomprehensible. She recognised far more fully
+than I did all that a separation from my home meant for me, and the
+difficulties that would surround a young woman, not yet twenty-six,
+living alone. She knew how brutally the world judges, and how the mere
+fact that a woman was young and alone justified any coarseness of
+slander. Then I did not guess how cruel men and women could be, how
+venomous their tongues; now, knowing it, having faced slander and
+lived it down, I deliberately say that were the choice again before me
+I would choose as I chose then; I would rather go through it all again
+than live "in Society" under the burden of an acted lie.
+
+The hardest struggle was against my mother's tears and pleading; to
+cause her pain was tenfold pain to me. Against harshness I had been
+rigid as steel, but it was hard to remain steadfast when my darling
+mother, whom I loved as I loved nothing else on earth, threw herself
+on her knees before me, imploring me to yield. It seemed like a crime
+to bring such anguish on her; and I felt as a murderer as the snowy
+head was pressed against my knees. And yet--to live a lie? Not even
+for her was that shame possible; in that worst crisis of blinding
+agony my will clung fast to Truth. And it is true now as it ever was
+that he who loves father or mother better than Truth is not worthy of
+her, and the flint-strewn path of honesty is the way to Light and
+Peace.
+
+Then there were the children, the two little ones who worshipped me,
+who was to them mother, nurse, and playfellow. Were they, too,
+demanded at my hands? Not wholly--for a time. Facts which I need not
+touch on here enabled my brother to obtain for me a legal separation,
+and when everything was arranged, I found myself guardian of my little
+daughter, and possessor of a small monthly income sufficient for
+respectable starvation. With a great price I had obtained my freedom,
+but--I was free. Home, friends, social position, were the price
+demanded and paid, and, being free, I wondered what to do with my
+freedom. I could have had a home with my brother if I would give up my
+heretical friends and keep quiet, but I had no mind to put my limbs
+into fetters again, and in my youthful inexperience I determined to
+find something to do. The difficulty was the "something," and I spent
+various shillings in agencies, with a quite wonderful unanimity of
+failures. I tried fancy needle-work, offered to "ladies in reduced
+circumstances," and earned 4s. 6d. by some weeks of stitching. I
+experimented with a Birmingham firm, who generously offered every one
+the opportunity of adding to their incomes, and on sending the small
+fee demanded, received a pencil-case, with an explanation that I was
+to sell little articles of that description, going as far as
+cruet-stands, to my friends. I did not feel equal to springing
+pencil-cases and cruet-stands on my acquaintances, so did not enter on
+that line of business, and similar failures in numerous efforts made
+me feel, as so many others have found, that the world-oyster is hard
+to open. However, I was resolute to build a nest for my wee daughter,
+my mother, and myself, and the first thing to do was to save my
+monthly pittance to buy furniture. I found a tiny house in Colby Road,
+Upper Norwood, near the Scotts, who were more than good to me, and
+arranged to take it in the spring, and then accepted a loving
+invitation to Folkestone, where my grandmother and two aunts were
+living, to look for work there. And found it. The vicar wanted a
+governess, and one of my aunts suggested me as a stop-gap, and thither
+I went with my little Mabel, our board and lodging being payment for
+my work. I became head cook, governess, and nurse, glad enough to have
+found "something to do" that enabled me to save my little income. But
+I do not think I will ever take to cooking for a permanence; broiling
+and frying are all right, and making pie-crust is rather pleasant; but
+saucepans and kettles blister your hands. There is a charm in making a
+stew, to the unaccustomed cook, from the excitement of wondering what
+the result will be, and whether any flavour save that of onions will
+survive the competition in the mixture. On the whole, my cooking
+(strictly by cookery book) was a success, but my sweeping was bad, for
+I lacked muscle. This curious episode came to an abrupt end, for one
+of my little pupils fell ill with diphtheria, and I was transformed
+from cook to nurse. Mabel I despatched to her grandmother, who adored
+her with a love condescendingly returned by the little fairy of three,
+and never was there a prettier picture than the red-gold curls nestled
+against the white, the baby-grace in exquisite contrast with the worn
+stateliness of her tender nurse. Scarcely was my little patient out of
+danger when the youngest boy fell ill of scarlet fever; we decided to
+isolate him on the top floor, and I cleared away carpets and curtains,
+hung sheets over the doorways and kept them wet with chloride of lime,
+shut myself up there with the boy, having my meals left on the
+landing; and when all risk was over, proudly handed back my charge,
+the disease touching no one else in the house.
+
+And now the spring of 1874 had come, and in a few weeks my mother and
+I were to set up house together. How we had planned all, and had
+knitted on the new life together we anticipated to the old one we
+remembered! How we had discussed Mabel's education, and the share
+which should fall to each! Day-dreams; day-dreams! never to be
+realised.
+
+My mother went up to town, and in a week or two I received a telegram,
+saying she was dangerously ill, and as fast as express train would
+take me I was beside her. Dying, the doctor said; three days she might
+live--no more. I told her the death-sentence, but she said resolutely,
+"I do not feel that I am going to die just yet," and she was right.
+There was an attack of fearful prostration--the valves of the heart
+had failed--a very wrestling with Death, and then the grim shadow drew
+backwards. I nursed her day and night with a very desperation of
+tenderness, for now Fate had touched the thing dearest to me in life.
+A second horrible crisis came, and for the second time her tenacity
+and my love beat back the death-stroke. She did not wish to die, the
+love of life was strong in her; I would not let her die; between us we
+kept the foe at bay. Then dropsy supervened, and the end loomed slowly
+sure.
+
+It was then, after eighteen months' abstention, that I took the
+Sacrament for the last time. My mother had an intense longing to
+communicate before she died, but absolutely refused to do so unless I
+took it with her. "If it be necessary to salvation," she persisted,
+doggedly, "I will not take it if darling Annie is to be shut out. I
+would rather be lost with her than saved without her." I went to a
+clergyman I knew well, and laid the case before him; as I expected, he
+refused to allow me to communicate. I tried a second, with the same
+result. At last a thought struck me. There was Dean Stanley, my
+mother's favourite, a man known to be of the broadest school within
+the Church of England; suppose I asked him? I did not know him, and I
+felt the request would be an impertinence; but there was just the
+chance that he might consent, and what would I not do to make my
+darling's death-bed easier? I said nothing to any one, but set out to
+the Deanery, Westminster, timidly asked for the Dean, and followed the
+servant upstairs with a sinking heart. I was left for a moment alone
+in the library, and then the Dean came in. I don't think I ever in my
+life felt more intensely uncomfortable than I did in that minute's
+interval as he stood waiting for me to speak, his clear, grave,
+piercing eyes gazing questioningly into mine. Very falteringly--it
+must have been very clumsily--I preferred my request, stating boldly,
+with abrupt honesty, that I was not a Christian, that my mother was
+dying, that she was fretting to take the Sacrament, that she would not
+take it unless I took it with her, that two clergymen had refused to
+allow me to take part in the service, that I had come to him in
+despair, feeling how great was the intrusion, but--she was dying.
+
+His face changed to a great softness. "You were quite right to come to
+me," he answered, in that low, musical voice of his, his keen gaze
+having altered into one no less direct, but marvellously gentle. "Of
+course I will go and see your mother, and I have little doubt that, if
+you will not mind talking over your position with me, we may see our
+way clear to doing as your mother wishes."
+
+I could barely speak my thanks, so much did the kindly sympathy move
+me; the revulsion from the anxiety and fear of rebuff was strong
+enough to be almost pain. But Dean Stanley did more than I asked. He
+suggested that he should call that afternoon, and have a quiet chat
+with my mother, and then come again on the following day to administer
+the Sacrament.
+
+"A stranger's presence is always trying to a sick person," he said,
+with rare delicacy of thought, "and, joined to the excitement of the
+service, it might be too much for your dear mother. If I spend half an
+hour with her to-day, and administer the Sacrament to-morrow, it will,
+I think, be better for her."
+
+So Dean Stanley came that afternoon, all the way to Brompton, and
+remained talking with my mother for about half an hour, and then set
+himself to understand my own position. He finally told me that conduct
+was far more important than theory, and that he regarded all as
+"Christians" who recognised and tried to follow the moral law of
+Christ. On the question of the absolute Deity of Jesus he laid but
+little stress; Jesus was "in a special sense the Son of God," but it
+was folly to quarrel over words with only human meanings when dealing
+with the mystery of the Divine existence, and, above all, it was folly
+to make such words into dividing walls between earnest souls. The one
+important matter was the recognition of "duty to God and man," and all
+who were one in that recognition might rightfully join in an act of
+worship, the essence of which was not acceptance of dogma, but love of
+God and self-sacrifice for man. "The Holy Communion," he concluded, in
+his soft tones, "was never meant to divide from each other hearts that
+are searching after the one true God. It was meant by its founder as a
+symbol of unity, not of strife."
+
+On the following day Dean Stanley celebrated the Holy Communion by the
+bedside of my dear mother, and well was I repaid for the struggle it
+had cost me to ask so great a kindness from a stranger, when I saw the
+comfort that gentle, noble heart had given to her. He soothed away all
+her anxiety about my heresy with tactful wisdom, bidding her have no
+fear of differences of opinion where the heart was set on truth.
+"Remember," she told me he said to her--"remember that our God is the
+God of truth, and that therefore the honest search for truth can never
+be displeasing in His eyes." Once again after that he came, and after
+his visit to my mother we had another long talk. I ventured to ask
+him, the conversation having turned that way, how, with views so broad
+as his, he found it possible to remain in communion with the Church of
+England. "I think," he answered, gently, "that I am of more service to
+true religion by remaining in the Church and striving to widen its
+boundaries from within, than if I left it and worked from without."
+And he went on to explain how, as Dean of Westminster, he was in a
+rarely independent position, and could make the Abbey of a wider
+national service than would otherwise be possible. In all he said on
+this his love for and his pride in the glorious Abbey were manifest,
+and it was easy to see that old historical associations, love of
+music, of painting, of stately architecture, were the bonds that held
+him bound to the "old historic Church of England." His emotions, not
+his intellect, kept him Churchman, and he shrank, with the
+over-sensitiveness of the cultured scholar, from the idea of allowing
+the old traditions to be handled roughly by inartistic hands.
+Naturally of a refined and delicate nature, he had been rendered yet
+more exquisitely sensitive by the training of the college and the
+court; the polished courtesy of his manners was but the natural
+expression of a noble and lofty mind--a mind whose very gentleness
+sometimes veiled its strength. I have often heard Dean Stanley harshly
+spoken of, I have heard his honesty roughly challenged; but never has
+he been attacked in my presence that I have not uttered my protest
+against the injustice done him, and thus striven to repay some small
+fraction of that great debt of gratitude which I shall ever owe his
+memory.
+
+And now the end came swiftly. I had hurriedly furnished a couple of
+rooms in the little house, now ours, that I might take my mother into
+the purer air of Norwood, and permission was given to drive her down
+in an invalid carriage. The following evening she was suddenly taken
+worse; we lifted her into bed, and telegraphed for the doctor. But he
+could do nothing, and she herself felt that the hand of Death had
+gripped her. Selfless to the last, she thought but for my loneliness.
+"I am leaving you alone," she sighed from time to time; and truly I
+felt, with an anguish I did not dare to realise, that when she died I
+should indeed be alone on earth.
+
+For two days longer she was with me, my beloved, and I never left her
+side for five minutes. On May 10th the weakness passed into gentle
+delirium, but even then the faithful eyes followed me about the room,
+until at length they closed for ever, and as the sun sank low in the
+heavens, the breath came slower and slower, till the silence of Death
+came down upon us and she was gone.
+
+Stunned and dazed with the loss, I went mechanically through the next
+few days. I would have none touch my dead save myself and her
+favourite sister, who was with us at the last. Cold and dry-eyed I
+remained, even when they hid her from me with the coffin-lid, even all
+the dreary way to Kensal Green where her husband and her baby-son were
+sleeping, and when we left her alone in the chill earth, damp with the
+rains of spring. I could not believe that our day-dream was dead and
+buried, and the home in ruins ere yet it was fairly built. Truly, my
+"house was left unto me desolate," and the rooms, filled with sunshine
+but unlighted by her presence, seemed to echo from their bare walls,
+"You are all alone."
+
+But my little daughter was there, and her sweet face and dancing feet
+broke the solitude, while her imperious claims for love and tendance
+forced me into attention to the daily needs of life. And life was hard
+in those days of spring and summer, resources small, and work
+difficult to find. In truth, the two months after my mother's death
+were the dreariest my life has known, and they were months of
+tolerably hard struggle. The little house in Colby Road taxed my
+slender resources heavily, and the search for work was not yet
+successful. I do not know how I should have managed but for the help
+ever at hand, of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Scott. During this time I wrote
+for Mr. Scott pamphlets on Inspiration, Atonement, Mediation and
+Salvation, Eternal Torture, Religious Education of Children, Natural
+_v_. Revealed Religion, and the few guineas thus earned were very
+valuable. Their house, too, was always open to me, and this was no
+small help, for often in those days the little money I had was enough
+to buy food for two but not enough to buy it for three, and I would go
+out and study all day at the British Museum, so as to "have my dinner
+in town," the said dinner being conspicuous by its absence. If I was
+away for two evenings running from the hospitable house in the
+terrace, Mrs. Scott would come down to see what had happened, and many
+a time the supper there was of real physical value to me. Well might I
+write, in 1879, when Thomas Scott lay dead: "It was Thomas Scott whose
+house was open to me when my need was sorest, and he never knew, this
+generous, noble heart, how sometimes, when I went in, weary and
+overdone, from a long day's study in the British Museum, with scarce
+food to struggle through the day--he never knew how his genial, 'Well,
+little lady,' in welcoming tone, cheered the then utter loneliness of
+my life. To no living man--save one--do I owe the debt of gratitude
+that I owe to Thomas Scott."
+
+The small amount of jewellery I possessed, and all my superfluous
+clothes, were turned into more necessary articles, and the child, at
+least, never suffered a solitary touch of want. My servant Mary was a
+wonderful contriver, and kept house on the very slenderest funds that
+could be put into a servant's hands, and she also made the little
+place so bright and fresh-looking that it was always a pleasure to go
+into it. Recalling those days of "hard living," I can now look on them
+without regret. More, I am glad to have passed through them, for they
+have taught me how to sympathise with those who are struggling as I
+struggled then, and I never can hear the words fall from pale lips, "I
+am hungry," without remembering how painful a thing hunger is, and
+without curing that pain, at least for the moment.
+
+The presence of the child was good for me, keeping alive my aching,
+lonely heart: she would play contentedly for hours while I was
+working, a word now and again being enough for happiness; when I had
+to go out without her, she would run to the door with me, and the
+"good-bye" would come from down-curved lips; she was ever watching at
+the window for my return, and the sunny face was always the first to
+welcome me home. Many and many a time have I been coming home, weary,
+hungry, and heart-sick, and the glimpse of the little face watching
+has reminded me that I must not carry in a grave face to sadden my
+darling, and the effort to throw off the depression for her sake threw
+it off altogether, and brought back the sunshine. She was the
+sweetness and joy of my life, my curly-headed darling, with her
+red-gold hair and glorious eyes, and passionate, wilful, loving
+nature. The torn, bruised tendrils of my heart gradually twined round
+this little life; she gave something to love and to tend, and thus
+gratified one of the strongest impulses of my nature.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH.
+
+
+During all these months the intellectual life had not stood still; I
+was slowly, cautiously feeling my way onward. And in the intellectual
+and social side of my life I found a delight unknown in the old days
+of bondage. First, there was the joy of freedom, the joy of speaking
+out frankly and honestly each thought. Truly, I had a right to say:
+"With a great price obtained I this freedom," and having paid the
+price, I revelled in the liberty I had bought. Mr. Scott's valuable
+library was at my service; his keen brain challenged my opinions,
+probed my assertions, and suggested phases of thought hitherto
+untouched. I studied harder than ever, and the study now was unchecked
+by any fear of possible consequences. I had nothing left of the old
+faith save belief in "a God," and that began slowly to melt away. The
+Theistic axiom: "If there be a God at all He must be at least as good
+as His highest creature," began with an "if," and to that "if" I
+turned my attention. "Of all impossible things," writes Miss Frances
+Power Cobbe, "the most impossible must surely be that a man should
+dream something of the good and the noble, and that it should prove at
+last that his Creator was less good and less noble than he had
+dreamed." But, I questioned, are we sure that there is a Creator?
+Granted that, if there is, He must be above His highest creature,
+but--is there such a being? "The ground," says the Rev. Charles
+Voysey, "on which our belief in God rests is man. Man, parent of
+Bibles and Churches, inspirer of all good thoughts and good deeds.
+Man, the masterpiece of God's thought on earth. Man, the text-book of
+all spiritual knowledge. Neither miraculous nor infallible, man is
+nevertheless the only trustworthy record of the Divine mind in things
+pertaining to God. Man's reason, conscience, and affections are the
+only true revelation of his Maker." But what if God were only man's
+own image reflected in the mirror of man's mind? What if man were the
+creator, not the revelation of his God?
+
+It was inevitable that such thoughts should arise after the more
+palpably indefensible doctrines of Christianity had been discarded.
+Once encourage the human mind to think, and bounds to the thinking can
+never again be set by authority. Once challenge traditional beliefs,
+and the challenge will ring on every shield which is hanging in the
+intellectual arena. Around me was the atmosphere of conflict, and,
+freed from its long repression, my mind leapt up to share in the
+strife with a joy in the intellectual tumult, the intellectual strain.
+
+I often attended South Place Chapel, where Moncure D. Conway was then
+preaching, and discussion with him did something towards widening my
+views on the deeper religious problems; I re-read Dean Mansel's
+"Bampton Lectures," and they did much towards turning me in the
+direction of Atheism; I re-read Mill's "Examination of Sir William
+Hamilton's Philosophy," and studied carefully Comte's "Philosophie
+Positive." Gradually I recognised the limitations of human intelligence
+and its incapacity for understanding the nature of God, presented as
+infinite and absolute; I had given up the use of prayer as a
+blasphemous absurdity, since an all-wise God could not need my
+suggestions, nor an all-good God require my promptings. But God fades
+out of the daily life of those who never pray; a personal God who is
+not a Providence is a superfluity; when from the heaven does not smile
+a listening Father, it soon becomes an empty space, whence resounds no
+echo of man's cry. I could then reach no loftier conception of the
+Divine than that offered by the orthodox, and that broke hopelessly
+away as I analysed it.
+
+At last I said to Mr. Scott, "Mr. Scott, may I write a tract on the
+nature and existence of God?"
+
+He glanced at me keenly. "Ah, little lady, you are facing, then, that
+problem at last? I thought it must come. Write away."
+
+While this pamphlet was in MS. an event occurred which coloured all my
+succeeding life. I met Charles Bradlaugh. One day in the late spring,
+talking with Mrs. Conway--one of the sweetest and steadiest natures
+whom it has been my lot to meet, and to whom, as to her husband, I owe
+much for kindness generously shown when I was poor and had but few
+friends--she asked me if I had been to the Hall of Science, Old
+Street. I answered, with the stupid, ignorant reflection of other
+people's prejudices so sadly common, "No, I have never been there. Mr.
+Bradlaugh is rather a rough sort of speaker, is he not?"
+
+"He is the finest speaker of Saxon-English that I have ever heard,"
+she answered, "except, perhaps, John Bright, and his power over a
+crowd is something marvellous. Whether you agree with him or not, you
+should hear him."
+
+In the following July I went into the shop of Mr. Edward Truelove,
+256, High Holborn, in search of some Comtist publications, having come
+across his name as a publisher in the course of my study at the
+British Museum. On the counter was a copy of the _National Reformer_,
+and, attracted by the title, I bought it. I read it placidly in the
+omnibus on my way to Victoria Station, and found it excellent, and was
+sent into convulsions of inward merriment when, glancing up, I saw an
+old gentleman gazing at me, with horror speaking from every line of
+his countenance. To see a young woman, respectably dressed in crape,
+reading an Atheistic journal, had evidently upset his peace of mind,
+and he looked so hard at the paper that I was tempted to offer it to
+him, but repressed the mischievous inclination.
+
+This first copy of the paper with which I was to be so closely
+connected bore date July 19, 1874, and contained two long letters from
+a Mr. Arnold of Northampton, attacking Mr. Bradlaugh, and a brief and
+singularly self-restrained answer from the latter. There was also an
+article on the National Secular Society, which made me aware that
+there was an organisation devoted to the propagandism of Free Thought.
+I felt that if such a society existed, I ought to belong to it, and I
+consequently wrote a short note to the editor of the _National
+Reformer_, asking whether it was necessary for a person to profess
+Atheism before being admitted to the Society. The answer appeared in
+the _National Reformer_:--
+
+"S.E.--To be a member of the National Secular Society it is only
+necessary to be able honestly to accept the four principles, as given
+in the _National Reformer_ of June 14th. This any person may do
+without being required to avow himself an Atheist. Candidly, we can
+see no logical resting-place between the entire acceptance of
+authority, as in the Roman Catholic Church, and the most extreme
+Rationalism. If, on again looking to the Principles of the Society,
+you can accept them, we repeat to you our invitation."
+
+I sent my name in as an active member, and find it is recorded in the
+_National Reformer_ of August 9th. Having received an intimation that
+Londoners could receive their certificates at the Hall of Science from
+Mr. Bradlaugh on any Sunday evening, I betook myself thither, and it
+was on August 2, 1874, that I first set foot in a Freethought hall.
+The Hall was crowded to suffocation, and, at the very moment announced
+for the lecture, a roar of cheering burst forth, a tall figure passed
+swiftly up the Hall to the platform, and, with a slight bow in answer
+to the voluminous greeting, Charles Bradlaugh took his seat. I looked
+at him with interest, impressed and surprised. The grave, quiet,
+stern, strong face, the massive head, the keen eyes, the magnificent
+breadth and height of forehead--was this the man I had heard described
+as a blatant agitator, an ignorant demagogue?
+
+He began quietly and simply, tracing out the resemblances between the
+Krishna and the Christ myths, and as he went from point to point his
+voice grew in force and resonance, till it rang round the hall like a
+trumpet. Familiar with the subject, I could test the value of his
+treatment of it, and saw that his knowledge was as sound as his
+language was splendid. Eloquence, fire, sarcasm, pathos, passion, all
+in turn were bent against Christian superstition, till the great
+audience, carried away by the torrent of the orator's force, hung
+silent, breathing soft, as he went on, till the silence that followed
+a magnificent peroration broke the spell, and a hurricane of cheers
+relieved the tension.
+
+He came down the Hall with some certificates in his hand, glanced
+round, and handed me mine with a questioning "Mrs. Besant?" Then he
+said, referring to my question as to a profession of Atheism, that he
+would willingly talk over the subject of Atheism with me if I would
+make an appointment, and offered me a book he had been using in his
+lecture. Long afterwards I asked him how he knew me, whom he had never
+seen, that he came straight to me in such fashion. He laughed and said
+he did not know, but, glancing over the faces, he felt sure that I was
+Annie Besant.
+
+From that first meeting in the Hall of Science dated a friendship that
+lasted unbroken till Death severed the earthly bond, and that to me
+stretches through Death's gateway and links us together still. As
+friends, not as strangers, we met--swift recognition, as it were,
+leaping from eye to eye; and I know now that the instinctive
+friendliness was in very truth an outgrowth of strong friendship in
+other lives, and that on that August day we took up again an ancient
+tie, we did not begin a new one. And so in lives to come we shall meet
+again, and help each other as we helped each other in this. And let me
+here place on record, as I have done before, some word of what I owe
+him for his true friendship; though, indeed, how great is my debt to
+him I can never tell. Some of his wise phrases have ever remained in
+my memory. "You should never say you have an opinion on a subject
+until you have tried to study the strongest things said against the
+view to which you are inclined." "You must not think you know a
+subject until you are acquainted with all that the best minds have
+said about it." "No steady work can be done in public unless the
+worker study at home far more than he talks outside." "Be your own
+harshest judge, listen to your own speech and criticise it; read abuse
+of yourself and see what grains of truth are in it." "Do not waste
+time by reading opinions that are mere echoes of your own; read
+opinions you disagree with, and you will catch aspects of truth you do
+not readily see." Through our long comradeship he was my sternest as
+well as gentlest critic, pointing out to me that in a party like ours,
+where our own education and knowledge were above those whom we led, it
+was very easy to gain indiscriminate praise and unstinted admiration;
+on the other hand, we received from Christians equally indiscriminate
+abuse and hatred. It was, therefore, needful that we should be our own
+harshest judges, and that we should be sure that we knew thoroughly
+every subject that we taught. He saved me from the superficiality that
+my "fatal facility" of speech might so easily have induced; and when I
+began to taste the intoxication of easily won applause, his criticism
+of weak points, his challenge of weak arguments, his trained judgment,
+were of priceless service to me, and what of value there is in my work
+is very largely due to his influence, which at once stimulated and
+restrained.
+
+One very charming characteristic of his was his extreme courtesy in
+private life, especially to women. This outward polish, which sat so
+gracefully on his massive frame and stately presence, was foreign
+rather than English--for the English, as a rule, save such as go to
+Court, are a singularly unpolished people--and it gave his manner a
+peculiar charm. I asked him once where he had learned his gracious
+fashions that were so un-English--he would stand with uplifted hat as
+he asked a question of a maidservant, or handed a woman into a
+carriage--and he answered, with a half-smile, half-scoff, that it was
+only in England he was an outcast from society. In France, in Spain,
+in Italy, he was always welcomed among men and women of the highest
+social rank, and he supposed that he had unconsciously caught the
+foreign tricks of manner. Moreover, he was absolutely indifferent to
+all questions of social position; peer or artisan, it was to him
+exactly the same; he never seemed conscious of the distinctions of
+which men make so much.
+
+Our first conversation, after the meeting at the Hall of Science, took
+place a day or two later in his little study in 29, Turner Street,
+Commercial Road, a wee room overflowing with books, in which he looked
+singularly out of place. Later I learned that he had failed in
+business in consequence of Christian persecution, and, resolute to
+avoid bankruptcy, he had sold everything he possessed, save his books,
+had sent his wife and daughters to live in the country with his
+father-in-law, had taken two tiny rooms in Turner Street, where he
+could live for a mere trifle, and had bent himself to the task of
+paying off the liabilities he had incurred--incurred in consequence of
+his battling for political and religious liberty. I took with me my
+MS. essay "On the Nature and Existence of God," and it served as the
+basis for our conversation; we found there was little difference in
+our views. "You have thought yourself into Atheism without knowing
+it," he said, and all that I changed in the essay was the correction
+of the vulgar error that the Atheist says "there is no God," by the
+insertion of a passage disclaiming this position from an essay pointed
+out to me by Mr. Bradlaugh. And at this stage of my life-story, it is
+necessary to put very clearly the position I took up and held so many
+years as Atheist, because otherwise the further evolution into
+Theosophist will be wholly incomprehensible. It will lead me into
+metaphysics, and to some readers these are dry, but if any one would
+understand the evolution of a Soul he must be willing to face the
+questions which the Soul faces in its growth. And the position of the
+philosophic Atheist is so misunderstood that it is the more necessary
+to put it plainly, and Theosophists, at least, in reading it, will see
+how Theosophy stepped in finally as a further evolution towards
+knowledge, rendering rational, and therefore acceptable, the loftiest
+spirituality that the human mind can as yet conceive.
+
+In order that I may not colour my past thinkings by my present
+thought, I take my statements from pamphlets written when I adopted
+the Atheistic philosophy and while I continued an adherent thereof. No
+charge can then be made that I have softened my old opinions for the
+sake of reconciling them with those now held.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT.
+
+
+The first step which leaves behind the idea of a limited and personal
+God, an extra-cosmic Creator, and leads the student to the point
+whence Atheism and Pantheism diverge, is the recognition that a
+profound unity of substance underlies the infinite diversities of
+natural phenomena, the discernment of the One beneath the Many. This
+was the step I had taken ere my first meeting with Charles Bradlaugh,
+and I had written:--
+
+"It is manifest to all who will take the trouble to think steadily,
+that there can be only one eternal and underived substance, and that
+matter and spirit must, therefore, only be varying manifestations of
+this one substance. The distinction made between matter and spirit is,
+then, simply made for the sake of convenience and clearness, just as
+we may distinguish perception from judgment, both of which, however,
+are alike processes of thought. Matter is, in its constituent elements,
+the same as spirit; existence is _one_, however manifold in its
+phenomena; life is one, however multiform in its evolution. As the
+heat of the coal differs from the coal itself, so do memory,
+perception, judgment, emotion, and will differ from the brain which is
+the instrument of thought. But nevertheless they are all equally
+products of the one sole substance, varying only in their
+conditions.... I find myself, then, compelled to believe that one only
+substance exists in all around me; that the universe is eternal, or at
+least eternal so far as our faculties are concerned, since we cannot,
+as some one has quaintly put it, 'get to the outside of everywhere';
+that a Deity cannot be conceived of as apart from the universe; that
+the Worker and the Work are inextricably interwoven, and in some sense
+eternally and indissolubly combined. Having got so far, we will
+proceed to examine into the possibility of proving the existence of
+that one essence popularly called by the name of _God_, under the
+conditions strictly defined by the orthodox. Having demonstrated, as I
+hope to do, that the orthodox idea of God is unreasonable and absurd,
+we will endeavour to ascertain whether _any_ idea of God, worthy to be
+called an idea, is attainable in the present state of our faculties."
+"The Deity must of necessity be that one and only substance out of
+which all things are evolved, under the uncreated conditions and
+eternal laws of the universe; He must be, as Theodore Parker somewhat
+oddly puts it, 'the materiality of matter as well as the spirituality
+of spirit'--_i.e._, these must both be products of this one substance;
+a truth which is readily accepted as soon as spirit and matter are
+seen to be but different modes of one essence. Thus we identify
+substance with the all-comprehending and vivifying force of nature,
+and in so doing we simply reduce to a physical impossibility the
+existence of the Being described by the orthodox as a God possessing
+the attributes of personality. The Deity becomes identified with
+nature, co-extensive with the universe, but the _God_ of the orthodox
+no longer exists; we may change the signification of God, and use the
+word to express a different idea, but we can no longer mean by it a
+Personal Being in the orthodox sense, possessing an individuality
+which divides Him from the rest of the universe."[3]
+
+Proceeding to search whether _any_ idea of God was attainable, I came
+to the conclusion that evidence of the existence of a conscious Power
+was lacking, and that the ordinary proofs offered were inconclusive;
+that we could grasp phenomena and no more. "There appears, also, to
+be a possibility of a mind in nature, though we have seen that
+intelligence is, strictly speaking, impossible. There cannot be
+perception, memory, comparison, or judgment, but may there not be a
+perfect mind, unchanging, calm, and still? Our faculties fail us when
+we try to estimate the Deity, and we are betrayed into contradictions
+and absurdities; but does it therefore follow that He _is_ not? It
+seems to me that to deny His existence is to overstep the boundaries
+of our thought-power almost as much as to try and define it. We
+pretend to know the Unknown if we declare Him to be the Unknowable.
+Unknowable to us at present, yes! Unknowable for ever, in other
+possible stages of existence? We have reached a region into which we
+cannot penetrate; here all human faculties fail us; we bow our heads
+on 'the threshold of the unknown.'
+
+  "'And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see,
+  But if we could see and hear, this vision--were it not He?'
+
+Thus sings Alfred Tennyson, the poet of metaphysics: '_if_ we could
+see and hear.' Alas! it is always an 'if!'[4]
+
+This refusal to believe without evidence, and the declaration that
+anything "behind phenomena" is unknowable to man as at present
+constituted--these are the two chief planks of the Atheistic platform,
+as Atheism was held by Charles Bradlaugh and myself. In 1876 this
+position was clearly reaffirmed. "It is necessary to put briefly the
+Atheistic position, for no position is more continuously and more
+persistently misrepresented. Atheism is _without_ God. It does not
+assert _no_ God. 'The Atheist does not say "There is no God," but he
+says, "I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the
+word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation.
+I do not deny God, because I cannot deny that of which I have no
+conception, and the conception of which, by its affirmer, is so
+imperfect that he is unable to define it to me."' (Charles Bradlaugh,
+"Freethinker's Text-book," p. 118.) The Atheist neither affirms nor
+denies the possibility of phenomena differing from those recognised by
+human experience.... As his knowledge of the universe is extremely
+limited and very imperfect, the Atheist declines either to deny or to
+affirm anything with regard to modes of existence of which he knows
+nothing. Further, he refuses to believe anything concerning that of
+which he knows nothing, and affirms that that which can never be the
+subject of knowledge ought never to be the object of belief. While the
+Atheist, then, neither affirms nor denies the unknown, he _does_ deny
+all which conflicts with the knowledge to which he has already
+attained. For example, he _knows_ that one is one, and that three
+times one are three; he _denies_ that three times one are, or can be,
+one. The position of the Atheist is a clear and a reasonable one: I
+know nothing about 'God,' and therefore I do not believe in Him or in
+it; what you tell me about your God is self-contradictory, and is
+therefore incredible. I do not deny 'God,' which is an unknown tongue
+to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without
+God."[5] Up to 1887 I find myself writing on the same lines: "No man
+can rationally affirm 'There is no God,' until the word 'God' has for
+him a definite meaning, and until everything that exists is known to
+him, and known with what Leibnitz calls 'perfect knowledge.' The
+Atheist's denial of the Gods begins only when these Gods are defined
+or described. Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not
+palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been
+described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human
+thought--Nor is anything gained by the assertors of Deity when they
+allege that He is incomprehensible. If 'God' exists and is
+incomprehensible, His incomprehensibility is an admirable reason for
+being silent about Him, but can never justify the affirmation of
+self-contradictory propositions, and the threatening of people with
+damnation if they do not accept them."[6] "The belief of the Atheist
+stops where his evidence stops. He believes in the existence of the
+universe, judging the accessible proof thereof to be adequate, and he
+finds in this universe sufficient cause for the happening of all
+phenomena. He finds no intellectual satisfaction in placing a gigantic
+conundrum behind the universe, which only adds its own
+unintelligibility to the already sufficiently difficult problem of
+existence. Our lungs are not fitted to breathe beyond the atmosphere
+which surrounds our globe, and our faculties cannot breathe outside
+the atmosphere of the phenomenal."[7] And I summed up this essay with
+the words: "I do not believe in God. My mind finds no grounds on which
+to build up a reasonable faith. My heart revolts against the spectre
+of an Almighty Indifference to the pain of sentient beings. My
+conscience rebels against the injustice, the cruelty, the inequality,
+which surround me on every side. But I believe in Man. In man's
+redeeming power; in man's remoulding energy; in man's approaching
+triumph, through knowledge, love, and work."[8]
+
+These views of existence naturally colour all views of life and of the
+existence of the Soul. And here steps in the profound difference
+between Atheism and Pantheism; both posit an Existence at present
+inscrutable by human faculties, of which all phenomena are modes; but
+to the Atheist that Existence manifests as Force-Matter, unconscious,
+unintelligent, while to the Pantheist it manifests as Life-Matter,
+conscious, intelligent. To the one, life and consciousness are
+attributes, properties, dependent upon arrangements of matter; to the
+other they are fundamental, essential, and only limited in their
+manifestation by arrangements of matter. Despite the attraction held
+for me in Spinoza's luminous arguments, the over-mastering sway which
+Science was beginning to exercise over me drove me to seek for the
+explanation of all problems of life and mind at the hands of the
+biologist and the chemist. They had done so much, explained so much,
+could they not explain all? Surely, I thought, the one safe ground is
+that of experiment, and the remembered agony of doubt made me very
+slow to believe where I could not prove. So I was fain to regard life
+as an attribute, and this again strengthened the Atheistic position.
+"Scientifically regarded, life is not an entity but a property; it is
+not a mode of existence, but a characteristic of certain modes. Life
+is the result of an arrangement of matter, and when rearrangement
+occurs the former result can no longer be present; we call the result
+of the changed arrangement death. Life and death are two convenient
+words for expressing the general outcome of two arrangements of
+matter, one of which is always found to precede the other."[9] And
+then, having resorted to chemistry for one illustration, I took
+another from one of those striking and easily grasped analogies,
+facility for seeing and presenting which has ever been one of the
+secrets of my success as a propagandist. Like pictures, they impress
+the mind of the hearer with a vivid sense of reality. "Every one knows
+the exquisite iridiscence of mother-of-pearl, the tender, delicate
+hues which melt into each other, glowing with soft radiance. How
+different is the dull, dead surface of a piece of wax. Yet take that
+dull, black wax and mould it so closely to the surface of the
+mother-of-pearl that it shall take every delicate marking of the
+shell, and when you raise it the seven-hued glory shall smile at you
+from the erstwhile colourless surface. For, though it be to the naked
+eye imperceptible, all the surface of the mother-of-pearl is in
+delicate ridges and furrows, like the surface of a newly-ploughed
+field; and when the waves of light come dashing up against the ridged
+surface, they are broken like the waves on a shingly shore, and are
+flung backwards, so that they cross each other and the oncoming waves;
+and, as every ray of white light is made up of waves of seven colours,
+and these waves differ in length each from the others, the fairy
+ridges fling them backward separately, and each ray reaches the eye by
+itself; so that the colour of the mother-of-pearl is really the spray
+of the light waves, and comes from arrangement of matter once again.
+Give the dull, black wax the same ridges and furrows, and its glory
+shall differ in nothing from that of the shell. To apply our
+illustration: as the colour belongs to one arrangement of matter and
+the dead surface to another, so life belongs to some arrangements of
+matter and is their resultant, while the resultant of other
+arrangements is death."[10]
+
+The same line of reasoning naturally was applied to the existence of
+"spirit" in man, and it was argued that mental activity, the domain of
+the "spirit," was dependent on bodily organisation. "When the babe is
+born it shows no sign of mind. For a brief space hunger and repletion,
+cold and warmth are its only sensations. Slowly the specialised senses
+begin to function; still more slowly muscular movements, at first
+aimless and reflex, become co-ordinated and consciously directed.
+There is no sign here of an intelligent spirit controlling a
+mechanism; there is every sign of a learning and developing
+intelligence, developing _pari passu_ with the organism of which it is
+a function. As the body grows, the mind grows with it, and the
+childish mind of the child develops into the hasty, quickly-judging,
+half-informed, unbalanced youthful mind of the youth; with maturity of
+years comes maturity of mind, and body and mind are vigorous and in
+their prime. As old age comes on and the bodily functions decay, the
+mind decays also, until age passes into senility, and body and mind
+sink into second childhood. Has the immortal spirit decayed with the
+organisation, or is it dwelling in sorrow, bound in its 'house of
+clay'? If this be so, the 'spirit' must be unconscious, or else
+separate from the very individual whose essence it is supposed to be,
+for the old man does not suffer when his mind is senile, but is
+contented as a little child. And not only is this constant,
+simultaneous growth and decay of body and mind to be observed, but we
+know that mental functions are disordered and suspended by various
+physical conditions. Alcohol, many drugs, fever, disorder the mind; a
+blow on the cranium suspends its functions, and the 'spirit' returns
+with the surgeon's trepanning. Does the 'spirit' take part in dreams?
+Is it absent from the idiot, from the lunatic? Is it guilty of
+manslaughter when the madman murders, or does it helplessly watch its
+own instrument performing actions at which it shudders? If it can only
+work here through an organism, is its nature changed in its
+independent life, severed from all with which it was identified? Can
+it, in its 'disembodied state,' have anything in common with its
+past?"[11]
+
+It will be seen that my unbelief in the existence of the Soul or
+Spirit was a matter of cold, calm reasoning. As I wrote in 1885: "For
+many of us evidence must precede belief. I would gladly believe in a
+happy immortality for all, as I would gladly believe that all misery
+and crime and poverty will disappear in 1885--_if I could_. But I am
+unable to believe an improbable proposition unless convincing evidence
+is brought in support of it. Immortality is most improbable; no
+evidence is brought forward in its favour. I cannot believe only
+because I wish."[12] Such was the philosophy by which I lived from
+1874 to 1886, when first some researches that will be dealt with in
+their proper place, and which led me ultimately to the evidence I had
+before vainly demanded, began to shake my confidence in its adequacy.
+Amid outer storm and turmoil and conflict, I found it satisfy my
+intellect, while lofty ideals of morality fed my emotions. I called
+myself Atheist, and rightly so, for I was without God, and my horizon
+was bounded by life on earth; I gloried in the name then, as it is
+dear to my heart now, for all the associations with which it is
+connected. "Atheist is one of the grandest titles a man can wear; it
+is the Order of Merit of the world's heroes. Most great discoverers,
+most deep-thinking philosophers, most earnest reformers, most toiling
+pioneers of progress, have in their turn had flung at them the name of
+Atheist. It was howled over the grave of Copernicus; it was clamoured
+round the death-pile of Bruno; it was yelled at Vanini, at Spinoza, at
+Priestley, at Voltaire, at Paine; it has become the laurel-bay of the
+hero, the halo of the martyr; in the world's history it has meant the
+pioneer of progress, and where the cry of 'Atheist' is raised there
+may we be sure that another step is being taken towards the redemption
+of humanity. The saviours of the world are too often howled at as
+Atheists, and then worshipped as Deities. The Atheists are the
+vanguard of the army of Freethought, on whom falls the brunt of the
+battle, and are shivered the hardest of the blows; their feet trample
+down the thorns that others may tread unwounded; their bodies fill up
+the ditch that, by the bridge thus made, others may pass to victory.
+Honour to the pioneers of progress, honour to the vanguard of
+Liberty's army, honour to those who to improve earth have forgotten
+heaven, and who in their zeal for man have forgotten God."[13]
+
+This poor sketch of the conception of the universe, to which I had
+conquered my way at the cost of so much pain, and which was the inner
+centre round which my life revolved for twelve years, may perhaps show
+that the Atheistic Philosophy is misjudged sorely when it is scouted
+as vile or condemned as intellectually degraded. It has outgrown
+anthropomorphic deities, and it leaves us face to face with Nature,
+open to all her purifying, strengthening inspirations. "There is only
+one kind of prayer," it says, "which is reasonable, and that is the
+deep, silent adoration of the greatness and beauty and order around
+us, as revealed in the realms of non-rational life and in Humanity; as
+we bow our heads before the laws of the universe, and mould our lives
+into obedience to their voice, we find a strong, calm peace steal over
+our hearts, a perfect trust in the ultimate triumph of the right, a
+quiet determination to 'make our lives sublime.' Before our own high
+ideals, before those lives which show us 'how high the tides of Divine
+life have risen in the human world,' we stand with hushed voice and
+veiled face; from them we draw strength to emulate, and even dare
+struggle to excel. The contemplation of the ideal is true prayer; it
+inspires, it strengthens, it ennobles. The other part of prayer is
+work; from contemplation to labour, from the forest to the street.
+Study nature's laws, conform to them, work in harmony with them, and
+work becomes a prayer and a thanksgiving, an adoration of the
+universal wisdom, and a true obedience to the universal law."[14]
+
+To a woman of my temperament, filled with passionate desire for the
+bettering of the world, the elevation of humanity, a lofty system of
+ethics was of even more importance than a logical, intellectual
+conception of the universe; and the total loss of all faith in a
+righteous God only made me more strenuously assertive of the binding
+nature of duty and the overwhelming importance of conduct. In 1874
+this conviction found voice in a pamphlet on the "True Basis of
+Morality," and in all the years of my propaganda on the platform of
+the National Secular Society no subject was more frequently dealt with
+in my lectures than that of human ethical growth and the duty of man
+to man. No thought was more constantly in my mind than that of the
+importance of morals, and it was voiced at the very outset of my
+public career. Speaking of the danger lest "in these stirring times of
+inquiry," old sanctions of right conduct should be cast aside ere new
+ones were firmly established, I wrote: "It therefore becomes the duty
+of every one who fights in the ranks of Freethought, and who ventures
+to attack the dogmas of the Churches, and to strike down the
+superstitions which enslave men's intellect, to beware how he uproots
+sanctions of morality which he is too weak to replace, or how, before
+he is prepared with better ones, he removes the barriers which do yet,
+however poorly, to some extent check vice and repress crime.... That
+which touches morality touches the heart of society; a high and pure
+morality is the life-blood of humanity; mistakes in belief are
+inevitable, and are of little moment; mistakes in life destroy
+happiness, and their destructive consequences spread far and wide. It
+is, then, a very important question whether we, who are endeavouring
+to take away from the world the authority on which has hitherto been
+based all its morality, can offer a new and firm ground whereupon may
+safely be built up the fair edifice of a noble life."
+
+I then proceeded to analyse revelation and intuition as a basis for
+morals, and, discarding both, I asserted: "The true basis of morality
+is utility; that is, the adaptation of our actions to the promotion of
+the general welfare and happiness; the endeavour so to rule our lives
+that we may serve and bless mankind." And I argued for this basis,
+showing that the effort after virtue was implied in the search for
+happiness: "Virtue is an indispensable part of all true and solid
+happiness.... But it is, after all, only reasonable that happiness
+should be the ultimate test of right and wrong, if we live, as we do,
+in a realm of law. Obedience to law must necessarily result in
+harmony, and disobedience in discord. But if obedience to law result
+in harmony it must also result in happiness--all through nature
+obedience to law results in happiness, and through obedience each
+living thing fulfils the perfection of its being, and in that
+perfection finds its true happiness." It seemed to me most important
+to remove morality from the controversies about religion, and to give
+it a basis of its own: "As, then, the grave subject of the existence
+of Deity is a matter of dispute, it is evidently of deep importance to
+society that morality should not be dragged into this battlefield, to
+stand or totter with the various theories of the Divine nature which
+human thought creates and destroys. If we can found morality on a
+basis apart from theology, we shall do humanity a service which can
+scarcely be overestimated." A study of the facts of nature, of the
+consequences of man in society, seemed sufficient for such a basis.
+"Our faculties do not suffice to tell us about God; they do suffice to
+study phenomena, and to deduce laws from correlated facts. Surely,
+then, we should do wisely to concentrate our strength and our energies
+on the discovery of the attainable, instead of on the search after the
+unknowable. If we are told that morality consists in obedience to the
+supposed will of a supposed perfectly moral being, because in so doing
+we please God, then we are at once placed in a region where our
+faculties are useless to us, and where our judgment is at fault. But
+if we are told that we are to lead noble lives, because nobility of
+life is desirable for itself alone, because in so doing we are acting
+in harmony with the laws of Nature, because in so doing we spread
+happiness around our pathway and gladden our fellow-men--then, indeed,
+motives are appealed to which spring forward to meet the call, and
+chords are struck in our hearts which respond in music to the touch."
+It was to the establishment of this secure basis that I bent my
+energies, this that was to me of supreme moment. "Amid the fervid
+movement of society, with its wild theories and crude social reforms,
+with its righteous fury against oppression and its unconsidered
+notions of wider freedom and gladder life, it is of vital importance
+that morality should stand on a foundation unshakable; that so through
+all political and religious revolutions human life may grow purer and
+nobler, may rise upwards into settled freedom, and not sink downwards
+into anarchy. Only utility can afford us a sure basis, the
+reasonableness of which will be accepted alike by thoughtful student
+and hard-headed artisan. Utility appeals to all alike, and sets in
+action motives which are found equally in every human heart. Well
+shall it be for humanity that creeds and dogmas pass away, that
+superstition vanishes, and the clear light of freedom and science
+dawns on a regenerated earth--but well only if men draw tighter and
+closer the links of trustworthiness, of honour, and of truth. Equality
+before the law is necessary and just; liberty is the birthright of
+every man and woman; free individual development will elevate and
+glorify the race. But little worth these priceless jewels, little
+worth liberty and equality with all their promise for mankind, little
+worth even wider happiness, if that happiness be selfish, if true
+fraternity, true brotherhood, do not knit man to man, and heart to
+heart, in loyal service to the common need, and generous
+self-sacrifice to the common good."[15]
+
+To the forwarding of this moral growth of man, two things seemed to me
+necessary--an Ideal which should stir the emotions and impel to
+action, and a clear understanding of the sources of evil and of the
+methods by which they might be drained. Into the drawing of the first
+I threw all the passion of my nature, striving to paint the Ideal in
+colours which should enthral and fascinate, so that love and desire to
+realise might stir man to effort. If "morality touched by emotion" be
+religion, then truly was I the most religious of Atheists, finding in
+this dwelling on and glorifying of the Ideal full satisfaction for the
+loftiest emotions. To meet the fascination exercised over men's hearts
+by the Man of Sorrows, I raised the image of man triumphant, man
+perfected. "Rightly is the ideal Christian type of humanity a Man of
+Sorrows. Jesus, with worn and wasted body; with sad, thin lips, curved
+into a mournful droop of penitence for human sin; with weary eyes
+gazing up to heaven because despairing of earth; bowed down and aged
+with grief and pain, broken-hearted with long anguish, broken-spirited
+with unresisted ill-usage--such is the ideal man of the Christian
+creed. Beautiful with a certain pathetic beauty, telling of the long
+travail of earth, eloquent of the sufferings of humanity, but not the
+model type to which men should conform their lives, if they would make
+humanity glorious. And, therefore, in radiant contrast with this,
+stands out in the sunshine and under the blue summer sky, far from
+graveyards and torture of death agony, the fair ideal Humanity of the
+Atheist. In form strong and fair, perfect in physical development as
+the Hercules of Grecian art, radiant with love, glorious in
+self-reliant power; with lips bent firm to resist oppression, and
+melting into soft curves of passion and of pity; with deep, far-seeing
+eyes, gazing piercingly into the secrets of the unknown, and resting
+lovingly on the beauties around him; with hands strong to work in the
+present; with heart full of hope which the future shall realise;
+making earth glad with his labour and beautiful with his skill--this,
+this is the Ideal Man, enshrined in the Atheist's heart. The ideal
+humanity of the Christian is the humanity of the slave, poor, meek,
+broken-spirited, humble, submissive to authority, however oppressive
+and unjust; the ideal humanity of the Atheist is the humanity of the
+free man who knows no lord, who brooks no tyranny, who relies on his
+own strength, who makes his brother's quarrel his, proud,
+true-hearted, loyal, brave."[16]
+
+A one-sided view? Yes. But a very natural outcome of a sunny nature,
+for years held down by unhappiness and the harshness of an outgrown
+creed. It was the rebound of such a nature suddenly set free,
+rejoicing in its liberty and self-conscious strength, and it carried
+with it a great power of rousing the sympathetic enthusiasm of men and
+women, deeply conscious of their own restrictions and their own
+longings. It was the cry of the freed soul that had found articulate
+expression, and the many inarticulate and prisoned souls answered to
+it tumultously, with fluttering of caged wings. With hot insistence I
+battled for the inspiration to be drawn from the beauty and grandeur
+of which human life was capable. "Will any one exclaim, 'You are
+taking all beauty out of human life, all hope, all warmth, all
+inspiration; you give us cold duty for filial obedience, and
+inexorable law in the place of God'? All beauty from life? Is there,
+then, no beauty in the idea of forming part of the great life of the
+universe, no beauty in conscious harmony with Nature, no beauty in
+faithful service, no beauty in ideals of every virtue? 'All hope'?
+Why, I give you more than hope, I give you certainty; if I bid you
+labour for this world, it is with the knowledge that this world will
+repay you a, thousand-fold, because society will grow purer, freedom
+more settled, law more honoured, life more full and glad. What is your
+heaven? A heaven in the clouds! I point to a heaven attainable on
+earth. 'All warmth'? What! you serve warmly a God unknown and
+invisible, in a sense the projected shadow of your own imaginings, and
+can only serve coldly your brother whom you see at your side? There is
+no warmth in brightening the lot of the sad, in reforming abuses, in
+establishing equal justice for rich and poor? You find warmth in the
+church, but none in the home? Warmth in imagining the cloud glories of
+heaven, but none in creating substantial glories on earth?' All
+inspiration'? If you want inspiration to feeling, to sentiment,
+perhaps you had better keep to your Bible and your creeds; if you want
+inspiration to work, go and walk through the East of London, or the
+back streets of Manchester. You are inspired to tenderness as you gaze
+at the wounds of Jesus, dead in Judaea long ago, and find no
+inspiration in the wounds of men and women, dying in the England of
+to-day? You 'have tears to shed for Him,' but none for the sufferer at
+your doors? His passion arouses your sympathies, but you see no pathos
+in the passion of the poor? Duty is colder than 'filial obedience'?
+What do you mean by filial obedience? Obedience to your ideal of
+goodness and love--is it not so? Then how is duty cold? I offer you
+ideals for your homage: here is Truth for your Mistress, to whose
+exaltation you shall devote your intellect; here is Freedom for your
+General, for whose triumph you shall fight; here is Love for your
+Inspirer, who shall influence your every thought; here is Man for your
+Master--not in heaven, but on earth--to whose service you shall
+consecrate every faculty of your being. 'Inexorable law in the place
+of God'? Yes; a stern certainty that you shall not waste your life,
+yet gather a rich reward at the close; that you shall not sow misery,
+yet reap gladness; that you shall not be selfish, yet be crowned with
+love; nor shall you sin, yet find safety in repentance. True, our
+creed _is_ a stern one, stern with the beautiful sternness of Nature.
+But if we be in the right, look to yourselves; laws do not check their
+action for your ignorance; fire will not cease to scorch, because you
+'did not know.'"[17]
+
+With equal vigour did I maintain that "virtue was its own reward," and
+that payment on the other side of the grave was unnecessary as an
+incentive to right living. "What shall we say to Miss Cobbe's
+contention that duty will 'grow grey and cold' without God and
+immortality? Yes, for those with whom duty is a matter of selfish
+calculation, and who are virtuous only because they look for a 'golden
+crown' in payment on the other side the grave. Those of us who find
+joy in right-doing, who work because work is useful to our fellows,
+who live well because in such living we pay our contribution to the
+world's wealth, leaving earth richer than we found it--we need no
+paltry payment after death for our life's labour, for in that labour
+is its own 'exceeding great reward.'"[18] But did any one yearn for
+immortality, that "not all of me shall die"? "Is it true that Atheism
+has no immortality? What is true immortality? Is Beethoven's true
+immortality in his continued personal consciousness, or in his
+glorious music deathless while the world endures? Is Shelley's true
+life in his existence in some far-off heaven, or in the pulsing
+liberty his lyrics send through men's hearts, when they respond to the
+strains of his lyre? Music does not die, though one instrument be
+broken; thought does not die, though one brain be shivered; love does
+not die, though one heart's strings be rent; and no great thinker dies
+so long as his thought re-echoes through the ages, its melody the
+fuller-toned the more human brains send its music on. Not only to the
+hero and the sage is this immortality given; it belongs to each
+according to the measure of his deeds; world-wide life for world-wide
+service; straitened life for straitened work; each reaps as he sows,
+and the harvest is gathered by each in his rightful order."[19]
+
+This longing to leave behind a name that will live among men by right
+of service done them, this yearning for human love and approval that
+springs naturally from the practical and intense realisation of human
+brotherhood--these will be found as strong motives in the breasts of
+the most earnest men and women who have in our generation identified
+themselves with the Freethought cause. They shine through the written
+and spoken words of Charles Bradlaugh all through his life, and every
+friend of his knows how often he has expressed the longing that "when
+the grass grows green over my grave, men may love me a little for the
+work I tried to do."
+
+Needless to say that, in the many controversies in which I took part,
+it was often urged against me that such motives were insufficient,
+that they appealed only to natures already ethically developed, and
+left the average man, and, above all, the man below the average, with
+no sufficiently constraining motive for right conduct. I resolutely
+held to my faith in human nature, and the inherent response of the
+human heart when appealed to from the highest grounds; strange--I
+often think now--this instinctive certainty I had of man's innate
+grandeur, that governed all my thought, inconsistent as that certainty
+was with my belief in his purely animal ancestry. Pressed too hard, I
+would take refuge in a passionate disdain for all who did not hear the
+thrilling voice of Virtue and love her for her own sweet sake. "I have
+myself heard the question asked: 'Why should I seek for truth, and why
+should I lead a good life, if there be no immortality in which to reap
+a reward?' To this question the Freethinker has one clear and short
+answer: 'There is no reason why you should seek Truth, if to you the
+search has no attracting power. There is no reason why you should lead
+a noble life, if you find your happiness in leading a poor and a base
+one.' Friends, no one can enjoy a happiness which is too high for his
+capabilities; a book may be of intensest interest, but a dog will very
+much prefer being given a bone. To him whose highest interest is
+centred in his own miserable self, to him who cares only to gain his
+own ends, to him who seeks only his own individual comfort, to that
+man Freethought can have no attraction. Such a man may indeed be made
+religious by a bribe of heaven; he may be led to seek for truth,
+because he hopes to gain his reward hereafter by the search; but Truth
+disdains the service of the self-seeker; she cannot be grasped by a
+hand that itches for reward. If Truth is not loved for her own pure
+sake, if to lead a noble life, if to make men happier, if to spread
+brightness around us, if to leave the world better than we found
+it--if these aims have no attraction for us, if these thoughts do not
+inspire us, then we are not worthy to be Secularists, we have no right
+to the proud title of Freethinkers. If you want to be paid for your
+good lives by living for ever in a lazy and useless fashion in an idle
+heaven; if you want to be bribed into nobility of life; if, like silly
+children, you learn your lesson not to gain knowledge but to win
+sugar-plums, then you had better go back to your creeds and your
+churches; they are all you are fit for; you are not worthy to be free.
+But we--who, having caught a glimpse of the beauty of Truth, deem the
+possession of her worth more than all the world beside; who have made
+up our minds to do our work ungrudgingly, asking for no reward beyond
+the results which spring up from our labour--we will spread the Gospel
+of Freethought among men, until the sad minor melodies of Christianity
+have sobbed out their last mournful notes on the dying evening breeze,
+and on the fresh morning winds shall ring out the chorus of hope and
+joyfulness, from the glad lips of men whom the Truth has at last set
+free."[20]
+
+The intellectual comprehension of the sources of evil and the method
+of its extinction was the second great plank in my ethical platform.
+The study of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, of Huxley, Büchner and
+Haeckel, had not only convinced me of the truth of evolution, but,
+with help from W.H. Clifford, Lubbock, Buckle, Lecky, and many
+another, had led me to see in the evolution of the social instinct the
+explanation of the growth of conscience and of the strengthening of
+man's mental and moral nature. If man by study of the conditions
+surrounding him and by the application of intelligence to the subdual
+of external nature, had already accomplished so much, why should not
+further persistence along the same road lead to his complete
+emancipation? All the evil, anti-social side of his nature was an
+inheritance from his brute ancestry, and could be gradually
+eradicated; he could not only "let the ape and tiger die," but he
+could kill them out." It may be frankly acknowledged that man inherits
+from his brute progenitors various bestial tendencies which are in
+course of elimination. The wild-beast desire to fight is one of these,
+and this has been encouraged, not checked, by religion.... Another
+bestial tendency is the lust of the male for the female apart from
+love, duty, and loyalty; this again has been encouraged by religion,
+as witness the polygamy and concubinage of the Hebrews--as in Abraham,
+David, and Solomon, not to mention the precepts of the Mosaic
+laws--the bands of male and female prostitutes in connection with
+Pagan temples, and the curious outbursts of sexual passion in
+connection with religious revivals and missions. Another bestial
+tendency is greed, the strongest grabbing all he can and trampling
+down the weak, in the mad struggle for wealth; how and when has
+religion modified this tendency, sanctified as it is in our present
+civilisation? All these bestial tendencies will be eradicated only by
+the recognition of human duty, of the social bond. Religion has not
+eradicated them, but science, by tracing them to their source in our
+brute ancestry, has explained them and has shown them in their true
+light. As each recognises that the anti-social tendencies are the
+bestial tendencies in man, and that man in evolving further must
+evolve out of these, each also feels it part of his personal duty to
+curb these in himself, and so to rise further from the brute. This
+rational 'co-operation with Nature' distinguishes the scientific from
+the religious person, and this constraining sense of obligation is
+becoming stronger and stronger in all those who, in losing faith in
+God, have gained hope for man."[21]
+
+For this rational setting of oneself on the side of the forces working
+for evolution implied active co-operation by personal purity and
+nobility." To the Atheist it seems that the knowledge that the
+perfecting of the race is only possible by the improvement of the
+individual, supplies the most constraining motive which can be
+imagined for efforts after personal perfection. The Theist may desire
+personal perfection, but his desire is self-centred; each righteous
+individual is righteous, as it were, alone, and his righteousness does
+not benefit his fellows save as it may make him helpful and loving in
+his dealings with them. The Atheist desires personal perfection not
+only for his joy in it as beautiful in itself, but because science has
+taught him the unity of the race, and he knows that each fresh
+conquest of his over the baser parts of his nature, and each
+strengthening of the higher, is a gain for all, and not for himself
+alone."[22]
+
+Besides all this, the struggle against evil, regarded as transitory
+and as a necessary concomitant of evolution, loses its bitterness. "In
+dealing with evil, Atheism is full of hope instead of despair. To the
+Christian, evil is as everlasting as good; it exists by the permission
+of God, and, therefore, by the will of God. Our nature is corrupt,
+inclined to evil; the devil is ever near us, working all sin and all
+misery. What hope has the Christian face to face with a world's
+wickedness? what answer to the question, Whence comes sin? To the
+Atheist the terrible problem has in it no figure of despair. Evil
+comes from ignorance, we say; ignorance of physical and of moral
+facts. Primarily, from ignorance of physical order; parents who dwell
+in filthy, unventilated, unweathertight houses, who live on
+insufficient, innutritious, unwholesome food, will necessarily be
+unhealthy, will lack vitality, will probably have disease lurking in
+their veins; such parents will bring into the world ill-nurtured
+children, in whom the brain will generally be the least developed part
+of the body; such children, by their very formation, will incline to
+the animal rather than to the human, and by leading an animal, or
+natural, life will be deficient in those qualities which are necessary
+in social life. Their surroundings as they grow up, the home, the
+food, the associates, all are bad. They are trained into vice,
+educated into criminality; so surely as from the sown corn rises the
+wheat-ear, so from the sowing of misery, filth, and starvation shall
+arise crime. And the root of all is poverty and ignorance. Educate the
+children, and give them fair wage for fair work in their maturity, and
+crime will gradually diminish and ultimately disappear. Man is
+God-made, says Theism; man is circumstance-made, says Atheism. Man is
+the resultant of what his parents were, of what his surroundings have
+been and are, and of what they have made him; himself the result of
+the past he modifies the actual, and so the action and reaction go on,
+he himself the effect of what is past, and one of the causes of what
+is to come. Make the circumstances good and the results will be good,
+for healthy bodies and healthy brains may be built up, and from a
+State composed of such the disease of crime will have disappeared.
+Thus is our work full of hope; no terrible will of God have we to
+struggle against; no despairful future to look forward to, of a world
+growing more and more evil, until it is, at last, to burned up; but a
+glad, fair future of an ever-rising race, where more equal laws, more
+general education, more just division, shall eradicate pauperism,
+destroy ignorance, nourish independence, a future to be made the
+grander by our struggles, a future to be made the nearer by our
+toil."[23]
+
+This joyous, self-reliant facing of the world with the resolute
+determination to improve it is characteristic of the noblest Atheism
+of our day. And it is thus a distintly elevating factor in the midst
+of the selfishness, luxury, and greed of modern civilisation. It is a
+virile virtue in the midst of the calculating and slothful spirit
+which too ofter veils itself under the pretence or religion. It will
+have no putting off of justice to a far-off day of reckoning, and it
+is ever spurred on by the feeling, "The night cometh, when no man can
+work." Bereft of all hope of a personal future, it binds up its hopes
+with that of the race; unbelieving in any aid from Deity, it struggles
+the more strenuously to work out man's salvation by his own strength.
+"To us there is but small comfort in Miss Cobbe's assurance that
+'earth's wrongs and agonies' 'will be righted hereafter.' Granting for
+a moment that man survives death what certainty have we that 'the next
+world' will be any improvement on this? Miss Cobbe assures us that
+this is 'God's world'; whose world will the next be, if not also His?
+Will He be stronger there or better, that He should set right in that
+world the wrongs He has permitted here? Will He have changed His mind,
+or have become weary of the contemplation of suffering? To me the
+thought that the world was in the hands of a God who permitted all the
+present wrongs and pains to exist would be intolerable, maddening in
+its hopelessness. There is every hope of righting earth's wrongs and
+of curing earth's pains if the reason and skill of man which have
+already done so much are free to do the rest; but if they are to
+strive against omnipotence, hopeless indeed is the future of the
+world. It is in this sense that the Atheist looks on good as 'the
+final goal of ill,' and believing that that goal will be reached the
+sooner the more strenuous the efforts of each individual, he works in
+the glad certainty that he is aiding the world's progress thitherward.
+Not dreaming of a personal reward hereafter, not craving a personal
+payment from heavenly treasury, he works and loves, content that he is
+building a future fairer than his present, joyous that he is creating
+a new earth for a happier race."[24]
+
+Such was the creed and such the morality which governed my life and
+thoughts from 1874 to 1886, and with some misgivings to 1889, and from
+which I drew strength and happiness amid all outer struggles and
+distress. And I shall ever remain grateful for the intellectual and
+moral training it gave me, for the self-reliance it nurtured, for the
+altruism it inculcated, for the deep feeling of the unity of man that
+it fostered, for the inspiration to work that it lent. And perhaps the
+chief debt of gratitude I owe to Freethought is that it left the mind
+ever open to new truth, encouraged the most unshrinking questioning of
+Nature, and shrank from no new conclusions, however adverse to the
+old, that were based on solid evidence. I admit sorrowfully that all
+Freethinkers do not learn this lesson, but I worked side by side with
+Charles Bradlaugh, and the Freethought we strove to spread was
+strong-headed and broad-hearted.
+
+The antagonism which, as we shall see in a few moments, blazed out
+against me from the commencement of my platform work, was based partly
+on ignorance, was partly aroused by my direct attacks on Christianity,
+and by the combative spirit I myself showed in those attacks, and very
+largely by my extreme Radicalism in politics. I had against me all the
+conventional beliefs and traditions of society in general, and I
+attacked them, not with bated breath and abundant apologies, but
+joyously and defiantly, with sheer delight in the intellectual strife.
+I was fired, too, with passionate sympathy for the sufferings of the
+poor, for the overburdened, overdriven masses of the people, not only
+here but in every land, and wherever a blow was struck at Liberty or
+Justice my pen or tongue brake silence. It was a perpetual carrying of
+the fiery cross, and the comfortable did not thank me for shaking them
+out of their soft repose.
+
+The antagonism that grew out of ignorance regarded Atheism as implying
+degraded morality and bestial life, and they assailed my conduct not
+on evidence that it was evil, but on the presumption that an Atheist
+must be immoral. Thus a Christian opponent at Leicester assailed me as
+a teacher of free love, fathering on me views which were maintained in
+a book that I had not read, but which, before I had ever seen the
+_National Reformer_, had been reviewed in its columns--as it was
+reviewed in other London papers--and had been commended for its clear
+statement of the Malthusian position, but not for its contention as to
+free love, a theory to which Mr. Bradlaugh was very strongly opposed.
+Nor were the attacks confined to the ascription to me of theories
+which I did not hold, but agents of the Christian Evidence Society, in
+their street preaching, made the foulest accusations against me of
+personal immorality. Remonstrances addressed to the Rev. Mr. Engström,
+the secretary of the society, brought voluble protestations of
+disavowal and disapproval; but as the peccant agents were continued in
+their employment, the apologies were of small value. No accusation was
+too coarse, no slander too baseless, for circulation by these men; and
+for a long time these indignities caused me bitter suffering,
+outraging my pride, and soiling my good name. The time was to come
+when I should throw that good name to the winds for the sake of the
+miserable, but in those early days I had done nothing to merit, even
+ostensibly, such attacks. Even by educated writers, who should have
+known better, the most wanton accusations of violence and would-be
+destructiveness were brought against Atheists; thus Miss Frances Power
+Cobbe wrote in the _Contemporary Review_ that loss of faith in God
+would bring about the secularisation _or destruction_ of all
+cathedrals, churches, and chapels. "Why," I wrote in answer, "should
+cathedrals, churches, and chapels be destroyed? Atheism will utilise,
+not destroy, the beautiful edifices which, once wasted on God, shall
+hereafter be consecrated for man. Destroy Westminster Abbey, with its
+exquisite arches, its glorious tones of soft, rich colour, its
+stonework light as if of cloud, its dreamy, subdued twilight, soothing
+as the 'shadow of a great rock in a weary land'? Nay, but reconsecrate
+it to humanity. The fat cherubs who tumble over guns and banners on
+soldiers' graves will fitly be removed to some spot where their clumsy
+forms will no longer mar the upward-springing grace of lines of pillar
+and of arch; but the glorious building wherein now barbaric psalms are
+chanted and droning canons preach of Eastern follies, shall hereafter
+echo the majestic music of Wagner and Beethoven, and the teachers of
+the future shall there unveil to thronging multitudes the beauties and
+the wonders of the world. The 'towers and spires' will not be effaced,
+but they will no longer be symbols of a religion which sacrifices
+earth to heaven and Man to God."[25] Between the cultured and the
+uncultured burlesques of Atheism we came off pretty badly, being for
+the most part regarded, as the late Cardinal Manning termed us, as
+mere "cattle."
+
+The moral purity and elevation of Atheistic teaching were overlooked
+by many who heard only of my bitter attacks on Christian theology.
+Against the teachings of eternal torture, of the vicarious atonement,
+of the infallibility of the Bible, I levelled all the strength of my
+brain and tongue, and I exposed the history of the Christian Church
+with unsparing hand, its persecutions, its religious wars, its
+cruelties, its oppressions. Smarting under the suffering inflicted on
+myself, and wroth with the cruel pressure continually put on
+Freethinkers by Christian employers, speaking under constant threats
+of prosecution, identifying Christianity with the political and social
+tyrannies of Christendom, I used every weapon that history, science,
+criticism, scholarship could give me against the Churches; eloquence,
+sarcasm, mockery, all were called on to make breaches in the wall of
+traditional belief and crass superstition.
+
+To argument and reason I was ever ready to listen, but I turned a
+front of stubborn defiance to all attempts to compel assent to
+Christianity by appeals to force. "The threat and the enforcement of
+legal and social penalties against unbelief can never compel belief.
+Belief must be gained by demonstration; it can never be forced by
+punishment. Persecution makes the stronger among us bitter; the weaker
+among us hypocrites; it never has made and never can make an honest
+convert."[26]
+
+That men and women are now able to speak and think as openly as they
+do, that a broader spirit is visible in the Churches, that heresy is
+no longer regarded as morally disgraceful--these things are very
+largely due to the active and militant propaganda carried on under the
+leadership of Charles Bradlaugh, whose nearest and most trusted friend
+I was. That my tongue was in the early days bitterer than it should
+have been, I frankly acknowledge; that I ignored the services done by
+Christianity and threw light only on its crimes, thus committing
+injustice, I am ready to admit. But these faults were conquered long
+ere I left the Atheistic camp, and they were the faults of my
+personality, not of the Atheistic philosophy. And my main contentions
+were true, and needed to be made; from many a Christian pulpit to-day
+may be heard the echo of the Freethought teachings; men's minds have
+been awakened, their knowledge enlarged; and while I condemn the
+unnecessary harshness of some of my language, I rejoice that I played
+my part in that educating of England which has made impossible for
+evermore the crude superstitions of the past, and the repetition of
+the cruelties and injustices under which preceding heretics suffered.
+
+But my extreme political views had also much to do with the general
+feeling of hatred with which I was regarded. Politics, as such, I
+cared not for at all, for the necessary compromises of political life
+were intolerable to me; but wherever they touched on the life of the
+people they became to me of burning interest. The land question, the
+incidence of taxation, the cost of Royalty, the obstructive power of
+the House of Lords--these were the matters to which I put my hand; I
+was a Home Ruler, too, of course, and a passionate opponent of all
+injustice to nations weaker than ourselves, so that I found myself
+always in opposition to the Government of the day. Against our
+aggressive and oppressive policy in Ireland, in the Transvaal, in
+India, in Afghanistan, in Burmah, in Egypt, I lifted up my voice in
+all our great towns, trying to touch the consciences of the people,
+and to make them feel the immorality of a land-stealing, piratical
+policy. Against war, against capital punishment, against flogging,
+demanding national education instead of big guns, public libraries
+instead of warships--no wonder I was denounced as an agitator, a
+firebrand, and that all orthodox society turned up at me its most
+respectable nose.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+AT WORK.
+
+
+From this sketch of the inner sources of action let me turn to the
+actions themselves, and see how the outer life was led which fed
+itself at these springs.
+
+I have said that the friendship between Mr. Bradlaugh and myself dated
+from our first meeting, and a few days after our talk in Turner Street
+he came down to see me at Norwood. It was characteristic of the man
+that he refused my first invitation, and bade me to think well ere I
+asked him to my house. He told me that he was so hated by English
+society that any friend of his would be certain to suffer, and that I
+should pay heavily for any friendship extended to him. When, however,
+I wrote to him, repeating my invitation, and telling him that I had
+counted the cost, he came to see me. His words came true; my
+friendship for him alienated from me even many professed Freethinkers,
+but the strength and the happiness of it outweighed a thousand times
+the loss it brought, and never has a shadow of regret touched me that
+I clasped hands with him in 1874, and won the noblest friend that
+woman ever had. He never spoke to me a harsh word; where we differed,
+he never tried to override my judgment, nor force on me his views; we
+discussed all points of difference as equal friends; he guarded me
+from all suffering as far as friend might, and shared with me all the
+pain he could not turn aside; all the brightness of my stormy life
+came to me through him, from his tender thoughtfulness, his ever-ready
+sympathy, his generous love. He was the most unselfish man I ever
+knew, and as patient as he was strong. My quick, impulsive nature
+found in him the restful strength it needed, and learned from him the
+self-control it lacked.
+
+He was the merriest of companions in our rare hours of relaxation; for
+many years he was wont to come to my house in the morning, after the
+hours always set aside by him for receiving poor men who wanted advice
+on legal and other matters--for he was a veritable poor man's lawyer,
+always ready to help and counsel--and, bringing his books and papers,
+he would sit writing, hour after hour, I equally busy with my own
+work, now and then, perhaps, exchanging a word, breaking off just for
+lunch and dinner, and working on again in the evening till about ten
+o'clock--he always went early to bed when at home--he would take
+himself off again to his lodgings, about three-quarters of a mile
+away. Sometimes he would play cards for an hour, euchre being our
+favourite game. But while we were mostly busy and grave, we would make
+holiday sometimes, and then he was like a boy, brimming over with
+mirth, full of quaint turns of thought and speech; all the country
+round London has for me bright memories of our wanderings--Richmond,
+where we tramped across the park, and sat under its mighty trees;
+Windsor, with its groves of bracken; Kew, where we had tea in a funny
+little room, with watercress _ad libitum_; Hampton Court, with its
+dishevelled beauties; Maidenhead and Taplow, where the river was the
+attraction; and, above all, Broxbourne, where he delighted to spend
+the day with his fishing-rod, wandering along the river, of which he
+knew every eddy. For he was a great fisherman, and he taught me all
+the mysteries of the craft, mirthfully disdainful of my dislike of the
+fish when I had caught them. And in those days he would talk of all
+his hopes of the future, of his work, of his duty to the thousands who
+looked to him for guidance, of the time when he would sit in
+Parliament as member for Northampton, and help to pass into laws the
+projects of reform for which he was battling with pen and tongue. How
+often he would voice his love of England, his admiration of her
+Parliament, his pride in her history. Keenly alive to the blots upon
+it in her sinful wars of conquest, in the cruel wrongs inflicted upon
+subject peoples, he was yet an Englishman to the heart's core, but
+feeling above all the Englishman's duty, as one of a race that had
+gripped power and held it, to understand the needs of those he ruled,
+and to do justice willingly, since compulsion to justice there was
+none. His service to India in the latest years of his life was no
+suddenly accepted task. He had spoken for her, pleaded for her, for
+many a long year, through press and on platform, and his spurs as
+member for India were won long ere he was member of Parliament.
+
+A place on the staff of the _National Reformer_ was offered me by Mr.
+Bradlaugh a few days after our first meeting, and the small weekly
+salary thus earned--it was only a guinea, for national reformers are
+always poor--was a very welcome addition to my resources. My first
+contribution appeared in the number for August 30, 1874, over the
+signature of "Ajax," and I wrote in it regularly until Mr. Bradlaugh
+died; from 1877 until his death I sub-edited it, so as to free him
+from all the technical trouble and the weary reading of copy, and for
+part of this period was also co-editor. I wrote at first under a _nom
+de guerre_, because the work I was doing for Mr. Scott would have been
+prejudiced had my name appeared in the columns of the terrible
+_National Reformer_, and until this work--commenced and paid for--was
+concluded I did not feel at liberty to use my own name. Afterwards, I
+signed my _National Reformer_ articles, and the tracts written for Mr.
+Scott appeared anonymously.
+
+  The name was suggested by the famous statue of
+  "Ajax Crying for Light," a cast of which may be seen
+  in the centre walk by any visitor to the Crystal Palace,
+  Sydenham. The cry through the darkness for light,
+  even though light should bring destruction, was one
+  that awoke the keenest sympathy of response from my
+  heart:
+
+  "If our fate be death
+  Give light, and let us die!"
+
+To see, to know, to understand, even though the seeing blind, though
+the knowledge sadden, though the understanding shatter the dearest
+hopes--such has ever been the craving of the upward-striving mind in
+man. Some regard it as a weakness, as a folly, but I am sure that it
+exists most strongly in some of the noblest of our race; that from the
+lips of those who have done most in lifting the burden of ignorance
+from the overstrained and bowed shoulders of a stumbling world has
+gone out most often into the empty darkness the pleading, impassioned
+cry:
+
+"Give light!"
+
+The light may come with a blinding flash, but it is light none the
+less, and we can see.
+
+And now the time had come when I was to use that gift of speech which
+I had discovered in Sibsey Church that I possessed, and to use it to
+move hearts and brains all over the English land. In 1874, tentatively, and in 1875 definitely, I took up this keen weapon, and have used it ever
+since. My first attempt was at a garden party, in a brief informal
+debate, and I found that words came readily and smoothly: the second
+in a discussion at the Liberal Social Union on the opening of museums
+and art galleries on Sunday. My first lecture was given at the
+Co-operative Institute, 55, Castle Street, Oxford Street, on August
+25, 1874. Mr. Greening--then, I think, the secretary--had invited me
+to read a paper before the society, and had left me the choice of the
+subject. I resolved that my first public lecture should be on behalf
+of my own sex, so I selected for my theme, "The Political Status of
+Women," and wrote thereon a paper. But it was a very nervous person
+who presented herself at the Co-operative Institute on that August
+evening. When a visit to the dentist is made, and one stands on the
+steps outside, desiring to run away ere the neat little boy in buttons
+opens the door and beams on one with a smile of compassionate
+superiority and implike triumph, then the world seems dark and life is
+as a huge blunder. But all such feelings are poor and weak as compared
+with the sinking of the heart and the trembling of the knees which
+seize upon the unhappy lecturer as he advances towards his first
+audience, and as before his eyes rises a ghastly vision of a
+tongue-tied would-be lecturer, facing rows of listening faces,
+listening to--silence. But to my surprise all this miserable feeling
+vanished the moment I was on my feet and was looking at the faces
+before me. I felt no tremor of nervousness from the first word to the
+last, and as I heard my own voice ring out over the attentive
+listeners I was conscious of power and of pleasure, not of fear. And
+from that day to this my experience has been the same; before a
+lecture I am horribly nervous, wishing myself at the ends of the
+earth, heart beating violently, and sometimes overcome by deadly
+sickness. Once on my feet, I feel perfectly at my ease, ruler of the
+crowd, master of myself. I often jeer at myself mentally as I feel
+myself throbbing and fearful, knowing that when I stand up I shall be
+all right, and yet I cannot conquer the physical terror and trembling,
+illusory as I know them to be. People often say to me, "You look too
+ill to go on the platform." And I smile feebly and say I am all right,
+and I often fancy that the more miserably nervous I am in the
+ante-room, the better I speak when once on the platform. My second
+lecture was delivered on September 27th, at Mr. Moncure D. Conway's
+Chapel, in St. Paul's Road, Camden Town, and redelivered a few weeks
+later at a Unitarian Chapel, where the Rev. Peter Dean was minister.
+This was on the "True Basis of Morality," and was later printed as a
+pamphlet, which attained a wide circulation. This was all I did in the
+way of speaking in 1874, but I took silent part in an electioneering
+struggle at Northampton, where a seat for the House of Commons had
+fallen vacant by the death of Mr. Charles Gilpin. Mr. Bradlaugh had
+contested the borough as a Radical in 1868, obtaining 1,086 votes, and
+again in February, 1874, when he received 1,653; of these no less than
+1,060 were plumpers, while his four opponents had only 113, 64, 21 and
+12 plumpers respectively; this band formed the compact and personally
+loyal following which was to win the seat for its chief in 1880, after
+twelve years of steady struggle, and to return him over and over again
+to Parliament during the long contest which followed his election, and
+which ended in his final triumph. They never wavered in their
+allegiance to "our Charlie," but stood by him through evil report and
+good report, when he was outcast as when he was triumphant, loving him
+with a deep, passionate devotion, as honourable to them as it was
+precious to him. I have seen him cry like a child at evidences of
+their love for him, he whose courage no danger could daunt, and who
+was never seen to blench before hatred nor change his stern immobility
+in the face of his foes. Iron to enmity, he was soft as a woman to
+kindness; unbending as steel to pressure, he was ductile as wax to
+love. John Stuart Mill had the insight in 1868 to see his value, and
+the courage to recognise it. He strongly supported his candidature,
+and sent a donation to his election expenses. In his "Autobiography"
+he wrote (pp. 311, 312):--
+
+"He had the support of the working classes; having heard him speak I
+knew him to be a man of ability, and he had proved that he was the
+reverse of a demagogue by placing himself in strong opposition to the
+prevailing opinion of the Democratic party on two such important
+subjects as Malthusianism and Proportional Representation. Men of this
+sort, who, while sharing the democratic feeling of the working
+classes, judge political questions for themselves, and have the
+courage to assert their individual convictions against popular
+opposition, were needed, as it seemed to me, in Parliament; and I did
+not think that Mr. Bradlaugh's anti-religious opinions (even though he
+had been intemperate in the expression of them) ought to exclude him."
+
+It has been said that Mr. Mill's support of Mr. Bradlaugh's
+candidature at Northampton cost him his own seat at Westminster, and
+so bitter was bigotry at that time that the statement is very likely
+to be true. On this, Mr. Mill himself said: "It was the right thing to
+do, and if the election were yet to take place, I would do it again."
+
+At this election of September, 1874--the second in the year, for the
+general election had taken place in the February, and Mr. Bradlaugh
+had been put up and defeated during his absence in America--I went
+down to Northampton to report electioneering incidents for the
+_National Reformer_, and spent some days there in the whirl of the
+struggle. The Whig party was more bitter against Mr. Bradlaugh than
+was the Tory. Strenuous efforts were made to procure a Liberal
+candidate, who would be able at least to prevent Mr. Bradlaugh's
+return, and, by dividing the Liberal and Radical party, should let in
+a Tory rather than the detested Radical. Messrs. Bell and James and
+Dr. Pearce came on the scene only to disappear. Mr. Jacob Bright and
+Mr. Arnold Morley were vainly suggested. Mr. Ayrton's name was
+whispered. Major Lumley was recommended by Mr. Bernal Osborne. Dr.
+Kenealy proclaimed himself ready to come to the rescue of the Whigs.
+Mr. Tillett, of Norwich, Mr. Cox, of Belper, were invited, but neither
+would consent to oppose a good Radical who had fought two elections at
+Northampton and had been the chosen of the Radical workers for six
+years. At last Mr. William Fowler, a banker, accepted the task of
+handing over the representation of a Liberal and Radical borough to a
+Tory, and duly succeeded in giving the seat to Mr. Mereweather, a very
+reputable Tory lawyer. Mr. Bradlaugh polled 1,766, thus adding another
+133 voters to those who had polled for him in the previous February.
+
+That election gave me my first experience of anything in the nature of
+rioting. The violent abuse levelled against Mr. Bradlaugh by the
+Whigs, and the foul and wicked slanders circulated against him,
+assailing his private life and family relations, had angered almost to
+madness those who knew and loved him; and when it was found that the
+unscrupulous Whig devices had triumphed, had turned the election
+against him, and given over the borough to a Tory, the fury broke out
+into open violence. One illustration may be given as a type of these
+cruel slanders. It was known that Mr. Bradlaugh was separated from his
+wife, and it was alleged that being an Atheist, and, (therefore!) an
+opponent of marriage, he had deserted his wife and children, and left
+them to the workhouse. The cause of the separation was known to very
+few, for Mr. Bradlaugh was chivalrously honourable to women, and he
+would not shield his own good name at the cost of that of the wife of
+his youth and the mother of his children. But since his death his only
+remaining child has, in devotion to her father's memory, stated the
+melancholy truth: that Mrs. Bradlaugh gave way to drink; that for long
+years he bore with her and did all that man could do to save her; that
+finally, hopeless of cure, he broke up his home, and placed his wife
+in the care of her parents in the country, leaving her daughters with
+her, while he worked for their support. No man could have acted more
+generously and wisely under these cruel circumstances than he did, but
+it was, perhaps, going to an extreme of Quixotism, that he concealed
+the real state of the case, and let the public blame him as it would.
+His Northampton followers did not know the facts, but they knew him as
+an upright, noble man, and these brutal attacks on his personal
+character drove them wild. Stray fights had taken place during the
+election over these slanders, and, defeated by such foul weapons, the
+people lost control of their passions. As Mr. Bradlaugh was sitting
+well-nigh exhausted in the hotel, after the declaration of the poll,
+the landlord rushed in, crying to him to go out and try to stop the
+people, or there would be murder done at the "Palmerston," Mr.
+Fowler's headquarters; the crowd was charging the door, and the
+windows were being broken with showers of stones. Weary as he was, Mr.
+Bradlaugh sprang to his feet, and swiftly made his way to the rescue
+of those who had maligned and defeated him. Flinging himself before
+the doorway, from which the door had just been battered down, he
+knocked down one or two of the most violent, drove the crowd back,
+argued and scolded them into quietness, and finally dispersed them.
+But at nine o'clock he had to leave Northampton to catch the mail
+steamer for America at Queenstown, and after he had left, word went
+round that he had gone, and the riot he had quelled broke out afresh.
+The Riot Act was at last read, the soldiers were called out, stones
+flew freely, heads and windows were broken, but no very serious harm
+was done. The "Palmerston" and the printing-office of the _Mercury_,
+the Whig organ, were the principal sufferers; doors and windows
+disappearing somewhat completely. The day after the election I
+returned home, and soon after fell ill with a severe attack of
+congestion of the lungs. Soon after my recovery I left Norwood and
+settled in a house in Westbourne Terrace, Bayswater, where I remained
+till 1876.
+
+In the following January (1875), after much thought and self-analysis,
+I resolved to give myself wholly to propagandist work, as a
+Freethinker and a Social Reformer, and to use my tongue as well as my
+pen in the struggle. I counted the cost ere I determined on this step,
+for I knew that it would not only outrage the feelings of such new
+friends as I had already made, but would be likely to imperil my
+custody of my little girl. I knew that an Atheist was outside the law,
+obnoxious to its penalties, but deprived of its protection, and that
+the step I contemplated might carry me into conflicts in which
+everything might be lost and nothing could be gained. But the desire
+to spread liberty and truer thought among men, to war against bigotry
+and superstition, to make the world freer and better than I found
+it--all this impelled me with a force that would not be denied. I
+seemed to hear the voice of Truth ringing over the battlefield: "Who
+will go? Who will speak for me?" And I sprang forward with passionate
+enthusiasm, with resolute cry: "Here am I, send me!" Nor have I ever
+regretted for one hour that resolution, come to in solitude, carried
+out amid the surging life of men, to devote to that sacred cause every
+power of brain and tongue that I possessed. Very solemn to me is the
+responsibility of the public teacher, standing forth in Press and on
+platform to partly mould the thought of his time, swaying thousands of
+readers and hearers year after year. No weighter responsibility can
+any take, no more sacred charge. The written and the spoken word start
+forces none may measure, set working brain after brain, influence
+numbers unknown to the forthgiver of the word, work for good or for
+evil all down the stream of time. Feeling the greatness of the career,
+the solemnity of the duty, I pledged my word then to the cause I loved
+that no effort on my part should be wanted to render myself worthy of
+the privilege of service that I took; that I would read and study, and
+would train every faculty that I had; that I would polish my language,
+discipline my thought, widen my knowledge; and this, at least, I may
+say, that if I have written and spoken much, I have studied and
+thought more, and that I have not given to my mistress Truth that
+"which hath cost me nothing."
+
+This same year (1875) that saw me launched on the world as a public
+advocate of Freethought, saw also the founding of the Theosophical
+Society to which my Freethought was to lead me. I have often since
+thought with pleasure that at the very time I began lecturing in
+England, H.P. Blavatsky was at work in the United States, preparing
+the foundation on which in November, 1875, the Theosophical Society
+was to be raised. And with deeper pleasure yet have I found her
+writing of what she called the noble work against superstition done by
+Charles Bradlaugh and myself, rendering the propaganda of Theosophy
+far more practicable and safer than it would otherwise have been. The
+fight soon began, and with some queer little skirmishes. I was a
+member of the "Liberal Social Union," and one night a discussion arose
+as to the admissibility of Atheists to the Society. Dr. Zerffi
+declared that he would not remain a member if avowed Atheists were
+admitted. I promptly declared that I was an Atheist, and that the
+basis of the union was liberty of opinion. The result was that I found
+myself cold-shouldered, and those that had been warmly cordial to me
+merely as a non-Christian looked askance at me when I had avowed that
+my scepticism had advanced beyond their "limits of religious thought."
+The Liberal Social Union soon knew me no more, but in the wider field
+of work open before me, the narrow-mindedness of this petty clique
+troubled me not at all.
+
+I started my definite lecturing work at South Place Chapel in January,
+1875, Mr. Moncure D. Conway presiding for me, and I find in the
+_National Reformer_ for January 17th, the announcement that "Mrs.
+Annie Besant ('Ajax') will lecture at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, on
+'Civil and Religious Liberty.'" Thus I threw off my pseudonym, and
+rode into the field of battle with uplifted visor. The identification
+led to an odd little exhibition of bigotry. I had been invited by the
+Dialectical Society to read a paper, and had selected for subject,
+"The Existence of God." (It may be noted, in passing, that young
+students and speakers always select the most tremendous subjects for
+their discourses. One advances in modesty as one advances in
+knowledge, and after eighteen years of platform work, I am far more
+dubious than I was at their beginning as to my power of dealing in any
+sense adequately with the problems of life.) The Dialectical Society
+had for some years held their meetings in a room in Adam Street,
+rented from the Social Science Association. When the members gathered
+as usual on February 17th, the door was found to be locked, and they
+had to gather on the stairs; they found that "Ajax's" as yet
+undelivered paper was too much for Social Science nerves, and that
+entrance to their ordinary meeting-room was then and thenceforth
+denied them. So they, with "Ajax," found refuge at the Charing Cross
+Hotel, and speculated merrily on the eccentricities of religious
+bigotry.
+
+On February 12th I started on my first provincial lecturing tour, and
+after speaking at Birkenhead that evening went on by the night mail to
+Glasgow. Some races--dog races--I think, had been going on, and very
+unpleasant were many of the passengers waiting on the platform. Some
+Birkenhead friends had secured me a compartment, and watched over me
+till the train began to move. Then, after we had fairly started, the
+door was flung open by a porter, and a man was thrust in who half
+tumbled on to the seat. As he slowly recovered he stood up, and as his
+money rolled out of his hand on to the floor, and he gazed vaguely at
+it, I saw to my horror that he was drunk. The position was not
+pleasant, for the train was an express, and was not timed to stop for
+a considerable time. My odious fellow-passenger spent some time on the
+floor, hunting after his scattered coins; then he slowly gathered
+himself up and presently became conscious of my presence. He studied
+me for some time, and then proposed to shut the window. I assented
+quietly, not wanting to discuss a trifle and feeling in deadly
+terror--alone at night in an express with a man not drunk enough to be
+helpless, but too drunk to be controlled. Never before nor since have
+I felt so thoroughly frightened. I can see him still, swaying as he
+stood, with eyes bleared and pendulous lips--but I sat there quiet and
+outwardly unmoved, as is always my impulse in danger till I see some
+way of escape, only grasping a penknife in my pocket, with a desperate
+resolve to use my feeble weapon as soon as the need arose. The man
+came towards me with a fatuous leer, when a jarring noise was heard
+and the train began to slacken.
+
+"What is that?" stammered my drunken companion.
+
+"They are putting on the brakes to stop the train," I answered very
+slowly and distinctly, though a very passion of relief made it hard to
+say quietly the measured words.
+
+The man sat down stupidly, staring at me, and in a minute or two the
+train pulled up at a station--it had been stopped by signal. My
+immobility was gone. In a moment I was at the window, called the
+guard, and explained rapidly that I was a woman travelling alone, and
+that a half-drunken man was in the carriage. With the usual kindness
+of a railway official, he at once moved me and my baggage into another
+compartment, into which he locked me, and he kept a friendly watch
+over me at every station at which we stopped until he landed me safely
+at Glasgow.
+
+At Glasgow a room had been taken for me at a temperance hotel, and it
+seemed to me so new and lonely a thing to be "all on my own account"
+in a strange hotel in a strange city, that I wanted to sit down and
+cry. This feeling, to which I was too proud to yield, was probably
+partly due to the extreme greyness and grubbiness of my surroundings.
+Things are better now, but in those days temperance hotels were for
+the most part lacking in cleanliness. Abstinence from alcohol and a
+superfluity of "matter in the wrong place" do not seem necessary
+correlatives, yet I rarely went to a temperance hotel in which water
+was liberally used for other purposes than that of drinking. From
+Glasgow I went north to Aberdeen, where I found a very stern and
+critical audience. Not a sound broke the stillness as I walked up the
+hall; not a sound as I ascended the platform and faced the people; the
+canny Scot was not going to applaud a stranger at sight; he was going
+to see what she was like first. In grim silence they listened; I could
+not move them; they were granite like their own granite city, and I
+felt I would like to take off my head and throw it at them, if only to
+break that hard wall. After about twenty minutes, a fortunate phrase
+drew a hiss from some child of the Covenanters. I made a quick retort,
+there was a burst of cheering, and the granite vanished. Never after
+that did I have to complain of the coldness of an Aberdeen audience.
+Back to London from Aberdeen, and a long, weary journey it was, in a
+third-class carriage in the cold month of February; but the labour had
+in it a joy that outpaid all physical discomfort, and the feeling that
+I had found my work in the world gave a new happiness to life.
+
+On February 28th I stood for the first time on the platform of the
+Hall of Science, Old Street, St. Luke's, London, and was received with
+that warmth of greeting which Secularists are always so ready to
+extend to any who sacrifice aught to join their ranks. That hall is
+identified in my mind with many a bitter struggle, with both victory
+and defeat, but whether in victory or in defeat I found there always
+welcome; and the love and the courage wherewith Secularists stood by
+me have overpaid a thousandfold any poor services I was fortunate
+enough to render, while in their ranks, to the cause of Liberty, and
+wholly prevent any bitterness arising in my mind for any
+unfriendliness shown me by some, who have perhaps overstepped kindness
+and justice in their sorrowful wrath at my renunciation of Materialism
+and Atheism. So far as health was concerned, the lecturing acted as a
+tonic. My chest had always been a little delicate, and when I
+consulted a doctor on the possibility of my standing platform work, he
+answered, "It will either kill you or cure you." It entirely cured the
+lung weakness, and I grew strong and vigorous instead of being frail
+and delicate, as of old.
+
+It would be wearisome to go step by step over eighteen years of
+platform work, so I will only select here and there incidents
+illustrative of the whole. And here let me say that the frequent
+attacks made on myself and others, that we were attracted to
+Free-thought propaganda by the gains it offered, formed a somewhat
+grotesque contrast to the facts. On one occasion I spent eight days in
+Northumberland and Durham, gave twelve lectures, and made a deficit of
+eleven shillings on the whole. Of course such a thing could not happen
+in later years, when I had made my name by sheer hard work, but I
+fancy that every Secularist lecturer could tell of similar experiences
+in the early days of "winning his way." The fact is that from Mr.
+Bradlaugh downwards every one of us could have earned a competence
+with comparative ease in any other line of work, and could have earned
+it with public approval instead of amid popular reproach. Much of my
+early lecturing was done in Northumberland and Durham; the miners
+there are, as a rule, shrewd and hard-headed men, and very cordial is
+the greeting given by them to those they have reason to trust. At
+Seghill and at Bedlington I have slept in their cottages and have been
+welcomed to their tables, and I have a vivid memory of one evening at
+Seghill, after a lecture, when my host, himself a miner, invited about
+a dozen of his comrades to supper to meet me; the talk ran on
+politics, and I soon found that my companions knew more of English
+politics, had a far shrewder notion of political methods, and were,
+therefore, much better worth talking to, than most of the ordinary men
+met at dinner parties "in society." They were of the "uneducated"
+class despised by "gentlemen," and had not then the franchise, but
+politically they were far better educated than their social superiors,
+and were far better fitted to discharge the duties of citizenship. How
+well, too, do I remember a ten-mile drive in a butcher's cart, to give
+a lecture in an out-of-the-way spot, unapproached by railway. Such was
+the jolting as we rattled over rough roads and stony places, that I
+felt as though all my bones were broken, and as though I should
+collapse on the platform like a bag half-filled with stones. How kind
+they were to me, those genial, cordial miners, how careful for my
+comfort, and how motherly were the women! Ah! if opponents of my views
+who did not know me were often cruel and malignant, there was
+compensation in the love and honour in which good men and women all
+the country over held me, and their devotion outweighed the hatred,
+and many a time and often soothed a weary and aching heart.
+
+Lecturing in June, 1875, at Leicester, I came for the first time
+across a falsehood that brought sore trouble and cost me more pain
+than I care to tell. An irate Christian opponent, in the discussion
+that followed the lecture, declared that I was responsible for a book
+entitled, "The Elements of Social Science," which was, he averred,
+"The Bible of Secularists." I had never heard of the book, but as he
+stated that it was in favour of the abolition of marriage, and that
+Mr. Bradlaugh agreed with it, I promptly contradicted him; for while I
+knew nothing about the book, I knew a great deal about Mr. Bradlaugh,
+and I knew that on the marriage question he was conservative rather
+than revolutionary. He detested "Free Love" doctrines, and had thrown
+himself strongly on the side of the agitation led so heroically for
+many years by Mrs. Josephine Butler. On my return to London after the
+lecture I naturally made inquiry as to the volume and its contents,
+and I found that it had been written by a Doctor of Medicine some
+years before, and sent to the _National Reformer_ for review, as to
+other journals, in ordinary course of business. It consisted of three
+parts--the first advocated, from the standpoint of medical science,
+what is roughly known as "Free Love"; the second was entirely medical;
+the third consisted of a clear and able exposition of the law of
+population as laid down by the Rev. Mr. Malthus, and--following the
+lines of John Stuart Mill--insisted that it was the duty of married
+persons to voluntarily limit their families within their means of
+subsistence. Mr. Bradlaugh, in reviewing the book, said that it was
+written "with honest and pure intent and purpose," and recommended to
+working men the exposition of the law of population. His enemies took
+hold of this recommendation, declared that he shared the author's
+views on the impermanence of the marriage tie, and, despite his
+reiterated contradictions, they used extracts against marriage from
+the book as containing his views. Anything more meanly vile it would
+be difficult to conceive, but such were the weapons used against him
+all his life, and used often by men whose own lives contrasted most
+unfavourably with his own. Unable to find anything in his own writings
+to serve their purpose, they used this book to damage him with those
+who knew nothing at first-hand of his views. What his enemies feared
+were not his views on marriage--which, as I have said, was
+conservative--but his Radicalism and his Atheism. To discredit him as
+politician they maligned him socially, and the idea that a man desires
+"to abolish marriage and the home," is a most convenient poniard, and
+the one most certain to wound. This was the origin of his worst
+difficulties, to be intensified, ere long, by his defence of
+Malthusianism. On me also fell the same lash, and I found myself held
+up to hatred as upholder of views that I abhorred.
+
+I may add that far warmer praise than that bestowed on this book by
+Mr. Bradlaugh was given by other writers, who were never attacked in
+the same way.
+
+In the _Reasoner_, edited by Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, I find warmer
+praise of it than in the _National Reformer_; in the review the
+following passage appears:--
+
+"In some respects all books of this class are evils: but it would be
+weakness and criminal prudery--a prudery as criminal as vice
+itself--not to say that such a book as the one in question is not only
+a far lesser evil than the one that it combats, but in one sense a
+book which it is a mercy to issue and courage to publish."
+
+The _Examiner_, reviewing the same book, declared it to be--
+
+"A very valuable, though rather heterogeneous book.... This is, we
+believe, the only book that has fully, honestly, and in a scientific
+spirit recognised all the elements in the problem--How are mankind to
+triumph over poverty, with its train of attendant evils?--and
+fearlessly endeavoured to find a practical solution."
+
+The _British Journal of Homoeopathy_ wrote:--
+
+"Though quite out of the province of our journal, we cannot refrain
+from stating that this work is unquestionably the most remarkable one,
+in many respects, we have ever met with. Though we differ _toto coelo_
+from the author in his views of religion and morality, and hold some
+of his remedies to tend rather to a dissolution than a reconstruction
+of society, yet we are bound to admit the benevolence and philanthropy
+of his motives. The scope of the work is nothing less than the whole
+field of political economy."
+
+Ernest Jones and others wrote yet more strongly, but out of all these
+Charles Bradlaugh alone has been selected for reproach, and has had
+the peculiar views of the anonymous author fathered on himself.
+
+Some of the lecture work in those days was pretty rough. In Darwen,
+Lancashire, in June, 1875, stone-throwing was regarded as a fair
+argument addressed to the Atheist lecturer. At Swansea, in March,
+1876, the fear of violence was so great that a guarantee against
+damage to the hall was exacted by the proprietor, and no local friend
+had the courage to take the chair for me. In September, 1876, at
+Hoyland, thanks to the exertions of Mr. Hebblethwaite, a Primitive
+Methodist, and two Protestant missionaries, I found the hall packed
+with a crowd that yelled at me with great vigour, stood on forms,
+shook fists at me, and otherwise showed feelings more warm than
+friendly. Taking advantage of a lull in the noise, I began to speak,
+and the tumult sank into quietness; but as I was leaving the hall it
+broke out afresh, and I walked slowly through a crowd that yelled and
+swore and struck at me, but somehow those nearest always shrank back
+and let me pass. In the dark, outside the hall, they took to kicking,
+but only one kick reached me, and the attempts to overturn the cab
+were foiled by the driver, who put his horse at a gallop. Later in the
+same month Mr. Bradlaugh and I visited Congleton together, having been
+invited there by Mr. and Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy. Mr. Bradlaugh
+lectured on the first evening to an accompaniment of broken windows,
+and I, sitting with Mrs. Elmy facing the platform, received a rather
+heavy blow on the back of the head from a stone thrown by some one in
+the room. We had a mile and a half to walk from the hall to the house,
+and were accompanied all the way by a stone-throwing crowd, who sang
+hymns at the tops of their voices, with interludes of curses and foul
+words. On the following evening I lectured, and our stone-throwing
+admirers escorted us to the hall; in the middle of the lecture a man
+shouted, "Put her out!" and a well-known wrestler of the
+neighbourhood, named Burbery, who had come to the hall with some
+friends to break up the meeting, stood up as at a signal in front of
+the platform and loudly interrupted. Mr. Bradlaugh, who was in the
+chair, told him to sit down, and, as he persisted in interrupting,
+informed him that he must either be quiet or go out. "Put me out!"
+shouted Mr. Burbery, striking an attitude. Mr. Bradlaugh left the
+platform and walked up to the noisy swashbuckler, who at once grappled
+with him and tried to throw him. But Mr. Burbery had not reckoned on
+the massive strength of his opponent, and when the "throw" was
+complete Mr. Burbery was underneath. Amid much excitement Mr. Burbery
+was propelled towards the door, being gently used on the way as a
+battering-ram against his friends who rushed to the rescue, and at the
+door was handed over to the police. The chairman then resumed his
+normal duties, with a brief "Go on" to me, and I promptly went on,
+finishing the lecture in peace. But outside the hall there was plenty
+of stone-throwing, and Mrs. Elmy received a cut on the temple from a
+flint. This stormy work gradually lessened, and my experience of it
+was a mere trifle compared to that which my predecessors had faced.
+Mr. Bradlaugh's early experiences involved much serious rioting, and
+Mrs. Harriet Law, a woman of much courage and of strong natural
+ability, had many a rough meeting in her lecturing days.
+
+In September, 1875, Mr. Bradlaugh again sailed for America, still to
+earn money there to pay his debts. Unhappily he was struck down by
+typhoid fever, and all his hopes of freeing himself thus were
+destroyed. His life was well-nigh despaired of, but the admirable
+skill of physician and nurse pulled him through. Said the _Baltimore
+Advertiser_:--
+
+"This long and severe illness has disappointed the hopes and retarded
+the object for which he came to this country; but he is gentleness and
+patience itself in his sickness in this strange land, and has endeared
+himself greatly to his physicians and attendants by his gratitude and
+appreciation of the slightest attention."
+
+His fortitude in face of death was also much commented on, lying there
+as he did far from home and from all he loved best. Never a quiver of
+fear touched him as he walked down into the valley of the shadow of
+death; the Rev. Mr. Frothingham bore public and admiring testimony in
+his own church to Mr. Bradlaugh's noble serenity, at once fearless and
+unpretending, and, himself a Theist, gave willing witness to the
+Atheist's calm strength. He came back to us at the end of September,
+worn to a shadow, weak as a child, and for many a long month he bore
+the traces of his wrestle with death.
+
+One part of my autumn's work during his absence was the delivery and
+subsequent publication of six lectures on the French Revolution. That
+stormy time had for me an intense fascination. I brooded over it,
+dreamed over it, and longed to tell the story from the people's point
+of view. I consequently read a large amount of the current literature
+of the time, as well as Louis Blanc's monumental work and the
+histories of Michelet, Lamartine, and others. Fortunately for me, Mr.
+Bradlaugh had a splendid collection of books on the subject, and ere
+we left England he brought me two cabs-full of volumes, aristocratic,
+ecclesiastical, democratic, and I studied all these diligently, and
+lived in them, till the French Revolution became to me as a drama in
+which I had myself taken part, and the actors were to me as personal
+friends and foes. In this, again, as in so much of my public work, I
+have to thank Mr. Bradlaugh for the influence which led me to read
+fully all sides of a question, and to read most carefully those from
+which I differed most, ere I considered myself competent to write or
+to speak thereon. From 1875 onwards I held office as one of the
+vice-presidents of the National Secular Society--a society founded on
+a broad basis of liberty, with the inspiring motto, "We Search for
+Truth." Mr. Bradlaugh was president, and I held office under him till
+he resigned his post in February, 1890, nine months after I had joined
+the Theosophical Society. The N.S.S., under his judicious and
+far-sighted leadership, became a real force in the country,
+theologically and politically, embracing large numbers of men and
+women who were Freethinkers as well as Radicals, and forming a nucleus
+of earnest workers, able to gather round them still larger numbers of
+others, and thus to powerfully affect public opinion. Once a year the
+society met in conference, and many a strong and lasting friendship
+between men living far apart dated from these yearly gatherings, so
+that all over the country spread a net-work of comradeship between the
+staunch followers of "our Charlie." These were the men and women who
+paid his election expenses over and over again, supported him in his
+Parliamentary struggle, came up to London to swell the demonstrations
+in his favour. And round them grew up a huge party--"the largest
+personal following of any public man since Mr. Gladstone," it was once
+said by an eminent man--who differed from him in theology, but
+passionately supported him in politics; miners, cutlers, weavers,
+spinners, shoemakers, operatives of every trade, strong, sturdy,
+self-reliant men who loved him to the last.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE KNOWLTON PAMPHLET.
+
+
+The year 1877 dawned, and in its early days began a struggle which,
+ending in victory all along the line, brought with it pain and anguish
+that I scarcely care to recall. An American physician, Dr. Charles
+Knowlton, convinced of the truth of the teaching of the Rev. Mr.
+Malthus, and seeing that that teaching had either no practical value
+or tended to the great increase of prostitution, unless married
+people were taught to limit their families within their means of
+livelihood--wrote a pamphlet on the voluntary limitation of the
+family. It was published somewhere in the Thirties--about 1835, I
+think--and was sold unchallenged in England as well as in America for
+some forty years. Philosophers of the Bentham school, like John Stuart
+Mill, endorsed its teachings, and the bearing of population on poverty
+was an axiom in economic literature. Dr. Knowlton's work was a
+physiological treatise, advocating conjugal prudence and parental
+responsibility; it argued in favour of early marriage, with a view to
+the purity of social life; but as early marriage between persons of
+small means generally implies a large family, leading either to
+pauperism or to lack of necessary food, clothing, education, and fair
+start in life for the children, Dr. Knowlton advocated the restriction
+of the number of the family within the means of subsistence, and
+stated the methods by which this restriction could be carried out. The
+book was never challenged till a disreputable Bristol bookseller put
+some copies on sale to which he added some improper pictures, and he
+was prosecuted and convicted. The publisher of the _National Reformer_
+and of Mr. Bradlaugh's and my books and pamphlets had taken over a
+stock of Knowlton's pamphlets among other literature he bought, and he
+was prosecuted and, to our great dismay, pleaded guilty. We at once
+removed our publishing from his hands, and after careful deliberation
+we decided to publish the incriminated pamphlet in order to test the
+right of discussion on the population question, when, with the advice
+to limit the family, information was given as to how that advice could
+be followed. We took a little shop, printed the pamphlet, and sent
+notice to the police that we would commence the sale at a certain day
+and hour, and ourselves sell the pamphlet, so that no one else might
+be endangered by our action. We resigned our offices in the National
+Secular Society that we might not injure the society, but the
+executive first, and then the Annual Conference, refused to accept the
+resignations. Our position as regarded the pamphlet was simple and
+definite; had it been brought to us for publication, we stated, we
+should not have published it, for it was not a treatise of high merit;
+but, prosecuted as immoral because it advised the limitation of the
+family, it at once embodied the right of publication. In a preface to
+the republished edition, we wrote:--
+
+"We republish this pamphlet, honestly believing that on all questions
+affecting the happiness of the people, whether they be theological,
+political, or social, fullest right of free discussion ought to be
+maintained at all hazards. We do not personally endorse all that Dr.
+Knowlton says: his 'Philosophical Proem' seems to us full of
+philosophical mistakes, and--as we are neither of us doctors--we are
+not prepared to endorse his medical views; but since progress can only
+be made through discussion, and no discussion is possible where
+differing opinions are suppressed, we claim the right to publish all
+opinions, so that the public, enabled to see all sides of a question,
+may have the materials for forming a sound judgment."
+
+We were not blind to the danger to which this defiance of the
+authorities exposed us, but it was not the danger of failure, with the
+prison as penalty, that gave us pause. It was the horrible
+misconceptions that we saw might arise; the odious imputations on
+honour and purity that would follow. Could we, the teachers of a lofty
+morality, venture to face a prosecution for publishing what would be
+technically described as an obscene book, and risk the ruin of our
+future, dependent as that was on our fair fame? To Mr. Bradlaugh it
+meant, as he felt, the almost certain destruction of his Parliamentary
+position, the forging by his own hands of a weapon that in the hands
+of his foes would be well-nigh fatal. To me it meant the loss of the
+pure reputation I prized, the good name I had guarded--scandal the
+most terrible a woman could face. But I had seen the misery of the
+poor, of my sister-women with children crying for bread; the wages of
+the workmen were often sufficient for four, but eight or ten they
+could not maintain. Should I set my own safety, my own good name,
+against the helping of these? Did it matter that my reputation should
+be ruined, if its ruin helped to bring remedy to this otherwise
+hopeless wretchedness of thousands? What was worth all my talk about
+self-sacrifice and self-surrender, if, brought to the test, I failed?
+So, with heart aching but steady, I came to my resolution; and though
+I know now that I was wrong intellectually, and blundered in the
+remedy, I was right morally in the will to sacrifice all to help the
+poor, and I can rejoice that I faced a storm of obloquy fiercer and
+harder to bear than any other which can ever touch me again. I learned
+a lesson of stern indifference to all judgments from without that were
+not endorsed by condemnation from within. The long suffering that
+followed was a splendid school for the teaching of endurance.
+
+The day before the pamphlet was put on sale we ourselves delivered
+copies to the Chief Clerk of the Magistrates at Guildhall, to the
+officer in charge at the City Police Office in Old Jewry, and to the
+Solicitor for the City of London. With each pamphlet was a notice that
+we would attend and sell the book from 4 to 5 p.m. on the following
+day, Saturday, March 24th. This we accordingly did, and in order to
+save trouble we offered to attend daily at the shop from 10 to 11 a.m.
+to facilitate our arrest, should the authorities determine to
+prosecute. The offer was readily accepted, and after some little
+delay--during which a deputation from the Christian Evidence Society
+waited upon Mr. Cross to urge the Tory Government to prosecute
+us--warrants were issued against us and we were arrested on April 6th.
+Letters of approval and encouragement came from the most diverse
+quarters, including among their writers General Garibaldi, the
+well-known economist, Yves Guyot, the great French constitutional
+lawyer, Emile Acollas, together with letters literally by the hundred
+from poor men and women thanking and blessing us for the stand taken.
+Noticeable were the numbers of letters from clergymen's wives, and
+wives of ministers of all denominations.
+
+After our arrest we were taken to the police-station in Bridewell
+Place, and thence to the Guildhall, where Alderman Figgins was
+sitting, before whom we duly appeared, while in the back of the court
+waited what an official described as "a regular waggon-load of bail."
+We were quickly released, the preliminary investigation being fixed
+for ten days later--April 17th. At the close of the day the magistrate
+released us on our own recognisances, without bail; and it was so
+fully seen on all sides that we were fighting for a principle that no
+bail was asked for during the various stages of the trial. Two days
+later we were committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court, but
+Mr. Bradlaugh moved for a writ of _certiorari_ to remove the trial to
+the Court of Queen's Bench; Lord Chief Justice Cockburn said he would
+grant the writ if "upon looking at it (the book), we think its object
+is the legitimate one of promoting knowledge on a matter of human
+interest," but not if the science were only a cover for impurity, and
+he directed that copies of the book should be handed in for perusal by
+himself and Mr. Justice Mellor. Having read the book they granted the
+writ.
+
+The trial commenced on June 18th before the Lord Chief Justice of
+England and a special jury, Sir Hardinge Giffard, the
+Solicitor-General of the Tory Government, leading against us, and we
+defending ourselves. The Lord Chief Justice "summed up strongly for an
+acquittal," as a morning paper said; he declared that "a more
+ill-advised and more injudicious proceeding in the way of a
+prosecution was probably never brought into a court of justice," and
+described us as "two enthusiasts who have been actuated by a desire to
+do good in a particular department of society." He then went on to a
+splendid statement of the law of population, and ended by praising our
+straightforwardness and asserting Knowlton's honesty of intention.
+Every one in court thought that we had won our case, but they had not
+taken into account the religious and political hatred against us and
+the presence on the jury of such men as Mr. Walter, of the _Times_.
+After an hour and thirty-five minutes of delay the verdict was a
+compromise: "We are unanimously of opinion that the book in question
+is calculated to deprave public morals, but at the same time we
+entirely exonerate the defendants from any corrupt motive in
+publishing it." The Lord Chief Justice looked troubled, and said that
+he should have to translate the verdict into one of guilty, and on
+that some of the jury turned to leave the box, it having been
+agreed--we heard later from one of them--that if the verdict were not
+accepted in that form they should retire again, as six of the jury
+were against convicting us; but the foreman, who was bitterly hostile,
+jumped at the chance of snatching a conviction, and none of those in
+our favour had the courage to contradict him on the spur of the
+moment, so the foreman's "Guilty" passed, and the judge set us free,
+on Mr. Bradlaugh's recognisances to come up for judgment that day
+week.
+
+On that day we moved to quash the indictment and for a new trial,
+partly on a technical ground and partly on the ground that the
+verdict, having acquitted us of wrong motive, was in our favour, not
+against us. On this the Court did not agree with us, holding that the
+part of the indictment alleging corrupt motive was superfluous. Then
+came the question of sentence, and on this the Lord Chief Justice did
+his best to save us; we were acquitted of any intent to violate the
+law; would we submit to the verdict of the jury and promise not to
+sell the book? No, we would not; we claimed the right to sell, and
+meant to vindicate it. The judge pleaded, argued, finally got angry
+with us, and, at last, compelled to pass sentence, he stated that if
+we would have yielded he would have let us go free without penalty,
+but that as we would set ourselves against the law, break it and defy
+it--a sore offence from the judge's point of view--he could only pass
+a heavy sentence on each of six months' imprisonment, a fine of £200,
+and recognisances of £500 for two years, and this, as he again
+repeated, upon the assumption "that they do intend to set the law at
+defiance." Even despite this he made us first-class misdemeanants.
+Then, as Mr. Bradlaugh stated that we should move for a writ of error,
+he liberated us on Mr. Bradlaugh's recognisance for £100, the queerest
+comment on his view of the case and of our characters, since we were
+liable jointly to £1,400 under the sentence, to say nothing of the
+imprisonment. But prison and money penalties vanished into thin air,
+for the writ of error was granted, proved successful, and the verdict
+was quashed.
+
+Then ensued a somewhat anxious time. We were resolute to continue
+selling; were our opponents equally resolved to prosecute us? We could
+not tell. I wrote a pamphlet entitled "The Law of Population," giving
+the arguments which had convinced me of its truth, the terrible
+distress and degradation entailed on families by overcrowding and the
+lack of the necessaries of life, pleading for early marriages that
+prostitution might be destroyed, and limitation of the family that
+pauperism might be avoided; finally, giving the information which
+rendered early marriage without these evils possible. This pamphlet
+was put in circulation as representing our view of the subject, and we
+again took up the sale of Knowlton's. Mr. Bradlaugh carried the war
+into the enemy's country, and commenced an action against the police
+for the recovery of some pamphlets they had seized; he carried the
+action to a successful issue, recovered the pamphlets, bore them off
+in triumph, and we sold them all with an inscription across them,
+"Recovered from the police." We continued the sale of Knowlton's tract
+for some time, until we received an intimation that no further
+prosecution would be attempted, and on this we at once dropped its
+publication, substituting for it my "Law of Population."
+
+[Illustration: CHARLES BRADLAUGH M.P.]
+
+But the worst part of the fight, for me, was to come. Prosecution of
+the "Law of Population" was threatened, but never commenced; a worse
+weapon against me was in store. An attempt had been made in August,
+1875, to deprive me of the custody of my little girl by hiding her
+away when she went on her annual visit of one month to her father, but
+I had promptly recovered her by threatening to issue a writ of _habeas
+corpus._ Now it was felt that the Knowlton trial might be added to the
+charges of blasphemy that could be urged against me, and that this
+double-barrelled gun might be discharged with effect. I received
+notice in January, 1878, that an application was to be made to the
+High Court of Chancery to deprive me of the child, but the petition
+was not filed till the following April. Mabel was dangerously ill with
+scarlet fever at the time, and though this fact was communicated to
+her father I received a copy of the petition while sitting at her
+bedside. The petition alleged that, "The said Annie Besant is, by
+addresses, lectures, and writings, endeavouring to propagate the
+principles of Atheism, and has published a book entitled 'The Gospel
+of Atheism.' She has also associated herself with an infidel lecturer
+and author named Charles Bradlaugh in giving lectures and in
+publishing books and pamphlets, whereby the truth of the Christian
+religion is impeached, and disbelief in all religion inculcated."
+
+It further alleged against me the publication of the Knowlton
+pamphlet, and the writing of the "Law of Population." Unhappily, the
+petition came for hearing before the then Master of the Rolls, Sir
+George Jessel, a man animated by the old spirit of Hebrew bigotry, to
+which he had added the time-serving morality of a "man of the world,"
+sceptical as to all sincerity, and contemptuous of all devotion to an
+unpopular cause. The treatment I received at his hands on my first
+appearance in court told me what I had to expect. I had already had
+some experience of English judges, the stately kindness and gentleness
+of the Lord Chief Justice, the perfect impartiality and dignified
+courtesy of the Lords Justices of Appeal. My astonishment, then, can
+be imagined when, in answer to a statement by Mr. Ince, Q.C., that I
+appeared in person, I heard a harsh, loud voice exclaim:
+
+"Appear in person? A lady appear in person? Never heard of such a
+thing! Does the lady really appear in person?"
+
+As the London papers had been full of my appearing in person in the
+other courts and had contained the high compliments of the Lord Chief
+Justice on my conduct of my own case, Sir George Jessel's pretended
+astonishment seemed a little overdone. After a variety of similar
+remarks delivered in the most grating tones and in the roughest
+manner, Sir George Jessel tried to obtain his object by browbeating me
+directly. "Is this the lady?"
+
+"I am the respondent, my lord, Mrs. Besant."
+
+"Then I advise you, Mrs. Besant, to employ counsel to represent you,
+if you can afford it; and I suppose you can."
+
+"With all submission to your lordship, I am afraid I must claim my
+right of arguing my case in person."
+
+"You will do so if you please, of course, but I think you had much
+better appear by counsel. I give you notice that, if you do not, you
+must not expect to be shown any consideration. You will not be heard
+by me at any greater length than the case requires, nor allowed to go
+into irrelevant matter, as persons who argue their own cases usually
+do."
+
+"I trust I shall not do so, my lord; but in any case I shall be
+arguing under your lordship's complete control."
+
+This encouraging beginning may be taken as a sample of the case--it
+was one long fight against clever counsel, aided by a counsel instead
+of a judge on the bench. Only once did judge and counsel fall out. Mr.
+Ince and Mr. Bardswell had been arguing that my Atheism and
+Malthusianism made me an unfit guardian for my child; Mr. Ince
+declared that Mabel, educated by me, would "be helpless for good in
+this world," and "hopeless for good hereafter, outcast in this life
+and damned in the next." Mr. Bardswell implored the judge to consider
+that my custody of her "would be detrimental to the future prospects
+of the child in society, to say nothing of her eternal prospects." Had
+not the matter been to me of such heart-breaking importance, I could
+have laughed at the mixture of Mrs. Grundy, marriage establishment,
+and hell, presented as an argument for robbing a mother of her child.
+But Mr. Bardswell carelessly forgot that Sir George Jessel was a Jew,
+and lifting eyes to heaven in horrified appeal, he gasped out:
+
+"Your lordship, I think, will scarcely credit it, but Mrs. Besant
+says, in a later affidavit, that she took away the Testament from the
+child because it contained coarse passages unfit for a child to read."
+
+The opportunity was too tempting for a Jew to refrain from striking at
+a book written by apostate Jews, and Sir George Jessel answered
+sharply:
+
+"It is not true to say there are no passages unfit for a child's
+reading, because I think there are a great many."
+
+"I do not know of any passages that could fairly be called coarse."
+
+"I cannot quite assent to that."
+
+Barring this little episode judge and counsel showed a charming
+unanimity. I distinctly said I was an Atheist, that I had withdrawn
+the child from religious instruction at the day-school she attended,
+that I had written various anti-Christian books, and so on; but I
+claimed the child's custody on the ground that the deed of separation
+distinctly gave it to me, and had been executed by her father after I
+had left the Christian Church, and that my opinions were not
+sufficient to invalidate it. It was admitted on the other side that
+the child was admirably cared for, and there was no attempt at
+attacking my personal character. The judge stated that I had taken the
+greatest possible care of the child, but decided that the mere fact of
+my refusing to give the child religious instruction was sufficient
+ground for depriving me of her custody. Secular education he regarded
+as "not only reprehensible, but detestable, and likely to work utter
+ruin to the child, and I certainly should upon this ground alone
+decide that this child ought not to remain another day under the care
+of her mother."
+
+Sir George Jessel denounced also my Malthusian views in a fashion at
+once so brutal and so untruthful as to facts, that some years later
+another judge, the senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court of New
+South Wales, declared in a judgment delivered in his own court that
+there was "no language used by Lord Cockburn which justified the
+Master of the Rolls in assuming that Lord Cockburn regarded the book
+as obscene," and that "little weight is to be attached to his opinion
+on a point not submitted for his decision"; he went on to administer a
+sharp rebuke for the way in which Sir George Jessel travelled outside
+the case, and remarked that "abuse, however, of an unpopular opinion,
+whether indulged in by judges or other people, is not argument, nor
+can the vituperation of opponents in opinion prove them to be
+immoral." However, Sir George Jessel was all-powerful in his own
+court, and he deprived me of my child, refusing to stay the order even
+until the hearing of my appeal against his decision. A messenger from
+the father came to my house, and the little child was carried away by
+main force, shrieking and struggling, still weak from the fever, and
+nearly frantic with fear and passionate resistance. No access to her
+was given me, and I gave notice that if access were denied me, I would
+sue for a restitution of conjugal rights, merely that I might see my
+children. But the strain had been too great, and I nearly went mad,
+spending hours pacing up and down the empty rooms, striving to weary
+myself to exhaustion that I might forget. The loneliness and silence
+of the house, of which my darling had always been the sunshine and the
+music, weighed on me like an evil dream; I listened for the patter of
+the dancing feet, and merry, thrilling laughter that rang through the
+garden, the sweet music of the childish voice; during my sleepless
+nights I missed in the darkness the soft breathing of the little
+child; each morning I longed in vain for the clinging arms and soft,
+sweet kisses. At last health broke down, and fever struck me, and
+mercifully gave me the rest of pain and delirium instead of the agony
+of conscious loss. Through that terrible illness, day after day, Mr.
+Bradlaugh came to me, and sat writing beside me, feeding me with ice
+and milk, refused from all others, and behaving more like a tender
+mother than a man friend; he saved my life, though it seemed to me for
+awhile of little value, till the first months of lonely pain were
+over. When recovered, I took steps to set aside an order obtained by
+Mr. Besant during my illness, forbidding me to bring any suit against
+him, and even the Master of the Rolls, on hearing that all access had
+been denied to me, and the money due to me stopped, uttered words of
+strong condemnation of the way in which I had been treated. Finally
+the deed of separation executed in 1873 was held to be good as
+protecting Mr. Besant from any suit brought by me, whether for divorce
+or for restitution of conjugal rights, while the clauses giving me the
+custody of the child were set aside. The Court of Appeal in April,
+1879, upheld the decision, the absolute right of the father as against
+a married mother being upheld. This ignoring of all right to her
+children on the part of the married mother is a scandal and a wrong
+that has since been redressed by Parliament, and the husband has no
+longer in his grasp this instrument of torture, whose power to agonise
+depends on the tenderness and strength of the motherliness of the
+wife. In the days when the law took my child from me, it virtually
+said to all women: "Choose which of these two positions, as wife and
+mother, you will occupy. If you are legally your husband's wife, you
+can have no legal claim to your children; if legally you are your
+husband's mistress, your rights as mother are secure." That stigma on
+marriage is now removed.
+
+One thing I gained in the Court of Appeal. The Court expressed a
+strong view as to my right of access, and directed me to apply to Sir
+George Jessel for it, adding that it could not doubt he would grant
+it. Under cover of this I applied to the Master of the Rolls, and
+obtained liberal access to the children; but I found that my visits
+kept Mabel in a continual state of longing and fretting for me, while
+the ingenious forms of petty insult that were devised against me and
+used in the children's presence would soon become palpable to them and
+cause continual pain. So, after a painful struggle with myself, I
+resolved to give up the right of seeing them, feeling that thus only
+could I save them from constantly recurring conflict, destructive of
+all happiness and of all respect for one or the other parent.
+Resolutely I turned my back on them that I might spare them trouble,
+and determined that, robbed of my own, I would be a mother to all
+helpless children I could aid, and cure the pain at my own heart by
+soothing the pain of others.
+
+As far as regards this whole struggle over the Knowlton pamphlet,
+victory was finally won all along the line. Not only did we, as
+related, recover all our seized pamphlets, and continue the sale till
+all prosecution and threat of prosecution were definitely surrendered;
+but my own tract had an enormous sale, so that when I withdrew it from
+sale in June, 1891, I was offered a large sum for the copyright, an
+offer which I, of course, refused. Since that time not a copy has been
+sold with my knowledge or permission, but long ere that the pamphlet
+had received a very complete legal vindication. For while it
+circulated untouched in England, a prosecution was attempted against
+it in New South Wales, but was put an end to by an eloquent and
+luminous judgment by the senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court, Mr.
+Justice Windmeyer, in December, 1888. This judge, the most respected
+in the great Australian colony, spoke out plainly and strongly on the
+morality of such teaching. "Take the case," he said, "of a woman
+married to a drunken husband, steadily ruining his constitution and
+hastening to the drunkard's doom, loss of employment for himself,
+semi-starvation for his family, and finally death, without a shilling
+to leave those whom he has brought into the world, but armed with the
+authority of the law to treat his wife as his slave, ever brutally
+insisting on the indulgence of his marital rights. Where is the
+immorality, if, already broken in health from unresting maternity,
+having already a larger family than she can support when the miserable
+breadwinner has drunk himself to death, the woman avails herself of
+the information given in this book, and so averts the consequences of
+yielding to her husband's brutal insistence on his marital rights?
+Already weighted with a family that she is unable to decently bring
+up, the immorality, it seems to me, would be in the reckless and
+criminal disregard of precautions which would prevent her bringing
+into the world daughters whose future outlook as a career would be
+prostitution, or sons whose inherited taint of alcoholism would soon
+drag them down with their sisters to herd with the seething mass of
+degenerate and criminal humanity that constitutes the dangerous
+classes of great cities. In all these cases the appeal is from
+thoughtless, unreasoning prejudice to conscience, and, if listened to,
+its voice will be heard unmistakably indicating where the path of duty
+lies."
+
+The judge forcibly refused to be any party to the prohibition of such
+a pamphlet, regarding it as of high service to the community. He said:
+"So strong is the dread of the world's censure upon this topic that
+few have the courage openly to express their views upon it; and its
+nature is such that it is only amongst thinkers who discuss all
+subjects, or amongst intimate acquaintances, that community of thought
+upon the question is discovered. But let any one inquire amongst those
+who have sufficient education and ability to think for themselves, and
+who do not idly float, slaves to the current of conventional opinion,
+and he will discover that numbers of men and women of purest lives, of
+noblest aspirations, pious, cultivated, and refined, see no wrong in
+teaching the ignorant that it is wrong to bring into the world
+children to whom they cannot do justice, and who think it folly to
+stop short in telling them simply and plainly how to prevent it. A
+more robust view of morals teaches that it is puerile to ignore human
+passions and human physiology. A clearer perception of truth and the
+safety of trusting to it teaches that in law, as in religion, it is
+useless trying to limit the knowledge of mankind by any inquisitorial
+attempts to place upon a judicial Index Expurgatorius works written
+with an earnest purpose, and commending themselves to thinkers of
+well-balanced minds. I will be no party to any such attempt. I do not
+believe that it was ever meant that the Obscene Publication Act should
+apply to cases of this kind, but only to the publication of such
+matter as all good men would regard as lewd and filthy, to lewd and
+bawdy novels, pictures and exhibitions, evidently published and given
+for lucre's sake. It could never have been intended to stifle the
+expression of thought by the earnest-minded on a subject of
+transcendent national importance like the present, and I will not
+strain it for that purpose. As pointed out by Lord Cockburn in the
+case of the Queen v. Bradlaugh and Besant, all prosecutions of this
+kind should be regarded as mischievous, even by those who disapprove
+the opinions sought to be stifled, inasmuch as they only tend more
+widely to diffuse the teaching objected to. To those, on the other
+hand, who desire its promulgation, it must be a matter of
+congratulation that this, like all attempted persecutions of thinkers,
+will defeat its own object, and that truth, like a torch, 'the more
+it's shook it shines.'"
+
+The argument of Mr. Justice Windmeyer for the Neo-Malthusian position
+was (as any one may see who reads the full text of the judgment) one
+of the most luminous and cogent I have ever read. The judgment was
+spoken of at the time in the English press as a "brilliant triumph for
+Mrs. Besant," and so I suppose it was; but no legal judgment could
+undo the harm wrought on the public mind in England by malignant and
+persistent misrepresentation. What that trial and its results cost me
+in pain no one but myself will ever know; on the other hand, there was
+the passionate gratitude evidenced by letters from thousands of poor
+married women--many from the wives of country clergymen and
+curates--thanking and blessing me for showing them how to escape from
+the veritable hell in which they lived. The "upper classes" of society
+know nothing about the way in which the poor live; how their
+overcrowding destroys all sense of personal dignity, of modesty, of
+outward decency, till human life, as Bishop Fraser justly said, is
+"degraded below the level of the swine." To such, and among such I
+went, and I could not grudge the price that then seemed to me as the
+ransom for their redemption. To me, indeed, it meant the losing of all
+that made life dear, but for them it seemed to be the gaining of all
+that gave hope of a better future. So how could I hesitate--I whose
+heart had been fired by devotion to an ideal Humanity, inspired by
+that Materialism that is of love and not of hate?
+
+And now, in August, 1893, we find the _Christian World,_ the
+representative organ of orthodox Christian Protestantism, proclaiming
+the right and the duty of voluntary limitation of the family. In a
+leading article, after a number of letters had been inserted, it
+said:--
+
+"The conditions are assuredly wrong which bring one member of the
+married partnership into a bondage so cruel. It is no less evident
+that the cause of the bondage in such cases lies in the too rapid
+multiplication of the family. There was a time when any idea of
+voluntary limitation was regarded by pious people as interfering with
+Providence. We are beyond that now, and have become capable of
+recognising that Providence works through the common sense of
+individual brains. We limit population just as much by deferring
+marriage from prudential motives as by any action that may be taken
+after it.... Apart from certain methods of limitation, the morality of
+which is gravely questioned by many, there are certain
+easily-understood physiological laws of the subject, the failure to
+know and to observe which is inexcusable on the part either of men or
+women in these circumstances. It is worth noting in this connection
+that Dr. Billings, in his article in this month's _Forum_, on the
+diminishing birth-rate of the United States, gives as one of the
+reasons the greater diffusion of intelligence, by means of popular and
+school treatises on physiology, than formerly prevailed."
+
+Thus has opinion changed in sixteen years, and all the obloquy poured
+on us is seen to have been the outcome of ignorance and bigotry.
+
+As for the children, what was gained by their separation from me? The
+moment they were old enough to free themselves, they came back to me,
+my little girl's too brief stay with me being ended by her happy
+marriage, and I fancy the fears expressed for her eternal future will
+prove as groundless as the fears for her temporal ruin have proved to
+be! Not only so, but both are treading in my steps as regards their
+views of the nature and destiny of man, and have joined in their
+bright youth the Theosophical Society to which, after so many
+struggles, I won my way.
+
+The struggle on the right to discuss the prudential restraint of
+population did not, however, conclude without a martyr. Mr. Edward
+Truelove, alluded to above, was prosecuted for selling a treatise by
+Robert Dale Owen on "Moral Physiology," and a pamphlet entitled,
+"Individual, Family, and National Poverty." He was tried on February
+1, 1878, before the Lord Chief Justice in the Court of Queen's Bench,
+and was most ably defended by Professor W.A. Hunter. The jury spent
+two hours in considering their verdict, and returned into court and
+stated that they were unable to agree. The majority of the jury were
+ready to convict, if they felt sure that Mr. Truelove would not be
+punished, but one of them boldly declared in court: "As to the book,
+it is written in plain language for plain people, and I think that
+many more persons ought to know what the contents of the book are."
+The jury was discharged, in consequence of this one man's courage, but
+Mr. Truelove's persecutors--the Vice Society--were determined not to
+let their victim free. They proceeded to trial a second time, and
+wisely endeavoured to secure a special jury, feeling that as
+prudential restraint would raise wages by limiting the supply of
+labour, they would be more likely to obtain a verdict from a jury of
+"gentlemen" than from one composed of workers. This attempt was
+circumvented by Mr. Truelove's legal advisers, who let a _procedendo_
+go which sent back the trial to the Old Bailey. The second trial was
+held on May 16th at the Central Criminal Court before Baron Pollock
+and a common jury, Professor Hunter and Mr. J.M. Davidson appearing
+for the defence. The jury convicted, and the brave old man,
+sixty-eight years of age, was condemned to four months' imprisonment
+and £50 fine for selling a pamphlet which had been sold unchallenged,
+during a period of forty-five years, by James Watson, George Jacob
+Holyoake, Austin Holyoake, and Charles Watts. Mr. Grain, the counsel
+employed by the Vice Society, most unfairly used against Mr. Truelove
+my "Law of Population," a pamphlet which contained, Baron Pollock
+said, "the head and front of the offence in the other [the Knowlton]
+case." I find an indignant protest against this odious unfairness in
+the _National Reformer_ for May 19th: "My 'Law of Population' was used
+against Mr. Truelove as an aggravation of his offence, passing over
+the utter meanness--worthy only of Collette--of using against a
+prisoner a book whose author has never been attacked for writing
+it--does Mr. Collette, or do the authorities, imagine that the
+severity shown to Mr. Truelove will in any fashion deter me from
+continuing the Malthusian propaganda? Let me here assure them, one and
+all, that it will do nothing of the kind; I shall continue to sell the
+'Law of Population' and to advocate scientific checks to population,
+just as though Mr. Collette and his Vice Society were all dead and
+buried. In commonest justice they are bound to prosecute me, and if
+they get, and keep, a verdict against me, and succeed in sending me to
+prison, they will only make people more anxious to read my book, and
+make me more personally powerful as a teacher of the views which they
+attack."
+
+A persistent attempt was made to obtain a writ of error in Mr.
+Truelove's case, but the Tory Attorney-General, Sir John Holker,
+refused it, although the ground on which it was asked was one of the
+grounds on which a similar writ had been granted to Mr. Bradlaugh and
+myself. Mr. Truelove was therefore compelled to suffer his sentence,
+but memorials, signed by 11,000 persons, asking for his release, were
+sent to the Home Secretary from every part of the country, and a
+crowded meeting in St. James's Hall, London, demanded his liberation
+with only six dissentients. The whole agitation did not shorten Mr.
+Truelove's sentence by a single day, and he was not released from
+Coldbath Fields Prison until September 5th. On the 12th of the same
+month the Hall of Science was crowded with enthusiastic friends, who
+assembled to do him honour, and he was presented with a
+beautifully-illuminated address and a purse containing £177
+(subsequent subscriptions raised the amount to £197 16s. 6d.).
+
+It is scarcely necessary to say that one of the results of the
+prosecution was a great agitation throughout the country, and a wide
+popularisation of Malthusian views. Some huge demonstrations were held
+in favour of free discussion; on one occasion the Free Trade Hall,
+Manchester, was crowded to the doors; on another the Star Music Hall,
+Bradford, was crammed in every corner; on another the Town Hall,
+Birmingham, had not a seat or a bit of standing-room unoccupied.
+Wherever we went, separately or together, it was the same story, and
+not only were Malthusian lectures eagerly attended, and Malthusian
+literature eagerly bought, but curiosity brought many to listen to our
+Radical and Freethought lectures, and thousands heard for the first
+time what Secularism really meant. The Press, both London and
+provincial, agreed in branding the prosecution as foolish, and it was
+generally remarked that it resulted only in the wider circulation of
+the indicted book, and the increased popularity of those who had stood
+for the right of publication. The furious attacks since made upon us
+have been made chiefly by those who differ from us in theological
+creed, and who have found a misrepresentation of our prosecution
+served them as a convenient weapon of attack. During the last few
+years public opinion has been gradually coming round to our side, in
+consequence of the pressure of poverty resulting from widespread
+depression of trade, and during the sensation caused in 1884 by "The
+Bitter Cry of Outcast London," many writers in the _Daily
+News_--notably Mr. G.R. Sims--boldly alleged that the distress was to
+a great extent due to the large families of the poor, and mentioned
+that we had been prosecuted for giving the very knowledge which would
+bring salvation to the sufferers in our great cities.
+
+Among the useful results of the prosecution was the establishment of
+the Malthusian League, "to agitate for the abolition of all penalties
+on the public discussion of the population question," and "to spread
+among the people, by all practicable means, a knowledge of the law of
+population, of its consequences, and of its bearing upon human conduct
+and morals." The first general meeting of the League was held at the
+Hall of Science on July 26, 1877, and a council of twenty persons was
+elected, and this council on August 2nd elected Dr. C.R. Drysdale,
+M.D., President; Mr. Swaagman, Treasurer; Mrs. Besant, Secretary; Mr.
+Shearer, Assistant-Secretary; and Mr. Hember, Financial Secretary.
+Since 1877 the League, under the same indefatigable president, has
+worked hard to carry out its objects; it has issued a large number of
+leaflets and tracts; it supports a monthly journal, the _Malthusian;_
+numerous lectures have been delivered under its auspices in all parts
+of the country; and it has now a medical branch, into which none but
+duly qualified medical men and women are admitted, with members in all
+European countries.
+
+Another result of the prosecution was the accession of "D." to the
+staff of the _National Reformer_. This able and thoughtful writer came
+forward and joined our ranks as soon as he heard of the attack on us,
+and he further volunteered to conduct the journal during our expected
+imprisonment. From that time to this--a period of fifteen
+years--articles from his pen appeared in its columns week by week, and
+during all that time not one solitary difficulty arose between editors
+and contributor. In public a trustworthy colleague, in private a warm
+and sincere friend, "D." proved an unmixed benefit bestowed upon us by
+the prosecution.
+
+Nor was "D." the only friend brought to us by our foes. I cannot ever
+think of that time without remembering that the prosecution brought me
+first into close intimacy with Mrs. Annie Parris--the wife of Mr.
+Touzeau Parris, the Secretary of the Defence Committee throughout all
+the fight--a lady who, during that long struggle, and during the, for
+me, far worse struggle that succeeded it, over the custody of my
+daughter, proved to me the most loving and sisterly of friends. One or
+two other friendships which will, I hope, last my life, date from that
+same time of strife and anxiety.
+
+The amount of money subscribed by the public during the Knowlton and
+succeeding prosecutions gives some idea of the interest felt in the
+struggle. The Defence Fund Committee in March, 1878, presented a
+balance-sheet, showing subscriptions amounting to £1,292 5s. 4d., and
+total expenditure in the Queen v. Bradlaugh and Besant, the Queen v.
+Truelove, and the appeal against Mr. Vaughan's order (the last two up
+to date) of £1,274 10s. This account was then closed and the balance
+of £17 15s. 4d. passed on to a new fund for the defence of Mr.
+Truelove, the carrying on of the appeal against the destruction of the
+Knowlton pamphlet, and the bearing of the costs incident on the
+petition lodged against myself. In July this new fund had reached £196
+16s. 7d., and after paying the remainder of the costs in Mr.
+Truelove's case, a balance of £26 15s. 2d. was carried on. This again
+rose to £247 15s. 2-1/2d., and the fund bore the expenses of Mr.
+Bradlaugh's successful appeal on the Knowlton pamphlet, the petition
+and subsequent proceedings in which I was concerned in the Court of
+Chancery, and an appeal on Mr. Truelove's behalf, unfortunately
+unsuccessful, against an order for the destruction of the Dale Owen
+pamphlet. This last decision was given on February 21, 1880, and on
+this the Defence Fund was closed. On Mr. Truelove's release, as
+mentioned above, a testimonial to the amount of £197 16s. 6d. was
+presented to him, and after the close of the struggle some anonymous
+friend sent to me personally £200 as "thanks for the courage and
+ability shown." In addition to all this, the Malthusian League
+received no less than £455 11s. 9d. during the first year of its life,
+and started on its second year with a balance in hand of £77 5s. 8d.
+
+A somewhat similar prosecution in America, in which the bookseller,
+Mr. D.M. Bennett, sold a book with which he did not agree, and was
+imprisoned, led to our giving him a warm welcome when, after his
+release, he visited England. We entertained him at the Hall of Science
+at a crowded gathering, and I was deputed as spokesman to present him
+with a testimonial. This I did in the following speech, quoted here in
+order to show the spirit then animating me:--
+
+"Friends, Mr. Bradlaugh has spoken of the duty that calls us here
+to-night. It is pleasant to think that in our work that duty is one to
+which we are not unaccustomed. In our army there are more true
+soldiers than traitors, more that are faithful to the trust of keeping
+the truth than those who shrink when the hour of danger comes. And I
+would ask Mr. Bennett to-night not to measure English feeling towards
+him by the mere number of those present. They that are here are
+representatives of many thousands of our fellow-countrymen. Glance
+down this middle table, and you will see that it is not without some
+right that we claim to welcome you in the name of multitudes of the
+citizens of England. There are those who taunt us with want of
+loyalty, and with the name of infidels. In what church will they find
+men and women more loyal to truth and conscience? The name infidel is
+not for us so long as we are faithful to the truth we know. If I
+speak, as I have done, of national representation in this hall this
+evening, tell me, you who know those who sit here, who have watched
+some of them for years, others of them but for a brief time, do I not
+speak truth? Take them one by one. Your President but a little while
+ago in circumstances similar to those wherein our guest himself was
+placed, with the true lover's keenness that recognises the mistress
+under all disguise, beholding his mistress Liberty in danger, under
+circumstances that would have blinded less sure eyes, leapt to her
+rescue. He risked the ambition of his life rather than be disloyal to
+liberty. And next is seated a woman, who, student of a noble
+profession, thought that liberty had greater claim upon her than even
+her work. When we stood in worse peril than even loss of liberty, she
+risked her own good name for the truth's sake. One also is here who,
+eminent in his own profession, came with the weight of his position
+and his right to speak, and gave a kindred testimony. One step
+further, and you see one who, soldier to liberty, throughout a long
+and spotless life, when the task was far harder than it is to-day,
+when there were no greetings, no welcomes, when to serve was to peril
+name as well as liberty, never flinched from the first until now. He
+is crowned with the glory of the jail, that was his for no crime but
+for claiming the right to publish that wherein the noblest thought is
+uttered in the bravest words. And next to him is another who speaks
+for liberty, who has brought culture, university degree, position in
+men's sight, and many friends, and cast them all at her beloved feet.
+Sir, not alone the past and the present greet you to-night. The future
+also greets you with us. We have here also those who are training
+themselves to walk in the footsteps of the one most dear to them, who
+shall carry on, when we have passed away, the work which we shall have
+dropped from our hands. But he whom we delight to honour at this hour
+in truth honours us, in that he allows us to offer him the welcome
+that it is our glory and our pleasure to give. He has fought bravely.
+The Christian creed had in its beginning more traitors and less true
+hearts than the creed of to-day. We are happy to-day not only in the
+thought of what manner of men we have for leaders, but in the thought
+of what manner of men we have as soldiers in our army. Jesus had
+twelve apostles. One betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver; a
+second denied Him. They all forsook Him and fled. We can scarcely
+point to one who has thus deserted our sacred cause. The traditions of
+our party tell us of many who went to jail because they claimed for
+all that right of free speech which is the heritage of all. One of the
+most famous members of our body in England, Richard Carlile, turned
+bookseller to sell books that were prosecuted. This man became
+Free-thinker, driven thereto by the bigotry and wickedness of the
+Churches. He sold the books of Hone not because he agreed with them,
+but because Hone was prosecuted. He saw that the book in whose
+prosecution freedom was attacked was the book for the freeman to sell;
+and the story of our guest shows that in all this England and America
+are one. Those who gave Milton to the world can yet bring forth men of
+the same stamp in continents leagues asunder. Because our friend was
+loyal and true, prison had to him no dread. It was far, far less of
+dishonour to wear the garb of the convict than to wear that of the
+hypocrite. The society we represent, like his society in America,
+pleads for free thought, speaks for free speech, claims for every one,
+however antagonistic, the right to speak the thought he feels. It is
+better that this should be, even though the thought be wrong, for thus
+the sooner will its error be discovered--better if the thought be
+right, for then the sooner does the gladness of a new truth find place
+in the heart of man. As the mouthpiece, Sir, of our National Secular
+Society, and of its thousands of members, I speak to you now:--
+
+"'ADDRESS.
+
+"'_We seek for Truth_.'
+
+"'To D.M. Bennett.
+
+"'In asking you to accept at the hands of the National Secular Society
+of England this symbol of cordial sympathy and brotherly welcome, we
+are but putting into act the motto of our Society. "We seek for Truth"
+is our badge, and it is as Truthseeker that we do you homage to-night.
+Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free
+speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without free speech progress
+is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards the nobler
+life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of
+free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the
+denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race.
+
+"'In your own country you have pleaded for free speech, and when,
+under a wicked and an odious law, one of your fellow-citizens was
+imprisoned for the publication of his opinions, you, not sharing the
+opinions but faithful to liberty, sprang forward to defend in him the
+principle of free speech which you claimed for yourself, and sold his
+book while he lay in prison. For this act you were in turn arrested
+and sent to jail, and the country which won its freedom by the aid of
+Paine in the eighteenth century disgraced itself in the nineteenth by
+the imprisonment of a heretic. The Republic of the United States
+dishonoured herself, and not you, in Albany penitentiary. Two hundred
+thousand of your countrymen pleaded for your release, but bigotry was
+too strong. We sent you greeting in your captivity; we rejoiced when
+the time came for your release. We offer you to-night our thanks and
+our hope--thanks for the heroism which never flinched in the hour of
+battle, hope for a more peaceful future, in which the memory of a past
+pain may be a sacred heritage and not a regret.
+
+"'Charles Bradlaugh, _President_.'
+
+"Soldier of liberty, we give you this. Do in the future the same good
+service that you have done in the past, and your reward shall be in
+the love that true men shall bear to you."
+
+That, however, which no force could compel me to do, which I refused
+to threats of fine and prison, to separation from my children, to
+social ostracism, and to insults and ignominy worse to bear than
+death, I surrendered freely when all the struggle was over, and a
+great part of society and of public opinion had adopted the view that
+cost Mr. Bradlaugh and myself so dear. I may as well complete the
+story here, so as not to have to refer to it again. I gave up
+Neo-Malthusianism in April, 1891, its renunciation being part of the
+outcome of two years' instruction from Mdme. H.P. Blavatsky, who
+showed me that however justifiable Neo-Malthusianism might be while
+man was regarded only as the most perfect outcome of physical
+evolution, it was wholly incompatible with the view of man as a
+spiritual being, whose material form and environment were the results
+of his own mental activity. Why and how I embraced Theosophy, and
+accepted H.P. Blavatsky as teacher, will soon be told in its proper
+place. Here I am concerned only with the why and how of my
+renunciation of the Neo-Malthusian teaching, for which I had fought so
+hard and suffered so much.
+
+When I built my life on the basis of Materialism I judged all actions
+by their effect on human happiness in this world now and in future
+generations, regarding man as an organism that lived on earth and
+there perished, with activities confined to earth and limited by
+physical laws. The object of life was the ultimate building-up of a
+physically, mentally, morally perfect man by the cumulative effects of
+heredity--mental and moral tendencies being regarded as the outcome of
+material conditions, to be slowly but surely evolved by rational
+selection and the transmission to offspring of qualities carefully
+acquired by, and developed in, parents. The most characteristic note
+of this serious and lofty Materialism had been struck by Professor W.
+K. Clifford in his noble article on the "Ethics of Belief."
+
+Taking this view of human duty in regard to the rational co-operation
+with nature in the evolution of the human race, it became of the first
+importance to rescue the control of the generation of offspring from
+mere blind brute passion, and to transfer it to the reason and to the
+intelligence; to impress on parents the sacredness of the parental
+office, the tremendous responsibility of the exercise of the creative
+function. And since, further, one of the most pressing problems for
+solution in the older countries is that of poverty, the horrible slums
+and dens into which are crowded and in which are festering families of
+eight and ten children, whose parents are earning an uncertain 10s.,
+12s., 15s., and 20s. a week; since an immediate palliative is wanted,
+if popular risings impelled by starvation are to be avoided; since the
+lives of men and women of the poorer classes, and of the worst paid
+professional classes, are one long, heart-breaking struggle "to make
+both ends meet and keep respectable"; since in the middle class
+marriage is often avoided, or delayed till late in life, from the
+dread of the large family, and late marriage is followed by its
+shadow, the prevalence of vice and the moral and social ruin of
+thousands of women; for these, and many other reasons, the teaching of
+the duty of limiting the family within the means of subsistence is the
+logical outcome of Materialism linked with the scientific view of
+evolution, and with a knowledge of the physical law, by which
+evolution is accelerated or retarded. Seeking to improve the physical
+type, scientific Materialism, it seemed to me, must forbid parentage
+to any but healthy married couples; it must restrict childbearing
+within the limits consistent with the thorough health and physical
+well-being of the mother; it must impose it as a duty never to bring
+children into the world unless the conditions for their fair nurture
+and development are present. Regarding it as hopeless, as well as
+mischievous, to preach asceticism, and looking on the conjunction of
+nominal celibacy with widespread prostitution as inevitable, from the
+constitution of human nature, scientific Materialism--quite rationally
+and logically--advises deliberate restriction of the production of
+offspring, while sanctioning the exercise of the sexual instinct
+within the limits imposed by temperance, the highest physical and
+mental efficiency, the good order and dignity of society, and the
+self-respect of the individual.
+
+In all this there is nothing which for one moment implies approval of
+licentiousness, profligacy, unbridled self-indulgence. On the
+contrary, it is a well-considered and intellectually-defensible scheme
+of human evolution, regarding all natural instincts as matters for
+regulation, not for destruction, and seeking to develop the perfectly
+healthy and well-balanced physical body as the necessary basis for the
+healthy and well-balanced mind. If the premises of Materialism be
+true, there is no answer to the Neo-Malthusian conclusions; for even
+those Socialists who have bitterly opposed the promulgation of
+Neo-Malthusianism--regarding it as a "red herring intended to draw the
+attention of the proletariat away from the real cause of poverty, the
+monopoly of land and capital by a class"--admit that when society is
+built on the foundation of common property in all that is necessary
+for the production of wealth, the time will come for the consideration
+of the population question. Nor do I now see, any more than I saw
+then, how any Materialist can rationally avoid the Neo-Malthusian
+position. For if man be the outcome of purely physical causes, it is
+with these that we must deal in guiding his future evolution. If he be
+related but to terrestrial existence, he is but the loftiest organism
+of earth; and, failing to see his past and his future, how should my
+eyes not have been then blinded to the deep-lying causes of his
+present woe? I brought a material cure to a disease which appeared to
+me to be of material origin; but how when the evil came from a subtler
+source, and its causes lay not on the material plane? How if the
+remedy only set up new causes for a future evil, and, while
+immediately a palliative, strengthened the disease itself, and ensured
+its reappearance in the future? This was the view of the problem set
+before me by H.P. Blavatsky when she unrolled the story of man, told
+of his origin and his destiny, showed me the forces that went to the
+making of man, and the true relation between his past, his present,
+and his future.
+
+For what is man in the light of Theosophy? He is a spiritual
+intelligence, eternal and uncreate, treading a vast cycle of human
+experience, born and reborn on earth millennium after millennium,
+evolving slowly into the ideal man. He is not the product of matter,
+but is encased in matter, and the forms of matter with which he
+clothes himself are of his own making. For the intelligence and will
+of man are creative forces--not creative _ex nihilo_, but creative as
+is the brain of the painter--and these forces are exercised by man in
+every act of thought. Thus he is ever creating round him
+thought-forms, moulding subtlest matter into shape by these energies,
+forms which persist as tangible realities when the body of the thinker
+has long gone back to earth and air and water. When the time for
+rebirth into this earth-life comes for the soul these thought-forms,
+its own progeny, help to form the tenuous model into which the
+molecules of physical matter are builded for the making of the body,
+and matter is thus moulded for the new body in which the soul is to
+dwell, on the lines laid down by the intelligent and volitional life
+of the previous, or of many previous, incarnations. So does each man
+create for himself in verity the form wherein he functions, and what
+he is in his present is the inevitable outcome of his own creative
+energies in his past. Applying this to the Neo-Malthusian theory, we
+see in sexual love not only a passion which man has in common with the
+brute, and which forms, at the present stage of evolution, a necessary
+part of human nature, but an animal passion that may be trained and
+purified into a human emotion, which may be used as one of the levers
+in human progress, one of the factors in human growth. But, instead of
+this, man in the past has made his intellect the servant of his
+passions; the abnormal development of the sexual instinct in man--in
+whom it is far greater and more continuous than in any brute--is due
+to the mingling with it of the intellectual element, all sexual
+thoughts, desires, and imaginations having created thought-forms,
+which have been wrought into the human race, giving rise to a
+continual demand, far beyond nature, and in marked contrast with the
+temperance of normal animal life. Hence it has become one of the most
+fruitful sources of human misery and human degradation, and the
+satisfaction of its imperious cravings in civilised countries lies at
+the root of our worst social evils. This excessive development has to
+be fought against, and the instinct reduced within natural limits, and
+this will certainly never be done by easy-going self-indulgence within
+the marital relation any more than by self-indulgence outside it. By
+none other road than that of self-control and self-denial can men and
+women now set going the causes which will build for them brains and
+bodies of a higher type for their future return to earth-life. They
+have to hold this instinct in complete control, to transmute it from
+passion into tender and self-denying affection, to develop the
+intellectual at the expense of the animal, and thus to raise the whole
+man to the human stage, in which every intellectual and physical
+capacity shall subserve the purposes of the soul. From all this it
+follows that Theosophists should sound the note of self-restraint
+within marriage, and the gradual--for with the mass it cannot be
+sudden--restriction of the sexual relation to the perpetuation of the
+race.
+
+Such was the bearing of Theosophical teaching on Neo-Malthusianism, as
+laid before me by H.P. Blavatsky, and when I urged, out of my bitter
+knowledge of the miseries endured by the poor, that it surely might,
+for a time at least, be recommended as a palliative, as a defence in
+the hands of a woman against intolerable oppression and enforced
+suffering, she bade me look beyond the moment, and see how the
+suffering must come back and back with every generation, unless we
+sought to remove the roots of wrong. "I do not judge a woman," she
+said, "who has resort to such means of defence in the midst of
+circumstances so evil, and whose ignorance of the real causes of all
+this misery is her excuse for snatching at any relief. But it is not
+for you, an Occultist, to continue to teach a method which you now
+know must tend to the perpetuation of the sorrow." I felt that she was
+right, and though I shrank from the decision--for my heart somewhat
+failed me at withdrawing from the knowledge of the poor, so far as I
+could, a temporary palliative of evils which too often wreck their
+lives and bring many to an early grave, worn old before even middle
+age has touched them--yet the decision was made. I refused to reprint
+the "Law of Population," or to sell the copyright, giving pain, as I
+sadly knew, to all the brave and loyal friends who had so generously
+stood by me in that long and bitter struggle, and who saw the results
+of victory thrown away on grounds to them inadequate and mistaken!
+Will it always be, I wonder, in man's climbing upward, that every step
+must be set on his own heart and on the hearts of those he loves?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+AT WAR ALL ROUND.
+
+
+Coming back to my work after my long and dangerous illness, I took up
+again its thread, heartsick, but with courage unshaken, and I find
+myself in the _National Reformer_ for September 15, 1878, saying in a
+brief note of thanks that "neither the illness nor the trouble which
+produced it has in any fashion lessened my determination to work for
+the cause." In truth, I plunged into work with added vigour, for only
+in that did I find any solace, but the pamphlets written at this time
+against Christianity were marked with considerable bitterness, for it
+was Christianity that had robbed me of my child, and I struck
+mercilessly at it in return. In the political struggles of that time,
+when the Beaconsfield Government was in full swing, with its policy of
+annexation and aggression, I played my part with tongue and pen, and
+my articles in defence of an honest and liberty-loving policy in
+India, against the invasion of Afghanistan and other outrages, laid in
+many an Indian heart a foundation of affection for me, and seem to me
+now as a preparation for the work among Indians to which much of my
+time and thought to-day are given. In November of this same year
+(1878) I wrote a little book on "England, India, and Afghanistan" that
+has brought me many a warm letter of thanks, and with this, the
+carrying on of the suit against Mr. Besant before alluded to, two and
+often three lectures every Sunday, to say nothing of the editorial
+work on the _National Reformer_, the secretarial work on the
+Malthusian League, and stray lectures during the week, my time was
+fairly well filled. But I found that in my reading I developed a
+tendency to let my thoughts wander from the subject in hand, and that
+they would drift after my lost little one, so I resolved to fill up
+the gaps in my scientific education, and to amuse myself by reading up
+for some examinations; I thought it would serve as an absorbing form
+of recreation from my other work, and would at the same time, by
+making my knowledge exact, render me more useful as a speaker on
+behalf of the causes to which my life was given.
+
+At the opening of the new year (1879) I met for the first time a man
+to whom I subsequently owed much in this department of work--Edward B.
+Aveling, a D.Sc. of London University, and a marvellously able teacher
+of scientific subjects, the very ablest, in fact, that I have ever
+met. Clear and accurate in his knowledge, with a singular gift for
+lucid exposition, enthusiastic in his love of science, and taking
+vivid pleasure in imparting his knowledge to others, he was an ideal
+teacher. This young man, in January, 1879, began writing under
+initials for the _National Reformer_, and in February I became his
+pupil, with the view of matriculating in June at the London
+University, an object which was duly accomplished. And here let me say
+to any one in mental trouble, that they might find an immense relief
+in taking up some intellectual recreation of this kind; during that
+spring, in addition to my ordinary work of writing, lecturing, and
+editing--and the lecturing meant travelling from one end of England to
+the other--I translated a fair-sized French volume, and had the
+wear-and-tear of pleading my case for the custody of my daughter in
+the Court of Appeal, as well as the case before the Master of the
+Rolls; and I found it the very greatest relief to turn to algebra,
+geometry, and physics, and forget the harassing legal struggles in
+wrestling with formulae and problems. The full access I gained to my
+children marked a step in the long battle of Freethinkers against
+disabilities, for, as noted in the _National Reformer_ by Mr.
+Bradlaugh, it was "won with a pleading unequalled in any case on
+record for the boldness of its affirmation of Freethought," a pleading
+of which he generously said that it deserved well of the party as "the
+most powerful pleading for freedom of opinion to which it has ever
+been our good fortune to listen."
+
+In the London _Daily News_ some powerful letters of protest appeared,
+one from Lord Harberton, in which he declared that "the Inquisition
+acted on no other principle" than that applied to me; and a second
+from Mr. Band, in which he sarcastically observed that "this Christian
+community has for some time had the pleasure of seeing her Majesty's
+courts repeatedly springing engines of torture upon a young mother--a
+clergyman's wife who dared to disagree with his creed--and her evident
+anguish, her long and expensive struggles to save her child, have
+proved that so far as heretical mothers are concerned modern defenders
+of the faith need not envy the past those persuasive instruments which
+so long secured the unity of the Church. In making Mrs. Besant an
+example, the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice James have been
+careful not to allow any of the effect to be lost by confusion of the
+main point--the intellectual heresy--with side questions. There was a
+Malthusian matter in the case, but the judges were very clear in
+stating that without any reference whatever to that, they would
+simply, on the ground of Mrs. Besant's 'religious, or anti-religious,
+opinions,' take her child from her." The great provincial papers took
+a similar tone, the _Manchester Examiner_ going so far as to say of
+the ruling of the judges: "We do not say they have done so wrongly. We
+only say that the effect of their judgment is cruel, and it shows that
+the holding of unpopular opinions is, in the eye of the law, an
+offence which, despite all we had thought to the contrary, may be
+visited with the severest punishment a woman and a mother can be
+possibly called on to bear." The outcome of all this long struggle and
+of another case of sore injustice--in which Mrs. Agar-Ellis, a Roman
+Catholic, was separated from her children by a judicial decision
+obtained against her by her husband, a Protestant--was a change in the
+law which had vested all power over the children in the hands of the
+father, and from thenceforth the rights of the married mother were
+recognised to a limited extent. A small side-fight was with the
+National Sunday League, the president of which, Lord Thurlow, strongly
+objected to me as one of the vice-presidents. Mr. P.A. Taylor and
+others at once resigned their offices, and, on the calling of a
+general meeting, Lord Thurlow was rejected as president. Mr. P.A.
+Taylor was requested to assume the presidency, and the vice-presidents
+who had resigned were, with myself, re-elected. Little battles of this
+sort were a running accompaniment of graver struggles during all these
+battling years.
+
+And through all the struggles the organised strength of the
+Freethought party grew, 650 new members being enrolled in the National
+Secular Society in the year 1878-79, and in July, 1879, the public
+adhesion of Dr. Edward B. Aveling brought into the ranks a pen of rare
+force and power, and gave a strong impulse to the educational side of
+our movement. I presided for him at his first lecture at the Hall of
+Science on August 10, 1879, and he soon paid the penalty of his
+boldness, finding himself, a few months later, dismissed from the
+Chair of Comparative Anatomy at the London Hospital, though the Board
+admitted that all his duties were discharged with punctuality and
+ability. One of the first results of his adhesion was the
+establishment of two classes under the Science and Art Department at
+South Kensington, and these grew year after year, attended by numbers
+of young men and women, till in 1883 we had thirteen classes in full
+swing, as well as Latin, and London University Matriculation classes;
+all these were taught by Dr. Aveling and pupils that he had trained. I
+took advanced certificates, one in honours, and so became qualified as
+a science teacher in eight different sciences, and Alice and Hypatia
+Bradlaugh followed a similar course, so that winter after winter we
+kept these classes going from September to the following May, from
+1879 until the year 1888. In addition to these Miss Bradlaugh carried
+on a choral union.
+
+Personally I found that this study and teaching together with
+attendance at classes held for teachers at South Kensington, the study
+for passing the First B.Sc. and Prel. Sc. Examinations at London
+University, and the study for the B.Sc. degree at London, at which I
+failed in practical chemistry three times--a thing that puzzled me not
+a little at the time, as I had passed a far more difficult practical
+chemical examination for teachers at South Kensington--all this gave
+me a knowledge of science that has stood me in good stead in my public
+work. But even here theological and social hatred pursued me.
+
+When Miss Bradlaugh and myself applied for permission to attend the
+botany class at University College, we were refused, I for my sins,
+and she only for being her father's daughter; when I had qualified as
+teacher, I stood back from claiming recognition from the Department
+for a year in order not to prejudice the claims of Mr. Bradlaugh's
+daughters, and later, when I had been recognised, Sir Henry Tyler in
+the House of Commons attacked the Education Department for accepting
+me, and actually tried to prevent the Government grant being paid to
+the Hall of Science Schools because Dr. Aveling, the Misses Bradlaugh,
+and myself were unbelievers in Christianity. When I asked permission
+to go to the Botanical Gardens in Regent's Park the curator refused
+it, on the ground that his daughters studied there. On every side
+repulse and insult, hard to struggle against, bitter to bear. It was
+against difficulties of this kind on every side that we had to make
+our way, handicapped in every effort by our heresy. Let our work be as
+good as it might--and our Science School was exceptionally
+successful--the subtle fragrance of heresy was everywhere
+distinguishable, and when Mr. Bradlaugh and myself are blamed for
+bitterness in our anti-Christian advocacy, this constant gnawing
+annoyance and petty persecution should be taken into account. For him
+it was especially trying, for he saw his daughters--girls of ability
+and of high character, whose only crime was that they were
+his--insulted, sneered at, slandered, continually put at a
+disadvantage, because they were his children and loved and honoured
+him beyond all others.
+
+It was in October, 1879, that I first met Herbert Burrows, though I
+did not become intimately acquainted with him till the Socialist
+troubles of the autumn of 1887 drew us into a common stream of work.
+He came as a delegate from the Tower Hamlets Radical Association to a
+preliminary conference, called by Mr. Bradlaugh, at the Hall of
+Science, on October 11th, to consider the advisability of holding a
+great London Convention on Land Law Reform, to be attended by
+delegates from all parts of the kingdom. He was appointed on the
+Executive Committee with Mr. Bradlaugh, Mr. Mottershead, Mr. Nieass,
+and others. The Convention was successfully held, and an advanced
+platform of Land Law Reform adopted, used later by Mr. Bradlaugh as a
+basis for some of the proposals he laid before Parliament.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+MR. BRADLAUGH'S STRUGGLE.
+
+
+And now dawned the year 1880, the memorable year in which commenced
+Mr. Bradlaugh's long Parliamentary battle. After a long and bitter
+struggle he was elected, with Mr. Labouchere, as member for
+Northampton, at the general election, and so the prize so long fought
+for was won. Shall I ever forget that election day, April 2, 1880? How
+at four o'clock Mr. Bradlaugh came into the room at the "George",
+where his daughters and I were sitting, flung himself into a chair
+with, "There's nothing more to do; our last man is polled." Then the
+waiting for the declaration through the long, weary hours of suspense,
+till as the time drew near we knelt by the window listening--listening
+to the hoarse murmur of the crowd, knowing that presently there would
+be a roar of triumph or a howl of anger when the numbers were read out
+from the steps of the Town Hall. And now silence sank, and we knew the
+moment had come, and we held our breath, and then--a roar, a wild roar
+of joy and exultation, cheer after cheer, ringing, throbbing, pealing,
+and then the mighty surge of the crowd bringing him back, their member
+at last, waving hats, handkerchiefs, a very madness of tumultuous
+delight, and the shrill strains of "Bradlaugh for Northampton!" with a
+ring of triumph in them they had never had before. And he, very grave,
+somewhat shaken by the outpour of love and exultation, very silent,
+feeling the weight of new responsibility more than the gladness of
+victory. And then the next morning, as he left the town, the mass of
+men and women, one sea of heads from hotel to station, every window
+crowded, his colours waving everywhere, men fighting to get near him,
+to touch him, women sobbing, the cries, "Our Charlie, our Charlie;
+we've got you and we'll keep you." How they loved him, how they joyed
+in the triumph won after twelve years of strife. Ah me! we thought the
+struggle over, and it was only beginning; we thought our hero
+victorious, and a fiercer, crueller fight lay in front. True, he was
+to win that fight, but his life was to be the price of the winning;
+victory for him was to be final, complete, but the laurel-wreath was
+to fall upon a grave.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by T. Westley, 57, Vernon Street,
+Northampton._ CHARLES BRADLAUGH AND HENRY LABOUCHERE.]
+
+The outburst of anger from the more bigoted of the Christian community
+was as savage as the outburst of delight had been exultant, but we
+recked little of it. Was he not member, duly elected, without
+possibility of assailment in his legal right? Parliament was to meet
+on April 29th, the swearing-in beginning on the following day, and Mr.
+Bradlaugh had taken counsel with some other Freethinking members as to
+the right of Freethinkers to affirm. He held that under the Act 29 and
+30 Vict. c. 19, and the Evidence Amendment Acts 1869 and 1870, the
+right to substitute affirmation for oath was clear; he was willing to
+take the oath as a necessary form if obligatory, but, believing it to
+be optional, he preferred affirmation. On May 3rd he presented himself
+and, according to the evidence of Sir Erskine May, the Clerk of the
+House, given before the second Select Committee on his case, he "came
+to the table and delivered the following statement in writing to the
+Clerk: 'To the Right Honourable the Speaker of the House of Commons.
+I, the undersigned, Charles Bradlaugh, beg respectfully to claim to be
+allowed to affirm, as a person for the time being by law permitted to
+make a solemn affirmation or declaration, instead of taking an oath.
+(Signed) Charles Bradlaugh.' And being asked by the Clerk upon what
+grounds he claimed to make an affirmation, he answered: 'By virtue of
+the Evidence Amendment Acts, 1869 and 1870.' Whereupon the Clerk
+reported to Mr. Speaker" the claim, and Mr. Speaker told Mr. Bradlaugh
+that he might address the House on the matter. "Mr. Bradlaugh's
+observations were very short. He repeated that he relied upon the
+Evidence Further Amendment Act, 1869, and the Evidence Amendment Act,
+1870, adding: 'I have repeatedly, for nine years past, made an
+affirmation in the highest courts of jurisdiction in this realm. I am
+ready to make such a declaration or affirmation.' Substantially those
+were the words which he addressed to the Speaker." This was the
+simple, quiet, and dignified scene which took place in the House. Mr.
+Bradlaugh was directed to withdraw, and he withdrew, and, after
+debate, a Select Committee was appointed to consider whether he could
+make affirmation; that Committee decided against the claim, and gave
+in its report on May 20th. On the following day Mr. Bradlaugh
+presented himself at the table of the House to take the oath in the
+form prescribed by the law, and on the objection of Sir Henry Drummond
+Wolff, who submitted a motion that he should not be allowed to take
+the oath, another Committee was appointed.
+
+Before this Committee Mr. Bradlaugh stated his case, and pointed out
+that the legal obligation lay on him to take the oath, adding: "Any
+form that I went through, any oath that I took, I should regard as
+binding upon my conscience in the fullest degree. I would go through
+no form, I would take no oath, unless I meant it to be so binding." He
+wrote in the same sense to the _Times_, saying that he should regard
+himself "as bound, not by the letter of its words, but by the spirit
+which the affirmation would have conveyed, had I been permitted to use
+it." The Committee reported against him, and on June 23rd he was heard
+at the Bar of the House, and made a speech so self-restrained, so
+noble, so dignified, that the House, in defiance of all its own rules,
+broke out over and over again into applause. In the debate that
+preceded his speech, members had lost sight of the ordinary rules of
+decency, and had used expressions against myself wholly gratuitous in
+such a quarrel; the grave rebuke to him who "was wanting in chivalry,
+because, while I can answer for myself and am able to answer for
+myself, nothing justified the introduction of any other name beside my
+own to make prejudice against me," brought irrepressible cheers. His
+appeal was wholly to the law. "I have not yet used--I trust no passion
+may tempt me into using--any words that would seem to savour of even a
+desire to enter into conflict with this House. I have always taught,
+preached, and believed the supremacy of Parliament, and it is not
+because for a moment the judgment of one Chamber of Parliament should
+be hostile to me that I am going to deny the ideas I have always held;
+but I submit that one Chamber of Parliament--even its grandest
+Chamber, as I have always held this to be--had no right to override
+the law. The law gives me the right to sign that roll, to take and
+subscribe the oath, and to take my seat there [with a gesture towards
+the benches]. I admit that the moment I am in the House, without any
+reason but your own good will, you can send me away. That is your
+right. You have full control over your members. But you cannot send me
+away until I have been heard in my place, not a suppliant as I am now,
+but with the rightful audience that each member has always had.... I
+am ready to admit, if you please, for the sake of argument, that every
+opinion I hold is wrong and deserves punishment. Let the law punish
+it. If you say the law cannot, then you admit that you have no right,
+and I appeal to public opinion against the iniquity of a decision
+which overrides the law and denies me justice. I beg your pardon, sir,
+and that of the House too, if in this warmth there seems to lack
+respect for its dignity. And as I shall have, if your decision be
+against me, to come to that table when your decision is given, I beg
+you, before the step is taken in which we may both lose our
+dignity--mine is not much, but yours is that of the Commons of
+England--I beg you, before the gauntlet is fatally thrown, I beg you,
+not in any sort of menace, not in any sort of boast, but as one man
+against six hundred, to give me that justice which on the other side
+of this hall the judges would give me, were I pleading there before
+them."
+
+But no eloquence, no plea for justice, could stay the tide of Tory and
+religious bigotry, and the House voted that he should not be allowed
+to take the oath. Summoned to the table to hear the decision
+communicated by the Speaker, he answered that decision with the words
+firmly spoken: "I respectfully refuse to obey the order of the House,
+because that order was against the law." The Speaker appealed to the
+House for direction, and on a division--during which the Speaker and
+Charles Bradlaugh were left together in the chamber--the House ordered
+the enforcement of Mr. Bradlaugh's withdrawal. Once more the order is
+given, once more the refusal made, and then the Serjeant-at-Arms was
+bidden to remove him. Strange was the scene as little Captain Cosset
+walked up to the member of Herculean proportions, and men wondered how
+the order would be enforced; but Charles Bradlaugh was not the man to
+make a vulgar brawl, and the light touch on his shoulder was to him
+the touch of an authority he admitted and to which he bowed. So he
+gravely accompanied his small captor, and was lodged in the Clock
+Tower of the House as prisoner until the House should further consider
+what to do with him--the most awkward prisoner it had ever had, in
+that in his person it was imprisoning the law.
+
+In a special issue of the _National Reformer_, giving an account of
+the Committee's work and of Mr. Bradlaugh's committal to the Clock
+Tower, I find the following from my own pen: "The Tory party, beaten
+at the polls by the nation, has thus, for the moment, triumphed in the
+House of Commons. The man chosen by the Radicals of Northampton has
+been committed to prison on the motion of the Tory ex-Chancellor of
+the Exchequer, simply because he desires to discharge the duty laid
+upon him by his constituency and by the law of the land. As this paper
+goes to press, I go to Westminster to receive from him his directions
+as to the conduct of the struggle with the nation into which the House
+of Commons has so recklessly plunged." I found him busily writing,
+prepared for all events, ready for a long imprisonment. On the
+following day a leaflet from my pen, "Law Makers and Law Breakers,"
+appealed to the people; after reciting what had happened, it
+concluded: "Let the people speak. Gladstone and Bright are for
+Liberty, and the help denied them within the House must come to them
+from without. No time must be lost. While we remain idle, a
+representative of the people is illegally held in prison. Northampton
+is insulted, and in this great constituency every constituency is
+threatened. On freedom of election depends our liberty; on freedom of
+conscience depends our progress. Tory squires and lordlings have
+defied the people and measured their strength against the masses. Let
+the masses speak." But there was no need to make appeals, for the
+outrage itself caused so swiftly a growl of anger that on the very
+next day the prisoner was set free, and there came protest upon
+protest against the high-handed action of the House. In Westminster
+Hall 4,000 people gathered to cheer Mr. Bradlaugh when he came to the
+House on the day after his liberation. In less than a week 200
+meetings had thundered out their protest. Liberal associations, clubs,
+societies, sent up messages of anger and of demand for justice. In
+Trafalgar Square there gathered--so said the papers--the largest crowd
+ever seen there, and on the Thursday following--the meeting was held
+on Monday--the House of Commons rescinded its resolution, refusing to
+allow Mr. Bradlaugh to affirm, and admitted him on Friday, July 2nd,
+to take his seat after affirmation. "At last the bitter struggle is
+over," I wrote, "and law and right have triumphed. The House of
+Commons has, by rescinding the resolution passed by Tories and
+Ultramontanes, re-established its good name in the eyes of the world.
+The triumph is not one of Freethought over Christianity, nor is it
+over the House of Commons; it is the triumph of law, brought about by
+good men--of all shades of opinion, but of one faith in justice--over
+Tory contempt of law and Ultramontane bigotry. It is the reassertion
+of civil and religious liberty under the most difficult circumstances,
+the declaration that the House of Commons is the creation of the
+people, and not a club of the aristocracy with the right of
+blackballing in its own hands."
+
+The battle between Charles Bradlaugh and his persecutors was now
+transferred to the law courts. As soon as he had taken his seat he was
+served with a writ for having voted without having taken the oath, and
+this began the wearisome proceedings by which his defeated enemies
+boasted that they would make him bankrupt, and so vacate the seat he
+had so hardly gained. Rich men like Mr. Newdegate sued him, putting
+forward a man of straw as nominal plaintiff; for many a weary month
+Mr. Bradlaugh kept all his enemies at bay, fighting each case himself;
+defeated time after time, he fought on, finally carrying the cases to
+the House of Lords, and there winning them triumphantly. But they were
+won at such heavy cost of physical strength and of money, that they
+undermined his strength and burdened him heavily with debt. For all
+this time he had not only to fight in the law courts and to attend
+scrupulously to his Parliamentary duties, but he had to earn his
+living by lecturing and writing, so that his nights away from the
+House were spent in travelling and his days in incessant labour. Many
+of his defeated foes turned their weapons against me, hoping thus to
+give him pain; thus Admiral Sir John Hay, at Wigton, used language of
+me so coarse that the _Scotsman_ and _Glasgow Herald_ refused to print
+it, and the editor of the _Scotsman_ described it as "language so
+coarse that it could have hardly dropped from a yahoo." August 25th
+found me at Brussels, whither I went, with Miss Hypatia Bradlaugh, to
+represent the English Freethinkers at the International Freethought
+Conference. It was an interesting gathering, attended by men of
+world-wide reputation, including Dr. Ludwig Büchner, a man of noble
+and kindly nature. An International Federation of Freethinkers was
+there founded, which did something towards bringing together the
+Freethinkers of different countries, and held interesting congresses
+in the following years in London and Amsterdam; but beyond these
+meetings it did little, and lacked energy and vitality. In truth, the
+Freethought party in each country had so much to do in holding its own
+that little time and thought could be given to international
+organisation. For myself, my introduction to Dr. Büchner, led to much
+interesting correspondence, and I translated, with his approval, his
+"Mind in Animals," and the enlarged fourteenth edition of "Force and
+Matter," as well as one or two pamphlets. This autumn of 1880 found
+the so-called Liberal Government in full tilt against the Irish
+leaders, and I worked hard to raise English feeling in defence of
+Irish freedom even against attack by one so much honoured as was Mr.
+Gladstone. It was uphill work, for harsh language had been used
+against England and all things English, but I showed by definite
+figures--all up and down England--that life and property were far
+safer in Ireland than in England, that Ireland was singularly free
+from crime save in agrarian disputes, and I argued that these would
+disappear if the law should step in between landlord and tenant, and
+by stopping the crimes of rack-renting and most brutal eviction, put
+an end to the horrible retaliations that were born of despair and
+revenge. A striking point on these evictions I quoted from Mr. T.P.
+O'Connor, who, using Mr. Gladstone's words that a sentence of eviction
+was a sentence of starvation, told of 15,000 processes of eviction
+issued in that one year. The autumn's work was varied by the teaching
+of science classes, a debate with a clergyman of the Church of
+England, and an operation which kept me in bed for three weeks, but
+which, on the other hand, was useful, for I learned to write while
+lying on my back, and accomplished in this fashion a good part of the
+translation of "Mind in Animals."
+
+And here let me point a moral about hard work. Hard work kills no one.
+I find a note in the _National Reformer_ in 1880 from the pen of Mr.
+Bradlaugh: "It is, we fear, useless to add that, in the judgment of
+her best friends, Mrs. Besant has worked far too hard during the last
+two years." This is 1893, and the thirteen years' interval has been
+full of incessant work, and I am working harder than ever now, and in
+splendid health. Looking over the _National Reformer_ for all these
+years, it seems to me that it did really fine educational work; Mr.
+Bradlaugh's strenuous utterances on political and theological matters;
+Dr. Aveling's luminous and beautiful scientific teachings; and to my
+share fell much of the educative work on questions of political and
+national morality in our dealings with weaker nations. We put all our
+hearts into our work, and the influence exercised was distinctly in
+favour of pure living and high thinking.
+
+In the spring of 1881 the Court of Appeal decided against Mr.
+Bradlaugh's right to affirm as Member of Parliament, and his seat was
+declared vacant, but he was at once returned again by the borough of
+Northampton, despite the virulence of slander directed against him, so
+that he rightly described the election as "the most bitter I have ever
+fought." His work in the House had won him golden opinions in the
+country, and he was already recognised as a power there; so Tory fear
+was added to bigoted hatred, and the efforts to keep him out of the
+House were increased.
+
+He was introduced to the House as a new member to take his seat by Mr.
+Labouchere and Mr. Burt, but Sir Stafford Northcote intervened, and
+after a lengthy debate, which included a speech from Mr. Bradlaugh at
+the Bar, a majority of thirty-three refused to allow him to take the
+oath. After a prolonged scene, during which Mr. Bradlaugh declined to
+withdraw and the House hesitated to use force, the House adjourned,
+and finally the Government promised to bring in an Affirmation Bill,
+and Mr. Bradlaugh promised, with the consent of his constituents, to
+await the decision of the House on this Bill. Meantime, a League for
+the Defence of Constitutional Rights was formed, and the agitation in
+the country grew: wherever Mr. Bradlaugh went to speak vast crowds
+awaited him, and he travelled from one end of the country to the
+other, the people answering his appeal for justice with no uncertain
+voice. On July 2nd, in consequence of Tory obstruction, Mr. Gladstone
+wrote to Mr. Bradlaugh that the Government were going to drop the
+Affirmation Bill, and Mr. Bradlaugh thereupon determined to present
+himself once more in the House, and fixed on August 3rd as the date of
+such action, so that the Irish Land Bill might get through the House
+ere any delay in business was caused by him. The House was then
+closely guarded with police; the great gates were closed, reserves of
+police were packed in the law courts, and all through July this state
+of siege continued. On August 2nd there was a large meeting in
+Trafalgar Square, at which delegates were present from all parts of
+England, and from as far north as Edinburgh, and on Wednesday, August
+3rd, Mr. Bradlaugh went down to the House. His last words to me were:
+"The people know you better than they know any one, save myself;
+whatever happens, mind, whatever happens, let them do no violence; I
+trust to you to keep them quiet." He went to the House entrance with
+Dr. Aveling, and into the House alone. His daughters and I went
+together, and with some hundreds of others carrying petitions--ten
+only with each petition, and the ten rigidly counted and allowed to
+pass through the gate, sufficiently opened to let one through at a
+time--reached Westminster Hall, where we waited on the steps leading
+to the passage of the lobby.
+
+An inspector ordered us off. I gently intimated that we were within
+our rights. Dramatic order: "Four officers this way." Up they marched
+and looked at us, and we looked at them. "I think you had better
+consult Inspector Denning before you use violence," I remarked
+placidly. They thought they had, and in a few moments up came the
+inspector, and seeing that we were standing in a place where we had a
+right to be, and were doing no harm, he rebuked his over-zealous
+subordinates, and they retired and left us in peace. A man of much
+tact and discretion was Inspector Denning. Indeed, all through this,
+the House of Commons police behaved admirably well. Even in the attack
+they were ordered to make on Mr. Bradlaugh, the police used as little
+violence as they could. It was Mr. Erskine, the Deputy
+Serjeant-at-Arms, and his ushers, who showed the brutality; as Dr.
+Aveling wrote at the time: "The police disliked their work, and, as
+brave men, had a sympathy for a brave man. Their orders they obeyed
+rigidly. This done, they were kindness itself." Gradually the crowd of
+petitioners grew and grew; angry murmurs were heard, for no news came
+from the House, and they loved "Charlie," and were mostly north
+country men, sturdy and independent. They thought they had a right to
+go into the lobby, and suddenly, with the impulse that will sway a
+crowd to a single action there was a roar, "Petition, petition,
+justice, justice," and they surged up the steps, charging at the
+policemen who held the door. Flashed into my mind my chief's charge,
+his words, "I trust to you to keep them quiet," and as the police
+sprang forward to meet the crowd I threw myself between them, with all
+the advantage of the position of the top of the steps that I had
+chosen, so that every man in the charging crowd saw me, and as they
+checked themselves in surprise I bade them stop for his sake, and keep
+for him the peace which he had bade us should not be broken. I heard
+afterwards that as I sprang forward the police laughed--they must have
+thought me a fool to face the rush of the charging men; but I knew his
+friends would never trample me down, and as the crowd stopped the
+laugh died out, and they drew back and left me my own way.
+
+Sullenly the men drew back, mastering themselves with effort, reining
+in their wrath, still for his sake. Ah! had I known what was going on
+inside, would I have kept his trust unbroken! and, as many a man said
+to me afterwards in northern towns, "Oh! if you had let us go we would
+have carried him into the House up to the Speaker's chair." We heard a
+crash inside, and listened, and there was sound of breaking glass and
+splintering wood, and in a few minutes a messenger came to me: "He is
+in Palace Yard." And we went thither and saw him standing, still and
+white, face set like marble, coat torn, motionless, as though carved
+in stone, facing the members' door. Now we know the whole shameful
+story: how as that one man stood alone, on his way to claim his right,
+alone so that he could do no violence, fourteen men, said the Central
+News, police and ushers, flung themselves upon him, pushed and pulled
+him down the stairs, smashing in their violence the glass and wood of
+the passage door; how he struck no blow, but used only his great
+strength in passive resistance--" Of all I have ever seen, I never saw
+one man struggle with ten like that," said one of the chiefs, angrily
+disdainful of the wrong he was forced to do--till they flung him out
+into Palace Yard. An eye-witness thus reported the scene in the Press:
+"The strong, broad, heavy, powerful frame of Mr. Bradlaugh was hard to
+move, with its every nerve and muscle strained to resist the coercion.
+Bending and straining against the overpowering numbers, he held every
+inch with surprising tenacity, and only surrendered it after almost
+superhuman exertions to retain it. The sight--little of it as was seen
+from the outside--soon became sickening. The overborne man appeared
+almost at his last gasp. The face, in spite of the warmth of the
+struggle, had an ominous pallor. The limbs barely sustained him....
+The Trafalgar Square phrase that this man might be broken but not bent
+occurred to minds apprehensive at the present appearance of him."
+
+They flung him out, and swift, short words were there interchanged. "I
+nearly did wrong at the door," he said afterwards, "I was very angry.
+I said to Inspector Denning, 'I shall come again with force enough to
+overcome it,' He said, 'When?' I said, 'Within a minute if I raise my
+hand.'" He stood in Palace Yard, and there outside the gate was a vast
+sea of heads, the men who had journeyed from all parts of England for
+love of him, and in defence of the great right he represented of a
+constituency to send to Parliament the man of its choice. Ah! he was
+never greater than in that moment of outrage and of triumphant wrong;
+with all the passion of a proud man surging within him, insulted by
+physical violence, injured by the cruel wrenching of all his
+muscles--so that for weeks his arms had to be swathed in bandages--he
+was never greater than when he conquered his own wrath, crushed down
+his own longing for battle, stirred to flame by the bodily struggle,
+and the bodily injury, and with thousands waiting within sound of his
+voice, longing to leap to his side, he gave the word to tell them to
+meet him that evening away from the scene of conflict, and meanwhile
+to disperse quietly, "no riot, no disorder." But how he suffered
+mentally no words of mine may tell, and none can understand how it
+wrung his heart who does not know how he reverenced the great
+Parliament of England, how he honoured law, how he believed in justice
+being done; it was the breaking down of his national ideals, of his
+pride in his country, of his belief that faith would be kept with a
+foe by English gentlemen, who with all their faults, he thought,
+held honour and chivalry dear. "No man will sleep in gaol for me
+to-night," he said to me that day; "no woman can blame me for her
+husband killed or wounded, but--" A wave of agony swept over his face,
+and from that fatal day Charles Bradlaugh was never the same man.
+Some hold their ideals lightly, but his heart-strings were twined
+round his; some care little for their country--he was an Englishman,
+law-abiding, liberty-loving, to his heart's core, of the type of the
+seventeenth-century patriot, holding England's honour dear. It was the
+treachery that broke his heart; he had gone alone, believing in the
+honour of his foes, ready to submit to expulsion, to imprisonment, and
+it was the latter that he expected; but he never dreamed that, going
+alone amongst his foes, they would use brutal and cowardly violence,
+and shame every Parliamentary tradition by personal outrage on a
+duly-elected member, outrage more worthy of a slum pot-house than of
+the great Commons House, the House of Hampden and of Vane, the House
+that had guarded its own from Royal violence, and had maintained its
+privileges in the teeth of kings.
+
+These stormy scenes brought about a promise of Government aid; Mr.
+Bradlaugh failed to get any legal redress, as, indeed, he expected to
+fail, on the ground that the officials of the House were covered by
+the House's order, but the Government promised to support his claim to
+his seat during the next session, and thus prevented the campaign
+against them on which we had resolved. I had solely on my own
+responsibility organised a great band of people pledged to refrain
+from the use of all excisable articles after a certain date, and to
+withdraw all their moneys in the Savings Bank, thus seriously
+crippling the financial resources of the Government. The response from
+the workers to my appeal to "Stop the supplies" was great and
+touching. One man wrote that as he never drank nor smoked he would
+leave off tea; others that though tobacco was their one luxury, they
+would forego it; and so on. Somewhat reluctantly, I asked the people
+to lay aside this formidable weapon, as "we have no right to embarrass
+the Government financially save when they refuse to do the first duty
+of a Government to maintain law. They have now promised to do justice,
+and we must wait." Meanwhile the injuries inflicted on Mr. Bradlaugh,
+rupturing the sheaths of some of the muscles of the arm, laid him
+prostrate, and various small fights went on during the temporary truce
+in the great struggle. I turned up in the House two or three times,
+haled thither, though not in person, by the people who kept Mr.
+Bradlaugh out, and a speech of mine became the subject of a question
+by Mr. Ritchie, while Sir Henry Tyler waged war on the science
+classes. Another joy was added to life by the use of my name--which
+by all these struggles had gained a marketable value--as author of
+pamphlets I had never seen, and this forgery of my name by
+unscrupulous people in the colonies caused me a good deal of
+annoyance. In the strengthening of the constitutional agitation in the
+country, the holding of an International Congress of Freethinkers in
+London, the studying and teaching of science, the delivering of
+courses of scientific lectures in the Hall of Science, a sharp
+correspondence with the Bishop of Manchester, who had libelled
+Secularists, and which led to a fiery pamphlet, "God's Views on
+Marriage," as retort--in all these matters the autumn months sped
+rapidly away. One incident of that autumn I record with regret. I was
+misled by very partial knowledge of the nature of the experiments
+performed, and by my fear that if scientific men were forbidden to
+experiment on animals with drugs they would perforce experiment with
+them on the poor in hospitals, to write two articles, republished as a
+pamphlet, against Sir Eardley Wilmot's Bill for the "Total Suppression
+of Vivisection." I limited my approval to highly skilled men engaged
+in original investigations, and took the representations made of the
+character of the experiments without sufficient care to verify them.
+Hence the publication of the one thing I ever wrote for which I feel
+deep regret and shame, as against the whole trend and efforts of my
+life. I am thankful to say that Dr. Anna Kingsford answered my
+articles, and I readily inserted her replies in the paper in which
+mine had appeared--our _National Reformer_--and she touched that
+question of the moral sense to which my nature at once responded.
+Ultimately, I looked carefully into the subject, found that
+vivisection abroad was very different from vivisection in England, saw
+that it was in very truth the fiendishly cruel thing that its
+opponents alleged, and destroyed my partial defence of even its less
+brutal form.
+
+1882 saw no cessation of the struggles in which Mr. Bradlaugh and
+those who stood by him were involved. On February 7th he was heard for
+the third time at the Bar of the House of Commons, and closed his
+speech with an offer that, accepted, would have closed the contest. "I
+am ready to stand aside, say for four or five weeks, without coming to
+that table, if the House within that time, or within such time as its
+great needs might demand, would discuss whether an Affirmation Bill
+should pass or not. I want to obey the law, and I tell you how I might
+meet the House still further, if the House will pardon me for seeming
+to advise it. Hon. members have said that would be a Bradlaugh Relief
+Bill. Bradlaugh is more proud than you are. Let the Bill pass without
+applying to elections that have taken place previously, and I will
+undertake not to claim my seat, and when the Bill has passed I will
+apply for the Chiltern Hundreds. I have no fear. If I am not fit for
+my constituents, they shall dismiss me, but you never shall. The grave
+alone shall make me yield." But the House would do nothing. He had
+asked for 100,000 signatures in favour of his constitutional right,
+and on February 8th, 9th, and 10th 1,008 petitions, bearing 241,970
+signatures, were presented; the House treated them with contemptuous
+indifference. The House refused to declare his seat vacant, and also
+refused to allow him to fill it, thus half-disfranchising Northampton,
+while closing every avenue to legal redress. Mr. Labouchere--who did
+all a loyal colleague could do to assist his brother member--brought
+in an Affirmation Bill; it was blocked. Mr. Gladstone, appealed to
+support the law declared by his own Attorney-General, refused to do
+anything. An _impasse_ was created, and all the enemies of freedom
+rejoiced. Out of this position of what the _Globe_ called "quiet
+omnipotence" the House was shaken by an audacious defiance, for on
+February 21st the member it was trying to hold at arm's length took
+the oath in its startled face, went to his seat, and--waited events.
+The House then expelled him--and, indeed, it could scarcely do
+anything else after such defiance--and Mr. Labouchere moved for a new
+writ, declaring that Northampton was ready, its "candidate was Charles
+Bradlaugh, expelled this House." Northampton, ever steadfast, returned
+him for the third time--the vote in his favour showing an increase of
+359 over the second bye-election--and the triumph was received in all
+the great towns of England with wild enthusiasm. By the small majority
+of fifteen in a House of 599 members--and this due to the vacillation
+of the Government--he was again refused the right to take his seat.
+But now the whole Liberal Press took up his quarrel; the oath question
+became a test question for every candidate for Parliament, and the
+Government was warned that it was alienating its best friends. The
+_Pall Mall Gazette_ voiced the general feeling. "What is the evidence
+that an Oaths Bill would injure the Government in the country? Of one
+thing we may be sure, that if they shirk the Bill they will do no good
+to themselves at the elections. Nobody doubts that it will be made a
+test question, and any Liberal who declines to vote for such a Bill
+will certainly lose the support of the Northampton sort of Radicalism
+in every constituency. The Liberal Press throughout the country is
+absolutely unanimous. The political Non-conformists are for it. The
+local clubs are for it. All that is wanted is that the Government
+should pick up a little more moral courage, and recognise that even in
+practice honesty is the best policy." The Government did not think so,
+and they paid the penalty, for one of the causes that led to their
+defeat at the polls was the disgust felt at their vacillation and
+cowardice in regard to the rights of constituencies. Not untruly did I
+write, in May, 1882, that Charles Bradlaugh was a man "who by the
+infliction of a great wrong had become the incarnation of a great
+principle"; for the agitation in the country grew and grew, until,
+returned again to Parliament at the General Election, he took the oath
+and his seat, brought in and carried an Oaths Bill, not only giving
+Members of Parliament the right to affirm, but making Freethinkers
+competent as jurymen, and relieving witnesses from the insult hitherto
+put upon those who objected to swearing; he thus ended an
+unprecedented struggle by a complete victory, weaving his name for
+ever into the constitutional history of his country.
+
+In the House of Lords, Lord Redesdale brought in a Bill disqualifying
+Atheists from sitting in Parliament, but in face of the feeling
+aroused in the country, the Lords, with many pathetic expressions of
+regret, declined to pass it. But, meanwhile, Sir Henry Tyler in the
+Commons was calling out for prosecutions for blasphemy to be brought
+against Mr. Bradlaugh and his friends, while he carried on his crusade
+against Mr. Bradlaugh's daughters, Dr. Aveling, and myself, as science
+teachers. I summed up the position in the spring of 1882 in the
+following somewhat strong language: "This short-lived 'Parliamentary
+Declaration Bill' is but one of the many clouds which presage a storm
+of prosecution. The reiterated attempts in the House of Commons to
+force the Government into prosecuting heretics for blasphemy; the
+petty and vicious attacks on the science classes at the Hall; the
+odious and wicked efforts of Mr. Newdegate to drive Mr. Bradlaugh into
+the Bankruptcy Court; all these are but signs that the heterogeneous
+army of pious and bigoted Christians are gathering together their
+forces for a furious attack on those who have silenced them in
+argument, but whom they hope to conquer by main force, by sheer
+brutality. Let them come. Free-thinkers were never so strong, never so
+united, never so well organised as they are to-day. Strong in the
+goodness of our cause, in our faith in the ultimate triumph of Truth,
+in our willingness to give up all save fidelity to the sacred cause of
+liberty of human thought and human speech, we await gravely and
+fearlessly the successors of the men who burned Bruno, who imprisoned
+Galileo, who tortured Vanini--the men who have in their hands the
+blood-red cross of Jesus of Nazareth, and in their hearts the love of
+God and the hate of man."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+STILL FIGHTING.
+
+
+All this hot fighting on the religious field did not render me blind
+to the misery of the Irish land so dear to my heart, writhing in the
+cruel grip of Mr. Forster's Coercion Act. An article "Coercion in
+Ireland and its Results," exposing the wrongs done under the Act, was
+reprinted as a pamphlet and had a wide circulation.
+
+I pleaded against eviction--7,020 persons had been evicted during the
+quarter ending in March--for the trial of those imprisoned on
+suspicion, for indemnity for those who before the Land Act had striven
+against wrongs the Land Act had been carried to prevent, and I urged
+that "no chance is given for the healing measures to cure the sore of
+Irish disaffection until not only are the prisoners in Ireland set at
+liberty, but until the brave, unfortunate Michael Davitt stands once
+more a free man on Irish soil." At last the Government reconsidered
+its policy and resolved on juster dealings; it sent Lord Frederick
+Cavendish over to Ireland, carrying with him the release of the
+"suspects," and scarcely had he landed ere the knife of assassination
+struck him--a foul and cowardly murder of an innocent messenger of
+peace. I was at Blackburn, to lecture on "The Irish Question," and as
+I was walking towards the platform, my heart full of joy for the
+dawning hope of peace, a telegram announcing the assassination was
+placed in my hands. Never shall I forget the shock, the incredulous
+horror, the wave of despair. "It is not only two men they have
+killed," I wrote, a day or two later; "they have stabbed the new-born
+hope of friendship between two countries, and have reopened the gulf
+of hatred that was just beginning to close." Alas! the crime succeeded
+in its object, and hurried the Government into new wrong. Hastily a
+new Coercion Bill was brought in, and rushed through its stages in
+Parliament, and, facing the storm of public excitement, I pleaded
+still, "Force no remedy," despite the hardship of the task. "There is
+excessive difficulty in dealing with the Irish difficulty at the
+present moment. Tories are howling for revenge on a whole nation as
+answer to the crime committed by a few; Whigs are swelling the outcry;
+many Radicals are swept away by the current, and feeling that
+'something must be done,' they endorse the Government action,
+forgetting to ask whether the 'something' proposed is the wisest
+thing. A few stand firm, but they are very few--too few to prevent the
+new Coercion Bill from passing into law. But few though we be who lift
+up the voice of protest against the wrong which we are powerless to
+prevent, we may yet do much to make the new Act of brief duration, by
+so rousing public opinion as to bring about its early repeal. When the
+measure is understood by the public half the battle will be won; it is
+accepted at the moment from faith in the Government; it will be
+rejected when its true character is grasped. The murders which have
+given birth to this repressive measure came with a shock upon the
+country, which was the more terrible from the sudden change from
+gladness and hope to darkness and despair. The new policy was welcomed
+so joyfully; the messenger of the new policy was slain ere yet the pen
+was dry which had signed the orders of mercy and of liberty. Small
+wonder that cry of horror should be followed by measures of vengeance;
+but the murders were the work of a few criminals, while the measure of
+vengeance strikes the whole of the Irish people. I plead against the
+panic which confounds political agitation and political redressal of
+wrong with crime and its punishment; the Government measure gags every
+mouth in Ireland, and puts, as we shall see, all political effort at
+the mercy of the Lord-Lieutenant, the magistracy, and the police." I
+then sketched the misery of the peasants in the grip of absentee
+landlords, the turning out on the roadside to die of the mother with
+new-born babe at her breast, the loss of "all thought of the sanctity
+of human life when the lives of the dearest are reckoned as less worth
+than the shillings of overdue rack-rental." I analysed the new Act:
+"When this Act passes, trial by jury, right of public meeting, liberty
+of press, sanctity of house, will one and all be held at the will of
+the Lord-Lieutenant, the irresponsible autocrat of Ireland, while
+liberty of person will lie at the mercy of every constable. Such is
+England's way of governing Ireland in the year 1882. And this is
+supposed to be a Bill for the 'repression of crime.'" Bluntly, I put
+the bald truth: "The plain fact is that the murderers have succeeded.
+They saw in the new policy the reconciliation of England and Ireland;
+they knew that friendship would follow justice, and that the two
+countries, for the first time in history, would clasp hands. To
+prevent this they dug a new gulf, which they hoped the English nation
+would not span; they sent a river of blood across the road of
+friendship, and they flung two corpses to bar the newly-opened gate of
+reconciliation and peace. They have succeeded."
+
+Into this whirl of political and social strife came the first whisper
+to me of the Theosophical Society, in the shape of a statement of its
+principles, which conveyed, I remarked, "no very definite idea of the
+requirements for membership, beyond a dreamy, emotional, scholarly
+interest in the religio-philosophic fancies of the past." Also a
+report of an address by Colonel Olcott, which led me to suppose that
+the society held to "some strange theory of 'apparitions' of the dead,
+and to some existence outside the physical and apart from it." These
+came to me from some Hindû Freethinkers, who asked my opinion as to
+Secularists joining the Theosophical Society, and Theosophists being
+admitted to the National Secular Society. I replied, judging from
+these reports, that "while Secularists would have no right to refuse
+to enrol Theosophists, if they desired it, among their members, there
+is a radical difference between the mysticism of Theosophy and the
+scientific materialism of Secularism. The exclusive devotion to this
+world implied in the profession of Secularism leaves no room for
+other-worldism; and consistent members of our body cannot join a
+society which professes belief therein."[27]
+
+H.P. Blavatsky penned a brief article in the _Theosophist_ for
+August, 1882, in which she commented on my paragraph, remarking, in
+her generous way, that it must have been written "while labouring
+under entirely misconceived notions about the real nature of our
+society. For one so highly intellectual and keen as that renowned
+writer to dogmatise and issue autocratic ukases, after she has herself
+suffered so cruelly and undeservedly at the hands of blind bigotry and
+social prejudice in her lifelong struggle for _freedom of thought_
+seems, to say the least, absurdly inconsistent." After quoting my
+paragraph she went on: "Until proofs to the contrary, we prefer to
+believe that the above lines were dictated to Mrs. Besant by some
+crafty misrepresentations from Madras, inspired by a mean personal
+revenge rather than a desire to remain consistent with the principles
+of 'the scientific materialism of Secularism.' We beg to assure the
+Radical editors of the _National Reformer_ that they were both very
+strangely misled by false reports about the Radical editors of the
+_Theosophist_. The term 'supernaturalists' can no more apply to the
+latter than to Mrs. A. Besant and Mr. C. Bradlaugh."
+
+H.P. Blavatsky, when she commented, as she occasionally did, on the
+struggles going on in England, took of them a singularly large-hearted
+and generous view. She referred with much admiration to Mr.
+Bradlaugh's work and to his Parliamentary struggle, and spoke warmly
+of the services he had rendered to liberty. Again, in pointing out
+that spiritualistic trance orations by no means transcended speeches
+that made no such claim, I find her first mention of myself: "Another
+lady orator, of deservedly great fame, both for eloquence and
+learning--the good Mrs. Annie Besant--without believing in controlling
+spirits, or for that matter in her own spirit, yet speaks and writes
+such sensible and wise things, that we might almost say that one of
+her speeches or chapters contains more matter to benefit humanity than
+would equip a modern trance-speaker for an entire oratorical
+career."[28] I have sometimes wondered of late years whether, had I
+met her then or seen any of her writings, I should have become her
+pupil. I fear not; I was still too much dazzled by the triumphs of
+Western Science, too self-assertive, too fond of combat, too much at
+the mercy of my own emotions, too sensitive to praise and blame. I
+needed to sound yet more deeply the depths of human misery, to hear
+yet more loudly the moaning of "the great Orphan," Humanity, to feel
+yet more keenly the lack of wider knowledge and of clearer light if I
+were to give effective help to man, ere I could bow my pride to crave
+admittance as pupil to the School of Occultism, ere I could put aside
+my prejudices and study the Science of the Soul.
+
+The long-continued attempts of Sir Henry Tyler and his friends to
+stimulate persecutions for blasphemy at length took practical shape,
+and in July, 1882, Mr. Foote, the editor, Mr. Ramsey, the publisher,
+and Mr. Whittle, the printer of the _Freethinker_, were summoned for
+blasphemy by Sir Henry Tyler himself. An attempt was made to involve
+Mr. Bradlaugh in the proceedings, and the solicitors promised to drop
+the case against the editor and printer if Mr. Bradlaugh would himself
+sell them some copies of the paper. But however ready Mr. Bradlaugh
+had always shown himself to shield his subordinates by taking his sins
+on his own shoulders, he saw no reason why he should assume
+responsibility for a paper over which he had no control, and which
+was, he thought, by its caricatures, lowering the tone of Freethought
+advocacy and giving an unnecessary handle to its foes. He therefore
+answered that he would sell the solicitors any works published by
+himself or with his authority, and sent them a catalogue of the whole
+of such works. The object of this effort of Sir Henry Tyler's was
+obvious enough, and Mr. Bradlaugh commented: "The above letters make
+it pretty clear that Sir Henry W. Tyler having failed in his endeavour
+to get the science classes stopped at the Hall of Science, having also
+failed in his attempt to induce Sir W. Vernon Harcourt to prosecute
+myself and Mrs. Besant as editors and publishers of this journal,
+desires to make me personally and criminally responsible for the
+contents of a journal I neither edit nor publish, over which I have
+not a shadow of control, and in which I have not the smallest
+interest. Why does Sir H.W. Tyler so ardently desire to prosecute, me
+for blasphemy? Is it because two convictions will under the 9th and
+10th Will. III. cap. 32, render me 'for ever' incapable of sitting in
+Parliament?" The _Whitehall Review_ frankly put this forward as an
+object to be gained, and Mr. Bradlaugh was summoned to the Mansion
+House on a charge of publishing blasphemous libels in the
+_Freethinker_; meanwhile Sir Henry Tyler put a notice on the Order
+Book to deprive "the daughters of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh" of the grant
+they had earned as science teachers, and got an order which proved to
+be invalid, but which was acted on, to inspect Mr. Bradlaugh's and my
+own private banking accounts, I being no party to the case. Looking
+back, I marvel at the incredible meannesses to which Sir Henry Tyler
+and others stooped in defence of "religion"--Heaven save the mark! Let
+me add that his motion in the House of Commons was a complete failure,
+and it was emphasised by the publication at the same time of the
+successful work, both as teachers and as students, of the "daughters
+of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh," and of my being the only student in all
+England who had succeeded in taking honours in botany.
+
+I must pause a moment to chronicle, in September, 1882, the death of
+Dr. Pusey, whom I had sought in the whirl of my early religious
+struggles. I wrote an article on him in the _National Reformer_, and
+ended by laying a tribute on his grave: "A strong man and a good man.
+Utterly out of harmony with the spirit of his own time, looking with
+sternly-rebuking eyes on all the eager research, the joyous love of
+nature, the earnest inquiry into a world doomed to be burnt up at the
+coming of its Judge. An ascetic, pure in life, stern in faith, harsh
+to unbelievers because sincere in his own cruel creed, generous and
+tender to all who accepted his doctrines and submitted to his Church.
+He never stooped to slander those with whom he disagreed. His hatred
+of heresy led him not to blacken the character of heretics, nor to
+descend to the vulgar abuse used by pettier priests. And therefore I,
+who honour courage and sincerity wherever I find them; I, who do
+homage to steadfastness wherever I find it; I, Atheist, lay my small
+tribute of respect on the bier of this noblest of the Anglo-Catholics,
+Edward Bouverie Pusey."
+
+As a practical answer to the numberless attacks made on us, and as a
+result of the enormous increase of circulation given to our
+theological and political writings by these harassing persecutions, we
+moved our publishing business to 63, Fleet Street, at the end of
+September, 1882, a shop facing that at which Richard Carlile had
+carried on his publishing business for a great time, and so seemed
+still redolent with memories of his gallant struggles. Two of the
+first things sold here were a pamphlet of mine, a strong protest
+against our shameful Egyptian policy, and a critical volume on
+"Genesis" which Mr. Bradlaugh found time to write in the intervals of
+his busy life. Here I worked daily, save when out of London, until Mr.
+Bradlaugh's death in 1891, assisted in the conduct of the business by
+Mr. Bradlaugh's elder daughter--a woman of strong character with many
+noble qualities, who died rather suddenly in December, 1888, and in
+the work on the _National Reformer_, first by Dr. Aveling, and then by
+Mr. John Robertson, its present editor. Here, too, from 1884 onwards,
+worked with me Thornton Smith, one of Mr. Bradlaugh's most devoted
+disciples, who became one of the leading speakers of the National
+Secular Society; like her well-loved chief, she was ever a good friend
+and a good fighter, and to me the most loyal and loving of colleagues,
+one of the few--the very few--Freethinkers who were large-hearted and
+generous enough not to turn against me when I became a Theosophist. A
+second of these--alas! I could count them on my fingers--was the John
+Robertson above mentioned, a man of rare ability and wide culture,
+somewhat too scholarly for popular propagandism of the most generally
+effective order, but a man who is a strength to any movement, always
+on the side of noble living and high thinking, loyal-natured as the
+true Scot should be, incapable of meanness or treachery, and the most
+genial and generous of friends.
+
+Among the new literary ventures that followed on our taking the large
+publishing premises in Fleet Street was a sixpenny magazine, edited by
+myself, and entitled _Our Corner_; its first number was dated January,
+1883, and for six years it appeared regularly, and served me as a
+useful mouthpiece in my Socialist and Labour propagandist work. Among
+its contributors were Moncure D. Conway, Professor Ludwig Büchner,
+Yves Guyot, Professor Ernst Haeckel, G. Bernard Shaw, Constance Naden,
+Dr. Aveling, J.H. Levy, J.L. Joynes, Mrs. Edgren, John Robertson,
+and many another, Charles Bradlaugh and I writing regularly each
+month.
+
+1883 broke stormily, fights on every hand, and a huge constitutional
+agitation going on in the country, which forced the Government into
+bringing in an Affirmation Bill; resolutions from Liberal Associations
+all over the land; preparations to oppose the re-election of disloyal
+members; no less than a thousand delegates sent up to London by clubs,
+Trade Unions, associations of every sort; a meeting that packed
+Trafalgar Square; an uneasy crowd in Westminster Hall; a request from
+Inspector Denning that Mr. Bradlaugh would go out to them--they feared
+for his safety inside; a word from him, "The Government have pledged
+themselves to bring in an Affirmation Bill at once;" roar after roar
+of cheering; a veritable people's victory on that 15th of February,
+1883. It was the answer of the country to the appeal for justice, the
+rebuke of the electors to the House that had defied them.
+
+Scarcely was this over when a second prosecution for blasphemy against
+Messrs. Foote, Ramsey, and Kemp began, and was hurried on in the
+Central Criminal Court, before Mr. Justice North, a bigot of the
+sternest type. The trial ended in a disagreement of the jury, Mr.
+Foote defending himself in a splendid speech. The judge acted very
+harshly throughout, interrupted Mr. Foote continuously, and even
+refused bail to the defendants during the interval between the first
+and second trial; they were, therefore, confined in Newgate from
+Thursday to Monday, and we were only allowed to see them through iron
+bars and lattice, as they exercised in the prison yard between 8:30
+and 9:30 a.m. Brought up to trial again on Monday, they were
+convicted, and Mr. Foote was sentenced to a year's imprisonment, Mr.
+Ramsey to nine months, and Mr. Kemp to three months. Mr. Foote
+especially behaved with great dignity and courage in a most difficult
+position, and heard his cruel sentence without wincing, and with the
+calm words, "My Lord, I thank you; it is worthy your creed." A few of
+us at once stepped in, to preserve to Mr. Ramsey his shop, and to Mr.
+Foote his literary property; Dr. Aveling undertook the editing of the
+_Freethinker_ and of Mr. Foote's magazine _Progress_; the immediate
+necessities of their families were seen to; Mr. and Mrs. Forder took
+charge of the shop, and within a few days all was in working order.
+Disapproving as many of us did of the policy of the paper, there was
+no time to think of that when a blasphemy prosecution had proved
+successful, and we all closed up in the support of men imprisoned for
+conscience' sake. I commenced a series of articles on "The Christian
+Creed; what it is blasphemy to deny," showing what Christians must
+believe under peril of prosecution. Everywhere a tremendous impulse
+was given to the Freethought movement, as men awakened to the
+knowledge that blasphemy laws were not obsolete.
+
+From over the sea came a word of sympathy from the pen of H.P.
+Blavatsky in the _Theosophist_. "We prefer Mr. Foote's actual position
+to that of his severe judge. Aye, and were we in his guilty skin, we
+would feel more proud, even in the poor editor's present position,
+than we would under the wig of Mr. Justice North."
+
+In April, 1883, the long legal struggles of Mr. Bradlaugh against Mr.
+Newdegate and his common informer, that had lasted from July 2, 1880,
+till April 9, 1883, ended in his complete victory by the judgment of
+the House of Lords in his favour. "Court after Court decided against
+me," he wrote; "and Whig and Tory journals alike mocked at me for my
+persistent resistance. Even some good friends thought that my fight
+was hopeless, and that the bigots held me fast in their toils. I have,
+however, at last shaken myself free of Mr. Newdegate and his common
+informer. The judgment of the House of Lords in my favour is final and
+conclusive, and the boasts of the Tories that I should be made
+bankrupt for the penalties, have now, for ever, come to naught. Yet
+but for the many poor folk who have stood by me with their help and
+sympathy, I should have long since been ruined. The days and weeks
+spent in the Law Courts, the harassing work connected with each stage
+of litigation, the watching daily when each hearing was imminent, the
+absolute hindrance of all provincial lecturing--it is hardly possible
+for any one to judge the terrible mental and pecuniary strain of all
+this long-drawn-out struggle." Aye! it killed him at last, twenty
+years before his time, sapping his splendid vitality, undermining his
+iron constitution.
+
+The blasphemy trial of Mr. Bradlaugh, Mr. Foote, and Mr. Ramsey now
+came on, but this time in the Queen's Bench, before the Lord Chief
+Justice Coleridge. I had the honour of sitting between Mr. Bradlaugh
+and Mr. Foote, charged with the duty of having ready for the former
+all his references, and with a duplicate brief to mark off point after
+point as he dealt with it. Messrs. Foote and Ramsey were brought up in
+custody, but were brave and bright with courage unbroken. Mr.
+Bradlaugh applied to have his case taken separately, as he denied
+responsibility for the paper, and the judge granted the application;
+it was clearly proved that he and I--the "Freethought Publishing
+Company"--had never had anything to do with the production of the
+paper; that until November, 1881, we published it, and then refused to
+publish it any longer; that the reason for the refusal was the
+addition of comic Bible illustrations as a feature of the paper. I was
+called as witness and began with a difficulty; claiming to affirm, I
+was asked by the judge if the oath would not be binding on my
+conscience; I answered that any promise was binding on me whatever the
+form, and after some little argument the judge found a way out of the
+insulting form by asking whether the "invocation of the Deity added
+anything to it of a binding nature--added any sanction?" "None, my
+Lord," was the prompt reply, and I was allowed to affirm. Sir Hardinge
+Giffard subjected me to a very stringent cross-examination, doing his
+best to entangle me, but the perfect frankness of my answers broke all
+his weapons of finesse and inuendo.
+
+Some of the incidents of the trial were curious; Sir Hardinge
+Giffard's opening speech was very able and very unscrupulous. All
+facts in Mr. Bradlaugh's favour were distorted or hidden; anything
+that could be used against him was tricked out in most seductive
+fashion. Among the many monstrous perversions of the truth made by
+this most pious counsel, was the statement that changes of publisher,
+and of registration of the _Freethinker_ were made in consequence of a
+question as to prosecuting it put in the House of Commons. The change
+of publisher was admittedly made in November; the registration was
+made for the first time in November, and could not be changed, as
+there was no previous one. The House of Commons was not sitting in
+November; the question alluded to was asked in the following February.
+This one deliberate lie of the "defender of the faith" will do as well
+as quoting a score of others to show how wickedly and maliciously he
+endeavoured to secure an unjust verdict.
+
+The speech over, a number of witnesses were called. Sir Hardinge did
+not call witnesses who knew the facts, such as Mr. Norrish, the
+shopman, or Mr. Whittle, the printer. These he carefully avoided,
+although he subpoenaed both, because he did not want the real facts to
+come out. But he put in two solicitor's clerks, who had been hanging
+about the premises, and buying endless _National Reformers_ and
+_Freethinkers_, sheaves of them which were never used, but by which
+Sir Hardinge hoped to convey the impression of a mass of criminality.
+He put in a gentleman from the British Museum, who produced two large
+books, presumed to be _National Reformers_ and _Freethinkers_; what
+they were brought for nobody understood, the counsel for the Crown as
+little as any one, and the judge, surveying them over his spectacles,
+treated them with supreme contempt, as utterly irrelevant. Then a man
+came to prove that Mr. Bradlaugh was rated for Stonecutter Street, a
+fact no one disputed. Two policemen came to say they had seen him go
+in. "You saw many people go in, I suppose?" queried the Lord Chief
+Justice. On the whole the most miserably weak and obviously malicious
+case that could be brought into a court of law.
+
+One witness, however, must not be forgotten--Mr. Woodhams, bank
+manager. When he stated that Mr. Maloney, the junior counsel for the
+Crown, had inspected Mr. Bradlaugh's banking account, a murmur of
+surprise and indignation ran round the court. "Oh! Oh!" was heard from
+the crowd of barristers behind. The judge looked down incredulously,
+and for a moment the examination was stopped by the general movement.
+Unless Sir Hardinge Giffard is a splendid actor, he was not aware of
+the infamous proceeding, for he looked as startled as the rest of his
+legal brethren.
+
+Another queer incident occurred, showing, perhaps more than aught
+else, Mr. Bradlaugh's swift perception of the situation and adaptation
+to the environment. He wanted to read the Mansion House deposition of
+Norrish, to show why he was not called; the judge objected, and
+declined to allow it to be read. A pause while you might count five;
+then; "Well, I think I may say the learned counsel did not call
+Norrish because ..." and then the whole substance of the deposition
+was given in supposititious form. The judge looked down a minute, and
+then went off into silent laughter impossible to control at the adroit
+change of means and persistent gaining of end; barristers all round
+broke into ripples of laughter unrestrained; a broad smile pervaded
+the jury box; the only unmoved person was the defendant who proceeded
+in his grave statement as to what Norrish "might" have been asked. The
+nature of the defence was very clearly stated by Mr. Bradlaugh: "I
+shall ask you to find that this prosecution is one of the steps in a
+vindictive attempt to oppress and to crush a political opponent--that
+it was a struggle that commenced on my return to Parliament in 1880.
+If the prosecutor had gone into the box I should have shown you that
+he was one of the first then in the House to use the suggestion of
+blasphemy against me there. Since then I have never had any peace
+until the Monday of this week. Writs for penalties have been served,
+and suits of all kinds have been taken against me. On Monday last the
+House of Lords cleared me from the whole of one set, and, gentlemen, I
+ask you to-day to clear me from another. Three times I have been
+re-elected by my constituents, and what Sir Henry Tyler asks you to do
+is to send me to them branded with the dishonour of a conviction,
+branded not with the conviction for publishing heresy, but branded
+with the conviction, dishonourable to me, of having lied in this
+matter. I have no desire to have a prison's walls closed on me, but I
+would sooner ten times that, than that my constituents should think
+that for one moment I lied to escape the penalties. I am not indicted
+for anything I have ever written or caused to be written. As my Lord
+at the very first stage this morning pointed out, it is no question
+with me, Are the matters indicted blasphemous, or are they not
+blasphemous? Are they defensible, or are they not defensible? That is
+not my duty here. On this I make no comment. I have no duty here of
+even discussing the policy of the blasphemy laws, although I cannot
+help thinking that, if I were here making my defence against them, I
+might say that they were bad laws unfairly revived, doing more
+mischief to those who revive them than to those whom they are revived
+against. But it is not for anything I have said myself; it is not for
+anything I have written myself; it is not for anything I have
+published myself. It is an endeavour to make me technically liable for
+a publication with which I have nothing whatever to do, and I will ask
+you to defeat that here. Every time I have succeeded I have been met
+with some new thing. When I first fought it was hoped to defeat my
+election. When I was re-elected it was sought to make me bankrupt by
+enormous penalties, and when I escaped the suit for enormous penalties
+they hope now to destroy me by this. I have no question here about
+defending my heresy, not because I am not ready to defend it when it
+is challenged in the right way, and it there be anything in it that
+the law can challenge. I have never gone back from anything I have
+ever said; I have never gone back from anything I have ever written; I
+have never gone back from anything I have ever done; and I ask you not
+to allow this Sir Henry Whatley Tyler, who dares not come here to-day,
+to use you as the assassin uses the dagger, to stab a man from behind
+whom he never dares to face."
+
+The summing up by Lord Coleridge was perfect in eloquence, in thought,
+in feeling. Nothing more touching could be imagined than the conflict
+between the real religious feeling, abhorrent of heresy, and the
+determination to be just, despite all prejudice. The earnest effort
+lest the prejudice he felt as a Christian should weigh also in the
+minds of the jury, and should cause them to pervert justice. The
+absolute pleading to them to do what was right and not to admit
+against the unbeliever what they would not admit in ordinary cases.
+Then the protest against prosecution of opinions; the admission of the
+difficulties in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the pathetic fear lest by
+persecution "the sacred truths might be struck through the sides of
+those who are their enemies." For intellectual clearness and moral
+elevation this exquisite piece of eloquence, delivered in a voice of
+silvery beauty, would be hard to excel, and Lord Coleridge did this
+piece of service to the religion so dear to his heart, that he showed
+that a Christian judge could be just and righteous in dealing with a
+foe of his creed.
+
+There was a time of terrible strain waiting for the verdict, and when
+at last it came, "Not Guilty," a sharp clap of applause hailed it,
+sternly and rightly reproved by the judge. It was echoed by the
+country, which almost unanimously condemned the prosecution as an
+iniquitous attempt on the part of Mr. Bradlaugh's political enemies to
+put a stop to his political career. Thus the _Pall Mall Gazette_
+wrote:--
+
+"Whatever may be the personal or political or religious aversion which
+is excited by Mr. Bradlaugh, it is impossible for even his bitterest
+opponents to deny the brilliance of the series of victories which he
+has won in the law courts. His acquittal in the blasphemy prosecution
+of Saturday was but the latest of a number of encounters in which he
+has succeeded in turning the tables upon his opponents in the most
+decisive fashion. The policy of baiting Mr. Bradlaugh which has been
+persisted in so long, savours so strongly of a petty and malignant
+species of persecution that it is well that those who indulge in it
+should be made to smart for their pains. The wise and weighty words
+used by the Lord Chief Justice in summing up should be taken seriously
+to heart: 'Those persons are to be deprecated who would pervert the
+law, even with the best intentions, and "do evil that good may come,
+whose damnation" (says the apostle) "is just."' Without emulating the
+severity of the apostle, we may say that it is satisfactory that the
+promoters of all these prosecutions should be condemned in costs."
+
+In the separate trial of Messrs. Foote and Ramsey, Mr. Foote again
+defended himself in a speech of marked ability, and spoken of by the
+judge as "very striking." Lord Coleridge made a noble charge to the
+jury, in which he strongly condemned prosecutions of unpopular
+opinions, pointing out that no prosecution short of extermination
+could be effective, and caustically remarking on the very easy form of
+virtue indulged in by persecutors. "As a general rule," he said,
+"persecution, unless far more extreme than in England in the
+nineteenth century is possible, is certain to be in vain. It is also
+true, and I cannot help assenting to it, that it is a very easy form
+of virtue. It is a more difficult form of virtue, quietly and
+unostentatiously to obey what we believe to be God's will in our own
+lives. It is not very easy to do it; and it makes much less noise in
+the world. It is very easy to turn upon somebody else who differs from
+us, and in the guise of zeal of God's honour to attack somebody of a
+difference of opinion, whose life may be more pleasing to God and more
+conducive to His honour than our own. And when it is done by persons
+whose own lives are not free from reproach and who take that
+particular form of zeal for God which consists in putting the criminal
+law in force against others, that, no doubt, does more to create a
+sympathy with the defendant than with the prosecutor. And if it should
+be done by those who enjoy the wit of Voltaire, and who do not turn
+away from the sneers of Gibbon, and rather relish the irony of Hume,
+our feelings do not go with the prosecutors, and we are rather
+disposed to sympathise with the defendant. It is still worse if the
+person who takes such a course takes it, not from a kind of notion
+that God wants his assistance, and that he can give it less on his own
+account than by prosecuting others--but it is mixed up with anything
+of partisan or political feeling, then nothing can be more foreign to
+what is high-minded, or religious, or noble, in men's conduct; and
+indeed, it seems to me that any one who will do that, not for the
+honour of God but for the purpose of the ban, deserves the most
+disdainful disapprobation."
+
+The jury disagreed, and a _nolle prosequi_ was entered. The net
+results of the trials were a large addition to the membership of the
+National Secular Society, an increase of circulation of Freethought
+literature, the raising of Mr. Foote for a time to a position of great
+influence and popularity, and the placing of his name in history as a
+brave martyr for liberty of speech. The offence against good taste
+will be forgotten; the loyalty to conviction and to courage will
+remain. History does not ask if men who suffered for heresy ever
+published a rough word; it asks, Were they brave in their
+steadfastness; were they faithful to the truth they saw? It may be
+well to place on record Mr. Foote's punishment for blasphemy: he spent
+twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four alone in his cell; his only
+seat was a stool without a back; his employment was picking matting;
+his bed was a plank with a thin mattress. During the latter part of
+his imprisonment he was allowed some books.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+SOCIALISM.
+
+
+The rest of 1883 passed in the usual way of hard work; the Affirmation
+Bill was rejected, and the agitation for Constitutional right grew
+steadily; the Liberal Press was won over, and Mr. Bradlaugh was
+beginning to earn golden opinions on all sides for his courage, his
+tenacity, and his self-control. A successful International Congress at
+Amsterdam took some of us over to the Northern Venice, where a most
+successful gathering was held. To me, personally, the year has a
+special interest, as being the one in which my attention was called,
+though only partially, to the Socialist movement. I had heard Louise
+Michelle lecture in the early spring; a brief controversy in the
+_National Reformer_ had interested me, but I had not yet concerned
+myself with the economic basis of Socialism; I had realised that the
+land should be public property, but had not gone into the deeper
+economic causes of poverty, though the question was pressing with
+ever-increasing force on heart and brain. Of Socialist teaching I knew
+nothing, having studied only the older English Economists in my
+younger days. In 1884 a more definite call to consider 299 these
+teachings was to come, and I may perhaps open the record of 1884 with
+the words of greeting spoken by me to our readers in the first number
+of the _Reformer_ for that year: "What tests 1884 may have for our
+courage, what strains on our endurance, what trials of our loyalty,
+none can tell. But this we know--that every test of courage
+successfully met, every strain of endurance steadily borne, every
+trial of loyalty nobly surmounted, leaves courage braver, endurance
+stronger, loyalty truer, than each was before. And therefore, for our
+own and for the world's sake, I will not wish you, friends, an 1884 in
+which there shall be no toil and no battling; but I will wish you,
+each and all, the hero's heart and the hero's patience, in the
+struggle for the world's raising that will endure through the coming
+year."
+
+On February 3rd I came for the first time across a paper called
+_Justice_, in which Mr. Bradlaugh was attacked, and which gave an
+account of a meeting of the Democratic Federation--not yet the Social
+Democratic--in which a man had, apparently unrebuked, said that "all
+means were justifiable to attain" working-class ends. I protested
+strongly against the advocacy of criminal means, declaring that those
+who urged the use of such means were the worst foes of social
+progress. A few weeks later the _Echo_ repeated a speech of Mr.
+Hyndman's in which a "bloodier revolution" than that of France was
+prophesied, and the extinction of "book-learning" seemed coupled with
+the success of Socialism, and this again I commented on. But I had the
+pleasure, a week later, of reprinting from _Justice_ a sensible
+paragraph, condemning the advocacy of violence so long as free
+agitation was allowed.
+
+The spring was marked by two events on which I have not time or space
+to dwell--the resignation by Mr. Bradlaugh of his seat, on the
+reiteration of the resolution of exclusion, and his triumphant return
+for the fourth time by an increased majority, a vote of 4,032, a
+higher poll than that of the general election; and the release of Mr.
+Foote, on February 25th, from Holloway, whence he was escorted by a
+procession a quarter of a mile in length. On the 12th of March he and
+his fellow-prisoners received a magnificent reception and were
+presented with valuable testimonials at the Hall of Science.
+
+Taking up again the thread of Socialism, the great debate in St.
+James's Hall, London, between Mr. Bradlaugh and Mr. Hyndman on April
+17th, roused me to a serious study of the questions raised. Socialism
+has in England no more devoted, no more self-sacrificing advocate than
+Henry Hyndman. A man of wide and deep reading, wielding most ably a
+singularly fascinating pen, with talents that would have made him
+wealthy in any career he adopted, he has sacrificed himself without a
+murmur to the people's cause. He has borne obloquy from without,
+suspicion and unkindness from those he served, and surrounded by
+temptations to betray the people, he has never swerved from his
+integrity. He has said rash things, has been stirred to passionate
+outbursts and reckless phrases, but love to the people and sympathy
+with suffering lay at the root of his wildest words, and they count
+but little as against his faithful service. Personally, my debt to him
+is of a mixed character; he kept me from Socialism for some time by
+his bitter and very unjust antagonism to Mr. Bradlaugh; but it was the
+debate at St. James's Hall that, while I angrily resented his
+injustice, made me feel that there was something more in practical
+Socialism than I had imagined, especially when I read it over
+afterwards, away from the magic of Mr. Bradlaugh's commanding
+eloquence and personal magnetism. It was a sore pity that English
+Socialists, from the outset of their movement, treated Mr. Bradlaugh
+so unfairly, so that his friends were set against Socialists ere they
+began to examine their arguments. I must confess that my deep
+attachment to him led me into injustice to his Socialist foes in those
+early days, and often made me ascribe to them calculated malignity
+instead of hasty and prejudiced assertion. Added to this, their
+uncurbed violence in discussion, their constant interruptions during
+the speeches of opponents, their reckless inaccuracy in matters of
+fact, were all bars standing in the way of the thoughtful. When I came
+to know them better, I found that the bulk of their speakers were very
+young men, overworked and underpaid, who spent their scanty leisure in
+efforts to learn, to educate themselves, to train themselves, and I
+learned to pardon faults which grew out of the bitter sense of
+injustice, and which were due largely to the terrible pressure of our
+system on characters not yet strong enough--how few are strong
+enough!--to bear grinding injustice without loss of balance and of
+impartiality. None save those who have worked with them know how much
+of real nobility, of heroic self-sacrifice, of constant self-denial,
+of brotherly affection, there is among the Social Democrats.
+
+At this time also I met George Bernard Shaw, one of the most brilliant
+of Socialist writers and most provoking of men; a man with a perfect
+genius for "aggravating" the enthusiastically earnest, and with a
+passion for representing himself as a scoundrel. On my first
+experience of him on the platform at South Place Institute he
+described himself as a "loafer," and I gave an angry snarl at him in
+the _Reformer_, for a loafer was my detestation, and behold! I found
+that he was very poor, because he was a writer with principles and
+preferred starving his body to starving his conscience; that he gave
+time and earnest work to the spreading of Socialism, spending night
+after night in workmen's clubs; and that "a loafer" was only an
+amiable way of describing himself because he did not carry a hod. Of
+course I had to apologise for my sharp criticism as doing him a
+serious injustice, but privately felt somewhat injured at having been
+entrapped into such a blunder. Meanwhile I was more and more turning
+aside from politics and devoting myself to the social condition of the
+people I find myself, in June, protesting against Sir John Lubbock's
+Bill which fixed a twelve-hour day as the limit of a "young person's"
+toil. "A 'day' of twelve hours is brutal," I wrote; "if the law fixes
+twelve hours as a 'fair day' that law will largely govern custom. I
+declare that a 'legal day' should be eight hours on five days in the
+week and not more than five hours on the sixth. If the labour is of an
+exhausting character these hours are too long." On every side now the
+Socialist controversy grew, and I listened, read, and thought much,
+but said little. The inclusion of John Robertson in the staff of the
+_Reformer_ brought a highly intellectual Socialist into closer touch
+with us, and slowly I found that the case for Socialism was
+intellectually complete and ethically beautiful. The trend of my
+thought was shown by urging the feeding of Board School children,
+breaking down under the combination of education and starvation, and I
+asked, "Why should people be pauperised by a rate-supported meal, and
+not pauperised by, state-supported police, drainage, road-mending,
+street-lighting, &c? "Socialism in its splendid ideal appealed to my
+heart, while the economic soundness of its basis convinced my head.
+All my life was turned towards the progress of the people, the helping
+of man, and it leaped forward to meet the stronger hope, the lofty
+ideal of social brotherhood, the rendering possible to all of freer
+life; so long had I been striving thitherward, and here there opened
+up a path to the yearned-for goal! How strong were the feelings
+surging in my heart may be seen in a brief extract from an article
+published second week of January, 1885: "Christian charity? We know
+its work. It gives a hundred-weight of coal and five pounds of beef
+once a year to a family whose head could earn a hundred such doles if
+Christian justice allowed him fair wage for the work he performs. It
+plunders the workers of the wealth they make, and then flings back at
+them a thousandth part of their own product as 'charity.' It builds
+hospitals for the poor whom it has poisoned in filthy courts and
+alleys, and workhouses for the worn-out creatures from whom it has
+wrung every energy, every hope, every joy. Miss Cobbe summons us to
+admire Christian civilisation, and we see idlers flaunting in the
+robes woven by the toilers, a glittering tinselled super-structure
+founded on the tears, the strugglings, the grey, hopeless misery of
+the poor."
+
+This first month of January, 1885, brought on me the first attack for
+my Socialistic tendencies, from the pen of Mr. W.P. Ball, who wrote
+to the _Reformer_ complaining of my paragraph, quoted above, in which
+I had advocated rate-supported meals for Board School children. A
+brief controversy thus arose, in which I supported my opinion, waiving
+the question as to my being "at heart a Socialist." In truth, I
+dreaded to make the plunge of publicly allying myself with the
+advocates of Socialism, because of the attitude of bitter hostility
+they had adopted towards Mr. Bradlaugh. On his strong, tenacious
+nature, nurtured on self-reliant individualism, the arguments of the
+younger generation made no impression. He could not change his methods
+because a new tendency was rising to the surface, and he did not see
+how different was the Socialism of our day to the Socialist dreams of
+the past--noble ideals of a future not immediately realisable in
+truth, but to be worked towards and rendered possible in the days to
+come. Could I take public action which might bring me into collision
+with the dearest of my friends, which might strain the strong and
+tender tie so long existing between us? My affection, my gratitude,
+all warred against the idea of working with those who wronged him so
+bitterly. But the cry of starving children was ever in my ears; the
+sobs of women poisoned in lead works, exhausted in nail works, driven
+to prostitution by starvation, made old and haggard by ceaseless work.
+I saw their misery was the result of an evil system, was inseparable
+from private ownership of the instruments of wealth production; that
+while the worker was himself but an instrument, selling his labour
+under the law of supply and demand, he must remain helpless in the
+grip of the employing classes, and that trade combinations could only
+mean increased warfare--necessary, indeed, for the time as weapons of
+defence--but meaning war, not brotherly co-operation of all for the
+good of all. A conflict which was stripped of all covering, a conflict
+between a personal tie and a call of duty could not last long, and
+with a heavy heart I made up my mind to profess Socialism openly and
+work for it with all my energy. Happily, Mr. Bradlaugh was as tolerant
+as he was strong, and our private friendship remained unbroken; but he
+never again felt the same confidence in my judgment as he felt before,
+nor did he any more consult me on his own policy, as he had done ever
+since we first clasped hands.
+
+A series of articles in _Our Corner_ on the "Redistribution of
+Political Power," on the "Evolution of Society," on "Modern
+Socialism," made my position clear. "Over against those who laud the
+present state of Society, with its unjustly rich and its unjustly
+poor, with its palaces and its slums, its millionaires and its
+paupers, be it ours to proclaim that there is a higher ideal in life
+than that of being first in the race for wealth, most successful in
+the scramble for gold. Be it ours to declare steadfastly that health,
+comfort, leisure, culture, plenty for every individual are far more
+desirable than breathless struggle for existence, furious trampling
+down of the weak by the strong, huge fortunes accumulated out of the
+toil of others, to be handed down to those who had done nothing to
+earn them. Be it ours to maintain that the greatness of a nation
+depends not on the number of its great proprietors, on the wealth of
+its great capitalists, or the splendour of its great nobles, but on
+the absence of poverty among its people, on the education and
+refinement of its masses, on the universality of enjoyment in life....
+Enough for each of work, of leisure, of joy; too little for none, too
+much for none--such is the Social ideal. Better to strive after it
+worthily and fail, than to die without striving for it at all."
+
+Then I differentiated the methods of the Socialist and the Radical
+Individualist, pleading for union among those who formed the wings of
+the army of Labour, and urging union of all workers against the
+idlers. For the weakness of the people has ever been in their
+divisions, in the readiness of each section to turn its weapons
+against other sections instead of against the common foe. All
+privileged classes, when they are attacked, sink their differences and
+present a serried front to their assailants; the people alone fight
+with each other, while the battle between themselves and the
+privileged is raging.
+
+I strove, as so many others were striving, to sound in the ears of the
+thoughtless and the careless the cry of the sufferings of the poor,
+endeavouring to make articulate their misery. Thus in a description of
+Edinburgh slums came the following: "I saw in a 'house' which was made
+by boarding up part of a passage, which had no window, and in which it
+was necessary to burn an oil lamp all day, thus adding to the burden
+of the rent, a family of three--man, wife, and child--whose lot was
+hardly 'of their own making.' The man was tall and bronzed, but he was
+dying of heart disease; he could not do hard work, and he was too
+clumsy for light work; so he sat there, after two days' fruitless
+search, patiently nursing his miserable, scrofulous baby in his dim
+and narrow den. The cases of individual hopeless suffering are
+heartbreaking. In one room lay a dying child, dying of low fever
+brought on by want of food. 'It hae no faither,' sobbed the mother;
+and for a moment I did not catch the meaning that the father had left
+to the mother all the burden of a child unallowed by law. In another
+lay the corpse of a mother, with the children round her, and
+hard-featured, gentle-hearted women came in to take back to their
+overcrowded beds 'the mitherless bairns.' In yet another a woman,
+shrunken and yellow, crouched over a glimmer of fire; "I am dying of
+cancer of the womb," she said, with that pathetic resignation to the
+inevitable so common among the poor. I sat chatting for a few minutes.
+'Come again, deary,' she said as I rose to go; 'it's gey dull sitting
+here the day through.'"
+
+The article in which these, among other descriptions, occurred was
+closed with the following: "Passing out of the slums into the streets
+of the town, only a few steps separating the horror and the beauty, I
+felt, with a vividness more intense than ever, the fearful contrasts
+between the lots of men; and with more pressing urgency the question
+seemed to ring in my ears, 'Is there no remedy? Must there always be
+rich and poor?' Some say that it must be so; that the palace and the
+slum will for ever exist as the light and the shadow. Not so do I
+believe. I believe that the poverty is the result of ignorance and of
+bad social arrangements, and that therefore it may be eradicated by
+knowledge and by social change. I admit that for many of these adult
+dwellers in the slums there is no hope. Poor victims of a civilisation
+that hides its brutality beneath a veneer of culture and of grace, for
+them individually there is, alas! no salvation. But for their
+children, yes! Healthy surroundings, good food, mental and physical
+training, plenty of play, and carefully chosen work--these might save
+the young and prepare them for happy life. But they are being left to
+grow up as their parents were, and even when a few hours of school are
+given them the home half-neutralises what the education effects. The
+scanty aid given is generally begrudged, the education is to be but
+elementary, as little as possible is doled out. Yet these children
+have each one of them hopes and fears, possibilities of virtue and of
+crime, a life to be made or marred. We shower money on generals and on
+nobles, we keep high-born paupers living on the national charity, we
+squander wealth with both hands on army and navy, on churches and
+palaces; but we grudge every halfpenny that increases the education
+rate and howl down every proposal to build decent houses for the poor.
+We cover our heartlessness and indifference with fine phrases about
+sapping the independence of the poor and destroying their
+self-respect. With loathsome hypocrisy we repair a prince's palace for
+him, and let him live in it rent-free, without one word about the
+degradation involved in his thus living upon charity; while we refuse
+to 'pauperise' the toiler by erecting decent buildings in which he may
+live--not rent-free like the prince, but only paying a rent which
+shall cover the cost of erection and maintenance, instead of one which
+gives a yearly profit to a speculator. And so, year after year, the
+misery grows, and every great city has on its womb a cancer; sapping
+its vitality, poisoning its life-blood. Every great city is breeding
+in its slums a race which is reverting through the savage to the
+brute--a brute more dangerous in that degraded humanity has
+possibilities of evil in it beyond the reach of the mere wild beast.
+If not for Love's sake, then for fear; if not for justice or for human
+pity, then for sheer desire of self-preservation; I appeal to the wise
+and to the wealthy to set their hands to the cure of social evil, ere
+stolidity gives place to passion and dull patience vanishes before
+fury, and they
+
+"'Learn at last, in some wild hour, how much the wretched dare.'"
+
+Because it was less hotly antagonistic to the Radicals than the two
+other Socialist organisations, I joined the Fabian Society, and worked
+hard with it as a speaker and lecturer. Sidney Webb, G. Bernard Shaw,
+Hubert and Mrs. Bland, Graham Wallas--these were some of those who
+gave time, thought, incessant work to the popularising of Socialist
+thought, the spreading of sound economics, the effort to turn the
+workers' energy toward social rather than merely political reform. We
+lectured at workmen's clubs wherever we could gain a hearing, till we
+leavened London Radicalism with Socialist thought, and by treating the
+Radical as the unevolved Socialist rather than as the anti-Socialist,
+we gradually won him over to Socialist views. We circulated questions
+to be put to all candidates for parliamentary or other offices,
+stirred up interest in local elections, educated men and women into an
+understanding of the causes of their poverty, won recruits for the
+army of propagandists from the younger of the educated middle class.
+That the London working classes to-day are so largely Socialist is
+greatly due to the years of work done among them by members of the
+Fabian Society, as well to the splendid, if occasionally too militant,
+energy of the Social Democratic Federation, and to the devotion of
+that noble and generous genius, William Morris.
+
+During this same year (1885) a movement was set on foot in England to
+draw attention to the terrible sufferings of the Russian political
+prisoners, and it was decided at a meeting held in my house to form a
+society of the friends of Russia, which should seek to spread accurate
+and careful information about the present condition of Russia. At that
+meeting were present Charles Bradlaugh, "Stepniak," and many others,
+E.R. Pease acting as honorary secretary. It is noteworthy that some
+of the most prominent Russian exiles--such as Kropotkin--take the view
+that the Tzar himself is not allowed to know what occurs, and is very
+largely the victim of the bureaucracy that surrounds him.
+
+Another matter, that increased as the months went on, was the attempt
+of the police authorities to stop Socialist speaking in the open air.
+Christians, Freethinkers, Salvationists, agitators of all kinds were,
+for the most part, left alone, but there was a regular crusade against
+the Socialists. Liberal and Tory journals alike condemned the way in
+which in Dod Street, in September, the Socialists' meetings were
+attacked. Quiet persistence was shown by the promoters--members of the
+Social Democratic Federation--and they were well supported by other
+Socialists and by the Radical clubs. I volunteered to speak on October
+4th (my first Sunday in London after the summoning and imprisoning of
+the speakers had commenced), but the attitude of the people was so
+determined on the preceding Sunday that all interference was
+withdrawn.
+
+Herbert Burrows stood for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets in
+the November of this year, and I find a paragraph in the _Reformer_ in
+which I heartily wished him success, especially as the first candidate
+who had put forward a demand for industrial education. In this, as in
+so many practical proposals, Socialists have led the way. He polled
+4,232 votes, despite the furious opposition of the clergy to him as a
+Freethinker, of the publicans to him as a teetotaler, of the
+maintainers of the present social system to him as a Socialist. And
+his fight did much to make possible my own success in 1888.
+
+With this autumn, too, began, in connection with the struggle for the
+right of meeting, the helping of the workmen to fair trial by
+providing of bail and legal defence. The first case that I bailed out
+was that of Lewis Lyons, sent to gaol for two months with hard labour
+by Mr. Saunders, of the Thames Police Court. Oh, the weary, sickening
+waiting in the court for "my prisoner," the sordid vice, the revolting
+details of human depravity to which my unwilling eyes and ears were
+witnesses. I carried Lyons off in triumph, and the Middlesex
+magistrates quashed the conviction, the evidence being pronounced by
+them to be "confusing, contradictory, and worthless." Yet but for the
+chance of one of us stepping forward to offer bail and to provide the
+means for an appeal (I acted on Mr. Bradlaugh's suggestion and advice,
+for he acted as counsellor to me all through the weary struggles that
+lasted till 1888, putting his great legal knowledge at my disposal,
+though he often disapproved my action, thinking me Quixotic)--but for
+this, Lewis Lyons would have had to suffer his heavy sentence.
+
+The general election took place this autumn, and Northampton returned
+Mr. Bradlaugh for the fifth time, thus putting an end to the long
+struggle, for he took the oath and his seat in the following January,
+and at once gave notice of an Oaths Bill, to give to all who claimed
+it, under all circumstances, the right to affirm. He was returned with
+the largest vote ever polled for him--4,315--and he entered Parliament
+with all the prestige of his great struggle, and went to the front at
+once, one of the recognised forces in the House. The action of Mr.
+Speaker Peel promptly put an end to an attempted obstruction. Sir
+Michael Hicks Beach, Mr. Cecil Raikes, and Sir John Hennaway had
+written to the Speaker asking his interference, but the Speaker
+declared that he had no authority, no right to stand between a duly
+elected member and the duty of taking the oath prescribed by statute.
+Thus ended the constitutional struggle of six years, that left the
+victor well-nigh bankrupt in health and in purse, and sent him to a
+comparatively early grave. He lived long enough to justify his
+election, to prove his value to the House and to his country, but he
+did not live long enough to render to England all the services which
+his long training, his wide knowledge, his courage, and his honesty so
+eminently fitted him to yield.
+
+[Illustration: NORWICH BRANCH OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE.]
+
+_Our Corner_ now served as a valuable aid in Socialist propaganda, and
+its monthly "Socialist Notes" became a record of Socialist progress in
+all lands. We were busy during the spring in organising a conference
+for the discussion of "The Present Commercial System, and the Better
+Utilisation of National Wealth for the Benefit of the Community," and
+this was successfully held at South Place Institute on June 9th, 10th,
+11th, the three days being given respectively, to the "Utilisation of
+Land," the "Utilisation of Capital," and the "Democratic Policy." On
+the 9th Mr. Bradlaugh spoke on the utilisation of waste lands, arguing
+that in a thickly populated country no one had the right to keep
+cultivable land uncultivated, and that where land was so kept there
+should be compulsory expropriation, the state taking the land and
+letting it out to cultivating tenants. Among the other speakers were
+Edward Carpenter, William Morris, Sidney Webb, John Robertson, William
+Saunders, W. Donnisthorpe, Edward Aveling, Charlotte Wilson, Mrs.
+Fenwick Miller, Hubert Bland, Dr. Pankhurst, and myself--men and women
+of many views, met to compare methods, and so help on the cause of
+social regeneration.
+
+Bitter attacks were made on me for my Socialist advocacy by some of
+the Radicals in the Freethought party, and looking back I find myself
+condemned as a "Saint Athanasius in petticoats," and as possessing a
+"mind like a milk-jug." This same courteous critic remarked, "I have
+heard Mrs. Besant described as being, like most women, at the mercy of
+her last male acquaintance for her views on economics." I was foolish
+enough to break a lance in self-defence with this assailant, not
+having then learned that self-defence was a waste of time that might
+be better employed in doing work for others. I certainly should not
+now take the trouble to write such a paragraph as the following: "The
+moment a man uses a woman's sex to discredit her arguments, the
+thoughtful reader knows that he is unable to answer the arguments
+themselves. But really these silly sneers at woman's ability have lost
+their force, and are best met with a laugh at the stupendous 'male
+self-conceit' of the writer. I may add that such shafts are specially
+pointless against myself. A woman who thought her way out of
+Christianity and Whiggism into Freethought and Radicalism absolutely
+alone; who gave up every old friend, male and female, rather than
+resign the beliefs she had struggled to in solitude; who, again, in
+embracing active Socialism, has run counter to the views of her
+nearest 'male friends'; such a woman may very likely go wrong, but I
+think she may venture, without conceit, to at least claim independence
+of judgment. I did not make the acquaintance of one of my present
+Socialist comrades, male or female, until I had embraced Socialism." A
+foolish paragraph, as are all self-defences, and a mischievous one, as
+all retort breeds fresh strife. But not yet had come the self-control
+that estimates the judgments of others at their true value, that recks
+not of praise and blame; not yet had I learned that evil should not be
+met with evil, wrath with wrath; not yet were the words of the Buddha
+the law to which I strove to render obedience: "Hatred ceases not by
+hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love." The year 1886 was a
+terrible one for labour, everywhere reductions of wages, everywhere
+increase of the numbers of the unemployed; turning over the pages of
+_Our Corner_, I see "Socialist Notes" filled, month after month, with
+a monotonous tale, "there is a reduction of wages at" such and such a
+place; so many "men have been discharged at -----, owing to the
+slackness of trade." Our hearts sank lower and lower as summer passed
+into autumn, and the coming winter threatened to add to starvation the
+bitter pains of cold. The agitation for the eight hours' day increased
+in strength as the unemployed grew more numerous week by week "We
+can't stand it," a sturdy, quiet fellow had said to me during the
+preceding winter; "flesh and blood can't stand it, and two months of
+this bitter cold, too." "We may as well starve idle as starve
+working," had said another, with a fierce laugh. And a spirit of
+sullen discontent was spreading everywhere, discontent that was wholly
+justified by facts. But ah! how patient they were for the most part,
+how sadly, pathetically patient, this crucified Christ, Humanity;
+wrongs that would set my heart and my tongue afire would be accepted
+as a matter of course. O blind and mighty people, how my heart went
+out to you; trampled on, abused, derided, asking so little and needing
+so much; so pathetically grateful for the pettiest services; so loving
+and so loyal to those who offered you but their poor services and
+helpless love. Deeper and deeper into my innermost nature ate the
+growing desire to succour, to suffer for, to save. I had long given up
+my social reputation, I now gave up with ever-increasing surrender
+ease, comfort, time; the passion of pity grew stronger and stronger,
+fed by each new sacrifice, and each sacrifice led me nearer and nearer
+to the threshold of that gateway beyond which stretched a path of
+renunciation I had never dreamed of, which those might tread who were
+ready wholly to strip off self for Man's sake, who for Love's sake
+would surrender Love's return from those they served, and would go out
+into the darkness for themselves that they might, with their own souls
+as fuel, feed the Light of the World.
+
+As the suffering deepened with the darkening months, the meetings of
+the unemployed grew in number, and the murmurs of discontent became
+louder. The Social Democratic Federation carried on an outdoor
+agitation, not without making blunders, being composed of human
+beings, but with abundant courage and self-sacrifice. The policy of
+breaking up Socialist meetings went on while other meetings were
+winked at, and John Williams, a fiery speaker, but a man with a record
+of pathetic struggle and patient heroism, was imprisoned for two
+months for speaking in the open air, and so nearly starved in gaol
+that he came out with his health broken for life.
+
+1887 dawned, the year that was to close so stormily, and Socialists
+everywhere were busying themselves on behalf of the unemployed, urging
+vestries to provide remunerative work for those applying for relief,
+assailing the Local Government Board with practicable proposals for
+utilising the productive energies of the unemployed, circulating
+suggestions to municipalities and other local representative bodies,
+urging remedial measures. A four days' oral debate with Mr. Foote, and
+a written debate with Mr. Bradlaugh, occupied some of my energies, and
+helped in the process of education to which public opinion was being
+subjected. Both these debates were largely circulated as pamphlets. A
+series of afternoon debates between representative speakers was
+organised at South Place Institute, and Mr. Corrie Grant and myself
+had a lively discussion, I affirming "That the existence of classes
+who live upon unearned incomes is detrimental to the welfare of the
+community, and ought to be put an end to by legislation." Another
+debate--in this very quarrelsome spring of 1887--was a written one in
+the _National Reformer_ between the Rev. G.F. Handel Rowe and myself
+on the proposition, "Is Atheism logically tenable, and is there a
+satisfactory Atheistic System for the guidance of Human Conduct." And
+so the months went on, and the menace of misery grew louder and
+louder, till in September I find myself writing: "This one thing is
+clear--Society must deal with the unemployed, or the unemployed will
+deal with Society. Stormier and stormier becomes the social outlook,
+and they at least are not the worst enemies of Society who seek to
+find some way through the breakers by which the ship of the
+Commonwealth may pass into quiet waters."
+
+Some amusement turned up in the shape of a Charing Cross Parliament,
+in which we debated with much vigour the "burning questions" of the
+day. We organised a compact Socialist party, defeated a Liberal
+Government, took the reins of office, and--after a Queen's Speech in
+which her Majesty addressed her loyal Commons with a plainness of
+speech never before (or since) heard from the throne--we brought in
+several Bills of a decidedly heroic character. G. Bernard Shaw, as
+President of the Local Government Board, and I, as Home Secretary,
+came in for a good deal of criticism in connection with various
+drastic measures. An International Freethought Congress, held in
+London, entailed fairly heavy work, and the science classes were ever
+with us. Another written debate came with October, this time on the
+"Teachings of Christianity," making the fifth of these set discussions
+held by me during the year. This same month brought a change, painful
+but just: I resigned my much-prized position as co-editor of the
+_National Reformer,_ and the number for October 23rd bore Charles
+Bradlaugh's name alone. The change did not affect my work on the
+paper, but I became merely a subordinate, though remaining, of course,
+joint proprietor. The reason cannot be more accurately given than in
+the paragraph penned at the time: "For a considerable time past, and
+lately in increasing number, complaints have reached me from various
+quarters of the inconvenience and uncertainty that result from the
+divided editorial policy of this paper on the question of Socialism.
+Some months ago I proposed to avoid this difficulty by resigning my
+share in the editorship; but my colleague, with characteristic
+liberality, asked me to let the proposal stand over and see if matters
+would not adjust themselves. But the difficulty, instead of
+disappearing, has only become more pressing; and we both feel that our
+readers have a right to demand that it be solved.
+
+"When I became co-editor of this paper I was not a Socialist; and,
+although I regard Socialism as the necessary and logical outcome of
+the Radicalism which for so many years the _National Reformer_ has
+taught, still, as in avowing myself a Socialist I have taken a
+distinct step, the partial separation of my policy in labour questions
+from that of my colleague has been of my own making, and not of his,
+and it is, therefore, for me to go away. Over by far the greater part
+of our sphere of action we are still substantially agreed, and are
+likely to remain so. But since, as Socialism becomes more and more a
+question of practical politics, differences of theory tend to produce
+differences in conduct; and since a political paper must have a single
+editorial programme in practical politics, it would obviously be most
+inconvenient for me to retain my position as co-editor. I therefore
+resume my former position as contributor only, thus clearing the
+_National Reformer_ of all responsibility for the views I hold."
+
+To this Mr. Bradlaugh added the following:--
+
+"I need hardly add to this how very deeply I regret the necessity for
+Mrs. Besant's resignation of the joint editorship of this Journal, and
+the real grief I feel in accepting this break in a position in which
+she has rendered such enormous service to the Freethought and Radical
+cause. As a most valued contributor I trust the _National Reformer_
+may never lose the efficient aid of her brain and pen. For thirteen
+years this paper has been richer for good by the measure of her
+never-ceasing and most useful work. I agree with her that a journal
+must have a distinct editorial policy; and I think this distinctness
+the more necessary when, as in the present case, every contributor has
+the greatest freedom of expression. I recognise in the fullest degree
+the spirit of self-sacrifice in which the lines, to which I add these
+words, have been penned by Mrs. Besant. "CHARLES BRADLAUGH."
+
+It was a wrench, this breaking of a tie for which a heavy price had
+been paid thirteen years before, but it was just. Any one who makes a
+change with which pain is connected is bound, in honour and duty, to
+take that pain as much as possible on himself; he must not put his
+sacrifice on others, nor pay his own ransom with their coin. There
+must be honour kept in the life that reaches towards the Ideal, for
+broken faith to that is the only real infidelity.
+
+And there was another reason for the change that I dared not name to
+him, for his quick loyalty would then have made him stubbornly
+determined against change. I saw the swift turning of public opinion,
+the gradual approach to him among Liberals who had hitherto held
+aloof, and I knew that they looked upon me as a clog and a burden, and
+that were I less prominently with him his way would be the easier to
+tread. So I slipped more and more into the background, no longer went
+with him to his meetings; my use to him in public was over, for I had
+become hindrance instead of help. While he was outcast and hated I had
+the pride of standing at his side; when all the fair-weather friends
+came buzzing round him I served him best by self-effacement, and I
+never loved him better than when I stood aside. But I continued all
+the literary work unaltered, and no change of opinions touched his
+kindness to me, although when, a little later, I joined the
+Theosophical Society, he lost his trust in my reasoning powers and
+judgment.
+
+In this same month of October the unemployed began walking in
+procession through the streets, and harshness on the part of the
+police led to some rioting. Sir Charles Warren thought it his duty to
+dragoon London meetings after the fashion of Continental prefects,
+with the inevitable result that an ill-feeling grew up between the
+people and the police.
+
+At last we formed a Socialist Defence Association, in order to help
+poor workmen brought up and sentenced on police evidence only, without
+any chance being given them of proper legal defence, and I organised a
+band of well-to-do men and women, who promised to obey a telegraphic
+summons, night or day, and to bail out any prisoner arrested for
+exercising the ancient right of walking in procession and speaking. To
+take one instance: Mr. Burleigh, the well-known war correspondent, and
+Mr. Winks were arrested and "run in" with Mr. J. Knight, a workman,
+for seditious language. I went down to the police-station to offer
+bail for the latter: Chief-Constable Howard accepted bail for Messrs.
+Burleigh and Winks, but refused it for Mr. Knight. The next day, at
+the police-court, the preposterous bail of £400 was demanded for Mr.
+Knight and supplied by my faithful band, and on the next hearing Mr.
+Poland, solicitor to the Treasury, withdrew the charge against him for
+lack of evidence!
+
+Then came the closing of Trafalgar Square, and the unexpected and
+high-handed order that cost some men their lives, many their liberty,
+and hundreds the most serious injuries. The Metropolitan Radical
+Federation had called a meeting for November 13th to protest against
+the imprisonment of Mr. O'Brien, and as Mr. Matthews, from his place
+in the House, had stated that there was no intention of interfering
+with _bonâ fide_ political meetings, the Radical clubs did not expect
+police interference. On November 9th Sir Charles Warren had issued an
+order forbidding all meetings in the Square, but the clubs trusted the
+promise of the Home Secretary. On Saturday evening only, November
+12th, when all arrangements were completed, did he issue a peremptory
+order, forbidding processions within a certain area. With this trap
+suddenly sprung upon them, the delegates from the clubs, the Fabian
+Society, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Socialist League,
+met on that same Saturday evening to see to any details that had been
+possibly left unsettled. It was finally decided to go to the Square as
+arranged, and, if challenged by the police, to protest formally
+against the illegal interference, then to break up the processions and
+leave the members to find their own way to the Square. It was also
+decided to go Sunday after Sunday to the Square, until the right of
+public meetings was vindicated.
+
+The procession I was in started from Clerkenwell Green, and walked
+with its banner in front, and the chosen speakers, including myself,
+immediately behind the flag. As we were moving slowly and quietly
+along one of the narrow streets debouching on Trafalgar Square,
+wondering whether we should be challenged, there was a sudden charge,
+and without a word the police were upon us with uplifted truncheons;
+the banner was struck down, and men and women were falling under a
+hail of blows. There was no attempt at resistance, the people were too
+much astounded at the unprepared attack. They scattered, leaving some
+of their number on the ground too much injured to move, and then made
+their way in twos and threes to the Square. It was garrisoned by
+police, drawn up in serried rows, that could only have been broken by
+a deliberate charge. Our orders were to attempt no violence, and we
+attempted none. Mr. Cunninghame Graham and Mr. John Burns, arm-in-arm,
+tried to pass through the police, and were savagely cut about the head
+and arrested. Then ensued a scene to be remembered; the horse police
+charged in squadrons at a hand-gallop, rolling men and women over like
+ninepins, while the foot police struck recklessly with their
+truncheons, cutting a road through the crowd that closed immediately
+behind them. I got on a waggonette and tried to persuade the driver to
+pull his trap across one of the roads, and to get others in line, so
+as to break the charges of the mounted police; but he was afraid, and
+drove away to the Embankment, so I jumped out and went back to the
+Square. At last a rattle of cavalry, and up came the Life Guards,
+cleverly handled but hurting none, trotting their horses gently and
+shouldering the crowd apart; and then the Scots Guards with bayonets
+fixed marched through and occupied the north of the Square. Then the
+people retreated as we passed round the word, "Go home, go home." The
+soldiers were ready to fire, the people unarmed; it would have been
+but a massacre. Slowly the Square emptied and all was still. All other
+processions were treated as ours had been, and the injuries inflicted
+were terrible. Peaceable, law-abiding workmen, who had never dreamed
+of rioting, were left with broken legs, broken arms, wounds of every
+description. One man, Linnell, died almost immediately, others from
+the effect of their injuries. The next day a regular court-martial in
+Bow Street Police Court, witnesses kept out by the police, men dazed
+with their wounds, decent workmen of unblemished character who had
+never been charged in a police-court before, sentenced to imprisonment
+without chance of defence. But a gallant band rallied to their rescue.
+William T. Stead, most chivalrous of journalists, opened a Defence
+Fund, and money rained in; my pledged bail came up by the dozen, and
+we got the men out on appeal. By sheer audacity I got into the
+police-court, addressed the magistrate, too astounded by my profound
+courtesy and calm assurance to remember that I had no right there, and
+then produced bail after bail of the most undeniable character and
+respectability, which no magistrate could refuse. Breathing-time
+gained, a barrister, Mr. W.M. Thompson, worked day after day with
+hearty devotion, and took up the legal defence. Fines we paid, and
+here Mrs. Marx Aveling did eager service. A pretty regiment I led out
+of Millbank Prison, after paying their fines; bruised, clothes torn,
+hatless, we must have looked a disreputable lot. We stopped and bought
+hats, to throw an air of respectability over our _cortège_, and we
+kept together until I saw the men into train and omnibus, lest, with
+the bitter feelings now roused, conflict should again arise. We formed
+the Law and Liberty League to defend all unjustly assailed by the
+police, and thus rescued many a man from prison; and we gave poor
+Linnell, killed in Trafalgar Square, a public funeral. Sir Charles
+Warren forbade the passing of the hearse through any of the main
+thoroughfares west of Waterloo Bridge, so the processions waited there
+for it. W.T. Stead, R. Cunninghame Graham, Herbert Burrows, and
+myself walked on one side the coffin, William Morris, F. Smith, R.
+Dowling, and J. Seddon on the other; the Rev. Stewart D. Headlam, the
+officiating clergyman, walked in front; fifty stewards carrying long
+wands guarded the coffin. From Wellington Street to Bow Cemetery the
+road was one mass of human beings, who uncovered reverently as the
+slain man went by; at Aldgate the procession took three-quarters of an
+hour to pass one spot, and thus we bore Linnell to his grave, symbol
+of a cruel wrong, the vast orderly, silent crowd, bareheaded, making
+mute protest against the outrage wrought.
+
+It is pleasant to put on record here Mr. Bradlaugh's grave approval of
+the heavy work done in the police-courts, and the following paragraph
+shows how generously he could praise one not acting on his own lines:
+"As I have on most serious matters of principle recently differed very
+widely from my brave and loyal co-worker, and as the difference has
+been regrettably emphasised by her resignation of her editorial
+functions on this Journal, it is the more necessary that I should say
+how thoroughly I approve, and how grateful I am to her for, her
+conduct in not only obtaining bail and providing legal assistance for
+the helpless unfortunates in the hands of the police, but also for her
+daily personal attendance and wise conduct at the police-stations and
+police-courts, where she has done so much to abate harsh treatment on
+the one hand and rash folly on the other. While I should not have
+marked out this as fitting woman's work, especially in the recent very
+inclement weather, I desire to record my view that it has been bravely
+done, well done, and most usefully done, and I wish to mark this the
+more emphatically as my views and those of Mrs. Besant seem wider
+apart than I could have deemed possible on many of the points of
+principle underlying what is every day growing into a most serious
+struggle." Ever did I find Charles Bradlaugh thus tolerant of
+difference of opinion, generously eager to approve what to him seemed
+right even in a policy he disapproved.
+
+The indignation grew and grew; the police were silently boycotted, but
+the people were so persistent and so tactful that no excuse for
+violence was given, until the strain on the police force began to
+tell, and the Tory Government felt that London was being hopelessly
+alienated; so at last Sir Charles Warren fell, and a wiser hand was
+put at the helm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+THROUGH STORM TO PEACE.
+
+
+Out of all this turmoil and stress rose a Brotherhood that had in it
+the promise of a fairer day. Mr. Stead and I had become close
+friends--he Christian, I Atheist, burning with one common love for
+man, one common hatred against oppression. And so in _Our Corner_ for
+February, 1888, I wrote:--"Lately there has been dawning on the minds
+of men far apart in questions of theology, the idea of founding a new
+Brotherhood, in which service of Man should take the place erstwhile
+given to service of God--a brotherhood in which work should be worship
+and love should be baptism, in which none should be regarded as alien
+who was willing to work for human good. One day as I was walking
+towards Millbank Gaol with the Rev. S.D. Headlam, on the way to
+liberate a prisoner, I said to him: 'Mr. Headlam, we ought to have a
+new Church, which should include all who have the common ground of
+faith in and love for man.' And a little later I found that my friend
+Mr. W.T. Stead, editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette,_ had long been
+brooding over a similar thought, and wondering whether men 'might not
+be persuaded to be as earnest about making this world happy as they
+are over saving their souls.' The teaching of social duty, the
+upholding of social righteousness, the building up of a true
+commonwealth--such would be among the aims of the Church of the
+future. Is the hope too fair for realisation? Is the winning of such
+beatific vision yet once more the dream of the enthusiast? But surely
+the one fact that persons so deeply differing in theological creeds as
+those who have been toiling for the last three months to aid and
+relieve the oppressed, can work in absolute harmony side by side for
+the one end--surely this proves that there is a bond which is stronger
+than our antagonisms, a unity which is deeper than the speculative
+theories which divide."
+
+How unconsciously I was marching towards the Theosophy which was to
+become the glory of my life, groping blindly in the darkness for that
+very brotherhood, definitely formulated on these very lines by those
+Elder Brothers of our race, at whose feet I was so soon to throw
+myself. How deeply this longing for something loftier than I had yet
+found had wrought itself into my life, how strong the conviction was
+growing that there was something to be sought to which the service of
+man was the road, may be seen in the following passage from the same
+article:--
+
+"It has been thought that in these days of factories and of tramways,
+of shoddy, and of adulteration, that all life must tread with even
+rhythm of measured footsteps, and that the glory of the ideal could no
+longer glow over the greyness of a modern horizon. But signs are not
+awanting that the breath of the older heroism is beginning to stir
+men's breasts, and that the passion for justice and for liberty, which
+thrilled through the veins of the world's greatest in the past, and
+woke our pulses to responsive throb, has not yet died wholly out of
+the hearts of men. Still the quest of the Holy Grail exercises its
+deathless fascination, but the seekers no longer raise eyes to heaven,
+nor search over land and sea, for they know that it waits them in the
+suffering at their doors, that the consecration of the holiest is on
+the agonising masses of the poor and the despairing, the cup is
+crimson with the blood of the
+
+"'People, the grey-grown speechless Christ.'
+
+... If there be a faith that can remove the mountains of ignorance and
+evil, it is surely that faith in the ultimate triumph of Right in the
+final enthronement of Justice, which alone makes life worth the
+living, and which gems the blackest cloud of depression with the
+rainbow-coloured arch of an immortal hope."
+
+As a step towards bringing about some such union of those ready to
+work for man, Mr. Stead and I projected the _Link_, a halfpenny
+weekly, the spirit of which was described in its motto, taken from
+Victor Hugo: "The people are silence. I will be the advocate of this
+silence. I will speak for the dumb. I will speak of the small to the
+great and of the feeble to the strong.... I will speak for all the
+despairing silent ones. I will interpret this stammering; I will
+interpret the grumblings, the murmurs, the tumults of crowds, the
+complaints ill-pronounced, and all these cries of beasts that, through
+ignorance and through suffering, man is forced to utter ... I will be
+the Word of the People. I will be the bleeding mouth whence the gag is
+snatched out. I will say everything." It announced its object to be
+the "building up" of a "New Church, dedicated to the service of man,"
+and "what we want to do is to establish in every village and in every
+street some man or woman who will sacrifice time and labour as
+systematically and as cheerfully in the temporal service of man as
+others do in what they believe to be the service of God." Week after
+week we issued our little paper, and it became a real light in the
+darkness. There the petty injustices inflicted on the poor found
+voice; there the starvation wages paid to women found exposure; there
+sweating was brought to public notice. A finisher of boots paid 2s.
+6d. per dozen pairs and "find your own polish and thread"; women
+working for 10-1/2 hours per day, making shirts--"fancy best"--at from
+10d. to 3s. per dozen, finding their own cotton and needles, paying
+for gas, towel, and tea (compulsory), earning from 4s. to 10s. per
+week for the most part; a mantle finisher 2s. 2d. a week, out of which
+6d. for materials; "respectable hard-working woman" tried for
+attempted suicide, "driven to rid herself of life from want." Another
+part of our work was defending people from unjust landlords, exposing
+workhouse scandals, enforcing the Employers' Liability Act, Charles
+Bradlaugh's Truck Act, forming "Vigilance Circles" whose members kept
+watch in their own district over cases of cruelty to children,
+extortion, insanitary workshops, sweating, &c., reporting each case to
+me. Into this work came Herbert Burrows, who had joined hands with me
+over the Trafalgar Square defence, and who wrote some noble articles
+in the _Link_. A man loving the people with passionate devotion,
+hating oppression and injustice with equal passion, working himself
+with remorseless energy, breaking his heart over wrongs he could not
+remedy. His whole character once came out in a sentence when he was
+lying delirious and thought himself dying: "Tell the people how I have
+loved them always."
+
+In our crusade for the poor we worked for the dockers." To-morrow
+morning, in London alone 20,000 to 25,000 adult men," wrote Sidney
+Webb, "will fight like savages for permission to labour in the docks
+for 4d. an hour, and one-third of them will fight in vain, and be
+turned workless away." We worked for children's dinners. "If we insist
+on these children being educated, is it not necessary that they shall
+be fed? If not, we waste on them knowledge they cannot assimilate, and
+torture many of them to death. Poor waifs of humanity, we drive them
+into the school and bid them learn; and the pitiful, wistful eyes
+question us why we inflict this strange new suffering, and bring into
+their dim lives this new pang. 'Why not leave us alone? 'ask the
+pathetically patient little faces. Why not, indeed, since for these
+child martyrs of the slums, Society has only formulas, not food." We
+cried out against "cheap goods," that meant "sweated and therefore
+stolen goods." "The ethics of buying should surely be simply enough.
+We want a particular thing, and we do not desire to obtain it either
+by begging or by robbery; but if in becoming possessed of it, we
+neither beg it nor steal, we must give for it something equivalent in
+exchange; so much of our neighbour's labour has been put into the
+thing we desire; if we will not yield him fair equivalent for that
+labour, yet take his article, we defraud him, and if we are not
+willing to give that fair equivalent we have no right to become the
+owners of his product."
+
+This branch of our work led to a big fight--a fight most happy in its
+results. At a meeting of the Fabian Society, Miss Clementina Black
+gave a capital lecture on Female Labour, and urged the formation of a
+Consumers' League, pledged only to buy from shops certificated "clean"
+from unfair wage. H.H. Champion, in the discussion that followed,
+drew attention to the wages paid by Bryant & May (Limited), while
+paying an enormous dividend to their shareholders, so that the value
+of the original £5 shares was quoted at £18 7s. 6d. Herbert Burrows
+and I interviewed some of the girls, got lists of wages, of fines, &c.
+"A typical case is that of a girl of sixteen, a piece-worker; she
+earns 4s. a week, and lives with a sister, employed by the same firm,
+who 'earns good money, as much as 8s. or 9s. a week.' Out of the
+earnings 2s. a week is paid for the rent of one room. The child lives
+only on bread and butter and tea, alike for breakfast and dinner, but
+related with dancing eyes that once a month she went to a meal where
+'you get coffee and bread and butter, and jam and marmalade, and lots
+of it.'" We published the facts under the title of "White Slavery in
+London," and called for a boycott of Bryant & May's matches. "It is
+time some one came and helped us," said two pale-faced girls to me;
+and I asked: "Who will help? Plenty of people wish well to any good
+cause; but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still
+fewer will risk anything in its support. 'Some one ought to do it, but
+why should I?' is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability.
+'Some one ought to do it, so why _not_ I?' is the cry of some earnest
+servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty.
+Between those two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution."
+
+I was promptly threatened with an action for libel, but nothing came
+of it; it was easier to strike at the girls, and a few days later
+Fleet Street was enlivened by the irruption of a crowd of match-girls,
+demanding Annie Besant. I couldn't speechify to match-girls in Fleet
+Street, so asked that a deputation should come and explain what they
+wanted. Up came three women and told their story: they had been asked
+to sign a paper certifying that they were well treated and contented,
+and that my statements were untrue; they refused. "You had spoke up
+for us," explained one, "and we weren't going back on you." A girl,
+pitched on as their leader, was threatened with dismissal; she stood
+firm; next day she was discharged for some trifle, and they all threw
+down their work, some 1,400 of them, and then a crowd of them started
+off to me to ask what to do next. If we ever worked in our lives,
+Herbert Burrows and I worked for the next fortnight. And a pretty
+hubbub we created; we asked for money, and it came pouring in; we
+registered the girls to receive strike pay, wrote articles, roused the
+clubs, held public meetings, got Mr. Bradlaugh to ask questions in
+Parliament, stirred up constituencies in which shareholders were
+members, till the whole country rang with the struggle. Mr. Frederick
+Charrington lent us a hall for registration, Mr. Sidney Webb and
+others moved the National Liberal Club to action; we led a procession
+of the girls to the House of Commons, and interviewed, with a
+deputation of them, Members of Parliament who cross-questioned them.
+The girls behaved splendidly, stuck together, kept brave and bright
+all through. Mr. Hobart of the Social Democratic Federation, Messrs.
+Shaw, Bland, and Oliver, and Headlam of the Fabian Society, Miss
+Clementina Black, and many another helped in the heavy work. The
+London Trades Council finally consented to act as arbitrators and a
+satisfactory settlement was arrived at; the girls went in to work,
+fines and deductions were abolished, better wages paid; the
+Match-makers' Union was established, still the strongest woman's
+Trades Union in England, and for years I acted as secretary, till,
+under press of other duties, I resigned, and my work was given by the
+girls to Mrs. Thornton Smith; Herbert Burrows became, and still is,
+the treasurer. For a time there was friction between the Company and
+the Union, but it gradually disappeared under the influence of common
+sense on both sides, and we have found the manager ready to consider
+any just grievance and to endeavour to remove it, while the Company
+have been liberal supporters of the Working Women's Club at Bow,
+founded by H.P. Blavatsky.
+
+[Illustration: STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.]
+
+The worst suffering of all was among the box-makers, thrown out of
+work by the strike, and they were hard to reach. Twopence-farthing per
+gross of boxes, and buy your own string and paste, is not wealth, but
+when the work went more rapid starvation came. Oh, those trudges
+through the lanes and alleys round Bethnal Green Junction late at
+night, when our day's work was over; children lying about on shavings,
+rags, anything; famine looking out of baby faces, out of women's eyes,
+out of the tremulous hands of men. Heart grew sick and eyes dim, and
+ever louder sounded the question, "Where is the cure for sorrow, what
+the way of rescue for the world?"
+
+In August I asked for a "match-girls' drawing-room." "It will want a
+piano, tables for papers, for games, for light literature; so that it
+may offer a bright, homelike refuge to these girls, who now have no
+real homes, no playground save the streets. It is not proposed to
+build an 'institution' with stern and rigid discipline and enforcement
+of prim behaviour, but to open a home, filled with the genial
+atmosphere of cordial comradeship, and self-respecting freedom--the
+atmosphere so familiar to all who have grown up in the blessed shelter
+of a happy home, so strange, alas! to too many of our East London
+girls." In the same month of August, two years later, H.P. Blavatsky
+opened such a home.
+
+Then came a cry for help from South London, from tin-box makers,
+illegally fined, and in many cases grievously mutilated by the
+non-fencing of machinery; then aid to shop assistants, also illegally
+fined; legal defences by the score still continued; a vigorous
+agitation for a free meal for children, and for fair wages to be paid
+by all public bodies; work for the dockers and exposure of their
+wrongs; a visit to the Cradley Heath chain-makers, speeches to them,
+writing for them; a contest for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets
+division, and triumphant return at the head of the poll. Such were
+some of the ways in which the autumn days were spent, to say nothing
+of scores of lectures--Secularist, Labour, Socialist--and scores of
+articles written for the winning of daily bread. When the School Board
+work was added I felt that I had as much work as one woman's strength
+could do.
+
+Thus was ushered in 1889, the to me never-to-be-forgotten year in
+which I found my way "Home," and had the priceless good fortune of
+meeting, and of becoming the pupil of, H.P. Blavatsky. Ever more and
+more had been growing on me the feeling that something more than I had
+was needed for the cure of social ills. The Socialist position
+sufficed on the economic side, but where to gain the inspiration, the
+motive, which should lead to the realisation of the Brotherhood of
+Man? Our efforts to really organise bands of unselfish workers had
+failed. Much indeed had been done, but there was not a real movement
+of self-sacrificing devotion, in which men worked for Love's sake
+only, and asked but to give, not to take. Where was the material for
+the nobler Social Order, where the hewn stones for the building of the
+Temple of Man? A great despair would oppress me as I sought for such a
+movement and found it not.
+
+[Illustration: MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.]
+
+Not only so; but since 1886 there had been slowly growing up a
+conviction that my philosophy was not sufficient; that life and mind
+were other than, more than, I had dreamed. Psychology was advancing
+with rapid strides; hypnotic experiments were revealing unlooked-for
+complexities in human consciousness, strange riddles of multiplex
+personalities, and, most startling of all, vivid intensities of mental
+action when the brain, that should be the generator of thought, was
+reduced to a comatose state. Fact after fact came hurtling in upon me,
+demanding explanation I was incompetent to give. I studied the
+obscurer sides of consciousness, dreams, hallucinations, illusions,
+insanity. Into the darkness shot a ray of light--A.P. Sinnett's
+"Occult World," with its wonderfully suggestive letters, expounding
+not the supernatural but a nature under law, wider than I had dared to
+conceive. I added Spiritualism to my studies, experimenting privately,
+finding the phenomena indubitable, but the spiritualistic explanation
+of them incredible. The phenomena of clairvoyance, clairaudience,
+thought-reading, were found to be real. Under all the rush of the
+outer life, already sketched, these questions were working in my mind,
+their answers were being diligently sought. I read a variety of books,
+but could find little in them that satisfied me. I experimented in
+various ways suggested in them, and got some (to me) curious results.
+I finally convinced myself that there was some hidden thing, some
+hidden power, and resolved to seek until I found, and by the early
+spring of 1889 I had grown desperately determined to find at all
+hazards what I sought. At last, sitting alone in deep thought as I had
+become accustomed to do after the sun had set, filled with an intense
+but nearly hopeless longing to solve the riddle of life and mind, I
+heard a Voice that was later to become to me the holiest sound on
+earth, bidding me take courage for the light was near. A fortnight
+passed, and then Mr. Stead gave into my hands two large volumes. "Can
+you review these? My young men all fight shy of them, but you are
+quite mad enough on these subjects to make something of them." I took
+the books; they were the two volumes of "The Secret Doctrine," written
+by H.P. Blavatsky.
+
+Home I carried my burden, and sat me down to read. As I turned over
+page after page the interest became absorbing; but how familiar it
+seemed; how my mind leapt forward to presage the conclusions, how
+natural it was, how coherent, how subtle, and yet how intelligible. I
+was dazzled, blinded by the light in which disjointed facts were seen
+as parts of a mighty whole, and all my puzzles, riddles, problems,
+seemed to disappear. The effect was partially illusory in one sense,
+in that they all had to be slowly unravelled later, the brain
+gradually assimilating that which the swift intuition had grasped as
+truth. But the light had been seen, and in that flash of illumination
+I knew that the weary search was over and the very Truth was found.
+
+I wrote the review, and asked Mr. Stead for an introduction to the
+writer, and then sent a note asking to be allowed to call. I received
+the most cordial of notes, bidding me come, and in the soft spring
+evening Herbert Burrows and I--for his aspirations were as mine on
+this matter--walked from Netting Hill Station, wondering what we
+should meet, to the door of 17, Lansdowne Road. A pause, a swift
+passing through hall and outer room, through folding-doors thrown
+back, a figure in a large chair before a table, a voice, vibrant,
+compelling, "My dear Mrs. Besant, I have so long wished to see you,"
+and I was standing with my hand in her firm grip, and looking for
+the first time in this life straight into the eyes of "H.P.B." I
+was conscious of a sudden leaping forth of my heart--was it
+recognition?--and then, I am ashamed to say, a fierce rebellion, a
+fierce withdrawal, as of some wild animal when it feels a mastering
+hand. I sat down, after some introductions that conveyed no ideas to
+me, and listened. She talked of travels, of various countries, easy
+brilliant talk, her eyes veiled, her exquisitely moulded fingers
+rolling cigarettes incessantly. Nothing special to record, no word of
+Occultism, nothing mysterious, a woman of the world chatting with her
+evening visitors. We rose to go, and for a moment the veil lifted, and
+two brilliant, piercing eyes met mine, and with a yearning throb in
+the voice: "Oh, my dear Mrs. Besant, if you would only come among us!"
+I felt a well-nigh uncontrollable desire to bend down and kiss her,
+under the compulsion of that yearning voice, those compelling eyes,
+but with a flash of the old unbending pride and an inward jeer at my
+own folly, I said a commonplace polite good-bye, and turned away with
+some inanely courteous and evasive remark. "Child," she said to me
+long afterwards, "your pride is terrible; you are as proud as Lucifer
+himself." But truly I think I never showed it to her again after that
+first evening, though it sprang up wrathfully in her defence many and
+many a time, until I learned the pettiness and the worthlessness of
+all criticism, and knew that the blind were objects of compassion not
+of scorn.
+
+Once again I went, and asked about the Theosophical Society, wishful
+to join, but fighting against it. For I saw, distinct and clear--with
+painful distinctness, indeed--what that joining would mean. I had
+largely conquered public prejudice against me by my work on the London
+School Board, and a smoother road stretched before me, whereon effort
+to help should be praised not blamed. Was I to plunge into a new
+vortex of strife, and make myself a mark for ridicule--worse than
+hatred--and fight again the weary fight for an unpopular truth? Must I
+turn against Materialism, and face the shame of publicly confessing
+that I had been wrong, misled by intellect to ignore the Soul? Must I
+leave the army that had battled for me so bravely, the friends who
+through all brutality of social ostracism had held me dear and true?
+And he, the strongest and truest friend of all, whose confidence I had
+shaken by my Socialism--must he suffer the pang of seeing his
+co-worker, his co-fighter, of whom he had been so proud, to whom he
+had been so generous, go over to the opposing hosts, and leave the
+ranks of Materialism? What would be the look in Charles Bradlaugh's
+eyes when I told him that I had become a Theosophist? The struggle was
+sharp and keen, but with none of the anguish of old days in it, for
+the soldier had now fought many fights and was hardened by many
+wounds. And so it came to pass that I went again to Lansdowne Road to
+ask about the Theosophical Society. H.P. Blavatsky looked at me
+piercingly for a moment. "Have you read the report about me of the
+Society for Psychical Research?" "No; I never heard of it, so far as I
+know." "Go and read it, and if, after reading it, you come
+back--well." And nothing more would she say on the subject, but
+branched off to her experiences in many lands.
+
+I borrowed a copy of the Report, read and re-read it. Quickly I saw
+how slender was the foundation on which the imposing structure was
+built. The continual assumptions on which conclusions were based; the
+incredible character of the allegations; and--most damning fact of
+all--the foul source from which the evidence was derived. Everything
+turned on the veracity of the Coulombs, and they were self-stamped as
+partners in the alleged frauds. Could I put such against the frank,
+fearless nature that I had caught a glimpse of, against the proud
+fiery truthfulness that shone at me from the clear, blue eyes, honest
+and fearless as those of a noble child? Was the writer of "The Secret
+Doctrine" this miserable impostor, this accomplice of tricksters, this
+foul and loathsome deceiver, this conjuror with trap-doors and sliding
+panels? I laughed aloud at the absurdity and flung the Report aside
+with the righteous scorn of an honest nature that knew its own kin
+when it met them, and shrank from the foulness and baseness of a lie.
+The next day saw me at the Theosophical Publishing Company's office at
+7, Duke Street, Adelphi, where Countess Wachtmeister--one of the
+lealest of H.P.B.'s friends--was at work, and I signed an
+application to be admitted as fellow of the Theosophical Society.
+
+On receiving my diploma I betook myself to Lansdowne Road, where I
+found H.P.B. alone. I went over to her, bent down and kissed her,
+but said no word. "You have joined the Society?" "Yes." "You have read
+the report?" "Yes." "Well?" I knelt down before her and clasped her
+hands in mine, looking straight into her eyes. "My answer is, will you
+accept me as your pupil, and give me the honour of proclaiming you my
+teacher in the face of the world?" Her stern, set face softened, the
+unwonted gleam of tears sprang to her eyes; then, with a dignity more
+than regal, she placed her hand upon my head. "You are a noble woman.
+May Master bless you."
+
+From that day, the 10th of May, 1889, until now--two years three and
+half months after she left her body on May 8, 1891--my faith in her
+has never wavered, my trust in her has never been shaken. I gave her
+my faith on an imperious intuition, I proved her true day after day in
+closest intimacy living by her side; and I speak of her with the
+reverence due from a pupil to a teacher who never failed her, with the
+passionate gratitude which, in our School, is the natural meed of the
+one who opens the gateway and points out the path. "Folly!
+fanaticism!" scoffs the Englishman of the nineteenth century. Be it
+so. I have seen, and I can wait. I have been told that I plunged
+headlong into Theosophy and let my enthusiasm carry me away. I think
+the charge is true, in so far as the decision was swiftly taken; but
+it had been long led up to, and realised the dreams of childhood on
+the higher planes of intellectual womanhood. And let me here say that
+more than all I hoped for in that first plunge has been realised, and
+a certainty of knowledge has been gained on doctrines seen as true as
+that swift flash of illumination. I _know_, by personal experiment,
+that the Soul exists, and that my Soul, not my body, is myself; that
+it can leave the body at will; that it can, disembodied, reach and
+learn from living human teachers, and bring back and impress on the
+physical brain that which it has learned; that this process of
+transferring consciousness from one range of being, as it were, to
+another, is a very slow process, during which the body and brain are
+gradually correlated with the subtler form which is essentially that
+of the Soul, and that my own experience of it, still so imperfect, so
+fragmentary, when compared with the experience of the highly trained,
+is like the first struggles of a child learning to speak compared with
+the perfect oratory of the practised speaker; that consciousness, so
+far from being dependent on the brain, is more active when freed from
+the gross forms of matter than when encased within them; that the
+great Sages spoken of by H.P. Blavatsky exist; that they wield powers
+and possess knowledge before which our control of Nature and knowledge
+of her ways is but as child's play. All this, and much more, have I
+learned, and I am but a pupil of low grade, as it were in the infant
+class of the Occult School; so the first plunge has been successful,
+and the intuition has been justified. This same path of knowledge that
+I am treading is open to all others who will pay the toll demanded at
+the gateway--and that toll is willingness to renounce everything for
+the sake of spiritual truth, and willingness to give all the truth
+that is won to the service of man, keeping back no shred for self.
+
+On June 23rd, in a review of "The Secret Doctrine" in the _National
+Reformer,_ the following passages occur, and show how swiftly some of
+the main points of the teaching had been grasped. (There is a blunder
+in the statement that of the seven modifications of Matter Science
+knows only four, and till lately knew only three; these four are
+sub-states only, sub-divisions of the lowest plane.)
+
+After saying that the nineteenth-century Englishman would be but too
+likely to be repelled if he only skimmed the book, I went on: "With
+telescope and with microscope, with scalpel and with battery, Western
+Science interrogates nature, adding fact to fact, storing experience
+after experience, but coming ever to gulfs unfathomable by its
+plummets, to heights unscalable by its ladders. Wide and masterful in
+its answers to the 'How?' the 'Why?' ever eludes it, and causes remain
+enwrapped in gloom. Eastern Science uses as its scientific instrument
+the penetrating faculties of the mind alone, and regarding the
+material plane as _Maya_--illusion--seeks in the mental and spiritual
+planes of being the causes of the material effects. There, too, is the
+only reality; there the true existence of which the visible universe
+is but the shadow.
+
+"It is clear that from such investigations some further mental
+equipment is necessary than that normally afforded by the human body.
+And here comes the parting of the ways between East and West. For the
+study of the material universe, our five senses, aided by the
+instruments invented by Science, may suffice. For all we can hear and
+see, taste and handle, these accustomed servitors, though often
+blundering, are the best available guides to knowledge. But it lies in
+the nature of the case that they are useless when the investigation is
+to be into modes of existence which cannot impress themselves on our
+nerve-ends. For instance, what we know as colour is the vibration
+frequency of etheric waves striking on the retina of the eye, between
+certain definite limits--759 trillions of blows from the maximum, 436
+trillions from the minimum--these waves give rise in us to the
+sensation which the brain translates into colour. (Why the 436
+trillion blows at one end of a nerve become 'Red' at the other end we
+do not know; we chronicle the fact but cannot explain it.) But our
+capacity to respond to the vibration cannot limit the vibrational
+capacity of the ether; to _us_ the higher and lower rates of vibration
+do not exist, but if our sense of vision were more sensitive we should
+see where now we are blind. Following this line of thought we realise
+that matter may exist in forms unknown to us, in modifications to
+which our senses are unable to respond. Now steps in the Eastern Sage
+and says: 'That which you say _may_ be, _is_; we have developed and
+cultivated senses as much superior to yours as your eye is superior to
+that of the jelly-fish; we have evolved mental and spiritual faculties
+which enable us to investigate on the higher planes of being with as
+much certainty as you are investigating on the physical plane; there
+is nothing _supernatural_ in the business, any more than your
+knowledge is supernatural, though much above that accessible to the
+fish; we do not speculate on these higher forms of existence; we
+_know_ them by personal study, just as you know the fauna and flora of
+your world. The powers we possess are not supernatural, they are
+latent in every human being, and will be evolved as the race
+progresses. All that we have done is to evolve them more rapidly than
+our neighbours, by a procedure as open to you as it was to us. Matter
+is everywhere, but it exists in seven modifications of which you only
+know four, and until lately only knew three; in those higher forms
+reside the causes of which you see the effects in the lower, and to
+know these causes you must develop the capacity to take cognisance of
+the higher planes.'"
+
+Then followed a brief outline of the cycle of evolution, and I went
+on: "What part does man play in this vast drama of a universe?
+Needless to say, he is not the only living form in a Cosmos, which for
+the most part is uninhabitable by him. As Science has shown living
+forms everywhere on the material plane, races in each drop of water,
+life throbbing in every leaf and blade, so the 'Secret Doctrine'
+points to living forms on higher planes of existence, each suited to
+its environment, till all space thrills with life, and nowhere is
+there death, but only change. Amid these myriads are some evolving
+towards humanity, some evolving away from humanity as we know it,
+divesting themselves of its grosser parts. For man is regarded as a
+sevenfold being, four of these parts belonging to the animal body, and
+perishing at, or soon after, death; while three form his higher self,
+his true individuality, and these persist and are immortal. These form
+the Ego, and it is this which passes through many incarnations,
+learning life's lesson as it goes, working out its own redemption
+within the limits of an inexorable law, sowing seeds of which it ever
+reaps the harvest, building its own fate with tireless fingers, and
+finding nowhere in the measureless time and space around it any that
+can lift for it one weight it has created, one burden it has gathered,
+unravel for it one tangle it has twisted, close for it one gulf it has
+digged."
+
+Then after noting the approaches of Western Science to Eastern, came
+the final words: "it is of curious interest to note how some of the
+latest theories seem to catch glimpses of the occult Doctrines, as
+though Science were standing on the very threshold of knowledge which
+shall make all her past seem small. Already her hand is trembling
+towards the grasp of forces beside which all those now at her command
+are insignificant. How soon will her grip fasten on them? Let us hope
+not until social order has been transformed, lest they should only
+give more to those who have, and leave the wretched still wretcheder
+by force of contrast. Knowledge used by selfishness widens the gulf
+that divides man from man and race from race, and we may well shrink
+from the idea of new powers in Nature being yoked to the car of Greed.
+Hence the wisdom of those 'Masters,' in whose name Madame Blavatsky
+speaks, has ever denied the knowledge which is power until Love's
+lesson has been learned, and has given only into the hands of the
+selfless the control of those natural forces which, misused, would
+wreck society."
+
+This review, and the public announcement, demanded by honesty, that I
+had joined the Theosophical Society, naturally raised somewhat of a
+storm of criticism, and the _National Reformer_ of June 30th contained
+the following: "The review of Madame Blavatsky's book in the last
+_National Reformer_, and an announcement in the _Star_, have brought
+me several letters on the subject of Theosophy. I am asked for an
+explanation as to what Theosophy is, and as to my own opinion on
+Theosophy--the word 'theosoph' is old, and was used among the
+Neo-platonists. From the dictionary its new meaning appears to be,
+'one who claims to have a knowledge of God, or of the laws of nature
+by means of internal illumination.' An Atheist certainly cannot be a
+Theosophist. A Deist might be a Theosophist. A Monist cannot be a
+Theosophist. Theosophy must at least involve Dualism. Modern
+Theosophy, according to Madame Blavatsky, as set out in last week's
+issue, asserts much that I do not believe, and alleges some things
+that, to me, are certainly not true. I have not had the opportunity of
+reading Madame Blavatsky's two volumes, but I have read during the
+past ten years many publications from the pen of herself, Colonel
+Olcott, and of other Theosophists. They appear to me to have sought to
+rehabilitate a kind of Spiritualism in Eastern phraseology. I think
+many of their allegations utterly erroneous, and their reasonings
+wholly unsound. I very deeply regret indeed that my colleague and
+co-worker has, with somewhat of suddenness, and without any
+interchange of ideas with myself, adopted as facts matters which seem
+to me to be as unreal as it is possible for any fiction to be. My
+regret is greater as I know Mrs. Besant's devotion to any course she
+believes to be true. I know that she will always be earnest in the
+advocacy of any views she undertakes to defend, and I look to possible
+developments of her Theosophic views with the very gravest misgiving.
+The editorial policy of this paper is unchanged, and is directly
+antagonistic to all forms of Theosophy. I would have preferred on this
+subject to have held my peace, for the public disagreeing with Mrs.
+Besant on her adoption of Socialism has caused pain to both; but on
+reading her article and taking the public announcement made of her
+having joined the Theosophical organisation, I owe it to those who
+look to me for guidance to say this with clearness.
+
+"CHARLES BRADLAUGH."
+
+"It is not possible for me here to state fully my reasons for joining
+the Theosophical Society, the three objects of which are: To found a
+Universal Brotherhood without distinction of race or creed; to forward
+the study of Aryan literature and philosophy; to investigate
+unexplained laws of nature and the physical powers latent in man. On
+matters of religious opinion the members are absolutely free. The
+founders of the society deny a personal God, and a somewhat subtle
+form of Pantheism is taught as the Theosophic view of the universe,
+though even this is not forced on members of the society. I have no
+desire to hide the fact that this form of Pantheism appears to me to
+promise solution of some problems, especially problems in psychology,
+which Atheism leaves untouched.
+
+"ANNIE BESANT."
+
+Theosophy, as its students well know, so far from involving Dualism,
+is based on the One, which becomes Two on manifestation, just as
+Atheism posits one existence, only cognisable in the duality force and
+matter, and as philosophic--though not popular--Theism teaches one
+Deity whereof are spirit and matter. Mr. Bradlaugh's temperate
+disapproval was not copied in its temperance by some other Freethought
+leaders, and Mr. Foote especially distinguished himself by the
+bitterness of his attacks. In the midst of the whirl I was called away
+to Paris to attend, with Herbert Burrows, the great Labour Congress
+held there from July 15th to July 20th, and spent a day or two at
+Fontainebleau with H.P. Blavatsky, who had gone abroad for a few
+weeks' rest. There I found her translating the wonderful fragments
+from "The Book of the Golden Precepts," now so widely known under the
+name of "The Voice of the Silence." She wrote it swiftly, without any
+material copy before her, and in the evening made me read it aloud to
+see if the "English was decent." Herbert Burrows was there, and Mrs.
+Candler, a staunch American Theosophist, and we sat round H.P.B. while
+I read. The translation was in perfect and beautiful English, flowing
+and musical; only a word or two could we find to alter, and she looked
+at us like a startled child, wondering at our praises--praises that
+any one with the literary sense would endorse if they read that
+exquisite prose poem.
+
+A little earlier in the same day I had asked her as to the agencies at
+work in producing the taps so constantly heard at Spiritualistic
+_Séances_. "You don't use spirits to produce taps," she said; "see
+here." She put her hand over my head, not touching it, and I heard and
+felt slight taps on the bone of my skull, each sending a little
+electric thrill down the spine. She then carefully explained how such
+taps were producible at any point desired by the operator, and how
+interplay of the currents to which they were due might be caused
+otherwise than by conscious human volition. It was in this fashion
+that she would illustrate her verbal teachings, proving by experiment
+the statements made as to the existence of subtle forces controllable
+by the trained mind. The phenomena all belonged to the scientific side
+of her teaching, and she never committed the folly of claiming
+authority for her philosophic doctrines on the ground that she was a
+wonder-worker. And constantly she would remind us that there was no
+such thing as "miracle"; that all the phenomena she had produced were
+worked by virtue of a knowledge of nature deeper than that of average
+people, and by the force of a well-trained mind and will; some of them
+were what she would describe as "psychological tricks," the creation
+of images by force of imagination, and in pressing them on others as a
+"collective hallucination"; others, such as the moving of solid
+articles, either by an astral hand projected to draw them towards her,
+or by using an Elemental; others by reading in the Astral Light, and
+so on. But the proof of the reality of her mission from those whom she
+spoke of as Masters lay not in these comparatively trivial physical
+and mental phenomena, but in the splendour of her heroic endurance,
+the depth of her knowledge, the selflessness of her character, the
+lofty spirituality of her teaching, the untiring passion of her
+devotion, the incessant ardour of her work for the enlightening of
+men. It was these, and not her phenomena, that won for her our faith
+and confidence--we who lived beside her, knowing her daily life--and
+we gratefully accepted her teaching not because she claimed any
+authority, but because it woke in us powers, the possibility of which
+in ourselves we had not dreamed of, energies of the Soul that
+demonstrated their own existence.
+
+Returning to London from Paris, it became necessary to make a very
+clear and definite presentment of my change of views, and in the
+_Reformer_ of August 4th I find the following: "Many statements are
+being made just now about me and my beliefs, some of which are
+absurdly, and some of which are maliciously, untrue. I must ask my
+friends not to give credence to them. It would not be fair to my
+friend Mr. Bradlaugh to ask him to open the columns of this Journal to
+an exposition of Theosophy from my pen, and so bring about a long
+controversy on a subject which would not interest the majority of the
+readers of the _National Reformer_. This being so I cannot here answer
+the attacks made on me. I feel, however, that the party with which I
+have worked for so long has a right to demand of me some explanation
+of the step I have taken, and I am therefore preparing a pamphlet
+dealing fully with the question. Further, I have arranged with Mr.
+R.O. Smith to take as subject of the lectures to be delivered by me at
+the Hall of Science on August 4th and 11th 'Why I became a
+Theosophist.' Meanwhile I think that my years of service in the ranks
+of the Freethought party give me the right to ask that I should not be
+condemned unheard, and I even venture to suggest, in view of the
+praises bestowed on me by Freethinkers in the past, that it is
+possible that there may be something to be said, from the intellectual
+standpoint, in favour of Theosophy. The caricatures of it which have
+appeared from some Freethinkers' pens represent it about as accurately
+as the Christian Evidence caricatures of Atheism represent that
+dignified philosophy of life; and, remembering how much they are
+themselves misrepresented, I ask them to wait before they judge."
+
+The lectures were delivered, and were condensed into a pamphlet
+bearing the same title, which has had a very great circulation. It
+closed as follows:--
+
+"There remains a great stumblingblock in the minds of many
+Freethinkers which is certain to prejudice them against Theosophy, and
+which offers to opponents a cheap subject for sarcasm--the assertion
+that there exist other living beings than the men and animals found on
+our own globe. It may be well for people who at once turn away when
+such an assertion is made to stop and ask themselves whether they
+really and seriously believe that throughout this mighty universe, in
+which our little planet is but as a tiny speck of sand in the Sahara,
+this one planet only is inhabited by living things? Is all the
+universe dumb save for _our_ voices? eyeless save for _our_ vision?
+dead save for _our_ life? Such a preposterous belief was well enough
+in the days when Christianity regarded our world as the centre of the
+universe, the human race as the one for which the Creator had deigned
+to die. But now that we are placed in our proper position, one among
+countless myriads of worlds, what ground is there for the preposterous
+conceit which arrogates as ours all sentient existence? Earth, air,
+water, all are teeming with living things suited to their environment;
+our globe is overflowing with life. But the moment we pass in thought
+beyond our atmosphere everything is to be changed. Neither reason nor
+analogy support such a supposition. It was one of Bruno's crimes that
+he dared to teach that other worlds than ours were inhabited; but he
+was wiser than the monks who burned him. All the Theosophists aver is
+that each phase of matter has living things suited to it, and that all
+the universe is pulsing with life. 'Superstition!' shriek the bigoted.
+It is no more superstition than the belief in Bacteria, or in any
+other living thing invisible to the ordinary human eye. 'Spirit' is a
+misleading word, for, historically, it connotes immateriality and a
+supernatural kind of existence, and the Theosophist believes neither
+in the one nor the other. With him all living things act in and
+through a material basis, and 'matter' and 'spirit' are not found
+dissociated. But he alleges that matter exists in states other than
+those at present known to science. To deny this is to be about as
+sensible as was the Hindû prince who denied the existence of ice
+because water, in his experience, never became solid. Refusal to
+believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all
+outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
+
+"One last word to my Secularist friends. If you say to me, 'Leave our
+ranks,' I will leave them; I force myself on no party, and the moment
+I feel myself unwelcome I will go.[29] It has cost me pain enough and
+to spare to admit that the Materialism from which I hoped all has
+failed me, and by such admission to bring on myself the disapproval of
+some of my nearest friends. But here, as at other times in my life, I
+dare not purchase peace with a lie. An imperious necessity forces me
+to speak the truth, as I see it, whether the speech please or
+displease, whether it bring praise or blame. That one loyalty to Truth
+I must keep stainless, whatever friendships fail me or human ties be
+broken. She may lead me into the wilderness, yet I must follow her;
+she may strip me of all love, yet I must pursue her; though she slay
+me, yet will I trust in her; and I ask no other epitaph on my tomb but
+
+"'SHE TRIED TO FOLLOW TRUTH.'"
+
+Meanwhile, with this new controversy on my hands, the School Board
+work went on, rendered possible, I ought to say, by the generous
+assistance of friends unknown to me, who sent me, £150 a year during
+the last year and a half. So also went on the vigorous Socialist work,
+and the continual championship of struggling labour movements,
+prominent here being the organisation of the South London fur-pullers
+into a union, and the aiding of the movement for shortening the hours
+of tram and 'bus men, the meetings for which had to be held after
+midnight. The feeding and clothing of children also occupied much time
+and attention, for the little ones in my district were, thousands of
+them, desperately poor. My studies I pursued as best I could, reading
+in railway carriages, tramcars, omnibuses, and stealing hours for
+listening to H.P.B. by shortening the nights.
+
+In October, Mr. Bradlaugh's shaken strength received its death-blow,
+though he was to live yet another fifteen months. He collapsed
+suddenly under a most severe attack of congestion and lay in imminent
+peril, devotedly nursed by his only remaining child, Mrs. Bonner, his
+elder daughter having died the preceding autumn. Slowly he struggled
+back to life, after four weeks in bed, and, ordered by his physician
+to take rest and if possible a sea voyage, he sailed for India on
+November 28th, to attend the National Congress, where he was
+enthusiastically acclaimed as "Member for India."
+
+In November I argued a libel suit, brought by me against the Rev. Mr.
+Hoskyns, vicar of Stepney, who had selected some vile passages from a
+book which was not mine and had circulated them as representing my
+views, during the School Board election of 1888. I had against me the
+Solicitor-General, Sir Edward Clarke, at the bar, and Baron Huddleston
+on the bench; both counsel and judge did their best to browbeat me and
+to use the coarsest language, endeavouring to prove that by advocating
+the limitation of the family I had condemned chastity as a crime. Five
+hours of brutal cross-examination left my denial of such teachings
+unshaken, and even the pleadings of the judge for the clergyman,
+defending his parishioners against an unbeliever and his laying down
+as law that the statement was privileged, did not avail to win a
+verdict. The jury disagreed, not, as one of them told me afterwards,
+on the question of the libel, but on some feeling that a clergyman
+ought not to be mulcted in damages for his over-zeal in defence of his
+faith against the ravening wolf of unbelief, while others, regarding
+the libel as a very cruel one, would not agree to a verdict that did
+not carry substantial damages. I did not carry the case to a new
+trial, feeling that it was not worth while to waste time over it
+further, my innocence of the charge itself having been fully proved.
+
+Busily the months rolled on, and early in the year 1890 H.P.Blavatsky
+had given to her £1,000, to use in her discretion for human service,
+and if she thought well, in the service of women. After a good deal of
+discussion she fixed on the establishment of a club in East London for
+working girls, and with her approval Miss Laura Cooper and I hunted
+for a suitable place. Finally we fixed on a very large and old house,
+193, Bow Road, and some months went in its complete renovation and the
+building of a hall attached to it. On August 15th it was opened by
+Madame Blavatsky, and dedicated by her to the brightening of the lot
+of hardworking and underpaid girls. It has nobly fulfilled its mission
+for the last three years. Very tender was H.P.B.'s heart to human
+suffering, especially to that of women and children. She was very poor
+towards the end of her earthly life, having spent all on her mission,
+and refusing to take time from her Theosophical work to write for the
+Russian papers which were ready to pay highly for her pen. But her
+slender purse was swiftly emptied when any human pain that money could
+relieve came in her way. One day I wrote a letter to a comrade that
+was shown to her, about some little children to whom I had carried a
+quantity of country flowers, and I had spoken of their faces pinched
+with want. The following characteristic note came to me:--
+
+"MY DEAREST FRIEND,--I have just read your letter to ---- and my heart
+is sick for the poor little ones! Look here; I have but 30s. of _my
+own money_ of which I can dispose (for as you know I am a pauper, and
+proud of it), but I want you to take them and _not say a word_. This
+may buy thirty dinners for thirty poor little starving wretches, and I
+may feel happier for thirty minutes at the thought. Now don't say a
+word, and do it; take them to those unfortunate babies who loved your
+flowers and felt happy. Forgive your old uncouth friend, _useless_ in
+this world!
+
+"Ever yours,
+
+"H.P.B."
+
+It was this tenderness of hers that led us, after she had gone, to
+found the "H.P.B. Home for little children," and one day we hope to
+fulfil her expressed desire that a large but homelike Refuge for
+outcast children should be opened under the auspices of the
+Theosophical Society.
+
+The lease of 17, Lansdowne Road expiring in the early summer of 1890,
+it was decided that 19, Avenue Road should be turned into the
+headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Europe. A hall was built
+for the meetings of the Blavatsky Lodge--the lodge founded by her--and
+various alterations made. In July her staff of workers was united
+under one roof; thither came Archibald and Bertram Keightley, who had
+devoted themselves to her service years before, and the Countess
+Wachtmeister, who had thrown aside all the luxuries of wealth and of
+high social rank to give all to the cause she served and the friend
+she loved with deep and faithful loyajty; and George Mead, her
+secretary and earnest disciple, a man of strong brain and strong
+character, a fine scholar and untiring worker; thither, too, Claude
+Wright, most lovable of Irishmen, with keen insight underlying a
+bright and sunny nature, careless on the surface, and Walter Old,
+dreamy and sensitive, a born psychic, and, like many such, easily
+swayed by those around him; Emily Kislingbury also, a studious and
+earnest woman; Isabel Cooper Oakley, intuitional and studious, a rare
+combination, and a most devoted pupil in Occult studies; James Pryse,
+an American, than whom none is more devoted, bringing practical
+knowledge to the help of the work, and making possible the large
+development of our printing department. These, with myself, were at
+first the resident staff, Miss Cooper and Herbert Burrows, who were
+also identified with the work, being prevented by other obligations
+from living always as part of the household.
+
+The rules of the house were--and are--very simple, but H.P.B.
+insisted on great regularity of life; we breakfasted at 8 a.m.,
+worked till lunch at 1, then again till dinner at 7. After dinner
+the outer work for the Society was put aside, and we gathered in
+H.P.B.'s room where we would sit talking over plans, receiving
+instructions, listening to her explanation of knotty points. By 12
+midnight all the lights had to be extinguished. My public work took me
+away for many hours, unfortunately for myself, but such was the
+regular run of our busy lives. She herself wrote incessantly; always
+suffering, but of indomitable will, she drove her body through its
+tasks, merciless to its weaknesses and its pains. Her pupils she
+treated very variously, adapting herself with nicest accuracy to their
+differing natures; as a teacher she was marvellously patient,
+explaining a thing over and over again in different fashions, until
+sometimes after prolonged failure she would throw herself back in her
+chair: "My God!" (the easy "Mon Dieu" of the foreigner) "am I a fool
+that you can't understand? Here, So-and-so"--to some one on whose
+countenance a faint gleam of comprehension was discernible--"tell
+these flapdoodles of the ages what I mean." With vanity, conceit,
+pretence of knowledge, she was merciless, if the pupil were a
+promising one; keen shafts of irony would pierce the sham. With some
+she would get very angry, lashing them out of their lethargy with
+fiery scorn; and in truth she made herself a mere instrument for the
+training of her pupils, careless what they, or any one else thought of
+her, providing that the resulting benefit to them was secured. And we,
+who lived around her, who in closest intimacy watched her day after
+day, we bear witness to the unselfish beauty of her life, the nobility
+of her character, and we lay at her feet our most reverent gratitude
+for knowledge gained, lives purified, strength developed. O noble and
+heroic Soul, whom the outside purblind world misjudges, but whom your
+pupils partly saw, never through lives and deaths shall we repay the
+debt of gratitude we owe to you.
+
+And thus I came through storm to peace, not to the peace of an
+untroubled sea of outer life, which no strong soul can crave, but to
+an inner peace that outer troubles may not avail to ruffle--a peace
+which belongs to the eternal not to the transitory, to the depths not
+to the shallows of life. It carried me scatheless through the terrible
+spring of 1891, when death struck down Charles Bradlaugh in the
+plenitude of his usefulness, and unlocked the gateway into rest for H.
+P. Blavatsky. Through anxieties and responsibilities heavy and
+numerous it has borne me; every strain makes it stronger; every trial
+makes it serener; every assault leaves it more radiant. Quiet
+confidence has taken the place of doubt; a strong security the place
+of anxious dread. In life, through death, to life, I am but the
+servant of the great Brotherhood, and those on whose heads but for a
+moment the touch of the Master has rested in blessing can never again
+look upon the world save through eyes made luminous with the radiance
+of the Eternal Peace.
+
+PEACE TO ALL BEINGS.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: This odious law has now been altered, and a married woman
+is a person, not a chattel.]
+
+[Footnote 2: "The Disciples," p. 14.]
+
+[Footnote 3: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 4: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 5: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 6: "Why I do not Believe in God." 1887.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 9: "Life, Death, and Immortality." 1886.]
+
+[Footnote 10: "Life, Death, and Immortality." 1886.]
+
+[Footnote 11: "Life, Death, and Immortality." 1886.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 13: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 14: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 15: "The True Basis of Morality." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 16: "Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 17: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 18: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 19: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 20: "The Gospels of Christianity and Freethought." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 21: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 22: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 23: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 24: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 25: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 26: "The Christian Creed." 1884.]
+
+[Footnote 27: _National Reformer_, June 18, 1882]
+
+[Footnote 28: _Theosophist_, June, 1882.]
+
+[Footnote 29: I leave these words as they were written in 1889. I
+resigned my office in the N.S.S. in 1890, feeling that the N.S.S. was
+so identified with Materialism that it had no longer place for me.]
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF BOOKS QUOTED.
+
+"Autobiography," J.S. Mill, 184
+
+"Christian Creed, The," 173
+
+"Freethinkers' Text-book," 144
+
+"Gospel of Atheism, The," 145, 152, 158, 168
+
+"Gospels of Christianity and Freethought," 164
+
+"Life, Death, and Immortality," 147, 149, 150
+
+_Link_, The, 333
+
+_National Reformer_, The, 79, 80, 280, 346-50, 354
+
+_Our Corner, _286, 329
+
+_Theosophist_, The, 282, 288
+
+"True Basis of Morality," 156
+
+"Why I do Not Believe in God," 146
+
+"World without God," 165, 169, 172
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+Affirmation Bill brought in, 287
+  rejected, 299
+Atheist, position as an, 139
+Authorship, first attempts at, 84.
+
+Bennett, D.M., prosecution of, 232
+Blasphemy prosecution, 283, 287, 289
+Blavatsky, H.P., 189, 337
+  meeting with, 341
+"Bloody Sunday," 324
+Bradlaugh, Charles, first meeting with, 135
+  as friend, 137
+  in the Clock Tower, 258
+  and the scene in the House, 265
+  _v_. Newdegate; result, 289
+  prosecuted for blasphemy, 283, 289
+
+Confirmation, 51
+
+Daughter, application to remove, 213
+  denied access to, 219
+Death of father, 21
+  of mother, 126
+Doubt the first, 58
+
+"Elements of Social Science," 196
+Engagement, 69
+Essay, first Freethought, 113
+
+Fenians, the, 73
+_Freethinker_ prosecution, 283, 287, 296
+Freethought Publishing Company, the, 285
+
+Harrow, life at, 30
+Hoskyns, Rev. E., libel action against, 359
+
+Knowlton pamphlet, the, 205
+  prosecution, 208
+  trial, 210
+
+"Law of Population, The," 212, 210
+"Law and Liberty League," the, 326
+Lecture, the first, 181
+Linnell, the Trafalgar Square victim, 316
+  funeral of, 327
+_Link_, founding of the, 331
+
+Malthusian League formed, 229
+Malthusianism and Theosophy, 240
+Marriage, 70
+  tie broken, no
+Match-girls' strike, 335
+  Union, established, 336
+
+_National Reformer,_ the, 134
+  first contribution to, 180
+  resignation of co-editorship, 320
+National Secular Society joined, 135
+  elected vice-president of, 202
+  resignation of, 357
+Northampton Election, 183
+  struggle, 253, 344
+
+Oaths Bill, the, 314, 329
+_Our Corner_, 286, 314
+
+Political Opinions, 174
+Pusey, Dr., 109, 284
+
+Russian politics, 311
+
+Scientific work, 249
+School Board, election to, 338
+Scott, Thomas, 112, 127
+Socialism, 299
+  debate on, between Messrs. Bradlaugh and Hyndman, 301
+Socialist debates, 318, 319
+Socialists and open-air speaking, 312
+  Defence Association, 323
+Stanley, Dean, 23, 122
+
+Theosophical Society, the, 180
+  joined, 344
+  headquarters established, 361
+Theosophy and Charles Bradlaugh, 350
+  the National Secular Society, 357
+Trafalgar Square, closing of, to the public, 323
+Truelove, Edward, trial of, 225
+
+Voysey, Rev. Charles, 106
+
+Working Women's Club, 337, 360
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Annie Besant, by Annie Besant
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+</title>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Annie Besant, by Annie Besant
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Annie Besant
+       An Autobiography
+
+Author: Annie Besant
+
+Release Date: April 19, 2004 [EBook #12085]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANNIE BESANT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<h1>
+ANNIE BESANT
+</h1>
+
+<h2>
+AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
+</h2>
+
+<h4>
+Illustrated
+</h4>
+
+
+<h5>
+LONDON
+</h5>
+
+<h5>
+SECOND EDITION
+</h5>
+<a name="01"></a>
+
+<p class="ctr"><img src="Images/01.jpg" alt="Annie Besant. 1885." width="382" height="541"></p>
+
+<h5><i>From a photograph by H.S. Mendelssohn, 27, Cathcart Road, South Kensington, London</i></h5>
+<h5>ANNIE BESANT<br>
+1885</h5>
+
+<hr>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>
+PREFACE
+</h3>
+<p>
+It is a difficult thing to tell the story of a life, and yet more
+difficult when that life is one's own. At the best, the telling has a
+savour of vanity, and the only excuse for the proceeding is that the
+life, being an average one, reflects many others, and in troublous
+times like ours may give the experience of many rather than of one.
+And so the autobiographer does his work because he thinks that, at the
+cost of some unpleasantness to himself, he may throw light on some of
+the typical problems that are vexing the souls of his contemporaries,
+and perchance may stretch out a helping hand to some brother who is
+struggling in the darkness, and so bring him cheer when despair has
+him in its grip. Since all of us, men and women of this restless and
+eager generation&mdash;surrounded by forces we dimly see but cannot as yet
+understand, discontented with old ideas and half afraid of new, greedy
+for the material results of the knowledge brought us by Science but
+looking askance at her agnosticism as regards the soul, fearful of
+superstition but still more fearful of atheism, turning from the husks
+of outgrown creeds but filled with desperate hunger for spiritual
+ideals--since all of us have the same anxieties, the same griefs, the
+same yearning hopes, the same passionate desire for knowledge, it may
+well be that the story of one may help all, and that the tale of one
+should that went out alone into the darkness and on the other side
+found light, that struggled through the Storm and on the other side
+found Peace, may bring some ray of light and of peace into the
+darkness and the storm of other lives.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+ANNIE BESANT.<br>
+The Theosophical Society,<Br>
+17 &amp; 19, Avenue Road, Regent's Park, London.<br>
+<i>August</i>, 1893.<br>
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+
+<h3>
+CONTENTS
+</h3>
+
+
+<p class="noindent">CHAP.</p>
+
+<ol>
+<li><a href="#CHI">&nbsp;&quot;OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE&quot;</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHII">&nbsp;EARLY CHILDHOOD</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHIII">&nbsp;GIRLHOOD</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHIV">&nbsp;MARRIAGE</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHV">&nbsp;THE STORM OF DOUBT</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHVI">&nbsp;CHARLES BRADLAUGH</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHVII">&nbsp;ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHVIII">&nbsp;AT WORK</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHIX">&nbsp;THE KNOWLTON PAMPHLET</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHX">&nbsp;AT WAR ALL ROUND</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHXI">&nbsp;MR. BRADLAUGH'S STRUGGLE</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHXII">&nbsp;STILL FIGHTING</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHXIII">&nbsp;SOCIALISM</a></li>
+
+<li><a href="#CHXIV">&nbsp;THROUGH STORM TO PEACE</a></li>
+</ol>
+
+<p class="addindent"><a href ="#LIST">LIST OF BOOKS QUOTED</a></p>
+
+<p class="addindent"><a href ="#INDEX">INDEX</a></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h3>
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+</h3>
+
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#01">
+ANNIE BESANT, 1885</a><br>
+<i>Frontispiece</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#01">HOROSCOPE OF ANNIE BESANT</a><br><i>Page</i> 12
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#02">ANNIE BESANT, 1869</a><br><i>Facing page</i> 86
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#03">THOMAS SCOTT</a><br><i>Facing page</i> 112
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#04">CHARLES BRADLAUGH, M.P.</a><br><i>Facing page</i> 212
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#05">CHARLES BRADLAUGH AND HENRY LABOUCHERE</a><br><i>Facing page</i> 254
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#06">NORWICH BRANCH OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE</a><br><i>Facing page</i> 314
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#07">STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION</a><br><i>Facing page</i> 336
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent"><a href="#08">MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION</a><br><i>Facing page</i> 338
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<a name="CHI"></a>
+<p class="chapter">
+CHAPTER I.
+</p>
+<h5>
+&quot;OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE.&quot;
+</h5>
+
+<p>
+On October 1, 1847, I am credibly informed, my baby eyes opened to the
+light(?) of a London afternoon at 5.39.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A friendly astrologer has drawn for me the following chart, showing the
+position of the planets at this, to me fateful, moment; but I know
+nothing of astrology, so feel no wiser as I gaze upon my horoscope.
+</p>
+
+<a name="02"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="Images/02.jpg" alt="Horoscope of Annie Besant." width="301" height="280"></p>
+<h5>Horoscope of Annie Besant.</h5>
+<p>
+Keeping in view the way in which sun, moon, and planets influence the
+physical condition of the earth, there is nothing incongruous with the
+orderly course of nature in the view that they also influence the
+physical bodies of men, these being part of the physical earth, and
+largely moulded by its conditions. Any one who knows the
+characteristics ascribed to those who are born under the several signs
+of the Zodiac, may very easily pick out the different types among his
+own acquaintances, and he may then get them to go to some astrologer
+and find out under what signs they were severally born. He will very
+quickly discover that two men of completely opposed types are not born
+under the same sign, and the invariability of the concurrence will
+convince him that law, and not chance, is at work. We are born into
+earthly life under certain conditions, just as we were physically
+affected by them pre-natally, and these will have their bearing on our
+subsequent physical evolution. At the most, astrology, as it is now
+practised, can only calculate the interaction between these physical
+conditions at any given moment, and the conditions brought to them by a
+given person whose general constitution and natal condition are known.
+It cannot say what the person will do, nor what will happen to him, but
+only what will be the physical district, so to speak, in which he will
+find himself, and the impulses that will play upon him from external
+nature and from his own body. Even on those matters modern astrology is
+not quite reliable&mdash;judging from the many blunders made&mdash;or else its
+professors are very badly instructed; but that there is a real science
+of astrology I have no doubt, and there are some men who are past
+masters in it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It has always been somewhat of a grievance to me that I was born in
+London, &quot;within the sound of Bow Bells,&quot; when three-quarters of my
+blood and all my heart are Irish. My dear mother was of purest Irish
+descent, and my father was Irish on his mother's side, though belonging
+to the Devonshire Woods on his father's. The Woods were yeomen of the
+sturdy English type, farming their own land in honest, independent
+fashion. Of late years they seem to have developed more in the
+direction of brains, from the time, in fact, that Matthew Wood became
+Mayor of London town, fought Queen Caroline's battles against her most
+religious and gracious royal husband, aided the Duke of Kent with no
+niggard hand, and received a baronetcy for his services from the Duke
+of Kent's royal daughter. Since then they have given England a Lord
+Chancellor in the person of the gentle-hearted and pure-living Lord
+Hatherley, while others have distinguished themselves in various ways
+in the service of their country. But I feel playfully inclined to
+grudge the English blood they put into my father's veins, with his
+Irish mother, his Galway birth, and his Trinity College, Dublin,
+education. For the Irish tongue is musical in my ear, and the Irish
+nature dear to my heart. Only in Ireland is it that if you stop to ask
+a worn-out ragged woman the way to some old monument, she will say:
+&quot;Sure, then, my darlin', it's just up the hill and round the corner,
+and then any one will tell you the way. And it's there you'll see the
+place where the blessed Saint Patrick set his foot, and his blessing be
+on yer.&quot; Old women as poor as she in other nations would never be as
+bright and as friendly and as garrulous. And where, out of Ireland,
+will you see a whole town crowd into a station to say good-bye to half
+a dozen emigrants, till the platform is a heaving mass of men and
+women, struggling, climbing over each other for a last kiss, crying,
+keening, laughing, all in a breath, till all the air is throbbing and
+there's a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes as the train
+steams out? Where, out of Ireland, will you be bumping along the
+streets on an outside car, beside a taciturn Jarvey, who, on suddenly
+discovering that you are shadowed by &quot;Castle&quot; spies, becomes
+loquaciously friendly, and points out everything that he thinks will
+interest you? Blessings on the quick tongues and warm hearts, on the
+people so easy to lead, so hard to drive. And blessings on the ancient
+land once inhabited by mighty men of wisdom, that in later times became
+the Island of Saints, and shall once again be the Island of Sages, when
+the Wheel turns round.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My maternal grandfather was a typical Irishman, much admired by me and
+somewhat feared also, in the childish days. He belonged to a decayed
+Irish family, the Maurices, and in a gay youth, with a beautiful wife
+as light-hearted as himself, he had merrily run through what remained
+to him in the way of fortune. In his old age, with abundant snow-white
+hair, he still showed the hot Irish blood on the lightest provocation,
+stormily angry for a moment and easily appeased. My mother was the
+second daughter in a large family, in a family that grew more numerous
+as pounds grew fewer, and she was adopted by a maiden aunt, a quaint
+memory of whom came through my mother's childhood into mine, and had
+its moulding effect on both our characters. This maiden aunt was, as
+are most Irish folk of decayed families, very proud of her family tree
+with its roots in the inevitable &quot;kings.&quot; Her particular kings were the
+&quot;seven kings of France&quot;&mdash;the &quot;Milesian kings&quot;&mdash;and the tree grew up a
+parchment, in all its impressive majesty, over the mantelpiece of their
+descendant's modest drawing-room. This heraldic monster was regarded
+with deep respect by child Emily, a respect in no wise deserved, I
+venture to suppose, by the disreputable royalties of whom she was a
+fortunately distant twig. Chased out of France, doubtless for cause
+shown, they had come over the sea to Ireland, and there continued their
+reckless plundering lives. But so strangely turns the wheel of time
+that these ill-doing and barbarous scamps became a kind of moral
+thermometer in the home of the gentle Irish lady in the early half of
+the present century. For my mother has told me that when she had
+committed some act of childish naughtiness, her aunt would say, looking
+gravely over her spectacles at the small culprit, &quot;Emily, your conduct
+is unworthy of the descendant of the seven kings of France.&quot; And Emily,
+with her sweet grey Irish eyes and her curling masses of raven black
+hair, would cry in penitent shame over her unworthiness, with some
+vague idea that those royal, and to her very real, ancestors would
+despise her small, sweet, rosebud self, so wholly unworthy of their
+disreputable majesties.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus those shadowy forms influenced her in childhood, and exercised
+over her a power that made her shrink from aught that was unworthy,
+petty or mean. To her the lightest breath of dishonour was to be
+avoided at any cost of pain, and she wrought into me, her only
+daughter, that same proud and passionate horror at any taint of shame
+or merited disgrace. To the world always a brave front was to be kept,
+and a stainless reputation, for suffering might be borne but dishonour
+never. A gentlewoman might starve, but she must not run in debt; she
+might break her heart, but it must be with a smile on her face. I have
+often thought that the training in this reticence and pride of honour
+was a strange preparation for my stormy, public, much attacked and
+slandered life; and certain it is that this inwrought shrinking from
+all criticism that touched personal purity and personal honour added a
+keenness of suffering to the fronting of public odium that none can
+appreciate who has not been trained in some similar school of dignified
+self-respect. And yet perhaps there was another result from it that in
+value outweighed the added pain: it was the stubbornly resistant
+feeling that rose and inwardly asserted its own purity in face of
+foulest lie, and turning scornful face against the foe, too proud
+either to justify itself or to defend, said to itself in its own heart,
+when condemnation was loudest: &quot;I am not what you think me, and your
+verdict does not change my own self. You cannot make me vile whatever
+you think of me, and I will never, in my own eyes, be that which you
+deem me to be now.&quot; And the very pride became a shield against
+degradation, for, however lost my public reputation, I could never bear
+to become sullied in my own sight&mdash;and that is a thing not without its
+use to a woman cut off, as I was at one time, from home, and friends,
+and Society. So peace to the maiden aunt's ashes, and to those of her
+absurd kings, for I owe them something after all. And I keep grateful
+memory of that unknown grand-aunt, for what she did in training my dear
+mother, the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest of women. It is well
+to be able to look back to a mother who served as ideal of all that was
+noblest and dearest during childhood and girlhood, whose face made the
+beauty of home, and whose love was both sun and shield. No other
+experience in life could quite make up for missing the perfect tie
+between mother and child&mdash;a tie that in our case never relaxed and
+never weakened. Though her grief at my change of faith and consequent
+social ostracism did much to hasten her death-hour, it never brought a
+cloud between our hearts; though her pleading was the hardest of all to
+face in later days, and brought the bitterest agony, it made no gulf
+between us, it cast no chill upon our mutual love. And I look back at
+her to-day with the same loving gratitude as ever encircled her to me
+in her earthly life. I have never met a woman more selflessly devoted
+to those she loved, more passionately contemptuous of all that was mean
+or base, more keenly sensitive on every question of honour, more iron
+in will, more sweet in tenderness, than the mother who made my girlhood
+sunny as dreamland, who guarded me, until my marriage, from every touch
+of pain that she could ward off or bear for me, who suffered more in
+every trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself, and who
+died in the little house I had taken for our new home in Norwood, worn
+out, ere old age touched her, by sorrow, poverty, and pain, in May,
+1874.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My earliest personal recollections are of a house and garden that we
+lived in when I was three and four years of age, situated in Grove
+Road, St. John's Wood. I can remember my mother hovering round the
+dinner-table to see that all was bright for the home-coming husband; my
+brother&mdash;two years older than myself&mdash;and I watching &quot;for papa&quot;; the
+loving welcome, the game of romps that always preceded the dinner of
+the elder folks. I can remember on the 1st of October, 1851, jumping up
+in my little cot, and shouting out triumphantly: &quot;Papa! mamma! I am
+four years old!&quot; and the grave demand of my brother, conscious of
+superior age, at dinner-time: &quot;May not Annie have a knife to-day, as
+she is four years old?&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a sore grievance during that same year, 1851, that I was not
+judged old enough to go to the Great Exhibition, and I have a faint
+memory of my brother consolingly bringing me home one of those folding
+pictured strips that are sold in the streets, on which were imaged
+glories that I longed only the more to see. Far-away, dusky, trivial
+memories, these. What a pity it is that a baby cannot notice, cannot
+observe, cannot remember, and so throw light on the fashion of the
+dawning of the external world on the human consciousness. If only we
+could remember how things looked when they were first imaged on the
+retinae; what we felt when first we became conscious of the outer world;
+what the feeling was as faces of father and mother grew out of the
+surrounding chaos and became familiar things, greeted with a smile,
+lost with a cry; if only memory would not become a mist when in later
+years we strive to throw our glances backward into the darkness of our
+infancy, what lessons we might learn to help our stumbling psychology,
+how many questions might be solved whose answers we are groping for in
+the West in vain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next scene that stands out clearly against the background of the
+past is that of my father's death-bed. The events which led to his
+death I know from my dear mother. He had never lost his fondness for
+the profession for which he had been trained, and having many medical
+friends, he would now and then accompany them on their hospital rounds,
+or share with them the labours of the dissecting-room. It chanced that
+during the dissection of the body of a person who had died of rapid
+consumption, my father cut his finger against the edge of the
+breast-bone. The cut did not heal easily, and the finger became swollen
+and inflamed. &quot;I would have that finger off, Wood, if I were you,&quot; said
+one of the surgeons, a day or two afterwards, on seeing the state of
+the wound. But the others laughed at the suggestion, and my father, at
+first inclined to submit to the amputation, was persuaded to &quot;leave
+Nature alone.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About the middle of August, 1852, he got wet through, riding on the top
+of an omnibus, and the wetting resulted in a severe cold, which
+&quot;settled on his chest.&quot; One of the most eminent doctors of the day, as
+able as he was rough in manner, was called to see him. He examined him
+carefully, sounded his lungs, and left the room followed by my mother.
+&quot;Well?&quot; she asked, scarcely anxious as to the answer, save as it might
+worry her husband to be kept idly at home. &quot;You must keep up his
+spirits,&quot; was the thoughtless answer. &quot;He is in a galloping
+consumption; you will not have him with you six weeks longer.&quot; The wife
+staggered back, and fell like a stone on the floor. But love triumphed
+over agony, and half an hour later she was again at her husband's side,
+never to leave it again for ten minutes at a time, night or day, till
+he was lying with closed eyes asleep in death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was lifted on to the bed to &quot;say good-bye to dear papa&quot; on the day
+before his death, and I remember being frightened at his eyes which
+looked so large, and his voice which sounded so strange, as he made me
+promise always to be &quot;a very good girl to darling mamma, as papa was
+going right away.&quot; I remember insisting that &quot;papa should kiss Cherry,&quot;
+a doll given me on my birthday, three days before, by his direction,
+and being removed, crying and struggling, from the room. He died on the
+following day, October 5th, and I do not think that my elder brother
+and I&mdash;who were staying at our maternal grandfather's&mdash;went to the
+house again until the day of the funeral. With the death, my mother
+broke down, and when all was over they carried her senseless from the
+room. I remember hearing afterwards how, when she recovered her senses,
+she passionately insisted on being left alone, and locked herself into
+her room for the night; and how on the following morning her mother, at
+last persuading her to open the door, started back at the face she saw
+with the cry: &quot;Good God, Emily! your hair is white!&quot; It was even so;
+her hair, black, glossy and abundant, which, contrasting with her large
+grey eyes, had made her face so strangely attractive, had turned grey
+in that night of agony, and to me my mother's face is ever framed in
+exquisite silver bands of hair as white as the driven unsullied snow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have heard that the love between my father and mother was a very
+beautiful thing, and it most certainly stamped her character for life.
+He was keenly intellectual and splendidly educated; a mathematician and
+a good classical scholar, thoroughly master of French, German, Italian,
+Spanish, and Portuguese, with a smattering of Hebrew and Gaelic, the
+treasures of ancient and of modern literature were his daily household
+delight. Nothing pleased him so well as to sit with his wife, reading
+aloud to her while she worked; now translating from some foreign poet,
+now rolling forth melodiously the exquisite cadences of &quot;Queen Mab.&quot;
+Student of philosophy as he was, he was deeply and steadily sceptical;
+and a very religious relative has told me that he often drove her from
+the room by his light, playful mockery of the tenets of the Christian
+faith. His mother and sister were strict Roman Catholics, and near the
+end forced a priest into his room, but the priest was promptly ejected
+by the wrath of the dying man, and by the almost fierce resolve of the
+wife that no messenger of the creed he detested should trouble her
+darling at the last.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Deeply read in philosophy, he had outgrown the orthodox beliefs of his
+day, and his wife, who loved him too much to criticise, was wont to
+reconcile her own piety and his scepticism by holding that &quot;women ought
+to be religious,&quot; while men had a right to read everything and think as
+they would, provided that they were upright and honourable in their
+lives. But the result of his liberal and unorthodox thought was to
+insensibly modify and partially rationalise her own beliefs, and she
+put on one side as errors the doctrines of eternal punishment, the
+vicarious atonement, the infallibility of the Bible, the equality of
+the Son with the Father in the Trinity, and other orthodox beliefs, and
+rejoiced in her later years in the writings of such men as Jowett,
+Colenso, and Stanley. The last named, indeed, was her ideal Christian
+gentleman, suave, polished, broad-minded, devout in a stately way. The
+baldness of a typical Evangelical service outraged her taste as much as
+the crudity of Evangelical dogmas outraged her intellect; she liked to
+feel herself a Christian in a dignified and artistic manner, and to be
+surrounded by solemn music and splendid architecture when she &quot;attended
+Divine service.&quot; Familiarity with celestial personages was detestable
+to her, and she did her duty of saluting them in a courtly and reverent
+fashion. Westminster Abbey was her favourite church, with its dim light
+and shadowy distances; there in a carven stall, with choristers
+chanting in solemn rhythm, with the many-coloured glories of the
+painted windows repeating themselves on upspringing arch and clustering
+pillars, with the rich harmonies of the pealing organ throbbing up
+against screen and monument, with the ashes of the mighty dead around,
+and all the stately memories of the past inwrought into the very
+masonry, there Religion appeared to her to be intellectually dignified
+and emotionally satisfactory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To me, who took my religion in strenuous fashion, this dainty and
+well-bred piety seemed perilously like Laodicean lukewarmness, while
+my headlong vigour of conviction and practice often jarred on her as
+alien from the delicate balance and absence of extremes that should
+characterise the gentlewoman. She was of the old <i>r&eacute;gime</i>; I of the
+stuff from which fanatics are made: and I have often thought, in
+looking back, that she must have had on her lips many a time unspoken
+a phrase that dropped from them when she lay a-dying: &quot;My little one,
+you have never made me sad or sorry except for your own sake; you have
+always been too religious.&quot; And then she murmured to herself: &quot;Yes,
+it has been darling Annie's only fault; she has always been too
+religious.&quot; Methinks that, as the world judges, the dying voice spake
+truly, and the dying eyes saw with a real insight. For though I was
+then kneeling beside her bed, heretic and outcast, the heart of me was
+religious in its very fervour of repudiation of a religion, and in its
+rebellious uprising against dogmas that crushed the reason and did not
+satisfy the soul. I went out into the darkness alone, not because
+religion was too good for me, but because it was not good enough; it
+was too meagre, too commonplace, too little exacting, too bound up
+with earthly interests, too calculating in its accommodations to
+social conventionalities. The Roman Catholic Church, had it captured
+me, as it nearly did, would have sent me on some mission of danger and
+sacrifice and utilised me as a martyr; the Church established by law
+transformed me into an unbeliever and an antagonist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For as a child I was mystical and imaginative religious to the very
+finger-tips, and with a certain faculty for seeing visions and
+dreaming dreams. This faculty is not uncommon with the Keltic races,
+and makes them seem &quot;superstitious&quot; to more solidly-built peoples.
+Thus, on the day of my father's funeral, my mother sat with vacant
+eyes and fixed pallid face&mdash;the picture comes back to me yet, it so
+impressed my childish imagination&mdash;following the funeral service,
+stage after stage, and suddenly, with the words, &quot;It is all over!&quot;
+fell back fainting. She said afterwards that she had followed the
+hearse, had attended the service, had walked behind the coffin to the
+grave. Certain it is that a few weeks later she determined to go to
+the Kensal Green Cemetery, where the body of her husband had been
+laid, and went thither with a relative; he failed to find the grave,
+and while another of the party went in search of an official to
+identify the spot, my mother said, &quot;If you will take me to the chapel
+where the first part of the service was read, I will find the grave.&quot;
+The idea seemed to her friend, of course, to be absurd; but he would
+not cross the newly-made widow, so took her to the chapel. She looked
+round, left the chapel door, and followed the path along which the
+corpse had been borne till she reached the grave, where she was
+quietly standing when the caretaker arrived to point it out. The grave
+is at some distance from the chapel, and is not on one of the main
+roads; it had nothing on it to mark it, save the wooden peg with the
+number, and this would be no help to identification at a distance
+since all the graves are thus marked, and at a little way off these
+pegs are not visible. How she found the grave remained a mystery in
+the family, as no one believed her straightforward story that she had
+been present at the funeral. With my present knowledge the matter is
+simple enough, for I now know that the consciousness can leave the
+body, take part in events going on at a distance, and, returning,
+impress on the physical brain what it has experienced. The very fact
+that she asked to be taken to the chapel is significant, showing that
+she was picking up a memory of a previous going from that spot to the
+grave; she could only find the grave if she started from <i>the place
+from which she had started before</i>. Another proof of this
+ultra-physical capacity was given a few months later, when her infant
+son, who had been pining himself ill for &quot;papa,&quot; was lying one night
+in her arms. On the next morning she said to her sister: &quot;Alf is going
+to die.&quot; The child had no definite disease, but was wasting away, and
+it was argued to her that the returning spring would restore the
+health lost during the winter. &quot;No,&quot; was her answer. &quot;He was lying
+asleep in my arms last night, and William&quot; (her husband) &quot;came to me
+and said that he wanted Alf with him, but that I might keep the other
+two.&quot; In vain she was assured that she had been dreaming, that it was
+quite natural that she should dream about her husband, and that her
+anxiety for the child had given the dream its shape. Nothing would
+persuade her that she had not seen her husband, or that the
+information he had given her was not true. So it was no matter of
+surprise to her when in the following March her arms were empty, and a
+waxen form lay lifeless in the baby's cot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My brother and I were allowed to see him just before he was placed in
+his coffin; I can see him still, so white and beautiful, with a black
+spot in the middle of the fair, waxen forehead, and I remember the
+deadly cold which startled me when I was told to kiss my little
+brother. It was the first time that I had touched Death. That black
+spot made a curious impression on me, and long afterwards, asking what
+had caused it, I was told that at the moment after his death my mother
+had passionately kissed the baby brow. Pathetic thought, that the
+mother's kiss of farewell should have been marked by the first sign of
+corruption on the child's face!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I do not mention these stories because they are in any fashion
+remarkable or out of the way, but only to show that the sensitiveness
+to impressions other than physical ones, that was a marked feature in
+my own childhood, was present also in the family to which I belonged.
+For the physical nature is inherited from parents, and sensitiveness
+to psychic impressions is a property of the physical body; in our
+family, as in so many Irish ones, belief in &quot;ghosts&quot; of all
+descriptions was general, and my mother has told me of the banshee
+that she had heard wailing when the death-hour of one of the family
+was near. To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were
+very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself
+a child. Punch and Judy were living entities, and the tragedy in which
+they bore part cost me many an agony of tears; to this day I can
+remember running away when I heard the squawk of the coming Punch, and
+burying my head in the pillows that I might shut out the sound of the
+blows and the cry of the ill-used baby. All the objects about me were
+to me alive, the flowers that I kissed as much as the kitten I petted,
+and I used to have a splendid time &quot;making believe&quot; and living out all
+sorts of lovely stories among my treasured and so-called inanimate
+playthings. But there was a more serious side to this dreamful fancy
+when it joined hands with religion.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHII"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER II.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+EARLY CHILDHOOD.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+And now began my mother's time of struggle and of anxiety. Hitherto,
+since her marriage, she had known no money troubles, for her husband
+was earning a good income; he was apparently vigorous and well: no
+thought of anxiety clouded their future. When he died, he believed
+that he left his wife and children safe, at least, from pecuniary
+distress. It was not so. I know nothing of the details, but the
+outcome of all was that nothing was left for the widow and children,
+save a trifle of ready money. The resolve to which my mother came was
+characteristic. Two of her husband's relatives, Western and Sir
+William Wood, offered to educate her son at a good city school, and to
+start him in commercial life, using their great city influence to push
+him forward. But the young lad's father and mother had talked of a
+different future for their eldest boy; he was to go to a public
+school, and then to the University, and was to enter one of the
+&quot;learned professions&quot;&mdash;to take orders, the mother wished; to go to the
+Bar, the father hoped. On his death-bed there was nothing more
+earnestly urged by my father than that Harry should receive the best
+possible education, and the widow was resolute to fulfil that last
+wish. In her eyes, a city school was not &quot;the best possible
+education,&quot; and the Irish pride rebelled against the idea of her son
+not being &quot;a University man.&quot; Many were the lectures poured out on the
+young widow's head about her &quot;foolish pride,&quot; especially by the female
+members of the Wood family; and her persistence in her own way caused
+a considerable alienation between herself and them. But Western and
+William, though half-disapproving, remained her friends, and lent many
+a helping hand to her in her first difficult struggles. After much
+cogitation, she resolved that the boy should be educated at Harrow,
+where the fees are comparatively low to lads living in the town, and
+that he should go thence to Cambridge or to Oxford, as his tastes
+should direct. A bold scheme for a penniless widow, but carried out to
+the letter; for never dwelt in a delicate body a more resolute mind
+and will than that of my dear mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a few months' time&mdash;during which we lived, poorly enough, in
+Richmond Terrace, Clapham, close to her father and mother&mdash;to Harrow,
+then, she betook herself, into lodgings over a grocer's shop, and set
+herself to look for a house. This grocer was a very pompous man, fond
+of long words, and patronised the young widow exceedingly, and one day
+my mother related with much amusement how he had told her that she was
+sure to get on if she worked hard. &quot;Look at me!&quot; he said, swelling
+visibly with importance; &quot;I was once a poor boy, without a penny of my
+own, and now I am a comfortable man, and have my submarine villa to go
+to every evening.&quot; That &quot;submarine villa&quot; was an object of amusement
+when we passed it in our walks for many a long day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;There is Mr. &mdash;'s submarine villa,&quot; some one would say, laughing:
+and I, too, used to laugh merrily, because my elders did, though my
+understanding of the difference between suburban and submarine was on
+a par with that of the honest grocer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My mother had fortunately found a boy, whose parents were glad to place
+him in her charge, of about the age of her own son, to educate with
+him; and by this means she was able to pay for a tutor, to prepare the
+two boys for school. The tutor had a cork leg, which was a source of
+serious trouble to me, for it stuck out straight behind when we knelt
+down to family prayers&mdash;conduct which struck me as irreverent and
+unbecoming, but which I always felt a desire to imitate. After about a
+year my mother found a house which she thought would suit her scheme,
+namely, to obtain permission from Dr. Vaughan, the then head-master of
+Harrow, to take some boys into her house, and so gain means of
+education for her own son. Dr. Vaughan, who must have been won by the
+gentle, strong, little woman, from that time forth became her earnest
+friend and helper; and to the counsel and active assistance both of
+himself and of his wife, was due much of the success that crowned her
+toil. He made only one condition in granting the permission she asked,
+and that was, that she should also have in her house one of the masters
+of the school, so that the boys should not suffer from the want of a
+house-tutor. This condition, of course, she readily accepted, and the
+arrangement lasted for ten years, until after her son had left school
+for Cambridge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The house she took is now, I am sorry to say, pulled down, and
+replaced by a hideous red-brick structure. It was very old and
+rambling, rose-covered in front, ivy-covered behind; it stood on the
+top of Harrow Hill, between the church and the school, and had once
+been the vicarage of the parish, but the vicar had left it because it
+was so far removed from the part of the village where all his work
+lay. The drawing-room opened by an old-fashioned half-window,
+half-door&mdash;which proved a constant source of grief to me, for whenever
+I had on a new frock I always tore it on the bolt as I flew
+through&mdash;into a large garden which sloped down one side of the hill,
+and was filled with the most delightful old trees, fir and laurel,
+may, mulberry, hazel, apple, pear, and damson, not to mention currant
+and gooseberry bushes innumerable, and large strawberry beds spreading
+down the sunny slopes. There was not a tree there that I did not
+climb, and one, a widespreading Portugal laurel, was my private
+country house. I had there my bedroom and my sitting-rooms, my study,
+and my larder. The larder was supplied by the fruit-trees, from which
+I was free to pick as I would, and in the study I would sit for hours
+with some favourite book&mdash;Milton's &quot;Paradise Lost&quot; the chief favourite
+of all. The birds must often have felt startled, when from the small
+swinging form perching on a branch, came out in childish tones the
+&quot;Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers,&quot; of Milton's
+stately and sonorous verse. I liked to personify Satan, and to declaim
+the grand speeches of the hero-rebel, and many a happy hour did I pass
+in Milton's heaven and hell, with for companions Satan and &quot;the Son,&quot;
+Gabriel and Abdiel. Then there was a terrace running by the side of
+the churchyard, always dry in the wettest weather, and bordered by an
+old wooden fence, over which clambered roses of every shade; never was
+such a garden for roses as that of the Old Vicarage. At the end of the
+terrace was a little summer-house, and in this a trap-door in the
+fence, which swung open and displayed one of the fairest views in
+England. Sheer from your feet downwards went the hill, and then far
+below stretched the wooded country till your eye reached the towers of
+Windsor Castle, far away on the horizon. It was the view at which
+Byron was never tired of gazing, as he lay on the flat tombstone close
+by&mdash;Byron's tomb, as it is still called&mdash;of which he wrote:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+&quot;Again I behold where for hours I have pondered,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;As reclining, at eve, on yon tombstone I lay,<br>
+Or round the steep brow of the churchyard I wandered,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;To catch the last gleam of the sun's setting ray.&quot;
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+Reader mine, if ever you go to Harrow, ask permission to enter the old
+garden, and try the effect of that sudden burst of beauty, as you
+swing back the small trap-door at the terrace end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Into this house we moved on my eighth birthday, and for eleven years it
+was &quot;home&quot; to me, left always with regret, returned to always with joy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Almost immediately afterwards I left my mother for the first time; for
+one day, visiting a family who lived close by, I found a stranger
+sitting in the drawing-room, a lame lady with a strong face, which
+softened marvellously as she smiled at the child who came dancing in;
+she called me to her presently, and took me on her lap and talked to
+me, and on the following day our friend came to see my mother, to ask
+if she would let me go away and be educated with this lady's niece,
+coming home for the holidays regularly, but leaving my education in
+her hands. At first my mother would not hear of it, for she and I
+scarcely ever left each other; my love for her was an idolatry, hers
+for me a devotion. (A foolish little story, about which I was
+unmercifully teased for years, marked that absolute idolatry of her,
+which has not yet faded from my heart. In tenderest rallying one day
+of the child who trotted after her everywhere, content to sit, or
+stand, or wait, if only she might touch hand or dress of &quot;mamma,&quot; she
+said: &quot;Little one&quot; (the name by which she always called me), &quot;if you
+cling to mamma in this way, I must really get a string and tie you to
+my apron, and how will you like that?&quot; &quot;O mamma, darling,&quot; came the
+fervent answer, &quot;do let it be in a knot.&quot; And, indeed, the tie of love
+between us was so tightly knotted that nothing ever loosened it till
+the sword of Death cut that which pain and trouble never availed to
+slacken in the slightest degree.) But it was urged upon her that the
+advantages of education offered were such as no money could purchase
+for me; that it would be a disadvantage for me to grow up in a
+houseful of boys&mdash;and, in truth, I was as good a cricketer and climber
+as the best of them&mdash;that my mother would soon be obliged to send me
+to school, unless she accepted an offer which gave me every advantage
+of school without its disadvantages. At last she yielded, and it was
+decided that Miss Marryat, on returning home, should take me with her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Marryat&mdash;the favourite sister of Captain Marryat, the famous
+novelist&mdash;was a maiden lady of large means. She had nursed her brother
+through the illness that ended in his death, and had been living with
+her mother at Wimbledon Park. On her mother's death she looked round
+for work which would make her useful in the world, and finding that one
+of her brothers had a large family of girls, she offered to take charge
+of one of them, and to educate her thoroughly. Chancing to come to
+Harrow, my good fortune threw me in her way, and she took a fancy to
+me and thought she would like to teach two little girls rather than
+one. Hence her offer to my mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Marryat had a perfect genius for teaching, and took in it the
+greatest delight. From time to time she added another child to our
+party, sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl. At first, with Amy Marryat
+and myself, there was a little boy, Walter Powys, son of a clergyman
+with a large family, and him she trained for some years, and then sent
+him on to school admirably prepared. She chose &quot;her children&quot;&mdash;as she
+loved to call us&mdash;in very definite fashion. Each must be gently born
+and gently trained, but in such position that the education freely
+given should be a relief and aid to a slender parental purse. It was
+her delight to seek out and aid those on whom poverty presses most
+heavily, when the need for education for the children weighs on the
+proud and the poor. &quot;Auntie&quot; we all called her, for she thought &quot;Miss
+Marryat&quot; seemed too cold and stiff. She taught us everything herself
+except music, and for this she had a master, practising us in
+composition, in recitation, in reading aloud English and French, and
+later, German, devoting herself to training us in the soundest, most
+thorough fashion. No words of mine can tell how much I owe her, not
+only of knowledge, but of that love of knowledge which has remained
+with me ever since as a constant spur to study.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her method of teaching may be of interest to some, who desire to train
+children with least pain, and the most enjoyment to the little ones
+themselves. First, we never used a spelling-book&mdash;that torment of the
+small child&mdash;nor an English grammar. But we wrote letters, telling of
+the things we had seen in our walks, or told again some story we had
+read; these childish compositions she would read over with us,
+correcting all faults of spelling, of grammar, of style, of cadence; a
+clumsy sentence would be read aloud, that we might hear how unmusical
+it sounded, an error in observation or expression pointed out. Then, as
+the letters recorded what we had seen the day before, the faculty of
+observation was drawn out and trained. &quot;Oh, dear! I have nothing to
+say!&quot; would come from a small child, hanging over a slate. &quot;Did you not
+go out for a walk yesterday?&quot; Auntie would question. &quot;Yes,&quot; would be
+sighed out; &quot;but there's nothing to say about it.&quot; &quot;Nothing to say! And
+you walked in the lanes for an hour and saw nothing, little No-eyes?
+You must use your eyes better to-day.&quot; Then there was a very favourite
+&quot;lesson,&quot; which proved an excellent way of teaching spelling. We used
+to write out lists of all the words we could think of which sounded the
+same but were differently spelt. Thus: &quot;key, quay,&quot; &quot;knight, night,&quot;
+and so on, and great was the glory of the child who found the largest
+number. Our French lessons&mdash;as the German later&mdash;included reading from
+the very first. On the day on which we began German we began reading
+Schiller's &quot;Wilhelm Tell,&quot; and the verbs given to us to copy out were
+those that had occurred in the reading. We learned much by heart, but
+always things that in themselves were worthy to be learned. We were
+never given the dry questions and answers which lazy teachers so much
+affect. We were taught history by one reading aloud while the others
+worked&mdash;the boys as well as the girls learning the use of the needle.
+&quot;It's like a girl to sew,&quot; said a little fellow, indignantly, one day.
+&quot;It is like a baby to have to run after a girl if you want a button
+sewn on,&quot; quoth Auntie. Geography was learned by painting skeleton
+maps&mdash;an exercise much delighted in by small fingers&mdash;and by putting
+together puzzle maps, in which countries in the map of a continent, or
+counties in the map of a country, were always cut out in their proper
+shapes. I liked big empires in those days; there was a solid
+satisfaction in putting down Russia, and seeing what a large part of
+the map was filled up thereby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The only grammar that we ever learned as grammar was the Latin, and
+that not until composition had made us familiar with the use of the
+rules therein given. Auntie had a great horror of children learning by
+rote things they did not understand, and then fancying they knew them.
+&quot;What do you mean by that expression, Annie?&quot; she would ask me. After
+feeble attempts to explain, I would answer: &quot;Indeed, Auntie, I know in
+my own head, but I can't explain.&quot; &quot;Then, indeed, Annie, you do not
+know in your own head, or you could explain, so that I might know in my
+own head.&quot; And so a healthy habit was fostered of clearness of thought
+and of expression. The Latin grammar was used because it was more
+perfect than the modern grammars, and served as a solid foundation for
+modern languages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Marryat took a beautiful place, Fern Hill, near Charmouth, in
+Dorsetshire, on the borders of Devon, and there she lived for some five
+years, a centre of beneficence in the district. She started a Sunday
+School, and a Bible Class after awhile for the lads too old for the
+school, who clamoured for admission to her class in it. She visited the
+poor, taking help wherever she went, and sending food from her own
+table to the sick. It was characteristic of her that she would never
+give &quot;scraps&quot; to the poor, but would have a basin brought in at dinner,
+and would cut the best slice to tempt the invalid appetite. Money she
+rarely, if ever, gave, but she would find a day's work, or busy herself
+to seek permanent employment for any one seeking aid. Stern in
+rectitude herself, and iron to the fawning or the dishonest, her
+influence, whether she was feared or loved, was always for good. Of the
+strictest sect of the Evangelicals, she was an Evangelical. On the
+Sunday no books were allowed save the Bible or the &quot;Sunday at Home&quot;;
+but she would try to make the day bright by various little devices; by
+a walk with her in the garden; by the singing of hymns, always
+attractive to children; by telling us wonderful missionary stories of
+Moffat and Livingstone, whose adventures with savages and wild beasts
+were as exciting as any tale of Mayne Reid's. We used to learn passages
+from the Bible and hymns for repetition; a favourite amusement was a
+&quot;Bible puzzle,&quot; such as a description of some Bible scene, which was to
+be recognised by the description. Then we taught in the Sunday School,
+for Auntie would tell us that it was useless for us to learn if we did
+not try to help those who had no one to teach them. The Sunday-school
+lessons had to be carefully prepared on the Saturday, for we were
+always taught that work given to the poor should be work that cost
+something to the giver. This principle, regarded by her as an
+illustration of the text, &quot;Shall I give unto the Lord my God that which
+has cost me nothing?&quot; ran through all her precept and her practice.
+When in some public distress we children went to her crying, and asking
+whether we could not help the little children who were starving, her
+prompt reply was, &quot;What will you give up for them?&quot; And then she said
+that if we liked to give up the use of sugar, we might thus each save
+sixpence a week to give away. I doubt if a healthier lesson can be
+given to children than that of personal self-denial for the good of
+others.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Daily, when our lessons were over, we had plenty of fun; long walks and
+rides, rides on a lovely pony, who found small children most amusing,
+and on which the coachman taught us to stick firmly, whatever his
+eccentricities of the moment; delightful all-day picnics in the lovely
+country round Charmouth, Auntie our merriest playfellow. Never was a
+healthier home, physically and mentally, made for young things than in
+that quiet village. And then the delight of the holidays! The pride of
+my mother at the good report of her darling's progress, and the renewal
+of acquaintance with every nook and corner in the dear old house and
+garden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dreamy tendency in the child, that on its worldly side is fancy,
+imagination, on its religious side is the germ of mysticism, and I
+believe it to be far more common than many people think. But the
+remorseless materialism of the day&mdash;not the philosophic materialism of
+the few, but the religious materialism of the many&mdash;crushes out all the
+delicate buddings forth of the childish thought, and bandages the eyes
+that might otherwise see. At first the child does not distinguish
+between what it &quot;sees&quot; and what it &quot;fancies&quot;; the one is as real, as
+objective, to it as the other, and it will talk to and play with its
+dream-comrades as merrily as with children like itself. As a child, I
+myself very much preferred the former, and never knew what it was to be
+lonely. But clumsy grown-ups come along and tramp right through the
+dream-garden, and crush the dream-flowers, and push the dream-children
+aside, and then say, in their loud, harsh voices&mdash;not soft and singable
+like the dream-voices&mdash;&quot;You must not tell such naughty stories, Miss
+Annie; you give me the shivers, and your mamma will be very vexed with
+you.&quot; But this tendency in me was too strong to be stifled, and it
+found its food in the fairy tales I loved, and in the religious
+allegories that I found yet more entrancing. How or when I learned to
+read, I do not know, for I cannot remember the time when a book was not
+a delight. At five years of age I must have read easily, for I remember
+being often unswathed from a delightful curtain, in which I used to
+roll myself with a book, and told to &quot;go and play,&quot; while I was still a
+five-years'-old dot. And I had a habit of losing myself so completely
+in the book that my name might be called in the room where I was, and I
+never hear it, so that I used to be blamed for wilfully hiding myself,
+when I had simply been away in fairyland, or lying trembling beneath
+some friendly cabbage-leaf as a giant went by.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was between seven and eight years of age when I first came across
+some children's allegories of a religious kind, and a very little
+later came &quot;Pilgrim's Progress,&quot; and Milton's &quot;Paradise Lost.&quot;
+Thenceforth my busy fancies carried me ever into the fascinating world
+where boy-soldiers kept some outpost for their absent Prince, bearing
+a shield with his sign of a red cross on it; where devils shaped as
+dragons came swooping down on the pilgrim, but were driven away
+defeated after hard struggle; where angels came and talked with little
+children, and gave them some talisman which warned them of coming
+danger, and lost its light if they were leaving the right path. What a
+dull, tire-some world it was that I had to live in, I used to think to
+myself, when I was told to be a good child, and not to lose my temper,
+and to be tidy, and not mess my pinafore at dinner. How much easier to
+be a Christian if one could have a red-cross shield and a white
+banner, and have a real devil to fight with, and a beautiful Divine
+Prince to smile at you when the battle was over. How much more
+exciting to struggle with a winged and clawed dragon, that you knew
+meant mischief, than to look after your temper, that you never
+remembered you ought to keep until you had lost it. If I had been Eve
+in the garden, that old serpent would never have got the better of me;
+but how was a little girl to know that she might not pick out the
+rosiest, prettiest apple from a tree that had no serpent to show it
+was a forbidden one? And as I grew older the dreams and fancies grew
+less fantastic, but more tinged with real enthusiasm. I read tales of
+the early Christian martyrs, and passionately regretted I was born so
+late when no suffering for religion was practicable; I would spend
+many an hour in daydreams, in which I stood before Roman judges,
+before Dominican Inquisitors, was flung to lions, tortured on the
+rack, burned at the stake; one day I saw myself preaching some great
+new faith to a vast crowd of people, and they listened and were
+converted, and I became a great religious leader. But always, with a
+shock, I was brought back to earth, where there were no heroic deeds
+to do, no lions to face, no judges to defy, but only some dull duty to
+be performed. And I used to fret that I was born so late, when all the
+grand things had been done, and when there was no chance of preaching
+and suffering for a new religion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the age of eight my education accented the religious side of my
+character. Under Miss Marryat's training my religious feeling received
+a strongly Evangelical bent, but it was a subject of some distress to
+me that I could never look back to an hour of &quot;conversion&quot;; when
+others gave their experiences, and spoke of the sudden change they had
+felt, I used to be sadly conscious that no such change had occurred in
+me, and I felt that my dreamy longings were very poor things compared
+with the vigorous &quot;sense of sin&quot; spoken of by the preachers, and used
+dolefully to wonder if I were &quot;saved.&quot; Then I had an uneasy sense that
+I was often praised for my piety when emulation and vanity were more
+to the front than religion; as when I learned by heart the Epistle of
+James, far more to distinguish myself for my good memory than from any
+love of the text itself; the sonorous cadences of many parts of the
+Old and New Testaments pleased my ear, and I took a dreamy pleasure in
+repeating them aloud, just as I would recite for my own amusement
+hundreds of lines of Milton's &quot;Paradise Lost,&quot; as I sat swinging on
+some branch of a tree, lying back often on some swaying bough and
+gazing into the unfathomable blue of the sky, till I lost myself in an
+ecstasy of sound and colour, half chanting the melodious sentences and
+peopling all the blue with misty forms. This facility of learning by
+heart, and the habit of dreamy recitation, made me very familiar with
+the Bible and very apt with its phrases. This stood me in good stead
+at the prayer-meetings dear to the Evangelical, in which we all took
+part; in turn we were called on to pray aloud&mdash;a terrible ordeal to
+me, for I was painfully shy when attention was called to me; I used to
+suffer agonies while I waited for the dreaded words, &quot;Now, Annie dear,
+will you speak to our Lord.&quot; But when my trembling lips had forced
+themselves into speech, all the nervousness used to vanish and I was
+swept away by an enthusiasm that readily clothed itself in balanced
+sentences, and alack! at the end, I too often hoped that God and
+Auntie had noticed that I prayed very nicely&mdash;a vanity certainly not
+intended to be fostered by the pious exercise. On the whole, the
+somewhat Calvinistic teaching tended, I think, to make me a little
+morbid, especially as I always fretted silently after my mother. I
+remember she was surprised on one of my home-comings, when Miss
+Marryat noted &quot;cheerfulness&quot; as a want in my character, for at home I
+was ever the blithest of children, despite my love of solitude; but
+away, there was always an aching for home, and the stern religion cast
+somewhat of a shadow over me, though, strangely enough, hell never
+came into my dreamings except in the interesting shape it took in
+&quot;Paradise Lost.&quot; After reading that, the devil was to me no horned and
+hoofed horror, but the beautiful shadowed archangel, and I always
+hoped that Jesus, my ideal Prince, would save him in the end. The
+things that really frightened me were vague, misty presences that I
+felt were near, but could not see; they were so real that I knew just
+where they were in the room, and the peculiar terror they excited lay
+largely in the feeling that I was just going to see them. If by chance
+I came across a ghost story it haunted me for months, for I saw
+whatever unpleasant spectre was described; and there was one horrid
+old woman in a tale by Sir Walter Scott, who glided up to the foot of
+your bed and sprang on it in some eerie fashion and glared at you, and
+who made my going to bed a terror to me for many weeks. I can still
+recall the feeling so vividly that it almost frightens me now!
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHIII"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER III.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+GIRLHOOD.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+In the spring of 1861 Miss Marryat announced her intention of going
+abroad, and asked my dear mother to let me accompany her. A little
+nephew whom she had adopted was suffering from cataract, and she
+desired to place him under the care of the famous D&uuml;sseldorf oculist.
+Amy Marryat had been recalled home soon after the death of her mother,
+who had died in giving birth to the child adopted by Miss Marryat, and
+named at her desire after her favourite brother Frederick (Captain
+Marryat). Her place had been taken by a girl a few months older than
+myself, Emma Mann, one of the daughters of a clergyman, who had
+married Miss Stanley, closely related, indeed, if I remember rightly,
+a sister of the Miss Mary Stanley who did such noble work in nursing
+in the Crimea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For some months we had been diligently studying German, for Miss
+Marryat thought it wise that we should know a language fairly well
+before we visited the country of which it was the native tongue. We
+had been trained also to talk French daily during dinner, so we were
+not quite &quot;helpless foreigners&quot; when we steamed away from St.
+Catherine's Docks, and found ourselves on the following day in
+Antwerp, amid what seemed to us a very Babel of conflicting tongues.
+Alas for our carefully spoken French, articulated laboriously! We were
+lost in that swirl of disputing luggage-porters, and could not
+understand a word! But Miss Marryat was quite equal to the occasion,
+being by no means new to travelling, and her French stood the test
+triumphantly, and steered us safely to a hotel. On the morrow we
+started again through Aix-la-Chapelle to Bonn, the town which lies on
+the borders of the exquisite scenery of which the Siebengebirge and
+Rolandseck serve as the magic portal. Our experiences in Bonn were not
+wholly satisfactory. Dear Auntie was a maiden lady, looking on all
+young men as wolves to be kept far from her growing lambs. Bonn was a
+university town, and there was a mania just then prevailing there for
+all things English. Emma was a plump, rosy, fair-haired typical
+English maiden, full of frolic and harmless fun; I a very slight,
+pale, black-haired girl, alternating between wild fun and extreme
+pensiveness. In the boarding-house to which we went at first&mdash;the
+&quot;Ch&acirc;teau du Rhin,&quot; a beautiful place overhanging the broad, blue
+Rhine&mdash;there chanced to be staying the two sons of the late Duke of
+Hamilton, the Marquis of Douglas and Lord Charles, with their tutor.
+They had the whole drawing-room floor: we a sitting-room on the ground
+floor and bedrooms above. The lads discovered that Miss Marryat did
+not like her &quot;children&quot; to be on speaking terms with any of the &quot;male
+sect.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here was a fine source of amusement. They would make their horses
+caracole on the gravel in front of our window; they would be just
+starting for their ride as we went for walk or drive, and would salute
+us with doffed hat and low bow; they would waylay us on our way
+downstairs with demure &quot;Good morning&quot;; they would go to church and
+post themselves so that they could survey our pew, and Lord
+Charles&mdash;who possessed the power of moving at will the whole skin of
+the scalp&mdash;would wriggle his hair up and down till we were choking
+with laughter, to our own imminent risk. After a month of this Auntie
+was literally driven out of the pretty ch&acirc;teau, and took refuge in a
+girls' school, much to our disgust; but still she was not allowed to
+be at rest. Mischievous students would pursue us wherever we went;
+sentimental Germans, with gashed cheeks, would whisper complimentary
+phrases as we passed; mere boyish nonsense of most harmless kind, but
+the rather stern English lady thought it &quot;not proper,&quot; and after three
+months of Bonn we were sent home for the holidays, somewhat in
+disgrace. But we had some lovely excursions during those months; such
+clambering up mountains, such rows on the swift-flowing Rhine, such
+wanderings in exquisite valleys. I have a long picture-gallery to
+retire into when I want to think of something fair, in recalling the
+moon as it silvered the Rhine at the foot of Drachenfels, or the soft,
+mist-veiled island where dwelt the lady who is consecrated for ever by
+Roland's love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A couple of months later we rejoined Miss Marryat in Paris, where we
+spent seven happy, workful months. On Wednesdays and Saturdays we were
+free from lessons, and many a long afternoon was passed in the
+galleries of the Louvre, till we became familiar with the masterpieces
+of art gathered there from all lands. I doubt if there was a beautiful
+church in Paris that we did not visit during those weekly wanderings;
+that of St. Germain de l'Auxerrois was my favourite&mdash;the church whose
+bell gave the signal for the massacre of St. Bartholomew&mdash;for it
+contained such marvellous stained glass, deepest, purest glory of
+colour that I had ever seen. The solemn beauty of Notre Dame, the
+somewhat gaudy magnificence of La Sainte Chapelle, the stateliness of
+La Madeleine, the impressive gloom of St. Roch, were all familiar to
+us. Other delights were found in mingling with the bright crowds which
+passed along the Champs Elysees and sauntered in the Bois de Boulogne,
+in strolling in the garden of the Tuileries, in climbing to the top of
+every monument whence view of Paris could be gained. The Empire was
+then in its heyday of glitter, and we much enjoyed seeing the
+brilliant escort of the imperial carriage, with plumes and gold and
+silver dancing and glistening in the sunlight, while in the carriage
+sat the exquisitely lovely empress, with the little boy beside her,
+touching his cap shyly, but with something of her own grace, in answer
+to a greeting&mdash;the boy who was thought to be born to an imperial
+crown, but whose brief career was to find an ending from the spears of
+savages in a quarrel in which he had no concern.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the spring of 1862 it chanced that the Bishop of Ohio visited
+Paris, and Mr. Forbes, then English chaplain at the Church of the Rue
+d'Aguesseau, arranged to have a confirmation. As said above, I was
+under deep &quot;religious impressions,&quot; and, in fact, with the exception
+of that little aberration in Germany, I was decidedly a pious girl. I
+looked on theatres (never having been to one) as traps set by Satan
+for the destruction of foolish souls; I was quite determined never to
+go to a ball, and was prepared to &quot;suffer for conscience' sake
+&quot;&mdash;little prig that I was&mdash;if I was desired to go to one. I was
+consequently quite prepared to take upon myself the vows made in my
+name at my baptism, and to renounce the world, the flesh, and the
+devil, with a heartiness and sincerity only equalled by my profound
+ignorance of the things I so readily resigned. That confirmation was
+to me a very solemn matter; the careful preparation, the prolonged
+prayers, the wondering awe as to the &quot;seven-fold gifts of the Spirit,&quot;
+which were to be given by &quot;the laying on of hands,&quot; all tended to
+excitement. I could scarcely control myself as I knelt at the altar
+rails, and felt as though the gentle touch of the aged bishop, which
+fluttered for an instant on my bowed head, were the very touch of the
+wing of that &quot;Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove,&quot; whose presence had been so
+earnestly invoked. Is there anything easier, I wonder, than to make a
+young and sensitive girl &quot;intensely religious&quot;? This stay in Paris
+roused into activity an aspect of my religious nature that had
+hitherto been latent. I discovered the sensuous enjoyment that lay in
+introducing colour and fragrance and pomp into religious services, so
+that the gratification of the aesthetic emotions became dignified with
+the garb of piety. The picture-galleries of the Louvre, crowded with
+Madonnas and saints, the Roman Catholic churches with their
+incense-laden air and exquisite music, brought a new joy into my life,
+a more vivid colour to my dreams. Insensibly, the colder, cruder
+Evangelicalism that I had never thoroughly assimilated, grew warmer
+and more brilliant, and the ideal Divine Prince of my childhood took
+on the more pathetic lineaments of the Man of Sorrows, the deeper
+attractiveness of the suffering Saviour of Men. Keble's &quot;Christian
+Year&quot; took the place of &quot;Paradise Lost,&quot; and as my girlhood began to
+bud towards womanhood, all its deeper currents set in the direction of
+religious devotion. My mother did not allow me to read love stories,
+and my daydreams of the future were scarcely touched by any of the
+ordinary hopes and fears of a girl lifting her eyes towards the world
+she is shortly to enter. They were filled with broodings over the days
+when girl-martyrs were blessed with visions of the King of Martyrs,
+when sweet St. Agnes saw her celestial Bridegroom, and angels stooped
+to whisper melodies in St. Cecilia's raptured ear. &quot;Why then and not
+now?&quot; my heart would question, and I would lose myself in these
+fancies, never happier than when alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The summer of 1862 was spent with Miss Marryat at Sidmouth, and, wise
+woman that she was, she now carefully directed our studies with a view
+to our coming enfranchisement from the &quot;schoolroom.&quot; More and more
+were we trained to work alone; our leading-strings were slackened, so
+that we never felt them save when we blundered; and I remember that
+when I once complained, in loving fashion, that she was &quot;teaching me
+so little,&quot; she told me that I was getting old enough to be trusted to
+work by myself, and that I must not expect to &quot;have Auntie for a
+crutch all through life.&quot; And I venture to say that this gentle
+withdrawal of constant supervision and teaching was one of the wisest
+and kindest things that this noble-hearted woman ever did for us. It
+is the usual custom to keep girls in the schoolroom until they &quot;come
+out&quot;; then, suddenly, they are left to their own devices, and,
+bewildered by their unaccustomed freedom, they waste time that might
+be priceless for their intellectual growth. Lately, the opening of
+universities to women has removed this danger for the more ambitious;
+but at the time of which I am writing no one dreamed of the changes
+soon to be made in the direction of the &quot;higher education of women.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During the winter of 1862-63 Miss Marryat was in London, and for a few
+months I remained there with her, attending the admirable French
+classes of M. Roche. In the spring I returned home to Harrow, going up
+each week to the classes; and when these were over, Auntie told me
+that she thought all she could usefully do was done, and that it was
+time that I should try my wings alone. So well, however, had she
+succeeded in her aims, that my emancipation from the schoolroom was
+but the starting-point of more eager study, though now the study
+turned into the lines of thought towards which my personal tendencies
+most attracted me. German I continued to read with a master, and
+music, under the marvellously able teaching of Mr. John Farmer,
+musical director of Harrow School, took up much of my time. My dear
+mother had a passion for music, and Beethoven and Bach were her
+favourite composers. There was scarcely a sonata of Beethoven's that I
+did not learn, scarcely a fugue of Bach's that I did not master.
+Mendelssohn's &quot;Lieder&quot; gave a lighter recreation, and many a happy
+evening did we spend, my mother and I, over the stately strains of the
+blind Titan, and the sweet melodies of the German wordless orator.
+Musical &quot;At Homes,&quot; too, were favourite amusements at Harrow, and at
+these my facile fingers made me a welcome guest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus set free from the schoolroom at 16&frac12;, an only daughter, I could do
+with my time as I would, save for the couple of hours a day given to
+music, for the satisfaction of my mother. From then till I became
+engaged, just before I was 19, my life flowed on smoothly, one current
+visible to all and dancing in the sunlight, the other running
+underground, but full and deep and strong. As regards my outer life,
+no girl had a brighter, happier life than mine; studying all the
+mornings and most of the afternoons in my own way, and spending the
+latter part of the day in games and walks and rides&mdash;varied with
+parties at which I was one of the merriest of guests. I practised
+archery so zealously that I carried up triumphantly as prize for the
+best score the first ring I ever possessed, while croquet found me a
+most eager devotee. My darling mother certainly &quot;spoiled&quot; me, so far
+as were concerned all the small roughnesses of life. She never allowed
+a trouble of any kind to touch me, and cared only that all worries
+should fall on her, all joys on me. I know now what I never dreamed
+then, that her life was one of serious anxiety. The heavy burden of my
+brother's school and college life pressed on her constantly, and her
+need of money was often serious. A lawyer whom she trusted absolutely
+cheated her systematically, using for his own purposes the remittances
+she made for payment of liabilities, thus keeping upon her a constant
+drain. Yet for me all that was wanted was ever there. Was it a ball to
+which we were going? I need never think of what I would wear till the
+time for dressing arrived, and there laid out ready for me was all I
+wanted, every detail complete from top to toe. No hand but hers must
+dress my hair, which, loosed, fell in dense curly masses nearly to my
+knees; no hand but hers must fasten dress and deck with flowers, and
+if I sometimes would coaxingly ask if I might not help by sewing in
+laces, or by doing some trifle in aid, she would kiss me and bid me
+run to my books or my play, telling me that her only pleasure in life
+was caring for her &quot;treasure.&quot; Alas! how lightly we take the
+self-denying labour that makes life so easy, ere yet we have known
+what life means when the protecting motherwing is withdrawn. So
+guarded and shielded had been my childhood and youth from every touch
+of pain and anxiety that love could bear for me, that I never dreamed
+that life might be a heavy burden, save as I saw it in the poor I was
+sent to help; all the joy of those happy years I took, not
+ungratefully I hope, but certainly with as glad unconsciousness of
+anything rare in it as I took the sunlight. Passionate love, indeed, I
+gave to my darling, but I never knew all I owed her till I passed out
+of her tender guardianship, till I left my mother's home. Is such
+training wise? I am not sure. It makes the ordinary roughnesses of
+life come with so stunning a shock, when one goes out into the world,
+that one is apt to question whether some earlier initiation into
+life's sterner mysteries would not be wiser for the young. Yet it is a
+fair thing to have that joyous youth to look back upon, and at least
+it is a treasury of memory that no thief can steal in the struggles of
+later life. &quot;Sunshine&quot; they called me in those bright days of merry
+play and earnest study. But that study showed the bent of my thought
+and linked itself to the hidden life; for the Fathers of the early
+Christian Church now became my chief companions, and I pored over the
+Shepherd of Hernias, the Epistles of Polycarp, Barnabas, Ignatius, and
+Clement, the commentaries of Chrysostom, the confessions of Augustine.
+With these I studied the writings of Pusey, Liddon, and Keble, with
+many another smaller light, joying in the great conception of a
+Catholic Church, lasting through the centuries, built on the
+foundations of apostles and of martyrs, stretching from the days of
+Christ Himself down to our own&mdash;&quot;One Lord, one Faith one Baptism,&quot; and
+I myself a child of that Holy Church. The hidden life grew stronger,
+constantly fed by these streams of study; weekly communion became the
+centre round which my devotional life revolved, with its ecstatic
+meditation, its growing intensity of conscious contact with the
+Divine; I fasted, according to the ordinances of the Church;
+occasionally flagellated myself to see if I could bear physical pain,
+should I be fortunate enough ever to tread the pathway trodden by the
+saints; and ever the Christ was the figure round which clustered all
+my hopes and longings, till I often felt that the very passion of, my
+devotion would draw Him down from His throne in heaven, present
+visibly in form as I felt Him invisibly in spirit. To serve Him
+through His Church became more and more a definite ideal in my life,
+and my thoughts began to turn towards some kind of &quot;religious life,&quot;
+in which I might prove my love by sacrifice and turn my passionate
+gratitude into active service.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Looking back to-day over my life, I see that its keynote&mdash;through all
+the blunders, and the blind mistakes, and clumsy follies&mdash;has been
+this longing for sacrifice to something felt as greater than the self.
+It has been so strong and so persistent that I recognise it now as a
+tendency brought over from a previous life and dominating the present
+one; and this is shown by the fact that to follow it is not the act of
+a deliberate and conscious will, forcing self into submission and
+giving up with pain something the heart desires, but the following it
+is a joyous springing forward along the easiest path, the &quot;sacrifice&quot;
+being the supremely attractive thing, not to make which would be to
+deny the deepest longings of the soul, and to feel oneself polluted
+and dishonoured. And it is here that the misjudgment comes in of many
+generous hearts who have spoken sometimes lately so strongly in my
+praise. For the efforts to serve have not been painful acts of
+self-denial, but the yielding to an overmastering desire. We do not
+praise the mother who, impelled by her protecting love, feeds her
+crying infant and stills its wailings at her breast; rather should we
+blame her if she turned aside from its weeping to play with some toy.
+And so with all those whose ears are opened to the wailings of the
+great orphan Humanity; they are less to be praised for helping than
+they would be to be blamed if they stood aside. I now know that it is
+those wailings that have stirred my heart through life, and that I
+brought with me the ears open to hear them from previous lives of
+service paid to men. It was those lives that drew for the child the
+alluring pictures of martyrdom, breathed into the girl the passion of
+devotion, sent the woman out to face scoff and odium, and drove her
+finally into the Theosophy that rationalises sacrifice, while opening
+up possibilities of service beside which all other hopes grow pale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Easter of 1866 was a memorable date in my life. I was introduced
+to the clergyman I married, and I met and conquered my first religious
+doubt. A little mission church had been opened the preceding Christmas
+in a very poor district of Clapham. My grandfather's house was near at
+hand, in Albert Square, and a favourite aunt and myself devoted
+ourselves a good deal to this little church, as enthusiastic girls and
+women will. At Easter we decorated it with spring flowers, with dewy
+primroses and fragrant violets, and with the yellow bells of the wild
+daffodil, to the huge delight of the poor who crowded in, and of the
+little London children who had, many of them, never seen a flower.
+Here I met the Rev. Frank Besant, a young Cambridge man, who had just
+taken orders, and was serving the little mission church as deacon;
+strange that at the same time I should meet the man I was to marry,
+and the doubts which were to break the marriage tie. For in the Holy
+Week preceding that Easter Eve, I had been&mdash;as English and Roman
+Catholics are wont to do&mdash;trying to throw the mind back to the time
+when the commemorated events occurred, and to follow, step by step,
+the last days of the Son of Man, living, as it were, through those
+last hours, so that I might be ready to kneel before the cross on Good
+Friday, to stand beside the sepulchre on Easter Day. In order to
+facilitate the realisation of those last sacred days of God incarnate
+on earth, working out man's salvation, I resolved to write a brief
+history of that week, compiled from the Four Gospels, meaning them to
+try and realise each day the occurrences that had happened on the
+corresponding date in A.D. 33, and so to follow those &quot;blessed feet&quot;
+step by step, till they were
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;... nailed for our advantage to the bitter cross.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the fearlessness which springs from ignorance I sat down to my
+task. My method was as follows:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<table border="1" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="4" summary="Four Gospels.">
+
+<tr>
+<th width="21%">MATTHEW.</th>
+<th width="21%">MARK.</th>
+<th width="21%">LUKE.</th>
+<th width="21%">JOHN.</th>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="center" valign="top">
+<td>PALM SUNDAY.</td>
+<td>PALM SUNDAY.</td>
+<td>PALM SUNDAY.</td>
+<td>PALM SUNDAY.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="left" valign="top"><td>Rode into Jerusalem. Purified the Temple. Returned to Bethany.</td>
+<td>Rode into Jerusalem. Returned to Bethany.</td>
+<td>Rode into Jerusalem. Purified the Temple. Note: &quot;Taught daily in the temple.&quot;</td>
+<td>Rode into Jerusalem. Spoke in the Temple.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="center" valign="top">
+<td>MONDAY.</td>
+<td>MONDAY.</td>
+<td>MONDAY.</td>
+<td>MONDAY.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="left" valign="top">
+<td>Cursed the fig-tree. Taught in the Temple, and spake many parables. No breaks shown, but the fig-tree (xxi.19) did not wither till Tuesday (see Mark).</td>
+<td>Cursed the fig-tree. Purified the Temple. Went out of city.</td>
+<td>Like Matthew.</td>
+<td>&mdash;&mdash;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="center" valign="top">
+<td>TUESDAY.</td>
+<td>TUESDAY.</td>
+<td>TUESDAY.</td>
+<td>TUESDAY.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="left" valign="top"><td>All chaps, xxi. 20, xxii-xxv., spoken on Tuesday, for xxvi. 2 gives Passover as &quot;after two days.&quot;</td>
+<td>Saw fig-tree withered up. Then discourses.</td>
+<td>Discourses. No date shown.</td>
+<td>&mdash;&mdash;</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="center" valign="top">
+<td>WEDNESDAY.</td>
+<td>WEDNESDAY.</td>
+<td>WEDNESDAY.</td>
+<td>WEDNESDAY.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="center" valign="top">
+<td colspan="4">Blank. (Possibly remained in Bethany, the alabaster box of ointment.)</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="center" valign="top">
+<td>THURSDAY.</td>
+<td>THURSDAY.</td>
+<td>THURSDAY.</td>
+<td>THURSDAY.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="left" valign="top"><td>Preparation of Passover. Eating of Passover, and institution of the Holy Eucharist. Gethsemane. Betrayal by Judas. Led captive to Caiaphas. Denied by St. Peter.</td>
+<td>Same as Matt.</td>
+<td>Same as Matt.</td>
+<td>Discourses with disciples, but <i>before</i> the Passover. Washes the disciples' feet. Nothing said of Holy Eucharist, nor of agony in Gethsemane. Malchus' ear. Led captives to Annas first. Then to Caiaphas. Denied by St. Peter.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="center" valign="top">
+<td>FRIDAY.</td>
+<td>FRIDAY.</td>
+<td>FRIDAY.</td>
+<td>FRIDAY.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr align="left" valign="top"><td>Led to Pilate. Judas hangs himself. Tried. Condemned to death. Scourged and mocked. Led to crucifixion. Darkness from 12 to 3. Died at 3.</td>
+<td>As Matthew, but hour of crucifixion given, 9 a.m.</td>
+<td>Led to Pilate. Sent to Herod. Sent back to Pilate. Rest as in Matthew; but <i>one</i> malefactor repents.</td>
+<td>Taken to Pilate. Jews would not enter, that they might eat the Passover. Scourged by Pilate before condemnation, and mocked. Shown by Pilate to Jews at 12.</td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<p>
+I became uneasy as I proceeded with my task, for discrepancies leaped
+at me from my four columns; the uneasiness grew as the contradictions
+increased, until I saw with a shock of horror that my &quot;harmony&quot; was a
+discord, and a doubt of the veracity of the story sprang up like a
+serpent hissing in my face. It was struck down in a moment, for to me
+to doubt was sin, and to have doubted on the very eve of the Passion
+was an added crime. Quickly I assured myself that these apparent
+contradictions were necessary as tests of faith, and I forced myself
+to repeat Tertullian's famous &quot;Credo quia impossible,&quot; till, from a
+wooden recital, it became a triumphant affirmation. I reminded myself
+that St. Peter had said of the Pauline Epistles that in them were
+&quot;some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and
+unstable wrest ... unto their own destruction.&quot; I shudderingly
+recognised that I must be very unlearned and unstable to find discord
+among the Holy Evangelists, and imposed on myself an extra fast as
+penance for my ignorance and lack of firmness in the faith. For my
+mental position was one to which doubt was one of the worst of sins. I
+knew that there were people like Colenso, who questioned the
+infallibility of the Bible, but I remembered how the Apostle John had
+fled from the Baths when Cerinthus entered them, lest the roof should
+fall on the heretic, and crush any one in his neighbourhood, and I
+looked on all heretics with holy horror. Pusey had indoctrinated me
+with his stern hatred of all heresy, and I was content to rest with
+him on that faith, &quot;which must be old because it is eternal, and must
+be unchangeable because it is true.&quot; I would not even read the works
+of my mothers favourite Stanley, because he was &quot;unsound,&quot; and because
+Pusey had condemned his &quot;variegated use of words which destroys all
+definiteness of meaning&quot;&mdash;a clever and pointed description, be it said
+in passing, of the Dean's exquisite phrases, capable of so many
+readings. It can then be imagined with what a stab of pain this first
+doubt struck me, and with what haste I smothered it up, buried it, and
+smoothed the turf over its grave. <i>But it had been there</i>, and it left
+its mark.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHIV"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER IV.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+MARRIAGE.
+</h5>
+
+<p>
+The last year of my girlish freedom was drawing to its close; how shall
+I hope to make commonsense readers understand how I became betrothed
+maiden ere yet nineteen, girl-wife when twenty years had struck?
+Looking back over twenty-five years, I feel a profound pity for the
+girl standing at that critical point of life, so utterly, hopelessly
+ignorant of all that marriage meant, so filled with impossible dreams,
+so unfitted for the <i>r&ocirc;le</i> of wife. As I have said, my day-dreams held
+little place for love, partly from the absence of love novels from my
+reading, partly from the mystic fancies that twined themselves round
+the figure of the Christ. Catholic books of devotion&mdash;English or Roman,
+it matters not, for to a large extent they are translations of the same
+hymns and prayers&mdash;are exceedingly glowing in their language, and the
+dawning feelings of womanhood unconsciously lend to them a passionate
+fervour. I longed to spend my time in worshipping Jesus, and was, as
+far as my inner life was concerned, absorbed in that passionate love of
+&quot;the Saviour&quot; which, among emotional Catholics, really is the human
+passion of love transferred to an ideal&mdash;for women to Jesus, for men to
+the Virgin Mary. In order to show that I am not here exaggerating, I
+subjoin a few of the prayers in which I found daily delight, and I do
+this in order to show how an emotional girl may be attracted by these
+so-called devotional exercises:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;O crucified Love, raise in me fresh ardours of love and consolation,
+that it may henceforth be the greatest torment I can endure ever to
+offend Thee; that it may be my greatest delight to please Thee.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Let the remembrance of Thy death, O Lord Jesu, make me to desire and
+pant after Thee, that I may delight in Thy gracious presence.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;O most sweet Jesu Christ, I, unworthy sinner, yet redeemed by Thy
+precious blood.... Thine I am and will be, in life and in death.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;O Jesu, beloved, fairer than the sons of men, draw me after Thee with
+the cords of Thy love.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Blessed are Thou, O most merciful God, who didst vouchsafe to espouse
+me to the heavenly Bridegroom in the waters of baptism, and hast
+imparted Thy body and blood as a new gift of espousal and the meet
+consummation of Thy love.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;O most sweet Lord Jesu, transfix the affections of my inmost soul with
+that most joyous and most healthful wound of Thy love, with true,
+serene, most holy, apostolical charity; that my soul may ever languish
+and melt with entire love and longing for Thee. Let it desire Thee and
+faint for Thy courts; long to be dissolved and be with Thee.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Oh, that I could embrace Thee with that most burning love of angels.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Let Him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth; for Thy love is better
+than wine. Draw me, we will run after Thee. The king hath brought me
+into his chambers.... Let my soul, O Lord, feel the sweetness of Thy
+presence. May it taste how sweet Thou art.... May the sweet and burning
+power of Thy love, I beseech Thee, absorb my soul.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All girls have in them the germ of passion, and the line of its
+development depends on the character brought into the world, and the
+surrounding influences of education. I had but two ideals in my
+childhood and youth, round whom twined these budding tendrils of
+passion; they were my mother and the Christ. I know this may seem
+strange, but I am trying to state things as they were in this
+life-story, and not give mere conventionalisms, and so it was. I had
+men friends, but no lovers&mdash;at least, to my knowledge, for I have since
+heard that my mother received two or three offers of marriage for me,
+but declined them on account of my youth and my childishness&mdash;friends
+with whom I liked to talk, because they knew more than I did; but they
+had no place in my day-dreams. These were more and more filled with the
+one Ideal Man, and my hopes turned towards the life of the Sister of
+Mercy, who ever worships the Christ, and devotes her life to the
+service of His poor. I knew my dear mother would set herself against
+this idea, but it nestled warm at my heart, for ever that idea of
+escaping from the humdrum of ordinary life by some complete sacrifice
+lured me onwards with its overmastering fascination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now one unlucky result of this view of religion is the idealisation of
+the clergyman, the special messenger and chosen servant of the Lord.
+Far more lofty than any title bestowed by earthly monarch is that
+patent of nobility straight from the hand of the &quot;King of kings,&quot; that
+seems to give to the mortal something of the authority of the immortal,
+and to crown the head of the priest with the diadem that belongs to
+those who are &quot;kings and priests unto God.&quot; Viewed in this way, the
+position of the priest's wife seems second only to that of the nun, and
+has, therefore, a wonderful attractiveness, an attractiveness in which
+the particular clergyman affected plays a very subordinate part; it is
+the &quot;sacred office,&quot; the nearness to &quot;holy things,&quot; the consecration
+which seems to include the wife&mdash;it is these things that shed a glamour
+over the clerical life which attracts most those who are most apt to
+self-devotion, most swayed by imagination. And the saddest pity of all
+this is that the glamour is most over those whose brains are quick,
+whose hearts are pure, who are responsive to all forms of noble
+emotions, all suggestions of personal self-sacrifice; if such in later
+life rise to the higher emotions whose shadows have attracted them, and
+to that higher self-sacrifice whose whispers reached them in their
+early youth, then the false prophet's veil is raised, the poverty of
+the conception seen, and the life is either wrecked, or through
+storm-wind and surge of battling billows, with loss of mast and sail,
+is steered by firm hand into the port of a nobler faith.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That summer of 1866 saw me engaged to the young clergyman I had met at
+the mission church in the spring, our knowledge of each other being an
+almost negligeable quantity. We were thrown together for a week, the
+only two young ones in a small party of holiday-makers, and in our
+walks, rides, and drives we were naturally companions; an hour or two
+before he left he asked me to marry him, taking my consent for granted
+as I had allowed him such full companionship&mdash;a perfectly fair
+assumption with girls accustomed to look on all men as possible
+husbands, but wholly mistaken as regarded myself, whose thoughts were
+in quite other directions. Startled, and my sensitive pride touched by
+what seemed to my strict views an assumption that I had been flirting,
+I hesitated, did not follow my first impulse of refusal, but took
+refuge in silence; my suitor had to catch his train, and bound me
+over to silence till he could himself speak to my mother, urging
+authoritatively that it would be dishonourable of me to break his
+confidence, and left me&mdash;the most upset and distressed little person
+on the Sussex coast. The fortnight that followed was the first unhappy
+one of my life, for I had a secret from my mother, a secret which I
+passionately longed to tell her, but dared not speak at the risk of
+doing a dishonourable thing. On meeting my suitor on our return to
+town I positively refused to keep silence any longer, and then out
+of sheer weakness and fear of inflicting pain I drifted into an
+engagement with a man I did not pretend to love. &quot;Drifted&quot; is the
+right word, for two or three months passed, on the ground that I was
+so much of a child, before my mother would consent to a definite
+engagement; my dislike of the thought of marriage faded before the
+idea of becoming the wife of a priest, working ever in the Church and
+among the poor. I had no outlet for my growing desire for usefulness
+in my happy and peaceful home-life, where all religious enthusiasm was
+regarded as unbalanced and unbecoming; all that was deepest and truest
+in my nature chafed against my easy, useless days, longed for work,
+yearned to devote itself, as I had read women saints had done, to the
+service of the Church and of the poor, to the battling against sin and
+misery&mdash;what empty names sin and misery then were to me! &quot;You will
+have more opportunities for doing good as a clergyman's wife than as
+anything else,&quot; was one of the pleas urged on my reluctance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the autumn I was definitely betrothed, and I married fourteen months
+later. Once, in the interval, I tried to break the engagement, but, on
+my broaching the subject to my mother, all her pride rose up in revolt.
+Would I, her daughter, break my word, would I dishonour myself by
+jilting a man I had pledged myself to marry? She could be stern where
+honour was involved, that sweet mother of mine, and I yielded to her
+wish as I had been ever wont to do, for a look or a word from her had
+ever been my law, save where religion was concerned. So I married in
+the winter of 1867 with no more idea of the marriage relation than if I
+had been four years old instead of twenty. My dreamy life, into which
+no knowledge of evil had been allowed to penetrate, in which I had been
+guarded from all pain, shielded from all anxiety, kept, innocent on all
+questions of sex, was no preparation for married existence, and left me
+defenceless to face a rude awakening. Looking back on it all, I
+deliberately say that no more fatal blunder can be made than to train a
+girl to womanhood in ignorance of all life's duties and burdens, and
+then to let her face them for the first time away from all the old
+associations, the old helps, the old refuge on the mother's breast.
+That &quot;perfect innocence&quot; may be very beautiful, but it is a perilous
+possession, and Eve should have the knowledge of good and evil ere she
+wanders forth from the paradise of a mother's love. Many an unhappy
+marriage dates from its very beginning, from the terrible shock to a
+young girl's sensitive modesty and pride, her helpless bewilderment and
+fear. Men, with their public school and college education, or the
+knowledge that comes by living in the outside world, may find it hard
+to realise the possibility of such infantile ignorance in many girls.
+None the less, such ignorance is a fact in the case of some girls at
+least, and no mother should let her daughter, blindfold, slip her neck
+under the marriage yoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before leaving the harbourage of girlhood to set sail on the troublous
+sea of life, there is an occurrence of which I must make mention, as
+it marks my first awakening of interest in the outer world of
+political struggle. In the autumn of 1867 my mother and I were staying
+with some dear friends of ours, the Robertses, at Pendleton, near
+Manchester. Mr. Roberts was &quot;the poor man's lawyer,&quot; in the
+affectionate phrase used of him by many a hundred men. He was a close
+friend of Ernest Jones, and was always ready to fight a poor man's
+battle without fee. He worked hard in the agitation which saved women
+from working in the mines, and I have heard him tell how he had seen
+them toiling, naked to the waist, with short petticoats barely
+reaching to their knees, rough, foul-tongued, brutalised out of all
+womanly decency and grace; and how he had seen little children working
+there too, babies of three and four set to watch a door, and falling
+asleep at their work to be roused by curse and kick to the unfair
+toil. The old man's eye would begin to flash and his voice to rise as
+he told of these horrors, and then his face would soften as he added
+that, after it was all over and the slavery was put an end to, as he
+went through a coal district the women standing at their doors would
+lift up their children to see &quot;Lawyer Roberts&quot; go by, and would bid
+&quot;God bless him&quot; for what he had done. This dear old man was my first
+tutor in Radicalism, and I was an apt pupil. I had taken no interest
+in politics, but had unconsciously reflected more or less the decorous
+Whiggism which had always surrounded me. I regarded &quot;the poor&quot; as folk
+to be educated, looked after, charitably dealt with, and always
+treated with most perfect courtesy, the courtesy being due from me, as
+a lady, to all equally, whether they were rich or poor. But to Mr.
+Roberts &quot;the poor&quot; were the working-bees, the wealth producers, with a
+right to self-rule not to looking after, with a right to justice, not
+to charity, and he preached his doctrines to me in season and out of
+season. I was a pet of his, and used often to drive him to his office
+in the morning, glorying much in the fact that my skill was trusted in
+guiding a horse through the crowded Manchester streets. During these
+drives, and on all other available occasions, Mr. Roberts would preach
+to me the cause of the people. &quot;What do you think of John Bright?&quot; he
+demanded suddenly one day, looking at me with fiery eyes from under
+heavy brows. &quot;I have never thought of him at all,&quot; was the careless
+answer. &quot;Isn't he a rather rough sort of man, who goes about making
+rows?&quot; &quot;There, I thought so!&quot; he thundered at me fiercely. &quot;That's
+just what I say. I believe some of you fine ladies would not go to
+heaven if you had to rub shoulders with John Bright, the noblest man
+God ever gave to the cause of the poor.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was the hot-tempered and lovable &quot;demagogue,&quot; as he was called,
+with whom we were staying when Colonel Kelly and Captain Deasy, two
+Fenian leaders, were arrested in Manchester and put on their trial. The
+whole Irish population became seething with excitement, and on
+September 18th the police van carrying them to Salford Gaol was stopped
+at the Bellevue Railway Arch by the sudden fall of one of the horses,
+shot from the side of the road. In a moment the van was surrounded, and
+crowbars were wrenching at the van door. It resisted; a body of police
+was rapidly approaching, and if the rescue was to be effective the door
+must be opened. The rescuers shouted to Brett, the constable inside, to
+pass out his keys; he refused, and some one exclaimed, &quot;Blow off the
+lock!&quot; In a moment the muzzle of a revolver was against the lock, and
+it was blown off; but Brett, stooping down to look through the keyhole,
+received the bullet in his head, and fell dying as the door flew open.
+Another moment, and Allen, a lad of seventeen, had wrenched open the
+doors of the compartments occupied by Kelly and Deasy, dragged them
+out, and while two or three hurried them off to a place of safety, the
+others threw themselves between the fugitives and the police, and with
+levelled revolvers guarded their flight. The Fenian leaders once safe,
+they scattered, and young William Allen, whose one thought had been for
+his chiefs, seeing them safe, fired his revolver in the air, for he
+would not shed blood in his own defence. Disarmed by his own act, he
+was set on by the police, brutally struck down, kicked and stoned, and
+was dragged off to gaol, faint and bleeding, to meet there some of his
+comrades in much the same plight as himself. Then Manchester went mad,
+and race-passions flared up into flame; no Irish workman was safe in a
+crowd of Englishmen, no Englishman safe in the Irish quarter. The
+friends of the prisoners besieged &quot;Lawyer Roberts's&quot; house, praying his
+aid, and he threw his whole fiery soul into their defence. The man who
+had fired the accidentally fatal shot was safely out of the way, and
+none of the others had hurt a human being. A Special Commission was
+issued, with Mr. Justice Blackburn at its head&mdash;&quot;the hanging judge,&quot;
+groaned Mr. Roberts&mdash;and it was soon in Manchester, for all Mr.
+Roberts's efforts to get the venue of the trial changed were futile,
+though of fair trial then in Manchester there was no chance. On October
+25th the prisoners were actually brought up before the magistrates in
+irons, and Mr. Ernest Jones, their counsel, failing in his protest
+against this outrage, threw down his brief and left the court. So great
+was the haste with which the trial was hurried on that on the 29th
+Allen, Larkin, Gould (O'Brien), Maguire, and Condon were standing in
+the dock before the Commission charged with murder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My first experience of an angry crowd was on that day as we drove to
+the court; the streets were barricaded, the soldiers were under arms,
+every approach to the court crowded with surging throngs. At last our
+carriage was stopped as we were passing at a foot's pace through an
+Irish section of the crowd, and various vehement fists came through the
+window, with hearty curses at the &quot;d&mdash;d English who were going to see
+the boys murdered.&quot; The situation was critical, for we were two women
+and three girls, when I bethought myself that we were unknown, and
+gently touched the nearest fist: &quot;Friends, these are Mr. Roberts' wife
+and daughters.&quot; &quot;Roberts! Lawyer Roberts! God bless Roberts! Let his
+carriage through.&quot; And all the scowling faces became smile-wreathen,
+and curses changed to cheers, as a road to the court steps was cleared
+for us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alas! if there was passion on behalf of the prisoners outside, there
+was passion against them within, and the very opening of the trial
+showed the spirit that animated the prosecution and the bench. Digby
+Seymour, Q.C., and Ernest Jones, were briefed for the defence, and Mr.
+Roberts did not think that they exercised sufficiently their right of
+challenge; he knew, as we all did, that many on the panel had loudly
+proclaimed their hostility to the Irish, and Mr. Roberts persisted in
+challenging them as his counsel would not. In vain Judge Blackburn
+threatened to commit the rebellious solicitor: &quot;These men's lives are
+at stake, my lord,&quot; was his indignant plea. &quot;Remove that man!&quot; cried
+the angry judge, but as the officers of the court came forward very
+slowly&mdash;for all poor men loved and honoured the sturdy fighter&mdash;he
+changed his mind and let him stay. Despite all his efforts, the jury
+contained a man who had declared that he &quot;didn't care what the evidence
+was, he would hang every d&mdash;d Irishman of the lot.&quot; And the result
+showed that he was not alone in his view, for evidence of the most
+disreputable kind was admitted; women of the lowest type were put into
+the box as witnesses, and their word taken as unchallengeable; thus was
+destroyed an <i>alibi</i> for Maguire, afterwards accepted by the Crown, a
+free pardon being issued on the strength of it. Nothing could save the
+doomed men from the determined verdict, and I could see from where I
+was sitting into a little room behind the bench, where an official was
+quietly preparing the black caps before the verdict had been delivered.
+The foregone &quot;Guilty&quot; was duly repeated as verdict on each of the five
+cases, and the prisoners asked if they had anything to say why sentence
+of death should not be passed on them. Allen, boy as he was, made a
+very brave and manly speech; he had not fired, save in the air&mdash;if he
+had done so he might have escaped; he had helped to free Kelly and
+Deasy, and did not regret it; he was willing to die for Ireland.
+Maguire and Condon (he also was reprieved) declared they were not
+present, but, like Allen, were ready to die for their country. Sentence
+of death was passed, and, as echo to the sardonic &quot;The Lord have mercy
+on your souls,&quot; rang back from the dock in five clear voices, with
+never a quiver of fear in them, &quot;God save Ireland!&quot; and the men passed
+one by one from the sight of my tear-dimmed eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a sorrowful time that followed; the despair of the heart-broken
+girl who was Allen's sweetheart, and who cried to us on her knees,
+&quot;Save my William!&quot; was hard to see; nothing we or any one could do
+availed to avert the doom, and on November 23rd Allen, Larkin, and
+O'Brien were hanged outside Salford Gaol. Had they striven for freedom
+in Italy England would have honoured them; here she buried them as
+common murderers in quicklime in the prison yard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have found, with a keen sense of pleasure, that Mr. Bradlaugh and
+myself were in 1867 to some extent co-workers, although we knew not of
+each other's existence, and although he was doing much, and I only
+giving such poor sympathy as a young girl might, who was only just
+awakening to the duty of political work. I read in the <i>National
+Reformer</i> for November 24, 1867, that in the preceding week he was
+pleading on Clerkenwell Green for these men's lives:&mdash;&quot;According to
+the evidence at the trial, Deasy and Kelly were illegally arrested.
+They had been arrested for vagrancy of which no evidence was given, and
+apparently remanded for felony without a shadow of justification. He
+had yet to learn that in England the same state of things existed as in
+Ireland; he had yet to learn that an illegal arrest was sufficient
+ground to detain any of the citizens of any country in the prisons of
+this one. If he were illegally held, he was justified in using enough
+force to procure his release. Wearing a policeman's coat gave no
+authority when the officer exceeded his jurisdiction. He had argued
+this before Lord Chief Justice Erie in the Court of Common Pleas, and
+that learned judge did not venture to contradict the argument which he
+submitted. There was another reason why they should spare these men,
+although he hardly expected the Government to listen, because the
+Government sent down one of the judges who was predetermined to convict
+the prisoners; it was that the offence was purely a political one. The
+death of Brett was a sad mischance, but no one who read the evidence
+could regard the killing of Brett as an intentional murder. Legally, it
+was murder; morally, it was homicide in the rescue of a political
+captive. If it were a question of the rescue of the political captives
+of Varignano, or of political captives in Bourbon, in Naples, or in
+Poland, or in Paris, even earls might be found so to argue. Wherein is
+our sister Ireland less than these? In executing these men, they would
+throw down the gauntlet for terrible reprisals. It was a grave and
+solemn question. It had been said by a previous speaker that they were
+prepared to go to any lengths to save these Irishmen. They were not. He
+wished they were. If they were, if the men of England, from one end to
+the other, were prepared to say, 'These men shall not be executed,'
+they would not be. He was afraid they had not pluck enough for that.
+Their moral courage was not equal to their physical strength. Therefore
+he would not say that they were prepared to do so. They must plead <i>ad
+misericordiam</i>. He appealed to the press, which represented the power
+of England; to that press which in its panic-stricken moments had done
+much harm, and which ought now to save these four doomed men. If the
+press demanded it, no Government would be mad enough to resist. The
+memory of the blood which was shed in 1798 rose up like a bloody ghost
+against them to-day. He only feared that what they said upon the
+subject might do the poor men more harm than good. If it were not so,
+he would coin words that should speak in words of fire. As it was, he
+could only say to the Government: You are strong to-day; you hold these
+men's lives in your hands; but if you want to reconcile their country
+to you, if you want to win back Ireland, if you want to make her
+children love you&mdash;then do not embitter their hearts still more by
+taking the lives of these men. Temper your strength with mercy; do not
+use the sword of justice like one of vengeance, for the day may come
+when it shall be broken in your hands, and you yourselves brained by
+the hilt of the weapon you have so wickedly wielded.&quot; In October he
+had printed a plea for Ireland, strong and earnest, asking:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Where is our boasted English freedom when you cross to Kingstown pier?
+Where has it been for near two years? The Habeas Corpus Act suspended,
+the gaols crowded, the steamers searched, spies listening at shebeen
+shops for sedition, and the end of it a Fenian panic in England. Oh,
+before it be too late, before more blood stain the pages of our present
+history, before we exasperate and arouse bitter animosities, let us try
+and do justice to our sister land. Abolish once and for all the land
+laws, which in their iniquitous operation have ruined her peasantry.
+Sweep away the leech-like Church which has sucked her vitality, and has
+given her back no word even of comfort in her degradation. Turn her
+barracks into flax mills, encourage a spirit of independence in her
+citizens, restore to her people the protection of the law, so that they
+may speak without fear of arrest, and beg them to plainly and boldly
+state their grievances. Let a commission of the best and wisest amongst
+Irishmen, with some of our highest English judges added, sit solemnly
+to hear all complaints, and then let us honestly legislate, not for the
+punishment of the discontented, but to remove the causes of the
+discontent. It is not the Fenians who have depopulated Ireland's
+strength and increased her misery. It is not the Fenians who have
+evicted tenants by the score. It is not the Fenians who have checked
+cultivation. Those who have caused the wrong at least should frame the
+remedy.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In December, 1867, I sailed out of the safe harbour of my happy and
+peaceful girlhood on to the wide sea of life, and the waves broke
+roughly as soon as the bar was crossed. We were an ill-matched pair, my
+husband and I, from the very outset; he, with very high ideas of a
+husband's authority and a wife's submission, holding strongly to the
+&quot;master-in-my-own-house theory,&quot; thinking much of the details of home
+arrangements, precise, methodical, easily angered and with difficulty
+appeased. I, accustomed to freedom, indifferent to home details,
+impulsive, very hot-tempered, and proud as Lucifer. I had never had a
+harsh word spoken to me, never been ordered to do anything, had had my
+way smoothed for my feet, and never a worry had touched me. Harshness
+roused first incredulous wonder, then a storm of indignant tears, and
+after a time a proud, defiant resistance, cold and hard as iron. The
+easy-going, sunshiny, enthusiastic girl changed&mdash;and changed pretty
+rapidly&mdash;into a grave, proud, reticent woman, burying deep in her own
+heart all her hopes, her fears, and her disillusions. I must have been
+a very unsatisfactory wife from the beginning, though I think other
+treatment might gradually have turned me into a fair imitation of the
+proper conventional article. Beginning with the ignorance before
+alluded to, and so scared and outraged at heart from the very first;
+knowing nothing of household management or economical use of money&mdash;I
+had never had an allowance or even bought myself a pair of
+gloves&mdash;though eager to perform my new duties creditably; unwilling to
+potter over little things, and liking to do swiftly what I had to do,
+and then turn to my beloved books; at heart fretting for my mother but
+rarely speaking of her, as I found my longing for her presence raised
+jealous vexation; with strangers about me with whom I had no sympathy;
+visited by ladies who talked to me only about babies and
+servants&mdash;troubles of which I knew nothing and which bored me
+unutterably&mdash;and who were as uninterested in all that had filled my
+life, in theology, in politics, in science, as I was uninterested in
+the discussions on the housemaid's young man and on the cook's
+extravagance in using &quot;butter, when dripping would have done perfectly
+well, my dear&quot;; was it wonderful that I became timid, dull, and
+depressed?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All my eager, passionate enthusiasm, so attractive to men in a young
+girl, were doubtless incompatible with &quot;the solid comfort of a wife,&quot;
+and I must have been inexpressibly tiring to the Rev. Frank Besant.
+And, in truth, I ought never to have married, for under the soft,
+loving, pliable girl there lay hidden, as much unknown to herself as to
+her surroundings, a woman of strong dominant will, strength that panted
+for expression and rebelled against restraint, fiery and passionate
+emotions that were seething under compression&mdash;a most undesirable
+partner to sit in the lady's arm-chair on the domestic rug before the
+fire. [<i>Que le diable faisait-elle dans cette gal&egrave;re,</i>] I have often
+thought, looking back at my past self, and asking, Why did that foolish
+girl make her bed so foolishly? But self-analysis shows the
+contradictories in my nature that led me into so mistaken a course. I
+have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have
+paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to suffer tortures of
+shyness, and if my shoe-lace was untied would feel shamefacedly that
+every eye was fixed on the unlucky string; as a girl I would shrink
+away from strangers and think myself unwanted and unliked, so that I
+was full of eager gratitude to any one who noticed me kindly; as the
+young mistress of a house, I was afraid of my servants, and would let
+careless work pass rather than bear the pain of reproving the ill-doer;
+when I have been lecturing and debating with no lack of spirit on the
+platform, I have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel
+rather than to ring and make the waiter fetch it; combative on the
+platform in defence of any cause I cared for, I shrink from quarrel or
+disapproval in the home, and am a coward at heart in private while a
+good fighter in public. How often have I passed unhappy quarters of an
+hour screwing up my courage to find fault with some subordinate whom my
+duty compelled me to reprove, and how often have I jeered at myself for
+a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming
+some lad or lass for doing their work badly! An unkind look or word has
+availed to make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while
+on the platform opposition makes me speak my best. So I slid into
+marriage blindly and stupidly, fearing to give pain; fretted my heart
+out for a year; then, roused by harshness and injustice, stiffened and
+hardened, and lived with a wall of ice round me within which I waged
+mental conflicts that nearly killed me; and learned at last how to live
+and work in armour that turned the edge of the weapons that struck it,
+and left the flesh beneath unwounded, armour laid aside, but in the
+presence of a very few.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up
+two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of
+a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character,
+&quot;The Lives of the Black Letter Saints.&quot; For the sake of the
+unecclesiastically trained it may be as well to mention that in the
+Calendar of the Church of England there are a number of Saints' Days;
+some of these are printed in red, and are Red Letter Days, for which
+services are appointed by the Church; others are printed in black, and
+are Black Letter Days, and have no special services fixed for them. It
+seemed to me that it would be interesting to take each of these days
+and write a sketch of the life of the saint belonging to it, and
+accordingly I set to work to do so, and gathered various books of
+history and legend where-from to collect my &quot;facts.&quot; I do not in the
+least know what became of that valuable book; I tried Macmillans with
+it, and it was sent on by them to some one who was preparing a series
+of Church books for the young; later I had a letter from a Church
+brotherhood offering to publish it, if I would give it as &quot;an act of
+piety&quot; to their order; its ultimate fate is to me unknown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The short stories were more fortunate. I sent the first to the <i>Family
+Herald</i>, and some weeks afterwards received a letter from which dropped
+a cheque as I opened it. Dear me! I have earned a good deal of money
+since by my pen, but never any that gave me the intense delight of that
+first thirty shillings. It was the first money I had ever earned, and
+the pride of the earning was added to the pride of authorship. In my
+childish delight and practical religion, I went down on my knees and
+thanked God for sending it to me, and I saw myself earning heaps of
+golden guineas, and becoming quite a support of the household. Besides,
+it was &quot;my very own,&quot; I thought, and a delightful sense of independence
+came over me. I had not then realised the beauty of the English law,
+and the dignified position in which it placed the married woman; I did
+not understand that all a married woman earned by law belonged to her
+owner, and that she could have nothing that belonged to her of
+right.<a href="#FN1"><sup>[1]</sup></a> I did not want the money: I was only so glad to have
+something of my own to give, and it was rather a shock to learn that it
+was not really mine at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From time to time after that I earned a few pounds for stories in the
+same journal; and the <i>Family Herald</i>, let me say, has one peculiarity
+which should render it beloved by poor authors; it pays its contributor
+when it accepts the paper, whether it prints it immediately or not;
+thus my first story was not printed for some weeks after I received the
+cheque, and it was the same with all the others accepted by the same
+journal. Encouraged by these small successes, I began writing a novel!
+It took a long time to do, but was at last finished, and sent off to
+the <i>Family Herald</i>. The poor thing came back, but with a kind note,
+telling me that it was too political for their pages, but that if I
+would write one of &quot;purely domestic interest,&quot; and up to the same
+level, it would probably be accepted. But by that time I was in the
+full struggle of theological doubt, and that novel of &quot;purely domestic
+interest&quot; never got itself written.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I contributed further to the literature of my country a theological
+pamphlet, of which I forget the exact title, but it dealt with the duty
+of fasting incumbent on all faithful Christians, and was very patristic
+in its tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In January, 1869, my little son was born, and as I was very ill for
+some months before, and was far too much interested in the tiny
+creature afterwards, to devote myself to pen and paper, my literary
+career was checked for a while. The baby gave a new interest and a new
+pleasure to life, and as we could not afford a nurse I had plenty to do
+in looking after his small majesty. My energy in reading became less
+feverish when it was done by the side of the baby's cradle, and the
+little one's presence almost healed the abiding pain of my mother's
+loss.
+</p>
+
+<a name="03"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="Images/03.jpg" alt="Annie Besant. 1869."
+height="464" width="319"></p>
+<h5><i>From a photograph by Dighton's Art Studio, Cheltenham</i>.</h5>
+<h5>
+ANNIE BESANT<br>1869.</h5>
+
+
+
+<p>
+I may pass very quickly over the next two years. In August, 1870, a
+little sister was born to my son, and the recovery was slow and
+tedious, for my general health had been failing for some time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boy was a bright, healthy little fellow, but the girl was delicate
+from birth, suffering from her mother's unhappiness, and born somewhat
+prematurely in consequence of a shock. When, in the spring of 1871, the
+two children caught the whooping cough, my Mabel's delicacy made the
+ordeal well-nigh fatal to her. She was very young for so trying a
+disease, and after a while bronchitis set in and was followed by
+congestion of the lungs. For weeks she lay in hourly peril of death We
+arranged a screen round the fire like a tent, and kept it full of steam
+to ease the panting breath; and there I sat, day and night, all through
+those weary weeks, the tortured baby on my knees. I loved my little
+ones passionately, for their clinging love soothed the aching at my
+heart, and their baby eyes could not critically scan the unhappiness
+that grew deeper month by month; and that steam-filled tent became my
+world, and there, alone, I fought with Death for my child. The doctor
+said that recovery was impossible, and that in one of the paroxysms of
+coughing she must die; the most distressing thing was that, at last,
+even a drop or two of milk would bring on the terrible convulsive
+choking, and it seemed cruel to add to the pain of the apparently dying
+child. At length, one morning the doctor said she could not last
+through the day; I had sent for him hurriedly, for the body had
+suddenly swollen up as a result of the perforation of one of the
+pleurae, and the consequent escape of air into the cavity of the chest.
+While he was there one of the fits of coughing came on, and it seemed
+as though it must be the last. He took a small bottle of chloroform out
+of his pocket, and putting a drop on a handkerchief held it near the
+child's face, till the drug soothed the convulsive struggle. &quot;It can't
+do any harm at this stage,&quot; he said, &quot;and it checks the suffering.&quot; He
+went away, saying that he feared he would never see the child alive
+again. One of the kindest friends I had in my married life was that
+same doctor, Mr. Lauriston Winterbotham; he was as good as he was
+clever, and, like so many of his noble profession, he had the merits of
+discretion and silence. He never breathed a word as to my unhappiness,
+until in 1878 he came up to town to give evidence as to cruelty
+which&mdash;had the deed of separation not been held as condonation&mdash;would
+have secured me a divorce <i>a mensa et thoro</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The child, however, recovered, and her recovery was due, I think, to
+that chance thought of Mr. Winterbotham's about the chloroform, for I
+used it whenever the first sign of a fit of coughing appeared, and so
+warded off the convulsive attack and the profound exhaustion that
+followed, in which a mere flicker of breath at the top of the throat
+was the only sign of life, and sometimes even that disappeared, and I
+thought her gone. For years the child remained ailing and delicate,
+requiring the tenderest care, but those weeks of anguish left a deeper
+trace on mother than on child. Once she was out of danger I collapsed
+physically, and lay in bed for a week unmoving, and then rose to face a
+struggle which lasted for three years and two months, and nearly cost
+me my life, the struggle which transformed me from a Christian into an
+Atheist. The agony of the struggle was in the first nineteen months&mdash;a
+time to be looked back upon with shrinking, as it was a hell to live
+through at the time. For no one who has not felt it knows the fearful
+anguish inflicted by doubt on the earnestly religious soul. There is in
+life no other pain so horrible, so keen in its torture, so crushing in
+its weight. It seems to shipwreck everything, to destroy the one steady
+gleam of happiness &quot;on the other side&quot; that no earthly storm could
+obscure; to make all life gloomy with a horror of despair, a darkness
+that verily may be felt. Nothing but an imperious intellectual and
+moral necessity can drive into doubt a religious mind, for it is as
+though an earthquake shook the foundations of the soul, and the very
+being quivers and sways under the shock. No life in the empty sky; no
+gleam in the blackness of the night; no voice to break the deadly
+silence; no hand outstretched to save. Empty-brained triflers who have
+never tried to think, who take their creed as they take their fashions,
+speak of Atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious desires. In
+their shallow heartlessness and shallower thought they cannot even
+dimly imagine the anguish of entering the mere penumbra of the Eclipse
+of Faith, much less the horror of that great darkness in which the
+orphaned soul cries out into the infinite emptiness: &quot;Is it a Devil
+that has made the world? Is the echo, 'Children, ye have no Father,'
+true? Is all blind chance, is all the clash of unconscious forces, or
+are we the sentient toys of an Almighty Power that sports with our
+agony, whose peals of awful mockery of laughter ring back answer to the
+wailings of our despair?&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How true are the noble words of Mrs. Hamilton King:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+  &quot;For some may follow Truth from dawn to dark,<br>
+  As a child follows by his mother's hand,<br>
+  Knowing no fear, rejoicing all the way;<br>
+  And unto some her face is as a Star<br>
+  Set through an avenue of thorns and fires,<br>
+  And waving branches black without a leaf;<br>
+  And still It draws them, though the feet must bleed,<br>
+  Though garments must be rent, and eyes be scorched:<br>
+  And if the valley of the shadow of death<br>
+  Be passed, and to the level road they come,<br>
+  Still with their faces to the polar star,<br>
+  It is not with the same looks, the same limbs,<br>
+  But halt, and maimed, and of infirmity.<br>
+  And for the rest of the way they have to go<br>
+  It is not day but night, and oftentimes<br>
+  A night of clouds wherein the stars are lost.&quot;<a href="#FN2"><sup>[2]</sup></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aye! but never lost is the Star of Truth to which the face is set, and
+while that shines all lesser lights may go. It was the long months of
+suffering through which I had been passing, with the seemingly
+purposeless torturing of my little one as a climax, that struck the
+first stunning blow at my belief in God as a merciful Father of men. I
+had been visiting the poor a good deal, and had marked the patient
+suffering of their lives; my idolised mother had been defrauded by a
+lawyer she had trusted, and was plunged into debt by his non-payment of
+the sums that should have passed through his hands to others; my own
+bright life had been enshrouded by pain and rendered to me degraded by
+an intolerable sense of bondage; and here was my helpless, sinless babe
+tortured for weeks and left frail and suffering. The smooth brightness
+of my previous life made all the disillusionment more startling, and
+the sudden plunge into conditions so new and so unfavourable dazed and
+stunned me. My religious past became the worst enemy of the suffering
+present. All my personal belief in Christ, all my intense faith in His
+constant direction of affairs, all my habit of continual prayer and of
+realisation of His Presence&mdash;all were against me now. The very height
+of my trust was the measure of the shock when the trust gave way. To me
+He was no abstract idea, but a living reality, and all my heart rose up
+against this Person in whom I believed, and whose individual finger I
+saw in my baby's agony, my own misery, the breaking of my mother's
+proud heart under a load of debt, and all the bitter suffering of the
+poor. The presence of pain and evil in a world made by a good God; the
+pain falling on the innocent, as on my seven months' old babe; the pain
+begun here reaching on into eternity unhealed; a sorrow-laden world; a
+lurid, hopeless hell; all these, while I still believed, drove me
+desperate, and instead of like the devils believing and trembling, I
+believed and hated. All the hitherto dormant and unsuspected strength
+of my nature rose up in rebellion; I did not yet dream of denial, but I
+would no longer kneel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the first stirrings of this hot rebellion moved in my heart I met a
+clergyman of a very noble type, who did much to help me by his ready
+and wise sympathy. Mr. Besant brought him to see me during the crisis
+of the child's illness; he said little, but on the following day I
+received from him the following note:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;<i>April</i> 21, 1871.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;My Dear Mrs. Besant,&mdash;I am painfully conscious that I gave you but
+little help in your trouble yesterday. It is needless to say that it
+was not from want of sympathy. Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to
+say that it was from excess of sympathy. I shrink intensely from
+meddling with the sorrow of any one whom I feel to be of a sensitive
+nature. 'The heart hath its own bitterness, and the stranger meddleth
+not therewith.' It is to me a positively fearful thought that I might
+awaken such a reflection as
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+  &quot;'And common was the commonplace,<br>
+  And vacant chaff well meant for grain.'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Conventional consolations, conventional verses out of the Bible, and
+conventional prayers are, it seems to me, an intolerable aggravation of
+suffering. And so I acted on a principle that I mentioned to your
+husband that 'there is no power so great as that of one human faith
+looking upon another human faith.' The promises of God, the love of
+Christ for little children, and all that has been given to us of hope
+and comfort, are as deeply planted in your heart as in mine, and I did
+not care to quote them. But when I talk face to face with one who is in
+sore need of them, my faith in them suddenly becomes so vast and
+heart-stirring that I think I must help most by talking naturally, and
+letting the faith find its own way from soul to soul. Indeed, I could
+not find words for it if I tried. And yet I am compelled, as a
+messenger of the glad tidings of God, to solemnly assure you that all
+is well. We have no key to the 'mystery of pain' excepting the Cross of
+Christ. But there is another and a deeper solution in the hands of our
+Father; and it will be ours when we can understand it. There is&mdash;in the
+place to which we travelsome blessed explanation of your baby's pain
+and your grief, which will fill with light the darkest heart. Now you
+must believe without having seen; that is true faith. You must
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+  &quot;'Reach a hand through time to catch<br>
+  The far-off interest of tears.'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That you may have strength so to do is part of your share in the
+prayers of
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Yours very faithfully,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;W. D&mdash;.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A noble letter, but the storm was beating too fiercely to be stilled,
+and one night in that summer of 1871 stands out clearly before me. Mr.
+Besant was away, and there had been a fierce quarrel before he left. I
+was outraged, desperate, with no door of escape from a life that,
+losing its hope in God, had not yet learned to live for hope for man.
+No door of escape? The thought came like a flash: &quot;There is one!&quot; And
+before me there swung open, with lure of peace and of safety, the
+gateway into silence and security, the gateway of the tomb. I was
+standing by the drawing-room window, staring hopelessly at the evening
+sky; with the thought came the remembrance that the means was at
+hand&mdash;the chloroform that had soothed my baby's pain, and that I had
+locked away upstairs. I ran up to my room, took out the bottle, and
+carried it downstairs, standing again at the window in the summer
+twilight, glad that the struggle was over and peace at hand. I uncorked
+the bottle, and was raising it to my lips, when, as though the words
+were spoken softly and clearly, I heard: &quot;O coward, coward, who used to
+dream of martyrdom, and cannot bear a few short years of pain!&quot; A rush
+of shame swept over me, and I flung the bottle far away among the
+shrubs in the garden at my feet, and for a moment I felt strong as for
+a struggle, and then fell fainting on the floor. Only once again in all
+the strifes of my career did the thought of suicide recur, and then it
+was but for a moment, to be put aside as unworthy a strong soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My new friend, Mr. D&mdash;, proved a very real help. The endless torture
+of hell, the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, the trustworthiness of
+revelation, doubts on all these hitherto accepted doctrines grew and
+heaped themselves on my bewildered soul. My questionings were neither
+shirked nor discouraged by Mr. D&mdash;; he was not horrified nor was he
+sanctimoniously rebukeful, but met them all with a wide comprehension
+inexpressibly soothing to one writhing in the first agonies of doubt.
+He left Cheltenham in the early autumn of 1871, but the following
+extracts from a letter written in November will show the kind of net in
+which I was struggling (I had been reading M'Leod Campbell's work &quot;On
+the Atonement&quot;):&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;You forget one great principle&mdash;that God is impassive, cannot suffer.
+Christ, <i>qu&acirc;</i> God, did not suffer, but as Son of <i>Man</i> and in His
+humanity. Still, it may be correctly stated that He felt to sin and
+sinners 'as God eternally feels'&mdash;<i>i.e., abhorrence of sin, and love of
+the sinner</i>. But to infer from that that the Father in His Godhead
+feels the sufferings which Christ experienced solely in humanity, and
+because incarnate is, I think, wrong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;(2) I felt strongly inclined to blow you up for the last part of your
+letter. You assume, I think quite gratuitously, that God condemns the
+major part of His children to objectless future suffering. You say that
+if He does not, He places a book in their hands which threatens what He
+does not mean to inflict. But how utterly this seems to me opposed to
+the gospel of Christ! All Christ's references to eternal punishment may
+be resolved into references to the Valley of Hinnom, by way of imagery;
+with the exception of the Dives parable, where is distinctly inferred a
+moral amendment beyond the grave. I speak of the unselfish desire of
+Dives to save his brothers. The more I see of the controversy, the more
+baseless does the eternal punishment theory appear. It seems then, to
+me, that instead of feeling aggrieved and shaken, you ought to feel
+encouraged and thankful that God is so much better than you were taught
+to believe Him. You will have discovered by this time in Maurice's
+'What is Revelation?' (I suppose you have the 'Sequel,' too?), that
+God's truth is our truth, and His love is our love, only more perfect
+and full. There is no position more utterly defeated in modern
+philosophy and theology than Dean Mansel's attempt to show that God's
+love, justice, &amp;c., are different in kind from ours. Mill and Maurice,
+from totally alien points of view, have shown up the preposterous
+nature of the notion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;(3) A good deal of what you have thought is, I fancy, based on a
+strange forgetfulness of your former experience. If you have known
+Christ&mdash;(whom to know is eternal life)&mdash;and that you have known Him I
+am certain&mdash;can you really say that a few intellectual difficulties,
+nay, a few moral difficulties if you will, are able at once to
+obliterate the testimony of that higher state of being?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Why, the keynote of all my theology is that Christ is lovable because,
+and <i>just</i> because, He is the perfection of all that I know to be noble
+and generous, and loving, and tender, and true. If an angel from heaven
+brought me a gospel which contained doctrines that would not stand the
+test of such perfect lovableness&mdash;doctrines hard, or cruel, or
+unjust&mdash;I should reject him and his trumpery gospel with scorn, knowing
+that neither could be Christ's. Know Christ and judge religions by Him;
+don't judge Him by religions, and then complain because they find
+yourself looking at Him through a blood-coloured glass.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;I am saturating myself with Maurice, who is the antidote given by God
+to this age against all dreary doublings and temptings of the devil to
+despair.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Many a one, in this age of controversy over all things once held
+sacred, has found peace and new light on this line of thought, and has
+succeeded in thus reconciling theological doctrines with the demands of
+the conscience for love and justice in a world made by a just and
+loving God. I could not do so. The awakening to what the world was, to
+the facts of human misery, to the ruthless tramp of nature and of
+events over the human heart, making no difference between innocent and
+guilty&mdash;the shock had been too great for the equilibrium to be restored
+by arguments that appealed to the emotions and left the intellect
+unconvinced. Months of this long-drawn-out mental anguish wrought their
+natural effects on physical health, and at last I broke down
+completely, and lay for weeks helpless and prostrate, in raging and
+unceasing head-pain, unable to sleep, unable to bear the light, lying
+like a log on the bed, not unconscious, but indifferent to everything,
+consciousness centred, as it were, in the ceaseless pain. The doctor
+tried every form of relief, but, entrenched in its citadel, the pain
+defied his puny efforts. He covered my head with ice, he gave me
+opium&mdash;which only drove me mad&mdash;he did all that skill and kindness
+could do, but all in vain. Finally the pain wore itself out, and the
+moment he dared to do so, he tried mental diversion; he brought me
+books on anatomy, on science, and persuaded me to study them; and out
+of his busy life would steal an hour to explain to me knotty points on
+physiology. He saw that if I were to be brought back to reasonable
+life, it could only be by diverting thought from the channels in which
+the current had been running to a dangerous extent. I have often felt
+that I owed life and sanity to that good man, who felt for the
+helpless, bewildered child-woman, beaten down by the cyclone of doubt
+and misery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So it will easily be understood that my religious wretchedness only
+increased the unhappiness of homelife, for how absurd it was that any
+reasonable human being should be so tossed with anguish over
+intellectual and moral difficulties on religious matters, and should
+make herself ill over these unsubstantial troubles. Surely it was a
+woman's business to attend to her husband's comforts and to see after
+her children, and not to break her heart over misery here and hell
+hereafter, and distract her brain with questions that had puzzled the
+greatest thinkers and still remained unsolved! And, truly, women or men
+who get themselves concerned about the universe at large, would do well
+not to plunge hastily into marriage, for they do not run smoothly in
+the double-harness of that honourable estate. <i>Sturm und Drang</i> should
+be faced alone, and the soul should go out alone into the wilderness to
+be tempted of the devil, and not bring his majesty and all his imps
+into the placid circle of the home. Unhappy they who go into marriage
+with the glamour of youth upon them and the destiny of conflict
+imprinted on their nature, for they make misery for their partner in
+marriage as well as for themselves. And if that partner, strong in
+traditional authority and conventional habits, seeks to &quot;break in&quot; the
+turbulent and storm-tossed creature&mdash;well, it comes to a mere trial of
+strength and endurance, whether that driven creature will fall panting
+and crushed, or whether it will turn in its despair, assert its Divine
+right to intellectual liberty, rend its fetters in pieces, and,
+discovering its own strength in its extremity, speak at all risks its
+&quot;No&quot; when bidden to live a lie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When that physical crisis was over I decided on my line of action. I
+resolved to take Christianity as it had been taught in the Churches,
+and carefully and thoroughly examine its dogmas one by one, so that I
+should never again say &quot;I believe&quot; where I had not proved, and that,
+however diminished my area of belief, what was left of it might at
+least be firm under my feet. I found that four chief problems were
+pressing for solution, and to these I addressed myself. How many are
+to-day the souls facing just these problems, and disputing every inch
+of their old ground of faith with the steadily advancing waves of
+historical and scientific criticism! Alas! for the many Canutes, as the
+waves wash over their feet. These problems were:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(1) The eternity of punishment after death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(2) The meaning of &quot;goodness&quot; and &quot;love,&quot; as applied to a God who had
+made this world, with all its sin and misery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(3) The nature of the atonement of Christ, and the &quot;justice&quot; of God in
+accepting a vicarious suffering from Christ, and a vicarious
+righteousness from the sinner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(4) The meaning of &quot;inspiration&quot; as applied to the Bible, and the
+reconciliation of the perfections of the author with the blunders and
+immoralities of the work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It will be seen that the deeper problems of religion&mdash;the deity of
+Christ, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul&mdash;were not yet
+brought into question, and, looking back, I cannot but see how orderly
+was the progression of thought, how steady the growth, after that first
+terrible earthquake, and the first wild swirl of agony. The points that
+I set myself to study were those which would naturally be first faced
+by any one whose first rebellion against the dogmas of the Churches was
+a rebellion of the moral nature rather than of the intellectual, a
+protest of the conscience rather than of the brain. It was not a desire
+for moral licence which gave me the impulse that finally landed me in
+Atheism; it was the sense of outraged justice and insulted right. I was
+a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty
+and a proud self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me,
+and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of
+outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity.
+My education, my mother's example, my inner timidity and self-distrust,
+all fenced me in from temptations from without. It was the uprising of
+an outraged conscience that made me a rebel against the Churches and
+finally an unbeliever in God. And I place this on record, because the
+progress of Materialism will never be checked by diatribes against
+unbelievers, as though they became unbelievers from desire for vice and
+for licence to do evil. What Religion has to face in the controversies
+of to-day is not the unbelief of the sty, but the unbelief of the
+educated conscience and of the soaring intellect; and unless it can arm
+itself with a loftier ethic and a grander philosophy than its opponent,
+it will lose its hold over the purest and the strongest of the younger
+generation.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHV"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER V.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+THE STORM OF DOUBT.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+My reading of heretical and Broad Church works on one side, and of
+orthodox ones on the other, now occupied a large part of my time, and
+our removal to Sibsey, in Lincolnshire, an agricultural village with a
+scattered population, increased my leisure. I read the works of
+Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Stanley, Greg, Matthew Arnold, Liddon,
+Mansel, and many another, and my scepticism grew deeper and deeper as
+I read. The Broad Church arguments appeared to me to be of the nature
+of special pleading, skilful evasions of difficulties rather than the
+real meeting and solving of them. For the problem was: Given a good
+God, how can He have created mankind, knowing beforehand that the vast
+majority of those whom He created were to be tortured for ever? Given
+a just God, how can He punish people for being sinful, when they have
+inherited a sinful nature without their own choice and of necessity?
+Given a righteous God, how can He allow sin to exist for ever, so that
+evil shall be as eternal as good, and Satan shall reign in hell as
+long as Christ in heaven? Worst of all puzzles, perhaps, was that of
+the existence of evil and of misery, and the racking doubt whether God
+<i>could</i> be good, and yet look on the evil and the misery of the world
+unmoved and untouched. It seemed so impossible to believe that a
+Creator could be either cruel enough to be indifferent to the misery,
+or weak enough to be unable to stop it. The old dilemma faced me
+incessantly: &quot;If He can prevent it and does not, He is not good; if He
+wishes to prevent it and cannot, He is not almighty.&quot; I racked my
+brains for an answer. I searched writings of believers for a clue, but
+I found no way of escape. Not yet had any doubt of the existence of
+God crossed my mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. D&mdash; continued to write me, striving to guide me along the path
+which had led his own soul to contentment, but I can only find room
+here for two brief extracts, which will show how to himself he solved
+the problem. He thought me mistaken in my view
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Of the nature of the <i>sin</i> and <i>error</i> which is supposed to grieve
+God. I take it that sin is an absolutely necessary factor in the
+production of the perfect man. It was foreseen and allowed as means to
+an end&mdash;as, in fact, an education. The view of all the sin and misery
+in the world cannot grieve God any more than it can grieve you to see
+Digby fail in his first attempt to build a card-castle or a
+rabbit-hutch. All is part of the training. God looks at the ideal man
+to which all tends.... &quot;No, Mrs. Besant; I never feel at all inclined
+to give up the search, or to suppose that the other side may be right.
+I claim no merit for it, but I have an invincible faith in the
+morality of God and the moral order of the world. I have no more doubt
+about the falsehood of the popular theology than I have about the
+unreality of six robbers who attacked me three nights ago in a horrid
+dream. I exult and rejoice in the grandeur and freedom of the little
+bit of truth it has been given me to see. I am told that 'Present-day
+Papers,' by Bishop Ewing (edited), are a wonderful help, many of them,
+to puzzled people; I mean to get them. But I am sure you will find
+that the truth will (even so little as we may be able to find out)
+grow on you, make you free, light your path, and dispel, at no distant
+time, your <i>painful</i> difficulties and doubts. I should say on no
+account give up your reading. I think with you that you could not do
+without it. It will be a wonderful source of help and peace to you.
+For there are struggles far more fearful than those of intellectual
+doubt. I am keenly alive to the gathered-up sadness of which your last
+two pages are an expression. I was sorrier than I can say to read
+them. They reminded me of a long and very dark time in my own life,
+when I thought the light never would come. Thank God it came, or I
+think I could not have held out much longer. But you have evidently
+strength to bear it now. The more dangerous time, I should fancy, has
+passed. You will have to mind that the fermentation leaves clear
+spiritual wine, and not (as too often) vinegar. I wish I could write
+something more helpful to you in this great matter. But as I sit in
+front of my large bay window and see the shadows on the grass and the
+sunlight on the leaves, and the soft glimmer of the rosebuds left by
+the storms, I can but believe that all will be very well. 'Trust in
+the Lord, wait patiently for Him'&mdash;they are trite words. But He made
+the grass, the leaves, the rosebuds, and the sunshine, and He is the
+Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And now the trite words have swelled
+into a mighty argument.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I found more help in Theistic writers like Grey, and Agnostic like
+Arnold, than I did in the Broad Church teachers, but these, of course,
+served to make return to the old faith more and more impossible. The
+Church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was
+only a doubter, I kept my doubts to myself. It was possible, I felt,
+that all my difficulties might be cleared up, and I had no right to
+shake the faith of others while in uncertainty myself. Others had
+doubted and had afterwards recovered their faith; for the doubter
+silence was a duty; the blinded had better keep their misery to
+themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During these weary months of anxiety and torment I found some relief
+from the mental strain in practical parish work, nursing the sick,
+trying to brighten the lot of the poor. I learned then some of the
+lessons as to the agricultural labourer and the land that I was able
+in after-years to teach from the platform. The movement among the
+agricultural labourers, due to the energy and devotion of Joseph Arch,
+was beginning to be discussed in the fens, and my sympathies went
+strongly with the claims of the labourers, for I knew their
+life-conditions. In one cottage I had found four generations sleeping
+in one room&mdash;the great-grandfather and his wife, the unmarried
+grandmother, the unmarried mother, the little child; three men lodgers
+completed the tale of eight human beings crowded into that narrow,
+ill-ventilated garret. Other cottages were hovels, through the broken
+roofs of which poured the rain, and wherein rheumatism and ague lived
+with the human dwellers. How could I do aught but sympathise with any
+combination that aimed at the raising of these poor? But the
+Agricultural Labourers' Union was bitterly opposed by the farmers, and
+they would give no work to a &quot;Union man.&quot; One example may serve for
+all. There was a young married man with two small children, who was
+sinful enough to go to a Union meeting and sinful enough to talk of it
+on his return home. No farmer would employ him in all the district
+round. He tramped about vainly looking for work, grew reckless, and
+took to drink. Visiting his cottage, consisting of one room and a
+&quot;lean-to,&quot; I found his wife ill with fever, a fever-stricken babe in
+her arms, the second child lying dead on the bed. In answer to my
+soft-spoken questions: Yes, she was pining (starving), there was no
+work. Why did she leave the dead child on the bed? Because she had no
+other place for it till the coffin came. And at night the unhappy,
+driven man, the fever-stricken wife, the fever-stricken child, the
+dead child, all lay in the one bed. The farmers hated the Union
+because its success meant higher wages for the men, and it never
+struck them that they might well pay less rent to the absent landlord
+and higher wage to the men who tilled their fields. They had only
+civil words for the burden that crushed them, hard words for the
+mowers of their harvests and the builders-up of their ricks; they made
+common cause with their enemies instead of with their friends, and
+instead of leaguing themselves together with the labourers as forming
+together the true agricultural interest, they leagued themselves with
+the landlords against the labourers, and so made ruinous fratricidal
+strife instead of easy victory over the common foe. And, seeing all
+this, I learned some useful lessons, and the political education
+progressed while the theological strife went on within.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the early autumn a ray of light broke the darkness. I was in London
+with my mother, and wandered one Sunday morning into St. George's
+Hall, where the Rev. Charles Voysey was preaching. There to my delight
+I found, on listening to the sermon and buying some literature on sale
+in the ante-room, that there were people who had passed through my own
+difficulties, and had given up the dogmas that I found so revolting. I
+went again on the following Sunday, and when the service was over I
+noticed that the outgoing stream of people were passing by Mr. and
+Mrs. Voysey, and that many who were evidently strangers spoke a word
+of thanks to him as they went on. Moved by a strong desire, after the
+long months of lonely striving, to speak to one who had struggled out
+of Christian difficulties, I said to Mr. Voysey, as I passed in my
+turn, &quot;I must thank you for very great help in what you said this
+morning,&quot; for in truth, never having yet doubted the existence of God,
+the teaching of Mr. Voysey that He was &quot;loving unto <i>every</i> man, and
+His tender mercy over <i>all</i> His works,&quot; came like a gleam of light
+across the stormy sea of doubt and distress on which I had so long
+been tossing. The next Sunday saw me again at the Hall, and Mrs.
+Voysey gave me a cordial invitation to visit them in their Dulwich
+home. I found their Theism was free from the defects that had revolted
+me in Christianity, and they opened up to me new views of religion. I
+read Theodore Parker's &quot;Discourse on Religion,&quot; Francis Newman's
+works, those of Miss Frances Power Cobbe, and of others; the anguish
+of the tension relaxed; the nightmare of an Almighty Evil passed away;
+my belief in God, not yet touched, was cleared from all the dark spots
+that had sullied it, and I no longer doubted whether the dogmas that
+had shocked my conscience were true or false. I shook them off, once
+for all, with all their pain and horror and darkness, and felt, with
+joy and relief inexpressible, that they were delusions of the
+ignorance of man, not the revelations of a God.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was one belief that had not been definitely challenged, but
+of which the <i>rationale</i> was gone with the orthodox dogmas now
+definitely renounced&mdash;the doctrine of the Deity of Christ. The whole
+teaching of the Broad Church school tends, of course, to emphasise the
+humanity of Christ at the expense of His Deity, and when eternal
+punishment and the substitutionary atonement had gone there seemed no
+reason remaining sufficient to account for so tremendous a miracle as
+the incarnation of the Deity. In the course of my reading I had become
+familiar with the idea of Avat&acirc;ras in Eastern creeds, and I saw that
+the incarnate God was put forward as a fact by all ancient religions,
+and thus the way was paved for challenging the especially Christian
+teaching, when the doctrines morally repulsive were cleared away. But
+I shrank from the thought of placing in the crucible a doctrine so
+dear from all the associations of the past; there was so much that was
+soothing and ennobling in the idea of a union between Man and God,
+between a perfect man and a Divine life, between a human heart and an
+almighty strength. Jesus as God was interwoven with all art and all
+beauty in religion; to break with the Deity of Jesus was to break with
+music, with painting, with literature; the Divine Babe in His Mother's
+arms; the Divine Man in His Passion and His Triumph; the Friend of Man
+encircled with the majesty of the Godhead. Did inexorable Truth demand
+that this ideal Figure, with all its pathos, its beauty, its human
+love, should pass away into the Pantheon of the dead Gods of the Past?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor was this all. If I gave up belief in Christ as God, I must give up
+Christianity as creed. Once challenge the unique position of the
+Christ, and the name Christian seemed to me to be a hypocrisy, and its
+renouncement a duty binding on the upright mind. I was a clergyman's
+wife; what would be the effect of such a step? Hitherto mental pain
+alone had been the price demanded inexorably from the searcher after
+truth; but with the renouncing of Christ outer warfare would be added
+to the inner, and who might guess the result upon my life? The
+struggle was keen but short; I decided to carefully review the
+evidence for and against the Deity of Christ, with the result that
+that belief followed the others, and I stood, no longer Christian,
+face to face with a dim future in which I sensed the coming conflict.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One effort I made to escape it; I appealed to Dr. Pusey, thinking that
+if he could not answer my questionings, no answer to them could be
+reasonably hoped for. I had a brief correspondence with him, but was
+referred only to lines of argument familiar to me&mdash;as those of Liddon
+in his &quot;Bampton Lectures&quot;&mdash;and finally, on his invitation, went down
+to Oxford to see him. I found a short, stout gentleman, dressed in a
+cassock, looking like a comfortable monk; but keen eyes, steadfastly
+gazing straight into mine, told of the force and subtlety enshrined in
+the fine, impressive head. But the learned doctor took the wrong line
+of treatment; he probably saw I was anxious, shy, and nervous, and he
+treated me as a penitent going to confession and seeking the advice of
+a director, instead of as an inquirer struggling after truth, and
+resolute to obtain some firm standing-ground in the sea of doubt. He
+would not deal with the question of the Deity of Jesus as a question
+for argument. &quot;You are speaking of your Judge,&quot; he retorted sternly,
+when I pressed a difficulty. The mere suggestion of an imperfection in
+the character of Jesus made him shudder, and he checked me with raised
+hand. &quot;You are blaspheming. The very thought is a terrible sin.&quot; Would
+he recommend me any books that might throw light on the subject? &quot;No,
+no; you have read too much already. You must pray; you must pray.&quot;
+When I urged that I could not believe without proof, I was told,
+&quot;Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed&quot;; and my
+further questioning was checked by the murmur, &quot;O my child, how
+undisciplined! how impatient!&quot; Truly, he must have found in me&mdash;hot,
+eager, passionate in my determination to <i>know</i>, resolute not to
+profess belief while belief was absent&mdash;nothing of the meek,
+chastened, submissive spirit with which he was wont to deal in
+penitents seeking his counsel as their spiritual guide. In vain did he
+bid me pray as though I believed; in vain did he urge the duty of
+blind submission to the authority of the Church, of blind, unreasoning
+faith that questioned not. I had not trodden the thorny path of doubt
+to come to the point from which I had started; I needed, and would
+have, solid grounds ere I believed. He had no conception of the
+struggles of a sceptical spirit; he had evidently never felt the pangs
+of doubt; his own faith was solid as a rock, firm, satisfied,
+unshakable; he would as soon have committed suicide as have doubted of
+the infallibility of the &quot;Universal Church.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;It is not your duty to ascertain the truth,&quot; he told me, sternly. &quot;It
+is your duty to accept and believe the truth as laid down by the
+Church. At your peril you reject it. The responsibility is not yours
+so long as you dutifully accept that which the Church has laid down
+for your acceptance. Did not the Lord promise that the presence of the
+Spirit should be ever with His Church, to guide her into all truth?&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;But the fact of the promise and its value are just the very points on
+which I am doubtful,&quot; I answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shuddered. &quot;Pray, pray,&quot; he said. &quot;Father, forgive her, for she
+knows not what she says.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in vain that I urged on him the sincerity of my seeking,
+pointing out that I had everything to gain by following his
+directions, everything to lose by going my own way, but that it seemed
+to me untruthful to pretend to accept what was not really believed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Everything to lose? Yes, indeed. You will be lost for time and lost
+for eternity.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Lost or not,&quot; I rejoined, &quot;I must and will try to find out what is
+true, and I will not believe till I am sure.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;You have no right to make terms with God,&quot; he retorted, &quot;as to what
+you will believe or what you will not believe. You are full of
+intellectual pride.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I sighed hopelessly. Little feeling of pride was there in me just
+then, but only a despairful feeling that in this rigid, unyielding
+dogmatism there was no comprehension of my difficulties, no help for
+me in my strugglings. I rose, and, thanking him for his courtesy, said
+that I would not waste his time further, that I must go home and face
+the difficulties, openly leaving the Church and taking the
+consequences. Then for the first time his serenity was ruffled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;I forbid you to speak of your disbelief,&quot; he cried. &quot;I forbid you to
+lead into your own lost state the souls for whom Christ died.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<a name="04"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="Images/04.jpg" alt="Thomas Scott." width="330" height="397">
+</p>
+<h5>THOMAS SCOTT</h5>
+
+<p>
+Slowly and sadly I took my way back to the station, knowing that my
+last chance of escape had failed me. I recognised in this famous
+divine the spirit of priest-craft, that could be tender and pitiful to
+the sinner, repentant, humble, submissive; but that was iron to the
+doubter, the heretic, and would crush out all questionings of
+&quot;revealed truth,&quot; silencing by force, not by argument, all challenge
+of the traditions of the Church. Out of such men were made the
+Inquisitors of the Middle Ages, perfectly conscientious, perfectly
+rigid, perfectly merciless to the heretic. To them heretics are
+centres of infectious disease, and charity to the heretic is &quot;the
+worst cruelty to the souls of men.&quot; Certain that they hold, &quot;by no
+merit of our own, but by the mercy of our God, the one truth which He
+has revealed,&quot; they can permit no questionings, they can accept nought
+but the most complete submission. But while man aspires after truth,
+while his mind yearns after knowledge, while his intellect soars
+upward into the empyrean of speculation and &quot;beats the air with
+tireless wing,&quot; so long shall those who demand faith from him be met
+by challenge for proof, and those who would blind him shall be
+defeated by his resolve to gaze unblenching on the face of Truth, even
+though her eyes should turn him into stone. It was during this same
+autumn of 1872 that I first met Mr. and Mrs. Scott, introduced to them
+by Mr. Voysey. At that time Thomas Scott was an old man, with
+beautiful white hair, and eyes like those of a hawk gleaming from
+under shaggy eyebrows. He had been a man of magnificent physique, and,
+though his frame was then enfeebled, the splendid lion-like head kept
+its impressive strength and beauty, and told of a unique personality.
+Well born and wealthy, he had spent his earlier life in adventure in
+all parts of the world, and after his marriage he had settled down at
+Ramsgate, and had made his home a centre of heretical thought. His
+wife, &quot;his right hand,&quot; as he justly called her, was young enough to
+be his daughter&mdash;a sweet, strong, gentle, noble woman, worthy of her
+husband, and than that no higher praise could be spoken. Mr. Scott for
+many years issued monthly a series of pamphlets, all heretical, though
+very varying in their shades of thought; all were well written,
+cultured, and polished in tone, and to this rule Mr. Scott made no
+exception; his writers might say what they liked, but they must have
+something to say, and must say it in good English. His correspondence
+was enormous, from Prime Ministers downwards. At his house met people
+of the most varied opinions; it was a veritable heretical <i>salon</i>.
+Colenso of Natal, Edward Maitland, E. Vansittart Neale, Charles Bray,
+Sarah Hennell, and hundreds more, clerics and laymen, scholars and
+thinkers, all coming to this one house, to which the <i>entr&eacute;e</i> was
+gained only by love of Truth and desire to spread Freedom among men.
+For Thomas Scott my first Freethought essay was written a few months
+after, &quot;On the Deity of Jesus of Nazareth,&quot; by the wife of a benefited
+clergyman. My name was not mine to use, so it was agreed that any
+essays from my pen should be anonymous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now came the return to Sibsey, and with it the need for definite
+steps as to the Church. For now I no longer doubted, I had rejected,
+and the time for silence was past. I was willing to attend the Church
+services, taking no part in any not directed to God Himself, but I
+could no longer attend the Holy Communion, for in that service, full
+of recognition of Jesus as Deity and of His atoning sacrifice, I could
+no longer take part without hypocrisy. This was agreed to, and well do
+I remember the pain and trembling wherewith on the first &quot;Sacrament
+Sunday&quot; after my return I rose and left the church. That the vicar's
+wife should &quot;communicate&quot; was as much a matter of course as that the
+vicar should &quot;administer&quot;; I had never done anything in public that
+would draw attention to me, and a feeling of deadly sickness nearly
+overcame me as I made my exit, conscious that every eye was on me, and
+that my non-participation would be the cause of unending comment. As a
+matter of fact, every one naturally thought I was taken suddenly ill,
+and I was overwhelmed with calls and inquiries. To any direct question
+I answered quietly that I was unable to take part in the profession of
+faith required by an honest communicant, but the statement was rarely
+necessary, as the idea of heresy in a vicar's wife is slow to suggest
+itself to the ordinary bucolic mind, and I proffered no information
+where no question was asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It happened that, shortly after that (to me) memorable Christmas of
+1872, a sharp epidemic of typhoid fever broke out in the village of
+Sibsey. The drainage there was of the most primitive type, and the
+contagion spread rapidly. Naturally fond of nursing, I found in this
+epidemic work just fitted to my hand, and I was fortunate enough to be
+able to lend personal help that made me welcome in the homes of the
+stricken poor. The mothers who slept exhausted while I watched beside
+their darlings' bedsides will never, I like to fancy, think
+over-harshly of the heretic whose hand was as tender and often more
+skilful than their own. I think Mother Nature meant me for a nurse,
+for I take a sheer delight in nursing any one, provided only that
+there is peril in the sickness, so that there is the strange and
+solemn feeling of the struggle between the human skill one wields and
+the supreme enemy, Death. There is a strange fascination in fighting
+Death, step by step, and this is of course felt to the full where one
+fights for life as life, and not for a life one loves. When the
+patient is beloved the struggle is touched with agony, but where one
+fights with Death over the body of a stranger there is a weird
+enchantment in the contest without personal pain, and as one forces
+back the hated foe there is a curious triumph in the feeling which
+marks the death-grip yielding up its prey, as one snatches back to
+earth the life which had well-nigh perished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The spring of 1873 brought me knowledge of a power that was to mould
+much of my future life. I delivered my first lecture, but delivered it
+to rows of empty pews in Sibsey Church. A queer whim took me that I
+would like to know how &quot;it felt&quot; to preach, and vague fancies stirred
+in me that I could speak if I had the chance. I saw no platform in the
+distance, nor had any idea of possible speaking in the future dawned
+upon me. But the longing to find outlet in words came upon me, and I
+felt as though I had something to say and was able to say it. So
+locked alone in the great, silent church, whither I had gone to
+practise some organ exercises, I ascended the pulpit steps and
+delivered my first lecture on the Inspiration of the Bible. I shall
+never forget the feeling of power and delight&mdash;but especially of
+power&mdash;that came upon me as I sent my voice ringing down the aisles,
+and the passion in me broke into balanced sentences and never paused
+for musical cadence or for rhythmical expression. All I wanted then
+was to see the church full of upturned faces, alive with throbbing
+sympathy, instead of the dreary emptiness of silent pews. And as
+though in a dream the solitude was peopled, and I saw the listening
+faces and the eager eyes, and as the sentences flowed unbidden from my
+lips and my own tones echoed back to me from the pillars of the
+ancient church, I knew of a verity that the gift of speech was mine,
+and that if ever&mdash;and then it seemed so impossible!&mdash;if ever the
+chance came to me of public work, this power of melodious utterance
+should at least win hearing for any message I had to bring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the knowledge remained a secret all to my own self for many a long
+month, for I quickly felt ashamed of that foolish speechifying in an
+empty church; but, foolish as it was, I note it here, as it was the
+first effort of that expression in spoken words which later became to
+me one of the deepest delights of life. And, indeed, none can know,
+save they who have felt it, what joy there is in the full rush of
+language that moves and sways; to feel a crowd respond to the lightest
+touch; to see the faces brighten or darken at your bidding; to know
+that the sources of human emotion and human passion gush forth at the
+word of the speaker as the stream from the riven rock; to feel that
+the thought which thrills through a thousand hearers has its impulse
+from you, and throbs back to you the fuller from a thousand
+heart-beats. Is there any emotional joy in life more brilliant than
+this, fuller of passionate triumph, and of the very essence of
+intellectual delight?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1873 my marriage tie was broken. I took no new step, but my absence
+from the Communion led to some gossip, and a relative of Mr. Besant
+pressed on him highly-coloured views of the social and professional
+dangers which would accrue if my heresy became known. My health, never
+really restored since the autumn of 1871, grew worse and worse,
+serious heart trouble having arisen from the constant strain under
+which I lived. At last, in July or August, 1873, the crisis came. I
+was told that I must conform to the outward observances of the Church,
+and attend the Communion; I refused. Then came the distinct
+alternative; conformity or exclusion from home&mdash;in other words,
+hypocrisy or expulsion. I chose the latter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A bitterly sad time followed. My dear mother was heart-broken. To her,
+with her wide and vague form of Christianity, loosely held, the
+intensity of my feeling that where I did not believe I would not
+pretend belief, was incomprehensible. She recognised far more fully
+than I did all that a separation from my home meant for me, and the
+difficulties that would surround a young woman, not yet twenty-six,
+living alone. She knew how brutally the world judges, and how the mere
+fact that a woman was young and alone justified any coarseness of
+slander. Then I did not guess how cruel men and women could be, how
+venomous their tongues; now, knowing it, having faced slander and
+lived it down, I deliberately say that were the choice again before me
+I would choose as I chose then; I would rather go through it all again
+than live &quot;in Society&quot; under the burden of an acted lie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hardest struggle was against my mother's tears and pleading; to
+cause her pain was tenfold pain to me. Against harshness I had been
+rigid as steel, but it was hard to remain steadfast when my darling
+mother, whom I loved as I loved nothing else on earth, threw herself
+on her knees before me, imploring me to yield. It seemed like a crime
+to bring such anguish on her; and I felt as a murderer as the snowy
+head was pressed against my knees. And yet&mdash;to live a lie? Not even
+for her was that shame possible; in that worst crisis of blinding
+agony my will clung fast to Truth. And it is true now as it ever was
+that he who loves father or mother better than Truth is not worthy of
+her, and the flint-strewn path of honesty is the way to Light and
+Peace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then there were the children, the two little ones who worshipped me,
+who was to them mother, nurse, and playfellow. Were they, too,
+demanded at my hands? Not wholly&mdash;for a time. Facts which I need not
+touch on here enabled my brother to obtain for me a legal separation,
+and when everything was arranged, I found myself guardian of my little
+daughter, and possessor of a small monthly income sufficient for
+respectable starvation. With a great price I had obtained my freedom,
+but&mdash;I was free. Home, friends, social position, were the price
+demanded and paid, and, being free, I wondered what to do with my
+freedom. I could have had a home with my brother if I would give up my
+heretical friends and keep quiet, but I had no mind to put my limbs
+into fetters again, and in my youthful inexperience I determined to
+find something to do. The difficulty was the &quot;something,&quot; and I spent
+various shillings in agencies, with a quite wonderful unanimity of
+failures. I tried fancy needle-work, offered to &quot;ladies in reduced
+circumstances,&quot; and earned 4s. 6d. by some weeks of stitching. I
+experimented with a Birmingham firm, who generously offered every one
+the opportunity of adding to their incomes, and on sending the small
+fee demanded, received a pencil-case, with an explanation that I was
+to sell little articles of that description, going as far as
+cruet-stands, to my friends. I did not feel equal to springing
+pencil-cases and cruet-stands on my acquaintances, so did not enter on
+that line of business, and similar failures in numerous efforts made
+me feel, as so many others have found, that the world-oyster is hard
+to open. However, I was resolute to build a nest for my wee daughter,
+my mother, and myself, and the first thing to do was to save my
+monthly pittance to buy furniture. I found a tiny house in Colby Road,
+Upper Norwood, near the Scotts, who were more than good to me, and
+arranged to take it in the spring, and then accepted a loving
+invitation to Folkestone, where my grandmother and two aunts were
+living, to look for work there. And found it. The vicar wanted a
+governess, and one of my aunts suggested me as a stop-gap, and thither
+I went with my little Mabel, our board and lodging being payment for
+my work. I became head cook, governess, and nurse, glad enough to have
+found &quot;something to do&quot; that enabled me to save my little income. But
+I do not think I will ever take to cooking for a permanence; broiling
+and frying are all right, and making pie-crust is rather pleasant; but
+saucepans and kettles blister your hands. There is a charm in making a
+stew, to the unaccustomed cook, from the excitement of wondering what
+the result will be, and whether any flavour save that of onions will
+survive the competition in the mixture. On the whole, my cooking
+(strictly by cookery book) was a success, but my sweeping was bad, for
+I lacked muscle. This curious episode came to an abrupt end, for one
+of my little pupils fell ill with diphtheria, and I was transformed
+from cook to nurse. Mabel I despatched to her grandmother, who adored
+her with a love condescendingly returned by the little fairy of three,
+and never was there a prettier picture than the red-gold curls nestled
+against the white, the baby-grace in exquisite contrast with the worn
+stateliness of her tender nurse. Scarcely was my little patient out of
+danger when the youngest boy fell ill of scarlet fever; we decided to
+isolate him on the top floor, and I cleared away carpets and curtains,
+hung sheets over the doorways and kept them wet with chloride of lime,
+shut myself up there with the boy, having my meals left on the
+landing; and when all risk was over, proudly handed back my charge,
+the disease touching no one else in the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now the spring of 1874 had come, and in a few weeks my mother and
+I were to set up house together. How we had planned all, and had
+knitted on the new life together we anticipated to the old one we
+remembered! How we had discussed Mabel's education, and the share
+which should fall to each! Day-dreams; day-dreams! never to be
+realised.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My mother went up to town, and in a week or two I received a telegram,
+saying she was dangerously ill, and as fast as express train would
+take me I was beside her. Dying, the doctor said; three days she might
+live&mdash;no more. I told her the death-sentence, but she said resolutely,
+&quot;I do not feel that I am going to die just yet,&quot; and she was right.
+There was an attack of fearful prostration&mdash;the valves of the heart
+had failed&mdash;a very wrestling with Death, and then the grim shadow drew
+backwards. I nursed her day and night with a very desperation of
+tenderness, for now Fate had touched the thing dearest to me in life.
+A second horrible crisis came, and for the second time her tenacity
+and my love beat back the death-stroke. She did not wish to die, the
+love of life was strong in her; I would not let her die; between us we
+kept the foe at bay. Then dropsy supervened, and the end loomed slowly
+sure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was then, after eighteen months' abstention, that I took the
+Sacrament for the last time. My mother had an intense longing to
+communicate before she died, but absolutely refused to do so unless I
+took it with her. &quot;If it be necessary to salvation,&quot; she persisted,
+doggedly, &quot;I will not take it if darling Annie is to be shut out. I
+would rather be lost with her than saved without her.&quot; I went to a
+clergyman I knew well, and laid the case before him; as I expected, he
+refused to allow me to communicate. I tried a second, with the same
+result. At last a thought struck me. There was Dean Stanley, my
+mother's favourite, a man known to be of the broadest school within
+the Church of England; suppose I asked him? I did not know him, and I
+felt the request would be an impertinence; but there was just the
+chance that he might consent, and what would I not do to make my
+darling's death-bed easier? I said nothing to any one, but set out to
+the Deanery, Westminster, timidly asked for the Dean, and followed the
+servant upstairs with a sinking heart. I was left for a moment alone
+in the library, and then the Dean came in. I don't think I ever in my
+life felt more intensely uncomfortable than I did in that minute's
+interval as he stood waiting for me to speak, his clear, grave,
+piercing eyes gazing questioningly into mine. Very falteringly&mdash;it
+must have been very clumsily&mdash;I preferred my request, stating boldly,
+with abrupt honesty, that I was not a Christian, that my mother was
+dying, that she was fretting to take the Sacrament, that she would not
+take it unless I took it with her, that two clergymen had refused to
+allow me to take part in the service, that I had come to him in
+despair, feeling how great was the intrusion, but&mdash;she was dying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His face changed to a great softness. &quot;You were quite right to come to
+me,&quot; he answered, in that low, musical voice of his, his keen gaze
+having altered into one no less direct, but marvellously gentle. &quot;Of
+course I will go and see your mother, and I have little doubt that, if
+you will not mind talking over your position with me, we may see our
+way clear to doing as your mother wishes.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could barely speak my thanks, so much did the kindly sympathy move
+me; the revulsion from the anxiety and fear of rebuff was strong
+enough to be almost pain. But Dean Stanley did more than I asked. He
+suggested that he should call that afternoon, and have a quiet chat
+with my mother, and then come again on the following day to administer
+the Sacrament.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;A stranger's presence is always trying to a sick person,&quot; he said,
+with rare delicacy of thought, &quot;and, joined to the excitement of the
+service, it might be too much for your dear mother. If I spend half an
+hour with her to-day, and administer the Sacrament to-morrow, it will,
+I think, be better for her.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Dean Stanley came that afternoon, all the way to Brompton, and
+remained talking with my mother for about half an hour, and then set
+himself to understand my own position. He finally told me that conduct
+was far more important than theory, and that he regarded all as
+&quot;Christians&quot; who recognised and tried to follow the moral law of
+Christ. On the question of the absolute Deity of Jesus he laid but
+little stress; Jesus was &quot;in a special sense the Son of God,&quot; but it
+was folly to quarrel over words with only human meanings when dealing
+with the mystery of the Divine existence, and, above all, it was folly
+to make such words into dividing walls between earnest souls. The one
+important matter was the recognition of &quot;duty to God and man,&quot; and all
+who were one in that recognition might rightfully join in an act of
+worship, the essence of which was not acceptance of dogma, but love of
+God and self-sacrifice for man. &quot;The Holy Communion,&quot; he concluded, in
+his soft tones, &quot;was never meant to divide from each other hearts that
+are searching after the one true God. It was meant by its founder as a
+symbol of unity, not of strife.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the following day Dean Stanley celebrated the Holy Communion by the
+bedside of my dear mother, and well was I repaid for the struggle it
+had cost me to ask so great a kindness from a stranger, when I saw the
+comfort that gentle, noble heart had given to her. He soothed away all
+her anxiety about my heresy with tactful wisdom, bidding her have no
+fear of differences of opinion where the heart was set on truth.
+&quot;Remember,&quot; she told me he said to her&mdash;&quot;remember that our God is the
+God of truth, and that therefore the honest search for truth can never
+be displeasing in His eyes.&quot; Once again after that he came, and after
+his visit to my mother we had another long talk. I ventured to ask
+him, the conversation having turned that way, how, with views so broad
+as his, he found it possible to remain in communion with the Church of
+England. &quot;I think,&quot; he answered, gently, &quot;that I am of more service to
+true religion by remaining in the Church and striving to widen its
+boundaries from within, than if I left it and worked from without.&quot;
+And he went on to explain how, as Dean of Westminster, he was in a
+rarely independent position, and could make the Abbey of a wider
+national service than would otherwise be possible. In all he said on
+this his love for and his pride in the glorious Abbey were manifest,
+and it was easy to see that old historical associations, love of
+music, of painting, of stately architecture, were the bonds that held
+him bound to the &quot;old historic Church of England.&quot; His emotions, not
+his intellect, kept him Churchman, and he shrank, with the
+over-sensitiveness of the cultured scholar, from the idea of allowing
+the old traditions to be handled roughly by inartistic hands.
+Naturally of a refined and delicate nature, he had been rendered yet
+more exquisitely sensitive by the training of the college and the
+court; the polished courtesy of his manners was but the natural
+expression of a noble and lofty mind&mdash;a mind whose very gentleness
+sometimes veiled its strength. I have often heard Dean Stanley harshly
+spoken of, I have heard his honesty roughly challenged; but never has
+he been attacked in my presence that I have not uttered my protest
+against the injustice done him, and thus striven to repay some small
+fraction of that great debt of gratitude which I shall ever owe his
+memory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now the end came swiftly. I had hurriedly furnished a couple of
+rooms in the little house, now ours, that I might take my mother into
+the purer air of Norwood, and permission was given to drive her down
+in an invalid carriage. The following evening she was suddenly taken
+worse; we lifted her into bed, and telegraphed for the doctor. But he
+could do nothing, and she herself felt that the hand of Death had
+gripped her. Selfless to the last, she thought but for my loneliness.
+&quot;I am leaving you alone,&quot; she sighed from time to time; and truly I
+felt, with an anguish I did not dare to realise, that when she died I
+should indeed be alone on earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For two days longer she was with me, my beloved, and I never left her
+side for five minutes. On May 10th the weakness passed into gentle
+delirium, but even then the faithful eyes followed me about the room,
+until at length they closed for ever, and as the sun sank low in the
+heavens, the breath came slower and slower, till the silence of Death
+came down upon us and she was gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stunned and dazed with the loss, I went mechanically through the next
+few days. I would have none touch my dead save myself and her
+favourite sister, who was with us at the last. Cold and dry-eyed I
+remained, even when they hid her from me with the coffin-lid, even all
+the dreary way to Kensal Green where her husband and her baby-son were
+sleeping, and when we left her alone in the chill earth, damp with the
+rains of spring. I could not believe that our day-dream was dead and
+buried, and the home in ruins ere yet it was fairly built. Truly, my
+&quot;house was left unto me desolate,&quot; and the rooms, filled with sunshine
+but unlighted by her presence, seemed to echo from their bare walls,
+&quot;You are all alone.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But my little daughter was there, and her sweet face and dancing feet
+broke the solitude, while her imperious claims for love and tendance
+forced me into attention to the daily needs of life. And life was hard
+in those days of spring and summer, resources small, and work
+difficult to find. In truth, the two months after my mother's death
+were the dreariest my life has known, and they were months of
+tolerably hard struggle. The little house in Colby Road taxed my
+slender resources heavily, and the search for work was not yet
+successful. I do not know how I should have managed but for the help
+ever at hand, of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Scott. During this time I wrote
+for Mr. Scott pamphlets on Inspiration, Atonement, Mediation and
+Salvation, Eternal Torture, Religious Education of Children, Natural
+<i>v</i>. Revealed Religion, and the few guineas thus earned were very
+valuable. Their house, too, was always open to me, and this was no
+small help, for often in those days the little money I had was enough
+to buy food for two but not enough to buy it for three, and I would go
+out and study all day at the British Museum, so as to &quot;have my dinner
+in town,&quot; the said dinner being conspicuous by its absence. If I was
+away for two evenings running from the hospitable house in the
+terrace, Mrs. Scott would come down to see what had happened, and many
+a time the supper there was of real physical value to me. Well might I
+write, in 1879, when Thomas Scott lay dead: &quot;It was Thomas Scott whose
+house was open to me when my need was sorest, and he never knew, this
+generous, noble heart, how sometimes, when I went in, weary and
+overdone, from a long day's study in the British Museum, with scarce
+food to struggle through the day&mdash;he never knew how his genial, 'Well,
+little lady,' in welcoming tone, cheered the then utter loneliness of
+my life. To no living man&mdash;save one&mdash;do I owe the debt of gratitude
+that I owe to Thomas Scott.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The small amount of jewellery I possessed, and all my superfluous
+clothes, were turned into more necessary articles, and the child, at
+least, never suffered a solitary touch of want. My servant Mary was a
+wonderful contriver, and kept house on the very slenderest funds that
+could be put into a servant's hands, and she also made the little
+place so bright and fresh-looking that it was always a pleasure to go
+into it. Recalling those days of &quot;hard living,&quot; I can now look on them
+without regret. More, I am glad to have passed through them, for they
+have taught me how to sympathise with those who are struggling as I
+struggled then, and I never can hear the words fall from pale lips, &quot;I
+am hungry,&quot; without remembering how painful a thing hunger is, and
+without curing that pain, at least for the moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The presence of the child was good for me, keeping alive my aching,
+lonely heart: she would play contentedly for hours while I was
+working, a word now and again being enough for happiness; when I had
+to go out without her, she would run to the door with me, and the
+&quot;good-bye&quot; would come from down-curved lips; she was ever watching at
+the window for my return, and the sunny face was always the first to
+welcome me home. Many and many a time have I been coming home, weary,
+hungry, and heart-sick, and the glimpse of the little face watching
+has reminded me that I must not carry in a grave face to sadden my
+darling, and the effort to throw off the depression for her sake threw
+it off altogether, and brought back the sunshine. She was the
+sweetness and joy of my life, my curly-headed darling, with her
+red-gold hair and glorious eyes, and passionate, wilful, loving
+nature. The torn, bruised tendrils of my heart gradually twined round
+this little life; she gave something to love and to tend, and thus
+gratified one of the strongest impulses of my nature.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHVI"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER VI.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+During all these months the intellectual life had not stood still; I
+was slowly, cautiously feeling my way onward. And in the intellectual
+and social side of my life I found a delight unknown in the old days
+of bondage. First, there was the joy of freedom, the joy of speaking
+out frankly and honestly each thought. Truly, I had a right to say:
+&quot;With a great price obtained I this freedom,&quot; and having paid the
+price, I revelled in the liberty I had bought. Mr. Scott's valuable
+library was at my service; his keen brain challenged my opinions,
+probed my assertions, and suggested phases of thought hitherto
+untouched. I studied harder than ever, and the study now was unchecked
+by any fear of possible consequences. I had nothing left of the old
+faith save belief in &quot;a God,&quot; and that began slowly to melt away. The
+Theistic axiom: &quot;If there be a God at all He must be at least as good
+as His highest creature,&quot; began with an &quot;if,&quot; and to that &quot;if&quot; I
+turned my attention. &quot;Of all impossible things,&quot; writes Miss Frances
+Power Cobbe, &quot;the most impossible must surely be that a man should
+dream something of the good and the noble, and that it should prove at
+last that his Creator was less good and less noble than he had
+dreamed.&quot; But, I questioned, are we sure that there is a Creator?
+Granted that, if there is, He must be above His highest creature,
+but&mdash;is there such a being? &quot;The ground,&quot; says the Rev. Charles
+Voysey, &quot;on which our belief in God rests is man. Man, parent of
+Bibles and Churches, inspirer of all good thoughts and good deeds.
+Man, the masterpiece of God's thought on earth. Man, the text-book of
+all spiritual knowledge. Neither miraculous nor infallible, man is
+nevertheless the only trustworthy record of the Divine mind in things
+pertaining to God. Man's reason, conscience, and affections are the
+only true revelation of his Maker.&quot; But what if God were only man's
+own image reflected in the mirror of man's mind? What if man were the
+creator, not the revelation of his God?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was inevitable that such thoughts should arise after the more
+palpably indefensible doctrines of Christianity had been discarded.
+Once encourage the human mind to think, and bounds to the thinking can
+never again be set by authority. Once challenge traditional beliefs,
+and the challenge will ring on every shield which is hanging in the
+intellectual arena. Around me was the atmosphere of conflict, and,
+freed from its long repression, my mind leapt up to share in the
+strife with a joy in the intellectual tumult, the intellectual strain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I often attended South Place Chapel, where Moncure D. Conway was then
+preaching, and discussion with him did something towards widening my
+views on the deeper religious problems; I re-read Dean Mansel's
+&quot;Bampton Lectures,&quot; and they did much towards turning me in the
+direction of Atheism; I re-read Mill's &quot;Examination of Sir William
+Hamilton's Philosophy,&quot; and studied carefully Comte's &quot;Philosophie
+Positive.&quot; Gradually I recognised the limitations of human intelligence
+and its incapacity for understanding the nature of God, presented as
+infinite and absolute; I had given up the use of prayer as a
+blasphemous absurdity, since an all-wise God could not need my
+suggestions, nor an all-good God require my promptings. But God fades
+out of the daily life of those who never pray; a personal God who is
+not a Providence is a superfluity; when from the heaven does not smile
+a listening Father, it soon becomes an empty space, whence resounds no
+echo of man's cry. I could then reach no loftier conception of the
+Divine than that offered by the orthodox, and that broke hopelessly
+away as I analysed it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last I said to Mr. Scott, &quot;Mr. Scott, may I write a tract on the
+nature and existence of God?&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He glanced at me keenly. &quot;Ah, little lady, you are facing, then, that
+problem at last? I thought it must come. Write away.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While this pamphlet was in MS. an event occurred which coloured all my
+succeeding life. I met Charles Bradlaugh. One day in the late spring,
+talking with Mrs. Conway&mdash;one of the sweetest and steadiest natures
+whom it has been my lot to meet, and to whom, as to her husband, I owe
+much for kindness generously shown when I was poor and had but few
+friends&mdash;she asked me if I had been to the Hall of Science, Old
+Street. I answered, with the stupid, ignorant reflection of other
+people's prejudices so sadly common, &quot;No, I have never been there. Mr.
+Bradlaugh is rather a rough sort of speaker, is he not?&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;He is the finest speaker of Saxon-English that I have ever heard,&quot;
+she answered, &quot;except, perhaps, John Bright, and his power over a
+crowd is something marvellous. Whether you agree with him or not, you
+should hear him.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<a name="05"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="Images/05.jpg" alt="Charles Bradlaugh M.P." width="275" height="407">
+</p>
+<h5>CHARLES BRADLAUGH M.P.</h5>
+
+<p>
+In the following July I went into the shop of Mr. Edward Truelove,
+256, High Holborn, in search of some Comtist publications, having come
+across his name as a publisher in the course of my study at the
+British Museum. On the counter was a copy of the <i>National Reformer</i>,
+and, attracted by the title, I bought it. I read it placidly in the
+omnibus on my way to Victoria Station, and found it excellent, and was
+sent into convulsions of inward merriment when, glancing up, I saw an
+old gentleman gazing at me, with horror speaking from every line of
+his countenance. To see a young woman, respectably dressed in crape,
+reading an Atheistic journal, had evidently upset his peace of mind,
+and he looked so hard at the paper that I was tempted to offer it to
+him, but repressed the mischievous inclination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This first copy of the paper with which I was to be so closely
+connected bore date July 19, 1874, and contained two long letters from
+a Mr. Arnold of Northampton, attacking Mr. Bradlaugh, and a brief and
+singularly self-restrained answer from the latter. There was also an
+article on the National Secular Society, which made me aware that
+there was an organisation devoted to the propagandism of Free Thought.
+I felt that if such a society existed, I ought to belong to it, and I
+consequently wrote a short note to the editor of the <i>National
+Reformer</i>, asking whether it was necessary for a person to profess
+Atheism before being admitted to the Society. The answer appeared in
+the <i>National Reformer</i>:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;S.E.&mdash;To be a member of the National Secular Society it is only
+necessary to be able honestly to accept the four principles, as given
+in the <i>National Reformer</i> of June 14th. This any person may do
+without being required to avow himself an Atheist. Candidly, we can
+see no logical resting-place between the entire acceptance of
+authority, as in the Roman Catholic Church, and the most extreme
+Rationalism. If, on again looking to the Principles of the Society,
+you can accept them, we repeat to you our invitation.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I sent my name in as an active member, and find it is recorded in the
+<i>National Reformer</i> of August 9th. Having received an intimation that
+Londoners could receive their certificates at the Hall of Science from
+Mr. Bradlaugh on any Sunday evening, I betook myself thither, and it
+was on August 2, 1874, that I first set foot in a Freethought hall.
+The Hall was crowded to suffocation, and, at the very moment announced
+for the lecture, a roar of cheering burst forth, a tall figure passed
+swiftly up the Hall to the platform, and, with a slight bow in answer
+to the voluminous greeting, Charles Bradlaugh took his seat. I looked
+at him with interest, impressed and surprised. The grave, quiet,
+stern, strong face, the massive head, the keen eyes, the magnificent
+breadth and height of forehead&mdash;was this the man I had heard described
+as a blatant agitator, an ignorant demagogue?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He began quietly and simply, tracing out the resemblances between the
+Krishna and the Christ myths, and as he went from point to point his
+voice grew in force and resonance, till it rang round the hall like a
+trumpet. Familiar with the subject, I could test the value of his
+treatment of it, and saw that his knowledge was as sound as his
+language was splendid. Eloquence, fire, sarcasm, pathos, passion, all
+in turn were bent against Christian superstition, till the great
+audience, carried away by the torrent of the orator's force, hung
+silent, breathing soft, as he went on, till the silence that followed
+a magnificent peroration broke the spell, and a hurricane of cheers
+relieved the tension.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He came down the Hall with some certificates in his hand, glanced
+round, and handed me mine with a questioning &quot;Mrs. Besant?&quot; Then he
+said, referring to my question as to a profession of Atheism, that he
+would willingly talk over the subject of Atheism with me if I would
+make an appointment, and offered me a book he had been using in his
+lecture. Long afterwards I asked him how he knew me, whom he had never
+seen, that he came straight to me in such fashion. He laughed and said
+he did not know, but, glancing over the faces, he felt sure that I was
+Annie Besant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From that first meeting in the Hall of Science dated a friendship that
+lasted unbroken till Death severed the earthly bond, and that to me
+stretches through Death's gateway and links us together still. As
+friends, not as strangers, we met&mdash;swift recognition, as it were,
+leaping from eye to eye; and I know now that the instinctive
+friendliness was in very truth an outgrowth of strong friendship in
+other lives, and that on that August day we took up again an ancient
+tie, we did not begin a new one. And so in lives to come we shall meet
+again, and help each other as we helped each other in this. And let me
+here place on record, as I have done before, some word of what I owe
+him for his true friendship; though, indeed, how great is my debt to
+him I can never tell. Some of his wise phrases have ever remained in
+my memory. &quot;You should never say you have an opinion on a subject
+until you have tried to study the strongest things said against the
+view to which you are inclined.&quot; &quot;You must not think you know a
+subject until you are acquainted with all that the best minds have
+said about it.&quot; &quot;No steady work can be done in public unless the
+worker study at home far more than he talks outside.&quot; &quot;Be your own
+harshest judge, listen to your own speech and criticise it; read abuse
+of yourself and see what grains of truth are in it.&quot; &quot;Do not waste
+time by reading opinions that are mere echoes of your own; read
+opinions you disagree with, and you will catch aspects of truth you do
+not readily see.&quot; Through our long comradeship he was my sternest as
+well as gentlest critic, pointing out to me that in a party like ours,
+where our own education and knowledge were above those whom we led, it
+was very easy to gain indiscriminate praise and unstinted admiration;
+on the other hand, we received from Christians equally indiscriminate
+abuse and hatred. It was, therefore, needful that we should be our own
+harshest judges, and that we should be sure that we knew thoroughly
+every subject that we taught. He saved me from the superficiality that
+my &quot;fatal facility&quot; of speech might so easily have induced; and when I
+began to taste the intoxication of easily won applause, his criticism
+of weak points, his challenge of weak arguments, his trained judgment,
+were of priceless service to me, and what of value there is in my work
+is very largely due to his influence, which at once stimulated and
+restrained.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One very charming characteristic of his was his extreme courtesy in
+private life, especially to women. This outward polish, which sat so
+gracefully on his massive frame and stately presence, was foreign
+rather than English&mdash;for the English, as a rule, save such as go to
+Court, are a singularly unpolished people&mdash;and it gave his manner a
+peculiar charm. I asked him once where he had learned his gracious
+fashions that were so un-English&mdash;he would stand with uplifted hat as
+he asked a question of a maidservant, or handed a woman into a
+carriage&mdash;and he answered, with a half-smile, half-scoff, that it was
+only in England he was an outcast from society. In France, in Spain,
+in Italy, he was always welcomed among men and women of the highest
+social rank, and he supposed that he had unconsciously caught the
+foreign tricks of manner. Moreover, he was absolutely indifferent to
+all questions of social position; peer or artisan, it was to him
+exactly the same; he never seemed conscious of the distinctions of
+which men make so much.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our first conversation, after the meeting at the Hall of Science, took
+place a day or two later in his little study in 29, Turner Street,
+Commercial Road, a wee room overflowing with books, in which he looked
+singularly out of place. Later I learned that he had failed in
+business in consequence of Christian persecution, and, resolute to
+avoid bankruptcy, he had sold everything he possessed, save his books,
+had sent his wife and daughters to live in the country with his
+father-in-law, had taken two tiny rooms in Turner Street, where he
+could live for a mere trifle, and had bent himself to the task of
+paying off the liabilities he had incurred&mdash;incurred in consequence of
+his battling for political and religious liberty. I took with me my
+MS. essay &quot;On the Nature and Existence of God,&quot; and it served as the
+basis for our conversation; we found there was little difference in
+our views. &quot;You have thought yourself into Atheism without knowing
+it,&quot; he said, and all that I changed in the essay was the correction
+of the vulgar error that the Atheist says &quot;there is no God,&quot; by the
+insertion of a passage disclaiming this position from an essay pointed
+out to me by Mr. Bradlaugh. And at this stage of my life-story, it is
+necessary to put very clearly the position I took up and held so many
+years as Atheist, because otherwise the further evolution into
+Theosophist will be wholly incomprehensible. It will lead me into
+metaphysics, and to some readers these are dry, but if any one would
+understand the evolution of a Soul he must be willing to face the
+questions which the Soul faces in its growth. And the position of the
+philosophic Atheist is so misunderstood that it is the more necessary
+to put it plainly, and Theosophists, at least, in reading it, will see
+how Theosophy stepped in finally as a further evolution towards
+knowledge, rendering rational, and therefore acceptable, the loftiest
+spirituality that the human mind can as yet conceive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In order that I may not colour my past thinkings by my present
+thought, I take my statements from pamphlets written when I adopted
+the Atheistic philosophy and while I continued an adherent thereof. No
+charge can then be made that I have softened my old opinions for the
+sake of reconciling them with those now held.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHVII"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER VII.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+The first step which leaves behind the idea of a limited and personal
+God, an extra-cosmic Creator, and leads the student to the point
+whence Atheism and Pantheism diverge, is the recognition that a
+profound unity of substance underlies the infinite diversities of
+natural phenomena, the discernment of the One beneath the Many. This
+was the step I had taken ere my first meeting with Charles Bradlaugh,
+and I had written:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;It is manifest to all who will take the trouble to think steadily,
+that there can be only one eternal and underived substance, and that
+matter and spirit must, therefore, only be varying manifestations of
+this one substance. The distinction made between matter and spirit is,
+then, simply made for the sake of convenience and clearness, just as
+we may distinguish perception from judgment, both of which, however,
+are alike processes of thought. Matter is, in its constituent elements,
+the same as spirit; existence is <i>one</i>, however manifold in its
+phenomena; life is one, however multiform in its evolution. As the
+heat of the coal differs from the coal itself, so do memory,
+perception, judgment, emotion, and will differ from the brain which is
+the instrument of thought. But nevertheless they are all equally
+products of the one sole substance, varying only in their
+conditions.... I find myself, then, compelled to believe that one only
+substance exists in all around me; that the universe is eternal, or at
+least eternal so far as our faculties are concerned, since we cannot,
+as some one has quaintly put it, 'get to the outside of everywhere';
+that a Deity cannot be conceived of as apart from the universe; that
+the Worker and the Work are inextricably interwoven, and in some sense
+eternally and indissolubly combined. Having got so far, we will
+proceed to examine into the possibility of proving the existence of
+that one essence popularly called by the name of <i>God</i>, under the
+conditions strictly defined by the orthodox. Having demonstrated, as I
+hope to do, that the orthodox idea of God is unreasonable and absurd,
+we will endeavour to ascertain whether <i>any</i> idea of God, worthy to be
+called an idea, is attainable in the present state of our faculties.&quot;
+&quot;The Deity must of necessity be that one and only substance out of
+which all things are evolved, under the uncreated conditions and
+eternal laws of the universe; He must be, as Theodore Parker somewhat
+oddly puts it, 'the materiality of matter as well as the spirituality
+of spirit'&mdash;<i>i.e.</i>, these must both be products of this one substance;
+a truth which is readily accepted as soon as spirit and matter are
+seen to be but different modes of one essence. Thus we identify
+substance with the all-comprehending and vivifying force of nature,
+and in so doing we simply reduce to a physical impossibility the
+existence of the Being described by the orthodox as a God possessing
+the attributes of personality. The Deity becomes identified with
+nature, co-extensive with the universe, but the <i>God</i> of the orthodox
+no longer exists; we may change the signification of God, and use the
+word to express a different idea, but we can no longer mean by it a
+Personal Being in the orthodox sense, possessing an individuality
+which divides Him from the rest of the universe.&quot;<a href="#FN3"><sup>[3]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Proceeding to search whether <i>any</i> idea of God was attainable, I came
+to the conclusion that evidence of the existence of a conscious Power
+was lacking, and that the ordinary proofs offered were inconclusive;
+that we could grasp phenomena and no more. &quot;There appears, also, to
+be a possibility of a mind in nature, though we have seen that
+intelligence is, strictly speaking, impossible. There cannot be
+perception, memory, comparison, or judgment, but may there not be a
+perfect mind, unchanging, calm, and still? Our faculties fail us when
+we try to estimate the Deity, and we are betrayed into contradictions
+and absurdities; but does it therefore follow that He <i>is</i> not? It
+seems to me that to deny His existence is to overstep the boundaries
+of our thought-power almost as much as to try and define it. We
+pretend to know the Unknown if we declare Him to be the Unknowable.
+Unknowable to us at present, yes! Unknowable for ever, in other
+possible stages of existence? We have reached a region into which we
+cannot penetrate; here all human faculties fail us; we bow our heads
+on 'the threshold of the unknown.'
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+  &quot;'And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see,<br>
+  But if we could see and hear, this vision&mdash;were it not He?'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus sings Alfred Tennyson, the poet of metaphysics: '<i>if</i> we could
+see and hear.' Alas! it is always an 'if!'<a href="#FN4"><sup>[4]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This refusal to believe without evidence, and the declaration that
+anything &quot;behind phenomena&quot; is unknowable to man as at present
+constituted&mdash;these are the two chief planks of the Atheistic platform,
+as Atheism was held by Charles Bradlaugh and myself. In 1876 this
+position was clearly reaffirmed. &quot;It is necessary to put briefly the
+Atheistic position, for no position is more continuously and more
+persistently misrepresented. Atheism is <i>without</i> God. It does not
+assert <i>no</i> God. 'The Atheist does not say &quot;There is no God,&quot; but he
+says, &quot;I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the
+word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation.
+I do not deny God, because I cannot deny that of which I have no
+conception, and the conception of which, by its affirmer, is so
+imperfect that he is unable to define it to me.&quot;' (Charles Bradlaugh,
+&quot;Freethinker's Text-book,&quot; p. 118.) The Atheist neither affirms nor
+denies the possibility of phenomena differing from those recognised by
+human experience.... As his knowledge of the universe is extremely
+limited and very imperfect, the Atheist declines either to deny or to
+affirm anything with regard to modes of existence of which he knows
+nothing. Further, he refuses to believe anything concerning that of
+which he knows nothing, and affirms that that which can never be the
+subject of knowledge ought never to be the object of belief. While the
+Atheist, then, neither affirms nor denies the unknown, he <i>does</i> deny
+all which conflicts with the knowledge to which he has already
+attained. For example, he <i>knows</i> that one is one, and that three
+times one are three; he <i>denies</i> that three times one are, or can be,
+one. The position of the Atheist is a clear and a reasonable one: I
+know nothing about 'God,' and therefore I do not believe in Him or in
+it; what you tell me about your God is self-contradictory, and is
+therefore incredible. I do not deny 'God,' which is an unknown tongue
+to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without
+God.&quot;<a href="#FN5"><sup>[5]</sup></a>
+ Up to 1887 I find myself writing on the same lines: &quot;No man
+can rationally affirm 'There is no God,' until the word 'God' has for
+him a definite meaning, and until everything that exists is known to
+him, and known with what Leibnitz calls 'perfect knowledge.' The
+Atheist's denial of the Gods begins only when these Gods are defined
+or described. Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not
+palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been
+described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human
+thought&mdash;Nor is anything gained by the assertors of Deity when they
+allege that He is incomprehensible. If 'God' exists and is
+incomprehensible, His incomprehensibility is an admirable reason for
+being silent about Him, but can never justify the affirmation of
+self-contradictory propositions, and the threatening of people with
+damnation if they do not accept them.&quot;<a href="#FN6"><sup>[6]</sup></a>
+ &quot;The belief of the Atheist
+stops where his evidence stops. He believes in the existence of the
+universe, judging the accessible proof thereof to be adequate, and he
+finds in this universe sufficient cause for the happening of all
+phenomena. He finds no intellectual satisfaction in placing a gigantic
+conundrum behind the universe, which only adds its own
+unintelligibility to the already sufficiently difficult problem of
+existence. Our lungs are not fitted to breathe beyond the atmosphere
+which surrounds our globe, and our faculties cannot breathe outside
+the atmosphere of the phenomenal.&quot;<a href="#FN7"><sup>[7]</sup></a>
+ And I summed up this essay with
+the words: &quot;I do not believe in God. My mind finds no grounds on which
+to build up a reasonable faith. My heart revolts against the spectre
+of an Almighty Indifference to the pain of sentient beings. My
+conscience rebels against the injustice, the cruelty, the inequality,
+which surround me on every side. But I believe in Man. In man's
+redeeming power; in man's remoulding energy; in man's approaching
+triumph, through knowledge, love, and work.&quot;<a href="#FN8"><sup>[8]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These views of existence naturally colour all views of life and of the
+existence of the Soul. And here steps in the profound difference
+between Atheism and Pantheism; both posit an Existence at present
+inscrutable by human faculties, of which all phenomena are modes; but
+to the Atheist that Existence manifests as Force-Matter, unconscious,
+unintelligent, while to the Pantheist it manifests as Life-Matter,
+conscious, intelligent. To the one, life and consciousness are
+attributes, properties, dependent upon arrangements of matter; to the
+other they are fundamental, essential, and only limited in their
+manifestation by arrangements of matter. Despite the attraction held
+for me in Spinoza's luminous arguments, the over-mastering sway which
+Science was beginning to exercise over me drove me to seek for the
+explanation of all problems of life and mind at the hands of the
+biologist and the chemist. They had done so much, explained so much,
+could they not explain all? Surely, I thought, the one safe ground is
+that of experiment, and the remembered agony of doubt made me very
+slow to believe where I could not prove. So I was fain to regard life
+as an attribute, and this again strengthened the Atheistic position.
+&quot;Scientifically regarded, life is not an entity but a property; it is
+not a mode of existence, but a characteristic of certain modes. Life
+is the result of an arrangement of matter, and when rearrangement
+occurs the former result can no longer be present; we call the result
+of the changed arrangement death. Life and death are two convenient
+words for expressing the general outcome of two arrangements of
+matter, one of which is always found to precede the other.&quot;<a href="#FN9"><sup>[9]</sup></a>
+ And
+then, having resorted to chemistry for one illustration, I took
+another from one of those striking and easily grasped analogies,
+facility for seeing and presenting which has ever been one of the
+secrets of my success as a propagandist. Like pictures, they impress
+the mind of the hearer with a vivid sense of reality. &quot;Every one knows
+the exquisite iridiscence of mother-of-pearl, the tender, delicate
+hues which melt into each other, glowing with soft radiance. How
+different is the dull, dead surface of a piece of wax. Yet take that
+dull, black wax and mould it so closely to the surface of the
+mother-of-pearl that it shall take every delicate marking of the
+shell, and when you raise it the seven-hued glory shall smile at you
+from the erstwhile colourless surface. For, though it be to the naked
+eye imperceptible, all the surface of the mother-of-pearl is in
+delicate ridges and furrows, like the surface of a newly-ploughed
+field; and when the waves of light come dashing up against the ridged
+surface, they are broken like the waves on a shingly shore, and are
+flung backwards, so that they cross each other and the oncoming waves;
+and, as every ray of white light is made up of waves of seven colours,
+and these waves differ in length each from the others, the fairy
+ridges fling them backward separately, and each ray reaches the eye by
+itself; so that the colour of the mother-of-pearl is really the spray
+of the light waves, and comes from arrangement of matter once again.
+Give the dull, black wax the same ridges and furrows, and its glory
+shall differ in nothing from that of the shell. To apply our
+illustration: as the colour belongs to one arrangement of matter and
+the dead surface to another, so life belongs to some arrangements of
+matter and is their resultant, while the resultant of other
+arrangements is death.&quot;<a href="#FN10"><sup>[10]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The same line of reasoning naturally was applied to the existence of
+&quot;spirit&quot; in man, and it was argued that mental activity, the domain of
+the &quot;spirit,&quot; was dependent on bodily organisation. &quot;When the babe is
+born it shows no sign of mind. For a brief space hunger and repletion,
+cold and warmth are its only sensations. Slowly the specialised senses
+begin to function; still more slowly muscular movements, at first
+aimless and reflex, become co-ordinated and consciously directed.
+There is no sign here of an intelligent spirit controlling a
+mechanism; there is every sign of a learning and developing
+intelligence, developing <i>pari passu</i> with the organism of which it is
+a function. As the body grows, the mind grows with it, and the
+childish mind of the child develops into the hasty, quickly-judging,
+half-informed, unbalanced youthful mind of the youth; with maturity of
+years comes maturity of mind, and body and mind are vigorous and in
+their prime. As old age comes on and the bodily functions decay, the
+mind decays also, until age passes into senility, and body and mind
+sink into second childhood. Has the immortal spirit decayed with the
+organisation, or is it dwelling in sorrow, bound in its 'house of
+clay'? If this be so, the 'spirit' must be unconscious, or else
+separate from the very individual whose essence it is supposed to be,
+for the old man does not suffer when his mind is senile, but is
+contented as a little child. And not only is this constant,
+simultaneous growth and decay of body and mind to be observed, but we
+know that mental functions are disordered and suspended by various
+physical conditions. Alcohol, many drugs, fever, disorder the mind; a
+blow on the cranium suspends its functions, and the 'spirit' returns
+with the surgeon's trepanning. Does the 'spirit' take part in dreams?
+Is it absent from the idiot, from the lunatic? Is it guilty of
+manslaughter when the madman murders, or does it helplessly watch its
+own instrument performing actions at which it shudders? If it can only
+work here through an organism, is its nature changed in its
+independent life, severed from all with which it was identified? Can
+it, in its 'disembodied state,' have anything in common with its
+past?&quot;<a href="#FN11"><sup>[11]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It will be seen that my unbelief in the existence of the Soul or
+Spirit was a matter of cold, calm reasoning. As I wrote in 1885: &quot;For
+many of us evidence must precede belief. I would gladly believe in a
+happy immortality for all, as I would gladly believe that all misery
+and crime and poverty will disappear in 1885&mdash;<i>if I could</i>. But I am
+unable to believe an improbable proposition unless convincing evidence
+is brought in support of it. Immortality is most improbable; no
+evidence is brought forward in its favour. I cannot believe only
+because I wish.&quot;<a href="#FN12"><sup>[12]</sup></a>
+ Such was the philosophy by which I lived from
+1874 to 1886, when first some researches that will be dealt with in
+their proper place, and which led me ultimately to the evidence I had
+before vainly demanded, began to shake my confidence in its adequacy.
+Amid outer storm and turmoil and conflict, I found it satisfy my
+intellect, while lofty ideals of morality fed my emotions. I called
+myself Atheist, and rightly so, for I was without God, and my horizon
+was bounded by life on earth; I gloried in the name then, as it is
+dear to my heart now, for all the associations with which it is
+connected. &quot;Atheist is one of the grandest titles a man can wear; it
+is the Order of Merit of the world's heroes. Most great discoverers,
+most deep-thinking philosophers, most earnest reformers, most toiling
+pioneers of progress, have in their turn had flung at them the name of
+Atheist. It was howled over the grave of Copernicus; it was clamoured
+round the death-pile of Bruno; it was yelled at Vanini, at Spinoza, at
+Priestley, at Voltaire, at Paine; it has become the laurel-bay of the
+hero, the halo of the martyr; in the world's history it has meant the
+pioneer of progress, and where the cry of 'Atheist' is raised there
+may we be sure that another step is being taken towards the redemption
+of humanity. The saviours of the world are too often howled at as
+Atheists, and then worshipped as Deities. The Atheists are the
+vanguard of the army of Freethought, on whom falls the brunt of the
+battle, and are shivered the hardest of the blows; their feet trample
+down the thorns that others may tread unwounded; their bodies fill up
+the ditch that, by the bridge thus made, others may pass to victory.
+Honour to the pioneers of progress, honour to the vanguard of
+Liberty's army, honour to those who to improve earth have forgotten
+heaven, and who in their zeal for man have forgotten God.&quot;<a href="#FN13"><sup>[13]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This poor sketch of the conception of the universe, to which I had
+conquered my way at the cost of so much pain, and which was the inner
+centre round which my life revolved for twelve years, may perhaps show
+that the Atheistic Philosophy is misjudged sorely when it is scouted
+as vile or condemned as intellectually degraded. It has outgrown
+anthropomorphic deities, and it leaves us face to face with Nature,
+open to all her purifying, strengthening inspirations. &quot;There is only
+one kind of prayer,&quot; it says, &quot;which is reasonable, and that is the
+deep, silent adoration of the greatness and beauty and order around
+us, as revealed in the realms of non-rational life and in Humanity; as
+we bow our heads before the laws of the universe, and mould our lives
+into obedience to their voice, we find a strong, calm peace steal over
+our hearts, a perfect trust in the ultimate triumph of the right, a
+quiet determination to 'make our lives sublime.' Before our own high
+ideals, before those lives which show us 'how high the tides of Divine
+life have risen in the human world,' we stand with hushed voice and
+veiled face; from them we draw strength to emulate, and even dare
+struggle to excel. The contemplation of the ideal is true prayer; it
+inspires, it strengthens, it ennobles. The other part of prayer is
+work; from contemplation to labour, from the forest to the street.
+Study nature's laws, conform to them, work in harmony with them, and
+work becomes a prayer and a thanksgiving, an adoration of the
+universal wisdom, and a true obedience to the universal law.&quot;<a href="#FN14"><sup>[14]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To a woman of my temperament, filled with passionate desire for the
+bettering of the world, the elevation of humanity, a lofty system of
+ethics was of even more importance than a logical, intellectual
+conception of the universe; and the total loss of all faith in a
+righteous God only made me more strenuously assertive of the binding
+nature of duty and the overwhelming importance of conduct. In 1874
+this conviction found voice in a pamphlet on the &quot;True Basis of
+Morality,&quot; and in all the years of my propaganda on the platform of
+the National Secular Society no subject was more frequently dealt with
+in my lectures than that of human ethical growth and the duty of man
+to man. No thought was more constantly in my mind than that of the
+importance of morals, and it was voiced at the very outset of my
+public career. Speaking of the danger lest &quot;in these stirring times of
+inquiry,&quot; old sanctions of right conduct should be cast aside ere new
+ones were firmly established, I wrote: &quot;It therefore becomes the duty
+of every one who fights in the ranks of Freethought, and who ventures
+to attack the dogmas of the Churches, and to strike down the
+superstitions which enslave men's intellect, to beware how he uproots
+sanctions of morality which he is too weak to replace, or how, before
+he is prepared with better ones, he removes the barriers which do yet,
+however poorly, to some extent check vice and repress crime.... That
+which touches morality touches the heart of society; a high and pure
+morality is the life-blood of humanity; mistakes in belief are
+inevitable, and are of little moment; mistakes in life destroy
+happiness, and their destructive consequences spread far and wide. It
+is, then, a very important question whether we, who are endeavouring
+to take away from the world the authority on which has hitherto been
+based all its morality, can offer a new and firm ground whereupon may
+safely be built up the fair edifice of a noble life.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I then proceeded to analyse revelation and intuition as a basis for
+morals, and, discarding both, I asserted: &quot;The true basis of morality
+is utility; that is, the adaptation of our actions to the promotion of
+the general welfare and happiness; the endeavour so to rule our lives
+that we may serve and bless mankind.&quot; And I argued for this basis,
+showing that the effort after virtue was implied in the search for
+happiness: &quot;Virtue is an indispensable part of all true and solid
+happiness.... But it is, after all, only reasonable that happiness
+should be the ultimate test of right and wrong, if we live, as we do,
+in a realm of law. Obedience to law must necessarily result in
+harmony, and disobedience in discord. But if obedience to law result
+in harmony it must also result in happiness&mdash;all through nature
+obedience to law results in happiness, and through obedience each
+living thing fulfils the perfection of its being, and in that
+perfection finds its true happiness.&quot; It seemed to me most important
+to remove morality from the controversies about religion, and to give
+it a basis of its own: &quot;As, then, the grave subject of the existence
+of Deity is a matter of dispute, it is evidently of deep importance to
+society that morality should not be dragged into this battlefield, to
+stand or totter with the various theories of the Divine nature which
+human thought creates and destroys. If we can found morality on a
+basis apart from theology, we shall do humanity a service which can
+scarcely be overestimated.&quot; A study of the facts of nature, of the
+consequences of man in society, seemed sufficient for such a basis.
+&quot;Our faculties do not suffice to tell us about God; they do suffice to
+study phenomena, and to deduce laws from correlated facts. Surely,
+then, we should do wisely to concentrate our strength and our energies
+on the discovery of the attainable, instead of on the search after the
+unknowable. If we are told that morality consists in obedience to the
+supposed will of a supposed perfectly moral being, because in so doing
+we please God, then we are at once placed in a region where our
+faculties are useless to us, and where our judgment is at fault. But
+if we are told that we are to lead noble lives, because nobility of
+life is desirable for itself alone, because in so doing we are acting
+in harmony with the laws of Nature, because in so doing we spread
+happiness around our pathway and gladden our fellow-men&mdash;then, indeed,
+motives are appealed to which spring forward to meet the call, and
+chords are struck in our hearts which respond in music to the touch.&quot;
+It was to the establishment of this secure basis that I bent my
+energies, this that was to me of supreme moment. &quot;Amid the fervid
+movement of society, with its wild theories and crude social reforms,
+with its righteous fury against oppression and its unconsidered
+notions of wider freedom and gladder life, it is of vital importance
+that morality should stand on a foundation unshakable; that so through
+all political and religious revolutions human life may grow purer and
+nobler, may rise upwards into settled freedom, and not sink downwards
+into anarchy. Only utility can afford us a sure basis, the
+reasonableness of which will be accepted alike by thoughtful student
+and hard-headed artisan. Utility appeals to all alike, and sets in
+action motives which are found equally in every human heart. Well
+shall it be for humanity that creeds and dogmas pass away, that
+superstition vanishes, and the clear light of freedom and science
+dawns on a regenerated earth&mdash;but well only if men draw tighter and
+closer the links of trustworthiness, of honour, and of truth. Equality
+before the law is necessary and just; liberty is the birthright of
+every man and woman; free individual development will elevate and
+glorify the race. But little worth these priceless jewels, little
+worth liberty and equality with all their promise for mankind, little
+worth even wider happiness, if that happiness be selfish, if true
+fraternity, true brotherhood, do not knit man to man, and heart to
+heart, in loyal service to the common need, and generous
+self-sacrifice to the common good.&quot;<a href="#FN15"><sup>[15]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the forwarding of this moral growth of man, two things seemed to me
+necessary&mdash;an Ideal which should stir the emotions and impel to
+action, and a clear understanding of the sources of evil and of the
+methods by which they might be drained. Into the drawing of the first
+I threw all the passion of my nature, striving to paint the Ideal in
+colours which should enthral and fascinate, so that love and desire to
+realise might stir man to effort. If &quot;morality touched by emotion&quot; be
+religion, then truly was I the most religious of Atheists, finding in
+this dwelling on and glorifying of the Ideal full satisfaction for the
+loftiest emotions. To meet the fascination exercised over men's hearts
+by the Man of Sorrows, I raised the image of man triumphant, man
+perfected. &quot;Rightly is the ideal Christian type of humanity a Man of
+Sorrows. Jesus, with worn and wasted body; with sad, thin lips, curved
+into a mournful droop of penitence for human sin; with weary eyes
+gazing up to heaven because despairing of earth; bowed down and aged
+with grief and pain, broken-hearted with long anguish, broken-spirited
+with unresisted ill-usage&mdash;such is the ideal man of the Christian
+creed. Beautiful with a certain pathetic beauty, telling of the long
+travail of earth, eloquent of the sufferings of humanity, but not the
+model type to which men should conform their lives, if they would make
+humanity glorious. And, therefore, in radiant contrast with this,
+stands out in the sunshine and under the blue summer sky, far from
+graveyards and torture of death agony, the fair ideal Humanity of the
+Atheist. In form strong and fair, perfect in physical development as
+the Hercules of Grecian art, radiant with love, glorious in
+self-reliant power; with lips bent firm to resist oppression, and
+melting into soft curves of passion and of pity; with deep, far-seeing
+eyes, gazing piercingly into the secrets of the unknown, and resting
+lovingly on the beauties around him; with hands strong to work in the
+present; with heart full of hope which the future shall realise;
+making earth glad with his labour and beautiful with his skill&mdash;this,
+this is the Ideal Man, enshrined in the Atheist's heart. The ideal
+humanity of the Christian is the humanity of the slave, poor, meek,
+broken-spirited, humble, submissive to authority, however oppressive
+and unjust; the ideal humanity of the Atheist is the humanity of the
+free man who knows no lord, who brooks no tyranny, who relies on his
+own strength, who makes his brother's quarrel his, proud,
+true-hearted, loyal, brave.&quot;<a href="#FN16"><sup>[16]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A one-sided view? Yes. But a very natural outcome of a sunny nature,
+for years held down by unhappiness and the harshness of an outgrown
+creed. It was the rebound of such a nature suddenly set free,
+rejoicing in its liberty and self-conscious strength, and it carried
+with it a great power of rousing the sympathetic enthusiasm of men and
+women, deeply conscious of their own restrictions and their own
+longings. It was the cry of the freed soul that had found articulate
+expression, and the many inarticulate and prisoned souls answered to
+it tumultously, with fluttering of caged wings. With hot insistence I
+battled for the inspiration to be drawn from the beauty and grandeur
+of which human life was capable. &quot;Will any one exclaim, 'You are
+taking all beauty out of human life, all hope, all warmth, all
+inspiration; you give us cold duty for filial obedience, and
+inexorable law in the place of God'? All beauty from life? Is there,
+then, no beauty in the idea of forming part of the great life of the
+universe, no beauty in conscious harmony with Nature, no beauty in
+faithful service, no beauty in ideals of every virtue? 'All hope'?
+Why, I give you more than hope, I give you certainty; if I bid you
+labour for this world, it is with the knowledge that this world will
+repay you a, thousand-fold, because society will grow purer, freedom
+more settled, law more honoured, life more full and glad. What is your
+heaven? A heaven in the clouds! I point to a heaven attainable on
+earth. 'All warmth'? What! you serve warmly a God unknown and
+invisible, in a sense the projected shadow of your own imaginings, and
+can only serve coldly your brother whom you see at your side? There is
+no warmth in brightening the lot of the sad, in reforming abuses, in
+establishing equal justice for rich and poor? You find warmth in the
+church, but none in the home? Warmth in imagining the cloud glories of
+heaven, but none in creating substantial glories on earth?' All
+inspiration'? If you want inspiration to feeling, to sentiment,
+perhaps you had better keep to your Bible and your creeds; if you want
+inspiration to work, go and walk through the East of London, or the
+back streets of Manchester. You are inspired to tenderness as you gaze
+at the wounds of Jesus, dead in Judaea long ago, and find no
+inspiration in the wounds of men and women, dying in the England of
+to-day? You 'have tears to shed for Him,' but none for the sufferer at
+your doors? His passion arouses your sympathies, but you see no pathos
+in the passion of the poor? Duty is colder than 'filial obedience'?
+What do you mean by filial obedience? Obedience to your ideal of
+goodness and love&mdash;is it not so? Then how is duty cold? I offer you
+ideals for your homage: here is Truth for your Mistress, to whose
+exaltation you shall devote your intellect; here is Freedom for your
+General, for whose triumph you shall fight; here is Love for your
+Inspirer, who shall influence your every thought; here is Man for your
+Master&mdash;not in heaven, but on earth&mdash;to whose service you shall
+consecrate every faculty of your being. 'Inexorable law in the place
+of God'? Yes; a stern certainty that you shall not waste your life,
+yet gather a rich reward at the close; that you shall not sow misery,
+yet reap gladness; that you shall not be selfish, yet be crowned with
+love; nor shall you sin, yet find safety in repentance. True, our
+creed <i>is</i> a stern one, stern with the beautiful sternness of Nature.
+But if we be in the right, look to yourselves; laws do not check their
+action for your ignorance; fire will not cease to scorch, because you
+'did not know.'&quot;<a href="#FN17"><sup>[17]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With equal vigour did I maintain that &quot;virtue was its own reward,&quot; and
+that payment on the other side of the grave was unnecessary as an
+incentive to right living. &quot;What shall we say to Miss Cobbe's
+contention that duty will 'grow grey and cold' without God and
+immortality? Yes, for those with whom duty is a matter of selfish
+calculation, and who are virtuous only because they look for a 'golden
+crown' in payment on the other side the grave. Those of us who find
+joy in right-doing, who work because work is useful to our fellows,
+who live well because in such living we pay our contribution to the
+world's wealth, leaving earth richer than we found it&mdash;we need no
+paltry payment after death for our life's labour, for in that labour
+is its own 'exceeding great reward.'&quot;<a href="#FN18"><sup>[18]</sup></a>
+ But did any one yearn for
+immortality, that &quot;not all of me shall die&quot;? &quot;Is it true that Atheism
+has no immortality? What is true immortality? Is Beethoven's true
+immortality in his continued personal consciousness, or in his
+glorious music deathless while the world endures? Is Shelley's true
+life in his existence in some far-off heaven, or in the pulsing
+liberty his lyrics send through men's hearts, when they respond to the
+strains of his lyre? Music does not die, though one instrument be
+broken; thought does not die, though one brain be shivered; love does
+not die, though one heart's strings be rent; and no great thinker dies
+so long as his thought re-echoes through the ages, its melody the
+fuller-toned the more human brains send its music on. Not only to the
+hero and the sage is this immortality given; it belongs to each
+according to the measure of his deeds; world-wide life for world-wide
+service; straitened life for straitened work; each reaps as he sows,
+and the harvest is gathered by each in his rightful order.&quot;<a href="#FN19"><sup>[19]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This longing to leave behind a name that will live among men by right
+of service done them, this yearning for human love and approval that
+springs naturally from the practical and intense realisation of human
+brotherhood&mdash;these will be found as strong motives in the breasts of
+the most earnest men and women who have in our generation identified
+themselves with the Freethought cause. They shine through the written
+and spoken words of Charles Bradlaugh all through his life, and every
+friend of his knows how often he has expressed the longing that &quot;when
+the grass grows green over my grave, men may love me a little for the
+work I tried to do.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Needless to say that, in the many controversies in which I took part,
+it was often urged against me that such motives were insufficient,
+that they appealed only to natures already ethically developed, and
+left the average man, and, above all, the man below the average, with
+no sufficiently constraining motive for right conduct. I resolutely
+held to my faith in human nature, and the inherent response of the
+human heart when appealed to from the highest grounds; strange&mdash;I
+often think now&mdash;this instinctive certainty I had of man's innate
+grandeur, that governed all my thought, inconsistent as that certainty
+was with my belief in his purely animal ancestry. Pressed too hard, I
+would take refuge in a passionate disdain for all who did not hear the
+thrilling voice of Virtue and love her for her own sweet sake. &quot;I have
+myself heard the question asked: 'Why should I seek for truth, and why
+should I lead a good life, if there be no immortality in which to reap
+a reward?' To this question the Freethinker has one clear and short
+answer: 'There is no reason why you should seek Truth, if to you the
+search has no attracting power. There is no reason why you should lead
+a noble life, if you find your happiness in leading a poor and a base
+one.' Friends, no one can enjoy a happiness which is too high for his
+capabilities; a book may be of intensest interest, but a dog will very
+much prefer being given a bone. To him whose highest interest is
+centred in his own miserable self, to him who cares only to gain his
+own ends, to him who seeks only his own individual comfort, to that
+man Freethought can have no attraction. Such a man may indeed be made
+religious by a bribe of heaven; he may be led to seek for truth,
+because he hopes to gain his reward hereafter by the search; but Truth
+disdains the service of the self-seeker; she cannot be grasped by a
+hand that itches for reward. If Truth is not loved for her own pure
+sake, if to lead a noble life, if to make men happier, if to spread
+brightness around us, if to leave the world better than we found
+it&mdash;if these aims have no attraction for us, if these thoughts do not
+inspire us, then we are not worthy to be Secularists, we have no right
+to the proud title of Freethinkers. If you want to be paid for your
+good lives by living for ever in a lazy and useless fashion in an idle
+heaven; if you want to be bribed into nobility of life; if, like silly
+children, you learn your lesson not to gain knowledge but to win
+sugar-plums, then you had better go back to your creeds and your
+churches; they are all you are fit for; you are not worthy to be free.
+But we&mdash;who, having caught a glimpse of the beauty of Truth, deem the
+possession of her worth more than all the world beside; who have made
+up our minds to do our work ungrudgingly, asking for no reward beyond
+the results which spring up from our labour&mdash;we will spread the Gospel
+of Freethought among men, until the sad minor melodies of Christianity
+have sobbed out their last mournful notes on the dying evening breeze,
+and on the fresh morning winds shall ring out the chorus of hope and
+joyfulness, from the glad lips of men whom the Truth has at last set
+free.&quot;<a href="#FN20"><sup>[20]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The intellectual comprehension of the sources of evil and the method
+of its extinction was the second great plank in my ethical platform.
+The study of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, of Huxley, B&uuml;chner and
+Haeckel, had not only convinced me of the truth of evolution, but,
+with help from W.H. Clifford, Lubbock, Buckle, Lecky, and many
+another, had led me to see in the evolution of the social instinct the
+explanation of the growth of conscience and of the strengthening of
+man's mental and moral nature. If man by study of the conditions
+surrounding him and by the application of intelligence to the subdual
+of external nature, had already accomplished so much, why should not
+further persistence along the same road lead to his complete
+emancipation? All the evil, anti-social side of his nature was an
+inheritance from his brute ancestry, and could be gradually
+eradicated; he could not only &quot;let the ape and tiger die,&quot; but he
+could kill them out.&quot; It may be frankly acknowledged that man inherits
+from his brute progenitors various bestial tendencies which are in
+course of elimination. The wild-beast desire to fight is one of these,
+and this has been encouraged, not checked, by religion.... Another
+bestial tendency is the lust of the male for the female apart from
+love, duty, and loyalty; this again has been encouraged by religion,
+as witness the polygamy and concubinage of the Hebrews&mdash;as in Abraham,
+David, and Solomon, not to mention the precepts of the Mosaic
+laws&mdash;the bands of male and female prostitutes in connection with
+Pagan temples, and the curious outbursts of sexual passion in
+connection with religious revivals and missions. Another bestial
+tendency is greed, the strongest grabbing all he can and trampling
+down the weak, in the mad struggle for wealth; how and when has
+religion modified this tendency, sanctified as it is in our present
+civilisation? All these bestial tendencies will be eradicated only by
+the recognition of human duty, of the social bond. Religion has not
+eradicated them, but science, by tracing them to their source in our
+brute ancestry, has explained them and has shown them in their true
+light. As each recognises that the anti-social tendencies are the
+bestial tendencies in man, and that man in evolving further must
+evolve out of these, each also feels it part of his personal duty to
+curb these in himself, and so to rise further from the brute. This
+rational 'co-operation with Nature' distinguishes the scientific from
+the religious person, and this constraining sense of obligation is
+becoming stronger and stronger in all those who, in losing faith in
+God, have gained hope for man.&quot;<a href="#FN21"><sup>[21]</sup></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For this rational setting of oneself on the side of the forces working
+for evolution implied active co-operation by personal purity and
+nobility.&quot; To the Atheist it seems that the knowledge that the
+perfecting of the race is only possible by the improvement of the
+individual, supplies the most constraining motive which can be
+imagined for efforts after personal perfection. The Theist may desire
+personal perfection, but his desire is self-centred; each righteous
+individual is righteous, as it were, alone, and his righteousness does
+not benefit his fellows save as it may make him helpful and loving in
+his dealings with them. The Atheist desires personal perfection not
+only for his joy in it as beautiful in itself, but because science has
+taught him the unity of the race, and he knows that each fresh
+conquest of his over the baser parts of his nature, and each
+strengthening of the higher, is a gain for all, and not for himself
+alone.&quot;<a href="#FN22"><sup>[22]</sup></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Besides all this, the struggle against evil, regarded as transitory
+and as a necessary concomitant of evolution, loses its bitterness. &quot;In
+dealing with evil, Atheism is full of hope instead of despair. To the
+Christian, evil is as everlasting as good; it exists by the permission
+of God, and, therefore, by the will of God. Our nature is corrupt,
+inclined to evil; the devil is ever near us, working all sin and all
+misery. What hope has the Christian face to face with a world's
+wickedness? what answer to the question, Whence comes sin? To the
+Atheist the terrible problem has in it no figure of despair. Evil
+comes from ignorance, we say; ignorance of physical and of moral
+facts. Primarily, from ignorance of physical order; parents who dwell
+in filthy, unventilated, unweathertight houses, who live on
+insufficient, innutritious, unwholesome food, will necessarily be
+unhealthy, will lack vitality, will probably have disease lurking in
+their veins; such parents will bring into the world ill-nurtured
+children, in whom the brain will generally be the least developed part
+of the body; such children, by their very formation, will incline to
+the animal rather than to the human, and by leading an animal, or
+natural, life will be deficient in those qualities which are necessary
+in social life. Their surroundings as they grow up, the home, the
+food, the associates, all are bad. They are trained into vice,
+educated into criminality; so surely as from the sown corn rises the
+wheat-ear, so from the sowing of misery, filth, and starvation shall
+arise crime. And the root of all is poverty and ignorance. Educate the
+children, and give them fair wage for fair work in their maturity, and
+crime will gradually diminish and ultimately disappear. Man is
+God-made, says Theism; man is circumstance-made, says Atheism. Man is
+the resultant of what his parents were, of what his surroundings have
+been and are, and of what they have made him; himself the result of
+the past he modifies the actual, and so the action and reaction go on,
+he himself the effect of what is past, and one of the causes of what
+is to come. Make the circumstances good and the results will be good,
+for healthy bodies and healthy brains may be built up, and from a
+State composed of such the disease of crime will have disappeared.
+Thus is our work full of hope; no terrible will of God have we to
+struggle against; no despairful future to look forward to, of a world
+growing more and more evil, until it is, at last, to burned up; but a
+glad, fair future of an ever-rising race, where more equal laws, more
+general education, more just division, shall eradicate pauperism,
+destroy ignorance, nourish independence, a future to be made the
+grander by our struggles, a future to be made the nearer by our
+toil.&quot;<a href="#FN23"><sup>[23]</sup></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This joyous, self-reliant facing of the world with the resolute
+determination to improve it is characteristic of the noblest Atheism
+of our day. And it is thus a distintly elevating factor in the midst
+of the selfishness, luxury, and greed of modern civilisation. It is a
+virile virtue in the midst of the calculating and slothful spirit
+which too ofter veils itself under the pretence or religion. It will
+have no putting off of justice to a far-off day of reckoning, and it
+is ever spurred on by the feeling, &quot;The night cometh, when no man can
+work.&quot; Bereft of all hope of a personal future, it binds up its hopes
+with that of the race; unbelieving in any aid from Deity, it struggles
+the more strenuously to work out man's salvation by his own strength.
+&quot;To us there is but small comfort in Miss Cobbe's assurance that
+'earth's wrongs and agonies' 'will be righted hereafter.' Granting for
+a moment that man survives death what certainty have we that 'the next
+world' will be any improvement on this? Miss Cobbe assures us that
+this is 'God's world'; whose world will the next be, if not also His?
+Will He be stronger there or better, that He should set right in that
+world the wrongs He has permitted here? Will He have changed His mind,
+or have become weary of the contemplation of suffering? To me the
+thought that the world was in the hands of a God who permitted all the
+present wrongs and pains to exist would be intolerable, maddening in
+its hopelessness. There is every hope of righting earth's wrongs and
+of curing earth's pains if the reason and skill of man which have
+already done so much are free to do the rest; but if they are to
+strive against omnipotence, hopeless indeed is the future of the
+world. It is in this sense that the Atheist looks on good as 'the
+final goal of ill,' and believing that that goal will be reached the
+sooner the more strenuous the efforts of each individual, he works in
+the glad certainty that he is aiding the world's progress thitherward.
+Not dreaming of a personal reward hereafter, not craving a personal
+payment from heavenly treasury, he works and loves, content that he is
+building a future fairer than his present, joyous that he is creating
+a new earth for a happier race.&quot;<a href="#FN24"><sup>[24]</sup></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such was the creed and such the morality which governed my life and
+thoughts from 1874 to 1886, and with some misgivings to 1889, and from
+which I drew strength and happiness amid all outer struggles and
+distress. And I shall ever remain grateful for the intellectual and
+moral training it gave me, for the self-reliance it nurtured, for the
+altruism it inculcated, for the deep feeling of the unity of man that
+it fostered, for the inspiration to work that it lent. And perhaps the
+chief debt of gratitude I owe to Freethought is that it left the mind
+ever open to new truth, encouraged the most unshrinking questioning of
+Nature, and shrank from no new conclusions, however adverse to the
+old, that were based on solid evidence. I admit sorrowfully that all
+Freethinkers do not learn this lesson, but I worked side by side with
+Charles Bradlaugh, and the Freethought we strove to spread was
+strong-headed and broad-hearted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The antagonism which, as we shall see in a few moments, blazed out
+against me from the commencement of my platform work, was based partly
+on ignorance, was partly aroused by my direct attacks on Christianity,
+and by the combative spirit I myself showed in those attacks, and very
+largely by my extreme Radicalism in politics. I had against me all the
+conventional beliefs and traditions of society in general, and I
+attacked them, not with bated breath and abundant apologies, but
+joyously and defiantly, with sheer delight in the intellectual strife.
+I was fired, too, with passionate sympathy for the sufferings of the
+poor, for the overburdened, overdriven masses of the people, not only
+here but in every land, and wherever a blow was struck at Liberty or
+Justice my pen or tongue brake silence. It was a perpetual carrying of
+the fiery cross, and the comfortable did not thank me for shaking them
+out of their soft repose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The antagonism that grew out of ignorance regarded Atheism as implying
+degraded morality and bestial life, and they assailed my conduct not
+on evidence that it was evil, but on the presumption that an Atheist
+must be immoral. Thus a Christian opponent at Leicester assailed me as
+a teacher of free love, fathering on me views which were maintained in
+a book that I had not read, but which, before I had ever seen the
+<i>National Reformer</i>, had been reviewed in its columns&mdash;as it was
+reviewed in other London papers&mdash;and had been commended for its clear
+statement of the Malthusian position, but not for its contention as to
+free love, a theory to which Mr. Bradlaugh was very strongly opposed.
+Nor were the attacks confined to the ascription to me of theories
+which I did not hold, but agents of the Christian Evidence Society, in
+their street preaching, made the foulest accusations against me of
+personal immorality. Remonstrances addressed to the Rev. Mr. Engstr&ouml;m,
+the secretary of the society, brought voluble protestations of
+disavowal and disapproval; but as the peccant agents were continued in
+their employment, the apologies were of small value. No accusation was
+too coarse, no slander too baseless, for circulation by these men; and
+for a long time these indignities caused me bitter suffering,
+outraging my pride, and soiling my good name. The time was to come
+when I should throw that good name to the winds for the sake of the
+miserable, but in those early days I had done nothing to merit, even
+ostensibly, such attacks. Even by educated writers, who should have
+known better, the most wanton accusations of violence and would-be
+destructiveness were brought against Atheists; thus Miss Frances Power
+Cobbe wrote in the <i>Contemporary Review</i> that loss of faith in God
+would bring about the secularisation <i>or destruction</i> of all
+cathedrals, churches, and chapels. &quot;Why,&quot; I wrote in answer, &quot;should
+cathedrals, churches, and chapels be destroyed? Atheism will utilise,
+not destroy, the beautiful edifices which, once wasted on God, shall
+hereafter be consecrated for man. Destroy Westminster Abbey, with its
+exquisite arches, its glorious tones of soft, rich colour, its
+stonework light as if of cloud, its dreamy, subdued twilight, soothing
+as the 'shadow of a great rock in a weary land'? Nay, but reconsecrate
+it to humanity. The fat cherubs who tumble over guns and banners on
+soldiers' graves will fitly be removed to some spot where their clumsy
+forms will no longer mar the upward-springing grace of lines of pillar
+and of arch; but the glorious building wherein now barbaric psalms are
+chanted and droning canons preach of Eastern follies, shall hereafter
+echo the majestic music of Wagner and Beethoven, and the teachers of
+the future shall there unveil to thronging multitudes the beauties and
+the wonders of the world. The 'towers and spires' will not be effaced,
+but they will no longer be symbols of a religion which sacrifices
+earth to heaven and Man to God.&quot;<a href="#FN25"><sup>[25]</sup></a> Between the cultured and the
+uncultured burlesques of Atheism we came off pretty badly, being for
+the most part regarded, as the late Cardinal Manning termed us, as
+mere &quot;cattle.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moral purity and elevation of Atheistic teaching were overlooked
+by many who heard only of my bitter attacks on Christian theology.
+Against the teachings of eternal torture, of the vicarious atonement,
+of the infallibility of the Bible, I levelled all the strength of my
+brain and tongue, and I exposed the history of the Christian Church
+with unsparing hand, its persecutions, its religious wars, its
+cruelties, its oppressions. Smarting under the suffering inflicted on
+myself, and wroth with the cruel pressure continually put on
+Freethinkers by Christian employers, speaking under constant threats
+of prosecution, identifying Christianity with the political and social
+tyrannies of Christendom, I used every weapon that history, science,
+criticism, scholarship could give me against the Churches; eloquence,
+sarcasm, mockery, all were called on to make breaches in the wall of
+traditional belief and crass superstition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To argument and reason I was ever ready to listen, but I turned a
+front of stubborn defiance to all attempts to compel assent to
+Christianity by appeals to force. &quot;The threat and the enforcement of
+legal and social penalties against unbelief can never compel belief.
+Belief must be gained by demonstration; it can never be forced by
+punishment. Persecution makes the stronger among us bitter; the weaker
+among us hypocrites; it never has made and never can make an honest
+convert.&quot;<a href="#FN26"><sup>[26]</sup></a>
+
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That men and women are now able to speak and think as openly as they
+do, that a broader spirit is visible in the Churches, that heresy is
+no longer regarded as morally disgraceful&mdash;these things are very
+largely due to the active and militant propaganda carried on under the
+leadership of Charles Bradlaugh, whose nearest and most trusted friend
+I was. That my tongue was in the early days bitterer than it should
+have been, I frankly acknowledge; that I ignored the services done by
+Christianity and threw light only on its crimes, thus committing
+injustice, I am ready to admit. But these faults were conquered long
+ere I left the Atheistic camp, and they were the faults of my
+personality, not of the Atheistic philosophy. And my main contentions
+were true, and needed to be made; from many a Christian pulpit to-day
+may be heard the echo of the Freethought teachings; men's minds have
+been awakened, their knowledge enlarged; and while I condemn the
+unnecessary harshness of some of my language, I rejoice that I played
+my part in that educating of England which has made impossible for
+evermore the crude superstitions of the past, and the repetition of
+the cruelties and injustices under which preceding heretics suffered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But my extreme political views had also much to do with the general
+feeling of hatred with which I was regarded. Politics, as such, I
+cared not for at all, for the necessary compromises of political life
+were intolerable to me; but wherever they touched on the life of the
+people they became to me of burning interest. The land question, the
+incidence of taxation, the cost of Royalty, the obstructive power of
+the House of Lords&mdash;these were the matters to which I put my hand; I
+was a Home Ruler, too, of course, and a passionate opponent of all
+injustice to nations weaker than ourselves, so that I found myself
+always in opposition to the Government of the day. Against our
+aggressive and oppressive policy in Ireland, in the Transvaal, in
+India, in Afghanistan, in Burmah, in Egypt, I lifted up my voice in
+all our great towns, trying to touch the consciences of the people,
+and to make them feel the immorality of a land-stealing, piratical
+policy. Against war, against capital punishment, against flogging,
+demanding national education instead of big guns, public libraries
+instead of warships&mdash;no wonder I was denounced as an agitator, a
+firebrand, and that all orthodox society turned up at me its most
+respectable nose.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHVIII"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER VIII.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+AT WORK.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+From this sketch of the inner sources of action let me turn to the
+actions themselves, and see how the outer life was led which fed
+itself at these springs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have said that the friendship between Mr. Bradlaugh and myself dated
+from our first meeting, and a few days after our talk in Turner Street
+he came down to see me at Norwood. It was characteristic of the man
+that he refused my first invitation, and bade me to think well ere I
+asked him to my house. He told me that he was so hated by English
+society that any friend of his would be certain to suffer, and that I
+should pay heavily for any friendship extended to him. When, however,
+I wrote to him, repeating my invitation, and telling him that I had
+counted the cost, he came to see me. His words came true; my
+friendship for him alienated from me even many professed Freethinkers,
+but the strength and the happiness of it outweighed a thousand times
+the loss it brought, and never has a shadow of regret touched me that
+I clasped hands with him in 1874, and won the noblest friend that
+woman ever had. He never spoke to me a harsh word; where we differed,
+he never tried to override my judgment, nor force on me his views; we
+discussed all points of difference as equal friends; he guarded me
+from all suffering as far as friend might, and shared with me all the
+pain he could not turn aside; all the brightness of my stormy life
+came to me through him, from his tender thoughtfulness, his ever-ready
+sympathy, his generous love. He was the most unselfish man I ever
+knew, and as patient as he was strong. My quick, impulsive nature
+found in him the restful strength it needed, and learned from him the
+self-control it lacked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was the merriest of companions in our rare hours of relaxation; for
+many years he was wont to come to my house in the morning, after the
+hours always set aside by him for receiving poor men who wanted advice
+on legal and other matters&mdash;for he was a veritable poor man's lawyer,
+always ready to help and counsel&mdash;and, bringing his books and papers,
+he would sit writing, hour after hour, I equally busy with my own
+work, now and then, perhaps, exchanging a word, breaking off just for
+lunch and dinner, and working on again in the evening till about ten
+o'clock&mdash;he always went early to bed when at home&mdash;he would take
+himself off again to his lodgings, about three-quarters of a mile
+away. Sometimes he would play cards for an hour, euchre being our
+favourite game. But while we were mostly busy and grave, we would make
+holiday sometimes, and then he was like a boy, brimming over with
+mirth, full of quaint turns of thought and speech; all the country
+round London has for me bright memories of our wanderings&mdash;Richmond,
+where we tramped across the park, and sat under its mighty trees;
+Windsor, with its groves of bracken; Kew, where we had tea in a funny
+little room, with watercress <i>ad libitum</i>; Hampton Court, with its
+dishevelled beauties; Maidenhead and Taplow, where the river was the
+attraction; and, above all, Broxbourne, where he delighted to spend
+the day with his fishing-rod, wandering along the river, of which he
+knew every eddy. For he was a great fisherman, and he taught me all
+the mysteries of the craft, mirthfully disdainful of my dislike of the
+fish when I had caught them. And in those days he would talk of all
+his hopes of the future, of his work, of his duty to the thousands who
+looked to him for guidance, of the time when he would sit in
+Parliament as member for Northampton, and help to pass into laws the
+projects of reform for which he was battling with pen and tongue. How
+often he would voice his love of England, his admiration of her
+Parliament, his pride in her history. Keenly alive to the blots upon
+it in her sinful wars of conquest, in the cruel wrongs inflicted upon
+subject peoples, he was yet an Englishman to the heart's core, but
+feeling above all the Englishman's duty, as one of a race that had
+gripped power and held it, to understand the needs of those he ruled,
+and to do justice willingly, since compulsion to justice there was
+none. His service to India in the latest years of his life was no
+suddenly accepted task. He had spoken for her, pleaded for her, for
+many a long year, through press and on platform, and his spurs as
+member for India were won long ere he was member of Parliament.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A place on the staff of the <i>National Reformer</i> was offered me by Mr.
+Bradlaugh a few days after our first meeting, and the small weekly
+salary thus earned&mdash;it was only a guinea, for national reformers are
+always poor&mdash;was a very welcome addition to my resources. My first
+contribution appeared in the number for August 30, 1874, over the
+signature of &quot;Ajax,&quot; and I wrote in it regularly until Mr. Bradlaugh
+died; from 1877 until his death I sub-edited it, so as to free him
+from all the technical trouble and the weary reading of copy, and for
+part of this period was also co-editor. I wrote at first under a <i>nom
+de guerre</i>, because the work I was doing for Mr. Scott would have been
+prejudiced had my name appeared in the columns of the terrible
+<i>National Reformer</i>, and until this work&mdash;commenced and paid for&mdash;was
+concluded I did not feel at liberty to use my own name. Afterwards, I
+signed my <i>National Reformer</i> articles, and the tracts written for Mr.
+Scott appeared anonymously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+  The name was suggested by the famous statue of
+  &quot;Ajax Crying for Light,&quot; a cast of which may be seen
+  in the centre walk by any visitor to the Crystal Palace,
+  Sydenham. The cry through the darkness for light,
+  even though light should bring destruction, was one
+  that awoke the keenest sympathy of response from my
+  heart:
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+  &quot;If our fate be death<br>
+  Give light, and let us die!&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To see, to know, to understand, even though the seeing blind, though
+the knowledge sadden, though the understanding shatter the dearest
+hopes&mdash;such has ever been the craving of the upward-striving mind in
+man. Some regard it as a weakness, as a folly, but I am sure that it
+exists most strongly in some of the noblest of our race; that from the
+lips of those who have done most in lifting the burden of ignorance
+from the overstrained and bowed shoulders of a stumbling world has
+gone out most often into the empty darkness the pleading, impassioned
+cry:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Give light!&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The light may come with a blinding flash, but it is light none the
+less, and we can see.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now the time had come when I was to use that gift of speech which
+I had discovered in Sibsey Church that I possessed, and to use it to
+move hearts and brains all over the English land. In 1874, tentatively, and in 1875 definitely, I took up this keen weapon, and have used it ever
+since. My first attempt was at a garden party, in a brief informal
+debate, and I found that words came readily and smoothly: the second
+in a discussion at the Liberal Social Union on the opening of museums
+and art galleries on Sunday. My first lecture was given at the
+Co-operative Institute, 55, Castle Street, Oxford Street, on August
+25, 1874. Mr. Greening&mdash;then, I think, the secretary&mdash;had invited me
+to read a paper before the society, and had left me the choice of the
+subject. I resolved that my first public lecture should be on behalf
+of my own sex, so I selected for my theme, &quot;The Political Status of
+Women,&quot; and wrote thereon a paper. But it was a very nervous person
+who presented herself at the Co-operative Institute on that August
+evening. When a visit to the dentist is made, and one stands on the
+steps outside, desiring to run away ere the neat little boy in buttons
+opens the door and beams on one with a smile of compassionate
+superiority and implike triumph, then the world seems dark and life is
+as a huge blunder. But all such feelings are poor and weak as compared
+with the sinking of the heart and the trembling of the knees which
+seize upon the unhappy lecturer as he advances towards his first
+audience, and as before his eyes rises a ghastly vision of a
+tongue-tied would-be lecturer, facing rows of listening faces,
+listening to&mdash;silence. But to my surprise all this miserable feeling
+vanished the moment I was on my feet and was looking at the faces
+before me. I felt no tremor of nervousness from the first word to the
+last, and as I heard my own voice ring out over the attentive
+listeners I was conscious of power and of pleasure, not of fear. And
+from that day to this my experience has been the same; before a
+lecture I am horribly nervous, wishing myself at the ends of the
+earth, heart beating violently, and sometimes overcome by deadly
+sickness. Once on my feet, I feel perfectly at my ease, ruler of the
+crowd, master of myself. I often jeer at myself mentally as I feel
+myself throbbing and fearful, knowing that when I stand up I shall be
+all right, and yet I cannot conquer the physical terror and trembling,
+illusory as I know them to be. People often say to me, &quot;You look too
+ill to go on the platform.&quot; And I smile feebly and say I am all right,
+and I often fancy that the more miserably nervous I am in the
+ante-room, the better I speak when once on the platform. My second
+lecture was delivered on September 27th, at Mr. Moncure D. Conway's
+Chapel, in St. Paul's Road, Camden Town, and redelivered a few weeks
+later at a Unitarian Chapel, where the Rev. Peter Dean was minister.
+This was on the &quot;True Basis of Morality,&quot; and was later printed as a
+pamphlet, which attained a wide circulation. This was all I did in the
+way of speaking in 1874, but I took silent part in an electioneering
+struggle at Northampton, where a seat for the House of Commons had
+fallen vacant by the death of Mr. Charles Gilpin. Mr. Bradlaugh had
+contested the borough as a Radical in 1868, obtaining 1,086 votes, and
+again in February, 1874, when he received 1,653; of these no less than
+1,060 were plumpers, while his four opponents had only 113, 64, 21 and
+12 plumpers respectively; this band formed the compact and personally
+loyal following which was to win the seat for its chief in 1880, after
+twelve years of steady struggle, and to return him over and over again
+to Parliament during the long contest which followed his election, and
+which ended in his final triumph. They never wavered in their
+allegiance to &quot;our Charlie,&quot; but stood by him through evil report and
+good report, when he was outcast as when he was triumphant, loving him
+with a deep, passionate devotion, as honourable to them as it was
+precious to him. I have seen him cry like a child at evidences of
+their love for him, he whose courage no danger could daunt, and who
+was never seen to blench before hatred nor change his stern immobility
+in the face of his foes. Iron to enmity, he was soft as a woman to
+kindness; unbending as steel to pressure, he was ductile as wax to
+love. John Stuart Mill had the insight in 1868 to see his value, and
+the courage to recognise it. He strongly supported his candidature,
+and sent a donation to his election expenses. In his &quot;Autobiography&quot;
+he wrote (pp. 311, 312):&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;He had the support of the working classes; having heard him speak I
+knew him to be a man of ability, and he had proved that he was the
+reverse of a demagogue by placing himself in strong opposition to the
+prevailing opinion of the Democratic party on two such important
+subjects as Malthusianism and Proportional Representation. Men of this
+sort, who, while sharing the democratic feeling of the working
+classes, judge political questions for themselves, and have the
+courage to assert their individual convictions against popular
+opposition, were needed, as it seemed to me, in Parliament; and I did
+not think that Mr. Bradlaugh's anti-religious opinions (even though he
+had been intemperate in the expression of them) ought to exclude him.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It has been said that Mr. Mill's support of Mr. Bradlaugh's
+candidature at Northampton cost him his own seat at Westminster, and
+so bitter was bigotry at that time that the statement is very likely
+to be true. On this, Mr. Mill himself said: &quot;It was the right thing to
+do, and if the election were yet to take place, I would do it again.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this election of September, 1874&mdash;the second in the year, for the
+general election had taken place in the February, and Mr. Bradlaugh
+had been put up and defeated during his absence in America&mdash;I went
+down to Northampton to report electioneering incidents for the
+<i>National Reformer</i>, and spent some days there in the whirl of the
+struggle. The Whig party was more bitter against Mr. Bradlaugh than
+was the Tory. Strenuous efforts were made to procure a Liberal
+candidate, who would be able at least to prevent Mr. Bradlaugh's
+return, and, by dividing the Liberal and Radical party, should let in
+a Tory rather than the detested Radical. Messrs. Bell and James and
+Dr. Pearce came on the scene only to disappear. Mr. Jacob Bright and
+Mr. Arnold Morley were vainly suggested. Mr. Ayrton's name was
+whispered. Major Lumley was recommended by Mr. Bernal Osborne. Dr.
+Kenealy proclaimed himself ready to come to the rescue of the Whigs.
+Mr. Tillett, of Norwich, Mr. Cox, of Belper, were invited, but neither
+would consent to oppose a good Radical who had fought two elections at
+Northampton and had been the chosen of the Radical workers for six
+years. At last Mr. William Fowler, a banker, accepted the task of
+handing over the representation of a Liberal and Radical borough to a
+Tory, and duly succeeded in giving the seat to Mr. Mereweather, a very
+reputable Tory lawyer. Mr. Bradlaugh polled 1,766, thus adding another
+133 voters to those who had polled for him in the previous February.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That election gave me my first experience of anything in the nature of
+rioting. The violent abuse levelled against Mr. Bradlaugh by the
+Whigs, and the foul and wicked slanders circulated against him,
+assailing his private life and family relations, had angered almost to
+madness those who knew and loved him; and when it was found that the
+unscrupulous Whig devices had triumphed, had turned the election
+against him, and given over the borough to a Tory, the fury broke out
+into open violence. One illustration may be given as a type of these
+cruel slanders. It was known that Mr. Bradlaugh was separated from his
+wife, and it was alleged that being an Atheist, and, (therefore!) an
+opponent of marriage, he had deserted his wife and children, and left
+them to the workhouse. The cause of the separation was known to very
+few, for Mr. Bradlaugh was chivalrously honourable to women, and he
+would not shield his own good name at the cost of that of the wife of
+his youth and the mother of his children. But since his death his only
+remaining child has, in devotion to her father's memory, stated the
+melancholy truth: that Mrs. Bradlaugh gave way to drink; that for long
+years he bore with her and did all that man could do to save her; that
+finally, hopeless of cure, he broke up his home, and placed his wife
+in the care of her parents in the country, leaving her daughters with
+her, while he worked for their support. No man could have acted more
+generously and wisely under these cruel circumstances than he did, but
+it was, perhaps, going to an extreme of Quixotism, that he concealed
+the real state of the case, and let the public blame him as it would.
+His Northampton followers did not know the facts, but they knew him as
+an upright, noble man, and these brutal attacks on his personal
+character drove them wild. Stray fights had taken place during the
+election over these slanders, and, defeated by such foul weapons, the
+people lost control of their passions. As Mr. Bradlaugh was sitting
+well-nigh exhausted in the hotel, after the declaration of the poll,
+the landlord rushed in, crying to him to go out and try to stop the
+people, or there would be murder done at the &quot;Palmerston,&quot; Mr.
+Fowler's headquarters; the crowd was charging the door, and the
+windows were being broken with showers of stones. Weary as he was, Mr.
+Bradlaugh sprang to his feet, and swiftly made his way to the rescue
+of those who had maligned and defeated him. Flinging himself before
+the doorway, from which the door had just been battered down, he
+knocked down one or two of the most violent, drove the crowd back,
+argued and scolded them into quietness, and finally dispersed them.
+But at nine o'clock he had to leave Northampton to catch the mail
+steamer for America at Queenstown, and after he had left, word went
+round that he had gone, and the riot he had quelled broke out afresh.
+The Riot Act was at last read, the soldiers were called out, stones
+flew freely, heads and windows were broken, but no very serious harm
+was done. The &quot;Palmerston&quot; and the printing-office of the <i>Mercury</i>,
+the Whig organ, were the principal sufferers; doors and windows
+disappearing somewhat completely. The day after the election I
+returned home, and soon after fell ill with a severe attack of
+congestion of the lungs. Soon after my recovery I left Norwood and
+settled in a house in Westbourne Terrace, Bayswater, where I remained
+till 1876.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the following January (1875), after much thought and self-analysis,
+I resolved to give myself wholly to propagandist work, as a
+Freethinker and a Social Reformer, and to use my tongue as well as my
+pen in the struggle. I counted the cost ere I determined on this step,
+for I knew that it would not only outrage the feelings of such new
+friends as I had already made, but would be likely to imperil my
+custody of my little girl. I knew that an Atheist was outside the law,
+obnoxious to its penalties, but deprived of its protection, and that
+the step I contemplated might carry me into conflicts in which
+everything might be lost and nothing could be gained. But the desire
+to spread liberty and truer thought among men, to war against bigotry
+and superstition, to make the world freer and better than I found
+it&mdash;all this impelled me with a force that would not be denied. I
+seemed to hear the voice of Truth ringing over the battlefield: &quot;Who
+will go? Who will speak for me?&quot; And I sprang forward with passionate
+enthusiasm, with resolute cry: &quot;Here am I, send me!&quot; Nor have I ever
+regretted for one hour that resolution, come to in solitude, carried
+out amid the surging life of men, to devote to that sacred cause every
+power of brain and tongue that I possessed. Very solemn to me is the
+responsibility of the public teacher, standing forth in Press and on
+platform to partly mould the thought of his time, swaying thousands of
+readers and hearers year after year. No weighter responsibility can
+any take, no more sacred charge. The written and the spoken word start
+forces none may measure, set working brain after brain, influence
+numbers unknown to the forthgiver of the word, work for good or for
+evil all down the stream of time. Feeling the greatness of the career,
+the solemnity of the duty, I pledged my word then to the cause I loved
+that no effort on my part should be wanted to render myself worthy of
+the privilege of service that I took; that I would read and study, and
+would train every faculty that I had; that I would polish my language,
+discipline my thought, widen my knowledge; and this, at least, I may
+say, that if I have written and spoken much, I have studied and
+thought more, and that I have not given to my mistress Truth that
+&quot;which hath cost me nothing.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This same year (1875) that saw me launched on the world as a public
+advocate of Freethought, saw also the founding of the Theosophical
+Society to which my Freethought was to lead me. I have often since
+thought with pleasure that at the very time I began lecturing in
+England, H.P. Blavatsky was at work in the United States, preparing
+the foundation on which in November, 1875, the Theosophical Society
+was to be raised. And with deeper pleasure yet have I found her
+writing of what she called the noble work against superstition done by
+Charles Bradlaugh and myself, rendering the propaganda of Theosophy
+far more practicable and safer than it would otherwise have been. The
+fight soon began, and with some queer little skirmishes. I was a
+member of the &quot;Liberal Social Union,&quot; and one night a discussion arose
+as to the admissibility of Atheists to the Society. Dr. Zerffi
+declared that he would not remain a member if avowed Atheists were
+admitted. I promptly declared that I was an Atheist, and that the
+basis of the union was liberty of opinion. The result was that I found
+myself cold-shouldered, and those that had been warmly cordial to me
+merely as a non-Christian looked askance at me when I had avowed that
+my scepticism had advanced beyond their &quot;limits of religious thought.&quot;
+The Liberal Social Union soon knew me no more, but in the wider field
+of work open before me, the narrow-mindedness of this petty clique
+troubled me not at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I started my definite lecturing work at South Place Chapel in January,
+1875, Mr. Moncure D. Conway presiding for me, and I find in the
+<i>National Reformer</i> for January 17th, the announcement that &quot;Mrs.
+Annie Besant ('Ajax') will lecture at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, on
+'Civil and Religious Liberty.'&quot; Thus I threw off my pseudonym, and
+rode into the field of battle with uplifted visor. The identification
+led to an odd little exhibition of bigotry. I had been invited by the
+Dialectical Society to read a paper, and had selected for subject,
+&quot;The Existence of God.&quot; (It may be noted, in passing, that young
+students and speakers always select the most tremendous subjects for
+their discourses. One advances in modesty as one advances in
+knowledge, and after eighteen years of platform work, I am far more
+dubious than I was at their beginning as to my power of dealing in any
+sense adequately with the problems of life.) The Dialectical Society
+had for some years held their meetings in a room in Adam Street,
+rented from the Social Science Association. When the members gathered
+as usual on February 17th, the door was found to be locked, and they
+had to gather on the stairs; they found that &quot;Ajax's&quot; as yet
+undelivered paper was too much for Social Science nerves, and that
+entrance to their ordinary meeting-room was then and thenceforth
+denied them. So they, with &quot;Ajax,&quot; found refuge at the Charing Cross
+Hotel, and speculated merrily on the eccentricities of religious
+bigotry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On February 12th I started on my first provincial lecturing tour, and
+after speaking at Birkenhead that evening went on by the night mail to
+Glasgow. Some races&mdash;dog races&mdash;I think, had been going on, and very
+unpleasant were many of the passengers waiting on the platform. Some
+Birkenhead friends had secured me a compartment, and watched over me
+till the train began to move. Then, after we had fairly started, the
+door was flung open by a porter, and a man was thrust in who half
+tumbled on to the seat. As he slowly recovered he stood up, and as his
+money rolled out of his hand on to the floor, and he gazed vaguely at
+it, I saw to my horror that he was drunk. The position was not
+pleasant, for the train was an express, and was not timed to stop for
+a considerable time. My odious fellow-passenger spent some time on the
+floor, hunting after his scattered coins; then he slowly gathered
+himself up and presently became conscious of my presence. He studied
+me for some time, and then proposed to shut the window. I assented
+quietly, not wanting to discuss a trifle and feeling in deadly
+terror&mdash;alone at night in an express with a man not drunk enough to be
+helpless, but too drunk to be controlled. Never before nor since have
+I felt so thoroughly frightened. I can see him still, swaying as he
+stood, with eyes bleared and pendulous lips&mdash;but I sat there quiet and
+outwardly unmoved, as is always my impulse in danger till I see some
+way of escape, only grasping a penknife in my pocket, with a desperate
+resolve to use my feeble weapon as soon as the need arose. The man
+came towards me with a fatuous leer, when a jarring noise was heard
+and the train began to slacken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;What is that?&quot; stammered my drunken companion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;They are putting on the brakes to stop the train,&quot; I answered very
+slowly and distinctly, though a very passion of relief made it hard to
+say quietly the measured words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man sat down stupidly, staring at me, and in a minute or two the
+train pulled up at a station&mdash;it had been stopped by signal. My
+immobility was gone. In a moment I was at the window, called the
+guard, and explained rapidly that I was a woman travelling alone, and
+that a half-drunken man was in the carriage. With the usual kindness
+of a railway official, he at once moved me and my baggage into another
+compartment, into which he locked me, and he kept a friendly watch
+over me at every station at which we stopped until he landed me safely
+at Glasgow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At Glasgow a room had been taken for me at a temperance hotel, and it
+seemed to me so new and lonely a thing to be &quot;all on my own account&quot;
+in a strange hotel in a strange city, that I wanted to sit down and
+cry. This feeling, to which I was too proud to yield, was probably
+partly due to the extreme greyness and grubbiness of my surroundings.
+Things are better now, but in those days temperance hotels were for
+the most part lacking in cleanliness. Abstinence from alcohol and a
+superfluity of &quot;matter in the wrong place&quot; do not seem necessary
+correlatives, yet I rarely went to a temperance hotel in which water
+was liberally used for other purposes than that of drinking. From
+Glasgow I went north to Aberdeen, where I found a very stern and
+critical audience. Not a sound broke the stillness as I walked up the
+hall; not a sound as I ascended the platform and faced the people; the
+canny Scot was not going to applaud a stranger at sight; he was going
+to see what she was like first. In grim silence they listened; I could
+not move them; they were granite like their own granite city, and I
+felt I would like to take off my head and throw it at them, if only to
+break that hard wall. After about twenty minutes, a fortunate phrase
+drew a hiss from some child of the Covenanters. I made a quick retort,
+there was a burst of cheering, and the granite vanished. Never after
+that did I have to complain of the coldness of an Aberdeen audience.
+Back to London from Aberdeen, and a long, weary journey it was, in a
+third-class carriage in the cold month of February; but the labour had
+in it a joy that outpaid all physical discomfort, and the feeling that
+I had found my work in the world gave a new happiness to life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On February 28th I stood for the first time on the platform of the
+Hall of Science, Old Street, St. Luke's, London, and was received with
+that warmth of greeting which Secularists are always so ready to
+extend to any who sacrifice aught to join their ranks. That hall is
+identified in my mind with many a bitter struggle, with both victory
+and defeat, but whether in victory or in defeat I found there always
+welcome; and the love and the courage wherewith Secularists stood by
+me have overpaid a thousandfold any poor services I was fortunate
+enough to render, while in their ranks, to the cause of Liberty, and
+wholly prevent any bitterness arising in my mind for any
+unfriendliness shown me by some, who have perhaps overstepped kindness
+and justice in their sorrowful wrath at my renunciation of Materialism
+and Atheism. So far as health was concerned, the lecturing acted as a
+tonic. My chest had always been a little delicate, and when I
+consulted a doctor on the possibility of my standing platform work, he
+answered, &quot;It will either kill you or cure you.&quot; It entirely cured the
+lung weakness, and I grew strong and vigorous instead of being frail
+and delicate, as of old.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It would be wearisome to go step by step over eighteen years of
+platform work, so I will only select here and there incidents
+illustrative of the whole. And here let me say that the frequent
+attacks made on myself and others, that we were attracted to
+Free-thought propaganda by the gains it offered, formed a somewhat
+grotesque contrast to the facts. On one occasion I spent eight days in
+Northumberland and Durham, gave twelve lectures, and made a deficit of
+eleven shillings on the whole. Of course such a thing could not happen
+in later years, when I had made my name by sheer hard work, but I
+fancy that every Secularist lecturer could tell of similar experiences
+in the early days of &quot;winning his way.&quot; The fact is that from Mr.
+Bradlaugh downwards every one of us could have earned a competence
+with comparative ease in any other line of work, and could have earned
+it with public approval instead of amid popular reproach. Much of my
+early lecturing was done in Northumberland and Durham; the miners
+there are, as a rule, shrewd and hard-headed men, and very cordial is
+the greeting given by them to those they have reason to trust. At
+Seghill and at Bedlington I have slept in their cottages and have been
+welcomed to their tables, and I have a vivid memory of one evening at
+Seghill, after a lecture, when my host, himself a miner, invited about
+a dozen of his comrades to supper to meet me; the talk ran on
+politics, and I soon found that my companions knew more of English
+politics, had a far shrewder notion of political methods, and were,
+therefore, much better worth talking to, than most of the ordinary men
+met at dinner parties &quot;in society.&quot; They were of the &quot;uneducated&quot;
+class despised by &quot;gentlemen,&quot; and had not then the franchise, but
+politically they were far better educated than their social superiors,
+and were far better fitted to discharge the duties of citizenship. How
+well, too, do I remember a ten-mile drive in a butcher's cart, to give
+a lecture in an out-of-the-way spot, unapproached by railway. Such was
+the jolting as we rattled over rough roads and stony places, that I
+felt as though all my bones were broken, and as though I should
+collapse on the platform like a bag half-filled with stones. How kind
+they were to me, those genial, cordial miners, how careful for my
+comfort, and how motherly were the women! Ah! if opponents of my views
+who did not know me were often cruel and malignant, there was
+compensation in the love and honour in which good men and women all
+the country over held me, and their devotion outweighed the hatred,
+and many a time and often soothed a weary and aching heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lecturing in June, 1875, at Leicester, I came for the first time
+across a falsehood that brought sore trouble and cost me more pain
+than I care to tell. An irate Christian opponent, in the discussion
+that followed the lecture, declared that I was responsible for a book
+entitled, &quot;The Elements of Social Science,&quot; which was, he averred,
+&quot;The Bible of Secularists.&quot; I had never heard of the book, but as he
+stated that it was in favour of the abolition of marriage, and that
+Mr. Bradlaugh agreed with it, I promptly contradicted him; for while I
+knew nothing about the book, I knew a great deal about Mr. Bradlaugh,
+and I knew that on the marriage question he was conservative rather
+than revolutionary. He detested &quot;Free Love&quot; doctrines, and had thrown
+himself strongly on the side of the agitation led so heroically for
+many years by Mrs. Josephine Butler. On my return to London after the
+lecture I naturally made inquiry as to the volume and its contents,
+and I found that it had been written by a Doctor of Medicine some
+years before, and sent to the <i>National Reformer</i> for review, as to
+other journals, in ordinary course of business. It consisted of three
+parts&mdash;the first advocated, from the standpoint of medical science,
+what is roughly known as &quot;Free Love&quot;; the second was entirely medical;
+the third consisted of a clear and able exposition of the law of
+population as laid down by the Rev. Mr. Malthus, and&mdash;following the
+lines of John Stuart Mill&mdash;insisted that it was the duty of married
+persons to voluntarily limit their families within their means of
+subsistence. Mr. Bradlaugh, in reviewing the book, said that it was
+written &quot;with honest and pure intent and purpose,&quot; and recommended to
+working men the exposition of the law of population. His enemies took
+hold of this recommendation, declared that he shared the author's
+views on the impermanence of the marriage tie, and, despite his
+reiterated contradictions, they used extracts against marriage from
+the book as containing his views. Anything more meanly vile it would
+be difficult to conceive, but such were the weapons used against him
+all his life, and used often by men whose own lives contrasted most
+unfavourably with his own. Unable to find anything in his own writings
+to serve their purpose, they used this book to damage him with those
+who knew nothing at first-hand of his views. What his enemies feared
+were not his views on marriage&mdash;which, as I have said, was
+conservative&mdash;but his Radicalism and his Atheism. To discredit him as
+politician they maligned him socially, and the idea that a man desires
+&quot;to abolish marriage and the home,&quot; is a most convenient poniard, and
+the one most certain to wound. This was the origin of his worst
+difficulties, to be intensified, ere long, by his defence of
+Malthusianism. On me also fell the same lash, and I found myself held
+up to hatred as upholder of views that I abhorred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I may add that far warmer praise than that bestowed on this book by
+Mr. Bradlaugh was given by other writers, who were never attacked in
+the same way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the <i>Reasoner</i>, edited by Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, I find warmer
+praise of it than in the <i>National Reformer</i>; in the review the
+following passage appears:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;In some respects all books of this class are evils: but it would be
+weakness and criminal prudery&mdash;a prudery as criminal as vice
+itself&mdash;not to say that such a book as the one in question is not only
+a far lesser evil than the one that it combats, but in one sense a
+book which it is a mercy to issue and courage to publish.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Examiner</i>, reviewing the same book, declared it to be&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;A very valuable, though rather heterogeneous book.... This is, we
+believe, the only book that has fully, honestly, and in a scientific
+spirit recognised all the elements in the problem&mdash;How are mankind to
+triumph over poverty, with its train of attendant evils?&mdash;and
+fearlessly endeavoured to find a practical solution.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>British Journal of Homoeopathy</i> wrote:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Though quite out of the province of our journal, we cannot refrain
+from stating that this work is unquestionably the most remarkable one,
+in many respects, we have ever met with. Though we differ <i>toto coelo</i>
+from the author in his views of religion and morality, and hold some
+of his remedies to tend rather to a dissolution than a reconstruction
+of society, yet we are bound to admit the benevolence and philanthropy
+of his motives. The scope of the work is nothing less than the whole
+field of political economy.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ernest Jones and others wrote yet more strongly, but out of all these
+Charles Bradlaugh alone has been selected for reproach, and has had
+the peculiar views of the anonymous author fathered on himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some of the lecture work in those days was pretty rough. In Darwen,
+Lancashire, in June, 1875, stone-throwing was regarded as a fair
+argument addressed to the Atheist lecturer. At Swansea, in March,
+1876, the fear of violence was so great that a guarantee against
+damage to the hall was exacted by the proprietor, and no local friend
+had the courage to take the chair for me. In September, 1876, at
+Hoyland, thanks to the exertions of Mr. Hebblethwaite, a Primitive
+Methodist, and two Protestant missionaries, I found the hall packed
+with a crowd that yelled at me with great vigour, stood on forms,
+shook fists at me, and otherwise showed feelings more warm than
+friendly. Taking advantage of a lull in the noise, I began to speak,
+and the tumult sank into quietness; but as I was leaving the hall it
+broke out afresh, and I walked slowly through a crowd that yelled and
+swore and struck at me, but somehow those nearest always shrank back
+and let me pass. In the dark, outside the hall, they took to kicking,
+but only one kick reached me, and the attempts to overturn the cab
+were foiled by the driver, who put his horse at a gallop. Later in the
+same month Mr. Bradlaugh and I visited Congleton together, having been
+invited there by Mr. and Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy. Mr. Bradlaugh
+lectured on the first evening to an accompaniment of broken windows,
+and I, sitting with Mrs. Elmy facing the platform, received a rather
+heavy blow on the back of the head from a stone thrown by some one in
+the room. We had a mile and a half to walk from the hall to the house,
+and were accompanied all the way by a stone-throwing crowd, who sang
+hymns at the tops of their voices, with interludes of curses and foul
+words. On the following evening I lectured, and our stone-throwing
+admirers escorted us to the hall; in the middle of the lecture a man
+shouted, &quot;Put her out!&quot; and a well-known wrestler of the
+neighbourhood, named Burbery, who had come to the hall with some
+friends to break up the meeting, stood up as at a signal in front of
+the platform and loudly interrupted. Mr. Bradlaugh, who was in the
+chair, told him to sit down, and, as he persisted in interrupting,
+informed him that he must either be quiet or go out. &quot;Put me out!&quot;
+shouted Mr. Burbery, striking an attitude. Mr. Bradlaugh left the
+platform and walked up to the noisy swashbuckler, who at once grappled
+with him and tried to throw him. But Mr. Burbery had not reckoned on
+the massive strength of his opponent, and when the &quot;throw&quot; was
+complete Mr. Burbery was underneath. Amid much excitement Mr. Burbery
+was propelled towards the door, being gently used on the way as a
+battering-ram against his friends who rushed to the rescue, and at the
+door was handed over to the police. The chairman then resumed his
+normal duties, with a brief &quot;Go on&quot; to me, and I promptly went on,
+finishing the lecture in peace. But outside the hall there was plenty
+of stone-throwing, and Mrs. Elmy received a cut on the temple from a
+flint. This stormy work gradually lessened, and my experience of it
+was a mere trifle compared to that which my predecessors had faced.
+Mr. Bradlaugh's early experiences involved much serious rioting, and
+Mrs. Harriet Law, a woman of much courage and of strong natural
+ability, had many a rough meeting in her lecturing days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In September, 1875, Mr. Bradlaugh again sailed for America, still to
+earn money there to pay his debts. Unhappily he was struck down by
+typhoid fever, and all his hopes of freeing himself thus were
+destroyed. His life was well-nigh despaired of, but the admirable
+skill of physician and nurse pulled him through. Said the <i>Baltimore
+Advertiser</i>:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;This long and severe illness has disappointed the hopes and retarded
+the object for which he came to this country; but he is gentleness and
+patience itself in his sickness in this strange land, and has endeared
+himself greatly to his physicians and attendants by his gratitude and
+appreciation of the slightest attention.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His fortitude in face of death was also much commented on, lying there
+as he did far from home and from all he loved best. Never a quiver of
+fear touched him as he walked down into the valley of the shadow of
+death; the Rev. Mr. Frothingham bore public and admiring testimony in
+his own church to Mr. Bradlaugh's noble serenity, at once fearless and
+unpretending, and, himself a Theist, gave willing witness to the
+Atheist's calm strength. He came back to us at the end of September,
+worn to a shadow, weak as a child, and for many a long month he bore
+the traces of his wrestle with death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One part of my autumn's work during his absence was the delivery and
+subsequent publication of six lectures on the French Revolution. That
+stormy time had for me an intense fascination. I brooded over it,
+dreamed over it, and longed to tell the story from the people's point
+of view. I consequently read a large amount of the current literature
+of the time, as well as Louis Blanc's monumental work and the
+histories of Michelet, Lamartine, and others. Fortunately for me, Mr.
+Bradlaugh had a splendid collection of books on the subject, and ere
+we left England he brought me two cabs-full of volumes, aristocratic,
+ecclesiastical, democratic, and I studied all these diligently, and
+lived in them, till the French Revolution became to me as a drama in
+which I had myself taken part, and the actors were to me as personal
+friends and foes. In this, again, as in so much of my public work, I
+have to thank Mr. Bradlaugh for the influence which led me to read
+fully all sides of a question, and to read most carefully those from
+which I differed most, ere I considered myself competent to write or
+to speak thereon. From 1875 onwards I held office as one of the
+vice-presidents of the National Secular Society&mdash;a society founded on
+a broad basis of liberty, with the inspiring motto, &quot;We Search for
+Truth.&quot; Mr. Bradlaugh was president, and I held office under him till
+he resigned his post in February, 1890, nine months after I had joined
+the Theosophical Society. The N.S.S., under his judicious and
+far-sighted leadership, became a real force in the country,
+theologically and politically, embracing large numbers of men and
+women who were Freethinkers as well as Radicals, and forming a nucleus
+of earnest workers, able to gather round them still larger numbers of
+others, and thus to powerfully affect public opinion. Once a year the
+society met in conference, and many a strong and lasting friendship
+between men living far apart dated from these yearly gatherings, so
+that all over the country spread a net-work of comradeship between the
+staunch followers of &quot;our Charlie.&quot; These were the men and women who
+paid his election expenses over and over again, supported him in his
+Parliamentary struggle, came up to London to swell the demonstrations
+in his favour. And round them grew up a huge party&mdash;&quot;the largest
+personal following of any public man since Mr. Gladstone,&quot; it was once
+said by an eminent man&mdash;who differed from him in theology, but
+passionately supported him in politics; miners, cutlers, weavers,
+spinners, shoemakers, operatives of every trade, strong, sturdy,
+self-reliant men who loved him to the last.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHIX"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER IX.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+THE KNOWLTON PAMPHLET.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+The year 1877 dawned, and in its early days began a struggle which,
+ending in victory all along the line, brought with it pain and anguish
+that I scarcely care to recall. An American physician, Dr. Charles
+Knowlton, convinced of the truth of the teaching of the Rev. Mr.
+Malthus, and seeing that that teaching had either no practical value
+or tended to the great increase of prostitution, unless married
+people were taught to limit their families within their means of
+livelihood&mdash;wrote a pamphlet on the voluntary limitation of the
+family. It was published somewhere in the Thirties&mdash;about 1835, I
+think&mdash;and was sold unchallenged in England as well as in America for
+some forty years. Philosophers of the Bentham school, like John Stuart
+Mill, endorsed its teachings, and the bearing of population on poverty
+was an axiom in economic literature. Dr. Knowlton's work was a
+physiological treatise, advocating conjugal prudence and parental
+responsibility; it argued in favour of early marriage, with a view to
+the purity of social life; but as early marriage between persons of
+small means generally implies a large family, leading either to
+pauperism or to lack of necessary food, clothing, education, and fair
+start in life for the children, Dr. Knowlton advocated the restriction
+of the number of the family within the means of subsistence, and
+stated the methods by which this restriction could be carried out. The
+book was never challenged till a disreputable Bristol bookseller put
+some copies on sale to which he added some improper pictures, and he
+was prosecuted and convicted. The publisher of the <i>National Reformer</i>
+and of Mr. Bradlaugh's and my books and pamphlets had taken over a
+stock of Knowlton's pamphlets among other literature he bought, and he
+was prosecuted and, to our great dismay, pleaded guilty. We at once
+removed our publishing from his hands, and after careful deliberation
+we decided to publish the incriminated pamphlet in order to test the
+right of discussion on the population question, when, with the advice
+to limit the family, information was given as to how that advice could
+be followed. We took a little shop, printed the pamphlet, and sent
+notice to the police that we would commence the sale at a certain day
+and hour, and ourselves sell the pamphlet, so that no one else might
+be endangered by our action. We resigned our offices in the National
+Secular Society that we might not injure the society, but the
+executive first, and then the Annual Conference, refused to accept the
+resignations. Our position as regarded the pamphlet was simple and
+definite; had it been brought to us for publication, we stated, we
+should not have published it, for it was not a treatise of high merit;
+but, prosecuted as immoral because it advised the limitation of the
+family, it at once embodied the right of publication. In a preface to
+the republished edition, we wrote:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;We republish this pamphlet, honestly believing that on all questions
+affecting the happiness of the people, whether they be theological,
+political, or social, fullest right of free discussion ought to be
+maintained at all hazards. We do not personally endorse all that Dr.
+Knowlton says: his 'Philosophical Proem' seems to us full of
+philosophical mistakes, and&mdash;as we are neither of us doctors&mdash;we are
+not prepared to endorse his medical views; but since progress can only
+be made through discussion, and no discussion is possible where
+differing opinions are suppressed, we claim the right to publish all
+opinions, so that the public, enabled to see all sides of a question,
+may have the materials for forming a sound judgment.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We were not blind to the danger to which this defiance of the
+authorities exposed us, but it was not the danger of failure, with the
+prison as penalty, that gave us pause. It was the horrible
+misconceptions that we saw might arise; the odious imputations on
+honour and purity that would follow. Could we, the teachers of a lofty
+morality, venture to face a prosecution for publishing what would be
+technically described as an obscene book, and risk the ruin of our
+future, dependent as that was on our fair fame? To Mr. Bradlaugh it
+meant, as he felt, the almost certain destruction of his Parliamentary
+position, the forging by his own hands of a weapon that in the hands
+of his foes would be well-nigh fatal. To me it meant the loss of the
+pure reputation I prized, the good name I had guarded&mdash;scandal the
+most terrible a woman could face. But I had seen the misery of the
+poor, of my sister-women with children crying for bread; the wages of
+the workmen were often sufficient for four, but eight or ten they
+could not maintain. Should I set my own safety, my own good name,
+against the helping of these? Did it matter that my reputation should
+be ruined, if its ruin helped to bring remedy to this otherwise
+hopeless wretchedness of thousands? What was worth all my talk about
+self-sacrifice and self-surrender, if, brought to the test, I failed?
+So, with heart aching but steady, I came to my resolution; and though
+I know now that I was wrong intellectually, and blundered in the
+remedy, I was right morally in the will to sacrifice all to help the
+poor, and I can rejoice that I faced a storm of obloquy fiercer and
+harder to bear than any other which can ever touch me again. I learned
+a lesson of stern indifference to all judgments from without that were
+not endorsed by condemnation from within. The long suffering that
+followed was a splendid school for the teaching of endurance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The day before the pamphlet was put on sale we ourselves delivered
+copies to the Chief Clerk of the Magistrates at Guildhall, to the
+officer in charge at the City Police Office in Old Jewry, and to the
+Solicitor for the City of London. With each pamphlet was a notice that
+we would attend and sell the book from 4 to 5 p.m. on the following
+day, Saturday, March 24th. This we accordingly did, and in order to
+save trouble we offered to attend daily at the shop from 10 to 11 a.m.
+to facilitate our arrest, should the authorities determine to
+prosecute. The offer was readily accepted, and after some little
+delay&mdash;during which a deputation from the Christian Evidence Society
+waited upon Mr. Cross to urge the Tory Government to prosecute
+us&mdash;warrants were issued against us and we were arrested on April 6th.
+Letters of approval and encouragement came from the most diverse
+quarters, including among their writers General Garibaldi, the
+well-known economist, Yves Guyot, the great French constitutional
+lawyer, Emile Acollas, together with letters literally by the hundred
+from poor men and women thanking and blessing us for the stand taken.
+Noticeable were the numbers of letters from clergymen's wives, and
+wives of ministers of all denominations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After our arrest we were taken to the police-station in Bridewell
+Place, and thence to the Guildhall, where Alderman Figgins was
+sitting, before whom we duly appeared, while in the back of the court
+waited what an official described as &quot;a regular waggon-load of bail.&quot;
+We were quickly released, the preliminary investigation being fixed
+for ten days later&mdash;April 17th. At the close of the day the magistrate
+released us on our own recognisances, without bail; and it was so
+fully seen on all sides that we were fighting for a principle that no
+bail was asked for during the various stages of the trial. Two days
+later we were committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court, but
+Mr. Bradlaugh moved for a writ of <i>certiorari</i> to remove the trial to
+the Court of Queen's Bench; Lord Chief Justice Cockburn said he would
+grant the writ if &quot;upon looking at it (the book), we think its object
+is the legitimate one of promoting knowledge on a matter of human
+interest,&quot; but not if the science were only a cover for impurity, and
+he directed that copies of the book should be handed in for perusal by
+himself and Mr. Justice Mellor. Having read the book they granted the
+writ.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The trial commenced on June 18th before the Lord Chief Justice of
+England and a special jury, Sir Hardinge Giffard, the
+Solicitor-General of the Tory Government, leading against us, and we
+defending ourselves. The Lord Chief Justice &quot;summed up strongly for an
+acquittal,&quot; as a morning paper said; he declared that &quot;a more
+ill-advised and more injudicious proceeding in the way of a
+prosecution was probably never brought into a court of justice,&quot; and
+described us as &quot;two enthusiasts who have been actuated by a desire to
+do good in a particular department of society.&quot; He then went on to a
+splendid statement of the law of population, and ended by praising our
+straightforwardness and asserting Knowlton's honesty of intention.
+Every one in court thought that we had won our case, but they had not
+taken into account the religious and political hatred against us and
+the presence on the jury of such men as Mr. Walter, of the <i>Times</i>.
+After an hour and thirty-five minutes of delay the verdict was a
+compromise: &quot;We are unanimously of opinion that the book in question
+is calculated to deprave public morals, but at the same time we
+entirely exonerate the defendants from any corrupt motive in
+publishing it.&quot; The Lord Chief Justice looked troubled, and said that
+he should have to translate the verdict into one of guilty, and on
+that some of the jury turned to leave the box, it having been
+agreed&mdash;we heard later from one of them&mdash;that if the verdict were not
+accepted in that form they should retire again, as six of the jury
+were against convicting us; but the foreman, who was bitterly hostile,
+jumped at the chance of snatching a conviction, and none of those in
+our favour had the courage to contradict him on the spur of the
+moment, so the foreman's &quot;Guilty&quot; passed, and the judge set us free,
+on Mr. Bradlaugh's recognisances to come up for judgment that day
+week.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On that day we moved to quash the indictment and for a new trial,
+partly on a technical ground and partly on the ground that the
+verdict, having acquitted us of wrong motive, was in our favour, not
+against us. On this the Court did not agree with us, holding that the
+part of the indictment alleging corrupt motive was superfluous. Then
+came the question of sentence, and on this the Lord Chief Justice did
+his best to save us; we were acquitted of any intent to violate the
+law; would we submit to the verdict of the jury and promise not to
+sell the book? No, we would not; we claimed the right to sell, and
+meant to vindicate it. The judge pleaded, argued, finally got angry
+with us, and, at last, compelled to pass sentence, he stated that if
+we would have yielded he would have let us go free without penalty,
+but that as we would set ourselves against the law, break it and defy
+it&mdash;a sore offence from the judge's point of view&mdash;he could only pass
+a heavy sentence on each of six months' imprisonment, a fine of &pound;200,
+and recognisances of &pound;500 for two years, and this, as he again
+repeated, upon the assumption &quot;that they do intend to set the law at
+defiance.&quot; Even despite this he made us first-class misdemeanants.
+Then, as Mr. Bradlaugh stated that we should move for a writ of error,
+he liberated us on Mr. Bradlaugh's recognisance for &pound;100, the queerest
+comment on his view of the case and of our characters, since we were
+liable jointly to &pound;1,400 under the sentence, to say nothing of the
+imprisonment. But prison and money penalties vanished into thin air,
+for the writ of error was granted, proved successful, and the verdict
+was quashed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then ensued a somewhat anxious time. We were resolute to continue
+selling; were our opponents equally resolved to prosecute us? We could
+not tell. I wrote a pamphlet entitled &quot;The Law of Population,&quot; giving
+the arguments which had convinced me of its truth, the terrible
+distress and degradation entailed on families by overcrowding and the
+lack of the necessaries of life, pleading for early marriages that
+prostitution might be destroyed, and limitation of the family that
+pauperism might be avoided; finally, giving the information which
+rendered early marriage without these evils possible. This pamphlet
+was put in circulation as representing our view of the subject, and we
+again took up the sale of Knowlton's. Mr. Bradlaugh carried the war
+into the enemy's country, and commenced an action against the police
+for the recovery of some pamphlets they had seized; he carried the
+action to a successful issue, recovered the pamphlets, bore them off
+in triumph, and we sold them all with an inscription across them,
+&quot;Recovered from the police.&quot; We continued the sale of Knowlton's tract
+for some time, until we received an intimation that no further
+prosecution would be attempted, and on this we at once dropped its
+publication, substituting for it my &quot;Law of Population.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the worst part of the fight, for me, was to come. Prosecution of
+the &quot;Law of Population&quot; was threatened, but never commenced; a worse
+weapon against me was in store. An attempt had been made in August,
+1875, to deprive me of the custody of my little girl by hiding her
+away when she went on her annual visit of one month to her father, but
+I had promptly recovered her by threatening to issue a writ of <i>habeas
+corpus.</i> Now it was felt that the Knowlton trial might be added to the
+charges of blasphemy that could be urged against me, and that this
+double-barrelled gun might be discharged with effect. I received
+notice in January, 1878, that an application was to be made to the
+High Court of Chancery to deprive me of the child, but the petition
+was not filed till the following April. Mabel was dangerously ill with
+scarlet fever at the time, and though this fact was communicated to
+her father I received a copy of the petition while sitting at her
+bedside. The petition alleged that, &quot;The said Annie Besant is, by
+addresses, lectures, and writings, endeavouring to propagate the
+principles of Atheism, and has published a book entitled 'The Gospel
+of Atheism.' She has also associated herself with an infidel lecturer
+and author named Charles Bradlaugh in giving lectures and in
+publishing books and pamphlets, whereby the truth of the Christian
+religion is impeached, and disbelief in all religion inculcated.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It further alleged against me the publication of the Knowlton
+pamphlet, and the writing of the &quot;Law of Population.&quot; Unhappily, the
+petition came for hearing before the then Master of the Rolls, Sir
+George Jessel, a man animated by the old spirit of Hebrew bigotry, to
+which he had added the time-serving morality of a &quot;man of the world,&quot;
+sceptical as to all sincerity, and contemptuous of all devotion to an
+unpopular cause. The treatment I received at his hands on my first
+appearance in court told me what I had to expect. I had already had
+some experience of English judges, the stately kindness and gentleness
+of the Lord Chief Justice, the perfect impartiality and dignified
+courtesy of the Lords Justices of Appeal. My astonishment, then, can
+be imagined when, in answer to a statement by Mr. Ince, Q.C., that I
+appeared in person, I heard a harsh, loud voice exclaim:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Appear in person? A lady appear in person? Never heard of such a
+thing! Does the lady really appear in person?&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the London papers had been full of my appearing in person in the
+other courts and had contained the high compliments of the Lord Chief
+Justice on my conduct of my own case, Sir George Jessel's pretended
+astonishment seemed a little overdone. After a variety of similar
+remarks delivered in the most grating tones and in the roughest
+manner, Sir George Jessel tried to obtain his object by browbeating me
+directly. &quot;Is this the lady?&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;I am the respondent, my lord, Mrs. Besant.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Then I advise you, Mrs. Besant, to employ counsel to represent you,
+if you can afford it; and I suppose you can.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;With all submission to your lordship, I am afraid I must claim my
+right of arguing my case in person.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;You will do so if you please, of course, but I think you had much
+better appear by counsel. I give you notice that, if you do not, you
+must not expect to be shown any consideration. You will not be heard
+by me at any greater length than the case requires, nor allowed to go
+into irrelevant matter, as persons who argue their own cases usually
+do.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;I trust I shall not do so, my lord; but in any case I shall be
+arguing under your lordship's complete control.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This encouraging beginning may be taken as a sample of the case&mdash;it
+was one long fight against clever counsel, aided by a counsel instead
+of a judge on the bench. Only once did judge and counsel fall out. Mr.
+Ince and Mr. Bardswell had been arguing that my Atheism and
+Malthusianism made me an unfit guardian for my child; Mr. Ince
+declared that Mabel, educated by me, would &quot;be helpless for good in
+this world,&quot; and &quot;hopeless for good hereafter, outcast in this life
+and damned in the next.&quot; Mr. Bardswell implored the judge to consider
+that my custody of her &quot;would be detrimental to the future prospects
+of the child in society, to say nothing of her eternal prospects.&quot; Had
+not the matter been to me of such heart-breaking importance, I could
+have laughed at the mixture of Mrs. Grundy, marriage establishment,
+and hell, presented as an argument for robbing a mother of her child.
+But Mr. Bardswell carelessly forgot that Sir George Jessel was a Jew,
+and lifting eyes to heaven in horrified appeal, he gasped out:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Your lordship, I think, will scarcely credit it, but Mrs. Besant
+says, in a later affidavit, that she took away the Testament from the
+child because it contained coarse passages unfit for a child to read.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The opportunity was too tempting for a Jew to refrain from striking at
+a book written by apostate Jews, and Sir George Jessel answered
+sharply:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;It is not true to say there are no passages unfit for a child's
+reading, because I think there are a great many.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;I do not know of any passages that could fairly be called coarse.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;I cannot quite assent to that.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Barring this little episode judge and counsel showed a charming
+unanimity. I distinctly said I was an Atheist, that I had withdrawn
+the child from religious instruction at the day-school she attended,
+that I had written various anti-Christian books, and so on; but I
+claimed the child's custody on the ground that the deed of separation
+distinctly gave it to me, and had been executed by her father after I
+had left the Christian Church, and that my opinions were not
+sufficient to invalidate it. It was admitted on the other side that
+the child was admirably cared for, and there was no attempt at
+attacking my personal character. The judge stated that I had taken the
+greatest possible care of the child, but decided that the mere fact of
+my refusing to give the child religious instruction was sufficient
+ground for depriving me of her custody. Secular education he regarded
+as &quot;not only reprehensible, but detestable, and likely to work utter
+ruin to the child, and I certainly should upon this ground alone
+decide that this child ought not to remain another day under the care
+of her mother.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sir George Jessel denounced also my Malthusian views in a fashion at
+once so brutal and so untruthful as to facts, that some years later
+another judge, the senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court of New
+South Wales, declared in a judgment delivered in his own court that
+there was &quot;no language used by Lord Cockburn which justified the
+Master of the Rolls in assuming that Lord Cockburn regarded the book
+as obscene,&quot; and that &quot;little weight is to be attached to his opinion
+on a point not submitted for his decision&quot;; he went on to administer a
+sharp rebuke for the way in which Sir George Jessel travelled outside
+the case, and remarked that &quot;abuse, however, of an unpopular opinion,
+whether indulged in by judges or other people, is not argument, nor
+can the vituperation of opponents in opinion prove them to be
+immoral.&quot; However, Sir George Jessel was all-powerful in his own
+court, and he deprived me of my child, refusing to stay the order even
+until the hearing of my appeal against his decision. A messenger from
+the father came to my house, and the little child was carried away by
+main force, shrieking and struggling, still weak from the fever, and
+nearly frantic with fear and passionate resistance. No access to her
+was given me, and I gave notice that if access were denied me, I would
+sue for a restitution of conjugal rights, merely that I might see my
+children. But the strain had been too great, and I nearly went mad,
+spending hours pacing up and down the empty rooms, striving to weary
+myself to exhaustion that I might forget. The loneliness and silence
+of the house, of which my darling had always been the sunshine and the
+music, weighed on me like an evil dream; I listened for the patter of
+the dancing feet, and merry, thrilling laughter that rang through the
+garden, the sweet music of the childish voice; during my sleepless
+nights I missed in the darkness the soft breathing of the little
+child; each morning I longed in vain for the clinging arms and soft,
+sweet kisses. At last health broke down, and fever struck me, and
+mercifully gave me the rest of pain and delirium instead of the agony
+of conscious loss. Through that terrible illness, day after day, Mr.
+Bradlaugh came to me, and sat writing beside me, feeding me with ice
+and milk, refused from all others, and behaving more like a tender
+mother than a man friend; he saved my life, though it seemed to me for
+awhile of little value, till the first months of lonely pain were
+over. When recovered, I took steps to set aside an order obtained by
+Mr. Besant during my illness, forbidding me to bring any suit against
+him, and even the Master of the Rolls, on hearing that all access had
+been denied to me, and the money due to me stopped, uttered words of
+strong condemnation of the way in which I had been treated. Finally
+the deed of separation executed in 1873 was held to be good as
+protecting Mr. Besant from any suit brought by me, whether for divorce
+or for restitution of conjugal rights, while the clauses giving me the
+custody of the child were set aside. The Court of Appeal in April,
+1879, upheld the decision, the absolute right of the father as against
+a married mother being upheld. This ignoring of all right to her
+children on the part of the married mother is a scandal and a wrong
+that has since been redressed by Parliament, and the husband has no
+longer in his grasp this instrument of torture, whose power to agonise
+depends on the tenderness and strength of the motherliness of the
+wife. In the days when the law took my child from me, it virtually
+said to all women: &quot;Choose which of these two positions, as wife and
+mother, you will occupy. If you are legally your husband's wife, you
+can have no legal claim to your children; if legally you are your
+husband's mistress, your rights as mother are secure.&quot; That stigma on
+marriage is now removed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One thing I gained in the Court of Appeal. The Court expressed a
+strong view as to my right of access, and directed me to apply to Sir
+George Jessel for it, adding that it could not doubt he would grant
+it. Under cover of this I applied to the Master of the Rolls, and
+obtained liberal access to the children; but I found that my visits
+kept Mabel in a continual state of longing and fretting for me, while
+the ingenious forms of petty insult that were devised against me and
+used in the children's presence would soon become palpable to them and
+cause continual pain. So, after a painful struggle with myself, I
+resolved to give up the right of seeing them, feeling that thus only
+could I save them from constantly recurring conflict, destructive of
+all happiness and of all respect for one or the other parent.
+Resolutely I turned my back on them that I might spare them trouble,
+and determined that, robbed of my own, I would be a mother to all
+helpless children I could aid, and cure the pain at my own heart by
+soothing the pain of others.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As far as regards this whole struggle over the Knowlton pamphlet,
+victory was finally won all along the line. Not only did we, as
+related, recover all our seized pamphlets, and continue the sale till
+all prosecution and threat of prosecution were definitely surrendered;
+but my own tract had an enormous sale, so that when I withdrew it from
+sale in June, 1891, I was offered a large sum for the copyright, an
+offer which I, of course, refused. Since that time not a copy has been
+sold with my knowledge or permission, but long ere that the pamphlet
+had received a very complete legal vindication. For while it
+circulated untouched in England, a prosecution was attempted against
+it in New South Wales, but was put an end to by an eloquent and
+luminous judgment by the senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court, Mr.
+Justice Windmeyer, in December, 1888. This judge, the most respected
+in the great Australian colony, spoke out plainly and strongly on the
+morality of such teaching. &quot;Take the case,&quot; he said, &quot;of a woman
+married to a drunken husband, steadily ruining his constitution and
+hastening to the drunkard's doom, loss of employment for himself,
+semi-starvation for his family, and finally death, without a shilling
+to leave those whom he has brought into the world, but armed with the
+authority of the law to treat his wife as his slave, ever brutally
+insisting on the indulgence of his marital rights. Where is the
+immorality, if, already broken in health from unresting maternity,
+having already a larger family than she can support when the miserable
+breadwinner has drunk himself to death, the woman avails herself of
+the information given in this book, and so averts the consequences of
+yielding to her husband's brutal insistence on his marital rights?
+Already weighted with a family that she is unable to decently bring
+up, the immorality, it seems to me, would be in the reckless and
+criminal disregard of precautions which would prevent her bringing
+into the world daughters whose future outlook as a career would be
+prostitution, or sons whose inherited taint of alcoholism would soon
+drag them down with their sisters to herd with the seething mass of
+degenerate and criminal humanity that constitutes the dangerous
+classes of great cities. In all these cases the appeal is from
+thoughtless, unreasoning prejudice to conscience, and, if listened to,
+its voice will be heard unmistakably indicating where the path of duty
+lies.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The judge forcibly refused to be any party to the prohibition of such
+a pamphlet, regarding it as of high service to the community. He said:
+&quot;So strong is the dread of the world's censure upon this topic that
+few have the courage openly to express their views upon it; and its
+nature is such that it is only amongst thinkers who discuss all
+subjects, or amongst intimate acquaintances, that community of thought
+upon the question is discovered. But let any one inquire amongst those
+who have sufficient education and ability to think for themselves, and
+who do not idly float, slaves to the current of conventional opinion,
+and he will discover that numbers of men and women of purest lives, of
+noblest aspirations, pious, cultivated, and refined, see no wrong in
+teaching the ignorant that it is wrong to bring into the world
+children to whom they cannot do justice, and who think it folly to
+stop short in telling them simply and plainly how to prevent it. A
+more robust view of morals teaches that it is puerile to ignore human
+passions and human physiology. A clearer perception of truth and the
+safety of trusting to it teaches that in law, as in religion, it is
+useless trying to limit the knowledge of mankind by any inquisitorial
+attempts to place upon a judicial Index Expurgatorius works written
+with an earnest purpose, and commending themselves to thinkers of
+well-balanced minds. I will be no party to any such attempt. I do not
+believe that it was ever meant that the Obscene Publication Act should
+apply to cases of this kind, but only to the publication of such
+matter as all good men would regard as lewd and filthy, to lewd and
+bawdy novels, pictures and exhibitions, evidently published and given
+for lucre's sake. It could never have been intended to stifle the
+expression of thought by the earnest-minded on a subject of
+transcendent national importance like the present, and I will not
+strain it for that purpose. As pointed out by Lord Cockburn in the
+case of the Queen v. Bradlaugh and Besant, all prosecutions of this
+kind should be regarded as mischievous, even by those who disapprove
+the opinions sought to be stifled, inasmuch as they only tend more
+widely to diffuse the teaching objected to. To those, on the other
+hand, who desire its promulgation, it must be a matter of
+congratulation that this, like all attempted persecutions of thinkers,
+will defeat its own object, and that truth, like a torch, 'the more
+it's shook it shines.'&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The argument of Mr. Justice Windmeyer for the Neo-Malthusian position
+was (as any one may see who reads the full text of the judgment) one
+of the most luminous and cogent I have ever read. The judgment was
+spoken of at the time in the English press as a &quot;brilliant triumph for
+Mrs. Besant,&quot; and so I suppose it was; but no legal judgment could
+undo the harm wrought on the public mind in England by malignant and
+persistent misrepresentation. What that trial and its results cost me
+in pain no one but myself will ever know; on the other hand, there was
+the passionate gratitude evidenced by letters from thousands of poor
+married women&mdash;many from the wives of country clergymen and
+curates&mdash;thanking and blessing me for showing them how to escape from
+the veritable hell in which they lived. The &quot;upper classes&quot; of society
+know nothing about the way in which the poor live; how their
+overcrowding destroys all sense of personal dignity, of modesty, of
+outward decency, till human life, as Bishop Fraser justly said, is
+&quot;degraded below the level of the swine.&quot; To such, and among such I
+went, and I could not grudge the price that then seemed to me as the
+ransom for their redemption. To me, indeed, it meant the losing of all
+that made life dear, but for them it seemed to be the gaining of all
+that gave hope of a better future. So how could I hesitate&mdash;I whose
+heart had been fired by devotion to an ideal Humanity, inspired by
+that Materialism that is of love and not of hate?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now, in August, 1893, we find the <i>Christian World,</i> the
+representative organ of orthodox Christian Protestantism, proclaiming
+the right and the duty of voluntary limitation of the family. In a
+leading article, after a number of letters had been inserted, it
+said:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;The conditions are assuredly wrong which bring one member of the
+married partnership into a bondage so cruel. It is no less evident
+that the cause of the bondage in such cases lies in the too rapid
+multiplication of the family. There was a time when any idea of
+voluntary limitation was regarded by pious people as interfering with
+Providence. We are beyond that now, and have become capable of
+recognising that Providence works through the common sense of
+individual brains. We limit population just as much by deferring
+marriage from prudential motives as by any action that may be taken
+after it.... Apart from certain methods of limitation, the morality of
+which is gravely questioned by many, there are certain
+easily-understood physiological laws of the subject, the failure to
+know and to observe which is inexcusable on the part either of men or
+women in these circumstances. It is worth noting in this connection
+that Dr. Billings, in his article in this month's <i>Forum</i>, on the
+diminishing birth-rate of the United States, gives as one of the
+reasons the greater diffusion of intelligence, by means of popular and
+school treatises on physiology, than formerly prevailed.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus has opinion changed in sixteen years, and all the obloquy poured
+on us is seen to have been the outcome of ignorance and bigotry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for the children, what was gained by their separation from me? The
+moment they were old enough to free themselves, they came back to me,
+my little girl's too brief stay with me being ended by her happy
+marriage, and I fancy the fears expressed for her eternal future will
+prove as groundless as the fears for her temporal ruin have proved to
+be! Not only so, but both are treading in my steps as regards their
+views of the nature and destiny of man, and have joined in their
+bright youth the Theosophical Society to which, after so many
+struggles, I won my way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The struggle on the right to discuss the prudential restraint of
+population did not, however, conclude without a martyr. Mr. Edward
+Truelove, alluded to above, was prosecuted for selling a treatise by
+Robert Dale Owen on &quot;Moral Physiology,&quot; and a pamphlet entitled,
+&quot;Individual, Family, and National Poverty.&quot; He was tried on February
+1, 1878, before the Lord Chief Justice in the Court of Queen's Bench,
+and was most ably defended by Professor W.A. Hunter. The jury spent
+two hours in considering their verdict, and returned into court and
+stated that they were unable to agree. The majority of the jury were
+ready to convict, if they felt sure that Mr. Truelove would not be
+punished, but one of them boldly declared in court: &quot;As to the book,
+it is written in plain language for plain people, and I think that
+many more persons ought to know what the contents of the book are.&quot;
+The jury was discharged, in consequence of this one man's courage, but
+Mr. Truelove's persecutors&mdash;the Vice Society&mdash;were determined not to
+let their victim free. They proceeded to trial a second time, and
+wisely endeavoured to secure a special jury, feeling that as
+prudential restraint would raise wages by limiting the supply of
+labour, they would be more likely to obtain a verdict from a jury of
+&quot;gentlemen&quot; than from one composed of workers. This attempt was
+circumvented by Mr. Truelove's legal advisers, who let a <i>procedendo</i>
+go which sent back the trial to the Old Bailey. The second trial was
+held on May 16th at the Central Criminal Court before Baron Pollock
+and a common jury, Professor Hunter and Mr. J.M. Davidson appearing
+for the defence. The jury convicted, and the brave old man,
+sixty-eight years of age, was condemned to four months' imprisonment
+and &pound;50 fine for selling a pamphlet which had been sold unchallenged,
+during a period of forty-five years, by James Watson, George Jacob
+Holyoake, Austin Holyoake, and Charles Watts. Mr. Grain, the counsel
+employed by the Vice Society, most unfairly used against Mr. Truelove
+my &quot;Law of Population,&quot; a pamphlet which contained, Baron Pollock
+said, &quot;the head and front of the offence in the other [the Knowlton]
+case.&quot; I find an indignant protest against this odious unfairness in
+the <i>National Reformer</i> for May 19th: &quot;My 'Law of Population' was used
+against Mr. Truelove as an aggravation of his offence, passing over
+the utter meanness&mdash;worthy only of Collette&mdash;of using against a
+prisoner a book whose author has never been attacked for writing
+it&mdash;does Mr. Collette, or do the authorities, imagine that the
+severity shown to Mr. Truelove will in any fashion deter me from
+continuing the Malthusian propaganda? Let me here assure them, one and
+all, that it will do nothing of the kind; I shall continue to sell the
+'Law of Population' and to advocate scientific checks to population,
+just as though Mr. Collette and his Vice Society were all dead and
+buried. In commonest justice they are bound to prosecute me, and if
+they get, and keep, a verdict against me, and succeed in sending me to
+prison, they will only make people more anxious to read my book, and
+make me more personally powerful as a teacher of the views which they
+attack.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A persistent attempt was made to obtain a writ of error in Mr.
+Truelove's case, but the Tory Attorney-General, Sir John Holker,
+refused it, although the ground on which it was asked was one of the
+grounds on which a similar writ had been granted to Mr. Bradlaugh and
+myself. Mr. Truelove was therefore compelled to suffer his sentence,
+but memorials, signed by 11,000 persons, asking for his release, were
+sent to the Home Secretary from every part of the country, and a
+crowded meeting in St. James's Hall, London, demanded his liberation
+with only six dissentients. The whole agitation did not shorten Mr.
+Truelove's sentence by a single day, and he was not released from
+Coldbath Fields Prison until September 5th. On the 12th of the same
+month the Hall of Science was crowded with enthusiastic friends, who
+assembled to do him honour, and he was presented with a
+beautifully-illuminated address and a purse containing &pound;177
+(subsequent subscriptions raised the amount to &pound;197 16s. 6d.).
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is scarcely necessary to say that one of the results of the
+prosecution was a great agitation throughout the country, and a wide
+popularisation of Malthusian views. Some huge demonstrations were held
+in favour of free discussion; on one occasion the Free Trade Hall,
+Manchester, was crowded to the doors; on another the Star Music Hall,
+Bradford, was crammed in every corner; on another the Town Hall,
+Birmingham, had not a seat or a bit of standing-room unoccupied.
+Wherever we went, separately or together, it was the same story, and
+not only were Malthusian lectures eagerly attended, and Malthusian
+literature eagerly bought, but curiosity brought many to listen to our
+Radical and Freethought lectures, and thousands heard for the first
+time what Secularism really meant. The Press, both London and
+provincial, agreed in branding the prosecution as foolish, and it was
+generally remarked that it resulted only in the wider circulation of
+the indicted book, and the increased popularity of those who had stood
+for the right of publication. The furious attacks since made upon us
+have been made chiefly by those who differ from us in theological
+creed, and who have found a misrepresentation of our prosecution
+served them as a convenient weapon of attack. During the last few
+years public opinion has been gradually coming round to our side, in
+consequence of the pressure of poverty resulting from widespread
+depression of trade, and during the sensation caused in 1884 by &quot;The
+Bitter Cry of Outcast London,&quot; many writers in the <i>Daily
+News</i>&mdash;notably Mr. G.R. Sims&mdash;boldly alleged that the distress was to
+a great extent due to the large families of the poor, and mentioned
+that we had been prosecuted for giving the very knowledge which would
+bring salvation to the sufferers in our great cities.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Among the useful results of the prosecution was the establishment of
+the Malthusian League, &quot;to agitate for the abolition of all penalties
+on the public discussion of the population question,&quot; and &quot;to spread
+among the people, by all practicable means, a knowledge of the law of
+population, of its consequences, and of its bearing upon human conduct
+and morals.&quot; The first general meeting of the League was held at the
+Hall of Science on July 26, 1877, and a council of twenty persons was
+elected, and this council on August 2nd elected Dr. C.R. Drysdale,
+M.D., President; Mr. Swaagman, Treasurer; Mrs. Besant, Secretary; Mr.
+Shearer, Assistant-Secretary; and Mr. Hember, Financial Secretary.
+Since 1877 the League, under the same indefatigable president, has
+worked hard to carry out its objects; it has issued a large number of
+leaflets and tracts; it supports a monthly journal, the <i>Malthusian</i>;
+numerous lectures have been delivered under its auspices in all parts
+of the country; and it has now a medical branch, into which none but
+duly qualified medical men and women are admitted, with members in all
+European countries.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another result of the prosecution was the accession of &quot;D.&quot; to the
+staff of the <i>National Reformer</i>. This able and thoughtful writer came
+forward and joined our ranks as soon as he heard of the attack on us,
+and he further volunteered to conduct the journal during our expected
+imprisonment. From that time to this&mdash;a period of fifteen
+years&mdash;articles from his pen appeared in its columns week by week, and
+during all that time not one solitary difficulty arose between editors
+and contributor. In public a trustworthy colleague, in private a warm
+and sincere friend, &quot;D.&quot; proved an unmixed benefit bestowed upon us by
+the prosecution.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor was &quot;D.&quot; the only friend brought to us by our foes. I cannot ever
+think of that time without remembering that the prosecution brought me
+first into close intimacy with Mrs. Annie Parris&mdash;the wife of Mr.
+Touzeau Parris, the Secretary of the Defence Committee throughout all
+the fight&mdash;a lady who, during that long struggle, and during the, for
+me, far worse struggle that succeeded it, over the custody of my
+daughter, proved to me the most loving and sisterly of friends. One or
+two other friendships which will, I hope, last my life, date from that
+same time of strife and anxiety.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The amount of money subscribed by the public during the Knowlton and
+succeeding prosecutions gives some idea of the interest felt in the
+struggle. The Defence Fund Committee in March, 1878, presented a
+balance-sheet, showing subscriptions amounting to &pound;1,292 5s. 4d., and
+total expenditure in the Queen v. Bradlaugh and Besant, the Queen v.
+Truelove, and the appeal against Mr. Vaughan's order (the last two up
+to date) of &pound;1,274 10s. This account was then closed and the balance
+of &pound;17 15s. 4d. passed on to a new fund for the defence of Mr.
+Truelove, the carrying on of the appeal against the destruction of the
+Knowlton pamphlet, and the bearing of the costs incident on the
+petition lodged against myself. In July this new fund had reached &pound;196
+16s. 7d., and after paying the remainder of the costs in Mr.
+Truelove's case, a balance of &pound;26 15s. 2d. was carried on. This again
+rose to &pound;247 15s. 2&frac12;d., and the fund bore the expenses of Mr.
+Bradlaugh's successful appeal on the Knowlton pamphlet, the petition
+and subsequent proceedings in which I was concerned in the Court of
+Chancery, and an appeal on Mr. Truelove's behalf, unfortunately
+unsuccessful, against an order for the destruction of the Dale Owen
+pamphlet. This last decision was given on February 21, 1880, and on
+this the Defence Fund was closed. On Mr. Truelove's release, as
+mentioned above, a testimonial to the amount of &pound;197 16s. 6d. was
+presented to him, and after the close of the struggle some anonymous
+friend sent to me personally &pound;200 as &quot;thanks for the courage and
+ability shown.&quot; In addition to all this, the Malthusian League
+received no less than &pound;455 11s. 9d. during the first year of its life,
+and started on its second year with a balance in hand of &pound;77 5s. 8d.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A somewhat similar prosecution in America, in which the bookseller,
+Mr. D.M. Bennett, sold a book with which he did not agree, and was
+imprisoned, led to our giving him a warm welcome when, after his
+release, he visited England. We entertained him at the Hall of Science
+at a crowded gathering, and I was deputed as spokesman to present him
+with a testimonial. This I did in the following speech, quoted here in
+order to show the spirit then animating me:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Friends, Mr. Bradlaugh has spoken of the duty that calls us here
+to-night. It is pleasant to think that in our work that duty is one to
+which we are not unaccustomed. In our army there are more true
+soldiers than traitors, more that are faithful to the trust of keeping
+the truth than those who shrink when the hour of danger comes. And I
+would ask Mr. Bennett to-night not to measure English feeling towards
+him by the mere number of those present. They that are here are
+representatives of many thousands of our fellow-countrymen. Glance
+down this middle table, and you will see that it is not without some
+right that we claim to welcome you in the name of multitudes of the
+citizens of England. There are those who taunt us with want of
+loyalty, and with the name of infidels. In what church will they find
+men and women more loyal to truth and conscience? The name infidel is
+not for us so long as we are faithful to the truth we know. If I
+speak, as I have done, of national representation in this hall this
+evening, tell me, you who know those who sit here, who have watched
+some of them for years, others of them but for a brief time, do I not
+speak truth? Take them one by one. Your President but a little while
+ago in circumstances similar to those wherein our guest himself was
+placed, with the true lover's keenness that recognises the mistress
+under all disguise, beholding his mistress Liberty in danger, under
+circumstances that would have blinded less sure eyes, leapt to her
+rescue. He risked the ambition of his life rather than be disloyal to
+liberty. And next is seated a woman, who, student of a noble
+profession, thought that liberty had greater claim upon her than even
+her work. When we stood in worse peril than even loss of liberty, she
+risked her own good name for the truth's sake. One also is here who,
+eminent in his own profession, came with the weight of his position
+and his right to speak, and gave a kindred testimony. One step
+further, and you see one who, soldier to liberty, throughout a long
+and spotless life, when the task was far harder than it is to-day,
+when there were no greetings, no welcomes, when to serve was to peril
+name as well as liberty, never flinched from the first until now. He
+is crowned with the glory of the jail, that was his for no crime but
+for claiming the right to publish that wherein the noblest thought is
+uttered in the bravest words. And next to him is another who speaks
+for liberty, who has brought culture, university degree, position in
+men's sight, and many friends, and cast them all at her beloved feet.
+Sir, not alone the past and the present greet you to-night. The future
+also greets you with us. We have here also those who are training
+themselves to walk in the footsteps of the one most dear to them, who
+shall carry on, when we have passed away, the work which we shall have
+dropped from our hands. But he whom we delight to honour at this hour
+in truth honours us, in that he allows us to offer him the welcome
+that it is our glory and our pleasure to give. He has fought bravely.
+The Christian creed had in its beginning more traitors and less true
+hearts than the creed of to-day. We are happy to-day not only in the
+thought of what manner of men we have for leaders, but in the thought
+of what manner of men we have as soldiers in our army. Jesus had
+twelve apostles. One betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver; a
+second denied Him. They all forsook Him and fled. We can scarcely
+point to one who has thus deserted our sacred cause. The traditions of
+our party tell us of many who went to jail because they claimed for
+all that right of free speech which is the heritage of all. One of the
+most famous members of our body in England, Richard Carlile, turned
+bookseller to sell books that were prosecuted. This man became
+Free-thinker, driven thereto by the bigotry and wickedness of the
+Churches. He sold the books of Hone not because he agreed with them,
+but because Hone was prosecuted. He saw that the book in whose
+prosecution freedom was attacked was the book for the freeman to sell;
+and the story of our guest shows that in all this England and America
+are one. Those who gave Milton to the world can yet bring forth men of
+the same stamp in continents leagues asunder. Because our friend was
+loyal and true, prison had to him no dread. It was far, far less of
+dishonour to wear the garb of the convict than to wear that of the
+hypocrite. The society we represent, like his society in America,
+pleads for free thought, speaks for free speech, claims for every one,
+however antagonistic, the right to speak the thought he feels. It is
+better that this should be, even though the thought be wrong, for thus
+the sooner will its error be discovered&mdash;better if the thought be
+right, for then the sooner does the gladness of a new truth find place
+in the heart of man. As the mouthpiece, Sir, of our National Secular
+Society, and of its thousands of members, I speak to you now:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;'ADDRESS.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;'<i>We seek for Truth</i>.'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;'To D.M. Bennett.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;'In asking you to accept at the hands of the National Secular Society
+of England this symbol of cordial sympathy and brotherly welcome, we
+are but putting into act the motto of our Society. &quot;We seek for Truth&quot;
+is our badge, and it is as Truthseeker that we do you homage to-night.
+Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free
+speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without free speech progress
+is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards the nobler
+life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of
+free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the
+denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;'In your own country you have pleaded for free speech, and when,
+under a wicked and an odious law, one of your fellow-citizens was
+imprisoned for the publication of his opinions, you, not sharing the
+opinions but faithful to liberty, sprang forward to defend in him the
+principle of free speech which you claimed for yourself, and sold his
+book while he lay in prison. For this act you were in turn arrested
+and sent to jail, and the country which won its freedom by the aid of
+Paine in the eighteenth century disgraced itself in the nineteenth by
+the imprisonment of a heretic. The Republic of the United States
+dishonoured herself, and not you, in Albany penitentiary. Two hundred
+thousand of your countrymen pleaded for your release, but bigotry was
+too strong. We sent you greeting in your captivity; we rejoiced when
+the time came for your release. We offer you to-night our thanks and
+our hope&mdash;thanks for the heroism which never flinched in the hour of
+battle, hope for a more peaceful future, in which the memory of a past
+pain may be a sacred heritage and not a regret.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;'Charles Bradlaugh, <i>President</i>.'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Soldier of liberty, we give you this. Do in the future the same good
+service that you have done in the past, and your reward shall be in
+the love that true men shall bear to you.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That, however, which no force could compel me to do, which I refused
+to threats of fine and prison, to separation from my children, to
+social ostracism, and to insults and ignominy worse to bear than
+death, I surrendered freely when all the struggle was over, and a
+great part of society and of public opinion had adopted the view that
+cost Mr. Bradlaugh and myself so dear. I may as well complete the
+story here, so as not to have to refer to it again. I gave up
+Neo-Malthusianism in April, 1891, its renunciation being part of the
+outcome of two years' instruction from Mdme. H.P. Blavatsky, who
+showed me that however justifiable Neo-Malthusianism might be while
+man was regarded only as the most perfect outcome of physical
+evolution, it was wholly incompatible with the view of man as a
+spiritual being, whose material form and environment were the results
+of his own mental activity. Why and how I embraced Theosophy, and
+accepted H.P. Blavatsky as teacher, will soon be told in its proper
+place. Here I am concerned only with the why and how of my
+renunciation of the Neo-Malthusian teaching, for which I had fought so
+hard and suffered so much.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When I built my life on the basis of Materialism I judged all actions
+by their effect on human happiness in this world now and in future
+generations, regarding man as an organism that lived on earth and
+there perished, with activities confined to earth and limited by
+physical laws. The object of life was the ultimate building-up of a
+physically, mentally, morally perfect man by the cumulative effects of
+heredity&mdash;mental and moral tendencies being regarded as the outcome of
+material conditions, to be slowly but surely evolved by rational
+selection and the transmission to offspring of qualities carefully
+acquired by, and developed in, parents. The most characteristic note
+of this serious and lofty Materialism had been struck by Professor W.
+K. Clifford in his noble article on the &quot;Ethics of Belief.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Taking this view of human duty in regard to the rational co-operation
+with nature in the evolution of the human race, it became of the first
+importance to rescue the control of the generation of offspring from
+mere blind brute passion, and to transfer it to the reason and to the
+intelligence; to impress on parents the sacredness of the parental
+office, the tremendous responsibility of the exercise of the creative
+function. And since, further, one of the most pressing problems for
+solution in the older countries is that of poverty, the horrible slums
+and dens into which are crowded and in which are festering families of
+eight and ten children, whose parents are earning an uncertain 10s.,
+12s., 15s., and 20s. a week; since an immediate palliative is wanted,
+if popular risings impelled by starvation are to be avoided; since the
+lives of men and women of the poorer classes, and of the worst paid
+professional classes, are one long, heart-breaking struggle &quot;to make
+both ends meet and keep respectable&quot;; since in the middle class
+marriage is often avoided, or delayed till late in life, from the
+dread of the large family, and late marriage is followed by its
+shadow, the prevalence of vice and the moral and social ruin of
+thousands of women; for these, and many other reasons, the teaching of
+the duty of limiting the family within the means of subsistence is the
+logical outcome of Materialism linked with the scientific view of
+evolution, and with a knowledge of the physical law, by which
+evolution is accelerated or retarded. Seeking to improve the physical
+type, scientific Materialism, it seemed to me, must forbid parentage
+to any but healthy married couples; it must restrict childbearing
+within the limits consistent with the thorough health and physical
+well-being of the mother; it must impose it as a duty never to bring
+children into the world unless the conditions for their fair nurture
+and development are present. Regarding it as hopeless, as well as
+mischievous, to preach asceticism, and looking on the conjunction of
+nominal celibacy with widespread prostitution as inevitable, from the
+constitution of human nature, scientific Materialism&mdash;quite rationally
+and logically&mdash;advises deliberate restriction of the production of
+offspring, while sanctioning the exercise of the sexual instinct
+within the limits imposed by temperance, the highest physical and
+mental efficiency, the good order and dignity of society, and the
+self-respect of the individual.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In all this there is nothing which for one moment implies approval of
+licentiousness, profligacy, unbridled self-indulgence. On the
+contrary, it is a well-considered and intellectually-defensible scheme
+of human evolution, regarding all natural instincts as matters for
+regulation, not for destruction, and seeking to develop the perfectly
+healthy and well-balanced physical body as the necessary basis for the
+healthy and well-balanced mind. If the premises of Materialism be
+true, there is no answer to the Neo-Malthusian conclusions; for even
+those Socialists who have bitterly opposed the promulgation of
+Neo-Malthusianism&mdash;regarding it as a &quot;red herring intended to draw the
+attention of the proletariat away from the real cause of poverty, the
+monopoly of land and capital by a class&quot;&mdash;admit that when society is
+built on the foundation of common property in all that is necessary
+for the production of wealth, the time will come for the consideration
+of the population question. Nor do I now see, any more than I saw
+then, how any Materialist can rationally avoid the Neo-Malthusian
+position. For if man be the outcome of purely physical causes, it is
+with these that we must deal in guiding his future evolution. If he be
+related but to terrestrial existence, he is but the loftiest organism
+of earth; and, failing to see his past and his future, how should my
+eyes not have been then blinded to the deep-lying causes of his
+present woe? I brought a material cure to a disease which appeared to
+me to be of material origin; but how when the evil came from a subtler
+source, and its causes lay not on the material plane? How if the
+remedy only set up new causes for a future evil, and, while
+immediately a palliative, strengthened the disease itself, and ensured
+its reappearance in the future? This was the view of the problem set
+before me by H.P. Blavatsky when she unrolled the story of man, told
+of his origin and his destiny, showed me the forces that went to the
+making of man, and the true relation between his past, his present,
+and his future.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For what is man in the light of Theosophy? He is a spiritual
+intelligence, eternal and uncreate, treading a vast cycle of human
+experience, born and reborn on earth millennium after millennium,
+evolving slowly into the ideal man. He is not the product of matter,
+but is encased in matter, and the forms of matter with which he
+clothes himself are of his own making. For the intelligence and will
+of man are creative forces&mdash;not creative <i>ex nihilo</i>, but creative as
+is the brain of the painter&mdash;and these forces are exercised by man in
+every act of thought. Thus he is ever creating round him
+thought-forms, moulding subtlest matter into shape by these energies,
+forms which persist as tangible realities when the body of the thinker
+has long gone back to earth and air and water. When the time for
+rebirth into this earth-life comes for the soul these thought-forms,
+its own progeny, help to form the tenuous model into which the
+molecules of physical matter are builded for the making of the body,
+and matter is thus moulded for the new body in which the soul is to
+dwell, on the lines laid down by the intelligent and volitional life
+of the previous, or of many previous, incarnations. So does each man
+create for himself in verity the form wherein he functions, and what
+he is in his present is the inevitable outcome of his own creative
+energies in his past. Applying this to the Neo-Malthusian theory, we
+see in sexual love not only a passion which man has in common with the
+brute, and which forms, at the present stage of evolution, a necessary
+part of human nature, but an animal passion that may be trained and
+purified into a human emotion, which may be used as one of the levers
+in human progress, one of the factors in human growth. But, instead of
+this, man in the past has made his intellect the servant of his
+passions; the abnormal development of the sexual instinct in man&mdash;in
+whom it is far greater and more continuous than in any brute&mdash;is due
+to the mingling with it of the intellectual element, all sexual
+thoughts, desires, and imaginations having created thought-forms,
+which have been wrought into the human race, giving rise to a
+continual demand, far beyond nature, and in marked contrast with the
+temperance of normal animal life. Hence it has become one of the most
+fruitful sources of human misery and human degradation, and the
+satisfaction of its imperious cravings in civilised countries lies at
+the root of our worst social evils. This excessive development has to
+be fought against, and the instinct reduced within natural limits, and
+this will certainly never be done by easy-going self-indulgence within
+the marital relation any more than by self-indulgence outside it. By
+none other road than that of self-control and self-denial can men and
+women now set going the causes which will build for them brains and
+bodies of a higher type for their future return to earth-life. They
+have to hold this instinct in complete control, to transmute it from
+passion into tender and self-denying affection, to develop the
+intellectual at the expense of the animal, and thus to raise the whole
+man to the human stage, in which every intellectual and physical
+capacity shall subserve the purposes of the soul. From all this it
+follows that Theosophists should sound the note of self-restraint
+within marriage, and the gradual&mdash;for with the mass it cannot be
+sudden&mdash;restriction of the sexual relation to the perpetuation of the
+race.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such was the bearing of Theosophical teaching on Neo-Malthusianism, as
+laid before me by H.P. Blavatsky, and when I urged, out of my bitter
+knowledge of the miseries endured by the poor, that it surely might,
+for a time at least, be recommended as a palliative, as a defence in
+the hands of a woman against intolerable oppression and enforced
+suffering, she bade me look beyond the moment, and see how the
+suffering must come back and back with every generation, unless we
+sought to remove the roots of wrong. &quot;I do not judge a woman,&quot; she
+said, &quot;who has resort to such means of defence in the midst of
+circumstances so evil, and whose ignorance of the real causes of all
+this misery is her excuse for snatching at any relief. But it is not
+for you, an Occultist, to continue to teach a method which you now
+know must tend to the perpetuation of the sorrow.&quot; I felt that she was
+right, and though I shrank from the decision&mdash;for my heart somewhat
+failed me at withdrawing from the knowledge of the poor, so far as I
+could, a temporary palliative of evils which too often wreck their
+lives and bring many to an early grave, worn old before even middle
+age has touched them&mdash;yet the decision was made. I refused to reprint
+the &quot;Law of Population,&quot; or to sell the copyright, giving pain, as I
+sadly knew, to all the brave and loyal friends who had so generously
+stood by me in that long and bitter struggle, and who saw the results
+of victory thrown away on grounds to them inadequate and mistaken!
+Will it always be, I wonder, in man's climbing upward, that every step
+must be set on his own heart and on the hearts of those he loves?
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHX"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER X.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+AT WAR ALL ROUND.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+Coming back to my work after my long and dangerous illness, I took up
+again its thread, heartsick, but with courage unshaken, and I find
+myself in the <i>National Reformer</i> for September 15, 1878, saying in a
+brief note of thanks that &quot;neither the illness nor the trouble which
+produced it has in any fashion lessened my determination to work for
+the cause.&quot; In truth, I plunged into work with added vigour, for only
+in that did I find any solace, but the pamphlets written at this time
+against Christianity were marked with considerable bitterness, for it
+was Christianity that had robbed me of my child, and I struck
+mercilessly at it in return. In the political struggles of that time,
+when the Beaconsfield Government was in full swing, with its policy of
+annexation and aggression, I played my part with tongue and pen, and
+my articles in defence of an honest and liberty-loving policy in
+India, against the invasion of Afghanistan and other outrages, laid in
+many an Indian heart a foundation of affection for me, and seem to me
+now as a preparation for the work among Indians to which much of my
+time and thought to-day are given. In November of this same year
+(1878) I wrote a little book on &quot;England, India, and Afghanistan&quot; that
+has brought me many a warm letter of thanks, and with this, the
+carrying on of the suit against Mr. Besant before alluded to, two and
+often three lectures every Sunday, to say nothing of the editorial
+work on the <i>National Reformer</i>, the secretarial work on the
+Malthusian League, and stray lectures during the week, my time was
+fairly well filled. But I found that in my reading I developed a
+tendency to let my thoughts wander from the subject in hand, and that
+they would drift after my lost little one, so I resolved to fill up
+the gaps in my scientific education, and to amuse myself by reading up
+for some examinations; I thought it would serve as an absorbing form
+of recreation from my other work, and would at the same time, by
+making my knowledge exact, render me more useful as a speaker on
+behalf of the causes to which my life was given.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the opening of the new year (1879) I met for the first time a man
+to whom I subsequently owed much in this department of work&mdash;Edward B.
+Aveling, a D.Sc. of London University, and a marvellously able teacher
+of scientific subjects, the very ablest, in fact, that I have ever
+met. Clear and accurate in his knowledge, with a singular gift for
+lucid exposition, enthusiastic in his love of science, and taking
+vivid pleasure in imparting his knowledge to others, he was an ideal
+teacher. This young man, in January, 1879, began writing under
+initials for the <i>National Reformer</i>, and in February I became his
+pupil, with the view of matriculating in June at the London
+University, an object which was duly accomplished. And here let me say
+to any one in mental trouble, that they might find an immense relief
+in taking up some intellectual recreation of this kind; during that
+spring, in addition to my ordinary work of writing, lecturing, and
+editing&mdash;and the lecturing meant travelling from one end of England to
+the other&mdash;I translated a fair-sized French volume, and had the
+wear-and-tear of pleading my case for the custody of my daughter in
+the Court of Appeal, as well as the case before the Master of the
+Rolls; and I found it the very greatest relief to turn to algebra,
+geometry, and physics, and forget the harassing legal struggles in
+wrestling with formulae and problems. The full access I gained to my
+children marked a step in the long battle of Freethinkers against
+disabilities, for, as noted in the <i>National Reformer</i> by Mr.
+Bradlaugh, it was &quot;won with a pleading unequalled in any case on
+record for the boldness of its affirmation of Freethought,&quot; a pleading
+of which he generously said that it deserved well of the party as &quot;the
+most powerful pleading for freedom of opinion to which it has ever
+been our good fortune to listen.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the London <i>Daily News</i> some powerful letters of protest appeared,
+one from Lord Harberton, in which he declared that &quot;the Inquisition
+acted on no other principle&quot; than that applied to me; and a second
+from Mr. Band, in which he sarcastically observed that &quot;this Christian
+community has for some time had the pleasure of seeing her Majesty's
+courts repeatedly springing engines of torture upon a young mother&mdash;a
+clergyman's wife who dared to disagree with his creed&mdash;and her evident
+anguish, her long and expensive struggles to save her child, have
+proved that so far as heretical mothers are concerned modern defenders
+of the faith need not envy the past those persuasive instruments which
+so long secured the unity of the Church. In making Mrs. Besant an
+example, the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice James have been
+careful not to allow any of the effect to be lost by confusion of the
+main point&mdash;the intellectual heresy&mdash;with side questions. There was a
+Malthusian matter in the case, but the judges were very clear in
+stating that without any reference whatever to that, they would
+simply, on the ground of Mrs. Besant's 'religious, or anti-religious,
+opinions,' take her child from her.&quot; The great provincial papers took
+a similar tone, the <i>Manchester Examiner</i> going so far as to say of
+the ruling of the judges: &quot;We do not say they have done so wrongly. We
+only say that the effect of their judgment is cruel, and it shows that
+the holding of unpopular opinions is, in the eye of the law, an
+offence which, despite all we had thought to the contrary, may be
+visited with the severest punishment a woman and a mother can be
+possibly called on to bear.&quot; The outcome of all this long struggle and
+of another case of sore injustice&mdash;in which Mrs. Agar-Ellis, a Roman
+Catholic, was separated from her children by a judicial decision
+obtained against her by her husband, a Protestant&mdash;was a change in the
+law which had vested all power over the children in the hands of the
+father, and from thenceforth the rights of the married mother were
+recognised to a limited extent. A small side-fight was with the
+National Sunday League, the president of which, Lord Thurlow, strongly
+objected to me as one of the vice-presidents. Mr. P.A. Taylor and
+others at once resigned their offices, and, on the calling of a
+general meeting, Lord Thurlow was rejected as president. Mr. P.A.
+Taylor was requested to assume the presidency, and the vice-presidents
+who had resigned were, with myself, re-elected. Little battles of this
+sort were a running accompaniment of graver struggles during all these
+battling years.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And through all the struggles the organised strength of the
+Freethought party grew, 650 new members being enrolled in the National
+Secular Society in the year 1878-79, and in July, 1879, the public
+adhesion of Dr. Edward B. Aveling brought into the ranks a pen of rare
+force and power, and gave a strong impulse to the educational side of
+our movement. I presided for him at his first lecture at the Hall of
+Science on August 10, 1879, and he soon paid the penalty of his
+boldness, finding himself, a few months later, dismissed from the
+Chair of Comparative Anatomy at the London Hospital, though the Board
+admitted that all his duties were discharged with punctuality and
+ability. One of the first results of his adhesion was the
+establishment of two classes under the Science and Art Department at
+South Kensington, and these grew year after year, attended by numbers
+of young men and women, till in 1883 we had thirteen classes in full
+swing, as well as Latin, and London University Matriculation classes;
+all these were taught by Dr. Aveling and pupils that he had trained. I
+took advanced certificates, one in honours, and so became qualified as
+a science teacher in eight different sciences, and Alice and Hypatia
+Bradlaugh followed a similar course, so that winter after winter we
+kept these classes going from September to the following May, from
+1879 until the year 1888. In addition to these Miss Bradlaugh carried
+on a choral union.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Personally I found that this study and teaching together with
+attendance at classes held for teachers at South Kensington, the study
+for passing the First B.Sc. and Prel. Sc. Examinations at London
+University, and the study for the B.Sc. degree at London, at which I
+failed in practical chemistry three times&mdash;a thing that puzzled me not
+a little at the time, as I had passed a far more difficult practical
+chemical examination for teachers at South Kensington&mdash;all this gave
+me a knowledge of science that has stood me in good stead in my public
+work. But even here theological and social hatred pursued me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Miss Bradlaugh and myself applied for permission to attend the
+botany class at University College, we were refused, I for my sins,
+and she only for being her father's daughter; when I had qualified as
+teacher, I stood back from claiming recognition from the Department
+for a year in order not to prejudice the claims of Mr. Bradlaugh's
+daughters, and later, when I had been recognised, Sir Henry Tyler in
+the House of Commons attacked the Education Department for accepting
+me, and actually tried to prevent the Government grant being paid to
+the Hall of Science Schools because Dr. Aveling, the Misses Bradlaugh,
+and myself were unbelievers in Christianity. When I asked permission
+to go to the Botanical Gardens in Regent's Park the curator refused
+it, on the ground that his daughters studied there. On every side
+repulse and insult, hard to struggle against, bitter to bear. It was
+against difficulties of this kind on every side that we had to make
+our way, handicapped in every effort by our heresy. Let our work be as
+good as it might&mdash;and our Science School was exceptionally
+successful&mdash;the subtle fragrance of heresy was everywhere
+distinguishable, and when Mr. Bradlaugh and myself are blamed for
+bitterness in our anti-Christian advocacy, this constant gnawing
+annoyance and petty persecution should be taken into account. For him
+it was especially trying, for he saw his daughters&mdash;girls of ability
+and of high character, whose only crime was that they were
+his&mdash;insulted, sneered at, slandered, continually put at a
+disadvantage, because they were his children and loved and honoured
+him beyond all others.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in October, 1879, that I first met Herbert Burrows, though I
+did not become intimately acquainted with him till the Socialist
+troubles of the autumn of 1887 drew us into a common stream of work.
+He came as a delegate from the Tower Hamlets Radical Association to a
+preliminary conference, called by Mr. Bradlaugh, at the Hall of
+Science, on October 11th, to consider the advisability of holding a
+great London Convention on Land Law Reform, to be attended by
+delegates from all parts of the kingdom. He was appointed on the
+Executive Committee with Mr. Bradlaugh, Mr. Mottershead, Mr. Nieass,
+and others. The Convention was successfully held, and an advanced
+platform of Land Law Reform adopted, used later by Mr. Bradlaugh as a
+basis for some of the proposals he laid before Parliament.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHXI"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER XI.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+MR. BRADLAUGH'S STRUGGLE.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+And now dawned the year 1880, the memorable year in which commenced
+Mr. Bradlaugh's long Parliamentary battle. After a long and bitter
+struggle he was elected, with Mr. Labouchere, as member for
+Northampton, at the general election, and so the prize so long fought
+for was won. Shall I ever forget that election day, April 2, 1880? How
+at four o'clock Mr. Bradlaugh came into the room at the &quot;George&quot;,
+where his daughters and I were sitting, flung himself into a chair
+with, &quot;There's nothing more to do; our last man is polled.&quot; Then the
+waiting for the declaration through the long, weary hours of suspense,
+till as the time drew near we knelt by the window listening&mdash;listening
+to the hoarse murmur of the crowd, knowing that presently there would
+be a roar of triumph or a howl of anger when the numbers were read out
+from the steps of the Town Hall. And now silence sank, and we knew the
+moment had come, and we held our breath, and then&mdash;a roar, a wild roar
+of joy and exultation, cheer after cheer, ringing, throbbing, pealing,
+and then the mighty surge of the crowd bringing him back, their member
+at last, waving hats, handkerchiefs, a very madness of tumultuous
+delight, and the shrill strains of &quot;Bradlaugh for Northampton!&quot; with a
+ring of triumph in them they had never had before. And he, very grave,
+somewhat shaken by the outpour of love and exultation, very silent,
+feeling the weight of new responsibility more than the gladness of
+victory. And then the next morning, as he left the town, the mass of
+men and women, one sea of heads from hotel to station, every window
+crowded, his colours waving everywhere, men fighting to get near him,
+to touch him, women sobbing, the cries, &quot;Our Charlie, our Charlie;
+we've got you and we'll keep you.&quot; How they loved him, how they joyed
+in the triumph won after twelve years of strife. Ah me! we thought the
+struggle over, and it was only beginning; we thought our hero
+victorious, and a fiercer, crueller fight lay in front. True, he was
+to win that fight, but his life was to be the price of the winning;
+victory for him was to be final, complete, but the laurel-wreath was
+to fall upon a grave.
+</p>
+
+<a name="06"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="Images/06.jpg" alt="Charles Bradlaugh and Henry Labouchere." height="544" width="385">
+</p>
+<h5><i>From a photograph by T. Westley, 57, Vernon Street,
+Northampton.</i><br>CHARLES BRADLAUGH AND HENRY LABOUCHERE.</h5>
+
+<p>
+The outburst of anger from the more bigoted of the Christian community
+was as savage as the outburst of delight had been exultant, but we
+recked little of it. Was he not member, duly elected, without
+possibility of assailment in his legal right? Parliament was to meet
+on April 29th, the swearing-in beginning on the following day, and Mr.
+Bradlaugh had taken counsel with some other Freethinking members as to
+the right of Freethinkers to affirm. He held that under the Act 29 and
+30 Vict. c. 19, and the Evidence Amendment Acts 1869 and 1870, the
+right to substitute affirmation for oath was clear; he was willing to
+take the oath as a necessary form if obligatory, but, believing it to
+be optional, he preferred affirmation. On May 3rd he presented himself
+and, according to the evidence of Sir Erskine May, the Clerk of the
+House, given before the second Select Committee on his case, he &quot;came
+to the table and delivered the following statement in writing to the
+Clerk: 'To the Right Honourable the Speaker of the House of Commons.
+I, the undersigned, Charles Bradlaugh, beg respectfully to claim to be
+allowed to affirm, as a person for the time being by law permitted to
+make a solemn affirmation or declaration, instead of taking an oath.
+(Signed) Charles Bradlaugh.' And being asked by the Clerk upon what
+grounds he claimed to make an affirmation, he answered: 'By virtue of
+the Evidence Amendment Acts, 1869 and 1870.' Whereupon the Clerk
+reported to Mr. Speaker&quot; the claim, and Mr. Speaker told Mr. Bradlaugh
+that he might address the House on the matter. &quot;Mr. Bradlaugh's
+observations were very short. He repeated that he relied upon the
+Evidence Further Amendment Act, 1869, and the Evidence Amendment Act,
+1870, adding: 'I have repeatedly, for nine years past, made an
+affirmation in the highest courts of jurisdiction in this realm. I am
+ready to make such a declaration or affirmation.' Substantially those
+were the words which he addressed to the Speaker.&quot; This was the
+simple, quiet, and dignified scene which took place in the House. Mr.
+Bradlaugh was directed to withdraw, and he withdrew, and, after
+debate, a Select Committee was appointed to consider whether he could
+make affirmation; that Committee decided against the claim, and gave
+in its report on May 20th. On the following day Mr. Bradlaugh
+presented himself at the table of the House to take the oath in the
+form prescribed by the law, and on the objection of Sir Henry Drummond
+Wolff, who submitted a motion that he should not be allowed to take
+the oath, another Committee was appointed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before this Committee Mr. Bradlaugh stated his case, and pointed out
+that the legal obligation lay on him to take the oath, adding: &quot;Any
+form that I went through, any oath that I took, I should regard as
+binding upon my conscience in the fullest degree. I would go through
+no form, I would take no oath, unless I meant it to be so binding.&quot; He
+wrote in the same sense to the <i>Times</i>, saying that he should regard
+himself &quot;as bound, not by the letter of its words, but by the spirit
+which the affirmation would have conveyed, had I been permitted to use
+it.&quot; The Committee reported against him, and on June 23rd he was heard
+at the Bar of the House, and made a speech so self-restrained, so
+noble, so dignified, that the House, in defiance of all its own rules,
+broke out over and over again into applause. In the debate that
+preceded his speech, members had lost sight of the ordinary rules of
+decency, and had used expressions against myself wholly gratuitous in
+such a quarrel; the grave rebuke to him who &quot;was wanting in chivalry,
+because, while I can answer for myself and am able to answer for
+myself, nothing justified the introduction of any other name beside my
+own to make prejudice against me,&quot; brought irrepressible cheers. His
+appeal was wholly to the law. &quot;I have not yet used&mdash;I trust no passion
+may tempt me into using&mdash;any words that would seem to savour of even a
+desire to enter into conflict with this House. I have always taught,
+preached, and believed the supremacy of Parliament, and it is not
+because for a moment the judgment of one Chamber of Parliament should
+be hostile to me that I am going to deny the ideas I have always held;
+but I submit that one Chamber of Parliament&mdash;even its grandest
+Chamber, as I have always held this to be&mdash;had no right to override
+the law. The law gives me the right to sign that roll, to take and
+subscribe the oath, and to take my seat there [with a gesture towards
+the benches]. I admit that the moment I am in the House, without any
+reason but your own good will, you can send me away. That is your
+right. You have full control over your members. But you cannot send me
+away until I have been heard in my place, not a suppliant as I am now,
+but with the rightful audience that each member has always had.... I
+am ready to admit, if you please, for the sake of argument, that every
+opinion I hold is wrong and deserves punishment. Let the law punish
+it. If you say the law cannot, then you admit that you have no right,
+and I appeal to public opinion against the iniquity of a decision
+which overrides the law and denies me justice. I beg your pardon, sir,
+and that of the House too, if in this warmth there seems to lack
+respect for its dignity. And as I shall have, if your decision be
+against me, to come to that table when your decision is given, I beg
+you, before the step is taken in which we may both lose our
+dignity&mdash;mine is not much, but yours is that of the Commons of
+England&mdash;I beg you, before the gauntlet is fatally thrown, I beg you,
+not in any sort of menace, not in any sort of boast, but as one man
+against six hundred, to give me that justice which on the other side
+of this hall the judges would give me, were I pleading there before
+them.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But no eloquence, no plea for justice, could stay the tide of Tory and
+religious bigotry, and the House voted that he should not be allowed
+to take the oath. Summoned to the table to hear the decision
+communicated by the Speaker, he answered that decision with the words
+firmly spoken: &quot;I respectfully refuse to obey the order of the House,
+because that order was against the law.&quot; The Speaker appealed to the
+House for direction, and on a division&mdash;during which the Speaker and
+Charles Bradlaugh were left together in the chamber&mdash;the House ordered
+the enforcement of Mr. Bradlaugh's withdrawal. Once more the order is
+given, once more the refusal made, and then the Serjeant-at-Arms was
+bidden to remove him. Strange was the scene as little Captain Cosset
+walked up to the member of Herculean proportions, and men wondered how
+the order would be enforced; but Charles Bradlaugh was not the man to
+make a vulgar brawl, and the light touch on his shoulder was to him
+the touch of an authority he admitted and to which he bowed. So he
+gravely accompanied his small captor, and was lodged in the Clock
+Tower of the House as prisoner until the House should further consider
+what to do with him&mdash;the most awkward prisoner it had ever had, in
+that in his person it was imprisoning the law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a special issue of the <i>National Reformer</i>, giving an account of
+the Committee's work and of Mr. Bradlaugh's committal to the Clock
+Tower, I find the following from my own pen: &quot;The Tory party, beaten
+at the polls by the nation, has thus, for the moment, triumphed in the
+House of Commons. The man chosen by the Radicals of Northampton has
+been committed to prison on the motion of the Tory ex-Chancellor of
+the Exchequer, simply because he desires to discharge the duty laid
+upon him by his constituency and by the law of the land. As this paper
+goes to press, I go to Westminster to receive from him his directions
+as to the conduct of the struggle with the nation into which the House
+of Commons has so recklessly plunged.&quot; I found him busily writing,
+prepared for all events, ready for a long imprisonment. On the
+following day a leaflet from my pen, &quot;Law Makers and Law Breakers,&quot;
+appealed to the people; after reciting what had happened, it
+concluded: &quot;Let the people speak. Gladstone and Bright are for
+Liberty, and the help denied them within the House must come to them
+from without. No time must be lost. While we remain idle, a
+representative of the people is illegally held in prison. Northampton
+is insulted, and in this great constituency every constituency is
+threatened. On freedom of election depends our liberty; on freedom of
+conscience depends our progress. Tory squires and lordlings have
+defied the people and measured their strength against the masses. Let
+the masses speak.&quot; But there was no need to make appeals, for the
+outrage itself caused so swiftly a growl of anger that on the very
+next day the prisoner was set free, and there came protest upon
+protest against the high-handed action of the House. In Westminster
+Hall 4,000 people gathered to cheer Mr. Bradlaugh when he came to the
+House on the day after his liberation. In less than a week 200
+meetings had thundered out their protest. Liberal associations, clubs,
+societies, sent up messages of anger and of demand for justice. In
+Trafalgar Square there gathered&mdash;so said the papers&mdash;the largest crowd
+ever seen there, and on the Thursday following&mdash;the meeting was held
+on Monday&mdash;the House of Commons rescinded its resolution, refusing to
+allow Mr. Bradlaugh to affirm, and admitted him on Friday, July 2nd,
+to take his seat after affirmation. &quot;At last the bitter struggle is
+over,&quot; I wrote, &quot;and law and right have triumphed. The House of
+Commons has, by rescinding the resolution passed by Tories and
+Ultramontanes, re-established its good name in the eyes of the world.
+The triumph is not one of Freethought over Christianity, nor is it
+over the House of Commons; it is the triumph of law, brought about by
+good men&mdash;of all shades of opinion, but of one faith in justice&mdash;over
+Tory contempt of law and Ultramontane bigotry. It is the reassertion
+of civil and religious liberty under the most difficult circumstances,
+the declaration that the House of Commons is the creation of the
+people, and not a club of the aristocracy with the right of
+blackballing in its own hands.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The battle between Charles Bradlaugh and his persecutors was now
+transferred to the law courts. As soon as he had taken his seat he was
+served with a writ for having voted without having taken the oath, and
+this began the wearisome proceedings by which his defeated enemies
+boasted that they would make him bankrupt, and so vacate the seat he
+had so hardly gained. Rich men like Mr. Newdegate sued him, putting
+forward a man of straw as nominal plaintiff; for many a weary month
+Mr. Bradlaugh kept all his enemies at bay, fighting each case himself;
+defeated time after time, he fought on, finally carrying the cases to
+the House of Lords, and there winning them triumphantly. But they were
+won at such heavy cost of physical strength and of money, that they
+undermined his strength and burdened him heavily with debt. For all
+this time he had not only to fight in the law courts and to attend
+scrupulously to his Parliamentary duties, but he had to earn his
+living by lecturing and writing, so that his nights away from the
+House were spent in travelling and his days in incessant labour. Many
+of his defeated foes turned their weapons against me, hoping thus to
+give him pain; thus Admiral Sir John Hay, at Wigton, used language of
+me so coarse that the <i>Scotsman</i> and <i>Glasgow Herald</i> refused to print
+it, and the editor of the <i>Scotsman</i> described it as &quot;language so
+coarse that it could have hardly dropped from a yahoo.&quot; August 25th
+found me at Brussels, whither I went, with Miss Hypatia Bradlaugh, to
+represent the English Freethinkers at the International Freethought
+Conference. It was an interesting gathering, attended by men of
+world-wide reputation, including Dr. Ludwig B&uuml;chner, a man of noble
+and kindly nature. An International Federation of Freethinkers was
+there founded, which did something towards bringing together the
+Freethinkers of different countries, and held interesting congresses
+in the following years in London and Amsterdam; but beyond these
+meetings it did little, and lacked energy and vitality. In truth, the
+Freethought party in each country had so much to do in holding its own
+that little time and thought could be given to international
+organisation. For myself, my introduction to Dr. B&uuml;chner, led to much
+interesting correspondence, and I translated, with his approval, his
+&quot;Mind in Animals,&quot; and the enlarged fourteenth edition of &quot;Force and
+Matter,&quot; as well as one or two pamphlets. This autumn of 1880 found
+the so-called Liberal Government in full tilt against the Irish
+leaders, and I worked hard to raise English feeling in defence of
+Irish freedom even against attack by one so much honoured as was Mr.
+Gladstone. It was uphill work, for harsh language had been used
+against England and all things English, but I showed by definite
+figures&mdash;all up and down England&mdash;that life and property were far
+safer in Ireland than in England, that Ireland was singularly free
+from crime save in agrarian disputes, and I argued that these would
+disappear if the law should step in between landlord and tenant, and
+by stopping the crimes of rack-renting and most brutal eviction, put
+an end to the horrible retaliations that were born of despair and
+revenge. A striking point on these evictions I quoted from Mr. T.P.
+O'Connor, who, using Mr. Gladstone's words that a sentence of eviction
+was a sentence of starvation, told of 15,000 processes of eviction
+issued in that one year. The autumn's work was varied by the teaching
+of science classes, a debate with a clergyman of the Church of
+England, and an operation which kept me in bed for three weeks, but
+which, on the other hand, was useful, for I learned to write while
+lying on my back, and accomplished in this fashion a good part of the
+translation of &quot;Mind in Animals.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And here let me point a moral about hard work. Hard work kills no one.
+I find a note in the <i>National Reformer</i> in 1880 from the pen of Mr.
+Bradlaugh: &quot;It is, we fear, useless to add that, in the judgment of
+her best friends, Mrs. Besant has worked far too hard during the last
+two years.&quot; This is 1893, and the thirteen years' interval has been
+full of incessant work, and I am working harder than ever now, and in
+splendid health. Looking over the <i>National Reformer</i> for all these
+years, it seems to me that it did really fine educational work; Mr.
+Bradlaugh's strenuous utterances on political and theological matters;
+Dr. Aveling's luminous and beautiful scientific teachings; and to my
+share fell much of the educative work on questions of political and
+national morality in our dealings with weaker nations. We put all our
+hearts into our work, and the influence exercised was distinctly in
+favour of pure living and high thinking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the spring of 1881 the Court of Appeal decided against Mr.
+Bradlaugh's right to affirm as Member of Parliament, and his seat was
+declared vacant, but he was at once returned again by the borough of
+Northampton, despite the virulence of slander directed against him, so
+that he rightly described the election as &quot;the most bitter I have ever
+fought.&quot; His work in the House had won him golden opinions in the
+country, and he was already recognised as a power there; so Tory fear
+was added to bigoted hatred, and the efforts to keep him out of the
+House were increased.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was introduced to the House as a new member to take his seat by Mr.
+Labouchere and Mr. Burt, but Sir Stafford Northcote intervened, and
+after a lengthy debate, which included a speech from Mr. Bradlaugh at
+the Bar, a majority of thirty-three refused to allow him to take the
+oath. After a prolonged scene, during which Mr. Bradlaugh declined to
+withdraw and the House hesitated to use force, the House adjourned,
+and finally the Government promised to bring in an Affirmation Bill,
+and Mr. Bradlaugh promised, with the consent of his constituents, to
+await the decision of the House on this Bill. Meantime, a League for
+the Defence of Constitutional Rights was formed, and the agitation in
+the country grew: wherever Mr. Bradlaugh went to speak vast crowds
+awaited him, and he travelled from one end of the country to the
+other, the people answering his appeal for justice with no uncertain
+voice. On July 2nd, in consequence of Tory obstruction, Mr. Gladstone
+wrote to Mr. Bradlaugh that the Government were going to drop the
+Affirmation Bill, and Mr. Bradlaugh thereupon determined to present
+himself once more in the House, and fixed on August 3rd as the date of
+such action, so that the Irish Land Bill might get through the House
+ere any delay in business was caused by him. The House was then
+closely guarded with police; the great gates were closed, reserves of
+police were packed in the law courts, and all through July this state
+of siege continued. On August 2nd there was a large meeting in
+Trafalgar Square, at which delegates were present from all parts of
+England, and from as far north as Edinburgh, and on Wednesday, August
+3rd, Mr. Bradlaugh went down to the House. His last words to me were:
+&quot;The people know you better than they know any one, save myself;
+whatever happens, mind, whatever happens, let them do no violence; I
+trust to you to keep them quiet.&quot; He went to the House entrance with
+Dr. Aveling, and into the House alone. His daughters and I went
+together, and with some hundreds of others carrying petitions&mdash;ten
+only with each petition, and the ten rigidly counted and allowed to
+pass through the gate, sufficiently opened to let one through at a
+time&mdash;reached Westminster Hall, where we waited on the steps leading
+to the passage of the lobby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An inspector ordered us off. I gently intimated that we were within
+our rights. Dramatic order: &quot;Four officers this way.&quot; Up they marched
+and looked at us, and we looked at them. &quot;I think you had better
+consult Inspector Denning before you use violence,&quot; I remarked
+placidly. They thought they had, and in a few moments up came the
+inspector, and seeing that we were standing in a place where we had a
+right to be, and were doing no harm, he rebuked his over-zealous
+subordinates, and they retired and left us in peace. A man of much
+tact and discretion was Inspector Denning. Indeed, all through this,
+the House of Commons police behaved admirably well. Even in the attack
+they were ordered to make on Mr. Bradlaugh, the police used as little
+violence as they could. It was Mr. Erskine, the Deputy
+Serjeant-at-Arms, and his ushers, who showed the brutality; as Dr.
+Aveling wrote at the time: &quot;The police disliked their work, and, as
+brave men, had a sympathy for a brave man. Their orders they obeyed
+rigidly. This done, they were kindness itself.&quot; Gradually the crowd of
+petitioners grew and grew; angry murmurs were heard, for no news came
+from the House, and they loved &quot;Charlie,&quot; and were mostly north
+country men, sturdy and independent. They thought they had a right to
+go into the lobby, and suddenly, with the impulse that will sway a
+crowd to a single action there was a roar, &quot;Petition, petition,
+justice, justice,&quot; and they surged up the steps, charging at the
+policemen who held the door. Flashed into my mind my chief's charge,
+his words, &quot;I trust to you to keep them quiet,&quot; and as the police
+sprang forward to meet the crowd I threw myself between them, with all
+the advantage of the position of the top of the steps that I had
+chosen, so that every man in the charging crowd saw me, and as they
+checked themselves in surprise I bade them stop for his sake, and keep
+for him the peace which he had bade us should not be broken. I heard
+afterwards that as I sprang forward the police laughed&mdash;they must have
+thought me a fool to face the rush of the charging men; but I knew his
+friends would never trample me down, and as the crowd stopped the
+laugh died out, and they drew back and left me my own way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sullenly the men drew back, mastering themselves with effort, reining
+in their wrath, still for his sake. Ah! had I known what was going on
+inside, would I have kept his trust unbroken! and, as many a man said
+to me afterwards in northern towns, &quot;Oh! if you had let us go we would
+have carried him into the House up to the Speaker's chair.&quot; We heard a
+crash inside, and listened, and there was sound of breaking glass and
+splintering wood, and in a few minutes a messenger came to me: &quot;He is
+in Palace Yard.&quot; And we went thither and saw him standing, still and
+white, face set like marble, coat torn, motionless, as though carved
+in stone, facing the members' door. Now we know the whole shameful
+story: how as that one man stood alone, on his way to claim his right,
+alone so that he could do no violence, fourteen men, said the Central
+News, police and ushers, flung themselves upon him, pushed and pulled
+him down the stairs, smashing in their violence the glass and wood of
+the passage door; how he struck no blow, but used only his great
+strength in passive resistance&mdash;&quot; Of all I have ever seen, I never saw
+one man struggle with ten like that,&quot; said one of the chiefs, angrily
+disdainful of the wrong he was forced to do&mdash;till they flung him out
+into Palace Yard. An eye-witness thus reported the scene in the Press:
+&quot;The strong, broad, heavy, powerful frame of Mr. Bradlaugh was hard to
+move, with its every nerve and muscle strained to resist the coercion.
+Bending and straining against the overpowering numbers, he held every
+inch with surprising tenacity, and only surrendered it after almost
+superhuman exertions to retain it. The sight&mdash;little of it as was seen
+from the outside&mdash;soon became sickening. The overborne man appeared
+almost at his last gasp. The face, in spite of the warmth of the
+struggle, had an ominous pallor. The limbs barely sustained him....
+The Trafalgar Square phrase that this man might be broken but not bent
+occurred to minds apprehensive at the present appearance of him.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They flung him out, and swift, short words were there interchanged. &quot;I
+nearly did wrong at the door,&quot; he said afterwards, &quot;I was very angry.
+I said to Inspector Denning, 'I shall come again with force enough to
+overcome it,' He said, 'When?' I said, 'Within a minute if I raise my
+hand.'&quot; He stood in Palace Yard, and there outside the gate was a vast
+sea of heads, the men who had journeyed from all parts of England for
+love of him, and in defence of the great right he represented of a
+constituency to send to Parliament the man of its choice. Ah! he was
+never greater than in that moment of outrage and of triumphant wrong;
+with all the passion of a proud man surging within him, insulted by
+physical violence, injured by the cruel wrenching of all his
+muscles&mdash;so that for weeks his arms had to be swathed in bandages&mdash;he
+was never greater than when he conquered his own wrath, crushed down
+his own longing for battle, stirred to flame by the bodily struggle,
+and the bodily injury, and with thousands waiting within sound of his
+voice, longing to leap to his side, he gave the word to tell them to
+meet him that evening away from the scene of conflict, and meanwhile
+to disperse quietly, &quot;no riot, no disorder.&quot; But how he suffered
+mentally no words of mine may tell, and none can understand how it
+wrung his heart who does not know how he reverenced the great
+Parliament of England, how he honoured law, how he believed in justice
+being done; it was the breaking down of his national ideals, of his
+pride in his country, of his belief that faith would be kept with a
+foe by English gentlemen, who with all their faults, he thought,
+held honour and chivalry dear. &quot;No man will sleep in gaol for me
+to-night,&quot; he said to me that day; &quot;no woman can blame me for her
+husband killed or wounded, but&mdash;&quot; A wave of agony swept over his face,
+and from that fatal day Charles Bradlaugh was never the same man.
+Some hold their ideals lightly, but his heart-strings were twined
+round his; some care little for their country&mdash;he was an Englishman,
+law-abiding, liberty-loving, to his heart's core, of the type of the
+seventeenth-century patriot, holding England's honour dear. It was the
+treachery that broke his heart; he had gone alone, believing in the
+honour of his foes, ready to submit to expulsion, to imprisonment, and
+it was the latter that he expected; but he never dreamed that, going
+alone amongst his foes, they would use brutal and cowardly violence,
+and shame every Parliamentary tradition by personal outrage on a
+duly-elected member, outrage more worthy of a slum pot-house than of
+the great Commons House, the House of Hampden and of Vane, the House
+that had guarded its own from Royal violence, and had maintained its
+privileges in the teeth of kings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These stormy scenes brought about a promise of Government aid; Mr.
+Bradlaugh failed to get any legal redress, as, indeed, he expected to
+fail, on the ground that the officials of the House were covered by
+the House's order, but the Government promised to support his claim to
+his seat during the next session, and thus prevented the campaign
+against them on which we had resolved. I had solely on my own
+responsibility organised a great band of people pledged to refrain
+from the use of all excisable articles after a certain date, and to
+withdraw all their moneys in the Savings Bank, thus seriously
+crippling the financial resources of the Government. The response from
+the workers to my appeal to &quot;Stop the supplies&quot; was great and
+touching. One man wrote that as he never drank nor smoked he would
+leave off tea; others that though tobacco was their one luxury, they
+would forego it; and so on. Somewhat reluctantly, I asked the people
+to lay aside this formidable weapon, as &quot;we have no right to embarrass
+the Government financially save when they refuse to do the first duty
+of a Government to maintain law. They have now promised to do justice,
+and we must wait.&quot; Meanwhile the injuries inflicted on Mr. Bradlaugh,
+rupturing the sheaths of some of the muscles of the arm, laid him
+prostrate, and various small fights went on during the temporary truce
+in the great struggle. I turned up in the House two or three times,
+haled thither, though not in person, by the people who kept Mr.
+Bradlaugh out, and a speech of mine became the subject of a question
+by Mr. Ritchie, while Sir Henry Tyler waged war on the science
+classes. Another joy was added to life by the use of my name&mdash;which
+by all these struggles had gained a marketable value&mdash;as author of
+pamphlets I had never seen, and this forgery of my name by
+unscrupulous people in the colonies caused me a good deal of
+annoyance. In the strengthening of the constitutional agitation in the
+country, the holding of an International Congress of Freethinkers in
+London, the studying and teaching of science, the delivering of
+courses of scientific lectures in the Hall of Science, a sharp
+correspondence with the Bishop of Manchester, who had libelled
+Secularists, and which led to a fiery pamphlet, &quot;God's Views on
+Marriage,&quot; as retort&mdash;in all these matters the autumn months sped
+rapidly away. One incident of that autumn I record with regret. I was
+misled by very partial knowledge of the nature of the experiments
+performed, and by my fear that if scientific men were forbidden to
+experiment on animals with drugs they would perforce experiment with
+them on the poor in hospitals, to write two articles, republished as a
+pamphlet, against Sir Eardley Wilmot's Bill for the &quot;Total Suppression
+of Vivisection.&quot; I limited my approval to highly skilled men engaged
+in original investigations, and took the representations made of the
+character of the experiments without sufficient care to verify them.
+Hence the publication of the one thing I ever wrote for which I feel
+deep regret and shame, as against the whole trend and efforts of my
+life. I am thankful to say that Dr. Anna Kingsford answered my
+articles, and I readily inserted her replies in the paper in which
+mine had appeared&mdash;our <i>National Reformer</i>&mdash;and she touched that
+question of the moral sense to which my nature at once responded.
+Ultimately, I looked carefully into the subject, found that
+vivisection abroad was very different from vivisection in England, saw
+that it was in very truth the fiendishly cruel thing that its
+opponents alleged, and destroyed my partial defence of even its less
+brutal form.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+1882 saw no cessation of the struggles in which Mr. Bradlaugh and
+those who stood by him were involved. On February 7th he was heard for
+the third time at the Bar of the House of Commons, and closed his
+speech with an offer that, accepted, would have closed the contest. &quot;I
+am ready to stand aside, say for four or five weeks, without coming to
+that table, if the House within that time, or within such time as its
+great needs might demand, would discuss whether an Affirmation Bill
+should pass or not. I want to obey the law, and I tell you how I might
+meet the House still further, if the House will pardon me for seeming
+to advise it. Hon. members have said that would be a Bradlaugh Relief
+Bill. Bradlaugh is more proud than you are. Let the Bill pass without
+applying to elections that have taken place previously, and I will
+undertake not to claim my seat, and when the Bill has passed I will
+apply for the Chiltern Hundreds. I have no fear. If I am not fit for
+my constituents, they shall dismiss me, but you never shall. The grave
+alone shall make me yield.&quot; But the House would do nothing. He had
+asked for 100,000 signatures in favour of his constitutional right,
+and on February 8th, 9th, and 10th 1,008 petitions, bearing 241,970
+signatures, were presented; the House treated them with contemptuous
+indifference. The House refused to declare his seat vacant, and also
+refused to allow him to fill it, thus half-disfranchising Northampton,
+while closing every avenue to legal redress. Mr. Labouchere&mdash;who did
+all a loyal colleague could do to assist his brother member&mdash;brought
+in an Affirmation Bill; it was blocked. Mr. Gladstone, appealed to
+support the law declared by his own Attorney-General, refused to do
+anything. An <i>impasse</i> was created, and all the enemies of freedom
+rejoiced. Out of this position of what the <i>Globe</i> called &quot;quiet
+omnipotence&quot; the House was shaken by an audacious defiance, for on
+February 21st the member it was trying to hold at arm's length took
+the oath in its startled face, went to his seat, and&mdash;waited events.
+The House then expelled him&mdash;and, indeed, it could scarcely do
+anything else after such defiance&mdash;and Mr. Labouchere moved for a new
+writ, declaring that Northampton was ready, its &quot;candidate was Charles
+Bradlaugh, expelled this House.&quot; Northampton, ever steadfast, returned
+him for the third time&mdash;the vote in his favour showing an increase of
+359 over the second bye-election&mdash;and the triumph was received in all
+the great towns of England with wild enthusiasm. By the small majority
+of fifteen in a House of 599 members&mdash;and this due to the vacillation
+of the Government&mdash;he was again refused the right to take his seat.
+But now the whole Liberal Press took up his quarrel; the oath question
+became a test question for every candidate for Parliament, and the
+Government was warned that it was alienating its best friends. The
+<i>Pall Mall Gazette</i> voiced the general feeling. &quot;What is the evidence
+that an Oaths Bill would injure the Government in the country? Of one
+thing we may be sure, that if they shirk the Bill they will do no good
+to themselves at the elections. Nobody doubts that it will be made a
+test question, and any Liberal who declines to vote for such a Bill
+will certainly lose the support of the Northampton sort of Radicalism
+in every constituency. The Liberal Press throughout the country is
+absolutely unanimous. The political Non-conformists are for it. The
+local clubs are for it. All that is wanted is that the Government
+should pick up a little more moral courage, and recognise that even in
+practice honesty is the best policy.&quot; The Government did not think so,
+and they paid the penalty, for one of the causes that led to their
+defeat at the polls was the disgust felt at their vacillation and
+cowardice in regard to the rights of constituencies. Not untruly did I
+write, in May, 1882, that Charles Bradlaugh was a man &quot;who by the
+infliction of a great wrong had become the incarnation of a great
+principle&quot;; for the agitation in the country grew and grew, until,
+returned again to Parliament at the General Election, he took the oath
+and his seat, brought in and carried an Oaths Bill, not only giving
+Members of Parliament the right to affirm, but making Freethinkers
+competent as jurymen, and relieving witnesses from the insult hitherto
+put upon those who objected to swearing; he thus ended an
+unprecedented struggle by a complete victory, weaving his name for
+ever into the constitutional history of his country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the House of Lords, Lord Redesdale brought in a Bill disqualifying
+Atheists from sitting in Parliament, but in face of the feeling
+aroused in the country, the Lords, with many pathetic expressions of
+regret, declined to pass it. But, meanwhile, Sir Henry Tyler in the
+Commons was calling out for prosecutions for blasphemy to be brought
+against Mr. Bradlaugh and his friends, while he carried on his crusade
+against Mr. Bradlaugh's daughters, Dr. Aveling, and myself, as science
+teachers. I summed up the position in the spring of 1882 in the
+following somewhat strong language: &quot;This short-lived 'Parliamentary
+Declaration Bill' is but one of the many clouds which presage a storm
+of prosecution. The reiterated attempts in the House of Commons to
+force the Government into prosecuting heretics for blasphemy; the
+petty and vicious attacks on the science classes at the Hall; the
+odious and wicked efforts of Mr. Newdegate to drive Mr. Bradlaugh into
+the Bankruptcy Court; all these are but signs that the heterogeneous
+army of pious and bigoted Christians are gathering together their
+forces for a furious attack on those who have silenced them in
+argument, but whom they hope to conquer by main force, by sheer
+brutality. Let them come. Free-thinkers were never so strong, never so
+united, never so well organised as they are to-day. Strong in the
+goodness of our cause, in our faith in the ultimate triumph of Truth,
+in our willingness to give up all save fidelity to the sacred cause of
+liberty of human thought and human speech, we await gravely and
+fearlessly the successors of the men who burned Bruno, who imprisoned
+Galileo, who tortured Vanini&mdash;the men who have in their hands the
+blood-red cross of Jesus of Nazareth, and in their hearts the love of
+God and the hate of man.&quot;
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHXII"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER XII.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+STILL FIGHTING.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+All this hot fighting on the religious field did not render me blind
+to the misery of the Irish land so dear to my heart, writhing in the
+cruel grip of Mr. Forster's Coercion Act. An article &quot;Coercion in
+Ireland and its Results,&quot; exposing the wrongs done under the Act, was
+reprinted as a pamphlet and had a wide circulation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I pleaded against eviction&mdash;7,020 persons had been evicted during the
+quarter ending in March&mdash;for the trial of those imprisoned on
+suspicion, for indemnity for those who before the Land Act had striven
+against wrongs the Land Act had been carried to prevent, and I urged
+that &quot;no chance is given for the healing measures to cure the sore of
+Irish disaffection until not only are the prisoners in Ireland set at
+liberty, but until the brave, unfortunate Michael Davitt stands once
+more a free man on Irish soil.&quot; At last the Government reconsidered
+its policy and resolved on juster dealings; it sent Lord Frederick
+Cavendish over to Ireland, carrying with him the release of the
+&quot;suspects,&quot; and scarcely had he landed ere the knife of assassination
+struck him&mdash;a foul and cowardly murder of an innocent messenger of
+peace. I was at Blackburn, to lecture on &quot;The Irish Question,&quot; and as
+I was walking towards the platform, my heart full of joy for the
+dawning hope of peace, a telegram announcing the assassination was
+placed in my hands. Never shall I forget the shock, the incredulous
+horror, the wave of despair. &quot;It is not only two men they have
+killed,&quot; I wrote, a day or two later; &quot;they have stabbed the new-born
+hope of friendship between two countries, and have reopened the gulf
+of hatred that was just beginning to close.&quot; Alas! the crime succeeded
+in its object, and hurried the Government into new wrong. Hastily a
+new Coercion Bill was brought in, and rushed through its stages in
+Parliament, and, facing the storm of public excitement, I pleaded
+still, &quot;Force no remedy,&quot; despite the hardship of the task. &quot;There is
+excessive difficulty in dealing with the Irish difficulty at the
+present moment. Tories are howling for revenge on a whole nation as
+answer to the crime committed by a few; Whigs are swelling the outcry;
+many Radicals are swept away by the current, and feeling that
+'something must be done,' they endorse the Government action,
+forgetting to ask whether the 'something' proposed is the wisest
+thing. A few stand firm, but they are very few&mdash;too few to prevent the
+new Coercion Bill from passing into law. But few though we be who lift
+up the voice of protest against the wrong which we are powerless to
+prevent, we may yet do much to make the new Act of brief duration, by
+so rousing public opinion as to bring about its early repeal. When the
+measure is understood by the public half the battle will be won; it is
+accepted at the moment from faith in the Government; it will be
+rejected when its true character is grasped. The murders which have
+given birth to this repressive measure came with a shock upon the
+country, which was the more terrible from the sudden change from
+gladness and hope to darkness and despair. The new policy was welcomed
+so joyfully; the messenger of the new policy was slain ere yet the pen
+was dry which had signed the orders of mercy and of liberty. Small
+wonder that cry of horror should be followed by measures of vengeance;
+but the murders were the work of a few criminals, while the measure of
+vengeance strikes the whole of the Irish people. I plead against the
+panic which confounds political agitation and political redressal of
+wrong with crime and its punishment; the Government measure gags every
+mouth in Ireland, and puts, as we shall see, all political effort at
+the mercy of the Lord-Lieutenant, the magistracy, and the police.&quot; I
+then sketched the misery of the peasants in the grip of absentee
+landlords, the turning out on the roadside to die of the mother with
+new-born babe at her breast, the loss of &quot;all thought of the sanctity
+of human life when the lives of the dearest are reckoned as less worth
+than the shillings of overdue rack-rental.&quot; I analysed the new Act:
+&quot;When this Act passes, trial by jury, right of public meeting, liberty
+of press, sanctity of house, will one and all be held at the will of
+the Lord-Lieutenant, the irresponsible autocrat of Ireland, while
+liberty of person will lie at the mercy of every constable. Such is
+England's way of governing Ireland in the year 1882. And this is
+supposed to be a Bill for the 'repression of crime.'&quot; Bluntly, I put
+the bald truth: &quot;The plain fact is that the murderers have succeeded.
+They saw in the new policy the reconciliation of England and Ireland;
+they knew that friendship would follow justice, and that the two
+countries, for the first time in history, would clasp hands. To
+prevent this they dug a new gulf, which they hoped the English nation
+would not span; they sent a river of blood across the road of
+friendship, and they flung two corpses to bar the newly-opened gate of
+reconciliation and peace. They have succeeded.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Into this whirl of political and social strife came the first whisper
+to me of the Theosophical Society, in the shape of a statement of its
+principles, which conveyed, I remarked, &quot;no very definite idea of the
+requirements for membership, beyond a dreamy, emotional, scholarly
+interest in the religio-philosophic fancies of the past.&quot; Also a
+report of an address by Colonel Olcott, which led me to suppose that
+the society held to &quot;some strange theory of 'apparitions' of the dead,
+and to some existence outside the physical and apart from it.&quot; These
+came to me from some Hind&ucirc; Freethinkers, who asked my opinion as to
+Secularists joining the Theosophical Society, and Theosophists being
+admitted to the National Secular Society. I replied, judging from
+these reports, that &quot;while Secularists would have no right to refuse
+to enrol Theosophists, if they desired it, among their members, there
+is a radical difference between the mysticism of Theosophy and the
+scientific materialism of Secularism. The exclusive devotion to this
+world implied in the profession of Secularism leaves no room for
+other-worldism; and consistent members of our body cannot join a
+society which professes belief therein.&quot;<a href="#FN27"><sup>[27]</sup></a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+H.P. Blavatsky penned a brief article in the <i>Theosophist</i> for
+August, 1882, in which she commented on my paragraph, remarking, in
+her generous way, that it must have been written &quot;while labouring
+under entirely misconceived notions about the real nature of our
+society. For one so highly intellectual and keen as that renowned
+writer to dogmatise and issue autocratic ukases, after she has herself
+suffered so cruelly and undeservedly at the hands of blind bigotry and
+social prejudice in her lifelong struggle for <i>freedom of thought</i>
+seems, to say the least, absurdly inconsistent.&quot; After quoting my
+paragraph she went on: &quot;Until proofs to the contrary, we prefer to
+believe that the above lines were dictated to Mrs. Besant by some
+crafty misrepresentations from Madras, inspired by a mean personal
+revenge rather than a desire to remain consistent with the principles
+of 'the scientific materialism of Secularism.' We beg to assure the
+Radical editors of the <i>National Reformer</i> that they were both very
+strangely misled by false reports about the Radical editors of the
+<i>Theosophist</i>. The term 'supernaturalists' can no more apply to the
+latter than to Mrs. A. Besant and Mr. C. Bradlaugh.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+H.P. Blavatsky, when she commented, as she occasionally did, on the
+struggles going on in England, took of them a singularly large-hearted
+and generous view. She referred with much admiration to Mr.
+Bradlaugh's work and to his Parliamentary struggle, and spoke warmly
+of the services he had rendered to liberty. Again, in pointing out
+that spiritualistic trance orations by no means transcended speeches
+that made no such claim, I find her first mention of myself: &quot;Another
+lady orator, of deservedly great fame, both for eloquence and
+learning&mdash;the good Mrs. Annie Besant&mdash;without believing in controlling
+spirits, or for that matter in her own spirit, yet speaks and writes
+such sensible and wise things, that we might almost say that one of
+her speeches or chapters contains more matter to benefit humanity than
+would equip a modern trance-speaker for an entire oratorical
+career.&quot;<a href="#FN28"><sup>[28]</sup></a> I have sometimes wondered of late years whether, had I
+met her then or seen any of her writings, I should have become her
+pupil. I fear not; I was still too much dazzled by the triumphs of
+Western Science, too self-assertive, too fond of combat, too much at
+the mercy of my own emotions, too sensitive to praise and blame. I
+needed to sound yet more deeply the depths of human misery, to hear
+yet more loudly the moaning of &quot;the great Orphan,&quot; Humanity, to feel
+yet more keenly the lack of wider knowledge and of clearer light if I
+were to give effective help to man, ere I could bow my pride to crave
+admittance as pupil to the School of Occultism, ere I could put aside
+my prejudices and study the Science of the Soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The long-continued attempts of Sir Henry Tyler and his friends to
+stimulate persecutions for blasphemy at length took practical shape,
+and in July, 1882, Mr. Foote, the editor, Mr. Ramsey, the publisher,
+and Mr. Whittle, the printer of the <i>Freethinker</i>, were summoned for
+blasphemy by Sir Henry Tyler himself. An attempt was made to involve
+Mr. Bradlaugh in the proceedings, and the solicitors promised to drop
+the case against the editor and printer if Mr. Bradlaugh would himself
+sell them some copies of the paper. But however ready Mr. Bradlaugh
+had always shown himself to shield his subordinates by taking his sins
+on his own shoulders, he saw no reason why he should assume
+responsibility for a paper over which he had no control, and which
+was, he thought, by its caricatures, lowering the tone of Freethought
+advocacy and giving an unnecessary handle to its foes. He therefore
+answered that he would sell the solicitors any works published by
+himself or with his authority, and sent them a catalogue of the whole
+of such works. The object of this effort of Sir Henry Tyler's was
+obvious enough, and Mr. Bradlaugh commented: &quot;The above letters make
+it pretty clear that Sir Henry W. Tyler having failed in his endeavour
+to get the science classes stopped at the Hall of Science, having also
+failed in his attempt to induce Sir W. Vernon Harcourt to prosecute
+myself and Mrs. Besant as editors and publishers of this journal,
+desires to make me personally and criminally responsible for the
+contents of a journal I neither edit nor publish, over which I have
+not a shadow of control, and in which I have not the smallest
+interest. Why does Sir H.W. Tyler so ardently desire to prosecute, me
+for blasphemy? Is it because two convictions will under the 9th and
+10th Will. III. cap. 32, render me 'for ever' incapable of sitting in
+Parliament?&quot; The <i>Whitehall Review</i> frankly put this forward as an
+object to be gained, and Mr. Bradlaugh was summoned to the Mansion
+House on a charge of publishing blasphemous libels in the
+<i>Freethinker</i>; meanwhile Sir Henry Tyler put a notice on the Order
+Book to deprive &quot;the daughters of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh&quot; of the grant
+they had earned as science teachers, and got an order which proved to
+be invalid, but which was acted on, to inspect Mr. Bradlaugh's and my
+own private banking accounts, I being no party to the case. Looking
+back, I marvel at the incredible meannesses to which Sir Henry Tyler
+and others stooped in defence of &quot;religion&quot;&mdash;Heaven save the mark! Let
+me add that his motion in the House of Commons was a complete failure,
+and it was emphasised by the publication at the same time of the
+successful work, both as teachers and as students, of the &quot;daughters
+of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh,&quot; and of my being the only student in all
+England who had succeeded in taking honours in botany.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I must pause a moment to chronicle, in September, 1882, the death of
+Dr. Pusey, whom I had sought in the whirl of my early religious
+struggles. I wrote an article on him in the <i>National Reformer</i>, and
+ended by laying a tribute on his grave: &quot;A strong man and a good man.
+Utterly out of harmony with the spirit of his own time, looking with
+sternly-rebuking eyes on all the eager research, the joyous love of
+nature, the earnest inquiry into a world doomed to be burnt up at the
+coming of its Judge. An ascetic, pure in life, stern in faith, harsh
+to unbelievers because sincere in his own cruel creed, generous and
+tender to all who accepted his doctrines and submitted to his Church.
+He never stooped to slander those with whom he disagreed. His hatred
+of heresy led him not to blacken the character of heretics, nor to
+descend to the vulgar abuse used by pettier priests. And therefore I,
+who honour courage and sincerity wherever I find them; I, who do
+homage to steadfastness wherever I find it; I, Atheist, lay my small
+tribute of respect on the bier of this noblest of the Anglo-Catholics,
+Edward Bouverie Pusey.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a practical answer to the numberless attacks made on us, and as a
+result of the enormous increase of circulation given to our
+theological and political writings by these harassing persecutions, we
+moved our publishing business to 63, Fleet Street, at the end of
+September, 1882, a shop facing that at which Richard Carlile had
+carried on his publishing business for a great time, and so seemed
+still redolent with memories of his gallant struggles. Two of the
+first things sold here were a pamphlet of mine, a strong protest
+against our shameful Egyptian policy, and a critical volume on
+&quot;Genesis&quot; which Mr. Bradlaugh found time to write in the intervals of
+his busy life. Here I worked daily, save when out of London, until Mr.
+Bradlaugh's death in 1891, assisted in the conduct of the business by
+Mr. Bradlaugh's elder daughter&mdash;a woman of strong character with many
+noble qualities, who died rather suddenly in December, 1888, and in
+the work on the <i>National Reformer</i>, first by Dr. Aveling, and then by
+Mr. John Robertson, its present editor. Here, too, from 1884 onwards,
+worked with me Thornton Smith, one of Mr. Bradlaugh's most devoted
+disciples, who became one of the leading speakers of the National
+Secular Society; like her well-loved chief, she was ever a good friend
+and a good fighter, and to me the most loyal and loving of colleagues,
+one of the few&mdash;the very few&mdash;Freethinkers who were large-hearted and
+generous enough not to turn against me when I became a Theosophist. A
+second of these&mdash;alas! I could count them on my fingers&mdash;was the John
+Robertson above mentioned, a man of rare ability and wide culture,
+somewhat too scholarly for popular propagandism of the most generally
+effective order, but a man who is a strength to any movement, always
+on the side of noble living and high thinking, loyal-natured as the
+true Scot should be, incapable of meanness or treachery, and the most
+genial and generous of friends.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Among the new literary ventures that followed on our taking the large
+publishing premises in Fleet Street was a sixpenny magazine, edited by
+myself, and entitled <i>Our Corner</i>; its first number was dated January,
+1883, and for six years it appeared regularly, and served me as a
+useful mouthpiece in my Socialist and Labour propagandist work. Among
+its contributors were Moncure D. Conway, Professor Ludwig B&uuml;chner,
+Yves Guyot, Professor Ernst Haeckel, G. Bernard Shaw, Constance Naden,
+Dr. Aveling, J.H. Levy, J.L. Joynes, Mrs. Edgren, John Robertson,
+and many another, Charles Bradlaugh and I writing regularly each
+month.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+1883 broke stormily, fights on every hand, and a huge constitutional
+agitation going on in the country, which forced the Government into
+bringing in an Affirmation Bill; resolutions from Liberal Associations
+all over the land; preparations to oppose the re-election of disloyal
+members; no less than a thousand delegates sent up to London by clubs,
+Trade Unions, associations of every sort; a meeting that packed
+Trafalgar Square; an uneasy crowd in Westminster Hall; a request from
+Inspector Denning that Mr. Bradlaugh would go out to them&mdash;they feared
+for his safety inside; a word from him, &quot;The Government have pledged
+themselves to bring in an Affirmation Bill at once;&quot; roar after roar
+of cheering; a veritable people's victory on that 15th of February,
+1883. It was the answer of the country to the appeal for justice, the
+rebuke of the electors to the House that had defied them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scarcely was this over when a second prosecution for blasphemy against
+Messrs. Foote, Ramsey, and Kemp began, and was hurried on in the
+Central Criminal Court, before Mr. Justice North, a bigot of the
+sternest type. The trial ended in a disagreement of the jury, Mr.
+Foote defending himself in a splendid speech. The judge acted very
+harshly throughout, interrupted Mr. Foote continuously, and even
+refused bail to the defendants during the interval between the first
+and second trial; they were, therefore, confined in Newgate from
+Thursday to Monday, and we were only allowed to see them through iron
+bars and lattice, as they exercised in the prison yard between 8:30
+and 9:30 a.m. Brought up to trial again on Monday, they were
+convicted, and Mr. Foote was sentenced to a year's imprisonment, Mr.
+Ramsey to nine months, and Mr. Kemp to three months. Mr. Foote
+especially behaved with great dignity and courage in a most difficult
+position, and heard his cruel sentence without wincing, and with the
+calm words, &quot;My Lord, I thank you; it is worthy your creed.&quot; A few of
+us at once stepped in, to preserve to Mr. Ramsey his shop, and to Mr.
+Foote his literary property; Dr. Aveling undertook the editing of the
+<i>Freethinker</i> and of Mr. Foote's magazine <i>Progress</i>; the immediate
+necessities of their families were seen to; Mr. and Mrs. Forder took
+charge of the shop, and within a few days all was in working order.
+Disapproving as many of us did of the policy of the paper, there was
+no time to think of that when a blasphemy prosecution had proved
+successful, and we all closed up in the support of men imprisoned for
+conscience' sake. I commenced a series of articles on &quot;The Christian
+Creed; what it is blasphemy to deny,&quot; showing what Christians must
+believe under peril of prosecution. Everywhere a tremendous impulse
+was given to the Freethought movement, as men awakened to the
+knowledge that blasphemy laws were not obsolete.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From over the sea came a word of sympathy from the pen of H.P.
+Blavatsky in the <i>Theosophist</i>. &quot;We prefer Mr. Foote's actual position
+to that of his severe judge. Aye, and were we in his guilty skin, we
+would feel more proud, even in the poor editor's present position,
+than we would under the wig of Mr. Justice North.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In April, 1883, the long legal struggles of Mr. Bradlaugh against Mr.
+Newdegate and his common informer, that had lasted from July 2, 1880,
+till April 9, 1883, ended in his complete victory by the judgment of
+the House of Lords in his favour. &quot;Court after Court decided against
+me,&quot; he wrote; &quot;and Whig and Tory journals alike mocked at me for my
+persistent resistance. Even some good friends thought that my fight
+was hopeless, and that the bigots held me fast in their toils. I have,
+however, at last shaken myself free of Mr. Newdegate and his common
+informer. The judgment of the House of Lords in my favour is final and
+conclusive, and the boasts of the Tories that I should be made
+bankrupt for the penalties, have now, for ever, come to naught. Yet
+but for the many poor folk who have stood by me with their help and
+sympathy, I should have long since been ruined. The days and weeks
+spent in the Law Courts, the harassing work connected with each stage
+of litigation, the watching daily when each hearing was imminent, the
+absolute hindrance of all provincial lecturing&mdash;it is hardly possible
+for any one to judge the terrible mental and pecuniary strain of all
+this long-drawn-out struggle.&quot; Aye! it killed him at last, twenty
+years before his time, sapping his splendid vitality, undermining his
+iron constitution.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The blasphemy trial of Mr. Bradlaugh, Mr. Foote, and Mr. Ramsey now
+came on, but this time in the Queen's Bench, before the Lord Chief
+Justice Coleridge. I had the honour of sitting between Mr. Bradlaugh
+and Mr. Foote, charged with the duty of having ready for the former
+all his references, and with a duplicate brief to mark off point after
+point as he dealt with it. Messrs. Foote and Ramsey were brought up in
+custody, but were brave and bright with courage unbroken. Mr.
+Bradlaugh applied to have his case taken separately, as he denied
+responsibility for the paper, and the judge granted the application;
+it was clearly proved that he and I&mdash;the &quot;Freethought Publishing
+Company&quot;&mdash;had never had anything to do with the production of the
+paper; that until November, 1881, we published it, and then refused to
+publish it any longer; that the reason for the refusal was the
+addition of comic Bible illustrations as a feature of the paper. I was
+called as witness and began with a difficulty; claiming to affirm, I
+was asked by the judge if the oath would not be binding on my
+conscience; I answered that any promise was binding on me whatever the
+form, and after some little argument the judge found a way out of the
+insulting form by asking whether the &quot;invocation of the Deity added
+anything to it of a binding nature&mdash;added any sanction?&quot; &quot;None, my
+Lord,&quot; was the prompt reply, and I was allowed to affirm. Sir Hardinge
+Giffard subjected me to a very stringent cross-examination, doing his
+best to entangle me, but the perfect frankness of my answers broke all
+his weapons of finesse and inuendo.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some of the incidents of the trial were curious; Sir Hardinge
+Giffard's opening speech was very able and very unscrupulous. All
+facts in Mr. Bradlaugh's favour were distorted or hidden; anything
+that could be used against him was tricked out in most seductive
+fashion. Among the many monstrous perversions of the truth made by
+this most pious counsel, was the statement that changes of publisher,
+and of registration of the <i>Freethinker</i> were made in consequence of a
+question as to prosecuting it put in the House of Commons. The change
+of publisher was admittedly made in November; the registration was
+made for the first time in November, and could not be changed, as
+there was no previous one. The House of Commons was not sitting in
+November; the question alluded to was asked in the following February.
+This one deliberate lie of the &quot;defender of the faith&quot; will do as well
+as quoting a score of others to show how wickedly and maliciously he
+endeavoured to secure an unjust verdict.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The speech over, a number of witnesses were called. Sir Hardinge did
+not call witnesses who knew the facts, such as Mr. Norrish, the
+shopman, or Mr. Whittle, the printer. These he carefully avoided,
+although he subpoenaed both, because he did not want the real facts to
+come out. But he put in two solicitor's clerks, who had been hanging
+about the premises, and buying endless <i>National Reformers</i> and
+<i>Freethinkers</i>, sheaves of them which were never used, but by which
+Sir Hardinge hoped to convey the impression of a mass of criminality.
+He put in a gentleman from the British Museum, who produced two large
+books, presumed to be <i>National Reformers</i> and <i>Freethinkers</i>; what
+they were brought for nobody understood, the counsel for the Crown as
+little as any one, and the judge, surveying them over his spectacles,
+treated them with supreme contempt, as utterly irrelevant. Then a man
+came to prove that Mr. Bradlaugh was rated for Stonecutter Street, a
+fact no one disputed. Two policemen came to say they had seen him go
+in. &quot;You saw many people go in, I suppose?&quot; queried the Lord Chief
+Justice. On the whole the most miserably weak and obviously malicious
+case that could be brought into a court of law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One witness, however, must not be forgotten&mdash;Mr. Woodhams, bank
+manager. When he stated that Mr. Maloney, the junior counsel for the
+Crown, had inspected Mr. Bradlaugh's banking account, a murmur of
+surprise and indignation ran round the court. &quot;Oh! Oh!&quot; was heard from
+the crowd of barristers behind. The judge looked down incredulously,
+and for a moment the examination was stopped by the general movement.
+Unless Sir Hardinge Giffard is a splendid actor, he was not aware of
+the infamous proceeding, for he looked as startled as the rest of his
+legal brethren.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another queer incident occurred, showing, perhaps more than aught
+else, Mr. Bradlaugh's swift perception of the situation and adaptation
+to the environment. He wanted to read the Mansion House deposition of
+Norrish, to show why he was not called; the judge objected, and
+declined to allow it to be read. A pause while you might count five;
+then; &quot;Well, I think I may say the learned counsel did not call
+Norrish because ...&quot; and then the whole substance of the deposition
+was given in supposititious form. The judge looked down a minute, and
+then went off into silent laughter impossible to control at the adroit
+change of means and persistent gaining of end; barristers all round
+broke into ripples of laughter unrestrained; a broad smile pervaded
+the jury box; the only unmoved person was the defendant who proceeded
+in his grave statement as to what Norrish &quot;might&quot; have been asked. The
+nature of the defence was very clearly stated by Mr. Bradlaugh: &quot;I
+shall ask you to find that this prosecution is one of the steps in a
+vindictive attempt to oppress and to crush a political opponent&mdash;that
+it was a struggle that commenced on my return to Parliament in 1880.
+If the prosecutor had gone into the box I should have shown you that
+he was one of the first then in the House to use the suggestion of
+blasphemy against me there. Since then I have never had any peace
+until the Monday of this week. Writs for penalties have been served,
+and suits of all kinds have been taken against me. On Monday last the
+House of Lords cleared me from the whole of one set, and, gentlemen, I
+ask you to-day to clear me from another. Three times I have been
+re-elected by my constituents, and what Sir Henry Tyler asks you to do
+is to send me to them branded with the dishonour of a conviction,
+branded not with the conviction for publishing heresy, but branded
+with the conviction, dishonourable to me, of having lied in this
+matter. I have no desire to have a prison's walls closed on me, but I
+would sooner ten times that, than that my constituents should think
+that for one moment I lied to escape the penalties. I am not indicted
+for anything I have ever written or caused to be written. As my Lord
+at the very first stage this morning pointed out, it is no question
+with me, Are the matters indicted blasphemous, or are they not
+blasphemous? Are they defensible, or are they not defensible? That is
+not my duty here. On this I make no comment. I have no duty here of
+even discussing the policy of the blasphemy laws, although I cannot
+help thinking that, if I were here making my defence against them, I
+might say that they were bad laws unfairly revived, doing more
+mischief to those who revive them than to those whom they are revived
+against. But it is not for anything I have said myself; it is not for
+anything I have written myself; it is not for anything I have
+published myself. It is an endeavour to make me technically liable for
+a publication with which I have nothing whatever to do, and I will ask
+you to defeat that here. Every time I have succeeded I have been met
+with some new thing. When I first fought it was hoped to defeat my
+election. When I was re-elected it was sought to make me bankrupt by
+enormous penalties, and when I escaped the suit for enormous penalties
+they hope now to destroy me by this. I have no question here about
+defending my heresy, not because I am not ready to defend it when it
+is challenged in the right way, and it there be anything in it that
+the law can challenge. I have never gone back from anything I have
+ever said; I have never gone back from anything I have ever written; I
+have never gone back from anything I have ever done; and I ask you not
+to allow this Sir Henry Whatley Tyler, who dares not come here to-day,
+to use you as the assassin uses the dagger, to stab a man from behind
+whom he never dares to face.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The summing up by Lord Coleridge was perfect in eloquence, in thought,
+in feeling. Nothing more touching could be imagined than the conflict
+between the real religious feeling, abhorrent of heresy, and the
+determination to be just, despite all prejudice. The earnest effort
+lest the prejudice he felt as a Christian should weigh also in the
+minds of the jury, and should cause them to pervert justice. The
+absolute pleading to them to do what was right and not to admit
+against the unbeliever what they would not admit in ordinary cases.
+Then the protest against prosecution of opinions; the admission of the
+difficulties in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the pathetic fear lest by
+persecution &quot;the sacred truths might be struck through the sides of
+those who are their enemies.&quot; For intellectual clearness and moral
+elevation this exquisite piece of eloquence, delivered in a voice of
+silvery beauty, would be hard to excel, and Lord Coleridge did this
+piece of service to the religion so dear to his heart, that he showed
+that a Christian judge could be just and righteous in dealing with a
+foe of his creed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a time of terrible strain waiting for the verdict, and when
+at last it came, &quot;Not Guilty,&quot; a sharp clap of applause hailed it,
+sternly and rightly reproved by the judge. It was echoed by the
+country, which almost unanimously condemned the prosecution as an
+iniquitous attempt on the part of Mr. Bradlaugh's political enemies to
+put a stop to his political career. Thus the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>
+wrote:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Whatever may be the personal or political or religious aversion which
+is excited by Mr. Bradlaugh, it is impossible for even his bitterest
+opponents to deny the brilliance of the series of victories which he
+has won in the law courts. His acquittal in the blasphemy prosecution
+of Saturday was but the latest of a number of encounters in which he
+has succeeded in turning the tables upon his opponents in the most
+decisive fashion. The policy of baiting Mr. Bradlaugh which has been
+persisted in so long, savours so strongly of a petty and malignant
+species of persecution that it is well that those who indulge in it
+should be made to smart for their pains. The wise and weighty words
+used by the Lord Chief Justice in summing up should be taken seriously
+to heart: 'Those persons are to be deprecated who would pervert the
+law, even with the best intentions, and &quot;do evil that good may come,
+whose damnation&quot; (says the apostle) &quot;is just.&quot;' Without emulating the
+severity of the apostle, we may say that it is satisfactory that the
+promoters of all these prosecutions should be condemned in costs.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the separate trial of Messrs. Foote and Ramsey, Mr. Foote again
+defended himself in a speech of marked ability, and spoken of by the
+judge as &quot;very striking.&quot; Lord Coleridge made a noble charge to the
+jury, in which he strongly condemned prosecutions of unpopular
+opinions, pointing out that no prosecution short of extermination
+could be effective, and caustically remarking on the very easy form of
+virtue indulged in by persecutors. &quot;As a general rule,&quot; he said,
+&quot;persecution, unless far more extreme than in England in the
+nineteenth century is possible, is certain to be in vain. It is also
+true, and I cannot help assenting to it, that it is a very easy form
+of virtue. It is a more difficult form of virtue, quietly and
+unostentatiously to obey what we believe to be God's will in our own
+lives. It is not very easy to do it; and it makes much less noise in
+the world. It is very easy to turn upon somebody else who differs from
+us, and in the guise of zeal of God's honour to attack somebody of a
+difference of opinion, whose life may be more pleasing to God and more
+conducive to His honour than our own. And when it is done by persons
+whose own lives are not free from reproach and who take that
+particular form of zeal for God which consists in putting the criminal
+law in force against others, that, no doubt, does more to create a
+sympathy with the defendant than with the prosecutor. And if it should
+be done by those who enjoy the wit of Voltaire, and who do not turn
+away from the sneers of Gibbon, and rather relish the irony of Hume,
+our feelings do not go with the prosecutors, and we are rather
+disposed to sympathise with the defendant. It is still worse if the
+person who takes such a course takes it, not from a kind of notion
+that God wants his assistance, and that he can give it less on his own
+account than by prosecuting others&mdash;but it is mixed up with anything
+of partisan or political feeling, then nothing can be more foreign to
+what is high-minded, or religious, or noble, in men's conduct; and
+indeed, it seems to me that any one who will do that, not for the
+honour of God but for the purpose of the ban, deserves the most
+disdainful disapprobation.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The jury disagreed, and a <i>nolle prosequi</i> was entered. The net
+results of the trials were a large addition to the membership of the
+National Secular Society, an increase of circulation of Freethought
+literature, the raising of Mr. Foote for a time to a position of great
+influence and popularity, and the placing of his name in history as a
+brave martyr for liberty of speech. The offence against good taste
+will be forgotten; the loyalty to conviction and to courage will
+remain. History does not ask if men who suffered for heresy ever
+published a rough word; it asks, Were they brave in their
+steadfastness; were they faithful to the truth they saw? It may be
+well to place on record Mr. Foote's punishment for blasphemy: he spent
+twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four alone in his cell; his only
+seat was a stool without a back; his employment was picking matting;
+his bed was a plank with a thin mattress. During the latter part of
+his imprisonment he was allowed some books.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHXIII"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER XIII.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+SOCIALISM.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+The rest of 1883 passed in the usual way of hard work; the Affirmation
+Bill was rejected, and the agitation for Constitutional right grew
+steadily; the Liberal Press was won over, and Mr. Bradlaugh was
+beginning to earn golden opinions on all sides for his courage, his
+tenacity, and his self-control. A successful International Congress at
+Amsterdam took some of us over to the Northern Venice, where a most
+successful gathering was held. To me, personally, the year has a
+special interest, as being the one in which my attention was called,
+though only partially, to the Socialist movement. I had heard Louise
+Michelle lecture in the early spring; a brief controversy in the
+<i>National Reformer</i> had interested me, but I had not yet concerned
+myself with the economic basis of Socialism; I had realised that the
+land should be public property, but had not gone into the deeper
+economic causes of poverty, though the question was pressing with
+ever-increasing force on heart and brain. Of Socialist teaching I knew
+nothing, having studied only the older English Economists in my
+younger days. In 1884 a more definite call to consider 299 these
+teachings was to come, and I may perhaps open the record of 1884 with
+the words of greeting spoken by me to our readers in the first number
+of the <i>Reformer</i> for that year: &quot;What tests 1884 may have for our
+courage, what strains on our endurance, what trials of our loyalty,
+none can tell. But this we know&mdash;that every test of courage
+successfully met, every strain of endurance steadily borne, every
+trial of loyalty nobly surmounted, leaves courage braver, endurance
+stronger, loyalty truer, than each was before. And therefore, for our
+own and for the world's sake, I will not wish you, friends, an 1884 in
+which there shall be no toil and no battling; but I will wish you,
+each and all, the hero's heart and the hero's patience, in the
+struggle for the world's raising that will endure through the coming
+year.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On February 3rd I came for the first time across a paper called
+<i>Justice</i>, in which Mr. Bradlaugh was attacked, and which gave an
+account of a meeting of the Democratic Federation&mdash;not yet the Social
+Democratic&mdash;in which a man had, apparently unrebuked, said that &quot;all
+means were justifiable to attain&quot; working-class ends. I protested
+strongly against the advocacy of criminal means, declaring that those
+who urged the use of such means were the worst foes of social
+progress. A few weeks later the <i>Echo</i> repeated a speech of Mr.
+Hyndman's in which a &quot;bloodier revolution&quot; than that of France was
+prophesied, and the extinction of &quot;book-learning&quot; seemed coupled with
+the success of Socialism, and this again I commented on. But I had the
+pleasure, a week later, of reprinting from <i>Justice</i> a sensible
+paragraph, condemning the advocacy of violence so long as free
+agitation was allowed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The spring was marked by two events on which I have not time or space
+to dwell&mdash;the resignation by Mr. Bradlaugh of his seat, on the
+reiteration of the resolution of exclusion, and his triumphant return
+for the fourth time by an increased majority, a vote of 4,032, a
+higher poll than that of the general election; and the release of Mr.
+Foote, on February 25th, from Holloway, whence he was escorted by a
+procession a quarter of a mile in length. On the 12th of March he and
+his fellow-prisoners received a magnificent reception and were
+presented with valuable testimonials at the Hall of Science.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Taking up again the thread of Socialism, the great debate in St.
+James's Hall, London, between Mr. Bradlaugh and Mr. Hyndman on April
+17th, roused me to a serious study of the questions raised. Socialism
+has in England no more devoted, no more self-sacrificing advocate than
+Henry Hyndman. A man of wide and deep reading, wielding most ably a
+singularly fascinating pen, with talents that would have made him
+wealthy in any career he adopted, he has sacrificed himself without a
+murmur to the people's cause. He has borne obloquy from without,
+suspicion and unkindness from those he served, and surrounded by
+temptations to betray the people, he has never swerved from his
+integrity. He has said rash things, has been stirred to passionate
+outbursts and reckless phrases, but love to the people and sympathy
+with suffering lay at the root of his wildest words, and they count
+but little as against his faithful service. Personally, my debt to him
+is of a mixed character; he kept me from Socialism for some time by
+his bitter and very unjust antagonism to Mr. Bradlaugh; but it was the
+debate at St. James's Hall that, while I angrily resented his
+injustice, made me feel that there was something more in practical
+Socialism than I had imagined, especially when I read it over
+afterwards, away from the magic of Mr. Bradlaugh's commanding
+eloquence and personal magnetism. It was a sore pity that English
+Socialists, from the outset of their movement, treated Mr. Bradlaugh
+so unfairly, so that his friends were set against Socialists ere they
+began to examine their arguments. I must confess that my deep
+attachment to him led me into injustice to his Socialist foes in those
+early days, and often made me ascribe to them calculated malignity
+instead of hasty and prejudiced assertion. Added to this, their
+uncurbed violence in discussion, their constant interruptions during
+the speeches of opponents, their reckless inaccuracy in matters of
+fact, were all bars standing in the way of the thoughtful. When I came
+to know them better, I found that the bulk of their speakers were very
+young men, overworked and underpaid, who spent their scanty leisure in
+efforts to learn, to educate themselves, to train themselves, and I
+learned to pardon faults which grew out of the bitter sense of
+injustice, and which were due largely to the terrible pressure of our
+system on characters not yet strong enough&mdash;how few are strong
+enough!&mdash;to bear grinding injustice without loss of balance and of
+impartiality. None save those who have worked with them know how much
+of real nobility, of heroic self-sacrifice, of constant self-denial,
+of brotherly affection, there is among the Social Democrats.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this time also I met George Bernard Shaw, one of the most brilliant
+of Socialist writers and most provoking of men; a man with a perfect
+genius for &quot;aggravating&quot; the enthusiastically earnest, and with a
+passion for representing himself as a scoundrel. On my first
+experience of him on the platform at South Place Institute he
+described himself as a &quot;loafer,&quot; and I gave an angry snarl at him in
+the <i>Reformer</i>, for a loafer was my detestation, and behold! I found
+that he was very poor, because he was a writer with principles and
+preferred starving his body to starving his conscience; that he gave
+time and earnest work to the spreading of Socialism, spending night
+after night in workmen's clubs; and that &quot;a loafer&quot; was only an
+amiable way of describing himself because he did not carry a hod. Of
+course I had to apologise for my sharp criticism as doing him a
+serious injustice, but privately felt somewhat injured at having been
+entrapped into such a blunder. Meanwhile I was more and more turning
+aside from politics and devoting myself to the social condition of the
+people I find myself, in June, protesting against Sir John Lubbock's
+Bill which fixed a twelve-hour day as the limit of a &quot;young person's&quot;
+toil. &quot;A 'day' of twelve hours is brutal,&quot; I wrote; &quot;if the law fixes
+twelve hours as a 'fair day' that law will largely govern custom. I
+declare that a 'legal day' should be eight hours on five days in the
+week and not more than five hours on the sixth. If the labour is of an
+exhausting character these hours are too long.&quot; On every side now the
+Socialist controversy grew, and I listened, read, and thought much,
+but said little. The inclusion of John Robertson in the staff of the
+<i>Reformer</i> brought a highly intellectual Socialist into closer touch
+with us, and slowly I found that the case for Socialism was
+intellectually complete and ethically beautiful. The trend of my
+thought was shown by urging the feeding of Board School children,
+breaking down under the combination of education and starvation, and I
+asked, &quot;Why should people be pauperised by a rate-supported meal, and
+not pauperised by, state-supported police, drainage, road-mending,
+street-lighting, &amp;c? &quot;Socialism in its splendid ideal appealed to my
+heart, while the economic soundness of its basis convinced my head.
+All my life was turned towards the progress of the people, the helping
+of man, and it leaped forward to meet the stronger hope, the lofty
+ideal of social brotherhood, the rendering possible to all of freer
+life; so long had I been striving thitherward, and here there opened
+up a path to the yearned-for goal! How strong were the feelings
+surging in my heart may be seen in a brief extract from an article
+published second week of January, 1885: &quot;Christian charity? We know
+its work. It gives a hundred-weight of coal and five pounds of beef
+once a year to a family whose head could earn a hundred such doles if
+Christian justice allowed him fair wage for the work he performs. It
+plunders the workers of the wealth they make, and then flings back at
+them a thousandth part of their own product as 'charity.' It builds
+hospitals for the poor whom it has poisoned in filthy courts and
+alleys, and workhouses for the worn-out creatures from whom it has
+wrung every energy, every hope, every joy. Miss Cobbe summons us to
+admire Christian civilisation, and we see idlers flaunting in the
+robes woven by the toilers, a glittering tinselled super-structure
+founded on the tears, the strugglings, the grey, hopeless misery of
+the poor.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This first month of January, 1885, brought on me the first attack for
+my Socialistic tendencies, from the pen of Mr. W.P. Ball, who wrote
+to the <i>Reformer</i> complaining of my paragraph, quoted above, in which
+I had advocated rate-supported meals for Board School children. A
+brief controversy thus arose, in which I supported my opinion, waiving
+the question as to my being &quot;at heart a Socialist.&quot; In truth, I
+dreaded to make the plunge of publicly allying myself with the
+advocates of Socialism, because of the attitude of bitter hostility
+they had adopted towards Mr. Bradlaugh. On his strong, tenacious
+nature, nurtured on self-reliant individualism, the arguments of the
+younger generation made no impression. He could not change his methods
+because a new tendency was rising to the surface, and he did not see
+how different was the Socialism of our day to the Socialist dreams of
+the past&mdash;noble ideals of a future not immediately realisable in
+truth, but to be worked towards and rendered possible in the days to
+come. Could I take public action which might bring me into collision
+with the dearest of my friends, which might strain the strong and
+tender tie so long existing between us? My affection, my gratitude,
+all warred against the idea of working with those who wronged him so
+bitterly. But the cry of starving children was ever in my ears; the
+sobs of women poisoned in lead works, exhausted in nail works, driven
+to prostitution by starvation, made old and haggard by ceaseless work.
+I saw their misery was the result of an evil system, was inseparable
+from private ownership of the instruments of wealth production; that
+while the worker was himself but an instrument, selling his labour
+under the law of supply and demand, he must remain helpless in the
+grip of the employing classes, and that trade combinations could only
+mean increased warfare&mdash;necessary, indeed, for the time as weapons of
+defence&mdash;but meaning war, not brotherly co-operation of all for the
+good of all. A conflict which was stripped of all covering, a conflict
+between a personal tie and a call of duty could not last long, and
+with a heavy heart I made up my mind to profess Socialism openly and
+work for it with all my energy. Happily, Mr. Bradlaugh was as tolerant
+as he was strong, and our private friendship remained unbroken; but he
+never again felt the same confidence in my judgment as he felt before,
+nor did he any more consult me on his own policy, as he had done ever
+since we first clasped hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A series of articles in <i>Our Corner</i> on the &quot;Redistribution of
+Political Power,&quot; on the &quot;Evolution of Society,&quot; on &quot;Modern
+Socialism,&quot; made my position clear. &quot;Over against those who laud the
+present state of Society, with its unjustly rich and its unjustly
+poor, with its palaces and its slums, its millionaires and its
+paupers, be it ours to proclaim that there is a higher ideal in life
+than that of being first in the race for wealth, most successful in
+the scramble for gold. Be it ours to declare steadfastly that health,
+comfort, leisure, culture, plenty for every individual are far more
+desirable than breathless struggle for existence, furious trampling
+down of the weak by the strong, huge fortunes accumulated out of the
+toil of others, to be handed down to those who had done nothing to
+earn them. Be it ours to maintain that the greatness of a nation
+depends not on the number of its great proprietors, on the wealth of
+its great capitalists, or the splendour of its great nobles, but on
+the absence of poverty among its people, on the education and
+refinement of its masses, on the universality of enjoyment in life....
+Enough for each of work, of leisure, of joy; too little for none, too
+much for none&mdash;such is the Social ideal. Better to strive after it
+worthily and fail, than to die without striving for it at all.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then I differentiated the methods of the Socialist and the Radical
+Individualist, pleading for union among those who formed the wings of
+the army of Labour, and urging union of all workers against the
+idlers. For the weakness of the people has ever been in their
+divisions, in the readiness of each section to turn its weapons
+against other sections instead of against the common foe. All
+privileged classes, when they are attacked, sink their differences and
+present a serried front to their assailants; the people alone fight
+with each other, while the battle between themselves and the
+privileged is raging.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I strove, as so many others were striving, to sound in the ears of the
+thoughtless and the careless the cry of the sufferings of the poor,
+endeavouring to make articulate their misery. Thus in a description of
+Edinburgh slums came the following: &quot;I saw in a 'house' which was made
+by boarding up part of a passage, which had no window, and in which it
+was necessary to burn an oil lamp all day, thus adding to the burden
+of the rent, a family of three&mdash;man, wife, and child&mdash;whose lot was
+hardly 'of their own making.' The man was tall and bronzed, but he was
+dying of heart disease; he could not do hard work, and he was too
+clumsy for light work; so he sat there, after two days' fruitless
+search, patiently nursing his miserable, scrofulous baby in his dim
+and narrow den. The cases of individual hopeless suffering are
+heartbreaking. In one room lay a dying child, dying of low fever
+brought on by want of food. 'It hae no faither,' sobbed the mother;
+and for a moment I did not catch the meaning that the father had left
+to the mother all the burden of a child unallowed by law. In another
+lay the corpse of a mother, with the children round her, and
+hard-featured, gentle-hearted women came in to take back to their
+overcrowded beds 'the mitherless bairns.' In yet another a woman,
+shrunken and yellow, crouched over a glimmer of fire; &quot;I am dying of
+cancer of the womb,&quot; she said, with that pathetic resignation to the
+inevitable so common among the poor. I sat chatting for a few minutes.
+'Come again, deary,' she said as I rose to go; 'it's gey dull sitting
+here the day through.'&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The article in which these, among other descriptions, occurred was
+closed with the following: &quot;Passing out of the slums into the streets
+of the town, only a few steps separating the horror and the beauty, I
+felt, with a vividness more intense than ever, the fearful contrasts
+between the lots of men; and with more pressing urgency the question
+seemed to ring in my ears, 'Is there no remedy? Must there always be
+rich and poor?' Some say that it must be so; that the palace and the
+slum will for ever exist as the light and the shadow. Not so do I
+believe. I believe that the poverty is the result of ignorance and of
+bad social arrangements, and that therefore it may be eradicated by
+knowledge and by social change. I admit that for many of these adult
+dwellers in the slums there is no hope. Poor victims of a civilisation
+that hides its brutality beneath a veneer of culture and of grace, for
+them individually there is, alas! no salvation. But for their
+children, yes! Healthy surroundings, good food, mental and physical
+training, plenty of play, and carefully chosen work&mdash;these might save
+the young and prepare them for happy life. But they are being left to
+grow up as their parents were, and even when a few hours of school are
+given them the home half-neutralises what the education effects. The
+scanty aid given is generally begrudged, the education is to be but
+elementary, as little as possible is doled out. Yet these children
+have each one of them hopes and fears, possibilities of virtue and of
+crime, a life to be made or marred. We shower money on generals and on
+nobles, we keep high-born paupers living on the national charity, we
+squander wealth with both hands on army and navy, on churches and
+palaces; but we grudge every halfpenny that increases the education
+rate and howl down every proposal to build decent houses for the poor.
+We cover our heartlessness and indifference with fine phrases about
+sapping the independence of the poor and destroying their
+self-respect. With loathsome hypocrisy we repair a prince's palace for
+him, and let him live in it rent-free, without one word about the
+degradation involved in his thus living upon charity; while we refuse
+to 'pauperise' the toiler by erecting decent buildings in which he may
+live&mdash;not rent-free like the prince, but only paying a rent which
+shall cover the cost of erection and maintenance, instead of one which
+gives a yearly profit to a speculator. And so, year after year, the
+misery grows, and every great city has on its womb a cancer; sapping
+its vitality, poisoning its life-blood. Every great city is breeding
+in its slums a race which is reverting through the savage to the
+brute&mdash;a brute more dangerous in that degraded humanity has
+possibilities of evil in it beyond the reach of the mere wild beast.
+If not for Love's sake, then for fear; if not for justice or for human
+pity, then for sheer desire of self-preservation; I appeal to the wise
+and to the wealthy to set their hands to the cure of social evil, ere
+stolidity gives place to passion and dull patience vanishes before
+fury, and they
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;'Learn at last, in some wild hour, how much the wretched dare.'&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Because it was less hotly antagonistic to the Radicals than the two
+other Socialist organisations, I joined the Fabian Society, and worked
+hard with it as a speaker and lecturer. Sidney Webb, G. Bernard Shaw,
+Hubert and Mrs. Bland, Graham Wallas&mdash;these were some of those who
+gave time, thought, incessant work to the popularising of Socialist
+thought, the spreading of sound economics, the effort to turn the
+workers' energy toward social rather than merely political reform. We
+lectured at workmen's clubs wherever we could gain a hearing, till we
+leavened London Radicalism with Socialist thought, and by treating the
+Radical as the unevolved Socialist rather than as the anti-Socialist,
+we gradually won him over to Socialist views. We circulated questions
+to be put to all candidates for parliamentary or other offices,
+stirred up interest in local elections, educated men and women into an
+understanding of the causes of their poverty, won recruits for the
+army of propagandists from the younger of the educated middle class.
+That the London working classes to-day are so largely Socialist is
+greatly due to the years of work done among them by members of the
+Fabian Society, as well to the splendid, if occasionally too militant,
+energy of the Social Democratic Federation, and to the devotion of
+that noble and generous genius, William Morris.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During this same year (1885) a movement was set on foot in England to
+draw attention to the terrible sufferings of the Russian political
+prisoners, and it was decided at a meeting held in my house to form a
+society of the friends of Russia, which should seek to spread accurate
+and careful information about the present condition of Russia. At that
+meeting were present Charles Bradlaugh, &quot;Stepniak,&quot; and many others,
+E.R. Pease acting as honorary secretary. It is noteworthy that some
+of the most prominent Russian exiles&mdash;such as Kropotkin&mdash;take the view
+that the Tzar himself is not allowed to know what occurs, and is very
+largely the victim of the bureaucracy that surrounds him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another matter, that increased as the months went on, was the attempt
+of the police authorities to stop Socialist speaking in the open air.
+Christians, Freethinkers, Salvationists, agitators of all kinds were,
+for the most part, left alone, but there was a regular crusade against
+the Socialists. Liberal and Tory journals alike condemned the way in
+which in Dod Street, in September, the Socialists' meetings were
+attacked. Quiet persistence was shown by the promoters&mdash;members of the
+Social Democratic Federation&mdash;and they were well supported by other
+Socialists and by the Radical clubs. I volunteered to speak on October
+4th (my first Sunday in London after the summoning and imprisoning of
+the speakers had commenced), but the attitude of the people was so
+determined on the preceding Sunday that all interference was
+withdrawn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Herbert Burrows stood for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets in
+the November of this year, and I find a paragraph in the <i>Reformer</i> in
+which I heartily wished him success, especially as the first candidate
+who had put forward a demand for industrial education. In this, as in
+so many practical proposals, Socialists have led the way. He polled
+4,232 votes, despite the furious opposition of the clergy to him as a
+Freethinker, of the publicans to him as a teetotaler, of the
+maintainers of the present social system to him as a Socialist. And
+his fight did much to make possible my own success in 1888.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With this autumn, too, began, in connection with the struggle for the
+right of meeting, the helping of the workmen to fair trial by
+providing of bail and legal defence. The first case that I bailed out
+was that of Lewis Lyons, sent to gaol for two months with hard labour
+by Mr. Saunders, of the Thames Police Court. Oh, the weary, sickening
+waiting in the court for &quot;my prisoner,&quot; the sordid vice, the revolting
+details of human depravity to which my unwilling eyes and ears were
+witnesses. I carried Lyons off in triumph, and the Middlesex
+magistrates quashed the conviction, the evidence being pronounced by
+them to be &quot;confusing, contradictory, and worthless.&quot; Yet but for the
+chance of one of us stepping forward to offer bail and to provide the
+means for an appeal (I acted on Mr. Bradlaugh's suggestion and advice,
+for he acted as counsellor to me all through the weary struggles that
+lasted till 1888, putting his great legal knowledge at my disposal,
+though he often disapproved my action, thinking me Quixotic)&mdash;but for
+this, Lewis Lyons would have had to suffer his heavy sentence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The general election took place this autumn, and Northampton returned
+Mr. Bradlaugh for the fifth time, thus putting an end to the long
+struggle, for he took the oath and his seat in the following January,
+and at once gave notice of an Oaths Bill, to give to all who claimed
+it, under all circumstances, the right to affirm. He was returned with
+the largest vote ever polled for him&mdash;4,315&mdash;and he entered Parliament
+with all the prestige of his great struggle, and went to the front at
+once, one of the recognised forces in the House. The action of Mr.
+Speaker Peel promptly put an end to an attempted obstruction. Sir
+Michael Hicks Beach, Mr. Cecil Raikes, and Sir John Hennaway had
+written to the Speaker asking his interference, but the Speaker
+declared that he had no authority, no right to stand between a duly
+elected member and the duty of taking the oath prescribed by statute.
+Thus ended the constitutional struggle of six years, that left the
+victor well-nigh bankrupt in health and in purse, and sent him to a
+comparatively early grave. He lived long enough to justify his
+election, to prove his value to the House and to his country, but he
+did not live long enough to render to England all the services which
+his long training, his wide knowledge, his courage, and his honesty so
+eminently fitted him to yield.
+</p>
+
+<a name="07"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="Images/07.jpg" alt="Norwich Branch of the Socialist League." width="597" height="412"></p>
+<h5>NORWICH BRANCH OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE.
+</h5>
+
+<p>
+<i>Our Corner</i> now served as a valuable aid in Socialist propaganda, and
+its monthly &quot;Socialist Notes&quot; became a record of Socialist progress in
+all lands. We were busy during the spring in organising a conference
+for the discussion of &quot;The Present Commercial System, and the Better
+Utilisation of National Wealth for the Benefit of the Community,&quot; and
+this was successfully held at South Place Institute on June 9th, 10th,
+11th, the three days being given respectively, to the &quot;Utilisation of
+Land,&quot; the &quot;Utilisation of Capital,&quot; and the &quot;Democratic Policy.&quot; On
+the 9th Mr. Bradlaugh spoke on the utilisation of waste lands, arguing
+that in a thickly populated country no one had the right to keep
+cultivable land uncultivated, and that where land was so kept there
+should be compulsory expropriation, the state taking the land and
+letting it out to cultivating tenants. Among the other speakers were
+Edward Carpenter, William Morris, Sidney Webb, John Robertson, William
+Saunders, W. Donnisthorpe, Edward Aveling, Charlotte Wilson, Mrs.
+Fenwick Miller, Hubert Bland, Dr. Pankhurst, and myself&mdash;men and women
+of many views, met to compare methods, and so help on the cause of
+social regeneration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bitter attacks were made on me for my Socialist advocacy by some of
+the Radicals in the Freethought party, and looking back I find myself
+condemned as a &quot;Saint Athanasius in petticoats,&quot; and as possessing a
+&quot;mind like a milk-jug.&quot; This same courteous critic remarked, &quot;I have
+heard Mrs. Besant described as being, like most women, at the mercy of
+her last male acquaintance for her views on economics.&quot; I was foolish
+enough to break a lance in self-defence with this assailant, not
+having then learned that self-defence was a waste of time that might
+be better employed in doing work for others. I certainly should not
+now take the trouble to write such a paragraph as the following: &quot;The
+moment a man uses a woman's sex to discredit her arguments, the
+thoughtful reader knows that he is unable to answer the arguments
+themselves. But really these silly sneers at woman's ability have lost
+their force, and are best met with a laugh at the stupendous 'male
+self-conceit' of the writer. I may add that such shafts are specially
+pointless against myself. A woman who thought her way out of
+Christianity and Whiggism into Freethought and Radicalism absolutely
+alone; who gave up every old friend, male and female, rather than
+resign the beliefs she had struggled to in solitude; who, again, in
+embracing active Socialism, has run counter to the views of her
+nearest 'male friends'; such a woman may very likely go wrong, but I
+think she may venture, without conceit, to at least claim independence
+of judgment. I did not make the acquaintance of one of my present
+Socialist comrades, male or female, until I had embraced Socialism.&quot; A
+foolish paragraph, as are all self-defences, and a mischievous one, as
+all retort breeds fresh strife. But not yet had come the self-control
+that estimates the judgments of others at their true value, that recks
+not of praise and blame; not yet had I learned that evil should not be
+met with evil, wrath with wrath; not yet were the words of the Buddha
+the law to which I strove to render obedience: &quot;Hatred ceases not by
+hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love.&quot; The year 1886 was a
+terrible one for labour, everywhere reductions of wages, everywhere
+increase of the numbers of the unemployed; turning over the pages of
+<i>Our Corner</i>, I see &quot;Socialist Notes&quot; filled, month after month, with
+a monotonous tale, &quot;there is a reduction of wages at&quot; such and such a
+place; so many &quot;men have been discharged at &mdash;-, owing to the
+slackness of trade.&quot; Our hearts sank lower and lower as summer passed
+into autumn, and the coming winter threatened to add to starvation the
+bitter pains of cold. The agitation for the eight hours' day increased
+in strength as the unemployed grew more numerous week by week &quot;We
+can't stand it,&quot; a sturdy, quiet fellow had said to me during the
+preceding winter; &quot;flesh and blood can't stand it, and two months of
+this bitter cold, too.&quot; &quot;We may as well starve idle as starve
+working,&quot; had said another, with a fierce laugh. And a spirit of
+sullen discontent was spreading everywhere, discontent that was wholly
+justified by facts. But ah! how patient they were for the most part,
+how sadly, pathetically patient, this crucified Christ, Humanity;
+wrongs that would set my heart and my tongue afire would be accepted
+as a matter of course. O blind and mighty people, how my heart went
+out to you; trampled on, abused, derided, asking so little and needing
+so much; so pathetically grateful for the pettiest services; so loving
+and so loyal to those who offered you but their poor services and
+helpless love. Deeper and deeper into my innermost nature ate the
+growing desire to succour, to suffer for, to save. I had long given up
+my social reputation, I now gave up with ever-increasing surrender
+ease, comfort, time; the passion of pity grew stronger and stronger,
+fed by each new sacrifice, and each sacrifice led me nearer and nearer
+to the threshold of that gateway beyond which stretched a path of
+renunciation I had never dreamed of, which those might tread who were
+ready wholly to strip off self for Man's sake, who for Love's sake
+would surrender Love's return from those they served, and would go out
+into the darkness for themselves that they might, with their own souls
+as fuel, feed the Light of the World.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the suffering deepened with the darkening months, the meetings of
+the unemployed grew in number, and the murmurs of discontent became
+louder. The Social Democratic Federation carried on an outdoor
+agitation, not without making blunders, being composed of human
+beings, but with abundant courage and self-sacrifice. The policy of
+breaking up Socialist meetings went on while other meetings were
+winked at, and John Williams, a fiery speaker, but a man with a record
+of pathetic struggle and patient heroism, was imprisoned for two
+months for speaking in the open air, and so nearly starved in gaol
+that he came out with his health broken for life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+1887 dawned, the year that was to close so stormily, and Socialists
+everywhere were busying themselves on behalf of the unemployed, urging
+vestries to provide remunerative work for those applying for relief,
+assailing the Local Government Board with practicable proposals for
+utilising the productive energies of the unemployed, circulating
+suggestions to municipalities and other local representative bodies,
+urging remedial measures. A four days' oral debate with Mr. Foote, and
+a written debate with Mr. Bradlaugh, occupied some of my energies, and
+helped in the process of education to which public opinion was being
+subjected. Both these debates were largely circulated as pamphlets. A
+series of afternoon debates between representative speakers was
+organised at South Place Institute, and Mr. Corrie Grant and myself
+had a lively discussion, I affirming &quot;That the existence of classes
+who live upon unearned incomes is detrimental to the welfare of the
+community, and ought to be put an end to by legislation.&quot; Another
+debate&mdash;in this very quarrelsome spring of 1887&mdash;was a written one in
+the <i>National Reformer</i> between the Rev. G.F. Handel Rowe and myself
+on the proposition, &quot;Is Atheism logically tenable, and is there a
+satisfactory Atheistic System for the guidance of Human Conduct.&quot; And
+so the months went on, and the menace of misery grew louder and
+louder, till in September I find myself writing: &quot;This one thing is
+clear&mdash;Society must deal with the unemployed, or the unemployed will
+deal with Society. Stormier and stormier becomes the social outlook,
+and they at least are not the worst enemies of Society who seek to
+find some way through the breakers by which the ship of the
+Commonwealth may pass into quiet waters.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some amusement turned up in the shape of a Charing Cross Parliament,
+in which we debated with much vigour the &quot;burning questions&quot; of the
+day. We organised a compact Socialist party, defeated a Liberal
+Government, took the reins of office, and&mdash;after a Queen's Speech in
+which her Majesty addressed her loyal Commons with a plainness of
+speech never before (or since) heard from the throne&mdash;we brought in
+several Bills of a decidedly heroic character. G. Bernard Shaw, as
+President of the Local Government Board, and I, as Home Secretary,
+came in for a good deal of criticism in connection with various
+drastic measures. An International Freethought Congress, held in
+London, entailed fairly heavy work, and the science classes were ever
+with us. Another written debate came with October, this time on the
+&quot;Teachings of Christianity,&quot; making the fifth of these set discussions
+held by me during the year. This same month brought a change, painful
+but just: I resigned my much-prized position as co-editor of the
+<i>National Reformer,</i> and the number for October 23rd bore Charles
+Bradlaugh's name alone. The change did not affect my work on the
+paper, but I became merely a subordinate, though remaining, of course,
+joint proprietor. The reason cannot be more accurately given than in
+the paragraph penned at the time: &quot;For a considerable time past, and
+lately in increasing number, complaints have reached me from various
+quarters of the inconvenience and uncertainty that result from the
+divided editorial policy of this paper on the question of Socialism.
+Some months ago I proposed to avoid this difficulty by resigning my
+share in the editorship; but my colleague, with characteristic
+liberality, asked me to let the proposal stand over and see if matters
+would not adjust themselves. But the difficulty, instead of
+disappearing, has only become more pressing; and we both feel that our
+readers have a right to demand that it be solved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;When I became co-editor of this paper I was not a Socialist; and,
+although I regard Socialism as the necessary and logical outcome of
+the Radicalism which for so many years the <i>National Reformer</i> has
+taught, still, as in avowing myself a Socialist I have taken a
+distinct step, the partial separation of my policy in labour questions
+from that of my colleague has been of my own making, and not of his,
+and it is, therefore, for me to go away. Over by far the greater part
+of our sphere of action we are still substantially agreed, and are
+likely to remain so. But since, as Socialism becomes more and more a
+question of practical politics, differences of theory tend to produce
+differences in conduct; and since a political paper must have a single
+editorial programme in practical politics, it would obviously be most
+inconvenient for me to retain my position as co-editor. I therefore
+resume my former position as contributor only, thus clearing the
+<i>National Reformer</i> of all responsibility for the views I hold.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To this Mr. Bradlaugh added the following:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;I need hardly add to this how very deeply I regret the necessity for
+Mrs. Besant's resignation of the joint editorship of this Journal, and
+the real grief I feel in accepting this break in a position in which
+she has rendered such enormous service to the Freethought and Radical
+cause. As a most valued contributor I trust the <i>National Reformer</i>
+may never lose the efficient aid of her brain and pen. For thirteen
+years this paper has been richer for good by the measure of her
+never-ceasing and most useful work. I agree with her that a journal
+must have a distinct editorial policy; and I think this distinctness
+the more necessary when, as in the present case, every contributor has
+the greatest freedom of expression. I recognise in the fullest degree
+the spirit of self-sacrifice in which the lines, to which I add these
+words, have been penned by Mrs. Besant.
+</p>
+<p class="noindent">
+&quot;CHARLES BRADLAUGH.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a wrench, this breaking of a tie for which a heavy price had
+been paid thirteen years before, but it was just. Any one who makes a
+change with which pain is connected is bound, in honour and duty, to
+take that pain as much as possible on himself; he must not put his
+sacrifice on others, nor pay his own ransom with their coin. There
+must be honour kept in the life that reaches towards the Ideal, for
+broken faith to that is the only real infidelity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And there was another reason for the change that I dared not name to
+him, for his quick loyalty would then have made him stubbornly
+determined against change. I saw the swift turning of public opinion,
+the gradual approach to him among Liberals who had hitherto held
+aloof, and I knew that they looked upon me as a clog and a burden, and
+that were I less prominently with him his way would be the easier to
+tread. So I slipped more and more into the background, no longer went
+with him to his meetings; my use to him in public was over, for I had
+become hindrance instead of help. While he was outcast and hated I had
+the pride of standing at his side; when all the fair-weather friends
+came buzzing round him I served him best by self-effacement, and I
+never loved him better than when I stood aside. But I continued all
+the literary work unaltered, and no change of opinions touched his
+kindness to me, although when, a little later, I joined the
+Theosophical Society, he lost his trust in my reasoning powers and
+judgment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this same month of October the unemployed began walking in
+procession through the streets, and harshness on the part of the
+police led to some rioting. Sir Charles Warren thought it his duty to
+dragoon London meetings after the fashion of Continental prefects,
+with the inevitable result that an ill-feeling grew up between the
+people and the police.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last we formed a Socialist Defence Association, in order to help
+poor workmen brought up and sentenced on police evidence only, without
+any chance being given them of proper legal defence, and I organised a
+band of well-to-do men and women, who promised to obey a telegraphic
+summons, night or day, and to bail out any prisoner arrested for
+exercising the ancient right of walking in procession and speaking. To
+take one instance: Mr. Burleigh, the well-known war correspondent, and
+Mr. Winks were arrested and &quot;run in&quot; with Mr. J. Knight, a workman,
+for seditious language. I went down to the police-station to offer
+bail for the latter: Chief-Constable Howard accepted bail for Messrs.
+Burleigh and Winks, but refused it for Mr. Knight. The next day, at
+the police-court, the preposterous bail of &pound;400 was demanded for Mr.
+Knight and supplied by my faithful band, and on the next hearing Mr.
+Poland, solicitor to the Treasury, withdrew the charge against him for
+lack of evidence!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came the closing of Trafalgar Square, and the unexpected and
+high-handed order that cost some men their lives, many their liberty,
+and hundreds the most serious injuries. The Metropolitan Radical
+Federation had called a meeting for November 13th to protest against
+the imprisonment of Mr. O'Brien, and as Mr. Matthews, from his place
+in the House, had stated that there was no intention of interfering
+with <i>bon&acirc; fide</i> political meetings, the Radical clubs did not expect
+police interference. On November 9th Sir Charles Warren had issued an
+order forbidding all meetings in the Square, but the clubs trusted the
+promise of the Home Secretary. On Saturday evening only, November
+12th, when all arrangements were completed, did he issue a peremptory
+order, forbidding processions within a certain area. With this trap
+suddenly sprung upon them, the delegates from the clubs, the Fabian
+Society, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Socialist League,
+met on that same Saturday evening to see to any details that had been
+possibly left unsettled. It was finally decided to go to the Square as
+arranged, and, if challenged by the police, to protest formally
+against the illegal interference, then to break up the processions and
+leave the members to find their own way to the Square. It was also
+decided to go Sunday after Sunday to the Square, until the right of
+public meetings was vindicated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The procession I was in started from Clerkenwell Green, and walked
+with its banner in front, and the chosen speakers, including myself,
+immediately behind the flag. As we were moving slowly and quietly
+along one of the narrow streets debouching on Trafalgar Square,
+wondering whether we should be challenged, there was a sudden charge,
+and without a word the police were upon us with uplifted truncheons;
+the banner was struck down, and men and women were falling under a
+hail of blows. There was no attempt at resistance, the people were too
+much astounded at the unprepared attack. They scattered, leaving some
+of their number on the ground too much injured to move, and then made
+their way in twos and threes to the Square. It was garrisoned by
+police, drawn up in serried rows, that could only have been broken by
+a deliberate charge. Our orders were to attempt no violence, and we
+attempted none. Mr. Cunninghame Graham and Mr. John Burns, arm-in-arm,
+tried to pass through the police, and were savagely cut about the head
+and arrested. Then ensued a scene to be remembered; the horse police
+charged in squadrons at a hand-gallop, rolling men and women over like
+ninepins, while the foot police struck recklessly with their
+truncheons, cutting a road through the crowd that closed immediately
+behind them. I got on a waggonette and tried to persuade the driver to
+pull his trap across one of the roads, and to get others in line, so
+as to break the charges of the mounted police; but he was afraid, and
+drove away to the Embankment, so I jumped out and went back to the
+Square. At last a rattle of cavalry, and up came the Life Guards,
+cleverly handled but hurting none, trotting their horses gently and
+shouldering the crowd apart; and then the Scots Guards with bayonets
+fixed marched through and occupied the north of the Square. Then the
+people retreated as we passed round the word, &quot;Go home, go home.&quot; The
+soldiers were ready to fire, the people unarmed; it would have been
+but a massacre. Slowly the Square emptied and all was still. All other
+processions were treated as ours had been, and the injuries inflicted
+were terrible. Peaceable, law-abiding workmen, who had never dreamed
+of rioting, were left with broken legs, broken arms, wounds of every
+description. One man, Linnell, died almost immediately, others from
+the effect of their injuries. The next day a regular court-martial in
+Bow Street Police Court, witnesses kept out by the police, men dazed
+with their wounds, decent workmen of unblemished character who had
+never been charged in a police-court before, sentenced to imprisonment
+without chance of defence. But a gallant band rallied to their rescue.
+William T. Stead, most chivalrous of journalists, opened a Defence
+Fund, and money rained in; my pledged bail came up by the dozen, and
+we got the men out on appeal. By sheer audacity I got into the
+police-court, addressed the magistrate, too astounded by my profound
+courtesy and calm assurance to remember that I had no right there, and
+then produced bail after bail of the most undeniable character and
+respectability, which no magistrate could refuse. Breathing-time
+gained, a barrister, Mr. W.M. Thompson, worked day after day with
+hearty devotion, and took up the legal defence. Fines we paid, and
+here Mrs. Marx Aveling did eager service. A pretty regiment I led out
+of Millbank Prison, after paying their fines; bruised, clothes torn,
+hatless, we must have looked a disreputable lot. We stopped and bought
+hats, to throw an air of respectability over our <i>cort&egrave;ge</i>, and we
+kept together until I saw the men into train and omnibus, lest, with
+the bitter feelings now roused, conflict should again arise. We formed
+the Law and Liberty League to defend all unjustly assailed by the
+police, and thus rescued many a man from prison; and we gave poor
+Linnell, killed in Trafalgar Square, a public funeral. Sir Charles
+Warren forbade the passing of the hearse through any of the main
+thoroughfares west of Waterloo Bridge, so the processions waited there
+for it. W.T. Stead, R. Cunninghame Graham, Herbert Burrows, and
+myself walked on one side the coffin, William Morris, F. Smith, R.
+Dowling, and J. Seddon on the other; the Rev. Stewart D. Headlam, the
+officiating clergyman, walked in front; fifty stewards carrying long
+wands guarded the coffin. From Wellington Street to Bow Cemetery the
+road was one mass of human beings, who uncovered reverently as the
+slain man went by; at Aldgate the procession took three-quarters of an
+hour to pass one spot, and thus we bore Linnell to his grave, symbol
+of a cruel wrong, the vast orderly, silent crowd, bareheaded, making
+mute protest against the outrage wrought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is pleasant to put on record here Mr. Bradlaugh's grave approval of
+the heavy work done in the police-courts, and the following paragraph
+shows how generously he could praise one not acting on his own lines:
+&quot;As I have on most serious matters of principle recently differed very
+widely from my brave and loyal co-worker, and as the difference has
+been regrettably emphasised by her resignation of her editorial
+functions on this Journal, it is the more necessary that I should say
+how thoroughly I approve, and how grateful I am to her for, her
+conduct in not only obtaining bail and providing legal assistance for
+the helpless unfortunates in the hands of the police, but also for her
+daily personal attendance and wise conduct at the police-stations and
+police-courts, where she has done so much to abate harsh treatment on
+the one hand and rash folly on the other. While I should not have
+marked out this as fitting woman's work, especially in the recent very
+inclement weather, I desire to record my view that it has been bravely
+done, well done, and most usefully done, and I wish to mark this the
+more emphatically as my views and those of Mrs. Besant seem wider
+apart than I could have deemed possible on many of the points of
+principle underlying what is every day growing into a most serious
+struggle.&quot; Ever did I find Charles Bradlaugh thus tolerant of
+difference of opinion, generously eager to approve what to him seemed
+right even in a policy he disapproved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The indignation grew and grew; the police were silently boycotted, but
+the people were so persistent and so tactful that no excuse for
+violence was given, until the strain on the police force began to
+tell, and the Tory Government felt that London was being hopelessly
+alienated; so at last Sir Charles Warren fell, and a wiser hand was
+put at the helm.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="CHXIV"></a>
+<p class="chapter">CHAPTER XIV.
+</p>
+
+<h5>
+THROUGH STORM TO PEACE.
+</h5>
+
+
+<p>
+Out of all this turmoil and stress rose a Brotherhood that had in it
+the promise of a fairer day. Mr. Stead and I had become close
+friends&mdash;he Christian, I Atheist, burning with one common love for
+man, one common hatred against oppression. And so in <i>Our Corner</i> for
+February, 1888, I wrote:&mdash;&quot;Lately there has been dawning on the minds
+of men far apart in questions of theology, the idea of founding a new
+Brotherhood, in which service of Man should take the place erstwhile
+given to service of God&mdash;a brotherhood in which work should be worship
+and love should be baptism, in which none should be regarded as alien
+who was willing to work for human good. One day as I was walking
+towards Millbank Gaol with the Rev. S.D. Headlam, on the way to
+liberate a prisoner, I said to him: 'Mr. Headlam, we ought to have a
+new Church, which should include all who have the common ground of
+faith in and love for man.' And a little later I found that my friend
+Mr. W.T. Stead, editor of the <i>Pall Mall Gazette,</i> had long been
+brooding over a similar thought, and wondering whether men 'might not
+be persuaded to be as earnest about making this world happy as they
+are over saving their souls.' The teaching of social duty, the
+upholding of social righteousness, the building up of a true
+commonwealth&mdash;such would be among the aims of the Church of the
+future. Is the hope too fair for realisation? Is the winning of such
+beatific vision yet once more the dream of the enthusiast? But surely
+the one fact that persons so deeply differing in theological creeds as
+those who have been toiling for the last three months to aid and
+relieve the oppressed, can work in absolute harmony side by side for
+the one end&mdash;surely this proves that there is a bond which is stronger
+than our antagonisms, a unity which is deeper than the speculative
+theories which divide.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How unconsciously I was marching towards the Theosophy which was to
+become the glory of my life, groping blindly in the darkness for that
+very brotherhood, definitely formulated on these very lines by those
+Elder Brothers of our race, at whose feet I was so soon to throw
+myself. How deeply this longing for something loftier than I had yet
+found had wrought itself into my life, how strong the conviction was
+growing that there was something to be sought to which the service of
+man was the road, may be seen in the following passage from the same
+article:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;It has been thought that in these days of factories and of tramways,
+of shoddy, and of adulteration, that all life must tread with even
+rhythm of measured footsteps, and that the glory of the ideal could no
+longer glow over the greyness of a modern horizon. But signs are not
+awanting that the breath of the older heroism is beginning to stir
+men's breasts, and that the passion for justice and for liberty, which
+thrilled through the veins of the world's greatest in the past, and
+woke our pulses to responsive throb, has not yet died wholly out of
+the hearts of men. Still the quest of the Holy Grail exercises its
+deathless fascination, but the seekers no longer raise eyes to heaven,
+nor search over land and sea, for they know that it waits them in the
+suffering at their doors, that the consecration of the holiest is on
+the agonising masses of the poor and the despairing, the cup is
+crimson with the blood of the
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+&quot;'People, the grey-grown speechless Christ.'
+</p>
+
+<p>
+... If there be a faith that can remove the mountains of ignorance and
+evil, it is surely that faith in the ultimate triumph of Right in the
+final enthronement of Justice, which alone makes life worth the
+living, and which gems the blackest cloud of depression with the
+rainbow-coloured arch of an immortal hope.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a step towards bringing about some such union of those ready to
+work for man, Mr. Stead and I projected the <i>Link</i>, a halfpenny
+weekly, the spirit of which was described in its motto, taken from
+Victor Hugo: &quot;The people are silence. I will be the advocate of this
+silence. I will speak for the dumb. I will speak of the small to the
+great and of the feeble to the strong.... I will speak for all the
+despairing silent ones. I will interpret this stammering; I will
+interpret the grumblings, the murmurs, the tumults of crowds, the
+complaints ill-pronounced, and all these cries of beasts that, through
+ignorance and through suffering, man is forced to utter ... I will be
+the Word of the People. I will be the bleeding mouth whence the gag is
+snatched out. I will say everything.&quot; It announced its object to be
+the &quot;building up&quot; of a &quot;New Church, dedicated to the service of man,&quot;
+and &quot;what we want to do is to establish in every village and in every
+street some man or woman who will sacrifice time and labour as
+systematically and as cheerfully in the temporal service of man as
+others do in what they believe to be the service of God.&quot; Week after
+week we issued our little paper, and it became a real light in the
+darkness. There the petty injustices inflicted on the poor found
+voice; there the starvation wages paid to women found exposure; there
+sweating was brought to public notice. A finisher of boots paid 2s.
+6d. per dozen pairs and &quot;find your own polish and thread&quot;; women
+working for 10&frac12; hours per day, making shirts&mdash;&quot;fancy best&quot;&mdash;at from
+10d. to 3s. per dozen, finding their own cotton and needles, paying
+for gas, towel, and tea (compulsory), earning from 4s. to 10s. per
+week for the most part; a mantle finisher 2s. 2d. a week, out of which
+6d. for materials; &quot;respectable hard-working woman&quot; tried for
+attempted suicide, &quot;driven to rid herself of life from want.&quot; Another
+part of our work was defending people from unjust landlords, exposing
+workhouse scandals, enforcing the Employers' Liability Act, Charles
+Bradlaugh's Truck Act, forming &quot;Vigilance Circles&quot; whose members kept
+watch in their own district over cases of cruelty to children,
+extortion, insanitary workshops, sweating, &amp;c., reporting each case to
+me. Into this work came Herbert Burrows, who had joined hands with me
+over the Trafalgar Square defence, and who wrote some noble articles
+in the <i>Link</i>. A man loving the people with passionate devotion,
+hating oppression and injustice with equal passion, working himself
+with remorseless energy, breaking his heart over wrongs he could not
+remedy. His whole character once came out in a sentence when he was
+lying delirious and thought himself dying: &quot;Tell the people how I have
+loved them always.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In our crusade for the poor we worked for the dockers.&quot; To-morrow
+morning, in London alone 20,000 to 25,000 adult men,&quot; wrote Sidney
+Webb, &quot;will fight like savages for permission to labour in the docks
+for 4d. an hour, and one-third of them will fight in vain, and be
+turned workless away.&quot; We worked for children's dinners. &quot;If we insist
+on these children being educated, is it not necessary that they shall
+be fed? If not, we waste on them knowledge they cannot assimilate, and
+torture many of them to death. Poor waifs of humanity, we drive them
+into the school and bid them learn; and the pitiful, wistful eyes
+question us why we inflict this strange new suffering, and bring into
+their dim lives this new pang. 'Why not leave us alone? 'ask the
+pathetically patient little faces. Why not, indeed, since for these
+child martyrs of the slums, Society has only formulas, not food.&quot; We
+cried out against &quot;cheap goods,&quot; that meant &quot;sweated and therefore
+stolen goods.&quot; &quot;The ethics of buying should surely be simply enough.
+We want a particular thing, and we do not desire to obtain it either
+by begging or by robbery; but if in becoming possessed of it, we
+neither beg it nor steal, we must give for it something equivalent in
+exchange; so much of our neighbour's labour has been put into the
+thing we desire; if we will not yield him fair equivalent for that
+labour, yet take his article, we defraud him, and if we are not
+willing to give that fair equivalent we have no right to become the
+owners of his product.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This branch of our work led to a big fight&mdash;a fight most happy in its
+results. At a meeting of the Fabian Society, Miss Clementina Black
+gave a capital lecture on Female Labour, and urged the formation of a
+Consumers' League, pledged only to buy from shops certificated &quot;clean&quot;
+from unfair wage. H.H. Champion, in the discussion that followed,
+drew attention to the wages paid by Bryant &amp; May (Limited), while
+paying an enormous dividend to their shareholders, so that the value
+of the original &pound;5 shares was quoted at &pound;18 7s. 6d. Herbert Burrows
+and I interviewed some of the girls, got lists of wages, of fines, &amp;c.
+&quot;A typical case is that of a girl of sixteen, a piece-worker; she
+earns 4s. a week, and lives with a sister, employed by the same firm,
+who 'earns good money, as much as 8s. or 9s. a week.' Out of the
+earnings 2s. a week is paid for the rent of one room. The child lives
+only on bread and butter and tea, alike for breakfast and dinner, but
+related with dancing eyes that once a month she went to a meal where
+'you get coffee and bread and butter, and jam and marmalade, and lots
+of it.'&quot; We published the facts under the title of &quot;White Slavery in
+London,&quot; and called for a boycott of Bryant &amp; May's matches. &quot;It is
+time some one came and helped us,&quot; said two pale-faced girls to me;
+and I asked: &quot;Who will help? Plenty of people wish well to any good
+cause; but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still
+fewer will risk anything in its support. 'Some one ought to do it, but
+why should I?' is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability.
+'Some one ought to do it, so why <i>not</i> I?' is the cry of some earnest
+servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty.
+Between those two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was promptly threatened with an action for libel, but nothing came
+of it; it was easier to strike at the girls, and a few days later
+Fleet Street was enlivened by the irruption of a crowd of match-girls,
+demanding Annie Besant. I couldn't speechify to match-girls in Fleet
+Street, so asked that a deputation should come and explain what they
+wanted. Up came three women and told their story: they had been asked
+to sign a paper certifying that they were well treated and contented,
+and that my statements were untrue; they refused. &quot;You had spoke up
+for us,&quot; explained one, &quot;and we weren't going back on you.&quot; A girl,
+pitched on as their leader, was threatened with dismissal; she stood
+firm; next day she was discharged for some trifle, and they all threw
+down their work, some 1,400 of them, and then a crowd of them started
+off to me to ask what to do next. If we ever worked in our lives,
+Herbert Burrows and I worked for the next fortnight. And a pretty
+hubbub we created; we asked for money, and it came pouring in; we
+registered the girls to receive strike pay, wrote articles, roused the
+clubs, held public meetings, got Mr. Bradlaugh to ask questions in
+Parliament, stirred up constituencies in which shareholders were
+members, till the whole country rang with the struggle. Mr. Frederick
+Charrington lent us a hall for registration, Mr. Sidney Webb and
+others moved the National Liberal Club to action; we led a procession
+of the girls to the House of Commons, and interviewed, with a
+deputation of them, Members of Parliament who cross-questioned them.
+The girls behaved splendidly, stuck together, kept brave and bright
+all through. Mr. Hobart of the Social Democratic Federation, Messrs.
+Shaw, Bland, and Oliver, and Headlam of the Fabian Society, Miss
+Clementina Black, and many another helped in the heavy work. The
+London Trades Council finally consented to act as arbitrators and a
+satisfactory settlement was arrived at; the girls went in to work,
+fines and deductions were abolished, better wages paid; the
+Match-makers' Union was established, still the strongest woman's
+Trades Union in England, and for years I acted as secretary, till,
+under press of other duties, I resigned, and my work was given by the
+girls to Mrs. Thornton Smith; Herbert Burrows became, and still is,
+the treasurer. For a time there was friction between the Company and
+the Union, but it gradually disappeared under the influence of common
+sense on both sides, and we have found the manager ready to consider
+any just grievance and to endeavour to remove it, while the Company
+have been liberal supporters of the Working Women's Club at Bow,
+founded by H.P. Blavatsky.
+</p>
+
+<a name="08"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="Images/08.jpg" alt="Strike Committee of the Matchmakers' Union." width="667" height="464">
+</p>
+<h5>STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.</h5>
+
+<p>
+The worst suffering of all was among the box-makers, thrown out of
+work by the strike, and they were hard to reach. Twopence-farthing per
+gross of boxes, and buy your own string and paste, is not wealth, but
+when the work went more rapid starvation came. Oh, those trudges
+through the lanes and alleys round Bethnal Green Junction late at
+night, when our day's work was over; children lying about on shavings,
+rags, anything; famine looking out of baby faces, out of women's eyes,
+out of the tremulous hands of men. Heart grew sick and eyes dim, and
+ever louder sounded the question, &quot;Where is the cure for sorrow, what
+the way of rescue for the world?&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In August I asked for a &quot;match-girls' drawing-room.&quot; &quot;It will want a
+piano, tables for papers, for games, for light literature; so that it
+may offer a bright, homelike refuge to these girls, who now have no
+real homes, no playground save the streets. It is not proposed to
+build an 'institution' with stern and rigid discipline and enforcement
+of prim behaviour, but to open a home, filled with the genial
+atmosphere of cordial comradeship, and self-respecting freedom&mdash;the
+atmosphere so familiar to all who have grown up in the blessed shelter
+of a happy home, so strange, alas! to too many of our East London
+girls.&quot; In the same month of August, two years later, H.P. Blavatsky
+opened such a home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came a cry for help from South London, from tin-box makers,
+illegally fined, and in many cases grievously mutilated by the
+non-fencing of machinery; then aid to shop assistants, also illegally
+fined; legal defences by the score still continued; a vigorous
+agitation for a free meal for children, and for fair wages to be paid
+by all public bodies; work for the dockers and exposure of their
+wrongs; a visit to the Cradley Heath chain-makers, speeches to them,
+writing for them; a contest for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets
+division, and triumphant return at the head of the poll. Such were
+some of the ways in which the autumn days were spent, to say nothing
+of scores of lectures&mdash;Secularist, Labour, Socialist&mdash;and scores of
+articles written for the winning of daily bread. When the School Board
+work was added I felt that I had as much work as one woman's strength
+could do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus was ushered in 1889, the to me never-to-be-forgotten year in
+which I found my way &quot;Home,&quot; and had the priceless good fortune of
+meeting, and of becoming the pupil of, H.P. Blavatsky. Ever more and
+more had been growing on me the feeling that something more than I had
+was needed for the cure of social ills. The Socialist position
+sufficed on the economic side, but where to gain the inspiration, the
+motive, which should lead to the realisation of the Brotherhood of
+Man? Our efforts to really organise bands of unselfish workers had
+failed. Much indeed had been done, but there was not a real movement
+of self-sacrificing devotion, in which men worked for Love's sake
+only, and asked but to give, not to take. Where was the material for
+the nobler Social Order, where the hewn stones for the building of the
+Temple of Man? A great despair would oppress me as I sought for such a
+movement and found it not.
+</p>
+
+<a name="09"></a>
+<p class="ctr">
+<img src="Images/09.jpg" alt="Members of the Matchmakers' Union." width="464" height="579">
+</p>
+<h5>MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.
+</h5>
+
+<p>
+Not only so; but since 1886 there had been slowly growing up a
+conviction that my philosophy was not sufficient; that life and mind
+were other than, more than, I had dreamed. Psychology was advancing
+with rapid strides; hypnotic experiments were revealing unlooked-for
+complexities in human consciousness, strange riddles of multiplex
+personalities, and, most startling of all, vivid intensities of mental
+action when the brain, that should be the generator of thought, was
+reduced to a comatose state. Fact after fact came hurtling in upon me,
+demanding explanation I was incompetent to give. I studied the
+obscurer sides of consciousness, dreams, hallucinations, illusions,
+insanity. Into the darkness shot a ray of light&mdash;A.P. Sinnett's
+&quot;Occult World,&quot; with its wonderfully suggestive letters, expounding
+not the supernatural but a nature under law, wider than I had dared to
+conceive. I added Spiritualism to my studies, experimenting privately,
+finding the phenomena indubitable, but the spiritualistic explanation
+of them incredible. The phenomena of clairvoyance, clairaudience,
+thought-reading, were found to be real. Under all the rush of the
+outer life, already sketched, these questions were working in my mind,
+their answers were being diligently sought. I read a variety of books,
+but could find little in them that satisfied me. I experimented in
+various ways suggested in them, and got some (to me) curious results.
+I finally convinced myself that there was some hidden thing, some
+hidden power, and resolved to seek until I found, and by the early
+spring of 1889 I had grown desperately determined to find at all
+hazards what I sought. At last, sitting alone in deep thought as I had
+become accustomed to do after the sun had set, filled with an intense
+but nearly hopeless longing to solve the riddle of life and mind, I
+heard a Voice that was later to become to me the holiest sound on
+earth, bidding me take courage for the light was near. A fortnight
+passed, and then Mr. Stead gave into my hands two large volumes. &quot;Can
+you review these? My young men all fight shy of them, but you are
+quite mad enough on these subjects to make something of them.&quot; I took
+the books; they were the two volumes of &quot;The Secret Doctrine,&quot; written
+by H.P. Blavatsky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Home I carried my burden, and sat me down to read. As I turned over
+page after page the interest became absorbing; but how familiar it
+seemed; how my mind leapt forward to presage the conclusions, how
+natural it was, how coherent, how subtle, and yet how intelligible. I
+was dazzled, blinded by the light in which disjointed facts were seen
+as parts of a mighty whole, and all my puzzles, riddles, problems,
+seemed to disappear. The effect was partially illusory in one sense,
+in that they all had to be slowly unravelled later, the brain
+gradually assimilating that which the swift intuition had grasped as
+truth. But the light had been seen, and in that flash of illumination
+I knew that the weary search was over and the very Truth was found.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I wrote the review, and asked Mr. Stead for an introduction to the
+writer, and then sent a note asking to be allowed to call. I received
+the most cordial of notes, bidding me come, and in the soft spring
+evening Herbert Burrows and I&mdash;for his aspirations were as mine on
+this matter&mdash;walked from Netting Hill Station, wondering what we
+should meet, to the door of 17, Lansdowne Road. A pause, a swift
+passing through hall and outer room, through folding-doors thrown
+back, a figure in a large chair before a table, a voice, vibrant,
+compelling, &quot;My dear Mrs. Besant, I have so long wished to see you,&quot;
+and I was standing with my hand in her firm grip, and looking for
+the first time in this life straight into the eyes of &quot;H.P.B.&quot; I
+was conscious of a sudden leaping forth of my heart&mdash;was it
+recognition?&mdash;and then, I am ashamed to say, a fierce rebellion, a
+fierce withdrawal, as of some wild animal when it feels a mastering
+hand. I sat down, after some introductions that conveyed no ideas to
+me, and listened. She talked of travels, of various countries, easy
+brilliant talk, her eyes veiled, her exquisitely moulded fingers
+rolling cigarettes incessantly. Nothing special to record, no word of
+Occultism, nothing mysterious, a woman of the world chatting with her
+evening visitors. We rose to go, and for a moment the veil lifted, and
+two brilliant, piercing eyes met mine, and with a yearning throb in
+the voice: &quot;Oh, my dear Mrs. Besant, if you would only come among us!&quot;
+I felt a well-nigh uncontrollable desire to bend down and kiss her,
+under the compulsion of that yearning voice, those compelling eyes,
+but with a flash of the old unbending pride and an inward jeer at my
+own folly, I said a commonplace polite good-bye, and turned away with
+some inanely courteous and evasive remark. &quot;Child,&quot; she said to me
+long afterwards, &quot;your pride is terrible; you are as proud as Lucifer
+himself.&quot; But truly I think I never showed it to her again after that
+first evening, though it sprang up wrathfully in her defence many and
+many a time, until I learned the pettiness and the worthlessness of
+all criticism, and knew that the blind were objects of compassion not
+of scorn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once again I went, and asked about the Theosophical Society, wishful
+to join, but fighting against it. For I saw, distinct and clear&mdash;with
+painful distinctness, indeed&mdash;what that joining would mean. I had
+largely conquered public prejudice against me by my work on the London
+School Board, and a smoother road stretched before me, whereon effort
+to help should be praised not blamed. Was I to plunge into a new
+vortex of strife, and make myself a mark for ridicule&mdash;worse than
+hatred&mdash;and fight again the weary fight for an unpopular truth? Must I
+turn against Materialism, and face the shame of publicly confessing
+that I had been wrong, misled by intellect to ignore the Soul? Must I
+leave the army that had battled for me so bravely, the friends who
+through all brutality of social ostracism had held me dear and true?
+And he, the strongest and truest friend of all, whose confidence I had
+shaken by my Socialism&mdash;must he suffer the pang of seeing his
+co-worker, his co-fighter, of whom he had been so proud, to whom he
+had been so generous, go over to the opposing hosts, and leave the
+ranks of Materialism? What would be the look in Charles Bradlaugh's
+eyes when I told him that I had become a Theosophist? The struggle was
+sharp and keen, but with none of the anguish of old days in it, for
+the soldier had now fought many fights and was hardened by many
+wounds. And so it came to pass that I went again to Lansdowne Road to
+ask about the Theosophical Society. H.P. Blavatsky looked at me
+piercingly for a moment. &quot;Have you read the report about me of the
+Society for Psychical Research?&quot; &quot;No; I never heard of it, so far as I
+know.&quot; &quot;Go and read it, and if, after reading it, you come
+back&mdash;well.&quot; And nothing more would she say on the subject, but
+branched off to her experiences in many lands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I borrowed a copy of the Report, read and re-read it. Quickly I saw
+how slender was the foundation on which the imposing structure was
+built. The continual assumptions on which conclusions were based; the
+incredible character of the allegations; and&mdash;most damning fact of
+all&mdash;the foul source from which the evidence was derived. Everything
+turned on the veracity of the Coulombs, and they were self-stamped as
+partners in the alleged frauds. Could I put such against the frank,
+fearless nature that I had caught a glimpse of, against the proud
+fiery truthfulness that shone at me from the clear, blue eyes, honest
+and fearless as those of a noble child? Was the writer of &quot;The Secret
+Doctrine&quot; this miserable impostor, this accomplice of tricksters, this
+foul and loathsome deceiver, this conjuror with trap-doors and sliding
+panels? I laughed aloud at the absurdity and flung the Report aside
+with the righteous scorn of an honest nature that knew its own kin
+when it met them, and shrank from the foulness and baseness of a lie.
+The next day saw me at the Theosophical Publishing Company's office at
+7, Duke Street, Adelphi, where Countess Wachtmeister&mdash;one of the
+lealest of H.P.B.'s friends&mdash;was at work, and I signed an
+application to be admitted as fellow of the Theosophical Society.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On receiving my diploma I betook myself to Lansdowne Road, where I
+found H.P.B. alone. I went over to her, bent down and kissed her,
+but said no word. &quot;You have joined the Society?&quot; &quot;Yes.&quot; &quot;You have read
+the report?&quot; &quot;Yes.&quot; &quot;Well?&quot; I knelt down before her and clasped her
+hands in mine, looking straight into her eyes. &quot;My answer is, will you
+accept me as your pupil, and give me the honour of proclaiming you my
+teacher in the face of the world?&quot; Her stern, set face softened, the
+unwonted gleam of tears sprang to her eyes; then, with a dignity more
+than regal, she placed her hand upon my head. &quot;You are a noble woman.
+May Master bless you.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From that day, the 10th of May, 1889, until now&mdash;two years three and
+half months after she left her body on May 8, 1891&mdash;my faith in her
+has never wavered, my trust in her has never been shaken. I gave her
+my faith on an imperious intuition, I proved her true day after day in
+closest intimacy living by her side; and I speak of her with the
+reverence due from a pupil to a teacher who never failed her, with the
+passionate gratitude which, in our School, is the natural meed of the
+one who opens the gateway and points out the path. &quot;Folly!
+fanaticism!&quot; scoffs the Englishman of the nineteenth century. Be it
+so. I have seen, and I can wait. I have been told that I plunged
+headlong into Theosophy and let my enthusiasm carry me away. I think
+the charge is true, in so far as the decision was swiftly taken; but
+it had been long led up to, and realised the dreams of childhood on
+the higher planes of intellectual womanhood. And let me here say that
+more than all I hoped for in that first plunge has been realised, and
+a certainty of knowledge has been gained on doctrines seen as true as
+that swift flash of illumination. I <i>know</i>, by personal experiment,
+that the Soul exists, and that my Soul, not my body, is myself; that
+it can leave the body at will; that it can, disembodied, reach and
+learn from living human teachers, and bring back and impress on the
+physical brain that which it has learned; that this process of
+transferring consciousness from one range of being, as it were, to
+another, is a very slow process, during which the body and brain are
+gradually correlated with the subtler form which is essentially that
+of the Soul, and that my own experience of it, still so imperfect, so
+fragmentary, when compared with the experience of the highly trained,
+is like the first struggles of a child learning to speak compared with
+the perfect oratory of the practised speaker; that consciousness, so
+far from being dependent on the brain, is more active when freed from
+the gross forms of matter than when encased within them; that the
+great Sages spoken of by H.P. Blavatsky exist; that they wield powers
+and possess knowledge before which our control of Nature and knowledge
+of her ways is but as child's play. All this, and much more, have I
+learned, and I am but a pupil of low grade, as it were in the infant
+class of the Occult School; so the first plunge has been successful,
+and the intuition has been justified. This same path of knowledge that
+I am treading is open to all others who will pay the toll demanded at
+the gateway&mdash;and that toll is willingness to renounce everything for
+the sake of spiritual truth, and willingness to give all the truth
+that is won to the service of man, keeping back no shred for self.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On June 23rd, in a review of &quot;The Secret Doctrine&quot; in the <i>National
+Reformer,</i> the following passages occur, and show how swiftly some of
+the main points of the teaching had been grasped. (There is a blunder
+in the statement that of the seven modifications of Matter Science
+knows only four, and till lately knew only three; these four are
+sub-states only, sub-divisions of the lowest plane.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After saying that the nineteenth-century Englishman would be but too
+likely to be repelled if he only skimmed the book, I went on: &quot;With
+telescope and with microscope, with scalpel and with battery, Western
+Science interrogates nature, adding fact to fact, storing experience
+after experience, but coming ever to gulfs unfathomable by its
+plummets, to heights unscalable by its ladders. Wide and masterful in
+its answers to the 'How?' the 'Why?' ever eludes it, and causes remain
+enwrapped in gloom. Eastern Science uses as its scientific instrument
+the penetrating faculties of the mind alone, and regarding the
+material plane as <i>Maya</i>&mdash;illusion&mdash;seeks in the mental and spiritual
+planes of being the causes of the material effects. There, too, is the
+only reality; there the true existence of which the visible universe
+is but the shadow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;It is clear that from such investigations some further mental
+equipment is necessary than that normally afforded by the human body.
+And here comes the parting of the ways between East and West. For the
+study of the material universe, our five senses, aided by the
+instruments invented by Science, may suffice. For all we can hear and
+see, taste and handle, these accustomed servitors, though often
+blundering, are the best available guides to knowledge. But it lies in
+the nature of the case that they are useless when the investigation is
+to be into modes of existence which cannot impress themselves on our
+nerve-ends. For instance, what we know as colour is the vibration
+frequency of etheric waves striking on the retina of the eye, between
+certain definite limits&mdash;759 trillions of blows from the maximum, 436
+trillions from the minimum&mdash;these waves give rise in us to the
+sensation which the brain translates into colour. (Why the 436
+trillion blows at one end of a nerve become 'Red' at the other end we
+do not know; we chronicle the fact but cannot explain it.) But our
+capacity to respond to the vibration cannot limit the vibrational
+capacity of the ether; to <i>us</i> the higher and lower rates of vibration
+do not exist, but if our sense of vision were more sensitive we should
+see where now we are blind. Following this line of thought we realise
+that matter may exist in forms unknown to us, in modifications to
+which our senses are unable to respond. Now steps in the Eastern Sage
+and says: 'That which you say <i>may</i> be, <i>is</i>; we have developed and
+cultivated senses as much superior to yours as your eye is superior to
+that of the jelly-fish; we have evolved mental and spiritual faculties
+which enable us to investigate on the higher planes of being with as
+much certainty as you are investigating on the physical plane; there
+is nothing <i>supernatural</i> in the business, any more than your
+knowledge is supernatural, though much above that accessible to the
+fish; we do not speculate on these higher forms of existence; we
+<i>know</i> them by personal study, just as you know the fauna and flora of
+your world. The powers we possess are not supernatural, they are
+latent in every human being, and will be evolved as the race
+progresses. All that we have done is to evolve them more rapidly than
+our neighbours, by a procedure as open to you as it was to us. Matter
+is everywhere, but it exists in seven modifications of which you only
+know four, and until lately only knew three; in those higher forms
+reside the causes of which you see the effects in the lower, and to
+know these causes you must develop the capacity to take cognisance of
+the higher planes.'&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then followed a brief outline of the cycle of evolution, and I went
+on: &quot;What part does man play in this vast drama of a universe?
+Needless to say, he is not the only living form in a Cosmos, which for
+the most part is uninhabitable by him. As Science has shown living
+forms everywhere on the material plane, races in each drop of water,
+life throbbing in every leaf and blade, so the 'Secret Doctrine'
+points to living forms on higher planes of existence, each suited to
+its environment, till all space thrills with life, and nowhere is
+there death, but only change. Amid these myriads are some evolving
+towards humanity, some evolving away from humanity as we know it,
+divesting themselves of its grosser parts. For man is regarded as a
+sevenfold being, four of these parts belonging to the animal body, and
+perishing at, or soon after, death; while three form his higher self,
+his true individuality, and these persist and are immortal. These form
+the Ego, and it is this which passes through many incarnations,
+learning life's lesson as it goes, working out its own redemption
+within the limits of an inexorable law, sowing seeds of which it ever
+reaps the harvest, building its own fate with tireless fingers, and
+finding nowhere in the measureless time and space around it any that
+can lift for it one weight it has created, one burden it has gathered,
+unravel for it one tangle it has twisted, close for it one gulf it has
+digged.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then after noting the approaches of Western Science to Eastern, came
+the final words: &quot;it is of curious interest to note how some of the
+latest theories seem to catch glimpses of the occult Doctrines, as
+though Science were standing on the very threshold of knowledge which
+shall make all her past seem small. Already her hand is trembling
+towards the grasp of forces beside which all those now at her command
+are insignificant. How soon will her grip fasten on them? Let us hope
+not until social order has been transformed, lest they should only
+give more to those who have, and leave the wretched still wretcheder
+by force of contrast. Knowledge used by selfishness widens the gulf
+that divides man from man and race from race, and we may well shrink
+from the idea of new powers in Nature being yoked to the car of Greed.
+Hence the wisdom of those 'Masters,' in whose name Madame Blavatsky
+speaks, has ever denied the knowledge which is power until Love's
+lesson has been learned, and has given only into the hands of the
+selfless the control of those natural forces which, misused, would
+wreck society.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This review, and the public announcement, demanded by honesty, that I
+had joined the Theosophical Society, naturally raised somewhat of a
+storm of criticism, and the <i>National Reformer</i> of June 30th contained
+the following: &quot;The review of Madame Blavatsky's book in the last
+<i>National Reformer</i>, and an announcement in the <i>Star</i>, have brought
+me several letters on the subject of Theosophy. I am asked for an
+explanation as to what Theosophy is, and as to my own opinion on
+Theosophy&mdash;the word 'theosoph' is old, and was used among the
+Neo-platonists. From the dictionary its new meaning appears to be,
+'one who claims to have a knowledge of God, or of the laws of nature
+by means of internal illumination.' An Atheist certainly cannot be a
+Theosophist. A Deist might be a Theosophist. A Monist cannot be a
+Theosophist. Theosophy must at least involve Dualism. Modern
+Theosophy, according to Madame Blavatsky, as set out in last week's
+issue, asserts much that I do not believe, and alleges some things
+that, to me, are certainly not true. I have not had the opportunity of
+reading Madame Blavatsky's two volumes, but I have read during the
+past ten years many publications from the pen of herself, Colonel
+Olcott, and of other Theosophists. They appear to me to have sought to
+rehabilitate a kind of Spiritualism in Eastern phraseology. I think
+many of their allegations utterly erroneous, and their reasonings
+wholly unsound. I very deeply regret indeed that my colleague and
+co-worker has, with somewhat of suddenness, and without any
+interchange of ideas with myself, adopted as facts matters which seem
+to me to be as unreal as it is possible for any fiction to be. My
+regret is greater as I know Mrs. Besant's devotion to any course she
+believes to be true. I know that she will always be earnest in the
+advocacy of any views she undertakes to defend, and I look to possible
+developments of her Theosophic views with the very gravest misgiving.
+The editorial policy of this paper is unchanged, and is directly
+antagonistic to all forms of Theosophy. I would have preferred on this
+subject to have held my peace, for the public disagreeing with Mrs.
+Besant on her adoption of Socialism has caused pain to both; but on
+reading her article and taking the public announcement made of her
+having joined the Theosophical organisation, I owe it to those who
+look to me for guidance to say this with clearness. &quot;CHARLES BRADLAUGH.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p class="quote">
+&quot;It is not possible for me here to state fully my reasons for joining
+the Theosophical Society, the three objects of which are: To found a
+Universal Brotherhood without distinction of race or creed; to forward
+the study of Aryan literature and philosophy; to investigate
+unexplained laws of nature and the physical powers latent in man. On
+matters of religious opinion the members are absolutely free. The
+founders of the society deny a personal God, and a somewhat subtle
+form of Pantheism is taught as the Theosophic view of the universe,
+though even this is not forced on members of the society. I have no
+desire to hide the fact that this form of Pantheism appears to me to
+promise solution of some problems, especially problems in psychology,
+which Atheism leaves untouched.<br><br>
+&quot;ANNIE BESANT.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>
+Theosophy, as its students well know, so far from involving Dualism,
+is based on the One, which becomes Two on manifestation, just as
+Atheism posits one existence, only cognisable in the duality force and
+matter, and as philosophic&mdash;though not popular&mdash;Theism teaches one
+Deity whereof are spirit and matter. Mr. Bradlaugh's temperate
+disapproval was not copied in its temperance by some other Freethought
+leaders, and Mr. Foote especially distinguished himself by the
+bitterness of his attacks. In the midst of the whirl I was called away
+to Paris to attend, with Herbert Burrows, the great Labour Congress
+held there from July 15th to July 20th, and spent a day or two at
+Fontainebleau with H.P. Blavatsky, who had gone abroad for a few
+weeks' rest. There I found her translating the wonderful fragments
+from &quot;The Book of the Golden Precepts,&quot; now so widely known under the
+name of &quot;The Voice of the Silence.&quot; She wrote it swiftly, without any
+material copy before her, and in the evening made me read it aloud to
+see if the &quot;English was decent.&quot; Herbert Burrows was there, and Mrs.
+Candler, a staunch American Theosophist, and we sat round H.P.B. while
+I read. The translation was in perfect and beautiful English, flowing
+and musical; only a word or two could we find to alter, and she looked
+at us like a startled child, wondering at our praises&mdash;praises that
+any one with the literary sense would endorse if they read that
+exquisite prose poem.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A little earlier in the same day I had asked her as to the agencies at
+work in producing the taps so constantly heard at Spiritualistic
+<i>S&eacute;ances</i>. &quot;You don't use spirits to produce taps,&quot; she said; &quot;see
+here.&quot; She put her hand over my head, not touching it, and I heard and
+felt slight taps on the bone of my skull, each sending a little
+electric thrill down the spine. She then carefully explained how such
+taps were producible at any point desired by the operator, and how
+interplay of the currents to which they were due might be caused
+otherwise than by conscious human volition. It was in this fashion
+that she would illustrate her verbal teachings, proving by experiment
+the statements made as to the existence of subtle forces controllable
+by the trained mind. The phenomena all belonged to the scientific side
+of her teaching, and she never committed the folly of claiming
+authority for her philosophic doctrines on the ground that she was a
+wonder-worker. And constantly she would remind us that there was no
+such thing as &quot;miracle&quot;; that all the phenomena she had produced were
+worked by virtue of a knowledge of nature deeper than that of average
+people, and by the force of a well-trained mind and will; some of them
+were what she would describe as &quot;psychological tricks,&quot; the creation
+of images by force of imagination, and in pressing them on others as a
+&quot;collective hallucination&quot;; others, such as the moving of solid
+articles, either by an astral hand projected to draw them towards her,
+or by using an Elemental; others by reading in the Astral Light, and
+so on. But the proof of the reality of her mission from those whom she
+spoke of as Masters lay not in these comparatively trivial physical
+and mental phenomena, but in the splendour of her heroic endurance,
+the depth of her knowledge, the selflessness of her character, the
+lofty spirituality of her teaching, the untiring passion of her
+devotion, the incessant ardour of her work for the enlightening of
+men. It was these, and not her phenomena, that won for her our faith
+and confidence&mdash;we who lived beside her, knowing her daily life&mdash;and
+we gratefully accepted her teaching not because she claimed any
+authority, but because it woke in us powers, the possibility of which
+in ourselves we had not dreamed of, energies of the Soul that
+demonstrated their own existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Returning to London from Paris, it became necessary to make a very
+clear and definite presentment of my change of views, and in the
+<i>Reformer</i> of August 4th I find the following: &quot;Many statements are
+being made just now about me and my beliefs, some of which are
+absurdly, and some of which are maliciously, untrue. I must ask my
+friends not to give credence to them. It would not be fair to my
+friend Mr. Bradlaugh to ask him to open the columns of this Journal to
+an exposition of Theosophy from my pen, and so bring about a long
+controversy on a subject which would not interest the majority of the
+readers of the <i>National Reformer</i>. This being so I cannot here answer
+the attacks made on me. I feel, however, that the party with which I
+have worked for so long has a right to demand of me some explanation
+of the step I have taken, and I am therefore preparing a pamphlet
+dealing fully with the question. Further, I have arranged with Mr.
+R.O. Smith to take as subject of the lectures to be delivered by me at
+the Hall of Science on August 4th and 11th 'Why I became a
+Theosophist.' Meanwhile I think that my years of service in the ranks
+of the Freethought party give me the right to ask that I should not be
+condemned unheard, and I even venture to suggest, in view of the
+praises bestowed on me by Freethinkers in the past, that it is
+possible that there may be something to be said, from the intellectual
+standpoint, in favour of Theosophy. The caricatures of it which have
+appeared from some Freethinkers' pens represent it about as accurately
+as the Christian Evidence caricatures of Atheism represent that
+dignified philosophy of life; and, remembering how much they are
+themselves misrepresented, I ask them to wait before they judge.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lectures were delivered, and were condensed into a pamphlet
+bearing the same title, which has had a very great circulation. It
+closed as follows:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;There remains a great stumblingblock in the minds of many
+Freethinkers which is certain to prejudice them against Theosophy, and
+which offers to opponents a cheap subject for sarcasm&mdash;the assertion
+that there exist other living beings than the men and animals found on
+our own globe. It may be well for people who at once turn away when
+such an assertion is made to stop and ask themselves whether they
+really and seriously believe that throughout this mighty universe, in
+which our little planet is but as a tiny speck of sand in the Sahara,
+this one planet only is inhabited by living things? Is all the
+universe dumb save for <i>our</i> voices? eyeless save for <i>our</i> vision?
+dead save for <i>our</i> life? Such a preposterous belief was well enough
+in the days when Christianity regarded our world as the centre of the
+universe, the human race as the one for which the Creator had deigned
+to die. But now that we are placed in our proper position, one among
+countless myriads of worlds, what ground is there for the preposterous
+conceit which arrogates as ours all sentient existence? Earth, air,
+water, all are teeming with living things suited to their environment;
+our globe is overflowing with life. But the moment we pass in thought
+beyond our atmosphere everything is to be changed. Neither reason nor
+analogy support such a supposition. It was one of Bruno's crimes that
+he dared to teach that other worlds than ours were inhabited; but he
+was wiser than the monks who burned him. All the Theosophists aver is
+that each phase of matter has living things suited to it, and that all
+the universe is pulsing with life. 'Superstition!' shriek the bigoted.
+It is no more superstition than the belief in Bacteria, or in any
+other living thing invisible to the ordinary human eye. 'Spirit' is a
+misleading word, for, historically, it connotes immateriality and a
+supernatural kind of existence, and the Theosophist believes neither
+in the one nor the other. With him all living things act in and
+through a material basis, and 'matter' and 'spirit' are not found
+dissociated. But he alleges that matter exists in states other than
+those at present known to science. To deny this is to be about as
+sensible as was the Hind&ucirc; prince who denied the existence of ice
+because water, in his experience, never became solid. Refusal to
+believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all
+outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;One last word to my Secularist friends. If you say to me, 'Leave our
+ranks,' I will leave them; I force myself on no party, and the moment
+I feel myself unwelcome I will go.<a href="#FN29"><sup>[29]</sup></a> It has cost me pain enough and
+to spare to admit that the Materialism from which I hoped all has
+failed me, and by such admission to bring on myself the disapproval of
+some of my nearest friends. But here, as at other times in my life, I
+dare not purchase peace with a lie. An imperious necessity forces me
+to speak the truth, as I see it, whether the speech please or
+displease, whether it bring praise or blame. That one loyalty to Truth
+I must keep stainless, whatever friendships fail me or human ties be
+broken. She may lead me into the wilderness, yet I must follow her;
+she may strip me of all love, yet I must pursue her; though she slay
+me, yet will I trust in her; and I ask no other epitaph on my tomb but
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;'SHE TRIED TO FOLLOW TRUTH.'&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, with this new controversy on my hands, the School Board
+work went on, rendered possible, I ought to say, by the generous
+assistance of friends unknown to me, who sent me, &pound;150 a year during
+the last year and a half. So also went on the vigorous Socialist work,
+and the continual championship of struggling labour movements,
+prominent here being the organisation of the South London fur-pullers
+into a union, and the aiding of the movement for shortening the hours
+of tram and 'bus men, the meetings for which had to be held after
+midnight. The feeding and clothing of children also occupied much time
+and attention, for the little ones in my district were, thousands of
+them, desperately poor. My studies I pursued as best I could, reading
+in railway carriages, tramcars, omnibuses, and stealing hours for
+listening to H.P.B. by shortening the nights.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In October, Mr. Bradlaugh's shaken strength received its death-blow,
+though he was to live yet another fifteen months. He collapsed
+suddenly under a most severe attack of congestion and lay in imminent
+peril, devotedly nursed by his only remaining child, Mrs. Bonner, his
+elder daughter having died the preceding autumn. Slowly he struggled
+back to life, after four weeks in bed, and, ordered by his physician
+to take rest and if possible a sea voyage, he sailed for India on
+November 28th, to attend the National Congress, where he was
+enthusiastically acclaimed as &quot;Member for India.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In November I argued a libel suit, brought by me against the Rev. Mr.
+Hoskyns, vicar of Stepney, who had selected some vile passages from a
+book which was not mine and had circulated them as representing my
+views, during the School Board election of 1888. I had against me the
+Solicitor-General, Sir Edward Clarke, at the bar, and Baron Huddleston
+on the bench; both counsel and judge did their best to browbeat me and
+to use the coarsest language, endeavouring to prove that by advocating
+the limitation of the family I had condemned chastity as a crime. Five
+hours of brutal cross-examination left my denial of such teachings
+unshaken, and even the pleadings of the judge for the clergyman,
+defending his parishioners against an unbeliever and his laying down
+as law that the statement was privileged, did not avail to win a
+verdict. The jury disagreed, not, as one of them told me afterwards,
+on the question of the libel, but on some feeling that a clergyman
+ought not to be mulcted in damages for his over-zeal in defence of his
+faith against the ravening wolf of unbelief, while others, regarding
+the libel as a very cruel one, would not agree to a verdict that did
+not carry substantial damages. I did not carry the case to a new
+trial, feeling that it was not worth while to waste time over it
+further, my innocence of the charge itself having been fully proved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Busily the months rolled on, and early in the year 1890 H.P.Blavatsky
+had given to her &pound;1,000, to use in her discretion for human service,
+and if she thought well, in the service of women. After a good deal of
+discussion she fixed on the establishment of a club in East London for
+working girls, and with her approval Miss Laura Cooper and I hunted
+for a suitable place. Finally we fixed on a very large and old house,
+193, Bow Road, and some months went in its complete renovation and the
+building of a hall attached to it. On August 15th it was opened by
+Madame Blavatsky, and dedicated by her to the brightening of the lot
+of hardworking and underpaid girls. It has nobly fulfilled its mission
+for the last three years. Very tender was H.P.B.'s heart to human
+suffering, especially to that of women and children. She was very poor
+towards the end of her earthly life, having spent all on her mission,
+and refusing to take time from her Theosophical work to write for the
+Russian papers which were ready to pay highly for her pen. But her
+slender purse was swiftly emptied when any human pain that money could
+relieve came in her way. One day I wrote a letter to a comrade that
+was shown to her, about some little children to whom I had carried a
+quantity of country flowers, and I had spoken of their faces pinched
+with want. The following characteristic note came to me:&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;MY DEAREST FRIEND,&mdash;I have just read your letter to &mdash; and my heart
+is sick for the poor little ones! Look here; I have but 30s. of <i>my
+own money</i> of which I can dispose (for as you know I am a pauper, and
+proud of it), but I want you to take them and <i>not say a word</i>. This
+may buy thirty dinners for thirty poor little starving wretches, and I
+may feel happier for thirty minutes at the thought. Now don't say a
+word, and do it; take them to those unfortunate babies who loved your
+flowers and felt happy. Forgive your old uncouth friend, <i>useless</i> in
+this world!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Ever yours,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;H.P.B.&quot;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was this tenderness of hers that led us, after she had gone, to
+found the &quot;H.P.B. Home for little children,&quot; and one day we hope to
+fulfil her expressed desire that a large but homelike Refuge for
+outcast children should be opened under the auspices of the
+Theosophical Society.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lease of 17, Lansdowne Road expiring in the early summer of 1890,
+it was decided that 19, Avenue Road should be turned into the
+headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Europe. A hall was built
+for the meetings of the Blavatsky Lodge&mdash;the lodge founded by her&mdash;and
+various alterations made. In July her staff of workers was united
+under one roof; thither came Archibald and Bertram Keightley, who had
+devoted themselves to her service years before, and the Countess
+Wachtmeister, who had thrown aside all the luxuries of wealth and of
+high social rank to give all to the cause she served and the friend
+she loved with deep and faithful loyajty; and George Mead, her
+secretary and earnest disciple, a man of strong brain and strong
+character, a fine scholar and untiring worker; thither, too, Claude
+Wright, most lovable of Irishmen, with keen insight underlying a
+bright and sunny nature, careless on the surface, and Walter Old,
+dreamy and sensitive, a born psychic, and, like many such, easily
+swayed by those around him; Emily Kislingbury also, a studious and
+earnest woman; Isabel Cooper Oakley, intuitional and studious, a rare
+combination, and a most devoted pupil in Occult studies; James Pryse,
+an American, than whom none is more devoted, bringing practical
+knowledge to the help of the work, and making possible the large
+development of our printing department. These, with myself, were at
+first the resident staff, Miss Cooper and Herbert Burrows, who were
+also identified with the work, being prevented by other obligations
+from living always as part of the household.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rules of the house were&mdash;and are&mdash;very simple, but H.P.B.
+insisted on great regularity of life; we breakfasted at 8 a.m.,
+worked till lunch at 1, then again till dinner at 7. After dinner
+the outer work for the Society was put aside, and we gathered in
+H.P.B.'s room where we would sit talking over plans, receiving
+instructions, listening to her explanation of knotty points. By 12
+midnight all the lights had to be extinguished. My public work took me
+away for many hours, unfortunately for myself, but such was the
+regular run of our busy lives. She herself wrote incessantly; always
+suffering, but of indomitable will, she drove her body through its
+tasks, merciless to its weaknesses and its pains. Her pupils she
+treated very variously, adapting herself with nicest accuracy to their
+differing natures; as a teacher she was marvellously patient,
+explaining a thing over and over again in different fashions, until
+sometimes after prolonged failure she would throw herself back in her
+chair: &quot;My God!&quot; (the easy &quot;Mon Dieu&quot; of the foreigner) &quot;am I a fool
+that you can't understand? Here, So-and-so&quot;&mdash;to some one on whose
+countenance a faint gleam of comprehension was discernible&mdash;&quot;tell
+these flapdoodles of the ages what I mean.&quot; With vanity, conceit,
+pretence of knowledge, she was merciless, if the pupil were a
+promising one; keen shafts of irony would pierce the sham. With some
+she would get very angry, lashing them out of their lethargy with
+fiery scorn; and in truth she made herself a mere instrument for the
+training of her pupils, careless what they, or any one else thought of
+her, providing that the resulting benefit to them was secured. And we,
+who lived around her, who in closest intimacy watched her day after
+day, we bear witness to the unselfish beauty of her life, the nobility
+of her character, and we lay at her feet our most reverent gratitude
+for knowledge gained, lives purified, strength developed. O noble and
+heroic Soul, whom the outside purblind world misjudges, but whom your
+pupils partly saw, never through lives and deaths shall we repay the
+debt of gratitude we owe to you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And thus I came through storm to peace, not to the peace of an
+untroubled sea of outer life, which no strong soul can crave, but to
+an inner peace that outer troubles may not avail to ruffle&mdash;a peace
+which belongs to the eternal not to the transitory, to the depths not
+to the shallows of life. It carried me scatheless through the terrible
+spring of 1891, when death struck down Charles Bradlaugh in the
+plenitude of his usefulness, and unlocked the gateway into rest for H.
+P. Blavatsky. Through anxieties and responsibilities heavy and
+numerous it has borne me; every strain makes it stronger; every trial
+makes it serener; every assault leaves it more radiant. Quiet
+confidence has taken the place of doubt; a strong security the place
+of anxious dread. In life, through death, to life, I am but the
+servant of the great Brotherhood, and those on whose heads but for a
+moment the touch of the Master has rested in blessing can never again
+look upon the world save through eyes made luminous with the radiance
+of the Eternal Peace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+PEACE TO ALL BEINGS.
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+
+<h4>
+FOOTNOTES
+</h4>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN1"><sup>1</sup></a>&nbsp;
+This odious law has now been altered, and a married woman
+is a person, not a chattel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN2"><sup>2</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;The Disciples,&quot; p. 14.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN3"><sup>3</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;On the Nature and Existence of God.&quot; 1874.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN4"><sup>4</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;On the Nature and Existence of God.&quot; 1874.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN5"><sup>5</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;The Gospel of Atheism.&quot; 1876.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN6"><sup>6</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;Why I do not Believe in God.&quot; 1887.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN7"><sup>7</sup></a>&nbsp;Ibid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN8"><sup>8</sup></a>&nbsp;Ibid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN9"><sup>9</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;Life, Death, and Immortality.&quot; 1886.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN10"><sup>10</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;Life, Death, and Immortality.&quot; 1886.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN11"><sup>11</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;Life, Death, and Immortality.&quot; 1886.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN12"><sup>12</sup></a>&nbsp;Ibid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN13"><sup>13</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;The Gospel of Atheism.&quot; 1876.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN14"><sup>14</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;On the Nature and Existence of God.&quot; 1874.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN15"><sup>15</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;The True Basis of Morality.&quot; 1874.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN16"><sup>16</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;Gospel of Atheism.&quot; 1876.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN17"><sup>17</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;On the Nature and Existence of God.&quot; 1874.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN18"><sup>18</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;A World without God.&quot; 1885.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN19"><sup>19</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;The Gospel of Atheism.&quot; 1876.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN20"><sup>20</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;The Gospels of Christianity and Freethought.&quot; 1874.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN21"><sup>21</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;A World without God.&quot; 1885.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN22"><sup>22</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;A World without God.&quot; 1885.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN23"><sup>23</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;The Gospel of Atheism.&quot; 1876.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN24"><sup>24</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;A World without God.&quot; 1885.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN25"><sup>25</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;A World without God.&quot; 1885.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN26"><sup>26</sup></a>&nbsp;&quot;The Christian Creed.&quot; 1884.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN27"><sup>27</sup></a>&nbsp;<i>National Reformer</i>, June 18, 1882
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN28"><sup>28</sup></a>&nbsp;<i>Theosophist</i>, June, 1882.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a name="FN29"><sup>29</sup></a>&nbsp;I leave these words as they were written in 1889. I
+resigned my office in the N.S.S. in 1890, feeling that the N.S.S. was
+so identified with Materialism that it had no longer place for me.
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr>
+
+<a name="LIST"></a>
+<h4>
+LIST OF BOOKS QUOTED.
+</h4>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Autobiography,&quot; J.S. Mill, 184
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Christian Creed, The,&quot; 173
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Freethinkers' Text-book,&quot; 144
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Gospel of Atheism, The,&quot; 145, 152, 158, 168
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Gospels of Christianity and Freethought,&quot; 164
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Life, Death, and Immortality,&quot; 147, 149, 150
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Link</i>, The, 333
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>National Reformer</i>, The, 79, 80, 280, 346-50, 354
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Our Corner</i>, 286, 329
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Theosophist</i>, The, 282, 288
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;True Basis of Morality,&quot; 156
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;Why I do Not Believe in God,&quot; 146
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&quot;World without God,&quot; 165, 169, 172
+</p>
+
+<hr>
+
+<a name="INDEX"></a>
+<h4>
+INDEX.</h4>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Affirmation Bill brought in, 287</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;rejected, 299</li>
+<li>Atheist, position as an, 139</li>
+<li>Authorship, first attempts at, 84.</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Bennett, D.M., prosecution of, 232</li>
+<li>Blasphemy prosecution, 283, 287, 289</li>
+<li>Blavatsky, H.P., 189, 337</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;meeting with, 341</li>
+<li>&quot;Bloody Sunday,&quot; 324</li>
+<li>Bradlaugh, Charles, first meeting with, 135</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;as friend, 137</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;in the Clock Tower, 258</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and the scene in the House, 265</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>v</i>. Newdegate; result, 289</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;prosecuted for blasphemy, 283, 289</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Confirmation, 51</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Daughter, application to remove, 213</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;denied access to, 219</li>
+<li>Death of father, 21</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;of mother, 126</li>
+<li>Doubt the first, 58</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;Elements of Social Science,&quot; 196</li>
+<li>Engagement, 69</li>
+<li>Essay, first Freethought, 113</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Fenians, the, 73</li>
+<li><i>Freethinker</i> prosecution, 283, 287, 296</li>
+<li>Freethought Publishing Company, the, 285</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Harrow, life at, 30</li>
+<li>Hoskyns, Rev. E., libel action against, 359</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Knowlton pamphlet, the, 205</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;prosecution, 208</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;trial, 210</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>&quot;Law of Population, The,&quot; 212, 210</li>
+<li>&quot;Law and Liberty League,&quot; the, 326</li>
+<li>Lecture, the first, 181</li>
+<li>Linnell, the Trafalgar Square victim, 316</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;funeral of, 327</li>
+<li><i>Link</i>, founding of the, 331</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Malthusian League formed, 229</li>
+<li>Malthusianism and Theosophy, 240</li>
+<li>Marriage, 70</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;tie broken, no</li>
+<li>Match-girls' strike, 335</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Union, established, 336</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li><i>National Reformer,</i> the, 134</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;first contribution to, 180</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;resignation of co-editorship, 320</li>
+<li>National Secular Society joined, 135</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;elected vice-president of, 202</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;resignation of, 357</li>
+<li>Northampton Election, 183</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;struggle, 253, 344</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Oaths Bill, the, 314, 329</li>
+<li><i>Our Corner</i>, 286, 314</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Political Opinions, 174</li>
+<li>Pusey, Dr., 109, 284</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Russian politics, 311</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Scientific work, 249</li>
+<li>School Board, election to, 338</li>
+<li>Scott, Thomas, 112, 127</li>
+<li>Socialism, 299</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;debate on, between Messrs. Bradlaugh and Hyndman, 301</li>
+<li>Socialist debates, 318, 319</li>
+<li>Socialists and open-air speaking, 312</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Defence Association, 323</li>
+<li>Stanley, Dean, 23, 122</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Theosophical Society, the, 180</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;joined, 344</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;headquarters established, 361</li>
+<li>Theosophy and Charles Bradlaugh, 350</li>
+<li>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the National Secular Society, 357</li>
+<li>Trafalgar Square, closing of, to the public, 323</li>
+<li>Truelove, Edward, trial of, 225</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Voysey, Rev. Charles, 106</li>
+</ul>
+
+<ul>
+<li>Working Women's Club, 337, 360</li>
+</ul>
+
+<hr>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Annie Besant, by Annie Besant
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@@ -0,0 +1,9345 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Annie Besant, by Annie Besant
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Annie Besant
+       An Autobiography
+
+Author: Annie Besant
+
+Release Date: April 19, 2004 [EBook #12085]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANNIE BESANT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by H.S. Mendelssohn, 27, Cathcart
+Road, South Kensington, London._ ANNIE BESANT. 1885]
+
+
+
+
+ANNIE BESANT
+
+AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+LONDON
+
+SECOND EDITION
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+It is a difficult thing to tell the story of a life, and yet more
+difficult when that life is one's own. At the best, the telling has a
+savour of vanity, and the only excuse for the proceeding is that the
+life, being an average one, reflects many others, and in troublous
+times like ours may give the experience of many rather than of one.
+And so the autobiographer does his work because he thinks that, at the
+cost of some unpleasantness to himself, he may throw light on some of
+the typical problems that are vexing the souls of his contemporaries,
+and perchance may stretch out a helping hand to some brother who is
+struggling in the darkness, and so bring him cheer when despair has
+him in its grip. Since all of us, men and women of this restless and
+eager generation--surrounded by forces we dimly see but cannot as yet
+understand, discontented with old ideas and half afraid of new, greedy
+for the material results of the knowledge brought us by Science but
+looking askance at her agnosticism as regards the soul, fearful of
+superstition but still more fearful of atheism, turning from the husks
+of outgrown creeds but filled with desperate hunger for spiritual
+ideals--since all of us have the same anxieties, the same griefs, the
+same yearning hopes, the same passionate desire for knowledge, it may
+well be that the story of one may help all, and that the tale of one
+should that went out alone into the darkness and on the other side
+found light, that struggled through the Storm and on the other side
+found Peace, may bring some ray of light and of peace into the
+darkness and the storm of other lives.
+
+ANNIE BESANT.
+
+THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY,
+
+17 & 19, AVENUE ROAD, REGENT'S PARK, LONDON.
+
+_August_, 1893.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+CHAP.
+
+I.    "OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE"
+
+II.   EARLY CHILDHOOD
+
+III.  GIRLHOOD
+
+IV.   MARRIAGE
+
+V.    THE STORM OF DOUBT
+
+VI.   CHARLES BRADLAUGH
+
+VII.  ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT
+
+VIII. AT WORK
+
+IX.   THE KNOWLTON PAMPHLET
+
+X.    AT WAR ALL ROUND
+
+XI.   MR. BRADLAUGH'S STRUGGLE
+
+XII.  STILL FIGHTING
+
+XIII. SOCIALISM
+
+XIV.  THROUGH STORM TO PEACE
+
+LIST OF BOOKS QUOTED
+
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+
+ANNIE BESANT, 1885                          _Frontispiece_
+
+HOROSCOPE OF ANNIE BESANT                   _Page_ 12
+
+ANNIE BESANT, 1869                          _Facing page_ 86
+
+THOMAS SCOTT                                _Facing page_ 112
+
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH, M.P.                     _Facing page_ 212
+
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH AND HENRY LABOUCHERE      _Facing page_ 254
+
+NORWICH BRANCH OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE      _Facing page_ 314
+
+STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION  _Facing page_ 336
+
+MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION           _Facing page_ 338
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+"OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE."
+
+
+On October 1, 1847, I am credibly informed, my baby eyes opened to the
+light(?) of a London afternoon at 5.39.
+
+A friendly astrologer has drawn for me the following chart, showing the
+position of the planets at this, to me fateful, moment; but I know
+nothing of astrology, so feel no wiser as I gaze upon my horoscope.
+
+Keeping in view the way in which sun, moon, and planets influence the
+physical condition of the earth, there is nothing incongruous with the
+orderly course of nature in the view that they also influence the
+physical bodies of men, these being part of the physical earth, and
+largely moulded by its conditions. Any one who knows the
+characteristics ascribed to those who are born under the several signs
+of the Zodiac, may very easily pick out the different types among his
+own acquaintances, and he may then get them to go to some astrologer
+and find out under what signs they were severally born. He will very
+quickly discover that two men of completely opposed types are not born
+under the same sign, and the invariability of the concurrence will
+convince him that law, and not chance, is at work. We are born into
+earthly life under certain conditions, just as we were physically
+affected by them pre-natally, and these will have their bearing on our
+subsequent physical evolution. At the most, astrology, as it is now
+practised, can only calculate the interaction between these physical
+conditions at any given moment, and the conditions brought to them by a
+given person whose general constitution and natal condition are known.
+It cannot say what the person will do, nor what will happen to him, but
+only what will be the physical district, so to speak, in which he will
+find himself, and the impulses that will play upon him from external
+nature and from his own body. Even on those matters modern astrology is
+not quite reliable--judging from the many blunders made--or else its
+professors are very badly instructed; but that there is a real science
+of astrology I have no doubt, and there are some men who are past
+masters in it.
+
+[Illustration: Horoscope of Annie Besant.]
+
+It has always been somewhat of a grievance to me that I was born in
+London, "within the sound of Bow Bells," when three-quarters of my
+blood and all my heart are Irish. My dear mother was of purest Irish
+descent, and my father was Irish on his mother's side, though belonging
+to the Devonshire Woods on his father's. The Woods were yeomen of the
+sturdy English type, farming their own land in honest, independent
+fashion. Of late years they seem to have developed more in the
+direction of brains, from the time, in fact, that Matthew Wood became
+Mayor of London town, fought Queen Caroline's battles against her most
+religious and gracious royal husband, aided the Duke of Kent with no
+niggard hand, and received a baronetcy for his services from the Duke
+of Kent's royal daughter. Since then they have given England a Lord
+Chancellor in the person of the gentle-hearted and pure-living Lord
+Hatherley, while others have distinguished themselves in various ways
+in the service of their country. But I feel playfully inclined to
+grudge the English blood they put into my father's veins, with his
+Irish mother, his Galway birth, and his Trinity College, Dublin,
+education. For the Irish tongue is musical in my ear, and the Irish
+nature dear to my heart. Only in Ireland is it that if you stop to ask
+a worn-out ragged woman the way to some old monument, she will say:
+"Sure, then, my darlin', it's just up the hill and round the corner,
+and then any one will tell you the way. And it's there you'll see the
+place where the blessed Saint Patrick set his foot, and his blessing be
+on yer." Old women as poor as she in other nations would never be as
+bright and as friendly and as garrulous. And where, out of Ireland,
+will you see a whole town crowd into a station to say good-bye to half
+a dozen emigrants, till the platform is a heaving mass of men and
+women, struggling, climbing over each other for a last kiss, crying,
+keening, laughing, all in a breath, till all the air is throbbing and
+there's a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes as the train
+steams out? Where, out of Ireland, will you be bumping along the
+streets on an outside car, beside a taciturn Jarvey, who, on suddenly
+discovering that you are shadowed by "Castle" spies, becomes
+loquaciously friendly, and points out everything that he thinks will
+interest you? Blessings on the quick tongues and warm hearts, on the
+people so easy to lead, so hard to drive. And blessings on the ancient
+land once inhabited by mighty men of wisdom, that in later times became
+the Island of Saints, and shall once again be the Island of Sages, when
+the Wheel turns round.
+
+My maternal grandfather was a typical Irishman, much admired by me and
+somewhat feared also, in the childish days. He belonged to a decayed
+Irish family, the Maurices, and in a gay youth, with a beautiful wife
+as light-hearted as himself, he had merrily run through what remained
+to him in the way of fortune. In his old age, with abundant snow-white
+hair, he still showed the hot Irish blood on the lightest provocation,
+stormily angry for a moment and easily appeased. My mother was the
+second daughter in a large family, in a family that grew more numerous
+as pounds grew fewer, and she was adopted by a maiden aunt, a quaint
+memory of whom came through my mother's childhood into mine, and had
+its moulding effect on both our characters. This maiden aunt was, as
+are most Irish folk of decayed families, very proud of her family tree
+with its roots in the inevitable "kings." Her particular kings were the
+"seven kings of France"--the "Milesian kings"--and the tree grew up a
+parchment, in all its impressive majesty, over the mantelpiece of their
+descendant's modest drawing-room. This heraldic monster was regarded
+with deep respect by child Emily, a respect in no wise deserved, I
+venture to suppose, by the disreputable royalties of whom she was a
+fortunately distant twig. Chased out of France, doubtless for cause
+shown, they had come over the sea to Ireland, and there continued their
+reckless plundering lives. But so strangely turns the wheel of time
+that these ill-doing and barbarous scamps became a kind of moral
+thermometer in the home of the gentle Irish lady in the early half of
+the present century. For my mother has told me that when she had
+committed some act of childish naughtiness, her aunt would say, looking
+gravely over her spectacles at the small culprit, "Emily, your conduct
+is unworthy of the descendant of the seven kings of France." And Emily,
+with her sweet grey Irish eyes and her curling masses of raven black
+hair, would cry in penitent shame over her unworthiness, with some
+vague idea that those royal, and to her very real, ancestors would
+despise her small, sweet, rosebud self, so wholly unworthy of their
+disreputable majesties.
+
+Thus those shadowy forms influenced her in childhood, and exercised
+over her a power that made her shrink from aught that was unworthy,
+petty or mean. To her the lightest breath of dishonour was to be
+avoided at any cost of pain, and she wrought into me, her only
+daughter, that same proud and passionate horror at any taint of shame
+or merited disgrace. To the world always a brave front was to be kept,
+and a stainless reputation, for suffering might be borne but dishonour
+never. A gentlewoman might starve, but she must not run in debt; she
+might break her heart, but it must be with a smile on her face. I have
+often thought that the training in this reticence and pride of honour
+was a strange preparation for my stormy, public, much attacked and
+slandered life; and certain it is that this inwrought shrinking from
+all criticism that touched personal purity and personal honour added a
+keenness of suffering to the fronting of public odium that none can
+appreciate who has not been trained in some similar school of dignified
+self-respect. And yet perhaps there was another result from it that in
+value outweighed the added pain: it was the stubbornly resistant
+feeling that rose and inwardly asserted its own purity in face of
+foulest lie, and turning scornful face against the foe, too proud
+either to justify itself or to defend, said to itself in its own heart,
+when condemnation was loudest: "I am not what you think me, and your
+verdict does not change my own self. You cannot make me vile whatever
+you think of me, and I will never, in my own eyes, be that which you
+deem me to be now." And the very pride became a shield against
+degradation, for, however lost my public reputation, I could never bear
+to become sullied in my own sight--and that is a thing not without its
+use to a woman cut off, as I was at one time, from home, and friends,
+and Society. So peace to the maiden aunt's ashes, and to those of her
+absurd kings, for I owe them something after all. And I keep grateful
+memory of that unknown grand-aunt, for what she did in training my dear
+mother, the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest of women. It is well
+to be able to look back to a mother who served as ideal of all that was
+noblest and dearest during childhood and girlhood, whose face made the
+beauty of home, and whose love was both sun and shield. No other
+experience in life could quite make up for missing the perfect tie
+between mother and child--a tie that in our case never relaxed and
+never weakened. Though her grief at my change of faith and consequent
+social ostracism did much to hasten her death-hour, it never brought a
+cloud between our hearts; though her pleading was the hardest of all to
+face in later days, and brought the bitterest agony, it made no gulf
+between us, it cast no chill upon our mutual love. And I look back at
+her to-day with the same loving gratitude as ever encircled her to me
+in her earthly life. I have never met a woman more selflessly devoted
+to those she loved, more passionately contemptuous of all that was mean
+or base, more keenly sensitive on every question of honour, more iron
+in will, more sweet in tenderness, than the mother who made my girlhood
+sunny as dreamland, who guarded me, until my marriage, from every touch
+of pain that she could ward off or bear for me, who suffered more in
+every trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself, and who
+died in the little house I had taken for our new home in Norwood, worn
+out, ere old age touched her, by sorrow, poverty, and pain, in May,
+1874.
+
+My earliest personal recollections are of a house and garden that we
+lived in when I was three and four years of age, situated in Grove
+Road, St. John's Wood. I can remember my mother hovering round the
+dinner-table to see that all was bright for the home-coming husband; my
+brother--two years older than myself--and I watching "for papa"; the
+loving welcome, the game of romps that always preceded the dinner of
+the elder folks. I can remember on the 1st of October, 1851, jumping up
+in my little cot, and shouting out triumphantly: "Papa! mamma! I am
+four years old!" and the grave demand of my brother, conscious of
+superior age, at dinner-time: "May not Annie have a knife to-day, as
+she is four years old?"
+
+It was a sore grievance during that same year, 1851, that I was not
+judged old enough to go to the Great Exhibition, and I have a faint
+memory of my brother consolingly bringing me home one of those folding
+pictured strips that are sold in the streets, on which were imaged
+glories that I longed only the more to see. Far-away, dusky, trivial
+memories, these. What a pity it is that a baby cannot notice, cannot
+observe, cannot remember, and so throw light on the fashion of the
+dawning of the external world on the human consciousness. If only we
+could remember how things looked when they were first imaged on the
+retinae; what we felt when first we became conscious of the outer world;
+what the feeling was as faces of father and mother grew out of the
+surrounding chaos and became familiar things, greeted with a smile,
+lost with a cry; if only memory would not become a mist when in later
+years we strive to throw our glances backward into the darkness of our
+infancy, what lessons we might learn to help our stumbling psychology,
+how many questions might be solved whose answers we are groping for in
+the West in vain.
+
+The next scene that stands out clearly against the background of the
+past is that of my father's death-bed. The events which led to his
+death I know from my dear mother. He had never lost his fondness for
+the profession for which he had been trained, and having many medical
+friends, he would now and then accompany them on their hospital rounds,
+or share with them the labours of the dissecting-room. It chanced that
+during the dissection of the body of a person who had died of rapid
+consumption, my father cut his finger against the edge of the
+breast-bone. The cut did not heal easily, and the finger became swollen
+and inflamed. "I would have that finger off, Wood, if I were you," said
+one of the surgeons, a day or two afterwards, on seeing the state of
+the wound. But the others laughed at the suggestion, and my father, at
+first inclined to submit to the amputation, was persuaded to "leave
+Nature alone."
+
+About the middle of August, 1852, he got wet through, riding on the top
+of an omnibus, and the wetting resulted in a severe cold, which
+"settled on his chest." One of the most eminent doctors of the day, as
+able as he was rough in manner, was called to see him. He examined him
+carefully, sounded his lungs, and left the room followed by my mother.
+"Well?" she asked, scarcely anxious as to the answer, save as it might
+worry her husband to be kept idly at home. "You must keep up his
+spirits," was the thoughtless answer. "He is in a galloping
+consumption; you will not have him with you six weeks longer." The wife
+staggered back, and fell like a stone on the floor. But love triumphed
+over agony, and half an hour later she was again at her husband's side,
+never to leave it again for ten minutes at a time, night or day, till
+he was lying with closed eyes asleep in death.
+
+I was lifted on to the bed to "say good-bye to dear papa" on the day
+before his death, and I remember being frightened at his eyes which
+looked so large, and his voice which sounded so strange, as he made me
+promise always to be "a very good girl to darling mamma, as papa was
+going right away." I remember insisting that "papa should kiss Cherry,"
+a doll given me on my birthday, three days before, by his direction,
+and being removed, crying and struggling, from the room. He died on the
+following day, October 5th, and I do not think that my elder brother
+and I--who were staying at our maternal grandfather's--went to the
+house again until the day of the funeral. With the death, my mother
+broke down, and when all was over they carried her senseless from the
+room. I remember hearing afterwards how, when she recovered her senses,
+she passionately insisted on being left alone, and locked herself into
+her room for the night; and how on the following morning her mother, at
+last persuading her to open the door, started back at the face she saw
+with the cry: "Good God, Emily! your hair is white!" It was even so;
+her hair, black, glossy and abundant, which, contrasting with her large
+grey eyes, had made her face so strangely attractive, had turned grey
+in that night of agony, and to me my mother's face is ever framed in
+exquisite silver bands of hair as white as the driven unsullied snow.
+
+I have heard that the love between my father and mother was a very
+beautiful thing, and it most certainly stamped her character for life.
+He was keenly intellectual and splendidly educated; a mathematician and
+a good classical scholar, thoroughly master of French, German, Italian,
+Spanish, and Portuguese, with a smattering of Hebrew and Gaelic, the
+treasures of ancient and of modern literature were his daily household
+delight. Nothing pleased him so well as to sit with his wife, reading
+aloud to her while she worked; now translating from some foreign poet,
+now rolling forth melodiously the exquisite cadences of "Queen Mab."
+Student of philosophy as he was, he was deeply and steadily sceptical;
+and a very religious relative has told me that he often drove her from
+the room by his light, playful mockery of the tenets of the Christian
+faith. His mother and sister were strict Roman Catholics, and near the
+end forced a priest into his room, but the priest was promptly ejected
+by the wrath of the dying man, and by the almost fierce resolve of the
+wife that no messenger of the creed he detested should trouble her
+darling at the last.
+
+Deeply read in philosophy, he had outgrown the orthodox beliefs of his
+day, and his wife, who loved him too much to criticise, was wont to
+reconcile her own piety and his scepticism by holding that "women ought
+to be religious," while men had a right to read everything and think as
+they would, provided that they were upright and honourable in their
+lives. But the result of his liberal and unorthodox thought was to
+insensibly modify and partially rationalise her own beliefs, and she
+put on one side as errors the doctrines of eternal punishment, the
+vicarious atonement, the infallibility of the Bible, the equality of
+the Son with the Father in the Trinity, and other orthodox beliefs, and
+rejoiced in her later years in the writings of such men as Jowett,
+Colenso, and Stanley. The last named, indeed, was her ideal Christian
+gentleman, suave, polished, broad-minded, devout in a stately way. The
+baldness of a typical Evangelical service outraged her taste as much as
+the crudity of Evangelical dogmas outraged her intellect; she liked to
+feel herself a Christian in a dignified and artistic manner, and to be
+surrounded by solemn music and splendid architecture when she "attended
+Divine service." Familiarity with celestial personages was detestable
+to her, and she did her duty of saluting them in a courtly and reverent
+fashion. Westminster Abbey was her favourite church, with its dim light
+and shadowy distances; there in a carven stall, with choristers
+chanting in solemn rhythm, with the many-coloured glories of the
+painted windows repeating themselves on upspringing arch and clustering
+pillars, with the rich harmonies of the pealing organ throbbing up
+against screen and monument, with the ashes of the mighty dead around,
+and all the stately memories of the past inwrought into the very
+masonry, there Religion appeared to her to be intellectually dignified
+and emotionally satisfactory.
+
+To me, who took my religion in strenuous fashion, this dainty and
+well-bred piety seemed perilously like Laodicean lukewarmness, while
+my headlong vigour of conviction and practice often jarred on her as
+alien from the delicate balance and absence of extremes that should
+characterise the gentlewoman. She was of the old _regime_; I of the
+stuff from which fanatics are made: and I have often thought, in
+looking back, that she must have had on her lips many a time unspoken
+a phrase that dropped from them when she lay a-dying: "My little one,
+you have never made me sad or sorry except for your own sake; you have
+always been too religious." And then she murmured to herself: "Yes,
+it has been darling Annie's only fault; she has always been too
+religious." Methinks that, as the world judges, the dying voice spake
+truly, and the dying eyes saw with a real insight. For though I was
+then kneeling beside her bed, heretic and outcast, the heart of me was
+religious in its very fervour of repudiation of a religion, and in its
+rebellious uprising against dogmas that crushed the reason and did not
+satisfy the soul. I went out into the darkness alone, not because
+religion was too good for me, but because it was not good enough; it
+was too meagre, too commonplace, too little exacting, too bound up
+with earthly interests, too calculating in its accommodations to
+social conventionalities. The Roman Catholic Church, had it captured
+me, as it nearly did, would have sent me on some mission of danger and
+sacrifice and utilised me as a martyr; the Church established by law
+transformed me into an unbeliever and an antagonist.
+
+For as a child I was mystical and imaginative religious to the very
+finger-tips, and with a certain faculty for seeing visions and
+dreaming dreams. This faculty is not uncommon with the Keltic races,
+and makes them seem "superstitious" to more solidly-built peoples.
+Thus, on the day of my father's funeral, my mother sat with vacant
+eyes and fixed pallid face--the picture comes back to me yet, it so
+impressed my childish imagination--following the funeral service,
+stage after stage, and suddenly, with the words, "It is all over!"
+fell back fainting. She said afterwards that she had followed the
+hearse, had attended the service, had walked behind the coffin to the
+grave. Certain it is that a few weeks later she determined to go to
+the Kensal Green Cemetery, where the body of her husband had been
+laid, and went thither with a relative; he failed to find the grave,
+and while another of the party went in search of an official to
+identify the spot, my mother said, "If you will take me to the chapel
+where the first part of the service was read, I will find the grave."
+The idea seemed to her friend, of course, to be absurd; but he would
+not cross the newly-made widow, so took her to the chapel. She looked
+round, left the chapel door, and followed the path along which the
+corpse had been borne till she reached the grave, where she was
+quietly standing when the caretaker arrived to point it out. The grave
+is at some distance from the chapel, and is not on one of the main
+roads; it had nothing on it to mark it, save the wooden peg with the
+number, and this would be no help to identification at a distance
+since all the graves are thus marked, and at a little way off these
+pegs are not visible. How she found the grave remained a mystery in
+the family, as no one believed her straightforward story that she had
+been present at the funeral. With my present knowledge the matter is
+simple enough, for I now know that the consciousness can leave the
+body, take part in events going on at a distance, and, returning,
+impress on the physical brain what it has experienced. The very fact
+that she asked to be taken to the chapel is significant, showing that
+she was picking up a memory of a previous going from that spot to the
+grave; she could only find the grave if she started from _the place
+from which she had started before_. Another proof of this
+ultra-physical capacity was given a few months later, when her infant
+son, who had been pining himself ill for "papa," was lying one night
+in her arms. On the next morning she said to her sister: "Alf is going
+to die." The child had no definite disease, but was wasting away, and
+it was argued to her that the returning spring would restore the
+health lost during the winter. "No," was her answer. "He was lying
+asleep in my arms last night, and William" (her husband) "came to me
+and said that he wanted Alf with him, but that I might keep the other
+two." In vain she was assured that she had been dreaming, that it was
+quite natural that she should dream about her husband, and that her
+anxiety for the child had given the dream its shape. Nothing would
+persuade her that she had not seen her husband, or that the
+information he had given her was not true. So it was no matter of
+surprise to her when in the following March her arms were empty, and a
+waxen form lay lifeless in the baby's cot.
+
+My brother and I were allowed to see him just before he was placed in
+his coffin; I can see him still, so white and beautiful, with a black
+spot in the middle of the fair, waxen forehead, and I remember the
+deadly cold which startled me when I was told to kiss my little
+brother. It was the first time that I had touched Death. That black
+spot made a curious impression on me, and long afterwards, asking what
+had caused it, I was told that at the moment after his death my mother
+had passionately kissed the baby brow. Pathetic thought, that the
+mother's kiss of farewell should have been marked by the first sign of
+corruption on the child's face!
+
+I do not mention these stories because they are in any fashion
+remarkable or out of the way, but only to show that the sensitiveness
+to impressions other than physical ones, that was a marked feature in
+my own childhood, was present also in the family to which I belonged.
+For the physical nature is inherited from parents, and sensitiveness
+to psychic impressions is a property of the physical body; in our
+family, as in so many Irish ones, belief in "ghosts" of all
+descriptions was general, and my mother has told me of the banshee
+that she had heard wailing when the death-hour of one of the family
+was near. To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were
+very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself
+a child. Punch and Judy were living entities, and the tragedy in which
+they bore part cost me many an agony of tears; to this day I can
+remember running away when I heard the squawk of the coming Punch, and
+burying my head in the pillows that I might shut out the sound of the
+blows and the cry of the ill-used baby. All the objects about me were
+to me alive, the flowers that I kissed as much as the kitten I petted,
+and I used to have a splendid time "making believe" and living out all
+sorts of lovely stories among my treasured and so-called inanimate
+playthings. But there was a more serious side to this dreamful fancy
+when it joined hands with religion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+EARLY CHILDHOOD.
+
+
+And now began my mother's time of struggle and of anxiety. Hitherto,
+since her marriage, she had known no money troubles, for her husband
+was earning a good income; he was apparently vigorous and well: no
+thought of anxiety clouded their future. When he died, he believed
+that he left his wife and children safe, at least, from pecuniary
+distress. It was not so. I know nothing of the details, but the
+outcome of all was that nothing was left for the widow and children,
+save a trifle of ready money. The resolve to which my mother came was
+characteristic. Two of her husband's relatives, Western and Sir
+William Wood, offered to educate her son at a good city school, and to
+start him in commercial life, using their great city influence to push
+him forward. But the young lad's father and mother had talked of a
+different future for their eldest boy; he was to go to a public
+school, and then to the University, and was to enter one of the
+"learned professions"--to take orders, the mother wished; to go to the
+Bar, the father hoped. On his death-bed there was nothing more
+earnestly urged by my father than that Harry should receive the best
+possible education, and the widow was resolute to fulfil that last
+wish. In her eyes, a city school was not "the best possible
+education," and the Irish pride rebelled against the idea of her son
+not being "a University man." Many were the lectures poured out on the
+young widow's head about her "foolish pride," especially by the female
+members of the Wood family; and her persistence in her own way caused
+a considerable alienation between herself and them. But Western and
+William, though half-disapproving, remained her friends, and lent many
+a helping hand to her in her first difficult struggles. After much
+cogitation, she resolved that the boy should be educated at Harrow,
+where the fees are comparatively low to lads living in the town, and
+that he should go thence to Cambridge or to Oxford, as his tastes
+should direct. A bold scheme for a penniless widow, but carried out to
+the letter; for never dwelt in a delicate body a more resolute mind
+and will than that of my dear mother.
+
+In a few months' time--during which we lived, poorly enough, in
+Richmond Terrace, Clapham, close to her father and mother--to Harrow,
+then, she betook herself, into lodgings over a grocer's shop, and set
+herself to look for a house. This grocer was a very pompous man, fond
+of long words, and patronised the young widow exceedingly, and one day
+my mother related with much amusement how he had told her that she was
+sure to get on if she worked hard. "Look at me!" he said, swelling
+visibly with importance; "I was once a poor boy, without a penny of my
+own, and now I am a comfortable man, and have my submarine villa to go
+to every evening." That "submarine villa" was an object of amusement
+when we passed it in our walks for many a long day.
+
+"There is Mr. ----'s submarine villa," some one would say, laughing:
+and I, too, used to laugh merrily, because my elders did, though my
+understanding of the difference between suburban and submarine was on
+a par with that of the honest grocer.
+
+My mother had fortunately found a boy, whose parents were glad to place
+him in her charge, of about the age of her own son, to educate with
+him; and by this means she was able to pay for a tutor, to prepare the
+two boys for school. The tutor had a cork leg, which was a source of
+serious trouble to me, for it stuck out straight behind when we knelt
+down to family prayers--conduct which struck me as irreverent and
+unbecoming, but which I always felt a desire to imitate. After about a
+year my mother found a house which she thought would suit her scheme,
+namely, to obtain permission from Dr. Vaughan, the then head-master of
+Harrow, to take some boys into her house, and so gain means of
+education for her own son. Dr. Vaughan, who must have been won by the
+gentle, strong, little woman, from that time forth became her earnest
+friend and helper; and to the counsel and active assistance both of
+himself and of his wife, was due much of the success that crowned her
+toil. He made only one condition in granting the permission she asked,
+and that was, that she should also have in her house one of the masters
+of the school, so that the boys should not suffer from the want of a
+house-tutor. This condition, of course, she readily accepted, and the
+arrangement lasted for ten years, until after her son had left school
+for Cambridge.
+
+The house she took is now, I am sorry to say, pulled down, and
+replaced by a hideous red-brick structure. It was very old and
+rambling, rose-covered in front, ivy-covered behind; it stood on the
+top of Harrow Hill, between the church and the school, and had once
+been the vicarage of the parish, but the vicar had left it because it
+was so far removed from the part of the village where all his work
+lay. The drawing-room opened by an old-fashioned half-window,
+half-door--which proved a constant source of grief to me, for whenever
+I had on a new frock I always tore it on the bolt as I flew
+through--into a large garden which sloped down one side of the hill,
+and was filled with the most delightful old trees, fir and laurel,
+may, mulberry, hazel, apple, pear, and damson, not to mention currant
+and gooseberry bushes innumerable, and large strawberry beds spreading
+down the sunny slopes. There was not a tree there that I did not
+climb, and one, a widespreading Portugal laurel, was my private
+country house. I had there my bedroom and my sitting-rooms, my study,
+and my larder. The larder was supplied by the fruit-trees, from which
+I was free to pick as I would, and in the study I would sit for hours
+with some favourite book--Milton's "Paradise Lost" the chief favourite
+of all. The birds must often have felt startled, when from the small
+swinging form perching on a branch, came out in childish tones the
+"Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers," of Milton's
+stately and sonorous verse. I liked to personify Satan, and to declaim
+the grand speeches of the hero-rebel, and many a happy hour did I pass
+in Milton's heaven and hell, with for companions Satan and "the Son,"
+Gabriel and Abdiel. Then there was a terrace running by the side of
+the churchyard, always dry in the wettest weather, and bordered by an
+old wooden fence, over which clambered roses of every shade; never was
+such a garden for roses as that of the Old Vicarage. At the end of the
+terrace was a little summer-house, and in this a trap-door in the
+fence, which swung open and displayed one of the fairest views in
+England. Sheer from your feet downwards went the hill, and then far
+below stretched the wooded country till your eye reached the towers of
+Windsor Castle, far away on the horizon. It was the view at which
+Byron was never tired of gazing, as he lay on the flat tombstone close
+by--Byron's tomb, as it is still called--of which he wrote:--
+
+  "Again I behold where for hours I have pondered,
+     As reclining, at eve, on yon tombstone I lay,
+  Or round the steep brow of the churchyard I wandered,
+     To catch the last gleam of the sun's setting ray."
+
+Reader mine, if ever you go to Harrow, ask permission to enter the old
+garden, and try the effect of that sudden burst of beauty, as you
+swing back the small trap-door at the terrace end.
+
+Into this house we moved on my eighth birthday, and for eleven years it
+was "home" to me, left always with regret, returned to always with joy.
+
+Almost immediately afterwards I left my mother for the first time; for
+one day, visiting a family who lived close by, I found a stranger
+sitting in the drawing-room, a lame lady with a strong face, which
+softened marvellously as she smiled at the child who came dancing in;
+she called me to her presently, and took me on her lap and talked to
+me, and on the following day our friend came to see my mother, to ask
+if she would let me go away and be educated with this lady's niece,
+coming home for the holidays regularly, but leaving my education in
+her hands. At first my mother would not hear of it, for she and I
+scarcely ever left each other; my love for her was an idolatry, hers
+for me a devotion. (A foolish little story, about which I was
+unmercifully teased for years, marked that absolute idolatry of her,
+which has not yet faded from my heart. In tenderest rallying one day
+of the child who trotted after her everywhere, content to sit, or
+stand, or wait, if only she might touch hand or dress of "mamma," she
+said: "Little one" (the name by which she always called me), "if you
+cling to mamma in this way, I must really get a string and tie you to
+my apron, and how will you like that?" "O mamma, darling," came the
+fervent answer, "do let it be in a knot." And, indeed, the tie of love
+between us was so tightly knotted that nothing ever loosened it till
+the sword of Death cut that which pain and trouble never availed to
+slacken in the slightest degree.) But it was urged upon her that the
+advantages of education offered were such as no money could purchase
+for me; that it would be a disadvantage for me to grow up in a
+houseful of boys--and, in truth, I was as good a cricketer and climber
+as the best of them--that my mother would soon be obliged to send me
+to school, unless she accepted an offer which gave me every advantage
+of school without its disadvantages. At last she yielded, and it was
+decided that Miss Marryat, on returning home, should take me with her.
+
+Miss Marryat--the favourite sister of Captain Marryat, the famous
+novelist--was a maiden lady of large means. She had nursed her brother
+through the illness that ended in his death, and had been living with
+her mother at Wimbledon Park. On her mother's death she looked round
+for work which would make her useful in the world, and finding that one
+of her brothers had a large family of girls, she offered to take charge
+of one of them, and to educate her thoroughly. Chancing to come to
+Harrow, my good fortune threw me in her way, and she took a fancy to
+me and thought she would like to teach two little girls rather than
+one. Hence her offer to my mother.
+
+Miss Marryat had a perfect genius for teaching, and took in it the
+greatest delight. From time to time she added another child to our
+party, sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl. At first, with Amy Marryat
+and myself, there was a little boy, Walter Powys, son of a clergyman
+with a large family, and him she trained for some years, and then sent
+him on to school admirably prepared. She chose "her children"--as she
+loved to call us--in very definite fashion. Each must be gently born
+and gently trained, but in such position that the education freely
+given should be a relief and aid to a slender parental purse. It was
+her delight to seek out and aid those on whom poverty presses most
+heavily, when the need for education for the children weighs on the
+proud and the poor. "Auntie" we all called her, for she thought "Miss
+Marryat" seemed too cold and stiff. She taught us everything herself
+except music, and for this she had a master, practising us in
+composition, in recitation, in reading aloud English and French, and
+later, German, devoting herself to training us in the soundest, most
+thorough fashion. No words of mine can tell how much I owe her, not
+only of knowledge, but of that love of knowledge which has remained
+with me ever since as a constant spur to study.
+
+Her method of teaching may be of interest to some, who desire to train
+children with least pain, and the most enjoyment to the little ones
+themselves. First, we never used a spelling-book--that torment of the
+small child--nor an English grammar. But we wrote letters, telling of
+the things we had seen in our walks, or told again some story we had
+read; these childish compositions she would read over with us,
+correcting all faults of spelling, of grammar, of style, of cadence; a
+clumsy sentence would be read aloud, that we might hear how unmusical
+it sounded, an error in observation or expression pointed out. Then, as
+the letters recorded what we had seen the day before, the faculty of
+observation was drawn out and trained. "Oh, dear! I have nothing to
+say!" would come from a small child, hanging over a slate. "Did you not
+go out for a walk yesterday?" Auntie would question. "Yes," would be
+sighed out; "but there's nothing to say about it." "Nothing to say! And
+you walked in the lanes for an hour and saw nothing, little No-eyes?
+You must use your eyes better to-day." Then there was a very favourite
+"lesson," which proved an excellent way of teaching spelling. We used
+to write out lists of all the words we could think of which sounded the
+same but were differently spelt. Thus: "key, quay," "knight, night,"
+and so on, and great was the glory of the child who found the largest
+number. Our French lessons--as the German later--included reading from
+the very first. On the day on which we began German we began reading
+Schiller's "Wilhelm Tell," and the verbs given to us to copy out were
+those that had occurred in the reading. We learned much by heart, but
+always things that in themselves were worthy to be learned. We were
+never given the dry questions and answers which lazy teachers so much
+affect. We were taught history by one reading aloud while the others
+worked--the boys as well as the girls learning the use of the needle.
+"It's like a girl to sew," said a little fellow, indignantly, one day.
+"It is like a baby to have to run after a girl if you want a button
+sewn on," quoth Auntie. Geography was learned by painting skeleton
+maps--an exercise much delighted in by small fingers--and by putting
+together puzzle maps, in which countries in the map of a continent, or
+counties in the map of a country, were always cut out in their proper
+shapes. I liked big empires in those days; there was a solid
+satisfaction in putting down Russia, and seeing what a large part of
+the map was filled up thereby.
+
+The only grammar that we ever learned as grammar was the Latin, and
+that not until composition had made us familiar with the use of the
+rules therein given. Auntie had a great horror of children learning by
+rote things they did not understand, and then fancying they knew them.
+"What do you mean by that expression, Annie?" she would ask me. After
+feeble attempts to explain, I would answer: "Indeed, Auntie, I know in
+my own head, but I can't explain." "Then, indeed, Annie, you do not
+know in your own head, or you could explain, so that I might know in my
+own head." And so a healthy habit was fostered of clearness of thought
+and of expression. The Latin grammar was used because it was more
+perfect than the modern grammars, and served as a solid foundation for
+modern languages.
+
+Miss Marryat took a beautiful place, Fern Hill, near Charmouth, in
+Dorsetshire, on the borders of Devon, and there she lived for some five
+years, a centre of beneficence in the district. She started a Sunday
+School, and a Bible Class after awhile for the lads too old for the
+school, who clamoured for admission to her class in it. She visited the
+poor, taking help wherever she went, and sending food from her own
+table to the sick. It was characteristic of her that she would never
+give "scraps" to the poor, but would have a basin brought in at dinner,
+and would cut the best slice to tempt the invalid appetite. Money she
+rarely, if ever, gave, but she would find a day's work, or busy herself
+to seek permanent employment for any one seeking aid. Stern in
+rectitude herself, and iron to the fawning or the dishonest, her
+influence, whether she was feared or loved, was always for good. Of the
+strictest sect of the Evangelicals, she was an Evangelical. On the
+Sunday no books were allowed save the Bible or the "Sunday at Home";
+but she would try to make the day bright by various little devices; by
+a walk with her in the garden; by the singing of hymns, always
+attractive to children; by telling us wonderful missionary stories of
+Moffat and Livingstone, whose adventures with savages and wild beasts
+were as exciting as any tale of Mayne Reid's. We used to learn passages
+from the Bible and hymns for repetition; a favourite amusement was a
+"Bible puzzle," such as a description of some Bible scene, which was to
+be recognised by the description. Then we taught in the Sunday School,
+for Auntie would tell us that it was useless for us to learn if we did
+not try to help those who had no one to teach them. The Sunday-school
+lessons had to be carefully prepared on the Saturday, for we were
+always taught that work given to the poor should be work that cost
+something to the giver. This principle, regarded by her as an
+illustration of the text, "Shall I give unto the Lord my God that which
+has cost me nothing?" ran through all her precept and her practice.
+When in some public distress we children went to her crying, and asking
+whether we could not help the little children who were starving, her
+prompt reply was, "What will you give up for them?" And then she said
+that if we liked to give up the use of sugar, we might thus each save
+sixpence a week to give away. I doubt if a healthier lesson can be
+given to children than that of personal self-denial for the good of
+others.
+
+Daily, when our lessons were over, we had plenty of fun; long walks and
+rides, rides on a lovely pony, who found small children most amusing,
+and on which the coachman taught us to stick firmly, whatever his
+eccentricities of the moment; delightful all-day picnics in the lovely
+country round Charmouth, Auntie our merriest playfellow. Never was a
+healthier home, physically and mentally, made for young things than in
+that quiet village. And then the delight of the holidays! The pride of
+my mother at the good report of her darling's progress, and the renewal
+of acquaintance with every nook and corner in the dear old house and
+garden.
+
+The dreamy tendency in the child, that on its worldly side is fancy,
+imagination, on its religious side is the germ of mysticism, and I
+believe it to be far more common than many people think. But the
+remorseless materialism of the day--not the philosophic materialism of
+the few, but the religious materialism of the many--crushes out all the
+delicate buddings forth of the childish thought, and bandages the eyes
+that might otherwise see. At first the child does not distinguish
+between what it "sees" and what it "fancies"; the one is as real, as
+objective, to it as the other, and it will talk to and play with its
+dream-comrades as merrily as with children like itself. As a child, I
+myself very much preferred the former, and never knew what it was to be
+lonely. But clumsy grown-ups come along and tramp right through the
+dream-garden, and crush the dream-flowers, and push the dream-children
+aside, and then say, in their loud, harsh voices--not soft and singable
+like the dream-voices--"You must not tell such naughty stories, Miss
+Annie; you give me the shivers, and your mamma will be very vexed with
+you." But this tendency in me was too strong to be stifled, and it
+found its food in the fairy tales I loved, and in the religious
+allegories that I found yet more entrancing. How or when I learned to
+read, I do not know, for I cannot remember the time when a book was not
+a delight. At five years of age I must have read easily, for I remember
+being often unswathed from a delightful curtain, in which I used to
+roll myself with a book, and told to "go and play," while I was still a
+five-years'-old dot. And I had a habit of losing myself so completely
+in the book that my name might be called in the room where I was, and I
+never hear it, so that I used to be blamed for wilfully hiding myself,
+when I had simply been away in fairyland, or lying trembling beneath
+some friendly cabbage-leaf as a giant went by.
+
+I was between seven and eight years of age when I first came across
+some children's allegories of a religious kind, and a very little
+later came "Pilgrim's Progress," and Milton's "Paradise Lost."
+Thenceforth my busy fancies carried me ever into the fascinating world
+where boy-soldiers kept some outpost for their absent Prince, bearing
+a shield with his sign of a red cross on it; where devils shaped as
+dragons came swooping down on the pilgrim, but were driven away
+defeated after hard struggle; where angels came and talked with little
+children, and gave them some talisman which warned them of coming
+danger, and lost its light if they were leaving the right path. What a
+dull, tire-some world it was that I had to live in, I used to think to
+myself, when I was told to be a good child, and not to lose my temper,
+and to be tidy, and not mess my pinafore at dinner. How much easier to
+be a Christian if one could have a red-cross shield and a white
+banner, and have a real devil to fight with, and a beautiful Divine
+Prince to smile at you when the battle was over. How much more
+exciting to struggle with a winged and clawed dragon, that you knew
+meant mischief, than to look after your temper, that you never
+remembered you ought to keep until you had lost it. If I had been Eve
+in the garden, that old serpent would never have got the better of me;
+but how was a little girl to know that she might not pick out the
+rosiest, prettiest apple from a tree that had no serpent to show it
+was a forbidden one? And as I grew older the dreams and fancies grew
+less fantastic, but more tinged with real enthusiasm. I read tales of
+the early Christian martyrs, and passionately regretted I was born so
+late when no suffering for religion was practicable; I would spend
+many an hour in daydreams, in which I stood before Roman judges,
+before Dominican Inquisitors, was flung to lions, tortured on the
+rack, burned at the stake; one day I saw myself preaching some great
+new faith to a vast crowd of people, and they listened and were
+converted, and I became a great religious leader. But always, with a
+shock, I was brought back to earth, where there were no heroic deeds
+to do, no lions to face, no judges to defy, but only some dull duty to
+be performed. And I used to fret that I was born so late, when all the
+grand things had been done, and when there was no chance of preaching
+and suffering for a new religion.
+
+From the age of eight my education accented the religious side of my
+character. Under Miss Marryat's training my religious feeling received
+a strongly Evangelical bent, but it was a subject of some distress to
+me that I could never look back to an hour of "conversion"; when
+others gave their experiences, and spoke of the sudden change they had
+felt, I used to be sadly conscious that no such change had occurred in
+me, and I felt that my dreamy longings were very poor things compared
+with the vigorous "sense of sin" spoken of by the preachers, and used
+dolefully to wonder if I were "saved." Then I had an uneasy sense that
+I was often praised for my piety when emulation and vanity were more
+to the front than religion; as when I learned by heart the Epistle of
+James, far more to distinguish myself for my good memory than from any
+love of the text itself; the sonorous cadences of many parts of the
+Old and New Testaments pleased my ear, and I took a dreamy pleasure in
+repeating them aloud, just as I would recite for my own amusement
+hundreds of lines of Milton's "Paradise Lost," as I sat swinging on
+some branch of a tree, lying back often on some swaying bough and
+gazing into the unfathomable blue of the sky, till I lost myself in an
+ecstasy of sound and colour, half chanting the melodious sentences and
+peopling all the blue with misty forms. This facility of learning by
+heart, and the habit of dreamy recitation, made me very familiar with
+the Bible and very apt with its phrases. This stood me in good stead
+at the prayer-meetings dear to the Evangelical, in which we all took
+part; in turn we were called on to pray aloud--a terrible ordeal to
+me, for I was painfully shy when attention was called to me; I used to
+suffer agonies while I waited for the dreaded words, "Now, Annie dear,
+will you speak to our Lord." But when my trembling lips had forced
+themselves into speech, all the nervousness used to vanish and I was
+swept away by an enthusiasm that readily clothed itself in balanced
+sentences, and alack! at the end, I too often hoped that God and
+Auntie had noticed that I prayed very nicely--a vanity certainly not
+intended to be fostered by the pious exercise. On the whole, the
+somewhat Calvinistic teaching tended, I think, to make me a little
+morbid, especially as I always fretted silently after my mother. I
+remember she was surprised on one of my home-comings, when Miss
+Marryat noted "cheerfulness" as a want in my character, for at home I
+was ever the blithest of children, despite my love of solitude; but
+away, there was always an aching for home, and the stern religion cast
+somewhat of a shadow over me, though, strangely enough, hell never
+came into my dreamings except in the interesting shape it took in
+"Paradise Lost." After reading that, the devil was to me no horned and
+hoofed horror, but the beautiful shadowed archangel, and I always
+hoped that Jesus, my ideal Prince, would save him in the end. The
+things that really frightened me were vague, misty presences that I
+felt were near, but could not see; they were so real that I knew just
+where they were in the room, and the peculiar terror they excited lay
+largely in the feeling that I was just going to see them. If by chance
+I came across a ghost story it haunted me for months, for I saw
+whatever unpleasant spectre was described; and there was one horrid
+old woman in a tale by Sir Walter Scott, who glided up to the foot of
+your bed and sprang on it in some eerie fashion and glared at you, and
+who made my going to bed a terror to me for many weeks. I can still
+recall the feeling so vividly that it almost frightens me now!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+GIRLHOOD.
+
+
+In the spring of 1861 Miss Marryat announced her intention of going
+abroad, and asked my dear mother to let me accompany her. A little
+nephew whom she had adopted was suffering from cataract, and she
+desired to place him under the care of the famous Duesseldorf oculist.
+Amy Marryat had been recalled home soon after the death of her mother,
+who had died in giving birth to the child adopted by Miss Marryat, and
+named at her desire after her favourite brother Frederick (Captain
+Marryat). Her place had been taken by a girl a few months older than
+myself, Emma Mann, one of the daughters of a clergyman, who had
+married Miss Stanley, closely related, indeed, if I remember rightly,
+a sister of the Miss Mary Stanley who did such noble work in nursing
+in the Crimea.
+
+For some months we had been diligently studying German, for Miss
+Marryat thought it wise that we should know a language fairly well
+before we visited the country of which it was the native tongue. We
+had been trained also to talk French daily during dinner, so we were
+not quite "helpless foreigners" when we steamed away from St.
+Catherine's Docks, and found ourselves on the following day in
+Antwerp, amid what seemed to us a very Babel of conflicting tongues.
+Alas for our carefully spoken French, articulated laboriously! We were
+lost in that swirl of disputing luggage-porters, and could not
+understand a word! But Miss Marryat was quite equal to the occasion,
+being by no means new to travelling, and her French stood the test
+triumphantly, and steered us safely to a hotel. On the morrow we
+started again through Aix-la-Chapelle to Bonn, the town which lies on
+the borders of the exquisite scenery of which the Siebengebirge and
+Rolandseck serve as the magic portal. Our experiences in Bonn were not
+wholly satisfactory. Dear Auntie was a maiden lady, looking on all
+young men as wolves to be kept far from her growing lambs. Bonn was a
+university town, and there was a mania just then prevailing there for
+all things English. Emma was a plump, rosy, fair-haired typical
+English maiden, full of frolic and harmless fun; I a very slight,
+pale, black-haired girl, alternating between wild fun and extreme
+pensiveness. In the boarding-house to which we went at first--the
+"Chateau du Rhin," a beautiful place overhanging the broad, blue
+Rhine--there chanced to be staying the two sons of the late Duke of
+Hamilton, the Marquis of Douglas and Lord Charles, with their tutor.
+They had the whole drawing-room floor: we a sitting-room on the ground
+floor and bedrooms above. The lads discovered that Miss Marryat did
+not like her "children" to be on speaking terms with any of the "male
+sect."
+
+Here was a fine source of amusement. They would make their horses
+caracole on the gravel in front of our window; they would be just
+starting for their ride as we went for walk or drive, and would salute
+us with doffed hat and low bow; they would waylay us on our way
+downstairs with demure "Good morning"; they would go to church and
+post themselves so that they could survey our pew, and Lord
+Charles--who possessed the power of moving at will the whole skin of
+the scalp--would wriggle his hair up and down till we were choking
+with laughter, to our own imminent risk. After a month of this Auntie
+was literally driven out of the pretty chateau, and took refuge in a
+girls' school, much to our disgust; but still she was not allowed to
+be at rest. Mischievous students would pursue us wherever we went;
+sentimental Germans, with gashed cheeks, would whisper complimentary
+phrases as we passed; mere boyish nonsense of most harmless kind, but
+the rather stern English lady thought it "not proper," and after three
+months of Bonn we were sent home for the holidays, somewhat in
+disgrace. But we had some lovely excursions during those months; such
+clambering up mountains, such rows on the swift-flowing Rhine, such
+wanderings in exquisite valleys. I have a long picture-gallery to
+retire into when I want to think of something fair, in recalling the
+moon as it silvered the Rhine at the foot of Drachenfels, or the soft,
+mist-veiled island where dwelt the lady who is consecrated for ever by
+Roland's love.
+
+A couple of months later we rejoined Miss Marryat in Paris, where we
+spent seven happy, workful months. On Wednesdays and Saturdays we were
+free from lessons, and many a long afternoon was passed in the
+galleries of the Louvre, till we became familiar with the masterpieces
+of art gathered there from all lands. I doubt if there was a beautiful
+church in Paris that we did not visit during those weekly wanderings;
+that of St. Germain de l'Auxerrois was my favourite--the church whose
+bell gave the signal for the massacre of St. Bartholomew--for it
+contained such marvellous stained glass, deepest, purest glory of
+colour that I had ever seen. The solemn beauty of Notre Dame, the
+somewhat gaudy magnificence of La Sainte Chapelle, the stateliness of
+La Madeleine, the impressive gloom of St. Roch, were all familiar to
+us. Other delights were found in mingling with the bright crowds which
+passed along the Champs Elysees and sauntered in the Bois de Boulogne,
+in strolling in the garden of the Tuileries, in climbing to the top of
+every monument whence view of Paris could be gained. The Empire was
+then in its heyday of glitter, and we much enjoyed seeing the
+brilliant escort of the imperial carriage, with plumes and gold and
+silver dancing and glistening in the sunlight, while in the carriage
+sat the exquisitely lovely empress, with the little boy beside her,
+touching his cap shyly, but with something of her own grace, in answer
+to a greeting--the boy who was thought to be born to an imperial
+crown, but whose brief career was to find an ending from the spears of
+savages in a quarrel in which he had no concern.
+
+In the spring of 1862 it chanced that the Bishop of Ohio visited
+Paris, and Mr. Forbes, then English chaplain at the Church of the Rue
+d'Aguesseau, arranged to have a confirmation. As said above, I was
+under deep "religious impressions," and, in fact, with the exception
+of that little aberration in Germany, I was decidedly a pious girl. I
+looked on theatres (never having been to one) as traps set by Satan
+for the destruction of foolish souls; I was quite determined never to
+go to a ball, and was prepared to "suffer for conscience' sake
+"--little prig that I was--if I was desired to go to one. I was
+consequently quite prepared to take upon myself the vows made in my
+name at my baptism, and to renounce the world, the flesh, and the
+devil, with a heartiness and sincerity only equalled by my profound
+ignorance of the things I so readily resigned. That confirmation was
+to me a very solemn matter; the careful preparation, the prolonged
+prayers, the wondering awe as to the "seven-fold gifts of the Spirit,"
+which were to be given by "the laying on of hands," all tended to
+excitement. I could scarcely control myself as I knelt at the altar
+rails, and felt as though the gentle touch of the aged bishop, which
+fluttered for an instant on my bowed head, were the very touch of the
+wing of that "Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove," whose presence had been so
+earnestly invoked. Is there anything easier, I wonder, than to make a
+young and sensitive girl "intensely religious"? This stay in Paris
+roused into activity an aspect of my religious nature that had
+hitherto been latent. I discovered the sensuous enjoyment that lay in
+introducing colour and fragrance and pomp into religious services, so
+that the gratification of the aesthetic emotions became dignified with
+the garb of piety. The picture-galleries of the Louvre, crowded with
+Madonnas and saints, the Roman Catholic churches with their
+incense-laden air and exquisite music, brought a new joy into my life,
+a more vivid colour to my dreams. Insensibly, the colder, cruder
+Evangelicalism that I had never thoroughly assimilated, grew warmer
+and more brilliant, and the ideal Divine Prince of my childhood took
+on the more pathetic lineaments of the Man of Sorrows, the deeper
+attractiveness of the suffering Saviour of Men. Keble's "Christian
+Year" took the place of "Paradise Lost," and as my girlhood began to
+bud towards womanhood, all its deeper currents set in the direction of
+religious devotion. My mother did not allow me to read love stories,
+and my daydreams of the future were scarcely touched by any of the
+ordinary hopes and fears of a girl lifting her eyes towards the world
+she is shortly to enter. They were filled with broodings over the days
+when girl-martyrs were blessed with visions of the King of Martyrs,
+when sweet St. Agnes saw her celestial Bridegroom, and angels stooped
+to whisper melodies in St. Cecilia's raptured ear. "Why then and not
+now?" my heart would question, and I would lose myself in these
+fancies, never happier than when alone.
+
+The summer of 1862 was spent with Miss Marryat at Sidmouth, and, wise
+woman that she was, she now carefully directed our studies with a view
+to our coming enfranchisement from the "schoolroom." More and more
+were we trained to work alone; our leading-strings were slackened, so
+that we never felt them save when we blundered; and I remember that
+when I once complained, in loving fashion, that she was "teaching me
+so little," she told me that I was getting old enough to be trusted to
+work by myself, and that I must not expect to "have Auntie for a
+crutch all through life." And I venture to say that this gentle
+withdrawal of constant supervision and teaching was one of the wisest
+and kindest things that this noble-hearted woman ever did for us. It
+is the usual custom to keep girls in the schoolroom until they "come
+out"; then, suddenly, they are left to their own devices, and,
+bewildered by their unaccustomed freedom, they waste time that might
+be priceless for their intellectual growth. Lately, the opening of
+universities to women has removed this danger for the more ambitious;
+but at the time of which I am writing no one dreamed of the changes
+soon to be made in the direction of the "higher education of women."
+
+During the winter of 1862-63 Miss Marryat was in London, and for a few
+months I remained there with her, attending the admirable French
+classes of M. Roche. In the spring I returned home to Harrow, going up
+each week to the classes; and when these were over, Auntie told me
+that she thought all she could usefully do was done, and that it was
+time that I should try my wings alone. So well, however, had she
+succeeded in her aims, that my emancipation from the schoolroom was
+but the starting-point of more eager study, though now the study
+turned into the lines of thought towards which my personal tendencies
+most attracted me. German I continued to read with a master, and
+music, under the marvellously able teaching of Mr. John Farmer,
+musical director of Harrow School, took up much of my time. My dear
+mother had a passion for music, and Beethoven and Bach were her
+favourite composers. There was scarcely a sonata of Beethoven's that I
+did not learn, scarcely a fugue of Bach's that I did not master.
+Mendelssohn's "Lieder" gave a lighter recreation, and many a happy
+evening did we spend, my mother and I, over the stately strains of the
+blind Titan, and the sweet melodies of the German wordless orator.
+Musical "At Homes," too, were favourite amusements at Harrow, and at
+these my facile fingers made me a welcome guest.
+
+Thus set free from the schoolroom at 161/2, an only daughter, I could do
+with my time as I would, save for the couple of hours a day given to
+music, for the satisfaction of my mother. From then till I became
+engaged, just before I was 19, my life flowed on smoothly, one current
+visible to all and dancing in the sunlight, the other running
+underground, but full and deep and strong. As regards my outer life,
+no girl had a brighter, happier life than mine; studying all the
+mornings and most of the afternoons in my own way, and spending the
+latter part of the day in games and walks and rides--varied with
+parties at which I was one of the merriest of guests. I practised
+archery so zealously that I carried up triumphantly as prize for the
+best score the first ring I ever possessed, while croquet found me a
+most eager devotee. My darling mother certainly "spoiled" me, so far
+as were concerned all the small roughnesses of life. She never allowed
+a trouble of any kind to touch me, and cared only that all worries
+should fall on her, all joys on me. I know now what I never dreamed
+then, that her life was one of serious anxiety. The heavy burden of my
+brother's school and college life pressed on her constantly, and her
+need of money was often serious. A lawyer whom she trusted absolutely
+cheated her systematically, using for his own purposes the remittances
+she made for payment of liabilities, thus keeping upon her a constant
+drain. Yet for me all that was wanted was ever there. Was it a ball to
+which we were going? I need never think of what I would wear till the
+time for dressing arrived, and there laid out ready for me was all I
+wanted, every detail complete from top to toe. No hand but hers must
+dress my hair, which, loosed, fell in dense curly masses nearly to my
+knees; no hand but hers must fasten dress and deck with flowers, and
+if I sometimes would coaxingly ask if I might not help by sewing in
+laces, or by doing some trifle in aid, she would kiss me and bid me
+run to my books or my play, telling me that her only pleasure in life
+was caring for her "treasure." Alas! how lightly we take the
+self-denying labour that makes life so easy, ere yet we have known
+what life means when the protecting motherwing is withdrawn. So
+guarded and shielded had been my childhood and youth from every touch
+of pain and anxiety that love could bear for me, that I never dreamed
+that life might be a heavy burden, save as I saw it in the poor I was
+sent to help; all the joy of those happy years I took, not
+ungratefully I hope, but certainly with as glad unconsciousness of
+anything rare in it as I took the sunlight. Passionate love, indeed, I
+gave to my darling, but I never knew all I owed her till I passed out
+of her tender guardianship, till I left my mother's home. Is such
+training wise? I am not sure. It makes the ordinary roughnesses of
+life come with so stunning a shock, when one goes out into the world,
+that one is apt to question whether some earlier initiation into
+life's sterner mysteries would not be wiser for the young. Yet it is a
+fair thing to have that joyous youth to look back upon, and at least
+it is a treasury of memory that no thief can steal in the struggles of
+later life. "Sunshine" they called me in those bright days of merry
+play and earnest study. But that study showed the bent of my thought
+and linked itself to the hidden life; for the Fathers of the early
+Christian Church now became my chief companions, and I pored over the
+Shepherd of Hernias, the Epistles of Polycarp, Barnabas, Ignatius, and
+Clement, the commentaries of Chrysostom, the confessions of Augustine.
+With these I studied the writings of Pusey, Liddon, and Keble, with
+many another smaller light, joying in the great conception of a
+Catholic Church, lasting through the centuries, built on the
+foundations of apostles and of martyrs, stretching from the days of
+Christ Himself down to our own--"One Lord, one Faith one Baptism," and
+I myself a child of that Holy Church. The hidden life grew stronger,
+constantly fed by these streams of study; weekly communion became the
+centre round which my devotional life revolved, with its ecstatic
+meditation, its growing intensity of conscious contact with the
+Divine; I fasted, according to the ordinances of the Church;
+occasionally flagellated myself to see if I could bear physical pain,
+should I be fortunate enough ever to tread the pathway trodden by the
+saints; and ever the Christ was the figure round which clustered all
+my hopes and longings, till I often felt that the very passion of, my
+devotion would draw Him down from His throne in heaven, present
+visibly in form as I felt Him invisibly in spirit. To serve Him
+through His Church became more and more a definite ideal in my life,
+and my thoughts began to turn towards some kind of "religious life,"
+in which I might prove my love by sacrifice and turn my passionate
+gratitude into active service.
+
+Looking back to-day over my life, I see that its keynote--through all
+the blunders, and the blind mistakes, and clumsy follies--has been
+this longing for sacrifice to something felt as greater than the self.
+It has been so strong and so persistent that I recognise it now as a
+tendency brought over from a previous life and dominating the present
+one; and this is shown by the fact that to follow it is not the act of
+a deliberate and conscious will, forcing self into submission and
+giving up with pain something the heart desires, but the following it
+is a joyous springing forward along the easiest path, the "sacrifice"
+being the supremely attractive thing, not to make which would be to
+deny the deepest longings of the soul, and to feel oneself polluted
+and dishonoured. And it is here that the misjudgment comes in of many
+generous hearts who have spoken sometimes lately so strongly in my
+praise. For the efforts to serve have not been painful acts of
+self-denial, but the yielding to an overmastering desire. We do not
+praise the mother who, impelled by her protecting love, feeds her
+crying infant and stills its wailings at her breast; rather should we
+blame her if she turned aside from its weeping to play with some toy.
+And so with all those whose ears are opened to the wailings of the
+great orphan Humanity; they are less to be praised for helping than
+they would be to be blamed if they stood aside. I now know that it is
+those wailings that have stirred my heart through life, and that I
+brought with me the ears open to hear them from previous lives of
+service paid to men. It was those lives that drew for the child the
+alluring pictures of martyrdom, breathed into the girl the passion of
+devotion, sent the woman out to face scoff and odium, and drove her
+finally into the Theosophy that rationalises sacrifice, while opening
+up possibilities of service beside which all other hopes grow pale.
+
+The Easter of 1866 was a memorable date in my life. I was introduced
+to the clergyman I married, and I met and conquered my first religious
+doubt. A little mission church had been opened the preceding Christmas
+in a very poor district of Clapham. My grandfather's house was near at
+hand, in Albert Square, and a favourite aunt and myself devoted
+ourselves a good deal to this little church, as enthusiastic girls and
+women will. At Easter we decorated it with spring flowers, with dewy
+primroses and fragrant violets, and with the yellow bells of the wild
+daffodil, to the huge delight of the poor who crowded in, and of the
+little London children who had, many of them, never seen a flower.
+Here I met the Rev. Frank Besant, a young Cambridge man, who had just
+taken orders, and was serving the little mission church as deacon;
+strange that at the same time I should meet the man I was to marry,
+and the doubts which were to break the marriage tie. For in the Holy
+Week preceding that Easter Eve, I had been--as English and Roman
+Catholics are wont to do--trying to throw the mind back to the time
+when the commemorated events occurred, and to follow, step by step,
+the last days of the Son of Man, living, as it were, through those
+last hours, so that I might be ready to kneel before the cross on Good
+Friday, to stand beside the sepulchre on Easter Day. In order to
+facilitate the realisation of those last sacred days of God incarnate
+on earth, working out man's salvation, I resolved to write a brief
+history of that week, compiled from the Four Gospels, meaning them to
+try and realise each day the occurrences that had happened on the
+corresponding date in A.D. 33, and so to follow those "blessed feet"
+step by step, till they were
+
+"... nailed for our advantage to the bitter cross."
+
+With the fearlessness which springs from ignorance I sat down to my
+task. My method was as follows:--
+
+    MATTHEW.         |    MARK.     |    LUKE.      |    JOHN.
+                     |              |               |
+  PALM SUNDAY.       | PALM SUNDAY. | PALM SUNDAY.  | PALM SUNDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Rode into          | Rode into    | Rode into     | Rode into
+  Jerusalem.         | Jerusalem.   | Jerusalem.    | Jerusalem.
+  Purified the       | Returned to  | Purified the  | Spoke in
+  Temple. Returned   | Bethany.     | Temple.       | the Temple.
+  to Bethany.        |              | Note: "Taught |
+                     |              | daily in the  |
+                     |              | temple."      |
+                     |              |               |
+    MONDAY.          |    MONDAY.   |    MONDAY.    |    MONDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Cursed the         | Cursed the   | Like Matthew. |    ----
+  fig-tree.          | fig-tree.    |               |
+  Taught in the      | Purified the |               |
+  Temple, and spake  | Temple. Went |               |
+  many parables.     | out of city. |               |
+  No breaks shown,   |              |               |
+  but the fig-tree   |              |               |
+  (xxi.19) did not   |              |               |
+  wither till        |              |               |
+  Tuesday (see       |              |               |
+  Mark).             |              |               |
+                     |              |               |
+    TUESDAY.         |    TUESDAY.  |   TUESDAY.    |   TUESDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  All chaps. xxi.    | Saw fig-tree | Discourses    |   ----
+  20, xxii.-xxv.,    | withered up. | No date       |
+  spoken on          | Then .       | shown.        |
+  Tuesday, for xxvi. | discourses   |               |
+  2 gives Passover   |              |               |
+  as "after two      |              |               |
+  days."             |              |               |
+                     |              |               |
+  WEDNESDAY.         |   WEDNESDAY. |  WEDNESDAY.   |  WEDNESDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Blank.             |   ----       |   ----        |  ----
+  (Possibly remained in Bethany; the alabaster box of oinment.)
+                     |              |               |
+  THURSDAY.          |   THURSDAY.  |   THURSDAY.   |   THURSDAY.
+                     |              |               |
+  Preparation of     | Same as Matt.| Same as Matt. | Discourses
+  Passover. Eating   |              |               | with disciples,
+  of Passover, and   |              |               | but _before_ the
+  institution of the |              |               | Passover. Washes
+  Holy Eucharist.    |              |               | the disciples'
+  Gethsemane.        |              |               | feet. Nothing
+  Betrayal by Judas. |              |               | said of Holy
+  Led captive to     |              |               | Eucharist, nor
+  Caiaphas. Denied   |              |               | of agony in
+  by St. Peter.      |              |               | Gethsemane.
+                     |              |               | Malchus' ear.
+                     |              |               | Led captive to
+                     |              |               | Annas first.
+                     |              |               | Then to Caiaphas.
+                     |              |               | Denied
+                     |              |               | by St. Peter.
+                     |              |               |
+  FRIDAY.            |   FRIDAY.    |   FRIDAY.     |   FRIDAY
+                     |              |               |
+  Led to Pilate.     | As Matthew,  | Led to        | Taken to
+  Judas hangs        | but hour of  | Pilate. Sent  | Pilate. Jews
+  himself. Tried.    | crucifixion  | to Herod.     | would not enter,
+  Condemned to       | given,       | Sent back to  | that they
+  death. Scourged    | 9 a.m.       | Pilate. Rest  | might eat
+  and mocked. Led    |              | as in         | the Passover.
+  to crucifixion.    |              | Matthew; but  | Scourged by
+  Darkness from 12   |              | _one_         | Pilate before
+  to 3. Died at 3.   |              | malefactor    | condemnation,
+                     |              | repents.      | and mocked. Shown
+                     |              |               | by Pilate to
+                     |              |               | Jews at 12.
+
+I became uneasy as I proceeded with my task, for discrepancies leaped
+at me from my four columns; the uneasiness grew as the contradictions
+increased, until I saw with a shock of horror that my "harmony" was a
+discord, and a doubt of the veracity of the story sprang up like a
+serpent hissing in my face. It was struck down in a moment, for to me
+to doubt was sin, and to have doubted on the very eve of the Passion
+was an added crime. Quickly I assured myself that these apparent
+contradictions were necessary as tests of faith, and I forced myself
+to repeat Tertullian's famous "Credo quia impossible," till, from a
+wooden recital, it became a triumphant affirmation. I reminded myself
+that St. Peter had said of the Pauline Epistles that in them were
+"some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and
+unstable wrest ... unto their own destruction." I shudderingly
+recognised that I must be very unlearned and unstable to find discord
+among the Holy Evangelists, and imposed on myself an extra fast as
+penance for my ignorance and lack of firmness in the faith. For my
+mental position was one to which doubt was one of the worst of sins. I
+knew that there were people like Colenso, who questioned the
+infallibility of the Bible, but I remembered how the Apostle John had
+fled from the Baths when Cerinthus entered them, lest the roof should
+fall on the heretic, and crush any one in his neighbourhood, and I
+looked on all heretics with holy horror. Pusey had indoctrinated me
+with his stern hatred of all heresy, and I was content to rest with
+him on that faith, "which must be old because it is eternal, and must
+be unchangeable because it is true." I would not even read the works
+of my mothers favourite Stanley, because he was "unsound," and because
+Pusey had condemned his "variegated use of words which destroys all
+definiteness of meaning"--a clever and pointed description, be it said
+in passing, of the Dean's exquisite phrases, capable of so many
+readings. It can then be imagined with what a stab of pain this first
+doubt struck me, and with what haste I smothered it up, buried it, and
+smoothed the turf over its grave. _But it had been there_, and it left
+its mark.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+MARRIAGE.
+
+
+The last year of my girlish freedom was drawing to its close; how shall
+I hope to make commonsense readers understand how I became betrothed
+maiden ere yet nineteen, girl-wife when twenty years had struck?
+Looking back over twenty-five years, I feel a profound pity for the
+girl standing at that critical point of life, so utterly, hopelessly
+ignorant of all that marriage meant, so filled with impossible dreams,
+so unfitted for the _role_ of wife. As I have said, my day-dreams held
+little place for love, partly from the absence of love novels from my
+reading, partly from the mystic fancies that twined themselves round
+the figure of the Christ. Catholic books of devotion--English or Roman,
+it matters not, for to a large extent they are translations of the same
+hymns and prayers--are exceedingly glowing in their language, and the
+dawning feelings of womanhood unconsciously lend to them a passionate
+fervour. I longed to spend my time in worshipping Jesus, and was, as
+far as my inner life was concerned, absorbed in that passionate love of
+"the Saviour" which, among emotional Catholics, really is the human
+passion of love transferred to an ideal--for women to Jesus, for men to
+the Virgin Mary. In order to show that I am not here exaggerating, I
+subjoin a few of the prayers in which I found daily delight, and I do
+this in order to show how an emotional girl may be attracted by these
+so-called devotional exercises:--
+
+"O crucified Love, raise in me fresh ardours of love and consolation,
+that it may henceforth be the greatest torment I can endure ever to
+offend Thee; that it may be my greatest delight to please Thee."
+
+"Let the remembrance of Thy death, O Lord Jesu, make me to desire and
+pant after Thee, that I may delight in Thy gracious presence."
+
+"O most sweet Jesu Christ, I, unworthy sinner, yet redeemed by Thy
+precious blood.... Thine I am and will be, in life and in death."
+
+"O Jesu, beloved, fairer than the sons of men, draw me after Thee with
+the cords of Thy love."
+
+"Blessed are Thou, O most merciful God, who didst vouchsafe to espouse
+me to the heavenly Bridegroom in the waters of baptism, and hast
+imparted Thy body and blood as a new gift of espousal and the meet
+consummation of Thy love."
+
+"O most sweet Lord Jesu, transfix the affections of my inmost soul with
+that most joyous and most healthful wound of Thy love, with true,
+serene, most holy, apostolical charity; that my soul may ever languish
+and melt with entire love and longing for Thee. Let it desire Thee and
+faint for Thy courts; long to be dissolved and be with Thee."
+
+"Oh, that I could embrace Thee with that most burning love of angels."
+
+"Let Him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth; for Thy love is better
+than wine. Draw me, we will run after Thee. The king hath brought me
+into his chambers.... Let my soul, O Lord, feel the sweetness of Thy
+presence. May it taste how sweet Thou art.... May the sweet and burning
+power of Thy love, I beseech Thee, absorb my soul."
+
+All girls have in them the germ of passion, and the line of its
+development depends on the character brought into the world, and the
+surrounding influences of education. I had but two ideals in my
+childhood and youth, round whom twined these budding tendrils of
+passion; they were my mother and the Christ. I know this may seem
+strange, but I am trying to state things as they were in this
+life-story, and not give mere conventionalisms, and so it was. I had
+men friends, but no lovers--at least, to my knowledge, for I have since
+heard that my mother received two or three offers of marriage for me,
+but declined them on account of my youth and my childishness--friends
+with whom I liked to talk, because they knew more than I did; but they
+had no place in my day-dreams. These were more and more filled with the
+one Ideal Man, and my hopes turned towards the life of the Sister of
+Mercy, who ever worships the Christ, and devotes her life to the
+service of His poor. I knew my dear mother would set herself against
+this idea, but it nestled warm at my heart, for ever that idea of
+escaping from the humdrum of ordinary life by some complete sacrifice
+lured me onwards with its overmastering fascination.
+
+Now one unlucky result of this view of religion is the idealisation of
+the clergyman, the special messenger and chosen servant of the Lord.
+Far more lofty than any title bestowed by earthly monarch is that
+patent of nobility straight from the hand of the "King of kings," that
+seems to give to the mortal something of the authority of the immortal,
+and to crown the head of the priest with the diadem that belongs to
+those who are "kings and priests unto God." Viewed in this way, the
+position of the priest's wife seems second only to that of the nun, and
+has, therefore, a wonderful attractiveness, an attractiveness in which
+the particular clergyman affected plays a very subordinate part; it is
+the "sacred office," the nearness to "holy things," the consecration
+which seems to include the wife--it is these things that shed a glamour
+over the clerical life which attracts most those who are most apt to
+self-devotion, most swayed by imagination. And the saddest pity of all
+this is that the glamour is most over those whose brains are quick,
+whose hearts are pure, who are responsive to all forms of noble
+emotions, all suggestions of personal self-sacrifice; if such in later
+life rise to the higher emotions whose shadows have attracted them, and
+to that higher self-sacrifice whose whispers reached them in their
+early youth, then the false prophet's veil is raised, the poverty of
+the conception seen, and the life is either wrecked, or through
+storm-wind and surge of battling billows, with loss of mast and sail,
+is steered by firm hand into the port of a nobler faith.
+
+That summer of 1866 saw me engaged to the young clergyman I had met at
+the mission church in the spring, our knowledge of each other being an
+almost negligeable quantity. We were thrown together for a week, the
+only two young ones in a small party of holiday-makers, and in our
+walks, rides, and drives we were naturally companions; an hour or two
+before he left he asked me to marry him, taking my consent for granted
+as I had allowed him such full companionship--a perfectly fair
+assumption with girls accustomed to look on all men as possible
+husbands, but wholly mistaken as regarded myself, whose thoughts were
+in quite other directions. Startled, and my sensitive pride touched by
+what seemed to my strict views an assumption that I had been flirting,
+I hesitated, did not follow my first impulse of refusal, but took
+refuge in silence; my suitor had to catch his train, and bound me
+over to silence till he could himself speak to my mother, urging
+authoritatively that it would be dishonourable of me to break his
+confidence, and left me--the most upset and distressed little person
+on the Sussex coast. The fortnight that followed was the first unhappy
+one of my life, for I had a secret from my mother, a secret which I
+passionately longed to tell her, but dared not speak at the risk of
+doing a dishonourable thing. On meeting my suitor on our return to
+town I positively refused to keep silence any longer, and then out
+of sheer weakness and fear of inflicting pain I drifted into an
+engagement with a man I did not pretend to love. "Drifted" is the
+right word, for two or three months passed, on the ground that I was
+so much of a child, before my mother would consent to a definite
+engagement; my dislike of the thought of marriage faded before the
+idea of becoming the wife of a priest, working ever in the Church and
+among the poor. I had no outlet for my growing desire for usefulness
+in my happy and peaceful home-life, where all religious enthusiasm was
+regarded as unbalanced and unbecoming; all that was deepest and truest
+in my nature chafed against my easy, useless days, longed for work,
+yearned to devote itself, as I had read women saints had done, to the
+service of the Church and of the poor, to the battling against sin and
+misery--what empty names sin and misery then were to me! "You will
+have more opportunities for doing good as a clergyman's wife than as
+anything else," was one of the pleas urged on my reluctance.
+
+In the autumn I was definitely betrothed, and I married fourteen months
+later. Once, in the interval, I tried to break the engagement, but, on
+my broaching the subject to my mother, all her pride rose up in revolt.
+Would I, her daughter, break my word, would I dishonour myself by
+jilting a man I had pledged myself to marry? She could be stern where
+honour was involved, that sweet mother of mine, and I yielded to her
+wish as I had been ever wont to do, for a look or a word from her had
+ever been my law, save where religion was concerned. So I married in
+the winter of 1867 with no more idea of the marriage relation than if I
+had been four years old instead of twenty. My dreamy life, into which
+no knowledge of evil had been allowed to penetrate, in which I had been
+guarded from all pain, shielded from all anxiety, kept, innocent on all
+questions of sex, was no preparation for married existence, and left me
+defenceless to face a rude awakening. Looking back on it all, I
+deliberately say that no more fatal blunder can be made than to train a
+girl to womanhood in ignorance of all life's duties and burdens, and
+then to let her face them for the first time away from all the old
+associations, the old helps, the old refuge on the mother's breast.
+That "perfect innocence" may be very beautiful, but it is a perilous
+possession, and Eve should have the knowledge of good and evil ere she
+wanders forth from the paradise of a mother's love. Many an unhappy
+marriage dates from its very beginning, from the terrible shock to a
+young girl's sensitive modesty and pride, her helpless bewilderment and
+fear. Men, with their public school and college education, or the
+knowledge that comes by living in the outside world, may find it hard
+to realise the possibility of such infantile ignorance in many girls.
+None the less, such ignorance is a fact in the case of some girls at
+least, and no mother should let her daughter, blindfold, slip her neck
+under the marriage yoke.
+
+Before leaving the harbourage of girlhood to set sail on the troublous
+sea of life, there is an occurrence of which I must make mention, as
+it marks my first awakening of interest in the outer world of
+political struggle. In the autumn of 1867 my mother and I were staying
+with some dear friends of ours, the Robertses, at Pendleton, near
+Manchester. Mr. Roberts was "the poor man's lawyer," in the
+affectionate phrase used of him by many a hundred men. He was a close
+friend of Ernest Jones, and was always ready to fight a poor man's
+battle without fee. He worked hard in the agitation which saved women
+from working in the mines, and I have heard him tell how he had seen
+them toiling, naked to the waist, with short petticoats barely
+reaching to their knees, rough, foul-tongued, brutalised out of all
+womanly decency and grace; and how he had seen little children working
+there too, babies of three and four set to watch a door, and falling
+asleep at their work to be roused by curse and kick to the unfair
+toil. The old man's eye would begin to flash and his voice to rise as
+he told of these horrors, and then his face would soften as he added
+that, after it was all over and the slavery was put an end to, as he
+went through a coal district the women standing at their doors would
+lift up their children to see "Lawyer Roberts" go by, and would bid
+"God bless him" for what he had done. This dear old man was my first
+tutor in Radicalism, and I was an apt pupil. I had taken no interest
+in politics, but had unconsciously reflected more or less the decorous
+Whiggism which had always surrounded me. I regarded "the poor" as folk
+to be educated, looked after, charitably dealt with, and always
+treated with most perfect courtesy, the courtesy being due from me, as
+a lady, to all equally, whether they were rich or poor. But to Mr.
+Roberts "the poor" were the working-bees, the wealth producers, with a
+right to self-rule not to looking after, with a right to justice, not
+to charity, and he preached his doctrines to me in season and out of
+season. I was a pet of his, and used often to drive him to his office
+in the morning, glorying much in the fact that my skill was trusted in
+guiding a horse through the crowded Manchester streets. During these
+drives, and on all other available occasions, Mr. Roberts would preach
+to me the cause of the people. "What do you think of John Bright?" he
+demanded suddenly one day, looking at me with fiery eyes from under
+heavy brows. "I have never thought of him at all," was the careless
+answer. "Isn't he a rather rough sort of man, who goes about making
+rows?" "There, I thought so!" he thundered at me fiercely. "That's
+just what I say. I believe some of you fine ladies would not go to
+heaven if you had to rub shoulders with John Bright, the noblest man
+God ever gave to the cause of the poor."
+
+This was the hot-tempered and lovable "demagogue," as he was called,
+with whom we were staying when Colonel Kelly and Captain Deasy, two
+Fenian leaders, were arrested in Manchester and put on their trial. The
+whole Irish population became seething with excitement, and on
+September 18th the police van carrying them to Salford Gaol was stopped
+at the Bellevue Railway Arch by the sudden fall of one of the horses,
+shot from the side of the road. In a moment the van was surrounded, and
+crowbars were wrenching at the van door. It resisted; a body of police
+was rapidly approaching, and if the rescue was to be effective the door
+must be opened. The rescuers shouted to Brett, the constable inside, to
+pass out his keys; he refused, and some one exclaimed, "Blow off the
+lock!" In a moment the muzzle of a revolver was against the lock, and
+it was blown off; but Brett, stooping down to look through the keyhole,
+received the bullet in his head, and fell dying as the door flew open.
+Another moment, and Allen, a lad of seventeen, had wrenched open the
+doors of the compartments occupied by Kelly and Deasy, dragged them
+out, and while two or three hurried them off to a place of safety, the
+others threw themselves between the fugitives and the police, and with
+levelled revolvers guarded their flight. The Fenian leaders once safe,
+they scattered, and young William Allen, whose one thought had been for
+his chiefs, seeing them safe, fired his revolver in the air, for he
+would not shed blood in his own defence. Disarmed by his own act, he
+was set on by the police, brutally struck down, kicked and stoned, and
+was dragged off to gaol, faint and bleeding, to meet there some of his
+comrades in much the same plight as himself. Then Manchester went mad,
+and race-passions flared up into flame; no Irish workman was safe in a
+crowd of Englishmen, no Englishman safe in the Irish quarter. The
+friends of the prisoners besieged "Lawyer Roberts's" house, praying his
+aid, and he threw his whole fiery soul into their defence. The man who
+had fired the accidentally fatal shot was safely out of the way, and
+none of the others had hurt a human being. A Special Commission was
+issued, with Mr. Justice Blackburn at its head--"the hanging judge,"
+groaned Mr. Roberts--and it was soon in Manchester, for all Mr.
+Roberts's efforts to get the venue of the trial changed were futile,
+though of fair trial then in Manchester there was no chance. On October
+25th the prisoners were actually brought up before the magistrates in
+irons, and Mr. Ernest Jones, their counsel, failing in his protest
+against this outrage, threw down his brief and left the court. So great
+was the haste with which the trial was hurried on that on the 29th
+Allen, Larkin, Gould (O'Brien), Maguire, and Condon were standing in
+the dock before the Commission charged with murder.
+
+My first experience of an angry crowd was on that day as we drove to
+the court; the streets were barricaded, the soldiers were under arms,
+every approach to the court crowded with surging throngs. At last our
+carriage was stopped as we were passing at a foot's pace through an
+Irish section of the crowd, and various vehement fists came through the
+window, with hearty curses at the "d----d English who were going to see
+the boys murdered." The situation was critical, for we were two women
+and three girls, when I bethought myself that we were unknown, and
+gently touched the nearest fist: "Friends, these are Mr. Roberts' wife
+and daughters." "Roberts! Lawyer Roberts! God bless Roberts! Let his
+carriage through." And all the scowling faces became smile-wreathen,
+and curses changed to cheers, as a road to the court steps was cleared
+for us.
+
+Alas! if there was passion on behalf of the prisoners outside, there
+was passion against them within, and the very opening of the trial
+showed the spirit that animated the prosecution and the bench. Digby
+Seymour, Q.C., and Ernest Jones, were briefed for the defence, and Mr.
+Roberts did not think that they exercised sufficiently their right of
+challenge; he knew, as we all did, that many on the panel had loudly
+proclaimed their hostility to the Irish, and Mr. Roberts persisted in
+challenging them as his counsel would not. In vain Judge Blackburn
+threatened to commit the rebellious solicitor: "These men's lives are
+at stake, my lord," was his indignant plea. "Remove that man!" cried
+the angry judge, but as the officers of the court came forward very
+slowly--for all poor men loved and honoured the sturdy fighter--he
+changed his mind and let him stay. Despite all his efforts, the jury
+contained a man who had declared that he "didn't care what the evidence
+was, he would hang every d----d Irishman of the lot." And the result
+showed that he was not alone in his view, for evidence of the most
+disreputable kind was admitted; women of the lowest type were put into
+the box as witnesses, and their word taken as unchallengeable; thus was
+destroyed an _alibi_ for Maguire, afterwards accepted by the Crown, a
+free pardon being issued on the strength of it. Nothing could save the
+doomed men from the determined verdict, and I could see from where I
+was sitting into a little room behind the bench, where an official was
+quietly preparing the black caps before the verdict had been delivered.
+The foregone "Guilty" was duly repeated as verdict on each of the five
+cases, and the prisoners asked if they had anything to say why sentence
+of death should not be passed on them. Allen, boy as he was, made a
+very brave and manly speech; he had not fired, save in the air--if he
+had done so he might have escaped; he had helped to free Kelly and
+Deasy, and did not regret it; he was willing to die for Ireland.
+Maguire and Condon (he also was reprieved) declared they were not
+present, but, like Allen, were ready to die for their country. Sentence
+of death was passed, and, as echo to the sardonic "The Lord have mercy
+on your souls," rang back from the dock in five clear voices, with
+never a quiver of fear in them, "God save Ireland!" and the men passed
+one by one from the sight of my tear-dimmed eyes.
+
+It was a sorrowful time that followed; the despair of the heart-broken
+girl who was Allen's sweetheart, and who cried to us on her knees,
+"Save my William!" was hard to see; nothing we or any one could do
+availed to avert the doom, and on November 23rd Allen, Larkin, and
+O'Brien were hanged outside Salford Gaol. Had they striven for freedom
+in Italy England would have honoured them; here she buried them as
+common murderers in quicklime in the prison yard.
+
+I have found, with a keen sense of pleasure, that Mr. Bradlaugh and
+myself were in 1867 to some extent co-workers, although we knew not of
+each other's existence, and although he was doing much, and I only
+giving such poor sympathy as a young girl might, who was only just
+awakening to the duty of political work. I read in the _National
+Reformer_ for November 24, 1867, that in the preceding week he was
+pleading on Clerkenwell Green for these men's lives:--"According to
+the evidence at the trial, Deasy and Kelly were illegally arrested.
+They had been arrested for vagrancy of which no evidence was given, and
+apparently remanded for felony without a shadow of justification. He
+had yet to learn that in England the same state of things existed as in
+Ireland; he had yet to learn that an illegal arrest was sufficient
+ground to detain any of the citizens of any country in the prisons of
+this one. If he were illegally held, he was justified in using enough
+force to procure his release. Wearing a policeman's coat gave no
+authority when the officer exceeded his jurisdiction. He had argued
+this before Lord Chief Justice Erie in the Court of Common Pleas, and
+that learned judge did not venture to contradict the argument which he
+submitted. There was another reason why they should spare these men,
+although he hardly expected the Government to listen, because the
+Government sent down one of the judges who was predetermined to convict
+the prisoners; it was that the offence was purely a political one. The
+death of Brett was a sad mischance, but no one who read the evidence
+could regard the killing of Brett as an intentional murder. Legally, it
+was murder; morally, it was homicide in the rescue of a political
+captive. If it were a question of the rescue of the political captives
+of Varignano, or of political captives in Bourbon, in Naples, or in
+Poland, or in Paris, even earls might be found so to argue. Wherein is
+our sister Ireland less than these? In executing these men, they would
+throw down the gauntlet for terrible reprisals. It was a grave and
+solemn question. It had been said by a previous speaker that they were
+prepared to go to any lengths to save these Irishmen. They were not. He
+wished they were. If they were, if the men of England, from one end to
+the other, were prepared to say, 'These men shall not be executed,'
+they would not be. He was afraid they had not pluck enough for that.
+Their moral courage was not equal to their physical strength. Therefore
+he would not say that they were prepared to do so. They must plead _ad
+misericordiam_. He appealed to the press, which represented the power
+of England; to that press which in its panic-stricken moments had done
+much harm, and which ought now to save these four doomed men. If the
+press demanded it, no Government would be mad enough to resist. The
+memory of the blood which was shed in 1798 rose up like a bloody ghost
+against them to-day. He only feared that what they said upon the
+subject might do the poor men more harm than good. If it were not so,
+he would coin words that should speak in words of fire. As it was, he
+could only say to the Government: You are strong to-day; you hold these
+men's lives in your hands; but if you want to reconcile their country
+to you, if you want to win back Ireland, if you want to make her
+children love you--then do not embitter their hearts still more by
+taking the lives of these men. Temper your strength with mercy; do not
+use the sword of justice like one of vengeance, for the day may come
+when it shall be broken in your hands, and you yourselves brained by
+the hilt of the weapon you have so wickedly wielded." In October he
+had printed a plea for Ireland, strong and earnest, asking:--
+
+"Where is our boasted English freedom when you cross to Kingstown pier?
+Where has it been for near two years? The Habeas Corpus Act suspended,
+the gaols crowded, the steamers searched, spies listening at shebeen
+shops for sedition, and the end of it a Fenian panic in England. Oh,
+before it be too late, before more blood stain the pages of our present
+history, before we exasperate and arouse bitter animosities, let us try
+and do justice to our sister land. Abolish once and for all the land
+laws, which in their iniquitous operation have ruined her peasantry.
+Sweep away the leech-like Church which has sucked her vitality, and has
+given her back no word even of comfort in her degradation. Turn her
+barracks into flax mills, encourage a spirit of independence in her
+citizens, restore to her people the protection of the law, so that they
+may speak without fear of arrest, and beg them to plainly and boldly
+state their grievances. Let a commission of the best and wisest amongst
+Irishmen, with some of our highest English judges added, sit solemnly
+to hear all complaints, and then let us honestly legislate, not for the
+punishment of the discontented, but to remove the causes of the
+discontent. It is not the Fenians who have depopulated Ireland's
+strength and increased her misery. It is not the Fenians who have
+evicted tenants by the score. It is not the Fenians who have checked
+cultivation. Those who have caused the wrong at least should frame the
+remedy."
+
+In December, 1867, I sailed out of the safe harbour of my happy and
+peaceful girlhood on to the wide sea of life, and the waves broke
+roughly as soon as the bar was crossed. We were an ill-matched pair, my
+husband and I, from the very outset; he, with very high ideas of a
+husband's authority and a wife's submission, holding strongly to the
+"master-in-my-own-house theory," thinking much of the details of home
+arrangements, precise, methodical, easily angered and with difficulty
+appeased. I, accustomed to freedom, indifferent to home details,
+impulsive, very hot-tempered, and proud as Lucifer. I had never had a
+harsh word spoken to me, never been ordered to do anything, had had my
+way smoothed for my feet, and never a worry had touched me. Harshness
+roused first incredulous wonder, then a storm of indignant tears, and
+after a time a proud, defiant resistance, cold and hard as iron. The
+easy-going, sunshiny, enthusiastic girl changed--and changed pretty
+rapidly--into a grave, proud, reticent woman, burying deep in her own
+heart all her hopes, her fears, and her disillusions. I must have been
+a very unsatisfactory wife from the beginning, though I think other
+treatment might gradually have turned me into a fair imitation of the
+proper conventional article. Beginning with the ignorance before
+alluded to, and so scared and outraged at heart from the very first;
+knowing nothing of household management or economical use of money--I
+had never had an allowance or even bought myself a pair of
+gloves--though eager to perform my new duties creditably; unwilling to
+potter over little things, and liking to do swiftly what I had to do,
+and then turn to my beloved books; at heart fretting for my mother but
+rarely speaking of her, as I found my longing for her presence raised
+jealous vexation; with strangers about me with whom I had no sympathy;
+visited by ladies who talked to me only about babies and
+servants--troubles of which I knew nothing and which bored me
+unutterably--and who were as uninterested in all that had filled my
+life, in theology, in politics, in science, as I was uninterested in
+the discussions on the housemaid's young man and on the cook's
+extravagance in using "butter, when dripping would have done perfectly
+well, my dear"; was it wonderful that I became timid, dull, and
+depressed?
+
+All my eager, passionate enthusiasm, so attractive to men in a young
+girl, were doubtless incompatible with "the solid comfort of a wife,"
+and I must have been inexpressibly tiring to the Rev. Frank Besant.
+And, in truth, I ought never to have married, for under the soft,
+loving, pliable girl there lay hidden, as much unknown to herself as to
+her surroundings, a woman of strong dominant will, strength that panted
+for expression and rebelled against restraint, fiery and passionate
+emotions that were seething under compression--a most undesirable
+partner to sit in the lady's arm-chair on the domestic rug before the
+fire. [_Que le diable faisait-elle dans cette galere,_] I have often
+thought, looking back at my past self, and asking, Why did that foolish
+girl make her bed so foolishly? But self-analysis shows the
+contradictories in my nature that led me into so mistaken a course. I
+have ever been the queerest mixture of weakness and strength, and have
+paid heavily for the weakness. As a child I used to suffer tortures of
+shyness, and if my shoe-lace was untied would feel shamefacedly that
+every eye was fixed on the unlucky string; as a girl I would shrink
+away from strangers and think myself unwanted and unliked, so that I
+was full of eager gratitude to any one who noticed me kindly; as the
+young mistress of a house, I was afraid of my servants, and would let
+careless work pass rather than bear the pain of reproving the ill-doer;
+when I have been lecturing and debating with no lack of spirit on the
+platform, I have preferred to go without what I wanted at the hotel
+rather than to ring and make the waiter fetch it; combative on the
+platform in defence of any cause I cared for, I shrink from quarrel or
+disapproval in the home, and am a coward at heart in private while a
+good fighter in public. How often have I passed unhappy quarters of an
+hour screwing up my courage to find fault with some subordinate whom my
+duty compelled me to reprove, and how often have I jeered at myself for
+a fraud as the doughty platform combatant, when shrinking from blaming
+some lad or lass for doing their work badly! An unkind look or word has
+availed to make me shrink into myself as a snail into its shell, while
+on the platform opposition makes me speak my best. So I slid into
+marriage blindly and stupidly, fearing to give pain; fretted my heart
+out for a year; then, roused by harshness and injustice, stiffened and
+hardened, and lived with a wall of ice round me within which I waged
+mental conflicts that nearly killed me; and learned at last how to live
+and work in armour that turned the edge of the weapons that struck it,
+and left the flesh beneath unwounded, armour laid aside, but in the
+presence of a very few.
+
+My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up
+two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of
+a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character,
+"The Lives of the Black Letter Saints." For the sake of the
+unecclesiastically trained it may be as well to mention that in the
+Calendar of the Church of England there are a number of Saints' Days;
+some of these are printed in red, and are Red Letter Days, for which
+services are appointed by the Church; others are printed in black, and
+are Black Letter Days, and have no special services fixed for them. It
+seemed to me that it would be interesting to take each of these days
+and write a sketch of the life of the saint belonging to it, and
+accordingly I set to work to do so, and gathered various books of
+history and legend where-from to collect my "facts." I do not in the
+least know what became of that valuable book; I tried Macmillans with
+it, and it was sent on by them to some one who was preparing a series
+of Church books for the young; later I had a letter from a Church
+brotherhood offering to publish it, if I would give it as "an act of
+piety" to their order; its ultimate fate is to me unknown.
+
+The short stories were more fortunate. I sent the first to the _Family
+Herald_, and some weeks afterwards received a letter from which dropped
+a cheque as I opened it. Dear me! I have earned a good deal of money
+since by my pen, but never any that gave me the intense delight of that
+first thirty shillings. It was the first money I had ever earned, and
+the pride of the earning was added to the pride of authorship. In my
+childish delight and practical religion, I went down on my knees and
+thanked God for sending it to me, and I saw myself earning heaps of
+golden guineas, and becoming quite a support of the household. Besides,
+it was "my very own," I thought, and a delightful sense of independence
+came over me. I had not then realised the beauty of the English law,
+and the dignified position in which it placed the married woman; I did
+not understand that all a married woman earned by law belonged to her
+owner, and that she could have nothing that belonged to her of
+right.[1] I did not want the money: I was only so glad to have
+something of my own to give, and it was rather a shock to learn that it
+was not really mine at all.
+
+From time to time after that I earned a few pounds for stories in the
+same journal; and the _Family Herald_, let me say, has one peculiarity
+which should render it beloved by poor authors; it pays its contributor
+when it accepts the paper, whether it prints it immediately or not;
+thus my first story was not printed for some weeks after I received the
+cheque, and it was the same with all the others accepted by the same
+journal. Encouraged by these small successes, I began writing a novel!
+It took a long time to do, but was at last finished, and sent off to
+the _Family Herald_. The poor thing came back, but with a kind note,
+telling me that it was too political for their pages, but that if I
+would write one of "purely domestic interest," and up to the same
+level, it would probably be accepted. But by that time I was in the
+full struggle of theological doubt, and that novel of "purely domestic
+interest" never got itself written.
+
+I contributed further to the literature of my country a theological
+pamphlet, of which I forget the exact title, but it dealt with the duty
+of fasting incumbent on all faithful Christians, and was very patristic
+in its tone.
+
+In January, 1869, my little son was born, and as I was very ill for
+some months before, and was far too much interested in the tiny
+creature afterwards, to devote myself to pen and paper, my literary
+career was checked for a while. The baby gave a new interest and a new
+pleasure to life, and as we could not afford a nurse I had plenty to do
+in looking after his small majesty. My energy in reading became less
+feverish when it was done by the side of the baby's cradle, and the
+little one's presence almost healed the abiding pain of my mother's
+loss.
+
+I may pass very quickly over the next two years. In August, 1870, a
+little sister was born to my son, and the recovery was slow and
+tedious, for my general health had been failing for some time.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by Dighton's Art Studio, Cheltenham_.
+ANNIE BESANT 1869.]
+
+The boy was a bright, healthy little fellow, but the girl was delicate
+from birth, suffering from her mother's unhappiness, and born somewhat
+prematurely in consequence of a shock. When, in the spring of 1871, the
+two children caught the whooping cough, my Mabel's delicacy made the
+ordeal well-nigh fatal to her. She was very young for so trying a
+disease, and after a while bronchitis set in and was followed by
+congestion of the lungs. For weeks she lay in hourly peril of death We
+arranged a screen round the fire like a tent, and kept it full of steam
+to ease the panting breath; and there I sat, day and night, all through
+those weary weeks, the tortured baby on my knees. I loved my little
+ones passionately, for their clinging love soothed the aching at my
+heart, and their baby eyes could not critically scan the unhappiness
+that grew deeper month by month; and that steam-filled tent became my
+world, and there, alone, I fought with Death for my child. The doctor
+said that recovery was impossible, and that in one of the paroxysms of
+coughing she must die; the most distressing thing was that, at last,
+even a drop or two of milk would bring on the terrible convulsive
+choking, and it seemed cruel to add to the pain of the apparently dying
+child. At length, one morning the doctor said she could not last
+through the day; I had sent for him hurriedly, for the body had
+suddenly swollen up as a result of the perforation of one of the
+pleurae, and the consequent escape of air into the cavity of the chest.
+While he was there one of the fits of coughing came on, and it seemed
+as though it must be the last. He took a small bottle of chloroform out
+of his pocket, and putting a drop on a handkerchief held it near the
+child's face, till the drug soothed the convulsive struggle. "It can't
+do any harm at this stage," he said, "and it checks the suffering." He
+went away, saying that he feared he would never see the child alive
+again. One of the kindest friends I had in my married life was that
+same doctor, Mr. Lauriston Winterbotham; he was as good as he was
+clever, and, like so many of his noble profession, he had the merits of
+discretion and silence. He never breathed a word as to my unhappiness,
+until in 1878 he came up to town to give evidence as to cruelty
+which--had the deed of separation not been held as condonation--would
+have secured me a divorce _a mensa et thoro._
+
+The child, however, recovered, and her recovery was due, I think, to
+that chance thought of Mr. Winterbotham's about the chloroform, for I
+used it whenever the first sign of a fit of coughing appeared, and so
+warded off the convulsive attack and the profound exhaustion that
+followed, in which a mere flicker of breath at the top of the throat
+was the only sign of life, and sometimes even that disappeared, and I
+thought her gone. For years the child remained ailing and delicate,
+requiring the tenderest care, but those weeks of anguish left a deeper
+trace on mother than on child. Once she was out of danger I collapsed
+physically, and lay in bed for a week unmoving, and then rose to face a
+struggle which lasted for three years and two months, and nearly cost
+me my life, the struggle which transformed me from a Christian into an
+Atheist. The agony of the struggle was in the first nineteen months--a
+time to be looked back upon with shrinking, as it was a hell to live
+through at the time. For no one who has not felt it knows the fearful
+anguish inflicted by doubt on the earnestly religious soul. There is in
+life no other pain so horrible, so keen in its torture, so crushing in
+its weight. It seems to shipwreck everything, to destroy the one steady
+gleam of happiness "on the other side" that no earthly storm could
+obscure; to make all life gloomy with a horror of despair, a darkness
+that verily may be felt. Nothing but an imperious intellectual and
+moral necessity can drive into doubt a religious mind, for it is as
+though an earthquake shook the foundations of the soul, and the very
+being quivers and sways under the shock. No life in the empty sky; no
+gleam in the blackness of the night; no voice to break the deadly
+silence; no hand outstretched to save. Empty-brained triflers who have
+never tried to think, who take their creed as they take their fashions,
+speak of Atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious desires. In
+their shallow heartlessness and shallower thought they cannot even
+dimly imagine the anguish of entering the mere penumbra of the Eclipse
+of Faith, much less the horror of that great darkness in which the
+orphaned soul cries out into the infinite emptiness: "Is it a Devil
+that has made the world? Is the echo, 'Children, ye have no Father,'
+true? Is all blind chance, is all the clash of unconscious forces, or
+are we the sentient toys of an Almighty Power that sports with our
+agony, whose peals of awful mockery of laughter ring back answer to the
+wailings of our despair?"
+
+How true are the noble words of Mrs. Hamilton King:--
+
+  "For some may follow Truth from dawn to dark,
+  As a child follows by his mother's hand,
+  Knowing no fear, rejoicing all the way;
+  And unto some her face is as a Star
+  Set through an avenue of thorns and fires,
+  And waving branches black without a leaf;
+  And still It draws them, though the feet must bleed,
+  Though garments must be rent, and eyes be scorched:
+  And if the valley of the shadow of death
+  Be passed, and to the level road they come,
+  Still with their faces to the polar star,
+  It is not with the same looks, the same limbs,
+  But halt, and maimed, and of infirmity.
+  And for the rest of the way they have to go
+  It is not day but night, and oftentimes
+  A night of clouds wherein the stars are lost."[2]
+
+Aye! but never lost is the Star of Truth to which the face is set, and
+while that shines all lesser lights may go. It was the long months of
+suffering through which I had been passing, with the seemingly
+purposeless torturing of my little one as a climax, that struck the
+first stunning blow at my belief in God as a merciful Father of men. I
+had been visiting the poor a good deal, and had marked the patient
+suffering of their lives; my idolised mother had been defrauded by a
+lawyer she had trusted, and was plunged into debt by his non-payment of
+the sums that should have passed through his hands to others; my own
+bright life had been enshrouded by pain and rendered to me degraded by
+an intolerable sense of bondage; and here was my helpless, sinless babe
+tortured for weeks and left frail and suffering. The smooth brightness
+of my previous life made all the disillusionment more startling, and
+the sudden plunge into conditions so new and so unfavourable dazed and
+stunned me. My religious past became the worst enemy of the suffering
+present. All my personal belief in Christ, all my intense faith in His
+constant direction of affairs, all my habit of continual prayer and of
+realisation of His Presence--all were against me now. The very height
+of my trust was the measure of the shock when the trust gave way. To me
+He was no abstract idea, but a living reality, and all my heart rose up
+against this Person in whom I believed, and whose individual finger I
+saw in my baby's agony, my own misery, the breaking of my mother's
+proud heart under a load of debt, and all the bitter suffering of the
+poor. The presence of pain and evil in a world made by a good God; the
+pain falling on the innocent, as on my seven months' old babe; the pain
+begun here reaching on into eternity unhealed; a sorrow-laden world; a
+lurid, hopeless hell; all these, while I still believed, drove me
+desperate, and instead of like the devils believing and trembling, I
+believed and hated. All the hitherto dormant and unsuspected strength
+of my nature rose up in rebellion; I did not yet dream of denial, but I
+would no longer kneel.
+
+As the first stirrings of this hot rebellion moved in my heart I met a
+clergyman of a very noble type, who did much to help me by his ready
+and wise sympathy. Mr. Besant brought him to see me during the crisis
+of the child's illness; he said little, but on the following day I
+received from him the following note:--
+
+"_April_ 21, 1871.
+
+"My Dear Mrs. Besant,--I am painfully conscious that I gave you but
+little help in your trouble yesterday. It is needless to say that it
+was not from want of sympathy. Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to
+say that it was from excess of sympathy. I shrink intensely from
+meddling with the sorrow of any one whom I feel to be of a sensitive
+nature. 'The heart hath its own bitterness, and the stranger meddleth
+not therewith.' It is to me a positively fearful thought that I might
+awaken such a reflection as
+
+  "'And common was the commonplace,
+  And vacant chaff well meant for grain.'
+
+Conventional consolations, conventional verses out of the Bible, and
+conventional prayers are, it seems to me, an intolerable aggravation of
+suffering. And so I acted on a principle that I mentioned to your
+husband that 'there is no power so great as that of one human faith
+looking upon another human faith.' The promises of God, the love of
+Christ for little children, and all that has been given to us of hope
+and comfort, are as deeply planted in your heart as in mine, and I did
+not care to quote them. But when I talk face to face with one who is in
+sore need of them, my faith in them suddenly becomes so vast and
+heart-stirring that I think I must help most by talking naturally, and
+letting the faith find its own way from soul to soul. Indeed, I could
+not find words for it if I tried. And yet I am compelled, as a
+messenger of the glad tidings of God, to solemnly assure you that all
+is well. We have no key to the 'mystery of pain' excepting the Cross of
+Christ. But there is another and a deeper solution in the hands of our
+Father; and it will be ours when we can understand it. There is--in the
+place to which we travelsome blessed explanation of your baby's pain
+and your grief, which will fill with light the darkest heart. Now you
+must believe without having seen; that is true faith. You must
+
+  "'Reach a hand through time to catch
+  The far-off interest of tears.'
+
+That you may have strength so to do is part of your share in the
+prayers of
+
+"Yours very faithfully,
+
+"W. D----."
+
+A noble letter, but the storm was beating too fiercely to be stilled,
+and one night in that summer of 1871 stands out clearly before me. Mr.
+Besant was away, and there had been a fierce quarrel before he left. I
+was outraged, desperate, with no door of escape from a life that,
+losing its hope in God, had not yet learned to live for hope for man.
+No door of escape? The thought came like a flash: "There is one!" And
+before me there swung open, with lure of peace and of safety, the
+gateway into silence and security, the gateway of the tomb. I was
+standing by the drawing-room window, staring hopelessly at the evening
+sky; with the thought came the remembrance that the means was at
+hand--the chloroform that had soothed my baby's pain, and that I had
+locked away upstairs. I ran up to my room, took out the bottle, and
+carried it downstairs, standing again at the window in the summer
+twilight, glad that the struggle was over and peace at hand. I uncorked
+the bottle, and was raising it to my lips, when, as though the words
+were spoken softly and clearly, I heard: "O coward, coward, who used to
+dream of martyrdom, and cannot bear a few short years of pain!" A rush
+of shame swept over me, and I flung the bottle far away among the
+shrubs in the garden at my feet, and for a moment I felt strong as for
+a struggle, and then fell fainting on the floor. Only once again in all
+the strifes of my career did the thought of suicide recur, and then it
+was but for a moment, to be put aside as unworthy a strong soul.
+
+My new friend, Mr. D----, proved a very real help. The endless torture
+of hell, the vicarious sacrifice of Christ, the trustworthiness of
+revelation, doubts on all these hitherto accepted doctrines grew and
+heaped themselves on my bewildered soul. My questionings were neither
+shirked nor discouraged by Mr. D----; he was not horrified nor was he
+sanctimoniously rebukeful, but met them all with a wide comprehension
+inexpressibly soothing to one writhing in the first agonies of doubt.
+He left Cheltenham in the early autumn of 1871, but the following
+extracts from a letter written in November will show the kind of net in
+which I was struggling (I had been reading M'Leod Campbell's work "On
+the Atonement"):--
+
+"You forget one great principle--that God is impassive, cannot suffer.
+Christ, _qua_ God, did not suffer, but as Son of _Man_ and in His
+humanity. Still, it may be correctly stated that He felt to sin and
+sinners 'as God eternally feels'--_i.e., abhorrence of sin, and love of
+the sinner_. But to infer from that that the Father in His Godhead
+feels the sufferings which Christ experienced solely in humanity, and
+because incarnate is, I think, wrong.
+
+"(2) I felt strongly inclined to blow you up for the last part of your
+letter. You assume, I think quite gratuitously, that God condemns the
+major part of His children to objectless future suffering. You say that
+if He does not, He places a book in their hands which threatens what He
+does not mean to inflict. But how utterly this seems to me opposed to
+the gospel of Christ! All Christ's references to eternal punishment may
+be resolved into references to the Valley of Hinnom, by way of imagery;
+with the exception of the Dives parable, where is distinctly inferred a
+moral amendment beyond the grave. I speak of the unselfish desire of
+Dives to save his brothers. The more I see of the controversy, the more
+baseless does the eternal punishment theory appear. It seems then, to
+me, that instead of feeling aggrieved and shaken, you ought to feel
+encouraged and thankful that God is so much better than you were taught
+to believe Him. You will have discovered by this time in Maurice's
+'What is Revelation?' (I suppose you have the 'Sequel,' too?), that
+God's truth is our truth, and His love is our love, only more perfect
+and full. There is no position more utterly defeated in modern
+philosophy and theology than Dean Mansel's attempt to show that God's
+love, justice, &c., are different in kind from ours. Mill and Maurice,
+from totally alien points of view, have shown up the preposterous
+nature of the notion.
+
+"(3) A good deal of what you have thought is, I fancy, based on a
+strange forgetfulness of your former experience. If you have known
+Christ--(whom to know is eternal life)--and that you have known Him I
+am certain--can you really say that a few intellectual difficulties,
+nay, a few moral difficulties if you will, are able at once to
+obliterate the testimony of that higher state of being?
+
+"Why, the keynote of all my theology is that Christ is lovable because,
+and _just_ because, He is the perfection of all that I know to be noble
+and generous, and loving, and tender, and true. If an angel from heaven
+brought me a gospel which contained doctrines that would not stand the
+test of such perfect lovableness--doctrines hard, or cruel, or
+unjust--I should reject him and his trumpery gospel with scorn, knowing
+that neither could be Christ's. Know Christ and judge religions by Him;
+don't judge Him by religions, and then complain because they find
+yourself looking at Him through a blood-coloured glass."
+
+"I am saturating myself with Maurice, who is the antidote given by God
+to this age against all dreary doublings and temptings of the devil to
+despair."
+
+Many a one, in this age of controversy over all things once held
+sacred, has found peace and new light on this line of thought, and has
+succeeded in thus reconciling theological doctrines with the demands of
+the conscience for love and justice in a world made by a just and
+loving God. I could not do so. The awakening to what the world was, to
+the facts of human misery, to the ruthless tramp of nature and of
+events over the human heart, making no difference between innocent and
+guilty--the shock had been too great for the equilibrium to be restored
+by arguments that appealed to the emotions and left the intellect
+unconvinced. Months of this long-drawn-out mental anguish wrought their
+natural effects on physical health, and at last I broke down
+completely, and lay for weeks helpless and prostrate, in raging and
+unceasing head-pain, unable to sleep, unable to bear the light, lying
+like a log on the bed, not unconscious, but indifferent to everything,
+consciousness centred, as it were, in the ceaseless pain. The doctor
+tried every form of relief, but, entrenched in its citadel, the pain
+defied his puny efforts. He covered my head with ice, he gave me
+opium--which only drove me mad--he did all that skill and kindness
+could do, but all in vain. Finally the pain wore itself out, and the
+moment he dared to do so, he tried mental diversion; he brought me
+books on anatomy, on science, and persuaded me to study them; and out
+of his busy life would steal an hour to explain to me knotty points on
+physiology. He saw that if I were to be brought back to reasonable
+life, it could only be by diverting thought from the channels in which
+the current had been running to a dangerous extent. I have often felt
+that I owed life and sanity to that good man, who felt for the
+helpless, bewildered child-woman, beaten down by the cyclone of doubt
+and misery.
+
+So it will easily be understood that my religious wretchedness only
+increased the unhappiness of homelife, for how absurd it was that any
+reasonable human being should be so tossed with anguish over
+intellectual and moral difficulties on religious matters, and should
+make herself ill over these unsubstantial troubles. Surely it was a
+woman's business to attend to her husband's comforts and to see after
+her children, and not to break her heart over misery here and hell
+hereafter, and distract her brain with questions that had puzzled the
+greatest thinkers and still remained unsolved! And, truly, women or men
+who get themselves concerned about the universe at large, would do well
+not to plunge hastily into marriage, for they do not run smoothly in
+the double-harness of that honourable estate. _Sturm und Drang_ should
+be faced alone, and the soul should go out alone into the wilderness to
+be tempted of the devil, and not bring his majesty and all his imps
+into the placid circle of the home. Unhappy they who go into marriage
+with the glamour of youth upon them and the destiny of conflict
+imprinted on their nature, for they make misery for their partner in
+marriage as well as for themselves. And if that partner, strong in
+traditional authority and conventional habits, seeks to "break in" the
+turbulent and storm-tossed creature--well, it comes to a mere trial of
+strength and endurance, whether that driven creature will fall panting
+and crushed, or whether it will turn in its despair, assert its Divine
+right to intellectual liberty, rend its fetters in pieces, and,
+discovering its own strength in its extremity, speak at all risks its
+"No" when bidden to live a lie.
+
+When that physical crisis was over I decided on my line of action. I
+resolved to take Christianity as it had been taught in the Churches,
+and carefully and thoroughly examine its dogmas one by one, so that I
+should never again say "I believe" where I had not proved, and that,
+however diminished my area of belief, what was left of it might at
+least be firm under my feet. I found that four chief problems were
+pressing for solution, and to these I addressed myself. How many are
+to-day the souls facing just these problems, and disputing every inch
+of their old ground of faith with the steadily advancing waves of
+historical and scientific criticism! Alas! for the many Canutes, as the
+waves wash over their feet. These problems were:--
+
+(1) The eternity of punishment after death.
+
+(2) The meaning of "goodness" and "love," as applied to a God who had
+made this world, with all its sin and misery.
+
+(3) The nature of the atonement of Christ, and the "justice" of God in
+accepting a vicarious suffering from Christ, and a vicarious
+righteousness from the sinner.
+
+(4) The meaning of "inspiration" as applied to the Bible, and the
+reconciliation of the perfections of the author with the blunders and
+immoralities of the work.
+
+It will be seen that the deeper problems of religion--the deity of
+Christ, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul--were not yet
+brought into question, and, looking back, I cannot but see how orderly
+was the progression of thought, how steady the growth, after that first
+terrible earthquake, and the first wild swirl of agony. The points that
+I set myself to study were those which would naturally be first faced
+by any one whose first rebellion against the dogmas of the Churches was
+a rebellion of the moral nature rather than of the intellectual, a
+protest of the conscience rather than of the brain. It was not a desire
+for moral licence which gave me the impulse that finally landed me in
+Atheism; it was the sense of outraged justice and insulted right. I was
+a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty
+and a proud self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me,
+and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of
+outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity.
+My education, my mother's example, my inner timidity and self-distrust,
+all fenced me in from temptations from without. It was the uprising of
+an outraged conscience that made me a rebel against the Churches and
+finally an unbeliever in God. And I place this on record, because the
+progress of Materialism will never be checked by diatribes against
+unbelievers, as though they became unbelievers from desire for vice and
+for licence to do evil. What Religion has to face in the controversies
+of to-day is not the unbelief of the sty, but the unbelief of the
+educated conscience and of the soaring intellect; and unless it can arm
+itself with a loftier ethic and a grander philosophy than its opponent,
+it will lose its hold over the purest and the strongest of the younger
+generation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE STORM OF DOUBT.
+
+
+My reading of heretical and Broad Church works on one side, and of
+orthodox ones on the other, now occupied a large part of my time, and
+our removal to Sibsey, in Lincolnshire, an agricultural village with a
+scattered population, increased my leisure. I read the works of
+Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Stanley, Greg, Matthew Arnold, Liddon,
+Mansel, and many another, and my scepticism grew deeper and deeper as
+I read. The Broad Church arguments appeared to me to be of the nature
+of special pleading, skilful evasions of difficulties rather than the
+real meeting and solving of them. For the problem was: Given a good
+God, how can He have created mankind, knowing beforehand that the vast
+majority of those whom He created were to be tortured for ever? Given
+a just God, how can He punish people for being sinful, when they have
+inherited a sinful nature without their own choice and of necessity?
+Given a righteous God, how can He allow sin to exist for ever, so that
+evil shall be as eternal as good, and Satan shall reign in hell as
+long as Christ in heaven? Worst of all puzzles, perhaps, was that of
+the existence of evil and of misery, and the racking doubt whether God
+_could_ be good, and yet look on the evil and the misery of the world
+unmoved and untouched. It seemed so impossible to believe that a
+Creator could be either cruel enough to be indifferent to the misery,
+or weak enough to be unable to stop it. The old dilemma faced me
+incessantly: "If He can prevent it and does not, He is not good; if He
+wishes to prevent it and cannot, He is not almighty." I racked my
+brains for an answer. I searched writings of believers for a clue, but
+I found no way of escape. Not yet had any doubt of the existence of
+God crossed my mind.
+
+Mr. D---- continued to write me, striving to guide me along the path
+which had led his own soul to contentment, but I can only find room
+here for two brief extracts, which will show how to himself he solved
+the problem. He thought me mistaken in my view
+
+"Of the nature of the _sin_ and _error_ which is supposed to grieve
+God. I take it that sin is an absolutely necessary factor in the
+production of the perfect man. It was foreseen and allowed as means to
+an end--as, in fact, an education. The view of all the sin and misery
+in the world cannot grieve God any more than it can grieve you to see
+Digby fail in his first attempt to build a card-castle or a
+rabbit-hutch. All is part of the training. God looks at the ideal man
+to which all tends.... "No, Mrs. Besant; I never feel at all inclined
+to give up the search, or to suppose that the other side may be right.
+I claim no merit for it, but I have an invincible faith in the
+morality of God and the moral order of the world. I have no more doubt
+about the falsehood of the popular theology than I have about the
+unreality of six robbers who attacked me three nights ago in a horrid
+dream. I exult and rejoice in the grandeur and freedom of the little
+bit of truth it has been given me to see. I am told that 'Present-day
+Papers,' by Bishop Ewing (edited), are a wonderful help, many of them,
+to puzzled people; I mean to get them. But I am sure you will find
+that the truth will (even so little as we may be able to find out)
+grow on you, make you free, light your path, and dispel, at no distant
+time, your _painful_ difficulties and doubts. I should say on no
+account give up your reading. I think with you that you could not do
+without it. It will be a wonderful source of help and peace to you.
+For there are struggles far more fearful than those of intellectual
+doubt. I am keenly alive to the gathered-up sadness of which your last
+two pages are an expression. I was sorrier than I can say to read
+them. They reminded me of a long and very dark time in my own life,
+when I thought the light never would come. Thank God it came, or I
+think I could not have held out much longer. But you have evidently
+strength to bear it now. The more dangerous time, I should fancy, has
+passed. You will have to mind that the fermentation leaves clear
+spiritual wine, and not (as too often) vinegar. I wish I could write
+something more helpful to you in this great matter. But as I sit in
+front of my large bay window and see the shadows on the grass and the
+sunlight on the leaves, and the soft glimmer of the rosebuds left by
+the storms, I can but believe that all will be very well. 'Trust in
+the Lord, wait patiently for Him'--they are trite words. But He made
+the grass, the leaves, the rosebuds, and the sunshine, and He is the
+Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And now the trite words have swelled
+into a mighty argument."
+
+I found more help in Theistic writers like Grey, and Agnostic like
+Arnold, than I did in the Broad Church teachers, but these, of course,
+served to make return to the old faith more and more impossible. The
+Church services were a weekly torture, but feeling as I did that I was
+only a doubter, I kept my doubts to myself. It was possible, I felt,
+that all my difficulties might be cleared up, and I had no right to
+shake the faith of others while in uncertainty myself. Others had
+doubted and had afterwards recovered their faith; for the doubter
+silence was a duty; the blinded had better keep their misery to
+themselves.
+
+During these weary months of anxiety and torment I found some relief
+from the mental strain in practical parish work, nursing the sick,
+trying to brighten the lot of the poor. I learned then some of the
+lessons as to the agricultural labourer and the land that I was able
+in after-years to teach from the platform. The movement among the
+agricultural labourers, due to the energy and devotion of Joseph Arch,
+was beginning to be discussed in the fens, and my sympathies went
+strongly with the claims of the labourers, for I knew their
+life-conditions. In one cottage I had found four generations sleeping
+in one room--the great-grandfather and his wife, the unmarried
+grandmother, the unmarried mother, the little child; three men lodgers
+completed the tale of eight human beings crowded into that narrow,
+ill-ventilated garret. Other cottages were hovels, through the broken
+roofs of which poured the rain, and wherein rheumatism and ague lived
+with the human dwellers. How could I do aught but sympathise with any
+combination that aimed at the raising of these poor? But the
+Agricultural Labourers' Union was bitterly opposed by the farmers, and
+they would give no work to a "Union man." One example may serve for
+all. There was a young married man with two small children, who was
+sinful enough to go to a Union meeting and sinful enough to talk of it
+on his return home. No farmer would employ him in all the district
+round. He tramped about vainly looking for work, grew reckless, and
+took to drink. Visiting his cottage, consisting of one room and a
+"lean-to," I found his wife ill with fever, a fever-stricken babe in
+her arms, the second child lying dead on the bed. In answer to my
+soft-spoken questions: Yes, she was pining (starving), there was no
+work. Why did she leave the dead child on the bed? Because she had no
+other place for it till the coffin came. And at night the unhappy,
+driven man, the fever-stricken wife, the fever-stricken child, the
+dead child, all lay in the one bed. The farmers hated the Union
+because its success meant higher wages for the men, and it never
+struck them that they might well pay less rent to the absent landlord
+and higher wage to the men who tilled their fields. They had only
+civil words for the burden that crushed them, hard words for the
+mowers of their harvests and the builders-up of their ricks; they made
+common cause with their enemies instead of with their friends, and
+instead of leaguing themselves together with the labourers as forming
+together the true agricultural interest, they leagued themselves with
+the landlords against the labourers, and so made ruinous fratricidal
+strife instead of easy victory over the common foe. And, seeing all
+this, I learned some useful lessons, and the political education
+progressed while the theological strife went on within.
+
+In the early autumn a ray of light broke the darkness. I was in London
+with my mother, and wandered one Sunday morning into St. George's
+Hall, where the Rev. Charles Voysey was preaching. There to my delight
+I found, on listening to the sermon and buying some literature on sale
+in the ante-room, that there were people who had passed through my own
+difficulties, and had given up the dogmas that I found so revolting. I
+went again on the following Sunday, and when the service was over I
+noticed that the outgoing stream of people were passing by Mr. and
+Mrs. Voysey, and that many who were evidently strangers spoke a word
+of thanks to him as they went on. Moved by a strong desire, after the
+long months of lonely striving, to speak to one who had struggled out
+of Christian difficulties, I said to Mr. Voysey, as I passed in my
+turn, "I must thank you for very great help in what you said this
+morning," for in truth, never having yet doubted the existence of God,
+the teaching of Mr. Voysey that He was "loving unto _every_ man, and
+His tender mercy over _all_ His works," came like a gleam of light
+across the stormy sea of doubt and distress on which I had so long
+been tossing. The next Sunday saw me again at the Hall, and Mrs.
+Voysey gave me a cordial invitation to visit them in their Dulwich
+home. I found their Theism was free from the defects that had revolted
+me in Christianity, and they opened up to me new views of religion. I
+read Theodore Parker's "Discourse on Religion," Francis Newman's
+works, those of Miss Frances Power Cobbe, and of others; the anguish
+of the tension relaxed; the nightmare of an Almighty Evil passed away;
+my belief in God, not yet touched, was cleared from all the dark spots
+that had sullied it, and I no longer doubted whether the dogmas that
+had shocked my conscience were true or false. I shook them off, once
+for all, with all their pain and horror and darkness, and felt, with
+joy and relief inexpressible, that they were delusions of the
+ignorance of man, not the revelations of a God.
+
+But there was one belief that had not been definitely challenged, but
+of which the _rationale_ was gone with the orthodox dogmas now
+definitely renounced--the doctrine of the Deity of Christ. The whole
+teaching of the Broad Church school tends, of course, to emphasise the
+humanity of Christ at the expense of His Deity, and when eternal
+punishment and the substitutionary atonement had gone there seemed no
+reason remaining sufficient to account for so tremendous a miracle as
+the incarnation of the Deity. In the course of my reading I had become
+familiar with the idea of Avataras in Eastern creeds, and I saw that
+the incarnate God was put forward as a fact by all ancient religions,
+and thus the way was paved for challenging the especially Christian
+teaching, when the doctrines morally repulsive were cleared away. But
+I shrank from the thought of placing in the crucible a doctrine so
+dear from all the associations of the past; there was so much that was
+soothing and ennobling in the idea of a union between Man and God,
+between a perfect man and a Divine life, between a human heart and an
+almighty strength. Jesus as God was interwoven with all art and all
+beauty in religion; to break with the Deity of Jesus was to break with
+music, with painting, with literature; the Divine Babe in His Mother's
+arms; the Divine Man in His Passion and His Triumph; the Friend of Man
+encircled with the majesty of the Godhead. Did inexorable Truth demand
+that this ideal Figure, with all its pathos, its beauty, its human
+love, should pass away into the Pantheon of the dead Gods of the Past?
+
+Nor was this all. If I gave up belief in Christ as God, I must give up
+Christianity as creed. Once challenge the unique position of the
+Christ, and the name Christian seemed to me to be a hypocrisy, and its
+renouncement a duty binding on the upright mind. I was a clergyman's
+wife; what would be the effect of such a step? Hitherto mental pain
+alone had been the price demanded inexorably from the searcher after
+truth; but with the renouncing of Christ outer warfare would be added
+to the inner, and who might guess the result upon my life? The
+struggle was keen but short; I decided to carefully review the
+evidence for and against the Deity of Christ, with the result that
+that belief followed the others, and I stood, no longer Christian,
+face to face with a dim future in which I sensed the coming conflict.
+
+One effort I made to escape it; I appealed to Dr. Pusey, thinking that
+if he could not answer my questionings, no answer to them could be
+reasonably hoped for. I had a brief correspondence with him, but was
+referred only to lines of argument familiar to me--as those of Liddon
+in his "Bampton Lectures"--and finally, on his invitation, went down
+to Oxford to see him. I found a short, stout gentleman, dressed in a
+cassock, looking like a comfortable monk; but keen eyes, steadfastly
+gazing straight into mine, told of the force and subtlety enshrined in
+the fine, impressive head. But the learned doctor took the wrong line
+of treatment; he probably saw I was anxious, shy, and nervous, and he
+treated me as a penitent going to confession and seeking the advice of
+a director, instead of as an inquirer struggling after truth, and
+resolute to obtain some firm standing-ground in the sea of doubt. He
+would not deal with the question of the Deity of Jesus as a question
+for argument. "You are speaking of your Judge," he retorted sternly,
+when I pressed a difficulty. The mere suggestion of an imperfection in
+the character of Jesus made him shudder, and he checked me with raised
+hand. "You are blaspheming. The very thought is a terrible sin." Would
+he recommend me any books that might throw light on the subject? "No,
+no; you have read too much already. You must pray; you must pray."
+When I urged that I could not believe without proof, I was told,
+"Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed"; and my
+further questioning was checked by the murmur, "O my child, how
+undisciplined! how impatient!" Truly, he must have found in me--hot,
+eager, passionate in my determination to _know_, resolute not to
+profess belief while belief was absent--nothing of the meek,
+chastened, submissive spirit with which he was wont to deal in
+penitents seeking his counsel as their spiritual guide. In vain did he
+bid me pray as though I believed; in vain did he urge the duty of
+blind submission to the authority of the Church, of blind, unreasoning
+faith that questioned not. I had not trodden the thorny path of doubt
+to come to the point from which I had started; I needed, and would
+have, solid grounds ere I believed. He had no conception of the
+struggles of a sceptical spirit; he had evidently never felt the pangs
+of doubt; his own faith was solid as a rock, firm, satisfied,
+unshakable; he would as soon have committed suicide as have doubted of
+the infallibility of the "Universal Church."
+
+"It is not your duty to ascertain the truth," he told me, sternly. "It
+is your duty to accept and believe the truth as laid down by the
+Church. At your peril you reject it. The responsibility is not yours
+so long as you dutifully accept that which the Church has laid down
+for your acceptance. Did not the Lord promise that the presence of the
+Spirit should be ever with His Church, to guide her into all truth?"
+
+"But the fact of the promise and its value are just the very points on
+which I am doubtful," I answered.
+
+He shuddered. "Pray, pray," he said. "Father, forgive her, for she
+knows not what she says."
+
+It was in vain that I urged on him the sincerity of my seeking,
+pointing out that I had everything to gain by following his
+directions, everything to lose by going my own way, but that it seemed
+to me untruthful to pretend to accept what was not really believed.
+
+"Everything to lose? Yes, indeed. You will be lost for time and lost
+for eternity."
+
+"Lost or not," I rejoined, "I must and will try to find out what is
+true, and I will not believe till I am sure."
+
+"You have no right to make terms with God," he retorted, "as to what
+you will believe or what you will not believe. You are full of
+intellectual pride."
+
+I sighed hopelessly. Little feeling of pride was there in me just
+then, but only a despairful feeling that in this rigid, unyielding
+dogmatism there was no comprehension of my difficulties, no help for
+me in my strugglings. I rose, and, thanking him for his courtesy, said
+that I would not waste his time further, that I must go home and face
+the difficulties, openly leaving the Church and taking the
+consequences. Then for the first time his serenity was ruffled.
+
+"I forbid you to speak of your disbelief," he cried. "I forbid you to
+lead into your own lost state the souls for whom Christ died."
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS SCOTT.]
+
+Slowly and sadly I took my way back to the station, knowing that my
+last chance of escape had failed me. I recognised in this famous
+divine the spirit of priest-craft, that could be tender and pitiful to
+the sinner, repentant, humble, submissive; but that was iron to the
+doubter, the heretic, and would crush out all questionings of
+"revealed truth," silencing by force, not by argument, all challenge
+of the traditions of the Church. Out of such men were made the
+Inquisitors of the Middle Ages, perfectly conscientious, perfectly
+rigid, perfectly merciless to the heretic. To them heretics are
+centres of infectious disease, and charity to the heretic is "the
+worst cruelty to the souls of men." Certain that they hold, "by no
+merit of our own, but by the mercy of our God, the one truth which He
+has revealed," they can permit no questionings, they can accept nought
+but the most complete submission. But while man aspires after truth,
+while his mind yearns after knowledge, while his intellect soars
+upward into the empyrean of speculation and "beats the air with
+tireless wing," so long shall those who demand faith from him be met
+by challenge for proof, and those who would blind him shall be
+defeated by his resolve to gaze unblenching on the face of Truth, even
+though her eyes should turn him into stone. It was during this same
+autumn of 1872 that I first met Mr. and Mrs. Scott, introduced to them
+by Mr. Voysey. At that time Thomas Scott was an old man, with
+beautiful white hair, and eyes like those of a hawk gleaming from
+under shaggy eyebrows. He had been a man of magnificent physique, and,
+though his frame was then enfeebled, the splendid lion-like head kept
+its impressive strength and beauty, and told of a unique personality.
+Well born and wealthy, he had spent his earlier life in adventure in
+all parts of the world, and after his marriage he had settled down at
+Ramsgate, and had made his home a centre of heretical thought. His
+wife, "his right hand," as he justly called her, was young enough to
+be his daughter--a sweet, strong, gentle, noble woman, worthy of her
+husband, and than that no higher praise could be spoken. Mr. Scott for
+many years issued monthly a series of pamphlets, all heretical, though
+very varying in their shades of thought; all were well written,
+cultured, and polished in tone, and to this rule Mr. Scott made no
+exception; his writers might say what they liked, but they must have
+something to say, and must say it in good English. His correspondence
+was enormous, from Prime Ministers downwards. At his house met people
+of the most varied opinions; it was a veritable heretical _salon_.
+Colenso of Natal, Edward Maitland, E. Vansittart Neale, Charles Bray,
+Sarah Hennell, and hundreds more, clerics and laymen, scholars and
+thinkers, all coming to this one house, to which the _entree_ was
+gained only by love of Truth and desire to spread Freedom among men.
+For Thomas Scott my first Freethought essay was written a few months
+after, "On the Deity of Jesus of Nazareth," by the wife of a benefited
+clergyman. My name was not mine to use, so it was agreed that any
+essays from my pen should be anonymous.
+
+And now came the return to Sibsey, and with it the need for definite
+steps as to the Church. For now I no longer doubted, I had rejected,
+and the time for silence was past. I was willing to attend the Church
+services, taking no part in any not directed to God Himself, but I
+could no longer attend the Holy Communion, for in that service, full
+of recognition of Jesus as Deity and of His atoning sacrifice, I could
+no longer take part without hypocrisy. This was agreed to, and well do
+I remember the pain and trembling wherewith on the first "Sacrament
+Sunday" after my return I rose and left the church. That the vicar's
+wife should "communicate" was as much a matter of course as that the
+vicar should "administer"; I had never done anything in public that
+would draw attention to me, and a feeling of deadly sickness nearly
+overcame me as I made my exit, conscious that every eye was on me, and
+that my non-participation would be the cause of unending comment. As a
+matter of fact, every one naturally thought I was taken suddenly ill,
+and I was overwhelmed with calls and inquiries. To any direct question
+I answered quietly that I was unable to take part in the profession of
+faith required by an honest communicant, but the statement was rarely
+necessary, as the idea of heresy in a vicar's wife is slow to suggest
+itself to the ordinary bucolic mind, and I proffered no information
+where no question was asked.
+
+It happened that, shortly after that (to me) memorable Christmas of
+1872, a sharp epidemic of typhoid fever broke out in the village of
+Sibsey. The drainage there was of the most primitive type, and the
+contagion spread rapidly. Naturally fond of nursing, I found in this
+epidemic work just fitted to my hand, and I was fortunate enough to be
+able to lend personal help that made me welcome in the homes of the
+stricken poor. The mothers who slept exhausted while I watched beside
+their darlings' bedsides will never, I like to fancy, think
+over-harshly of the heretic whose hand was as tender and often more
+skilful than their own. I think Mother Nature meant me for a nurse,
+for I take a sheer delight in nursing any one, provided only that
+there is peril in the sickness, so that there is the strange and
+solemn feeling of the struggle between the human skill one wields and
+the supreme enemy, Death. There is a strange fascination in fighting
+Death, step by step, and this is of course felt to the full where one
+fights for life as life, and not for a life one loves. When the
+patient is beloved the struggle is touched with agony, but where one
+fights with Death over the body of a stranger there is a weird
+enchantment in the contest without personal pain, and as one forces
+back the hated foe there is a curious triumph in the feeling which
+marks the death-grip yielding up its prey, as one snatches back to
+earth the life which had well-nigh perished.
+
+The spring of 1873 brought me knowledge of a power that was to mould
+much of my future life. I delivered my first lecture, but delivered it
+to rows of empty pews in Sibsey Church. A queer whim took me that I
+would like to know how "it felt" to preach, and vague fancies stirred
+in me that I could speak if I had the chance. I saw no platform in the
+distance, nor had any idea of possible speaking in the future dawned
+upon me. But the longing to find outlet in words came upon me, and I
+felt as though I had something to say and was able to say it. So
+locked alone in the great, silent church, whither I had gone to
+practise some organ exercises, I ascended the pulpit steps and
+delivered my first lecture on the Inspiration of the Bible. I shall
+never forget the feeling of power and delight--but especially of
+power--that came upon me as I sent my voice ringing down the aisles,
+and the passion in me broke into balanced sentences and never paused
+for musical cadence or for rhythmical expression. All I wanted then
+was to see the church full of upturned faces, alive with throbbing
+sympathy, instead of the dreary emptiness of silent pews. And as
+though in a dream the solitude was peopled, and I saw the listening
+faces and the eager eyes, and as the sentences flowed unbidden from my
+lips and my own tones echoed back to me from the pillars of the
+ancient church, I knew of a verity that the gift of speech was mine,
+and that if ever--and then it seemed so impossible!--if ever the
+chance came to me of public work, this power of melodious utterance
+should at least win hearing for any message I had to bring.
+
+But the knowledge remained a secret all to my own self for many a long
+month, for I quickly felt ashamed of that foolish speechifying in an
+empty church; but, foolish as it was, I note it here, as it was the
+first effort of that expression in spoken words which later became to
+me one of the deepest delights of life. And, indeed, none can know,
+save they who have felt it, what joy there is in the full rush of
+language that moves and sways; to feel a crowd respond to the lightest
+touch; to see the faces brighten or darken at your bidding; to know
+that the sources of human emotion and human passion gush forth at the
+word of the speaker as the stream from the riven rock; to feel that
+the thought which thrills through a thousand hearers has its impulse
+from you, and throbs back to you the fuller from a thousand
+heart-beats. Is there any emotional joy in life more brilliant than
+this, fuller of passionate triumph, and of the very essence of
+intellectual delight?
+
+In 1873 my marriage tie was broken. I took no new step, but my absence
+from the Communion led to some gossip, and a relative of Mr. Besant
+pressed on him highly-coloured views of the social and professional
+dangers which would accrue if my heresy became known. My health, never
+really restored since the autumn of 1871, grew worse and worse,
+serious heart trouble having arisen from the constant strain under
+which I lived. At last, in July or August, 1873, the crisis came. I
+was told that I must conform to the outward observances of the Church,
+and attend the Communion; I refused. Then came the distinct
+alternative; conformity or exclusion from home--in other words,
+hypocrisy or expulsion. I chose the latter.
+
+A bitterly sad time followed. My dear mother was heart-broken. To her,
+with her wide and vague form of Christianity, loosely held, the
+intensity of my feeling that where I did not believe I would not
+pretend belief, was incomprehensible. She recognised far more fully
+than I did all that a separation from my home meant for me, and the
+difficulties that would surround a young woman, not yet twenty-six,
+living alone. She knew how brutally the world judges, and how the mere
+fact that a woman was young and alone justified any coarseness of
+slander. Then I did not guess how cruel men and women could be, how
+venomous their tongues; now, knowing it, having faced slander and
+lived it down, I deliberately say that were the choice again before me
+I would choose as I chose then; I would rather go through it all again
+than live "in Society" under the burden of an acted lie.
+
+The hardest struggle was against my mother's tears and pleading; to
+cause her pain was tenfold pain to me. Against harshness I had been
+rigid as steel, but it was hard to remain steadfast when my darling
+mother, whom I loved as I loved nothing else on earth, threw herself
+on her knees before me, imploring me to yield. It seemed like a crime
+to bring such anguish on her; and I felt as a murderer as the snowy
+head was pressed against my knees. And yet--to live a lie? Not even
+for her was that shame possible; in that worst crisis of blinding
+agony my will clung fast to Truth. And it is true now as it ever was
+that he who loves father or mother better than Truth is not worthy of
+her, and the flint-strewn path of honesty is the way to Light and
+Peace.
+
+Then there were the children, the two little ones who worshipped me,
+who was to them mother, nurse, and playfellow. Were they, too,
+demanded at my hands? Not wholly--for a time. Facts which I need not
+touch on here enabled my brother to obtain for me a legal separation,
+and when everything was arranged, I found myself guardian of my little
+daughter, and possessor of a small monthly income sufficient for
+respectable starvation. With a great price I had obtained my freedom,
+but--I was free. Home, friends, social position, were the price
+demanded and paid, and, being free, I wondered what to do with my
+freedom. I could have had a home with my brother if I would give up my
+heretical friends and keep quiet, but I had no mind to put my limbs
+into fetters again, and in my youthful inexperience I determined to
+find something to do. The difficulty was the "something," and I spent
+various shillings in agencies, with a quite wonderful unanimity of
+failures. I tried fancy needle-work, offered to "ladies in reduced
+circumstances," and earned 4s. 6d. by some weeks of stitching. I
+experimented with a Birmingham firm, who generously offered every one
+the opportunity of adding to their incomes, and on sending the small
+fee demanded, received a pencil-case, with an explanation that I was
+to sell little articles of that description, going as far as
+cruet-stands, to my friends. I did not feel equal to springing
+pencil-cases and cruet-stands on my acquaintances, so did not enter on
+that line of business, and similar failures in numerous efforts made
+me feel, as so many others have found, that the world-oyster is hard
+to open. However, I was resolute to build a nest for my wee daughter,
+my mother, and myself, and the first thing to do was to save my
+monthly pittance to buy furniture. I found a tiny house in Colby Road,
+Upper Norwood, near the Scotts, who were more than good to me, and
+arranged to take it in the spring, and then accepted a loving
+invitation to Folkestone, where my grandmother and two aunts were
+living, to look for work there. And found it. The vicar wanted a
+governess, and one of my aunts suggested me as a stop-gap, and thither
+I went with my little Mabel, our board and lodging being payment for
+my work. I became head cook, governess, and nurse, glad enough to have
+found "something to do" that enabled me to save my little income. But
+I do not think I will ever take to cooking for a permanence; broiling
+and frying are all right, and making pie-crust is rather pleasant; but
+saucepans and kettles blister your hands. There is a charm in making a
+stew, to the unaccustomed cook, from the excitement of wondering what
+the result will be, and whether any flavour save that of onions will
+survive the competition in the mixture. On the whole, my cooking
+(strictly by cookery book) was a success, but my sweeping was bad, for
+I lacked muscle. This curious episode came to an abrupt end, for one
+of my little pupils fell ill with diphtheria, and I was transformed
+from cook to nurse. Mabel I despatched to her grandmother, who adored
+her with a love condescendingly returned by the little fairy of three,
+and never was there a prettier picture than the red-gold curls nestled
+against the white, the baby-grace in exquisite contrast with the worn
+stateliness of her tender nurse. Scarcely was my little patient out of
+danger when the youngest boy fell ill of scarlet fever; we decided to
+isolate him on the top floor, and I cleared away carpets and curtains,
+hung sheets over the doorways and kept them wet with chloride of lime,
+shut myself up there with the boy, having my meals left on the
+landing; and when all risk was over, proudly handed back my charge,
+the disease touching no one else in the house.
+
+And now the spring of 1874 had come, and in a few weeks my mother and
+I were to set up house together. How we had planned all, and had
+knitted on the new life together we anticipated to the old one we
+remembered! How we had discussed Mabel's education, and the share
+which should fall to each! Day-dreams; day-dreams! never to be
+realised.
+
+My mother went up to town, and in a week or two I received a telegram,
+saying she was dangerously ill, and as fast as express train would
+take me I was beside her. Dying, the doctor said; three days she might
+live--no more. I told her the death-sentence, but she said resolutely,
+"I do not feel that I am going to die just yet," and she was right.
+There was an attack of fearful prostration--the valves of the heart
+had failed--a very wrestling with Death, and then the grim shadow drew
+backwards. I nursed her day and night with a very desperation of
+tenderness, for now Fate had touched the thing dearest to me in life.
+A second horrible crisis came, and for the second time her tenacity
+and my love beat back the death-stroke. She did not wish to die, the
+love of life was strong in her; I would not let her die; between us we
+kept the foe at bay. Then dropsy supervened, and the end loomed slowly
+sure.
+
+It was then, after eighteen months' abstention, that I took the
+Sacrament for the last time. My mother had an intense longing to
+communicate before she died, but absolutely refused to do so unless I
+took it with her. "If it be necessary to salvation," she persisted,
+doggedly, "I will not take it if darling Annie is to be shut out. I
+would rather be lost with her than saved without her." I went to a
+clergyman I knew well, and laid the case before him; as I expected, he
+refused to allow me to communicate. I tried a second, with the same
+result. At last a thought struck me. There was Dean Stanley, my
+mother's favourite, a man known to be of the broadest school within
+the Church of England; suppose I asked him? I did not know him, and I
+felt the request would be an impertinence; but there was just the
+chance that he might consent, and what would I not do to make my
+darling's death-bed easier? I said nothing to any one, but set out to
+the Deanery, Westminster, timidly asked for the Dean, and followed the
+servant upstairs with a sinking heart. I was left for a moment alone
+in the library, and then the Dean came in. I don't think I ever in my
+life felt more intensely uncomfortable than I did in that minute's
+interval as he stood waiting for me to speak, his clear, grave,
+piercing eyes gazing questioningly into mine. Very falteringly--it
+must have been very clumsily--I preferred my request, stating boldly,
+with abrupt honesty, that I was not a Christian, that my mother was
+dying, that she was fretting to take the Sacrament, that she would not
+take it unless I took it with her, that two clergymen had refused to
+allow me to take part in the service, that I had come to him in
+despair, feeling how great was the intrusion, but--she was dying.
+
+His face changed to a great softness. "You were quite right to come to
+me," he answered, in that low, musical voice of his, his keen gaze
+having altered into one no less direct, but marvellously gentle. "Of
+course I will go and see your mother, and I have little doubt that, if
+you will not mind talking over your position with me, we may see our
+way clear to doing as your mother wishes."
+
+I could barely speak my thanks, so much did the kindly sympathy move
+me; the revulsion from the anxiety and fear of rebuff was strong
+enough to be almost pain. But Dean Stanley did more than I asked. He
+suggested that he should call that afternoon, and have a quiet chat
+with my mother, and then come again on the following day to administer
+the Sacrament.
+
+"A stranger's presence is always trying to a sick person," he said,
+with rare delicacy of thought, "and, joined to the excitement of the
+service, it might be too much for your dear mother. If I spend half an
+hour with her to-day, and administer the Sacrament to-morrow, it will,
+I think, be better for her."
+
+So Dean Stanley came that afternoon, all the way to Brompton, and
+remained talking with my mother for about half an hour, and then set
+himself to understand my own position. He finally told me that conduct
+was far more important than theory, and that he regarded all as
+"Christians" who recognised and tried to follow the moral law of
+Christ. On the question of the absolute Deity of Jesus he laid but
+little stress; Jesus was "in a special sense the Son of God," but it
+was folly to quarrel over words with only human meanings when dealing
+with the mystery of the Divine existence, and, above all, it was folly
+to make such words into dividing walls between earnest souls. The one
+important matter was the recognition of "duty to God and man," and all
+who were one in that recognition might rightfully join in an act of
+worship, the essence of which was not acceptance of dogma, but love of
+God and self-sacrifice for man. "The Holy Communion," he concluded, in
+his soft tones, "was never meant to divide from each other hearts that
+are searching after the one true God. It was meant by its founder as a
+symbol of unity, not of strife."
+
+On the following day Dean Stanley celebrated the Holy Communion by the
+bedside of my dear mother, and well was I repaid for the struggle it
+had cost me to ask so great a kindness from a stranger, when I saw the
+comfort that gentle, noble heart had given to her. He soothed away all
+her anxiety about my heresy with tactful wisdom, bidding her have no
+fear of differences of opinion where the heart was set on truth.
+"Remember," she told me he said to her--"remember that our God is the
+God of truth, and that therefore the honest search for truth can never
+be displeasing in His eyes." Once again after that he came, and after
+his visit to my mother we had another long talk. I ventured to ask
+him, the conversation having turned that way, how, with views so broad
+as his, he found it possible to remain in communion with the Church of
+England. "I think," he answered, gently, "that I am of more service to
+true religion by remaining in the Church and striving to widen its
+boundaries from within, than if I left it and worked from without."
+And he went on to explain how, as Dean of Westminster, he was in a
+rarely independent position, and could make the Abbey of a wider
+national service than would otherwise be possible. In all he said on
+this his love for and his pride in the glorious Abbey were manifest,
+and it was easy to see that old historical associations, love of
+music, of painting, of stately architecture, were the bonds that held
+him bound to the "old historic Church of England." His emotions, not
+his intellect, kept him Churchman, and he shrank, with the
+over-sensitiveness of the cultured scholar, from the idea of allowing
+the old traditions to be handled roughly by inartistic hands.
+Naturally of a refined and delicate nature, he had been rendered yet
+more exquisitely sensitive by the training of the college and the
+court; the polished courtesy of his manners was but the natural
+expression of a noble and lofty mind--a mind whose very gentleness
+sometimes veiled its strength. I have often heard Dean Stanley harshly
+spoken of, I have heard his honesty roughly challenged; but never has
+he been attacked in my presence that I have not uttered my protest
+against the injustice done him, and thus striven to repay some small
+fraction of that great debt of gratitude which I shall ever owe his
+memory.
+
+And now the end came swiftly. I had hurriedly furnished a couple of
+rooms in the little house, now ours, that I might take my mother into
+the purer air of Norwood, and permission was given to drive her down
+in an invalid carriage. The following evening she was suddenly taken
+worse; we lifted her into bed, and telegraphed for the doctor. But he
+could do nothing, and she herself felt that the hand of Death had
+gripped her. Selfless to the last, she thought but for my loneliness.
+"I am leaving you alone," she sighed from time to time; and truly I
+felt, with an anguish I did not dare to realise, that when she died I
+should indeed be alone on earth.
+
+For two days longer she was with me, my beloved, and I never left her
+side for five minutes. On May 10th the weakness passed into gentle
+delirium, but even then the faithful eyes followed me about the room,
+until at length they closed for ever, and as the sun sank low in the
+heavens, the breath came slower and slower, till the silence of Death
+came down upon us and she was gone.
+
+Stunned and dazed with the loss, I went mechanically through the next
+few days. I would have none touch my dead save myself and her
+favourite sister, who was with us at the last. Cold and dry-eyed I
+remained, even when they hid her from me with the coffin-lid, even all
+the dreary way to Kensal Green where her husband and her baby-son were
+sleeping, and when we left her alone in the chill earth, damp with the
+rains of spring. I could not believe that our day-dream was dead and
+buried, and the home in ruins ere yet it was fairly built. Truly, my
+"house was left unto me desolate," and the rooms, filled with sunshine
+but unlighted by her presence, seemed to echo from their bare walls,
+"You are all alone."
+
+But my little daughter was there, and her sweet face and dancing feet
+broke the solitude, while her imperious claims for love and tendance
+forced me into attention to the daily needs of life. And life was hard
+in those days of spring and summer, resources small, and work
+difficult to find. In truth, the two months after my mother's death
+were the dreariest my life has known, and they were months of
+tolerably hard struggle. The little house in Colby Road taxed my
+slender resources heavily, and the search for work was not yet
+successful. I do not know how I should have managed but for the help
+ever at hand, of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Scott. During this time I wrote
+for Mr. Scott pamphlets on Inspiration, Atonement, Mediation and
+Salvation, Eternal Torture, Religious Education of Children, Natural
+_v_. Revealed Religion, and the few guineas thus earned were very
+valuable. Their house, too, was always open to me, and this was no
+small help, for often in those days the little money I had was enough
+to buy food for two but not enough to buy it for three, and I would go
+out and study all day at the British Museum, so as to "have my dinner
+in town," the said dinner being conspicuous by its absence. If I was
+away for two evenings running from the hospitable house in the
+terrace, Mrs. Scott would come down to see what had happened, and many
+a time the supper there was of real physical value to me. Well might I
+write, in 1879, when Thomas Scott lay dead: "It was Thomas Scott whose
+house was open to me when my need was sorest, and he never knew, this
+generous, noble heart, how sometimes, when I went in, weary and
+overdone, from a long day's study in the British Museum, with scarce
+food to struggle through the day--he never knew how his genial, 'Well,
+little lady,' in welcoming tone, cheered the then utter loneliness of
+my life. To no living man--save one--do I owe the debt of gratitude
+that I owe to Thomas Scott."
+
+The small amount of jewellery I possessed, and all my superfluous
+clothes, were turned into more necessary articles, and the child, at
+least, never suffered a solitary touch of want. My servant Mary was a
+wonderful contriver, and kept house on the very slenderest funds that
+could be put into a servant's hands, and she also made the little
+place so bright and fresh-looking that it was always a pleasure to go
+into it. Recalling those days of "hard living," I can now look on them
+without regret. More, I am glad to have passed through them, for they
+have taught me how to sympathise with those who are struggling as I
+struggled then, and I never can hear the words fall from pale lips, "I
+am hungry," without remembering how painful a thing hunger is, and
+without curing that pain, at least for the moment.
+
+The presence of the child was good for me, keeping alive my aching,
+lonely heart: she would play contentedly for hours while I was
+working, a word now and again being enough for happiness; when I had
+to go out without her, she would run to the door with me, and the
+"good-bye" would come from down-curved lips; she was ever watching at
+the window for my return, and the sunny face was always the first to
+welcome me home. Many and many a time have I been coming home, weary,
+hungry, and heart-sick, and the glimpse of the little face watching
+has reminded me that I must not carry in a grave face to sadden my
+darling, and the effort to throw off the depression for her sake threw
+it off altogether, and brought back the sunshine. She was the
+sweetness and joy of my life, my curly-headed darling, with her
+red-gold hair and glorious eyes, and passionate, wilful, loving
+nature. The torn, bruised tendrils of my heart gradually twined round
+this little life; she gave something to love and to tend, and thus
+gratified one of the strongest impulses of my nature.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+CHARLES BRADLAUGH.
+
+
+During all these months the intellectual life had not stood still; I
+was slowly, cautiously feeling my way onward. And in the intellectual
+and social side of my life I found a delight unknown in the old days
+of bondage. First, there was the joy of freedom, the joy of speaking
+out frankly and honestly each thought. Truly, I had a right to say:
+"With a great price obtained I this freedom," and having paid the
+price, I revelled in the liberty I had bought. Mr. Scott's valuable
+library was at my service; his keen brain challenged my opinions,
+probed my assertions, and suggested phases of thought hitherto
+untouched. I studied harder than ever, and the study now was unchecked
+by any fear of possible consequences. I had nothing left of the old
+faith save belief in "a God," and that began slowly to melt away. The
+Theistic axiom: "If there be a God at all He must be at least as good
+as His highest creature," began with an "if," and to that "if" I
+turned my attention. "Of all impossible things," writes Miss Frances
+Power Cobbe, "the most impossible must surely be that a man should
+dream something of the good and the noble, and that it should prove at
+last that his Creator was less good and less noble than he had
+dreamed." But, I questioned, are we sure that there is a Creator?
+Granted that, if there is, He must be above His highest creature,
+but--is there such a being? "The ground," says the Rev. Charles
+Voysey, "on which our belief in God rests is man. Man, parent of
+Bibles and Churches, inspirer of all good thoughts and good deeds.
+Man, the masterpiece of God's thought on earth. Man, the text-book of
+all spiritual knowledge. Neither miraculous nor infallible, man is
+nevertheless the only trustworthy record of the Divine mind in things
+pertaining to God. Man's reason, conscience, and affections are the
+only true revelation of his Maker." But what if God were only man's
+own image reflected in the mirror of man's mind? What if man were the
+creator, not the revelation of his God?
+
+It was inevitable that such thoughts should arise after the more
+palpably indefensible doctrines of Christianity had been discarded.
+Once encourage the human mind to think, and bounds to the thinking can
+never again be set by authority. Once challenge traditional beliefs,
+and the challenge will ring on every shield which is hanging in the
+intellectual arena. Around me was the atmosphere of conflict, and,
+freed from its long repression, my mind leapt up to share in the
+strife with a joy in the intellectual tumult, the intellectual strain.
+
+I often attended South Place Chapel, where Moncure D. Conway was then
+preaching, and discussion with him did something towards widening my
+views on the deeper religious problems; I re-read Dean Mansel's
+"Bampton Lectures," and they did much towards turning me in the
+direction of Atheism; I re-read Mill's "Examination of Sir William
+Hamilton's Philosophy," and studied carefully Comte's "Philosophie
+Positive." Gradually I recognised the limitations of human intelligence
+and its incapacity for understanding the nature of God, presented as
+infinite and absolute; I had given up the use of prayer as a
+blasphemous absurdity, since an all-wise God could not need my
+suggestions, nor an all-good God require my promptings. But God fades
+out of the daily life of those who never pray; a personal God who is
+not a Providence is a superfluity; when from the heaven does not smile
+a listening Father, it soon becomes an empty space, whence resounds no
+echo of man's cry. I could then reach no loftier conception of the
+Divine than that offered by the orthodox, and that broke hopelessly
+away as I analysed it.
+
+At last I said to Mr. Scott, "Mr. Scott, may I write a tract on the
+nature and existence of God?"
+
+He glanced at me keenly. "Ah, little lady, you are facing, then, that
+problem at last? I thought it must come. Write away."
+
+While this pamphlet was in MS. an event occurred which coloured all my
+succeeding life. I met Charles Bradlaugh. One day in the late spring,
+talking with Mrs. Conway--one of the sweetest and steadiest natures
+whom it has been my lot to meet, and to whom, as to her husband, I owe
+much for kindness generously shown when I was poor and had but few
+friends--she asked me if I had been to the Hall of Science, Old
+Street. I answered, with the stupid, ignorant reflection of other
+people's prejudices so sadly common, "No, I have never been there. Mr.
+Bradlaugh is rather a rough sort of speaker, is he not?"
+
+"He is the finest speaker of Saxon-English that I have ever heard,"
+she answered, "except, perhaps, John Bright, and his power over a
+crowd is something marvellous. Whether you agree with him or not, you
+should hear him."
+
+In the following July I went into the shop of Mr. Edward Truelove,
+256, High Holborn, in search of some Comtist publications, having come
+across his name as a publisher in the course of my study at the
+British Museum. On the counter was a copy of the _National Reformer_,
+and, attracted by the title, I bought it. I read it placidly in the
+omnibus on my way to Victoria Station, and found it excellent, and was
+sent into convulsions of inward merriment when, glancing up, I saw an
+old gentleman gazing at me, with horror speaking from every line of
+his countenance. To see a young woman, respectably dressed in crape,
+reading an Atheistic journal, had evidently upset his peace of mind,
+and he looked so hard at the paper that I was tempted to offer it to
+him, but repressed the mischievous inclination.
+
+This first copy of the paper with which I was to be so closely
+connected bore date July 19, 1874, and contained two long letters from
+a Mr. Arnold of Northampton, attacking Mr. Bradlaugh, and a brief and
+singularly self-restrained answer from the latter. There was also an
+article on the National Secular Society, which made me aware that
+there was an organisation devoted to the propagandism of Free Thought.
+I felt that if such a society existed, I ought to belong to it, and I
+consequently wrote a short note to the editor of the _National
+Reformer_, asking whether it was necessary for a person to profess
+Atheism before being admitted to the Society. The answer appeared in
+the _National Reformer_:--
+
+"S.E.--To be a member of the National Secular Society it is only
+necessary to be able honestly to accept the four principles, as given
+in the _National Reformer_ of June 14th. This any person may do
+without being required to avow himself an Atheist. Candidly, we can
+see no logical resting-place between the entire acceptance of
+authority, as in the Roman Catholic Church, and the most extreme
+Rationalism. If, on again looking to the Principles of the Society,
+you can accept them, we repeat to you our invitation."
+
+I sent my name in as an active member, and find it is recorded in the
+_National Reformer_ of August 9th. Having received an intimation that
+Londoners could receive their certificates at the Hall of Science from
+Mr. Bradlaugh on any Sunday evening, I betook myself thither, and it
+was on August 2, 1874, that I first set foot in a Freethought hall.
+The Hall was crowded to suffocation, and, at the very moment announced
+for the lecture, a roar of cheering burst forth, a tall figure passed
+swiftly up the Hall to the platform, and, with a slight bow in answer
+to the voluminous greeting, Charles Bradlaugh took his seat. I looked
+at him with interest, impressed and surprised. The grave, quiet,
+stern, strong face, the massive head, the keen eyes, the magnificent
+breadth and height of forehead--was this the man I had heard described
+as a blatant agitator, an ignorant demagogue?
+
+He began quietly and simply, tracing out the resemblances between the
+Krishna and the Christ myths, and as he went from point to point his
+voice grew in force and resonance, till it rang round the hall like a
+trumpet. Familiar with the subject, I could test the value of his
+treatment of it, and saw that his knowledge was as sound as his
+language was splendid. Eloquence, fire, sarcasm, pathos, passion, all
+in turn were bent against Christian superstition, till the great
+audience, carried away by the torrent of the orator's force, hung
+silent, breathing soft, as he went on, till the silence that followed
+a magnificent peroration broke the spell, and a hurricane of cheers
+relieved the tension.
+
+He came down the Hall with some certificates in his hand, glanced
+round, and handed me mine with a questioning "Mrs. Besant?" Then he
+said, referring to my question as to a profession of Atheism, that he
+would willingly talk over the subject of Atheism with me if I would
+make an appointment, and offered me a book he had been using in his
+lecture. Long afterwards I asked him how he knew me, whom he had never
+seen, that he came straight to me in such fashion. He laughed and said
+he did not know, but, glancing over the faces, he felt sure that I was
+Annie Besant.
+
+From that first meeting in the Hall of Science dated a friendship that
+lasted unbroken till Death severed the earthly bond, and that to me
+stretches through Death's gateway and links us together still. As
+friends, not as strangers, we met--swift recognition, as it were,
+leaping from eye to eye; and I know now that the instinctive
+friendliness was in very truth an outgrowth of strong friendship in
+other lives, and that on that August day we took up again an ancient
+tie, we did not begin a new one. And so in lives to come we shall meet
+again, and help each other as we helped each other in this. And let me
+here place on record, as I have done before, some word of what I owe
+him for his true friendship; though, indeed, how great is my debt to
+him I can never tell. Some of his wise phrases have ever remained in
+my memory. "You should never say you have an opinion on a subject
+until you have tried to study the strongest things said against the
+view to which you are inclined." "You must not think you know a
+subject until you are acquainted with all that the best minds have
+said about it." "No steady work can be done in public unless the
+worker study at home far more than he talks outside." "Be your own
+harshest judge, listen to your own speech and criticise it; read abuse
+of yourself and see what grains of truth are in it." "Do not waste
+time by reading opinions that are mere echoes of your own; read
+opinions you disagree with, and you will catch aspects of truth you do
+not readily see." Through our long comradeship he was my sternest as
+well as gentlest critic, pointing out to me that in a party like ours,
+where our own education and knowledge were above those whom we led, it
+was very easy to gain indiscriminate praise and unstinted admiration;
+on the other hand, we received from Christians equally indiscriminate
+abuse and hatred. It was, therefore, needful that we should be our own
+harshest judges, and that we should be sure that we knew thoroughly
+every subject that we taught. He saved me from the superficiality that
+my "fatal facility" of speech might so easily have induced; and when I
+began to taste the intoxication of easily won applause, his criticism
+of weak points, his challenge of weak arguments, his trained judgment,
+were of priceless service to me, and what of value there is in my work
+is very largely due to his influence, which at once stimulated and
+restrained.
+
+One very charming characteristic of his was his extreme courtesy in
+private life, especially to women. This outward polish, which sat so
+gracefully on his massive frame and stately presence, was foreign
+rather than English--for the English, as a rule, save such as go to
+Court, are a singularly unpolished people--and it gave his manner a
+peculiar charm. I asked him once where he had learned his gracious
+fashions that were so un-English--he would stand with uplifted hat as
+he asked a question of a maidservant, or handed a woman into a
+carriage--and he answered, with a half-smile, half-scoff, that it was
+only in England he was an outcast from society. In France, in Spain,
+in Italy, he was always welcomed among men and women of the highest
+social rank, and he supposed that he had unconsciously caught the
+foreign tricks of manner. Moreover, he was absolutely indifferent to
+all questions of social position; peer or artisan, it was to him
+exactly the same; he never seemed conscious of the distinctions of
+which men make so much.
+
+Our first conversation, after the meeting at the Hall of Science, took
+place a day or two later in his little study in 29, Turner Street,
+Commercial Road, a wee room overflowing with books, in which he looked
+singularly out of place. Later I learned that he had failed in
+business in consequence of Christian persecution, and, resolute to
+avoid bankruptcy, he had sold everything he possessed, save his books,
+had sent his wife and daughters to live in the country with his
+father-in-law, had taken two tiny rooms in Turner Street, where he
+could live for a mere trifle, and had bent himself to the task of
+paying off the liabilities he had incurred--incurred in consequence of
+his battling for political and religious liberty. I took with me my
+MS. essay "On the Nature and Existence of God," and it served as the
+basis for our conversation; we found there was little difference in
+our views. "You have thought yourself into Atheism without knowing
+it," he said, and all that I changed in the essay was the correction
+of the vulgar error that the Atheist says "there is no God," by the
+insertion of a passage disclaiming this position from an essay pointed
+out to me by Mr. Bradlaugh. And at this stage of my life-story, it is
+necessary to put very clearly the position I took up and held so many
+years as Atheist, because otherwise the further evolution into
+Theosophist will be wholly incomprehensible. It will lead me into
+metaphysics, and to some readers these are dry, but if any one would
+understand the evolution of a Soul he must be willing to face the
+questions which the Soul faces in its growth. And the position of the
+philosophic Atheist is so misunderstood that it is the more necessary
+to put it plainly, and Theosophists, at least, in reading it, will see
+how Theosophy stepped in finally as a further evolution towards
+knowledge, rendering rational, and therefore acceptable, the loftiest
+spirituality that the human mind can as yet conceive.
+
+In order that I may not colour my past thinkings by my present
+thought, I take my statements from pamphlets written when I adopted
+the Atheistic philosophy and while I continued an adherent thereof. No
+charge can then be made that I have softened my old opinions for the
+sake of reconciling them with those now held.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT.
+
+
+The first step which leaves behind the idea of a limited and personal
+God, an extra-cosmic Creator, and leads the student to the point
+whence Atheism and Pantheism diverge, is the recognition that a
+profound unity of substance underlies the infinite diversities of
+natural phenomena, the discernment of the One beneath the Many. This
+was the step I had taken ere my first meeting with Charles Bradlaugh,
+and I had written:--
+
+"It is manifest to all who will take the trouble to think steadily,
+that there can be only one eternal and underived substance, and that
+matter and spirit must, therefore, only be varying manifestations of
+this one substance. The distinction made between matter and spirit is,
+then, simply made for the sake of convenience and clearness, just as
+we may distinguish perception from judgment, both of which, however,
+are alike processes of thought. Matter is, in its constituent elements,
+the same as spirit; existence is _one_, however manifold in its
+phenomena; life is one, however multiform in its evolution. As the
+heat of the coal differs from the coal itself, so do memory,
+perception, judgment, emotion, and will differ from the brain which is
+the instrument of thought. But nevertheless they are all equally
+products of the one sole substance, varying only in their
+conditions.... I find myself, then, compelled to believe that one only
+substance exists in all around me; that the universe is eternal, or at
+least eternal so far as our faculties are concerned, since we cannot,
+as some one has quaintly put it, 'get to the outside of everywhere';
+that a Deity cannot be conceived of as apart from the universe; that
+the Worker and the Work are inextricably interwoven, and in some sense
+eternally and indissolubly combined. Having got so far, we will
+proceed to examine into the possibility of proving the existence of
+that one essence popularly called by the name of _God_, under the
+conditions strictly defined by the orthodox. Having demonstrated, as I
+hope to do, that the orthodox idea of God is unreasonable and absurd,
+we will endeavour to ascertain whether _any_ idea of God, worthy to be
+called an idea, is attainable in the present state of our faculties."
+"The Deity must of necessity be that one and only substance out of
+which all things are evolved, under the uncreated conditions and
+eternal laws of the universe; He must be, as Theodore Parker somewhat
+oddly puts it, 'the materiality of matter as well as the spirituality
+of spirit'--_i.e._, these must both be products of this one substance;
+a truth which is readily accepted as soon as spirit and matter are
+seen to be but different modes of one essence. Thus we identify
+substance with the all-comprehending and vivifying force of nature,
+and in so doing we simply reduce to a physical impossibility the
+existence of the Being described by the orthodox as a God possessing
+the attributes of personality. The Deity becomes identified with
+nature, co-extensive with the universe, but the _God_ of the orthodox
+no longer exists; we may change the signification of God, and use the
+word to express a different idea, but we can no longer mean by it a
+Personal Being in the orthodox sense, possessing an individuality
+which divides Him from the rest of the universe."[3]
+
+Proceeding to search whether _any_ idea of God was attainable, I came
+to the conclusion that evidence of the existence of a conscious Power
+was lacking, and that the ordinary proofs offered were inconclusive;
+that we could grasp phenomena and no more. "There appears, also, to
+be a possibility of a mind in nature, though we have seen that
+intelligence is, strictly speaking, impossible. There cannot be
+perception, memory, comparison, or judgment, but may there not be a
+perfect mind, unchanging, calm, and still? Our faculties fail us when
+we try to estimate the Deity, and we are betrayed into contradictions
+and absurdities; but does it therefore follow that He _is_ not? It
+seems to me that to deny His existence is to overstep the boundaries
+of our thought-power almost as much as to try and define it. We
+pretend to know the Unknown if we declare Him to be the Unknowable.
+Unknowable to us at present, yes! Unknowable for ever, in other
+possible stages of existence? We have reached a region into which we
+cannot penetrate; here all human faculties fail us; we bow our heads
+on 'the threshold of the unknown.'
+
+  "'And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see,
+  But if we could see and hear, this vision--were it not He?'
+
+Thus sings Alfred Tennyson, the poet of metaphysics: '_if_ we could
+see and hear.' Alas! it is always an 'if!'[4]
+
+This refusal to believe without evidence, and the declaration that
+anything "behind phenomena" is unknowable to man as at present
+constituted--these are the two chief planks of the Atheistic platform,
+as Atheism was held by Charles Bradlaugh and myself. In 1876 this
+position was clearly reaffirmed. "It is necessary to put briefly the
+Atheistic position, for no position is more continuously and more
+persistently misrepresented. Atheism is _without_ God. It does not
+assert _no_ God. 'The Atheist does not say "There is no God," but he
+says, "I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the
+word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation.
+I do not deny God, because I cannot deny that of which I have no
+conception, and the conception of which, by its affirmer, is so
+imperfect that he is unable to define it to me."' (Charles Bradlaugh,
+"Freethinker's Text-book," p. 118.) The Atheist neither affirms nor
+denies the possibility of phenomena differing from those recognised by
+human experience.... As his knowledge of the universe is extremely
+limited and very imperfect, the Atheist declines either to deny or to
+affirm anything with regard to modes of existence of which he knows
+nothing. Further, he refuses to believe anything concerning that of
+which he knows nothing, and affirms that that which can never be the
+subject of knowledge ought never to be the object of belief. While the
+Atheist, then, neither affirms nor denies the unknown, he _does_ deny
+all which conflicts with the knowledge to which he has already
+attained. For example, he _knows_ that one is one, and that three
+times one are three; he _denies_ that three times one are, or can be,
+one. The position of the Atheist is a clear and a reasonable one: I
+know nothing about 'God,' and therefore I do not believe in Him or in
+it; what you tell me about your God is self-contradictory, and is
+therefore incredible. I do not deny 'God,' which is an unknown tongue
+to me; I do deny your God, who is an impossibility. I am without
+God."[5] Up to 1887 I find myself writing on the same lines: "No man
+can rationally affirm 'There is no God,' until the word 'God' has for
+him a definite meaning, and until everything that exists is known to
+him, and known with what Leibnitz calls 'perfect knowledge.' The
+Atheist's denial of the Gods begins only when these Gods are defined
+or described. Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not
+palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been
+described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human
+thought--Nor is anything gained by the assertors of Deity when they
+allege that He is incomprehensible. If 'God' exists and is
+incomprehensible, His incomprehensibility is an admirable reason for
+being silent about Him, but can never justify the affirmation of
+self-contradictory propositions, and the threatening of people with
+damnation if they do not accept them."[6] "The belief of the Atheist
+stops where his evidence stops. He believes in the existence of the
+universe, judging the accessible proof thereof to be adequate, and he
+finds in this universe sufficient cause for the happening of all
+phenomena. He finds no intellectual satisfaction in placing a gigantic
+conundrum behind the universe, which only adds its own
+unintelligibility to the already sufficiently difficult problem of
+existence. Our lungs are not fitted to breathe beyond the atmosphere
+which surrounds our globe, and our faculties cannot breathe outside
+the atmosphere of the phenomenal."[7] And I summed up this essay with
+the words: "I do not believe in God. My mind finds no grounds on which
+to build up a reasonable faith. My heart revolts against the spectre
+of an Almighty Indifference to the pain of sentient beings. My
+conscience rebels against the injustice, the cruelty, the inequality,
+which surround me on every side. But I believe in Man. In man's
+redeeming power; in man's remoulding energy; in man's approaching
+triumph, through knowledge, love, and work."[8]
+
+These views of existence naturally colour all views of life and of the
+existence of the Soul. And here steps in the profound difference
+between Atheism and Pantheism; both posit an Existence at present
+inscrutable by human faculties, of which all phenomena are modes; but
+to the Atheist that Existence manifests as Force-Matter, unconscious,
+unintelligent, while to the Pantheist it manifests as Life-Matter,
+conscious, intelligent. To the one, life and consciousness are
+attributes, properties, dependent upon arrangements of matter; to the
+other they are fundamental, essential, and only limited in their
+manifestation by arrangements of matter. Despite the attraction held
+for me in Spinoza's luminous arguments, the over-mastering sway which
+Science was beginning to exercise over me drove me to seek for the
+explanation of all problems of life and mind at the hands of the
+biologist and the chemist. They had done so much, explained so much,
+could they not explain all? Surely, I thought, the one safe ground is
+that of experiment, and the remembered agony of doubt made me very
+slow to believe where I could not prove. So I was fain to regard life
+as an attribute, and this again strengthened the Atheistic position.
+"Scientifically regarded, life is not an entity but a property; it is
+not a mode of existence, but a characteristic of certain modes. Life
+is the result of an arrangement of matter, and when rearrangement
+occurs the former result can no longer be present; we call the result
+of the changed arrangement death. Life and death are two convenient
+words for expressing the general outcome of two arrangements of
+matter, one of which is always found to precede the other."[9] And
+then, having resorted to chemistry for one illustration, I took
+another from one of those striking and easily grasped analogies,
+facility for seeing and presenting which has ever been one of the
+secrets of my success as a propagandist. Like pictures, they impress
+the mind of the hearer with a vivid sense of reality. "Every one knows
+the exquisite iridiscence of mother-of-pearl, the tender, delicate
+hues which melt into each other, glowing with soft radiance. How
+different is the dull, dead surface of a piece of wax. Yet take that
+dull, black wax and mould it so closely to the surface of the
+mother-of-pearl that it shall take every delicate marking of the
+shell, and when you raise it the seven-hued glory shall smile at you
+from the erstwhile colourless surface. For, though it be to the naked
+eye imperceptible, all the surface of the mother-of-pearl is in
+delicate ridges and furrows, like the surface of a newly-ploughed
+field; and when the waves of light come dashing up against the ridged
+surface, they are broken like the waves on a shingly shore, and are
+flung backwards, so that they cross each other and the oncoming waves;
+and, as every ray of white light is made up of waves of seven colours,
+and these waves differ in length each from the others, the fairy
+ridges fling them backward separately, and each ray reaches the eye by
+itself; so that the colour of the mother-of-pearl is really the spray
+of the light waves, and comes from arrangement of matter once again.
+Give the dull, black wax the same ridges and furrows, and its glory
+shall differ in nothing from that of the shell. To apply our
+illustration: as the colour belongs to one arrangement of matter and
+the dead surface to another, so life belongs to some arrangements of
+matter and is their resultant, while the resultant of other
+arrangements is death."[10]
+
+The same line of reasoning naturally was applied to the existence of
+"spirit" in man, and it was argued that mental activity, the domain of
+the "spirit," was dependent on bodily organisation. "When the babe is
+born it shows no sign of mind. For a brief space hunger and repletion,
+cold and warmth are its only sensations. Slowly the specialised senses
+begin to function; still more slowly muscular movements, at first
+aimless and reflex, become co-ordinated and consciously directed.
+There is no sign here of an intelligent spirit controlling a
+mechanism; there is every sign of a learning and developing
+intelligence, developing _pari passu_ with the organism of which it is
+a function. As the body grows, the mind grows with it, and the
+childish mind of the child develops into the hasty, quickly-judging,
+half-informed, unbalanced youthful mind of the youth; with maturity of
+years comes maturity of mind, and body and mind are vigorous and in
+their prime. As old age comes on and the bodily functions decay, the
+mind decays also, until age passes into senility, and body and mind
+sink into second childhood. Has the immortal spirit decayed with the
+organisation, or is it dwelling in sorrow, bound in its 'house of
+clay'? If this be so, the 'spirit' must be unconscious, or else
+separate from the very individual whose essence it is supposed to be,
+for the old man does not suffer when his mind is senile, but is
+contented as a little child. And not only is this constant,
+simultaneous growth and decay of body and mind to be observed, but we
+know that mental functions are disordered and suspended by various
+physical conditions. Alcohol, many drugs, fever, disorder the mind; a
+blow on the cranium suspends its functions, and the 'spirit' returns
+with the surgeon's trepanning. Does the 'spirit' take part in dreams?
+Is it absent from the idiot, from the lunatic? Is it guilty of
+manslaughter when the madman murders, or does it helplessly watch its
+own instrument performing actions at which it shudders? If it can only
+work here through an organism, is its nature changed in its
+independent life, severed from all with which it was identified? Can
+it, in its 'disembodied state,' have anything in common with its
+past?"[11]
+
+It will be seen that my unbelief in the existence of the Soul or
+Spirit was a matter of cold, calm reasoning. As I wrote in 1885: "For
+many of us evidence must precede belief. I would gladly believe in a
+happy immortality for all, as I would gladly believe that all misery
+and crime and poverty will disappear in 1885--_if I could_. But I am
+unable to believe an improbable proposition unless convincing evidence
+is brought in support of it. Immortality is most improbable; no
+evidence is brought forward in its favour. I cannot believe only
+because I wish."[12] Such was the philosophy by which I lived from
+1874 to 1886, when first some researches that will be dealt with in
+their proper place, and which led me ultimately to the evidence I had
+before vainly demanded, began to shake my confidence in its adequacy.
+Amid outer storm and turmoil and conflict, I found it satisfy my
+intellect, while lofty ideals of morality fed my emotions. I called
+myself Atheist, and rightly so, for I was without God, and my horizon
+was bounded by life on earth; I gloried in the name then, as it is
+dear to my heart now, for all the associations with which it is
+connected. "Atheist is one of the grandest titles a man can wear; it
+is the Order of Merit of the world's heroes. Most great discoverers,
+most deep-thinking philosophers, most earnest reformers, most toiling
+pioneers of progress, have in their turn had flung at them the name of
+Atheist. It was howled over the grave of Copernicus; it was clamoured
+round the death-pile of Bruno; it was yelled at Vanini, at Spinoza, at
+Priestley, at Voltaire, at Paine; it has become the laurel-bay of the
+hero, the halo of the martyr; in the world's history it has meant the
+pioneer of progress, and where the cry of 'Atheist' is raised there
+may we be sure that another step is being taken towards the redemption
+of humanity. The saviours of the world are too often howled at as
+Atheists, and then worshipped as Deities. The Atheists are the
+vanguard of the army of Freethought, on whom falls the brunt of the
+battle, and are shivered the hardest of the blows; their feet trample
+down the thorns that others may tread unwounded; their bodies fill up
+the ditch that, by the bridge thus made, others may pass to victory.
+Honour to the pioneers of progress, honour to the vanguard of
+Liberty's army, honour to those who to improve earth have forgotten
+heaven, and who in their zeal for man have forgotten God."[13]
+
+This poor sketch of the conception of the universe, to which I had
+conquered my way at the cost of so much pain, and which was the inner
+centre round which my life revolved for twelve years, may perhaps show
+that the Atheistic Philosophy is misjudged sorely when it is scouted
+as vile or condemned as intellectually degraded. It has outgrown
+anthropomorphic deities, and it leaves us face to face with Nature,
+open to all her purifying, strengthening inspirations. "There is only
+one kind of prayer," it says, "which is reasonable, and that is the
+deep, silent adoration of the greatness and beauty and order around
+us, as revealed in the realms of non-rational life and in Humanity; as
+we bow our heads before the laws of the universe, and mould our lives
+into obedience to their voice, we find a strong, calm peace steal over
+our hearts, a perfect trust in the ultimate triumph of the right, a
+quiet determination to 'make our lives sublime.' Before our own high
+ideals, before those lives which show us 'how high the tides of Divine
+life have risen in the human world,' we stand with hushed voice and
+veiled face; from them we draw strength to emulate, and even dare
+struggle to excel. The contemplation of the ideal is true prayer; it
+inspires, it strengthens, it ennobles. The other part of prayer is
+work; from contemplation to labour, from the forest to the street.
+Study nature's laws, conform to them, work in harmony with them, and
+work becomes a prayer and a thanksgiving, an adoration of the
+universal wisdom, and a true obedience to the universal law."[14]
+
+To a woman of my temperament, filled with passionate desire for the
+bettering of the world, the elevation of humanity, a lofty system of
+ethics was of even more importance than a logical, intellectual
+conception of the universe; and the total loss of all faith in a
+righteous God only made me more strenuously assertive of the binding
+nature of duty and the overwhelming importance of conduct. In 1874
+this conviction found voice in a pamphlet on the "True Basis of
+Morality," and in all the years of my propaganda on the platform of
+the National Secular Society no subject was more frequently dealt with
+in my lectures than that of human ethical growth and the duty of man
+to man. No thought was more constantly in my mind than that of the
+importance of morals, and it was voiced at the very outset of my
+public career. Speaking of the danger lest "in these stirring times of
+inquiry," old sanctions of right conduct should be cast aside ere new
+ones were firmly established, I wrote: "It therefore becomes the duty
+of every one who fights in the ranks of Freethought, and who ventures
+to attack the dogmas of the Churches, and to strike down the
+superstitions which enslave men's intellect, to beware how he uproots
+sanctions of morality which he is too weak to replace, or how, before
+he is prepared with better ones, he removes the barriers which do yet,
+however poorly, to some extent check vice and repress crime.... That
+which touches morality touches the heart of society; a high and pure
+morality is the life-blood of humanity; mistakes in belief are
+inevitable, and are of little moment; mistakes in life destroy
+happiness, and their destructive consequences spread far and wide. It
+is, then, a very important question whether we, who are endeavouring
+to take away from the world the authority on which has hitherto been
+based all its morality, can offer a new and firm ground whereupon may
+safely be built up the fair edifice of a noble life."
+
+I then proceeded to analyse revelation and intuition as a basis for
+morals, and, discarding both, I asserted: "The true basis of morality
+is utility; that is, the adaptation of our actions to the promotion of
+the general welfare and happiness; the endeavour so to rule our lives
+that we may serve and bless mankind." And I argued for this basis,
+showing that the effort after virtue was implied in the search for
+happiness: "Virtue is an indispensable part of all true and solid
+happiness.... But it is, after all, only reasonable that happiness
+should be the ultimate test of right and wrong, if we live, as we do,
+in a realm of law. Obedience to law must necessarily result in
+harmony, and disobedience in discord. But if obedience to law result
+in harmony it must also result in happiness--all through nature
+obedience to law results in happiness, and through obedience each
+living thing fulfils the perfection of its being, and in that
+perfection finds its true happiness." It seemed to me most important
+to remove morality from the controversies about religion, and to give
+it a basis of its own: "As, then, the grave subject of the existence
+of Deity is a matter of dispute, it is evidently of deep importance to
+society that morality should not be dragged into this battlefield, to
+stand or totter with the various theories of the Divine nature which
+human thought creates and destroys. If we can found morality on a
+basis apart from theology, we shall do humanity a service which can
+scarcely be overestimated." A study of the facts of nature, of the
+consequences of man in society, seemed sufficient for such a basis.
+"Our faculties do not suffice to tell us about God; they do suffice to
+study phenomena, and to deduce laws from correlated facts. Surely,
+then, we should do wisely to concentrate our strength and our energies
+on the discovery of the attainable, instead of on the search after the
+unknowable. If we are told that morality consists in obedience to the
+supposed will of a supposed perfectly moral being, because in so doing
+we please God, then we are at once placed in a region where our
+faculties are useless to us, and where our judgment is at fault. But
+if we are told that we are to lead noble lives, because nobility of
+life is desirable for itself alone, because in so doing we are acting
+in harmony with the laws of Nature, because in so doing we spread
+happiness around our pathway and gladden our fellow-men--then, indeed,
+motives are appealed to which spring forward to meet the call, and
+chords are struck in our hearts which respond in music to the touch."
+It was to the establishment of this secure basis that I bent my
+energies, this that was to me of supreme moment. "Amid the fervid
+movement of society, with its wild theories and crude social reforms,
+with its righteous fury against oppression and its unconsidered
+notions of wider freedom and gladder life, it is of vital importance
+that morality should stand on a foundation unshakable; that so through
+all political and religious revolutions human life may grow purer and
+nobler, may rise upwards into settled freedom, and not sink downwards
+into anarchy. Only utility can afford us a sure basis, the
+reasonableness of which will be accepted alike by thoughtful student
+and hard-headed artisan. Utility appeals to all alike, and sets in
+action motives which are found equally in every human heart. Well
+shall it be for humanity that creeds and dogmas pass away, that
+superstition vanishes, and the clear light of freedom and science
+dawns on a regenerated earth--but well only if men draw tighter and
+closer the links of trustworthiness, of honour, and of truth. Equality
+before the law is necessary and just; liberty is the birthright of
+every man and woman; free individual development will elevate and
+glorify the race. But little worth these priceless jewels, little
+worth liberty and equality with all their promise for mankind, little
+worth even wider happiness, if that happiness be selfish, if true
+fraternity, true brotherhood, do not knit man to man, and heart to
+heart, in loyal service to the common need, and generous
+self-sacrifice to the common good."[15]
+
+To the forwarding of this moral growth of man, two things seemed to me
+necessary--an Ideal which should stir the emotions and impel to
+action, and a clear understanding of the sources of evil and of the
+methods by which they might be drained. Into the drawing of the first
+I threw all the passion of my nature, striving to paint the Ideal in
+colours which should enthral and fascinate, so that love and desire to
+realise might stir man to effort. If "morality touched by emotion" be
+religion, then truly was I the most religious of Atheists, finding in
+this dwelling on and glorifying of the Ideal full satisfaction for the
+loftiest emotions. To meet the fascination exercised over men's hearts
+by the Man of Sorrows, I raised the image of man triumphant, man
+perfected. "Rightly is the ideal Christian type of humanity a Man of
+Sorrows. Jesus, with worn and wasted body; with sad, thin lips, curved
+into a mournful droop of penitence for human sin; with weary eyes
+gazing up to heaven because despairing of earth; bowed down and aged
+with grief and pain, broken-hearted with long anguish, broken-spirited
+with unresisted ill-usage--such is the ideal man of the Christian
+creed. Beautiful with a certain pathetic beauty, telling of the long
+travail of earth, eloquent of the sufferings of humanity, but not the
+model type to which men should conform their lives, if they would make
+humanity glorious. And, therefore, in radiant contrast with this,
+stands out in the sunshine and under the blue summer sky, far from
+graveyards and torture of death agony, the fair ideal Humanity of the
+Atheist. In form strong and fair, perfect in physical development as
+the Hercules of Grecian art, radiant with love, glorious in
+self-reliant power; with lips bent firm to resist oppression, and
+melting into soft curves of passion and of pity; with deep, far-seeing
+eyes, gazing piercingly into the secrets of the unknown, and resting
+lovingly on the beauties around him; with hands strong to work in the
+present; with heart full of hope which the future shall realise;
+making earth glad with his labour and beautiful with his skill--this,
+this is the Ideal Man, enshrined in the Atheist's heart. The ideal
+humanity of the Christian is the humanity of the slave, poor, meek,
+broken-spirited, humble, submissive to authority, however oppressive
+and unjust; the ideal humanity of the Atheist is the humanity of the
+free man who knows no lord, who brooks no tyranny, who relies on his
+own strength, who makes his brother's quarrel his, proud,
+true-hearted, loyal, brave."[16]
+
+A one-sided view? Yes. But a very natural outcome of a sunny nature,
+for years held down by unhappiness and the harshness of an outgrown
+creed. It was the rebound of such a nature suddenly set free,
+rejoicing in its liberty and self-conscious strength, and it carried
+with it a great power of rousing the sympathetic enthusiasm of men and
+women, deeply conscious of their own restrictions and their own
+longings. It was the cry of the freed soul that had found articulate
+expression, and the many inarticulate and prisoned souls answered to
+it tumultously, with fluttering of caged wings. With hot insistence I
+battled for the inspiration to be drawn from the beauty and grandeur
+of which human life was capable. "Will any one exclaim, 'You are
+taking all beauty out of human life, all hope, all warmth, all
+inspiration; you give us cold duty for filial obedience, and
+inexorable law in the place of God'? All beauty from life? Is there,
+then, no beauty in the idea of forming part of the great life of the
+universe, no beauty in conscious harmony with Nature, no beauty in
+faithful service, no beauty in ideals of every virtue? 'All hope'?
+Why, I give you more than hope, I give you certainty; if I bid you
+labour for this world, it is with the knowledge that this world will
+repay you a, thousand-fold, because society will grow purer, freedom
+more settled, law more honoured, life more full and glad. What is your
+heaven? A heaven in the clouds! I point to a heaven attainable on
+earth. 'All warmth'? What! you serve warmly a God unknown and
+invisible, in a sense the projected shadow of your own imaginings, and
+can only serve coldly your brother whom you see at your side? There is
+no warmth in brightening the lot of the sad, in reforming abuses, in
+establishing equal justice for rich and poor? You find warmth in the
+church, but none in the home? Warmth in imagining the cloud glories of
+heaven, but none in creating substantial glories on earth?' All
+inspiration'? If you want inspiration to feeling, to sentiment,
+perhaps you had better keep to your Bible and your creeds; if you want
+inspiration to work, go and walk through the East of London, or the
+back streets of Manchester. You are inspired to tenderness as you gaze
+at the wounds of Jesus, dead in Judaea long ago, and find no
+inspiration in the wounds of men and women, dying in the England of
+to-day? You 'have tears to shed for Him,' but none for the sufferer at
+your doors? His passion arouses your sympathies, but you see no pathos
+in the passion of the poor? Duty is colder than 'filial obedience'?
+What do you mean by filial obedience? Obedience to your ideal of
+goodness and love--is it not so? Then how is duty cold? I offer you
+ideals for your homage: here is Truth for your Mistress, to whose
+exaltation you shall devote your intellect; here is Freedom for your
+General, for whose triumph you shall fight; here is Love for your
+Inspirer, who shall influence your every thought; here is Man for your
+Master--not in heaven, but on earth--to whose service you shall
+consecrate every faculty of your being. 'Inexorable law in the place
+of God'? Yes; a stern certainty that you shall not waste your life,
+yet gather a rich reward at the close; that you shall not sow misery,
+yet reap gladness; that you shall not be selfish, yet be crowned with
+love; nor shall you sin, yet find safety in repentance. True, our
+creed _is_ a stern one, stern with the beautiful sternness of Nature.
+But if we be in the right, look to yourselves; laws do not check their
+action for your ignorance; fire will not cease to scorch, because you
+'did not know.'"[17]
+
+With equal vigour did I maintain that "virtue was its own reward," and
+that payment on the other side of the grave was unnecessary as an
+incentive to right living. "What shall we say to Miss Cobbe's
+contention that duty will 'grow grey and cold' without God and
+immortality? Yes, for those with whom duty is a matter of selfish
+calculation, and who are virtuous only because they look for a 'golden
+crown' in payment on the other side the grave. Those of us who find
+joy in right-doing, who work because work is useful to our fellows,
+who live well because in such living we pay our contribution to the
+world's wealth, leaving earth richer than we found it--we need no
+paltry payment after death for our life's labour, for in that labour
+is its own 'exceeding great reward.'"[18] But did any one yearn for
+immortality, that "not all of me shall die"? "Is it true that Atheism
+has no immortality? What is true immortality? Is Beethoven's true
+immortality in his continued personal consciousness, or in his
+glorious music deathless while the world endures? Is Shelley's true
+life in his existence in some far-off heaven, or in the pulsing
+liberty his lyrics send through men's hearts, when they respond to the
+strains of his lyre? Music does not die, though one instrument be
+broken; thought does not die, though one brain be shivered; love does
+not die, though one heart's strings be rent; and no great thinker dies
+so long as his thought re-echoes through the ages, its melody the
+fuller-toned the more human brains send its music on. Not only to the
+hero and the sage is this immortality given; it belongs to each
+according to the measure of his deeds; world-wide life for world-wide
+service; straitened life for straitened work; each reaps as he sows,
+and the harvest is gathered by each in his rightful order."[19]
+
+This longing to leave behind a name that will live among men by right
+of service done them, this yearning for human love and approval that
+springs naturally from the practical and intense realisation of human
+brotherhood--these will be found as strong motives in the breasts of
+the most earnest men and women who have in our generation identified
+themselves with the Freethought cause. They shine through the written
+and spoken words of Charles Bradlaugh all through his life, and every
+friend of his knows how often he has expressed the longing that "when
+the grass grows green over my grave, men may love me a little for the
+work I tried to do."
+
+Needless to say that, in the many controversies in which I took part,
+it was often urged against me that such motives were insufficient,
+that they appealed only to natures already ethically developed, and
+left the average man, and, above all, the man below the average, with
+no sufficiently constraining motive for right conduct. I resolutely
+held to my faith in human nature, and the inherent response of the
+human heart when appealed to from the highest grounds; strange--I
+often think now--this instinctive certainty I had of man's innate
+grandeur, that governed all my thought, inconsistent as that certainty
+was with my belief in his purely animal ancestry. Pressed too hard, I
+would take refuge in a passionate disdain for all who did not hear the
+thrilling voice of Virtue and love her for her own sweet sake. "I have
+myself heard the question asked: 'Why should I seek for truth, and why
+should I lead a good life, if there be no immortality in which to reap
+a reward?' To this question the Freethinker has one clear and short
+answer: 'There is no reason why you should seek Truth, if to you the
+search has no attracting power. There is no reason why you should lead
+a noble life, if you find your happiness in leading a poor and a base
+one.' Friends, no one can enjoy a happiness which is too high for his
+capabilities; a book may be of intensest interest, but a dog will very
+much prefer being given a bone. To him whose highest interest is
+centred in his own miserable self, to him who cares only to gain his
+own ends, to him who seeks only his own individual comfort, to that
+man Freethought can have no attraction. Such a man may indeed be made
+religious by a bribe of heaven; he may be led to seek for truth,
+because he hopes to gain his reward hereafter by the search; but Truth
+disdains the service of the self-seeker; she cannot be grasped by a
+hand that itches for reward. If Truth is not loved for her own pure
+sake, if to lead a noble life, if to make men happier, if to spread
+brightness around us, if to leave the world better than we found
+it--if these aims have no attraction for us, if these thoughts do not
+inspire us, then we are not worthy to be Secularists, we have no right
+to the proud title of Freethinkers. If you want to be paid for your
+good lives by living for ever in a lazy and useless fashion in an idle
+heaven; if you want to be bribed into nobility of life; if, like silly
+children, you learn your lesson not to gain knowledge but to win
+sugar-plums, then you had better go back to your creeds and your
+churches; they are all you are fit for; you are not worthy to be free.
+But we--who, having caught a glimpse of the beauty of Truth, deem the
+possession of her worth more than all the world beside; who have made
+up our minds to do our work ungrudgingly, asking for no reward beyond
+the results which spring up from our labour--we will spread the Gospel
+of Freethought among men, until the sad minor melodies of Christianity
+have sobbed out their last mournful notes on the dying evening breeze,
+and on the fresh morning winds shall ring out the chorus of hope and
+joyfulness, from the glad lips of men whom the Truth has at last set
+free."[20]
+
+The intellectual comprehension of the sources of evil and the method
+of its extinction was the second great plank in my ethical platform.
+The study of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, of Huxley, Buechner and
+Haeckel, had not only convinced me of the truth of evolution, but,
+with help from W.H. Clifford, Lubbock, Buckle, Lecky, and many
+another, had led me to see in the evolution of the social instinct the
+explanation of the growth of conscience and of the strengthening of
+man's mental and moral nature. If man by study of the conditions
+surrounding him and by the application of intelligence to the subdual
+of external nature, had already accomplished so much, why should not
+further persistence along the same road lead to his complete
+emancipation? All the evil, anti-social side of his nature was an
+inheritance from his brute ancestry, and could be gradually
+eradicated; he could not only "let the ape and tiger die," but he
+could kill them out." It may be frankly acknowledged that man inherits
+from his brute progenitors various bestial tendencies which are in
+course of elimination. The wild-beast desire to fight is one of these,
+and this has been encouraged, not checked, by religion.... Another
+bestial tendency is the lust of the male for the female apart from
+love, duty, and loyalty; this again has been encouraged by religion,
+as witness the polygamy and concubinage of the Hebrews--as in Abraham,
+David, and Solomon, not to mention the precepts of the Mosaic
+laws--the bands of male and female prostitutes in connection with
+Pagan temples, and the curious outbursts of sexual passion in
+connection with religious revivals and missions. Another bestial
+tendency is greed, the strongest grabbing all he can and trampling
+down the weak, in the mad struggle for wealth; how and when has
+religion modified this tendency, sanctified as it is in our present
+civilisation? All these bestial tendencies will be eradicated only by
+the recognition of human duty, of the social bond. Religion has not
+eradicated them, but science, by tracing them to their source in our
+brute ancestry, has explained them and has shown them in their true
+light. As each recognises that the anti-social tendencies are the
+bestial tendencies in man, and that man in evolving further must
+evolve out of these, each also feels it part of his personal duty to
+curb these in himself, and so to rise further from the brute. This
+rational 'co-operation with Nature' distinguishes the scientific from
+the religious person, and this constraining sense of obligation is
+becoming stronger and stronger in all those who, in losing faith in
+God, have gained hope for man."[21]
+
+For this rational setting of oneself on the side of the forces working
+for evolution implied active co-operation by personal purity and
+nobility." To the Atheist it seems that the knowledge that the
+perfecting of the race is only possible by the improvement of the
+individual, supplies the most constraining motive which can be
+imagined for efforts after personal perfection. The Theist may desire
+personal perfection, but his desire is self-centred; each righteous
+individual is righteous, as it were, alone, and his righteousness does
+not benefit his fellows save as it may make him helpful and loving in
+his dealings with them. The Atheist desires personal perfection not
+only for his joy in it as beautiful in itself, but because science has
+taught him the unity of the race, and he knows that each fresh
+conquest of his over the baser parts of his nature, and each
+strengthening of the higher, is a gain for all, and not for himself
+alone."[22]
+
+Besides all this, the struggle against evil, regarded as transitory
+and as a necessary concomitant of evolution, loses its bitterness. "In
+dealing with evil, Atheism is full of hope instead of despair. To the
+Christian, evil is as everlasting as good; it exists by the permission
+of God, and, therefore, by the will of God. Our nature is corrupt,
+inclined to evil; the devil is ever near us, working all sin and all
+misery. What hope has the Christian face to face with a world's
+wickedness? what answer to the question, Whence comes sin? To the
+Atheist the terrible problem has in it no figure of despair. Evil
+comes from ignorance, we say; ignorance of physical and of moral
+facts. Primarily, from ignorance of physical order; parents who dwell
+in filthy, unventilated, unweathertight houses, who live on
+insufficient, innutritious, unwholesome food, will necessarily be
+unhealthy, will lack vitality, will probably have disease lurking in
+their veins; such parents will bring into the world ill-nurtured
+children, in whom the brain will generally be the least developed part
+of the body; such children, by their very formation, will incline to
+the animal rather than to the human, and by leading an animal, or
+natural, life will be deficient in those qualities which are necessary
+in social life. Their surroundings as they grow up, the home, the
+food, the associates, all are bad. They are trained into vice,
+educated into criminality; so surely as from the sown corn rises the
+wheat-ear, so from the sowing of misery, filth, and starvation shall
+arise crime. And the root of all is poverty and ignorance. Educate the
+children, and give them fair wage for fair work in their maturity, and
+crime will gradually diminish and ultimately disappear. Man is
+God-made, says Theism; man is circumstance-made, says Atheism. Man is
+the resultant of what his parents were, of what his surroundings have
+been and are, and of what they have made him; himself the result of
+the past he modifies the actual, and so the action and reaction go on,
+he himself the effect of what is past, and one of the causes of what
+is to come. Make the circumstances good and the results will be good,
+for healthy bodies and healthy brains may be built up, and from a
+State composed of such the disease of crime will have disappeared.
+Thus is our work full of hope; no terrible will of God have we to
+struggle against; no despairful future to look forward to, of a world
+growing more and more evil, until it is, at last, to burned up; but a
+glad, fair future of an ever-rising race, where more equal laws, more
+general education, more just division, shall eradicate pauperism,
+destroy ignorance, nourish independence, a future to be made the
+grander by our struggles, a future to be made the nearer by our
+toil."[23]
+
+This joyous, self-reliant facing of the world with the resolute
+determination to improve it is characteristic of the noblest Atheism
+of our day. And it is thus a distintly elevating factor in the midst
+of the selfishness, luxury, and greed of modern civilisation. It is a
+virile virtue in the midst of the calculating and slothful spirit
+which too ofter veils itself under the pretence or religion. It will
+have no putting off of justice to a far-off day of reckoning, and it
+is ever spurred on by the feeling, "The night cometh, when no man can
+work." Bereft of all hope of a personal future, it binds up its hopes
+with that of the race; unbelieving in any aid from Deity, it struggles
+the more strenuously to work out man's salvation by his own strength.
+"To us there is but small comfort in Miss Cobbe's assurance that
+'earth's wrongs and agonies' 'will be righted hereafter.' Granting for
+a moment that man survives death what certainty have we that 'the next
+world' will be any improvement on this? Miss Cobbe assures us that
+this is 'God's world'; whose world will the next be, if not also His?
+Will He be stronger there or better, that He should set right in that
+world the wrongs He has permitted here? Will He have changed His mind,
+or have become weary of the contemplation of suffering? To me the
+thought that the world was in the hands of a God who permitted all the
+present wrongs and pains to exist would be intolerable, maddening in
+its hopelessness. There is every hope of righting earth's wrongs and
+of curing earth's pains if the reason and skill of man which have
+already done so much are free to do the rest; but if they are to
+strive against omnipotence, hopeless indeed is the future of the
+world. It is in this sense that the Atheist looks on good as 'the
+final goal of ill,' and believing that that goal will be reached the
+sooner the more strenuous the efforts of each individual, he works in
+the glad certainty that he is aiding the world's progress thitherward.
+Not dreaming of a personal reward hereafter, not craving a personal
+payment from heavenly treasury, he works and loves, content that he is
+building a future fairer than his present, joyous that he is creating
+a new earth for a happier race."[24]
+
+Such was the creed and such the morality which governed my life and
+thoughts from 1874 to 1886, and with some misgivings to 1889, and from
+which I drew strength and happiness amid all outer struggles and
+distress. And I shall ever remain grateful for the intellectual and
+moral training it gave me, for the self-reliance it nurtured, for the
+altruism it inculcated, for the deep feeling of the unity of man that
+it fostered, for the inspiration to work that it lent. And perhaps the
+chief debt of gratitude I owe to Freethought is that it left the mind
+ever open to new truth, encouraged the most unshrinking questioning of
+Nature, and shrank from no new conclusions, however adverse to the
+old, that were based on solid evidence. I admit sorrowfully that all
+Freethinkers do not learn this lesson, but I worked side by side with
+Charles Bradlaugh, and the Freethought we strove to spread was
+strong-headed and broad-hearted.
+
+The antagonism which, as we shall see in a few moments, blazed out
+against me from the commencement of my platform work, was based partly
+on ignorance, was partly aroused by my direct attacks on Christianity,
+and by the combative spirit I myself showed in those attacks, and very
+largely by my extreme Radicalism in politics. I had against me all the
+conventional beliefs and traditions of society in general, and I
+attacked them, not with bated breath and abundant apologies, but
+joyously and defiantly, with sheer delight in the intellectual strife.
+I was fired, too, with passionate sympathy for the sufferings of the
+poor, for the overburdened, overdriven masses of the people, not only
+here but in every land, and wherever a blow was struck at Liberty or
+Justice my pen or tongue brake silence. It was a perpetual carrying of
+the fiery cross, and the comfortable did not thank me for shaking them
+out of their soft repose.
+
+The antagonism that grew out of ignorance regarded Atheism as implying
+degraded morality and bestial life, and they assailed my conduct not
+on evidence that it was evil, but on the presumption that an Atheist
+must be immoral. Thus a Christian opponent at Leicester assailed me as
+a teacher of free love, fathering on me views which were maintained in
+a book that I had not read, but which, before I had ever seen the
+_National Reformer_, had been reviewed in its columns--as it was
+reviewed in other London papers--and had been commended for its clear
+statement of the Malthusian position, but not for its contention as to
+free love, a theory to which Mr. Bradlaugh was very strongly opposed.
+Nor were the attacks confined to the ascription to me of theories
+which I did not hold, but agents of the Christian Evidence Society, in
+their street preaching, made the foulest accusations against me of
+personal immorality. Remonstrances addressed to the Rev. Mr. Engstroem,
+the secretary of the society, brought voluble protestations of
+disavowal and disapproval; but as the peccant agents were continued in
+their employment, the apologies were of small value. No accusation was
+too coarse, no slander too baseless, for circulation by these men; and
+for a long time these indignities caused me bitter suffering,
+outraging my pride, and soiling my good name. The time was to come
+when I should throw that good name to the winds for the sake of the
+miserable, but in those early days I had done nothing to merit, even
+ostensibly, such attacks. Even by educated writers, who should have
+known better, the most wanton accusations of violence and would-be
+destructiveness were brought against Atheists; thus Miss Frances Power
+Cobbe wrote in the _Contemporary Review_ that loss of faith in God
+would bring about the secularisation _or destruction_ of all
+cathedrals, churches, and chapels. "Why," I wrote in answer, "should
+cathedrals, churches, and chapels be destroyed? Atheism will utilise,
+not destroy, the beautiful edifices which, once wasted on God, shall
+hereafter be consecrated for man. Destroy Westminster Abbey, with its
+exquisite arches, its glorious tones of soft, rich colour, its
+stonework light as if of cloud, its dreamy, subdued twilight, soothing
+as the 'shadow of a great rock in a weary land'? Nay, but reconsecrate
+it to humanity. The fat cherubs who tumble over guns and banners on
+soldiers' graves will fitly be removed to some spot where their clumsy
+forms will no longer mar the upward-springing grace of lines of pillar
+and of arch; but the glorious building wherein now barbaric psalms are
+chanted and droning canons preach of Eastern follies, shall hereafter
+echo the majestic music of Wagner and Beethoven, and the teachers of
+the future shall there unveil to thronging multitudes the beauties and
+the wonders of the world. The 'towers and spires' will not be effaced,
+but they will no longer be symbols of a religion which sacrifices
+earth to heaven and Man to God."[25] Between the cultured and the
+uncultured burlesques of Atheism we came off pretty badly, being for
+the most part regarded, as the late Cardinal Manning termed us, as
+mere "cattle."
+
+The moral purity and elevation of Atheistic teaching were overlooked
+by many who heard only of my bitter attacks on Christian theology.
+Against the teachings of eternal torture, of the vicarious atonement,
+of the infallibility of the Bible, I levelled all the strength of my
+brain and tongue, and I exposed the history of the Christian Church
+with unsparing hand, its persecutions, its religious wars, its
+cruelties, its oppressions. Smarting under the suffering inflicted on
+myself, and wroth with the cruel pressure continually put on
+Freethinkers by Christian employers, speaking under constant threats
+of prosecution, identifying Christianity with the political and social
+tyrannies of Christendom, I used every weapon that history, science,
+criticism, scholarship could give me against the Churches; eloquence,
+sarcasm, mockery, all were called on to make breaches in the wall of
+traditional belief and crass superstition.
+
+To argument and reason I was ever ready to listen, but I turned a
+front of stubborn defiance to all attempts to compel assent to
+Christianity by appeals to force. "The threat and the enforcement of
+legal and social penalties against unbelief can never compel belief.
+Belief must be gained by demonstration; it can never be forced by
+punishment. Persecution makes the stronger among us bitter; the weaker
+among us hypocrites; it never has made and never can make an honest
+convert."[26]
+
+That men and women are now able to speak and think as openly as they
+do, that a broader spirit is visible in the Churches, that heresy is
+no longer regarded as morally disgraceful--these things are very
+largely due to the active and militant propaganda carried on under the
+leadership of Charles Bradlaugh, whose nearest and most trusted friend
+I was. That my tongue was in the early days bitterer than it should
+have been, I frankly acknowledge; that I ignored the services done by
+Christianity and threw light only on its crimes, thus committing
+injustice, I am ready to admit. But these faults were conquered long
+ere I left the Atheistic camp, and they were the faults of my
+personality, not of the Atheistic philosophy. And my main contentions
+were true, and needed to be made; from many a Christian pulpit to-day
+may be heard the echo of the Freethought teachings; men's minds have
+been awakened, their knowledge enlarged; and while I condemn the
+unnecessary harshness of some of my language, I rejoice that I played
+my part in that educating of England which has made impossible for
+evermore the crude superstitions of the past, and the repetition of
+the cruelties and injustices under which preceding heretics suffered.
+
+But my extreme political views had also much to do with the general
+feeling of hatred with which I was regarded. Politics, as such, I
+cared not for at all, for the necessary compromises of political life
+were intolerable to me; but wherever they touched on the life of the
+people they became to me of burning interest. The land question, the
+incidence of taxation, the cost of Royalty, the obstructive power of
+the House of Lords--these were the matters to which I put my hand; I
+was a Home Ruler, too, of course, and a passionate opponent of all
+injustice to nations weaker than ourselves, so that I found myself
+always in opposition to the Government of the day. Against our
+aggressive and oppressive policy in Ireland, in the Transvaal, in
+India, in Afghanistan, in Burmah, in Egypt, I lifted up my voice in
+all our great towns, trying to touch the consciences of the people,
+and to make them feel the immorality of a land-stealing, piratical
+policy. Against war, against capital punishment, against flogging,
+demanding national education instead of big guns, public libraries
+instead of warships--no wonder I was denounced as an agitator, a
+firebrand, and that all orthodox society turned up at me its most
+respectable nose.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+AT WORK.
+
+
+From this sketch of the inner sources of action let me turn to the
+actions themselves, and see how the outer life was led which fed
+itself at these springs.
+
+I have said that the friendship between Mr. Bradlaugh and myself dated
+from our first meeting, and a few days after our talk in Turner Street
+he came down to see me at Norwood. It was characteristic of the man
+that he refused my first invitation, and bade me to think well ere I
+asked him to my house. He told me that he was so hated by English
+society that any friend of his would be certain to suffer, and that I
+should pay heavily for any friendship extended to him. When, however,
+I wrote to him, repeating my invitation, and telling him that I had
+counted the cost, he came to see me. His words came true; my
+friendship for him alienated from me even many professed Freethinkers,
+but the strength and the happiness of it outweighed a thousand times
+the loss it brought, and never has a shadow of regret touched me that
+I clasped hands with him in 1874, and won the noblest friend that
+woman ever had. He never spoke to me a harsh word; where we differed,
+he never tried to override my judgment, nor force on me his views; we
+discussed all points of difference as equal friends; he guarded me
+from all suffering as far as friend might, and shared with me all the
+pain he could not turn aside; all the brightness of my stormy life
+came to me through him, from his tender thoughtfulness, his ever-ready
+sympathy, his generous love. He was the most unselfish man I ever
+knew, and as patient as he was strong. My quick, impulsive nature
+found in him the restful strength it needed, and learned from him the
+self-control it lacked.
+
+He was the merriest of companions in our rare hours of relaxation; for
+many years he was wont to come to my house in the morning, after the
+hours always set aside by him for receiving poor men who wanted advice
+on legal and other matters--for he was a veritable poor man's lawyer,
+always ready to help and counsel--and, bringing his books and papers,
+he would sit writing, hour after hour, I equally busy with my own
+work, now and then, perhaps, exchanging a word, breaking off just for
+lunch and dinner, and working on again in the evening till about ten
+o'clock--he always went early to bed when at home--he would take
+himself off again to his lodgings, about three-quarters of a mile
+away. Sometimes he would play cards for an hour, euchre being our
+favourite game. But while we were mostly busy and grave, we would make
+holiday sometimes, and then he was like a boy, brimming over with
+mirth, full of quaint turns of thought and speech; all the country
+round London has for me bright memories of our wanderings--Richmond,
+where we tramped across the park, and sat under its mighty trees;
+Windsor, with its groves of bracken; Kew, where we had tea in a funny
+little room, with watercress _ad libitum_; Hampton Court, with its
+dishevelled beauties; Maidenhead and Taplow, where the river was the
+attraction; and, above all, Broxbourne, where he delighted to spend
+the day with his fishing-rod, wandering along the river, of which he
+knew every eddy. For he was a great fisherman, and he taught me all
+the mysteries of the craft, mirthfully disdainful of my dislike of the
+fish when I had caught them. And in those days he would talk of all
+his hopes of the future, of his work, of his duty to the thousands who
+looked to him for guidance, of the time when he would sit in
+Parliament as member for Northampton, and help to pass into laws the
+projects of reform for which he was battling with pen and tongue. How
+often he would voice his love of England, his admiration of her
+Parliament, his pride in her history. Keenly alive to the blots upon
+it in her sinful wars of conquest, in the cruel wrongs inflicted upon
+subject peoples, he was yet an Englishman to the heart's core, but
+feeling above all the Englishman's duty, as one of a race that had
+gripped power and held it, to understand the needs of those he ruled,
+and to do justice willingly, since compulsion to justice there was
+none. His service to India in the latest years of his life was no
+suddenly accepted task. He had spoken for her, pleaded for her, for
+many a long year, through press and on platform, and his spurs as
+member for India were won long ere he was member of Parliament.
+
+A place on the staff of the _National Reformer_ was offered me by Mr.
+Bradlaugh a few days after our first meeting, and the small weekly
+salary thus earned--it was only a guinea, for national reformers are
+always poor--was a very welcome addition to my resources. My first
+contribution appeared in the number for August 30, 1874, over the
+signature of "Ajax," and I wrote in it regularly until Mr. Bradlaugh
+died; from 1877 until his death I sub-edited it, so as to free him
+from all the technical trouble and the weary reading of copy, and for
+part of this period was also co-editor. I wrote at first under a _nom
+de guerre_, because the work I was doing for Mr. Scott would have been
+prejudiced had my name appeared in the columns of the terrible
+_National Reformer_, and until this work--commenced and paid for--was
+concluded I did not feel at liberty to use my own name. Afterwards, I
+signed my _National Reformer_ articles, and the tracts written for Mr.
+Scott appeared anonymously.
+
+  The name was suggested by the famous statue of
+  "Ajax Crying for Light," a cast of which may be seen
+  in the centre walk by any visitor to the Crystal Palace,
+  Sydenham. The cry through the darkness for light,
+  even though light should bring destruction, was one
+  that awoke the keenest sympathy of response from my
+  heart:
+
+  "If our fate be death
+  Give light, and let us die!"
+
+To see, to know, to understand, even though the seeing blind, though
+the knowledge sadden, though the understanding shatter the dearest
+hopes--such has ever been the craving of the upward-striving mind in
+man. Some regard it as a weakness, as a folly, but I am sure that it
+exists most strongly in some of the noblest of our race; that from the
+lips of those who have done most in lifting the burden of ignorance
+from the overstrained and bowed shoulders of a stumbling world has
+gone out most often into the empty darkness the pleading, impassioned
+cry:
+
+"Give light!"
+
+The light may come with a blinding flash, but it is light none the
+less, and we can see.
+
+And now the time had come when I was to use that gift of speech which
+I had discovered in Sibsey Church that I possessed, and to use it to
+move hearts and brains all over the English land. In 1874, tentatively, and in 1875 definitely, I took up this keen weapon, and have used it ever
+since. My first attempt was at a garden party, in a brief informal
+debate, and I found that words came readily and smoothly: the second
+in a discussion at the Liberal Social Union on the opening of museums
+and art galleries on Sunday. My first lecture was given at the
+Co-operative Institute, 55, Castle Street, Oxford Street, on August
+25, 1874. Mr. Greening--then, I think, the secretary--had invited me
+to read a paper before the society, and had left me the choice of the
+subject. I resolved that my first public lecture should be on behalf
+of my own sex, so I selected for my theme, "The Political Status of
+Women," and wrote thereon a paper. But it was a very nervous person
+who presented herself at the Co-operative Institute on that August
+evening. When a visit to the dentist is made, and one stands on the
+steps outside, desiring to run away ere the neat little boy in buttons
+opens the door and beams on one with a smile of compassionate
+superiority and implike triumph, then the world seems dark and life is
+as a huge blunder. But all such feelings are poor and weak as compared
+with the sinking of the heart and the trembling of the knees which
+seize upon the unhappy lecturer as he advances towards his first
+audience, and as before his eyes rises a ghastly vision of a
+tongue-tied would-be lecturer, facing rows of listening faces,
+listening to--silence. But to my surprise all this miserable feeling
+vanished the moment I was on my feet and was looking at the faces
+before me. I felt no tremor of nervousness from the first word to the
+last, and as I heard my own voice ring out over the attentive
+listeners I was conscious of power and of pleasure, not of fear. And
+from that day to this my experience has been the same; before a
+lecture I am horribly nervous, wishing myself at the ends of the
+earth, heart beating violently, and sometimes overcome by deadly
+sickness. Once on my feet, I feel perfectly at my ease, ruler of the
+crowd, master of myself. I often jeer at myself mentally as I feel
+myself throbbing and fearful, knowing that when I stand up I shall be
+all right, and yet I cannot conquer the physical terror and trembling,
+illusory as I know them to be. People often say to me, "You look too
+ill to go on the platform." And I smile feebly and say I am all right,
+and I often fancy that the more miserably nervous I am in the
+ante-room, the better I speak when once on the platform. My second
+lecture was delivered on September 27th, at Mr. Moncure D. Conway's
+Chapel, in St. Paul's Road, Camden Town, and redelivered a few weeks
+later at a Unitarian Chapel, where the Rev. Peter Dean was minister.
+This was on the "True Basis of Morality," and was later printed as a
+pamphlet, which attained a wide circulation. This was all I did in the
+way of speaking in 1874, but I took silent part in an electioneering
+struggle at Northampton, where a seat for the House of Commons had
+fallen vacant by the death of Mr. Charles Gilpin. Mr. Bradlaugh had
+contested the borough as a Radical in 1868, obtaining 1,086 votes, and
+again in February, 1874, when he received 1,653; of these no less than
+1,060 were plumpers, while his four opponents had only 113, 64, 21 and
+12 plumpers respectively; this band formed the compact and personally
+loyal following which was to win the seat for its chief in 1880, after
+twelve years of steady struggle, and to return him over and over again
+to Parliament during the long contest which followed his election, and
+which ended in his final triumph. They never wavered in their
+allegiance to "our Charlie," but stood by him through evil report and
+good report, when he was outcast as when he was triumphant, loving him
+with a deep, passionate devotion, as honourable to them as it was
+precious to him. I have seen him cry like a child at evidences of
+their love for him, he whose courage no danger could daunt, and who
+was never seen to blench before hatred nor change his stern immobility
+in the face of his foes. Iron to enmity, he was soft as a woman to
+kindness; unbending as steel to pressure, he was ductile as wax to
+love. John Stuart Mill had the insight in 1868 to see his value, and
+the courage to recognise it. He strongly supported his candidature,
+and sent a donation to his election expenses. In his "Autobiography"
+he wrote (pp. 311, 312):--
+
+"He had the support of the working classes; having heard him speak I
+knew him to be a man of ability, and he had proved that he was the
+reverse of a demagogue by placing himself in strong opposition to the
+prevailing opinion of the Democratic party on two such important
+subjects as Malthusianism and Proportional Representation. Men of this
+sort, who, while sharing the democratic feeling of the working
+classes, judge political questions for themselves, and have the
+courage to assert their individual convictions against popular
+opposition, were needed, as it seemed to me, in Parliament; and I did
+not think that Mr. Bradlaugh's anti-religious opinions (even though he
+had been intemperate in the expression of them) ought to exclude him."
+
+It has been said that Mr. Mill's support of Mr. Bradlaugh's
+candidature at Northampton cost him his own seat at Westminster, and
+so bitter was bigotry at that time that the statement is very likely
+to be true. On this, Mr. Mill himself said: "It was the right thing to
+do, and if the election were yet to take place, I would do it again."
+
+At this election of September, 1874--the second in the year, for the
+general election had taken place in the February, and Mr. Bradlaugh
+had been put up and defeated during his absence in America--I went
+down to Northampton to report electioneering incidents for the
+_National Reformer_, and spent some days there in the whirl of the
+struggle. The Whig party was more bitter against Mr. Bradlaugh than
+was the Tory. Strenuous efforts were made to procure a Liberal
+candidate, who would be able at least to prevent Mr. Bradlaugh's
+return, and, by dividing the Liberal and Radical party, should let in
+a Tory rather than the detested Radical. Messrs. Bell and James and
+Dr. Pearce came on the scene only to disappear. Mr. Jacob Bright and
+Mr. Arnold Morley were vainly suggested. Mr. Ayrton's name was
+whispered. Major Lumley was recommended by Mr. Bernal Osborne. Dr.
+Kenealy proclaimed himself ready to come to the rescue of the Whigs.
+Mr. Tillett, of Norwich, Mr. Cox, of Belper, were invited, but neither
+would consent to oppose a good Radical who had fought two elections at
+Northampton and had been the chosen of the Radical workers for six
+years. At last Mr. William Fowler, a banker, accepted the task of
+handing over the representation of a Liberal and Radical borough to a
+Tory, and duly succeeded in giving the seat to Mr. Mereweather, a very
+reputable Tory lawyer. Mr. Bradlaugh polled 1,766, thus adding another
+133 voters to those who had polled for him in the previous February.
+
+That election gave me my first experience of anything in the nature of
+rioting. The violent abuse levelled against Mr. Bradlaugh by the
+Whigs, and the foul and wicked slanders circulated against him,
+assailing his private life and family relations, had angered almost to
+madness those who knew and loved him; and when it was found that the
+unscrupulous Whig devices had triumphed, had turned the election
+against him, and given over the borough to a Tory, the fury broke out
+into open violence. One illustration may be given as a type of these
+cruel slanders. It was known that Mr. Bradlaugh was separated from his
+wife, and it was alleged that being an Atheist, and, (therefore!) an
+opponent of marriage, he had deserted his wife and children, and left
+them to the workhouse. The cause of the separation was known to very
+few, for Mr. Bradlaugh was chivalrously honourable to women, and he
+would not shield his own good name at the cost of that of the wife of
+his youth and the mother of his children. But since his death his only
+remaining child has, in devotion to her father's memory, stated the
+melancholy truth: that Mrs. Bradlaugh gave way to drink; that for long
+years he bore with her and did all that man could do to save her; that
+finally, hopeless of cure, he broke up his home, and placed his wife
+in the care of her parents in the country, leaving her daughters with
+her, while he worked for their support. No man could have acted more
+generously and wisely under these cruel circumstances than he did, but
+it was, perhaps, going to an extreme of Quixotism, that he concealed
+the real state of the case, and let the public blame him as it would.
+His Northampton followers did not know the facts, but they knew him as
+an upright, noble man, and these brutal attacks on his personal
+character drove them wild. Stray fights had taken place during the
+election over these slanders, and, defeated by such foul weapons, the
+people lost control of their passions. As Mr. Bradlaugh was sitting
+well-nigh exhausted in the hotel, after the declaration of the poll,
+the landlord rushed in, crying to him to go out and try to stop the
+people, or there would be murder done at the "Palmerston," Mr.
+Fowler's headquarters; the crowd was charging the door, and the
+windows were being broken with showers of stones. Weary as he was, Mr.
+Bradlaugh sprang to his feet, and swiftly made his way to the rescue
+of those who had maligned and defeated him. Flinging himself before
+the doorway, from which the door had just been battered down, he
+knocked down one or two of the most violent, drove the crowd back,
+argued and scolded them into quietness, and finally dispersed them.
+But at nine o'clock he had to leave Northampton to catch the mail
+steamer for America at Queenstown, and after he had left, word went
+round that he had gone, and the riot he had quelled broke out afresh.
+The Riot Act was at last read, the soldiers were called out, stones
+flew freely, heads and windows were broken, but no very serious harm
+was done. The "Palmerston" and the printing-office of the _Mercury_,
+the Whig organ, were the principal sufferers; doors and windows
+disappearing somewhat completely. The day after the election I
+returned home, and soon after fell ill with a severe attack of
+congestion of the lungs. Soon after my recovery I left Norwood and
+settled in a house in Westbourne Terrace, Bayswater, where I remained
+till 1876.
+
+In the following January (1875), after much thought and self-analysis,
+I resolved to give myself wholly to propagandist work, as a
+Freethinker and a Social Reformer, and to use my tongue as well as my
+pen in the struggle. I counted the cost ere I determined on this step,
+for I knew that it would not only outrage the feelings of such new
+friends as I had already made, but would be likely to imperil my
+custody of my little girl. I knew that an Atheist was outside the law,
+obnoxious to its penalties, but deprived of its protection, and that
+the step I contemplated might carry me into conflicts in which
+everything might be lost and nothing could be gained. But the desire
+to spread liberty and truer thought among men, to war against bigotry
+and superstition, to make the world freer and better than I found
+it--all this impelled me with a force that would not be denied. I
+seemed to hear the voice of Truth ringing over the battlefield: "Who
+will go? Who will speak for me?" And I sprang forward with passionate
+enthusiasm, with resolute cry: "Here am I, send me!" Nor have I ever
+regretted for one hour that resolution, come to in solitude, carried
+out amid the surging life of men, to devote to that sacred cause every
+power of brain and tongue that I possessed. Very solemn to me is the
+responsibility of the public teacher, standing forth in Press and on
+platform to partly mould the thought of his time, swaying thousands of
+readers and hearers year after year. No weighter responsibility can
+any take, no more sacred charge. The written and the spoken word start
+forces none may measure, set working brain after brain, influence
+numbers unknown to the forthgiver of the word, work for good or for
+evil all down the stream of time. Feeling the greatness of the career,
+the solemnity of the duty, I pledged my word then to the cause I loved
+that no effort on my part should be wanted to render myself worthy of
+the privilege of service that I took; that I would read and study, and
+would train every faculty that I had; that I would polish my language,
+discipline my thought, widen my knowledge; and this, at least, I may
+say, that if I have written and spoken much, I have studied and
+thought more, and that I have not given to my mistress Truth that
+"which hath cost me nothing."
+
+This same year (1875) that saw me launched on the world as a public
+advocate of Freethought, saw also the founding of the Theosophical
+Society to which my Freethought was to lead me. I have often since
+thought with pleasure that at the very time I began lecturing in
+England, H.P. Blavatsky was at work in the United States, preparing
+the foundation on which in November, 1875, the Theosophical Society
+was to be raised. And with deeper pleasure yet have I found her
+writing of what she called the noble work against superstition done by
+Charles Bradlaugh and myself, rendering the propaganda of Theosophy
+far more practicable and safer than it would otherwise have been. The
+fight soon began, and with some queer little skirmishes. I was a
+member of the "Liberal Social Union," and one night a discussion arose
+as to the admissibility of Atheists to the Society. Dr. Zerffi
+declared that he would not remain a member if avowed Atheists were
+admitted. I promptly declared that I was an Atheist, and that the
+basis of the union was liberty of opinion. The result was that I found
+myself cold-shouldered, and those that had been warmly cordial to me
+merely as a non-Christian looked askance at me when I had avowed that
+my scepticism had advanced beyond their "limits of religious thought."
+The Liberal Social Union soon knew me no more, but in the wider field
+of work open before me, the narrow-mindedness of this petty clique
+troubled me not at all.
+
+I started my definite lecturing work at South Place Chapel in January,
+1875, Mr. Moncure D. Conway presiding for me, and I find in the
+_National Reformer_ for January 17th, the announcement that "Mrs.
+Annie Besant ('Ajax') will lecture at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, on
+'Civil and Religious Liberty.'" Thus I threw off my pseudonym, and
+rode into the field of battle with uplifted visor. The identification
+led to an odd little exhibition of bigotry. I had been invited by the
+Dialectical Society to read a paper, and had selected for subject,
+"The Existence of God." (It may be noted, in passing, that young
+students and speakers always select the most tremendous subjects for
+their discourses. One advances in modesty as one advances in
+knowledge, and after eighteen years of platform work, I am far more
+dubious than I was at their beginning as to my power of dealing in any
+sense adequately with the problems of life.) The Dialectical Society
+had for some years held their meetings in a room in Adam Street,
+rented from the Social Science Association. When the members gathered
+as usual on February 17th, the door was found to be locked, and they
+had to gather on the stairs; they found that "Ajax's" as yet
+undelivered paper was too much for Social Science nerves, and that
+entrance to their ordinary meeting-room was then and thenceforth
+denied them. So they, with "Ajax," found refuge at the Charing Cross
+Hotel, and speculated merrily on the eccentricities of religious
+bigotry.
+
+On February 12th I started on my first provincial lecturing tour, and
+after speaking at Birkenhead that evening went on by the night mail to
+Glasgow. Some races--dog races--I think, had been going on, and very
+unpleasant were many of the passengers waiting on the platform. Some
+Birkenhead friends had secured me a compartment, and watched over me
+till the train began to move. Then, after we had fairly started, the
+door was flung open by a porter, and a man was thrust in who half
+tumbled on to the seat. As he slowly recovered he stood up, and as his
+money rolled out of his hand on to the floor, and he gazed vaguely at
+it, I saw to my horror that he was drunk. The position was not
+pleasant, for the train was an express, and was not timed to stop for
+a considerable time. My odious fellow-passenger spent some time on the
+floor, hunting after his scattered coins; then he slowly gathered
+himself up and presently became conscious of my presence. He studied
+me for some time, and then proposed to shut the window. I assented
+quietly, not wanting to discuss a trifle and feeling in deadly
+terror--alone at night in an express with a man not drunk enough to be
+helpless, but too drunk to be controlled. Never before nor since have
+I felt so thoroughly frightened. I can see him still, swaying as he
+stood, with eyes bleared and pendulous lips--but I sat there quiet and
+outwardly unmoved, as is always my impulse in danger till I see some
+way of escape, only grasping a penknife in my pocket, with a desperate
+resolve to use my feeble weapon as soon as the need arose. The man
+came towards me with a fatuous leer, when a jarring noise was heard
+and the train began to slacken.
+
+"What is that?" stammered my drunken companion.
+
+"They are putting on the brakes to stop the train," I answered very
+slowly and distinctly, though a very passion of relief made it hard to
+say quietly the measured words.
+
+The man sat down stupidly, staring at me, and in a minute or two the
+train pulled up at a station--it had been stopped by signal. My
+immobility was gone. In a moment I was at the window, called the
+guard, and explained rapidly that I was a woman travelling alone, and
+that a half-drunken man was in the carriage. With the usual kindness
+of a railway official, he at once moved me and my baggage into another
+compartment, into which he locked me, and he kept a friendly watch
+over me at every station at which we stopped until he landed me safely
+at Glasgow.
+
+At Glasgow a room had been taken for me at a temperance hotel, and it
+seemed to me so new and lonely a thing to be "all on my own account"
+in a strange hotel in a strange city, that I wanted to sit down and
+cry. This feeling, to which I was too proud to yield, was probably
+partly due to the extreme greyness and grubbiness of my surroundings.
+Things are better now, but in those days temperance hotels were for
+the most part lacking in cleanliness. Abstinence from alcohol and a
+superfluity of "matter in the wrong place" do not seem necessary
+correlatives, yet I rarely went to a temperance hotel in which water
+was liberally used for other purposes than that of drinking. From
+Glasgow I went north to Aberdeen, where I found a very stern and
+critical audience. Not a sound broke the stillness as I walked up the
+hall; not a sound as I ascended the platform and faced the people; the
+canny Scot was not going to applaud a stranger at sight; he was going
+to see what she was like first. In grim silence they listened; I could
+not move them; they were granite like their own granite city, and I
+felt I would like to take off my head and throw it at them, if only to
+break that hard wall. After about twenty minutes, a fortunate phrase
+drew a hiss from some child of the Covenanters. I made a quick retort,
+there was a burst of cheering, and the granite vanished. Never after
+that did I have to complain of the coldness of an Aberdeen audience.
+Back to London from Aberdeen, and a long, weary journey it was, in a
+third-class carriage in the cold month of February; but the labour had
+in it a joy that outpaid all physical discomfort, and the feeling that
+I had found my work in the world gave a new happiness to life.
+
+On February 28th I stood for the first time on the platform of the
+Hall of Science, Old Street, St. Luke's, London, and was received with
+that warmth of greeting which Secularists are always so ready to
+extend to any who sacrifice aught to join their ranks. That hall is
+identified in my mind with many a bitter struggle, with both victory
+and defeat, but whether in victory or in defeat I found there always
+welcome; and the love and the courage wherewith Secularists stood by
+me have overpaid a thousandfold any poor services I was fortunate
+enough to render, while in their ranks, to the cause of Liberty, and
+wholly prevent any bitterness arising in my mind for any
+unfriendliness shown me by some, who have perhaps overstepped kindness
+and justice in their sorrowful wrath at my renunciation of Materialism
+and Atheism. So far as health was concerned, the lecturing acted as a
+tonic. My chest had always been a little delicate, and when I
+consulted a doctor on the possibility of my standing platform work, he
+answered, "It will either kill you or cure you." It entirely cured the
+lung weakness, and I grew strong and vigorous instead of being frail
+and delicate, as of old.
+
+It would be wearisome to go step by step over eighteen years of
+platform work, so I will only select here and there incidents
+illustrative of the whole. And here let me say that the frequent
+attacks made on myself and others, that we were attracted to
+Free-thought propaganda by the gains it offered, formed a somewhat
+grotesque contrast to the facts. On one occasion I spent eight days in
+Northumberland and Durham, gave twelve lectures, and made a deficit of
+eleven shillings on the whole. Of course such a thing could not happen
+in later years, when I had made my name by sheer hard work, but I
+fancy that every Secularist lecturer could tell of similar experiences
+in the early days of "winning his way." The fact is that from Mr.
+Bradlaugh downwards every one of us could have earned a competence
+with comparative ease in any other line of work, and could have earned
+it with public approval instead of amid popular reproach. Much of my
+early lecturing was done in Northumberland and Durham; the miners
+there are, as a rule, shrewd and hard-headed men, and very cordial is
+the greeting given by them to those they have reason to trust. At
+Seghill and at Bedlington I have slept in their cottages and have been
+welcomed to their tables, and I have a vivid memory of one evening at
+Seghill, after a lecture, when my host, himself a miner, invited about
+a dozen of his comrades to supper to meet me; the talk ran on
+politics, and I soon found that my companions knew more of English
+politics, had a far shrewder notion of political methods, and were,
+therefore, much better worth talking to, than most of the ordinary men
+met at dinner parties "in society." They were of the "uneducated"
+class despised by "gentlemen," and had not then the franchise, but
+politically they were far better educated than their social superiors,
+and were far better fitted to discharge the duties of citizenship. How
+well, too, do I remember a ten-mile drive in a butcher's cart, to give
+a lecture in an out-of-the-way spot, unapproached by railway. Such was
+the jolting as we rattled over rough roads and stony places, that I
+felt as though all my bones were broken, and as though I should
+collapse on the platform like a bag half-filled with stones. How kind
+they were to me, those genial, cordial miners, how careful for my
+comfort, and how motherly were the women! Ah! if opponents of my views
+who did not know me were often cruel and malignant, there was
+compensation in the love and honour in which good men and women all
+the country over held me, and their devotion outweighed the hatred,
+and many a time and often soothed a weary and aching heart.
+
+Lecturing in June, 1875, at Leicester, I came for the first time
+across a falsehood that brought sore trouble and cost me more pain
+than I care to tell. An irate Christian opponent, in the discussion
+that followed the lecture, declared that I was responsible for a book
+entitled, "The Elements of Social Science," which was, he averred,
+"The Bible of Secularists." I had never heard of the book, but as he
+stated that it was in favour of the abolition of marriage, and that
+Mr. Bradlaugh agreed with it, I promptly contradicted him; for while I
+knew nothing about the book, I knew a great deal about Mr. Bradlaugh,
+and I knew that on the marriage question he was conservative rather
+than revolutionary. He detested "Free Love" doctrines, and had thrown
+himself strongly on the side of the agitation led so heroically for
+many years by Mrs. Josephine Butler. On my return to London after the
+lecture I naturally made inquiry as to the volume and its contents,
+and I found that it had been written by a Doctor of Medicine some
+years before, and sent to the _National Reformer_ for review, as to
+other journals, in ordinary course of business. It consisted of three
+parts--the first advocated, from the standpoint of medical science,
+what is roughly known as "Free Love"; the second was entirely medical;
+the third consisted of a clear and able exposition of the law of
+population as laid down by the Rev. Mr. Malthus, and--following the
+lines of John Stuart Mill--insisted that it was the duty of married
+persons to voluntarily limit their families within their means of
+subsistence. Mr. Bradlaugh, in reviewing the book, said that it was
+written "with honest and pure intent and purpose," and recommended to
+working men the exposition of the law of population. His enemies took
+hold of this recommendation, declared that he shared the author's
+views on the impermanence of the marriage tie, and, despite his
+reiterated contradictions, they used extracts against marriage from
+the book as containing his views. Anything more meanly vile it would
+be difficult to conceive, but such were the weapons used against him
+all his life, and used often by men whose own lives contrasted most
+unfavourably with his own. Unable to find anything in his own writings
+to serve their purpose, they used this book to damage him with those
+who knew nothing at first-hand of his views. What his enemies feared
+were not his views on marriage--which, as I have said, was
+conservative--but his Radicalism and his Atheism. To discredit him as
+politician they maligned him socially, and the idea that a man desires
+"to abolish marriage and the home," is a most convenient poniard, and
+the one most certain to wound. This was the origin of his worst
+difficulties, to be intensified, ere long, by his defence of
+Malthusianism. On me also fell the same lash, and I found myself held
+up to hatred as upholder of views that I abhorred.
+
+I may add that far warmer praise than that bestowed on this book by
+Mr. Bradlaugh was given by other writers, who were never attacked in
+the same way.
+
+In the _Reasoner_, edited by Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, I find warmer
+praise of it than in the _National Reformer_; in the review the
+following passage appears:--
+
+"In some respects all books of this class are evils: but it would be
+weakness and criminal prudery--a prudery as criminal as vice
+itself--not to say that such a book as the one in question is not only
+a far lesser evil than the one that it combats, but in one sense a
+book which it is a mercy to issue and courage to publish."
+
+The _Examiner_, reviewing the same book, declared it to be--
+
+"A very valuable, though rather heterogeneous book.... This is, we
+believe, the only book that has fully, honestly, and in a scientific
+spirit recognised all the elements in the problem--How are mankind to
+triumph over poverty, with its train of attendant evils?--and
+fearlessly endeavoured to find a practical solution."
+
+The _British Journal of Homoeopathy_ wrote:--
+
+"Though quite out of the province of our journal, we cannot refrain
+from stating that this work is unquestionably the most remarkable one,
+in many respects, we have ever met with. Though we differ _toto coelo_
+from the author in his views of religion and morality, and hold some
+of his remedies to tend rather to a dissolution than a reconstruction
+of society, yet we are bound to admit the benevolence and philanthropy
+of his motives. The scope of the work is nothing less than the whole
+field of political economy."
+
+Ernest Jones and others wrote yet more strongly, but out of all these
+Charles Bradlaugh alone has been selected for reproach, and has had
+the peculiar views of the anonymous author fathered on himself.
+
+Some of the lecture work in those days was pretty rough. In Darwen,
+Lancashire, in June, 1875, stone-throwing was regarded as a fair
+argument addressed to the Atheist lecturer. At Swansea, in March,
+1876, the fear of violence was so great that a guarantee against
+damage to the hall was exacted by the proprietor, and no local friend
+had the courage to take the chair for me. In September, 1876, at
+Hoyland, thanks to the exertions of Mr. Hebblethwaite, a Primitive
+Methodist, and two Protestant missionaries, I found the hall packed
+with a crowd that yelled at me with great vigour, stood on forms,
+shook fists at me, and otherwise showed feelings more warm than
+friendly. Taking advantage of a lull in the noise, I began to speak,
+and the tumult sank into quietness; but as I was leaving the hall it
+broke out afresh, and I walked slowly through a crowd that yelled and
+swore and struck at me, but somehow those nearest always shrank back
+and let me pass. In the dark, outside the hall, they took to kicking,
+but only one kick reached me, and the attempts to overturn the cab
+were foiled by the driver, who put his horse at a gallop. Later in the
+same month Mr. Bradlaugh and I visited Congleton together, having been
+invited there by Mr. and Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy. Mr. Bradlaugh
+lectured on the first evening to an accompaniment of broken windows,
+and I, sitting with Mrs. Elmy facing the platform, received a rather
+heavy blow on the back of the head from a stone thrown by some one in
+the room. We had a mile and a half to walk from the hall to the house,
+and were accompanied all the way by a stone-throwing crowd, who sang
+hymns at the tops of their voices, with interludes of curses and foul
+words. On the following evening I lectured, and our stone-throwing
+admirers escorted us to the hall; in the middle of the lecture a man
+shouted, "Put her out!" and a well-known wrestler of the
+neighbourhood, named Burbery, who had come to the hall with some
+friends to break up the meeting, stood up as at a signal in front of
+the platform and loudly interrupted. Mr. Bradlaugh, who was in the
+chair, told him to sit down, and, as he persisted in interrupting,
+informed him that he must either be quiet or go out. "Put me out!"
+shouted Mr. Burbery, striking an attitude. Mr. Bradlaugh left the
+platform and walked up to the noisy swashbuckler, who at once grappled
+with him and tried to throw him. But Mr. Burbery had not reckoned on
+the massive strength of his opponent, and when the "throw" was
+complete Mr. Burbery was underneath. Amid much excitement Mr. Burbery
+was propelled towards the door, being gently used on the way as a
+battering-ram against his friends who rushed to the rescue, and at the
+door was handed over to the police. The chairman then resumed his
+normal duties, with a brief "Go on" to me, and I promptly went on,
+finishing the lecture in peace. But outside the hall there was plenty
+of stone-throwing, and Mrs. Elmy received a cut on the temple from a
+flint. This stormy work gradually lessened, and my experience of it
+was a mere trifle compared to that which my predecessors had faced.
+Mr. Bradlaugh's early experiences involved much serious rioting, and
+Mrs. Harriet Law, a woman of much courage and of strong natural
+ability, had many a rough meeting in her lecturing days.
+
+In September, 1875, Mr. Bradlaugh again sailed for America, still to
+earn money there to pay his debts. Unhappily he was struck down by
+typhoid fever, and all his hopes of freeing himself thus were
+destroyed. His life was well-nigh despaired of, but the admirable
+skill of physician and nurse pulled him through. Said the _Baltimore
+Advertiser_:--
+
+"This long and severe illness has disappointed the hopes and retarded
+the object for which he came to this country; but he is gentleness and
+patience itself in his sickness in this strange land, and has endeared
+himself greatly to his physicians and attendants by his gratitude and
+appreciation of the slightest attention."
+
+His fortitude in face of death was also much commented on, lying there
+as he did far from home and from all he loved best. Never a quiver of
+fear touched him as he walked down into the valley of the shadow of
+death; the Rev. Mr. Frothingham bore public and admiring testimony in
+his own church to Mr. Bradlaugh's noble serenity, at once fearless and
+unpretending, and, himself a Theist, gave willing witness to the
+Atheist's calm strength. He came back to us at the end of September,
+worn to a shadow, weak as a child, and for many a long month he bore
+the traces of his wrestle with death.
+
+One part of my autumn's work during his absence was the delivery and
+subsequent publication of six lectures on the French Revolution. That
+stormy time had for me an intense fascination. I brooded over it,
+dreamed over it, and longed to tell the story from the people's point
+of view. I consequently read a large amount of the current literature
+of the time, as well as Louis Blanc's monumental work and the
+histories of Michelet, Lamartine, and others. Fortunately for me, Mr.
+Bradlaugh had a splendid collection of books on the subject, and ere
+we left England he brought me two cabs-full of volumes, aristocratic,
+ecclesiastical, democratic, and I studied all these diligently, and
+lived in them, till the French Revolution became to me as a drama in
+which I had myself taken part, and the actors were to me as personal
+friends and foes. In this, again, as in so much of my public work, I
+have to thank Mr. Bradlaugh for the influence which led me to read
+fully all sides of a question, and to read most carefully those from
+which I differed most, ere I considered myself competent to write or
+to speak thereon. From 1875 onwards I held office as one of the
+vice-presidents of the National Secular Society--a society founded on
+a broad basis of liberty, with the inspiring motto, "We Search for
+Truth." Mr. Bradlaugh was president, and I held office under him till
+he resigned his post in February, 1890, nine months after I had joined
+the Theosophical Society. The N.S.S., under his judicious and
+far-sighted leadership, became a real force in the country,
+theologically and politically, embracing large numbers of men and
+women who were Freethinkers as well as Radicals, and forming a nucleus
+of earnest workers, able to gather round them still larger numbers of
+others, and thus to powerfully affect public opinion. Once a year the
+society met in conference, and many a strong and lasting friendship
+between men living far apart dated from these yearly gatherings, so
+that all over the country spread a net-work of comradeship between the
+staunch followers of "our Charlie." These were the men and women who
+paid his election expenses over and over again, supported him in his
+Parliamentary struggle, came up to London to swell the demonstrations
+in his favour. And round them grew up a huge party--"the largest
+personal following of any public man since Mr. Gladstone," it was once
+said by an eminent man--who differed from him in theology, but
+passionately supported him in politics; miners, cutlers, weavers,
+spinners, shoemakers, operatives of every trade, strong, sturdy,
+self-reliant men who loved him to the last.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+THE KNOWLTON PAMPHLET.
+
+
+The year 1877 dawned, and in its early days began a struggle which,
+ending in victory all along the line, brought with it pain and anguish
+that I scarcely care to recall. An American physician, Dr. Charles
+Knowlton, convinced of the truth of the teaching of the Rev. Mr.
+Malthus, and seeing that that teaching had either no practical value
+or tended to the great increase of prostitution, unless married
+people were taught to limit their families within their means of
+livelihood--wrote a pamphlet on the voluntary limitation of the
+family. It was published somewhere in the Thirties--about 1835, I
+think--and was sold unchallenged in England as well as in America for
+some forty years. Philosophers of the Bentham school, like John Stuart
+Mill, endorsed its teachings, and the bearing of population on poverty
+was an axiom in economic literature. Dr. Knowlton's work was a
+physiological treatise, advocating conjugal prudence and parental
+responsibility; it argued in favour of early marriage, with a view to
+the purity of social life; but as early marriage between persons of
+small means generally implies a large family, leading either to
+pauperism or to lack of necessary food, clothing, education, and fair
+start in life for the children, Dr. Knowlton advocated the restriction
+of the number of the family within the means of subsistence, and
+stated the methods by which this restriction could be carried out. The
+book was never challenged till a disreputable Bristol bookseller put
+some copies on sale to which he added some improper pictures, and he
+was prosecuted and convicted. The publisher of the _National Reformer_
+and of Mr. Bradlaugh's and my books and pamphlets had taken over a
+stock of Knowlton's pamphlets among other literature he bought, and he
+was prosecuted and, to our great dismay, pleaded guilty. We at once
+removed our publishing from his hands, and after careful deliberation
+we decided to publish the incriminated pamphlet in order to test the
+right of discussion on the population question, when, with the advice
+to limit the family, information was given as to how that advice could
+be followed. We took a little shop, printed the pamphlet, and sent
+notice to the police that we would commence the sale at a certain day
+and hour, and ourselves sell the pamphlet, so that no one else might
+be endangered by our action. We resigned our offices in the National
+Secular Society that we might not injure the society, but the
+executive first, and then the Annual Conference, refused to accept the
+resignations. Our position as regarded the pamphlet was simple and
+definite; had it been brought to us for publication, we stated, we
+should not have published it, for it was not a treatise of high merit;
+but, prosecuted as immoral because it advised the limitation of the
+family, it at once embodied the right of publication. In a preface to
+the republished edition, we wrote:--
+
+"We republish this pamphlet, honestly believing that on all questions
+affecting the happiness of the people, whether they be theological,
+political, or social, fullest right of free discussion ought to be
+maintained at all hazards. We do not personally endorse all that Dr.
+Knowlton says: his 'Philosophical Proem' seems to us full of
+philosophical mistakes, and--as we are neither of us doctors--we are
+not prepared to endorse his medical views; but since progress can only
+be made through discussion, and no discussion is possible where
+differing opinions are suppressed, we claim the right to publish all
+opinions, so that the public, enabled to see all sides of a question,
+may have the materials for forming a sound judgment."
+
+We were not blind to the danger to which this defiance of the
+authorities exposed us, but it was not the danger of failure, with the
+prison as penalty, that gave us pause. It was the horrible
+misconceptions that we saw might arise; the odious imputations on
+honour and purity that would follow. Could we, the teachers of a lofty
+morality, venture to face a prosecution for publishing what would be
+technically described as an obscene book, and risk the ruin of our
+future, dependent as that was on our fair fame? To Mr. Bradlaugh it
+meant, as he felt, the almost certain destruction of his Parliamentary
+position, the forging by his own hands of a weapon that in the hands
+of his foes would be well-nigh fatal. To me it meant the loss of the
+pure reputation I prized, the good name I had guarded--scandal the
+most terrible a woman could face. But I had seen the misery of the
+poor, of my sister-women with children crying for bread; the wages of
+the workmen were often sufficient for four, but eight or ten they
+could not maintain. Should I set my own safety, my own good name,
+against the helping of these? Did it matter that my reputation should
+be ruined, if its ruin helped to bring remedy to this otherwise
+hopeless wretchedness of thousands? What was worth all my talk about
+self-sacrifice and self-surrender, if, brought to the test, I failed?
+So, with heart aching but steady, I came to my resolution; and though
+I know now that I was wrong intellectually, and blundered in the
+remedy, I was right morally in the will to sacrifice all to help the
+poor, and I can rejoice that I faced a storm of obloquy fiercer and
+harder to bear than any other which can ever touch me again. I learned
+a lesson of stern indifference to all judgments from without that were
+not endorsed by condemnation from within. The long suffering that
+followed was a splendid school for the teaching of endurance.
+
+The day before the pamphlet was put on sale we ourselves delivered
+copies to the Chief Clerk of the Magistrates at Guildhall, to the
+officer in charge at the City Police Office in Old Jewry, and to the
+Solicitor for the City of London. With each pamphlet was a notice that
+we would attend and sell the book from 4 to 5 p.m. on the following
+day, Saturday, March 24th. This we accordingly did, and in order to
+save trouble we offered to attend daily at the shop from 10 to 11 a.m.
+to facilitate our arrest, should the authorities determine to
+prosecute. The offer was readily accepted, and after some little
+delay--during which a deputation from the Christian Evidence Society
+waited upon Mr. Cross to urge the Tory Government to prosecute
+us--warrants were issued against us and we were arrested on April 6th.
+Letters of approval and encouragement came from the most diverse
+quarters, including among their writers General Garibaldi, the
+well-known economist, Yves Guyot, the great French constitutional
+lawyer, Emile Acollas, together with letters literally by the hundred
+from poor men and women thanking and blessing us for the stand taken.
+Noticeable were the numbers of letters from clergymen's wives, and
+wives of ministers of all denominations.
+
+After our arrest we were taken to the police-station in Bridewell
+Place, and thence to the Guildhall, where Alderman Figgins was
+sitting, before whom we duly appeared, while in the back of the court
+waited what an official described as "a regular waggon-load of bail."
+We were quickly released, the preliminary investigation being fixed
+for ten days later--April 17th. At the close of the day the magistrate
+released us on our own recognisances, without bail; and it was so
+fully seen on all sides that we were fighting for a principle that no
+bail was asked for during the various stages of the trial. Two days
+later we were committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court, but
+Mr. Bradlaugh moved for a writ of _certiorari_ to remove the trial to
+the Court of Queen's Bench; Lord Chief Justice Cockburn said he would
+grant the writ if "upon looking at it (the book), we think its object
+is the legitimate one of promoting knowledge on a matter of human
+interest," but not if the science were only a cover for impurity, and
+he directed that copies of the book should be handed in for perusal by
+himself and Mr. Justice Mellor. Having read the book they granted the
+writ.
+
+The trial commenced on June 18th before the Lord Chief Justice of
+England and a special jury, Sir Hardinge Giffard, the
+Solicitor-General of the Tory Government, leading against us, and we
+defending ourselves. The Lord Chief Justice "summed up strongly for an
+acquittal," as a morning paper said; he declared that "a more
+ill-advised and more injudicious proceeding in the way of a
+prosecution was probably never brought into a court of justice," and
+described us as "two enthusiasts who have been actuated by a desire to
+do good in a particular department of society." He then went on to a
+splendid statement of the law of population, and ended by praising our
+straightforwardness and asserting Knowlton's honesty of intention.
+Every one in court thought that we had won our case, but they had not
+taken into account the religious and political hatred against us and
+the presence on the jury of such men as Mr. Walter, of the _Times_.
+After an hour and thirty-five minutes of delay the verdict was a
+compromise: "We are unanimously of opinion that the book in question
+is calculated to deprave public morals, but at the same time we
+entirely exonerate the defendants from any corrupt motive in
+publishing it." The Lord Chief Justice looked troubled, and said that
+he should have to translate the verdict into one of guilty, and on
+that some of the jury turned to leave the box, it having been
+agreed--we heard later from one of them--that if the verdict were not
+accepted in that form they should retire again, as six of the jury
+were against convicting us; but the foreman, who was bitterly hostile,
+jumped at the chance of snatching a conviction, and none of those in
+our favour had the courage to contradict him on the spur of the
+moment, so the foreman's "Guilty" passed, and the judge set us free,
+on Mr. Bradlaugh's recognisances to come up for judgment that day
+week.
+
+On that day we moved to quash the indictment and for a new trial,
+partly on a technical ground and partly on the ground that the
+verdict, having acquitted us of wrong motive, was in our favour, not
+against us. On this the Court did not agree with us, holding that the
+part of the indictment alleging corrupt motive was superfluous. Then
+came the question of sentence, and on this the Lord Chief Justice did
+his best to save us; we were acquitted of any intent to violate the
+law; would we submit to the verdict of the jury and promise not to
+sell the book? No, we would not; we claimed the right to sell, and
+meant to vindicate it. The judge pleaded, argued, finally got angry
+with us, and, at last, compelled to pass sentence, he stated that if
+we would have yielded he would have let us go free without penalty,
+but that as we would set ourselves against the law, break it and defy
+it--a sore offence from the judge's point of view--he could only pass
+a heavy sentence on each of six months' imprisonment, a fine of L200,
+and recognisances of L500 for two years, and this, as he again
+repeated, upon the assumption "that they do intend to set the law at
+defiance." Even despite this he made us first-class misdemeanants.
+Then, as Mr. Bradlaugh stated that we should move for a writ of error,
+he liberated us on Mr. Bradlaugh's recognisance for L100, the queerest
+comment on his view of the case and of our characters, since we were
+liable jointly to L1,400 under the sentence, to say nothing of the
+imprisonment. But prison and money penalties vanished into thin air,
+for the writ of error was granted, proved successful, and the verdict
+was quashed.
+
+Then ensued a somewhat anxious time. We were resolute to continue
+selling; were our opponents equally resolved to prosecute us? We could
+not tell. I wrote a pamphlet entitled "The Law of Population," giving
+the arguments which had convinced me of its truth, the terrible
+distress and degradation entailed on families by overcrowding and the
+lack of the necessaries of life, pleading for early marriages that
+prostitution might be destroyed, and limitation of the family that
+pauperism might be avoided; finally, giving the information which
+rendered early marriage without these evils possible. This pamphlet
+was put in circulation as representing our view of the subject, and we
+again took up the sale of Knowlton's. Mr. Bradlaugh carried the war
+into the enemy's country, and commenced an action against the police
+for the recovery of some pamphlets they had seized; he carried the
+action to a successful issue, recovered the pamphlets, bore them off
+in triumph, and we sold them all with an inscription across them,
+"Recovered from the police." We continued the sale of Knowlton's tract
+for some time, until we received an intimation that no further
+prosecution would be attempted, and on this we at once dropped its
+publication, substituting for it my "Law of Population."
+
+[Illustration: CHARLES BRADLAUGH M.P.]
+
+But the worst part of the fight, for me, was to come. Prosecution of
+the "Law of Population" was threatened, but never commenced; a worse
+weapon against me was in store. An attempt had been made in August,
+1875, to deprive me of the custody of my little girl by hiding her
+away when she went on her annual visit of one month to her father, but
+I had promptly recovered her by threatening to issue a writ of _habeas
+corpus._ Now it was felt that the Knowlton trial might be added to the
+charges of blasphemy that could be urged against me, and that this
+double-barrelled gun might be discharged with effect. I received
+notice in January, 1878, that an application was to be made to the
+High Court of Chancery to deprive me of the child, but the petition
+was not filed till the following April. Mabel was dangerously ill with
+scarlet fever at the time, and though this fact was communicated to
+her father I received a copy of the petition while sitting at her
+bedside. The petition alleged that, "The said Annie Besant is, by
+addresses, lectures, and writings, endeavouring to propagate the
+principles of Atheism, and has published a book entitled 'The Gospel
+of Atheism.' She has also associated herself with an infidel lecturer
+and author named Charles Bradlaugh in giving lectures and in
+publishing books and pamphlets, whereby the truth of the Christian
+religion is impeached, and disbelief in all religion inculcated."
+
+It further alleged against me the publication of the Knowlton
+pamphlet, and the writing of the "Law of Population." Unhappily, the
+petition came for hearing before the then Master of the Rolls, Sir
+George Jessel, a man animated by the old spirit of Hebrew bigotry, to
+which he had added the time-serving morality of a "man of the world,"
+sceptical as to all sincerity, and contemptuous of all devotion to an
+unpopular cause. The treatment I received at his hands on my first
+appearance in court told me what I had to expect. I had already had
+some experience of English judges, the stately kindness and gentleness
+of the Lord Chief Justice, the perfect impartiality and dignified
+courtesy of the Lords Justices of Appeal. My astonishment, then, can
+be imagined when, in answer to a statement by Mr. Ince, Q.C., that I
+appeared in person, I heard a harsh, loud voice exclaim:
+
+"Appear in person? A lady appear in person? Never heard of such a
+thing! Does the lady really appear in person?"
+
+As the London papers had been full of my appearing in person in the
+other courts and had contained the high compliments of the Lord Chief
+Justice on my conduct of my own case, Sir George Jessel's pretended
+astonishment seemed a little overdone. After a variety of similar
+remarks delivered in the most grating tones and in the roughest
+manner, Sir George Jessel tried to obtain his object by browbeating me
+directly. "Is this the lady?"
+
+"I am the respondent, my lord, Mrs. Besant."
+
+"Then I advise you, Mrs. Besant, to employ counsel to represent you,
+if you can afford it; and I suppose you can."
+
+"With all submission to your lordship, I am afraid I must claim my
+right of arguing my case in person."
+
+"You will do so if you please, of course, but I think you had much
+better appear by counsel. I give you notice that, if you do not, you
+must not expect to be shown any consideration. You will not be heard
+by me at any greater length than the case requires, nor allowed to go
+into irrelevant matter, as persons who argue their own cases usually
+do."
+
+"I trust I shall not do so, my lord; but in any case I shall be
+arguing under your lordship's complete control."
+
+This encouraging beginning may be taken as a sample of the case--it
+was one long fight against clever counsel, aided by a counsel instead
+of a judge on the bench. Only once did judge and counsel fall out. Mr.
+Ince and Mr. Bardswell had been arguing that my Atheism and
+Malthusianism made me an unfit guardian for my child; Mr. Ince
+declared that Mabel, educated by me, would "be helpless for good in
+this world," and "hopeless for good hereafter, outcast in this life
+and damned in the next." Mr. Bardswell implored the judge to consider
+that my custody of her "would be detrimental to the future prospects
+of the child in society, to say nothing of her eternal prospects." Had
+not the matter been to me of such heart-breaking importance, I could
+have laughed at the mixture of Mrs. Grundy, marriage establishment,
+and hell, presented as an argument for robbing a mother of her child.
+But Mr. Bardswell carelessly forgot that Sir George Jessel was a Jew,
+and lifting eyes to heaven in horrified appeal, he gasped out:
+
+"Your lordship, I think, will scarcely credit it, but Mrs. Besant
+says, in a later affidavit, that she took away the Testament from the
+child because it contained coarse passages unfit for a child to read."
+
+The opportunity was too tempting for a Jew to refrain from striking at
+a book written by apostate Jews, and Sir George Jessel answered
+sharply:
+
+"It is not true to say there are no passages unfit for a child's
+reading, because I think there are a great many."
+
+"I do not know of any passages that could fairly be called coarse."
+
+"I cannot quite assent to that."
+
+Barring this little episode judge and counsel showed a charming
+unanimity. I distinctly said I was an Atheist, that I had withdrawn
+the child from religious instruction at the day-school she attended,
+that I had written various anti-Christian books, and so on; but I
+claimed the child's custody on the ground that the deed of separation
+distinctly gave it to me, and had been executed by her father after I
+had left the Christian Church, and that my opinions were not
+sufficient to invalidate it. It was admitted on the other side that
+the child was admirably cared for, and there was no attempt at
+attacking my personal character. The judge stated that I had taken the
+greatest possible care of the child, but decided that the mere fact of
+my refusing to give the child religious instruction was sufficient
+ground for depriving me of her custody. Secular education he regarded
+as "not only reprehensible, but detestable, and likely to work utter
+ruin to the child, and I certainly should upon this ground alone
+decide that this child ought not to remain another day under the care
+of her mother."
+
+Sir George Jessel denounced also my Malthusian views in a fashion at
+once so brutal and so untruthful as to facts, that some years later
+another judge, the senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court of New
+South Wales, declared in a judgment delivered in his own court that
+there was "no language used by Lord Cockburn which justified the
+Master of the Rolls in assuming that Lord Cockburn regarded the book
+as obscene," and that "little weight is to be attached to his opinion
+on a point not submitted for his decision"; he went on to administer a
+sharp rebuke for the way in which Sir George Jessel travelled outside
+the case, and remarked that "abuse, however, of an unpopular opinion,
+whether indulged in by judges or other people, is not argument, nor
+can the vituperation of opponents in opinion prove them to be
+immoral." However, Sir George Jessel was all-powerful in his own
+court, and he deprived me of my child, refusing to stay the order even
+until the hearing of my appeal against his decision. A messenger from
+the father came to my house, and the little child was carried away by
+main force, shrieking and struggling, still weak from the fever, and
+nearly frantic with fear and passionate resistance. No access to her
+was given me, and I gave notice that if access were denied me, I would
+sue for a restitution of conjugal rights, merely that I might see my
+children. But the strain had been too great, and I nearly went mad,
+spending hours pacing up and down the empty rooms, striving to weary
+myself to exhaustion that I might forget. The loneliness and silence
+of the house, of which my darling had always been the sunshine and the
+music, weighed on me like an evil dream; I listened for the patter of
+the dancing feet, and merry, thrilling laughter that rang through the
+garden, the sweet music of the childish voice; during my sleepless
+nights I missed in the darkness the soft breathing of the little
+child; each morning I longed in vain for the clinging arms and soft,
+sweet kisses. At last health broke down, and fever struck me, and
+mercifully gave me the rest of pain and delirium instead of the agony
+of conscious loss. Through that terrible illness, day after day, Mr.
+Bradlaugh came to me, and sat writing beside me, feeding me with ice
+and milk, refused from all others, and behaving more like a tender
+mother than a man friend; he saved my life, though it seemed to me for
+awhile of little value, till the first months of lonely pain were
+over. When recovered, I took steps to set aside an order obtained by
+Mr. Besant during my illness, forbidding me to bring any suit against
+him, and even the Master of the Rolls, on hearing that all access had
+been denied to me, and the money due to me stopped, uttered words of
+strong condemnation of the way in which I had been treated. Finally
+the deed of separation executed in 1873 was held to be good as
+protecting Mr. Besant from any suit brought by me, whether for divorce
+or for restitution of conjugal rights, while the clauses giving me the
+custody of the child were set aside. The Court of Appeal in April,
+1879, upheld the decision, the absolute right of the father as against
+a married mother being upheld. This ignoring of all right to her
+children on the part of the married mother is a scandal and a wrong
+that has since been redressed by Parliament, and the husband has no
+longer in his grasp this instrument of torture, whose power to agonise
+depends on the tenderness and strength of the motherliness of the
+wife. In the days when the law took my child from me, it virtually
+said to all women: "Choose which of these two positions, as wife and
+mother, you will occupy. If you are legally your husband's wife, you
+can have no legal claim to your children; if legally you are your
+husband's mistress, your rights as mother are secure." That stigma on
+marriage is now removed.
+
+One thing I gained in the Court of Appeal. The Court expressed a
+strong view as to my right of access, and directed me to apply to Sir
+George Jessel for it, adding that it could not doubt he would grant
+it. Under cover of this I applied to the Master of the Rolls, and
+obtained liberal access to the children; but I found that my visits
+kept Mabel in a continual state of longing and fretting for me, while
+the ingenious forms of petty insult that were devised against me and
+used in the children's presence would soon become palpable to them and
+cause continual pain. So, after a painful struggle with myself, I
+resolved to give up the right of seeing them, feeling that thus only
+could I save them from constantly recurring conflict, destructive of
+all happiness and of all respect for one or the other parent.
+Resolutely I turned my back on them that I might spare them trouble,
+and determined that, robbed of my own, I would be a mother to all
+helpless children I could aid, and cure the pain at my own heart by
+soothing the pain of others.
+
+As far as regards this whole struggle over the Knowlton pamphlet,
+victory was finally won all along the line. Not only did we, as
+related, recover all our seized pamphlets, and continue the sale till
+all prosecution and threat of prosecution were definitely surrendered;
+but my own tract had an enormous sale, so that when I withdrew it from
+sale in June, 1891, I was offered a large sum for the copyright, an
+offer which I, of course, refused. Since that time not a copy has been
+sold with my knowledge or permission, but long ere that the pamphlet
+had received a very complete legal vindication. For while it
+circulated untouched in England, a prosecution was attempted against
+it in New South Wales, but was put an end to by an eloquent and
+luminous judgment by the senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court, Mr.
+Justice Windmeyer, in December, 1888. This judge, the most respected
+in the great Australian colony, spoke out plainly and strongly on the
+morality of such teaching. "Take the case," he said, "of a woman
+married to a drunken husband, steadily ruining his constitution and
+hastening to the drunkard's doom, loss of employment for himself,
+semi-starvation for his family, and finally death, without a shilling
+to leave those whom he has brought into the world, but armed with the
+authority of the law to treat his wife as his slave, ever brutally
+insisting on the indulgence of his marital rights. Where is the
+immorality, if, already broken in health from unresting maternity,
+having already a larger family than she can support when the miserable
+breadwinner has drunk himself to death, the woman avails herself of
+the information given in this book, and so averts the consequences of
+yielding to her husband's brutal insistence on his marital rights?
+Already weighted with a family that she is unable to decently bring
+up, the immorality, it seems to me, would be in the reckless and
+criminal disregard of precautions which would prevent her bringing
+into the world daughters whose future outlook as a career would be
+prostitution, or sons whose inherited taint of alcoholism would soon
+drag them down with their sisters to herd with the seething mass of
+degenerate and criminal humanity that constitutes the dangerous
+classes of great cities. In all these cases the appeal is from
+thoughtless, unreasoning prejudice to conscience, and, if listened to,
+its voice will be heard unmistakably indicating where the path of duty
+lies."
+
+The judge forcibly refused to be any party to the prohibition of such
+a pamphlet, regarding it as of high service to the community. He said:
+"So strong is the dread of the world's censure upon this topic that
+few have the courage openly to express their views upon it; and its
+nature is such that it is only amongst thinkers who discuss all
+subjects, or amongst intimate acquaintances, that community of thought
+upon the question is discovered. But let any one inquire amongst those
+who have sufficient education and ability to think for themselves, and
+who do not idly float, slaves to the current of conventional opinion,
+and he will discover that numbers of men and women of purest lives, of
+noblest aspirations, pious, cultivated, and refined, see no wrong in
+teaching the ignorant that it is wrong to bring into the world
+children to whom they cannot do justice, and who think it folly to
+stop short in telling them simply and plainly how to prevent it. A
+more robust view of morals teaches that it is puerile to ignore human
+passions and human physiology. A clearer perception of truth and the
+safety of trusting to it teaches that in law, as in religion, it is
+useless trying to limit the knowledge of mankind by any inquisitorial
+attempts to place upon a judicial Index Expurgatorius works written
+with an earnest purpose, and commending themselves to thinkers of
+well-balanced minds. I will be no party to any such attempt. I do not
+believe that it was ever meant that the Obscene Publication Act should
+apply to cases of this kind, but only to the publication of such
+matter as all good men would regard as lewd and filthy, to lewd and
+bawdy novels, pictures and exhibitions, evidently published and given
+for lucre's sake. It could never have been intended to stifle the
+expression of thought by the earnest-minded on a subject of
+transcendent national importance like the present, and I will not
+strain it for that purpose. As pointed out by Lord Cockburn in the
+case of the Queen v. Bradlaugh and Besant, all prosecutions of this
+kind should be regarded as mischievous, even by those who disapprove
+the opinions sought to be stifled, inasmuch as they only tend more
+widely to diffuse the teaching objected to. To those, on the other
+hand, who desire its promulgation, it must be a matter of
+congratulation that this, like all attempted persecutions of thinkers,
+will defeat its own object, and that truth, like a torch, 'the more
+it's shook it shines.'"
+
+The argument of Mr. Justice Windmeyer for the Neo-Malthusian position
+was (as any one may see who reads the full text of the judgment) one
+of the most luminous and cogent I have ever read. The judgment was
+spoken of at the time in the English press as a "brilliant triumph for
+Mrs. Besant," and so I suppose it was; but no legal judgment could
+undo the harm wrought on the public mind in England by malignant and
+persistent misrepresentation. What that trial and its results cost me
+in pain no one but myself will ever know; on the other hand, there was
+the passionate gratitude evidenced by letters from thousands of poor
+married women--many from the wives of country clergymen and
+curates--thanking and blessing me for showing them how to escape from
+the veritable hell in which they lived. The "upper classes" of society
+know nothing about the way in which the poor live; how their
+overcrowding destroys all sense of personal dignity, of modesty, of
+outward decency, till human life, as Bishop Fraser justly said, is
+"degraded below the level of the swine." To such, and among such I
+went, and I could not grudge the price that then seemed to me as the
+ransom for their redemption. To me, indeed, it meant the losing of all
+that made life dear, but for them it seemed to be the gaining of all
+that gave hope of a better future. So how could I hesitate--I whose
+heart had been fired by devotion to an ideal Humanity, inspired by
+that Materialism that is of love and not of hate?
+
+And now, in August, 1893, we find the _Christian World,_ the
+representative organ of orthodox Christian Protestantism, proclaiming
+the right and the duty of voluntary limitation of the family. In a
+leading article, after a number of letters had been inserted, it
+said:--
+
+"The conditions are assuredly wrong which bring one member of the
+married partnership into a bondage so cruel. It is no less evident
+that the cause of the bondage in such cases lies in the too rapid
+multiplication of the family. There was a time when any idea of
+voluntary limitation was regarded by pious people as interfering with
+Providence. We are beyond that now, and have become capable of
+recognising that Providence works through the common sense of
+individual brains. We limit population just as much by deferring
+marriage from prudential motives as by any action that may be taken
+after it.... Apart from certain methods of limitation, the morality of
+which is gravely questioned by many, there are certain
+easily-understood physiological laws of the subject, the failure to
+know and to observe which is inexcusable on the part either of men or
+women in these circumstances. It is worth noting in this connection
+that Dr. Billings, in his article in this month's _Forum_, on the
+diminishing birth-rate of the United States, gives as one of the
+reasons the greater diffusion of intelligence, by means of popular and
+school treatises on physiology, than formerly prevailed."
+
+Thus has opinion changed in sixteen years, and all the obloquy poured
+on us is seen to have been the outcome of ignorance and bigotry.
+
+As for the children, what was gained by their separation from me? The
+moment they were old enough to free themselves, they came back to me,
+my little girl's too brief stay with me being ended by her happy
+marriage, and I fancy the fears expressed for her eternal future will
+prove as groundless as the fears for her temporal ruin have proved to
+be! Not only so, but both are treading in my steps as regards their
+views of the nature and destiny of man, and have joined in their
+bright youth the Theosophical Society to which, after so many
+struggles, I won my way.
+
+The struggle on the right to discuss the prudential restraint of
+population did not, however, conclude without a martyr. Mr. Edward
+Truelove, alluded to above, was prosecuted for selling a treatise by
+Robert Dale Owen on "Moral Physiology," and a pamphlet entitled,
+"Individual, Family, and National Poverty." He was tried on February
+1, 1878, before the Lord Chief Justice in the Court of Queen's Bench,
+and was most ably defended by Professor W.A. Hunter. The jury spent
+two hours in considering their verdict, and returned into court and
+stated that they were unable to agree. The majority of the jury were
+ready to convict, if they felt sure that Mr. Truelove would not be
+punished, but one of them boldly declared in court: "As to the book,
+it is written in plain language for plain people, and I think that
+many more persons ought to know what the contents of the book are."
+The jury was discharged, in consequence of this one man's courage, but
+Mr. Truelove's persecutors--the Vice Society--were determined not to
+let their victim free. They proceeded to trial a second time, and
+wisely endeavoured to secure a special jury, feeling that as
+prudential restraint would raise wages by limiting the supply of
+labour, they would be more likely to obtain a verdict from a jury of
+"gentlemen" than from one composed of workers. This attempt was
+circumvented by Mr. Truelove's legal advisers, who let a _procedendo_
+go which sent back the trial to the Old Bailey. The second trial was
+held on May 16th at the Central Criminal Court before Baron Pollock
+and a common jury, Professor Hunter and Mr. J.M. Davidson appearing
+for the defence. The jury convicted, and the brave old man,
+sixty-eight years of age, was condemned to four months' imprisonment
+and L50 fine for selling a pamphlet which had been sold unchallenged,
+during a period of forty-five years, by James Watson, George Jacob
+Holyoake, Austin Holyoake, and Charles Watts. Mr. Grain, the counsel
+employed by the Vice Society, most unfairly used against Mr. Truelove
+my "Law of Population," a pamphlet which contained, Baron Pollock
+said, "the head and front of the offence in the other [the Knowlton]
+case." I find an indignant protest against this odious unfairness in
+the _National Reformer_ for May 19th: "My 'Law of Population' was used
+against Mr. Truelove as an aggravation of his offence, passing over
+the utter meanness--worthy only of Collette--of using against a
+prisoner a book whose author has never been attacked for writing
+it--does Mr. Collette, or do the authorities, imagine that the
+severity shown to Mr. Truelove will in any fashion deter me from
+continuing the Malthusian propaganda? Let me here assure them, one and
+all, that it will do nothing of the kind; I shall continue to sell the
+'Law of Population' and to advocate scientific checks to population,
+just as though Mr. Collette and his Vice Society were all dead and
+buried. In commonest justice they are bound to prosecute me, and if
+they get, and keep, a verdict against me, and succeed in sending me to
+prison, they will only make people more anxious to read my book, and
+make me more personally powerful as a teacher of the views which they
+attack."
+
+A persistent attempt was made to obtain a writ of error in Mr.
+Truelove's case, but the Tory Attorney-General, Sir John Holker,
+refused it, although the ground on which it was asked was one of the
+grounds on which a similar writ had been granted to Mr. Bradlaugh and
+myself. Mr. Truelove was therefore compelled to suffer his sentence,
+but memorials, signed by 11,000 persons, asking for his release, were
+sent to the Home Secretary from every part of the country, and a
+crowded meeting in St. James's Hall, London, demanded his liberation
+with only six dissentients. The whole agitation did not shorten Mr.
+Truelove's sentence by a single day, and he was not released from
+Coldbath Fields Prison until September 5th. On the 12th of the same
+month the Hall of Science was crowded with enthusiastic friends, who
+assembled to do him honour, and he was presented with a
+beautifully-illuminated address and a purse containing L177
+(subsequent subscriptions raised the amount to L197 16s. 6d.).
+
+It is scarcely necessary to say that one of the results of the
+prosecution was a great agitation throughout the country, and a wide
+popularisation of Malthusian views. Some huge demonstrations were held
+in favour of free discussion; on one occasion the Free Trade Hall,
+Manchester, was crowded to the doors; on another the Star Music Hall,
+Bradford, was crammed in every corner; on another the Town Hall,
+Birmingham, had not a seat or a bit of standing-room unoccupied.
+Wherever we went, separately or together, it was the same story, and
+not only were Malthusian lectures eagerly attended, and Malthusian
+literature eagerly bought, but curiosity brought many to listen to our
+Radical and Freethought lectures, and thousands heard for the first
+time what Secularism really meant. The Press, both London and
+provincial, agreed in branding the prosecution as foolish, and it was
+generally remarked that it resulted only in the wider circulation of
+the indicted book, and the increased popularity of those who had stood
+for the right of publication. The furious attacks since made upon us
+have been made chiefly by those who differ from us in theological
+creed, and who have found a misrepresentation of our prosecution
+served them as a convenient weapon of attack. During the last few
+years public opinion has been gradually coming round to our side, in
+consequence of the pressure of poverty resulting from widespread
+depression of trade, and during the sensation caused in 1884 by "The
+Bitter Cry of Outcast London," many writers in the _Daily
+News_--notably Mr. G.R. Sims--boldly alleged that the distress was to
+a great extent due to the large families of the poor, and mentioned
+that we had been prosecuted for giving the very knowledge which would
+bring salvation to the sufferers in our great cities.
+
+Among the useful results of the prosecution was the establishment of
+the Malthusian League, "to agitate for the abolition of all penalties
+on the public discussion of the population question," and "to spread
+among the people, by all practicable means, a knowledge of the law of
+population, of its consequences, and of its bearing upon human conduct
+and morals." The first general meeting of the League was held at the
+Hall of Science on July 26, 1877, and a council of twenty persons was
+elected, and this council on August 2nd elected Dr. C.R. Drysdale,
+M.D., President; Mr. Swaagman, Treasurer; Mrs. Besant, Secretary; Mr.
+Shearer, Assistant-Secretary; and Mr. Hember, Financial Secretary.
+Since 1877 the League, under the same indefatigable president, has
+worked hard to carry out its objects; it has issued a large number of
+leaflets and tracts; it supports a monthly journal, the _Malthusian;_
+numerous lectures have been delivered under its auspices in all parts
+of the country; and it has now a medical branch, into which none but
+duly qualified medical men and women are admitted, with members in all
+European countries.
+
+Another result of the prosecution was the accession of "D." to the
+staff of the _National Reformer_. This able and thoughtful writer came
+forward and joined our ranks as soon as he heard of the attack on us,
+and he further volunteered to conduct the journal during our expected
+imprisonment. From that time to this--a period of fifteen
+years--articles from his pen appeared in its columns week by week, and
+during all that time not one solitary difficulty arose between editors
+and contributor. In public a trustworthy colleague, in private a warm
+and sincere friend, "D." proved an unmixed benefit bestowed upon us by
+the prosecution.
+
+Nor was "D." the only friend brought to us by our foes. I cannot ever
+think of that time without remembering that the prosecution brought me
+first into close intimacy with Mrs. Annie Parris--the wife of Mr.
+Touzeau Parris, the Secretary of the Defence Committee throughout all
+the fight--a lady who, during that long struggle, and during the, for
+me, far worse struggle that succeeded it, over the custody of my
+daughter, proved to me the most loving and sisterly of friends. One or
+two other friendships which will, I hope, last my life, date from that
+same time of strife and anxiety.
+
+The amount of money subscribed by the public during the Knowlton and
+succeeding prosecutions gives some idea of the interest felt in the
+struggle. The Defence Fund Committee in March, 1878, presented a
+balance-sheet, showing subscriptions amounting to L1,292 5s. 4d., and
+total expenditure in the Queen v. Bradlaugh and Besant, the Queen v.
+Truelove, and the appeal against Mr. Vaughan's order (the last two up
+to date) of L1,274 10s. This account was then closed and the balance
+of L17 15s. 4d. passed on to a new fund for the defence of Mr.
+Truelove, the carrying on of the appeal against the destruction of the
+Knowlton pamphlet, and the bearing of the costs incident on the
+petition lodged against myself. In July this new fund had reached L196
+16s. 7d., and after paying the remainder of the costs in Mr.
+Truelove's case, a balance of L26 15s. 2d. was carried on. This again
+rose to L247 15s. 2-1/2d., and the fund bore the expenses of Mr.
+Bradlaugh's successful appeal on the Knowlton pamphlet, the petition
+and subsequent proceedings in which I was concerned in the Court of
+Chancery, and an appeal on Mr. Truelove's behalf, unfortunately
+unsuccessful, against an order for the destruction of the Dale Owen
+pamphlet. This last decision was given on February 21, 1880, and on
+this the Defence Fund was closed. On Mr. Truelove's release, as
+mentioned above, a testimonial to the amount of L197 16s. 6d. was
+presented to him, and after the close of the struggle some anonymous
+friend sent to me personally L200 as "thanks for the courage and
+ability shown." In addition to all this, the Malthusian League
+received no less than L455 11s. 9d. during the first year of its life,
+and started on its second year with a balance in hand of L77 5s. 8d.
+
+A somewhat similar prosecution in America, in which the bookseller,
+Mr. D.M. Bennett, sold a book with which he did not agree, and was
+imprisoned, led to our giving him a warm welcome when, after his
+release, he visited England. We entertained him at the Hall of Science
+at a crowded gathering, and I was deputed as spokesman to present him
+with a testimonial. This I did in the following speech, quoted here in
+order to show the spirit then animating me:--
+
+"Friends, Mr. Bradlaugh has spoken of the duty that calls us here
+to-night. It is pleasant to think that in our work that duty is one to
+which we are not unaccustomed. In our army there are more true
+soldiers than traitors, more that are faithful to the trust of keeping
+the truth than those who shrink when the hour of danger comes. And I
+would ask Mr. Bennett to-night not to measure English feeling towards
+him by the mere number of those present. They that are here are
+representatives of many thousands of our fellow-countrymen. Glance
+down this middle table, and you will see that it is not without some
+right that we claim to welcome you in the name of multitudes of the
+citizens of England. There are those who taunt us with want of
+loyalty, and with the name of infidels. In what church will they find
+men and women more loyal to truth and conscience? The name infidel is
+not for us so long as we are faithful to the truth we know. If I
+speak, as I have done, of national representation in this hall this
+evening, tell me, you who know those who sit here, who have watched
+some of them for years, others of them but for a brief time, do I not
+speak truth? Take them one by one. Your President but a little while
+ago in circumstances similar to those wherein our guest himself was
+placed, with the true lover's keenness that recognises the mistress
+under all disguise, beholding his mistress Liberty in danger, under
+circumstances that would have blinded less sure eyes, leapt to her
+rescue. He risked the ambition of his life rather than be disloyal to
+liberty. And next is seated a woman, who, student of a noble
+profession, thought that liberty had greater claim upon her than even
+her work. When we stood in worse peril than even loss of liberty, she
+risked her own good name for the truth's sake. One also is here who,
+eminent in his own profession, came with the weight of his position
+and his right to speak, and gave a kindred testimony. One step
+further, and you see one who, soldier to liberty, throughout a long
+and spotless life, when the task was far harder than it is to-day,
+when there were no greetings, no welcomes, when to serve was to peril
+name as well as liberty, never flinched from the first until now. He
+is crowned with the glory of the jail, that was his for no crime but
+for claiming the right to publish that wherein the noblest thought is
+uttered in the bravest words. And next to him is another who speaks
+for liberty, who has brought culture, university degree, position in
+men's sight, and many friends, and cast them all at her beloved feet.
+Sir, not alone the past and the present greet you to-night. The future
+also greets you with us. We have here also those who are training
+themselves to walk in the footsteps of the one most dear to them, who
+shall carry on, when we have passed away, the work which we shall have
+dropped from our hands. But he whom we delight to honour at this hour
+in truth honours us, in that he allows us to offer him the welcome
+that it is our glory and our pleasure to give. He has fought bravely.
+The Christian creed had in its beginning more traitors and less true
+hearts than the creed of to-day. We are happy to-day not only in the
+thought of what manner of men we have for leaders, but in the thought
+of what manner of men we have as soldiers in our army. Jesus had
+twelve apostles. One betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver; a
+second denied Him. They all forsook Him and fled. We can scarcely
+point to one who has thus deserted our sacred cause. The traditions of
+our party tell us of many who went to jail because they claimed for
+all that right of free speech which is the heritage of all. One of the
+most famous members of our body in England, Richard Carlile, turned
+bookseller to sell books that were prosecuted. This man became
+Free-thinker, driven thereto by the bigotry and wickedness of the
+Churches. He sold the books of Hone not because he agreed with them,
+but because Hone was prosecuted. He saw that the book in whose
+prosecution freedom was attacked was the book for the freeman to sell;
+and the story of our guest shows that in all this England and America
+are one. Those who gave Milton to the world can yet bring forth men of
+the same stamp in continents leagues asunder. Because our friend was
+loyal and true, prison had to him no dread. It was far, far less of
+dishonour to wear the garb of the convict than to wear that of the
+hypocrite. The society we represent, like his society in America,
+pleads for free thought, speaks for free speech, claims for every one,
+however antagonistic, the right to speak the thought he feels. It is
+better that this should be, even though the thought be wrong, for thus
+the sooner will its error be discovered--better if the thought be
+right, for then the sooner does the gladness of a new truth find place
+in the heart of man. As the mouthpiece, Sir, of our National Secular
+Society, and of its thousands of members, I speak to you now:--
+
+"'ADDRESS.
+
+"'_We seek for Truth_.'
+
+"'To D.M. Bennett.
+
+"'In asking you to accept at the hands of the National Secular Society
+of England this symbol of cordial sympathy and brotherly welcome, we
+are but putting into act the motto of our Society. "We seek for Truth"
+is our badge, and it is as Truthseeker that we do you homage to-night.
+Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free
+speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without free speech progress
+is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards the nobler
+life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of
+free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the
+denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race.
+
+"'In your own country you have pleaded for free speech, and when,
+under a wicked and an odious law, one of your fellow-citizens was
+imprisoned for the publication of his opinions, you, not sharing the
+opinions but faithful to liberty, sprang forward to defend in him the
+principle of free speech which you claimed for yourself, and sold his
+book while he lay in prison. For this act you were in turn arrested
+and sent to jail, and the country which won its freedom by the aid of
+Paine in the eighteenth century disgraced itself in the nineteenth by
+the imprisonment of a heretic. The Republic of the United States
+dishonoured herself, and not you, in Albany penitentiary. Two hundred
+thousand of your countrymen pleaded for your release, but bigotry was
+too strong. We sent you greeting in your captivity; we rejoiced when
+the time came for your release. We offer you to-night our thanks and
+our hope--thanks for the heroism which never flinched in the hour of
+battle, hope for a more peaceful future, in which the memory of a past
+pain may be a sacred heritage and not a regret.
+
+"'Charles Bradlaugh, _President_.'
+
+"Soldier of liberty, we give you this. Do in the future the same good
+service that you have done in the past, and your reward shall be in
+the love that true men shall bear to you."
+
+That, however, which no force could compel me to do, which I refused
+to threats of fine and prison, to separation from my children, to
+social ostracism, and to insults and ignominy worse to bear than
+death, I surrendered freely when all the struggle was over, and a
+great part of society and of public opinion had adopted the view that
+cost Mr. Bradlaugh and myself so dear. I may as well complete the
+story here, so as not to have to refer to it again. I gave up
+Neo-Malthusianism in April, 1891, its renunciation being part of the
+outcome of two years' instruction from Mdme. H.P. Blavatsky, who
+showed me that however justifiable Neo-Malthusianism might be while
+man was regarded only as the most perfect outcome of physical
+evolution, it was wholly incompatible with the view of man as a
+spiritual being, whose material form and environment were the results
+of his own mental activity. Why and how I embraced Theosophy, and
+accepted H.P. Blavatsky as teacher, will soon be told in its proper
+place. Here I am concerned only with the why and how of my
+renunciation of the Neo-Malthusian teaching, for which I had fought so
+hard and suffered so much.
+
+When I built my life on the basis of Materialism I judged all actions
+by their effect on human happiness in this world now and in future
+generations, regarding man as an organism that lived on earth and
+there perished, with activities confined to earth and limited by
+physical laws. The object of life was the ultimate building-up of a
+physically, mentally, morally perfect man by the cumulative effects of
+heredity--mental and moral tendencies being regarded as the outcome of
+material conditions, to be slowly but surely evolved by rational
+selection and the transmission to offspring of qualities carefully
+acquired by, and developed in, parents. The most characteristic note
+of this serious and lofty Materialism had been struck by Professor W.
+K. Clifford in his noble article on the "Ethics of Belief."
+
+Taking this view of human duty in regard to the rational co-operation
+with nature in the evolution of the human race, it became of the first
+importance to rescue the control of the generation of offspring from
+mere blind brute passion, and to transfer it to the reason and to the
+intelligence; to impress on parents the sacredness of the parental
+office, the tremendous responsibility of the exercise of the creative
+function. And since, further, one of the most pressing problems for
+solution in the older countries is that of poverty, the horrible slums
+and dens into which are crowded and in which are festering families of
+eight and ten children, whose parents are earning an uncertain 10s.,
+12s., 15s., and 20s. a week; since an immediate palliative is wanted,
+if popular risings impelled by starvation are to be avoided; since the
+lives of men and women of the poorer classes, and of the worst paid
+professional classes, are one long, heart-breaking struggle "to make
+both ends meet and keep respectable"; since in the middle class
+marriage is often avoided, or delayed till late in life, from the
+dread of the large family, and late marriage is followed by its
+shadow, the prevalence of vice and the moral and social ruin of
+thousands of women; for these, and many other reasons, the teaching of
+the duty of limiting the family within the means of subsistence is the
+logical outcome of Materialism linked with the scientific view of
+evolution, and with a knowledge of the physical law, by which
+evolution is accelerated or retarded. Seeking to improve the physical
+type, scientific Materialism, it seemed to me, must forbid parentage
+to any but healthy married couples; it must restrict childbearing
+within the limits consistent with the thorough health and physical
+well-being of the mother; it must impose it as a duty never to bring
+children into the world unless the conditions for their fair nurture
+and development are present. Regarding it as hopeless, as well as
+mischievous, to preach asceticism, and looking on the conjunction of
+nominal celibacy with widespread prostitution as inevitable, from the
+constitution of human nature, scientific Materialism--quite rationally
+and logically--advises deliberate restriction of the production of
+offspring, while sanctioning the exercise of the sexual instinct
+within the limits imposed by temperance, the highest physical and
+mental efficiency, the good order and dignity of society, and the
+self-respect of the individual.
+
+In all this there is nothing which for one moment implies approval of
+licentiousness, profligacy, unbridled self-indulgence. On the
+contrary, it is a well-considered and intellectually-defensible scheme
+of human evolution, regarding all natural instincts as matters for
+regulation, not for destruction, and seeking to develop the perfectly
+healthy and well-balanced physical body as the necessary basis for the
+healthy and well-balanced mind. If the premises of Materialism be
+true, there is no answer to the Neo-Malthusian conclusions; for even
+those Socialists who have bitterly opposed the promulgation of
+Neo-Malthusianism--regarding it as a "red herring intended to draw the
+attention of the proletariat away from the real cause of poverty, the
+monopoly of land and capital by a class"--admit that when society is
+built on the foundation of common property in all that is necessary
+for the production of wealth, the time will come for the consideration
+of the population question. Nor do I now see, any more than I saw
+then, how any Materialist can rationally avoid the Neo-Malthusian
+position. For if man be the outcome of purely physical causes, it is
+with these that we must deal in guiding his future evolution. If he be
+related but to terrestrial existence, he is but the loftiest organism
+of earth; and, failing to see his past and his future, how should my
+eyes not have been then blinded to the deep-lying causes of his
+present woe? I brought a material cure to a disease which appeared to
+me to be of material origin; but how when the evil came from a subtler
+source, and its causes lay not on the material plane? How if the
+remedy only set up new causes for a future evil, and, while
+immediately a palliative, strengthened the disease itself, and ensured
+its reappearance in the future? This was the view of the problem set
+before me by H.P. Blavatsky when she unrolled the story of man, told
+of his origin and his destiny, showed me the forces that went to the
+making of man, and the true relation between his past, his present,
+and his future.
+
+For what is man in the light of Theosophy? He is a spiritual
+intelligence, eternal and uncreate, treading a vast cycle of human
+experience, born and reborn on earth millennium after millennium,
+evolving slowly into the ideal man. He is not the product of matter,
+but is encased in matter, and the forms of matter with which he
+clothes himself are of his own making. For the intelligence and will
+of man are creative forces--not creative _ex nihilo_, but creative as
+is the brain of the painter--and these forces are exercised by man in
+every act of thought. Thus he is ever creating round him
+thought-forms, moulding subtlest matter into shape by these energies,
+forms which persist as tangible realities when the body of the thinker
+has long gone back to earth and air and water. When the time for
+rebirth into this earth-life comes for the soul these thought-forms,
+its own progeny, help to form the tenuous model into which the
+molecules of physical matter are builded for the making of the body,
+and matter is thus moulded for the new body in which the soul is to
+dwell, on the lines laid down by the intelligent and volitional life
+of the previous, or of many previous, incarnations. So does each man
+create for himself in verity the form wherein he functions, and what
+he is in his present is the inevitable outcome of his own creative
+energies in his past. Applying this to the Neo-Malthusian theory, we
+see in sexual love not only a passion which man has in common with the
+brute, and which forms, at the present stage of evolution, a necessary
+part of human nature, but an animal passion that may be trained and
+purified into a human emotion, which may be used as one of the levers
+in human progress, one of the factors in human growth. But, instead of
+this, man in the past has made his intellect the servant of his
+passions; the abnormal development of the sexual instinct in man--in
+whom it is far greater and more continuous than in any brute--is due
+to the mingling with it of the intellectual element, all sexual
+thoughts, desires, and imaginations having created thought-forms,
+which have been wrought into the human race, giving rise to a
+continual demand, far beyond nature, and in marked contrast with the
+temperance of normal animal life. Hence it has become one of the most
+fruitful sources of human misery and human degradation, and the
+satisfaction of its imperious cravings in civilised countries lies at
+the root of our worst social evils. This excessive development has to
+be fought against, and the instinct reduced within natural limits, and
+this will certainly never be done by easy-going self-indulgence within
+the marital relation any more than by self-indulgence outside it. By
+none other road than that of self-control and self-denial can men and
+women now set going the causes which will build for them brains and
+bodies of a higher type for their future return to earth-life. They
+have to hold this instinct in complete control, to transmute it from
+passion into tender and self-denying affection, to develop the
+intellectual at the expense of the animal, and thus to raise the whole
+man to the human stage, in which every intellectual and physical
+capacity shall subserve the purposes of the soul. From all this it
+follows that Theosophists should sound the note of self-restraint
+within marriage, and the gradual--for with the mass it cannot be
+sudden--restriction of the sexual relation to the perpetuation of the
+race.
+
+Such was the bearing of Theosophical teaching on Neo-Malthusianism, as
+laid before me by H.P. Blavatsky, and when I urged, out of my bitter
+knowledge of the miseries endured by the poor, that it surely might,
+for a time at least, be recommended as a palliative, as a defence in
+the hands of a woman against intolerable oppression and enforced
+suffering, she bade me look beyond the moment, and see how the
+suffering must come back and back with every generation, unless we
+sought to remove the roots of wrong. "I do not judge a woman," she
+said, "who has resort to such means of defence in the midst of
+circumstances so evil, and whose ignorance of the real causes of all
+this misery is her excuse for snatching at any relief. But it is not
+for you, an Occultist, to continue to teach a method which you now
+know must tend to the perpetuation of the sorrow." I felt that she was
+right, and though I shrank from the decision--for my heart somewhat
+failed me at withdrawing from the knowledge of the poor, so far as I
+could, a temporary palliative of evils which too often wreck their
+lives and bring many to an early grave, worn old before even middle
+age has touched them--yet the decision was made. I refused to reprint
+the "Law of Population," or to sell the copyright, giving pain, as I
+sadly knew, to all the brave and loyal friends who had so generously
+stood by me in that long and bitter struggle, and who saw the results
+of victory thrown away on grounds to them inadequate and mistaken!
+Will it always be, I wonder, in man's climbing upward, that every step
+must be set on his own heart and on the hearts of those he loves?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+AT WAR ALL ROUND.
+
+
+Coming back to my work after my long and dangerous illness, I took up
+again its thread, heartsick, but with courage unshaken, and I find
+myself in the _National Reformer_ for September 15, 1878, saying in a
+brief note of thanks that "neither the illness nor the trouble which
+produced it has in any fashion lessened my determination to work for
+the cause." In truth, I plunged into work with added vigour, for only
+in that did I find any solace, but the pamphlets written at this time
+against Christianity were marked with considerable bitterness, for it
+was Christianity that had robbed me of my child, and I struck
+mercilessly at it in return. In the political struggles of that time,
+when the Beaconsfield Government was in full swing, with its policy of
+annexation and aggression, I played my part with tongue and pen, and
+my articles in defence of an honest and liberty-loving policy in
+India, against the invasion of Afghanistan and other outrages, laid in
+many an Indian heart a foundation of affection for me, and seem to me
+now as a preparation for the work among Indians to which much of my
+time and thought to-day are given. In November of this same year
+(1878) I wrote a little book on "England, India, and Afghanistan" that
+has brought me many a warm letter of thanks, and with this, the
+carrying on of the suit against Mr. Besant before alluded to, two and
+often three lectures every Sunday, to say nothing of the editorial
+work on the _National Reformer_, the secretarial work on the
+Malthusian League, and stray lectures during the week, my time was
+fairly well filled. But I found that in my reading I developed a
+tendency to let my thoughts wander from the subject in hand, and that
+they would drift after my lost little one, so I resolved to fill up
+the gaps in my scientific education, and to amuse myself by reading up
+for some examinations; I thought it would serve as an absorbing form
+of recreation from my other work, and would at the same time, by
+making my knowledge exact, render me more useful as a speaker on
+behalf of the causes to which my life was given.
+
+At the opening of the new year (1879) I met for the first time a man
+to whom I subsequently owed much in this department of work--Edward B.
+Aveling, a D.Sc. of London University, and a marvellously able teacher
+of scientific subjects, the very ablest, in fact, that I have ever
+met. Clear and accurate in his knowledge, with a singular gift for
+lucid exposition, enthusiastic in his love of science, and taking
+vivid pleasure in imparting his knowledge to others, he was an ideal
+teacher. This young man, in January, 1879, began writing under
+initials for the _National Reformer_, and in February I became his
+pupil, with the view of matriculating in June at the London
+University, an object which was duly accomplished. And here let me say
+to any one in mental trouble, that they might find an immense relief
+in taking up some intellectual recreation of this kind; during that
+spring, in addition to my ordinary work of writing, lecturing, and
+editing--and the lecturing meant travelling from one end of England to
+the other--I translated a fair-sized French volume, and had the
+wear-and-tear of pleading my case for the custody of my daughter in
+the Court of Appeal, as well as the case before the Master of the
+Rolls; and I found it the very greatest relief to turn to algebra,
+geometry, and physics, and forget the harassing legal struggles in
+wrestling with formulae and problems. The full access I gained to my
+children marked a step in the long battle of Freethinkers against
+disabilities, for, as noted in the _National Reformer_ by Mr.
+Bradlaugh, it was "won with a pleading unequalled in any case on
+record for the boldness of its affirmation of Freethought," a pleading
+of which he generously said that it deserved well of the party as "the
+most powerful pleading for freedom of opinion to which it has ever
+been our good fortune to listen."
+
+In the London _Daily News_ some powerful letters of protest appeared,
+one from Lord Harberton, in which he declared that "the Inquisition
+acted on no other principle" than that applied to me; and a second
+from Mr. Band, in which he sarcastically observed that "this Christian
+community has for some time had the pleasure of seeing her Majesty's
+courts repeatedly springing engines of torture upon a young mother--a
+clergyman's wife who dared to disagree with his creed--and her evident
+anguish, her long and expensive struggles to save her child, have
+proved that so far as heretical mothers are concerned modern defenders
+of the faith need not envy the past those persuasive instruments which
+so long secured the unity of the Church. In making Mrs. Besant an
+example, the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice James have been
+careful not to allow any of the effect to be lost by confusion of the
+main point--the intellectual heresy--with side questions. There was a
+Malthusian matter in the case, but the judges were very clear in
+stating that without any reference whatever to that, they would
+simply, on the ground of Mrs. Besant's 'religious, or anti-religious,
+opinions,' take her child from her." The great provincial papers took
+a similar tone, the _Manchester Examiner_ going so far as to say of
+the ruling of the judges: "We do not say they have done so wrongly. We
+only say that the effect of their judgment is cruel, and it shows that
+the holding of unpopular opinions is, in the eye of the law, an
+offence which, despite all we had thought to the contrary, may be
+visited with the severest punishment a woman and a mother can be
+possibly called on to bear." The outcome of all this long struggle and
+of another case of sore injustice--in which Mrs. Agar-Ellis, a Roman
+Catholic, was separated from her children by a judicial decision
+obtained against her by her husband, a Protestant--was a change in the
+law which had vested all power over the children in the hands of the
+father, and from thenceforth the rights of the married mother were
+recognised to a limited extent. A small side-fight was with the
+National Sunday League, the president of which, Lord Thurlow, strongly
+objected to me as one of the vice-presidents. Mr. P.A. Taylor and
+others at once resigned their offices, and, on the calling of a
+general meeting, Lord Thurlow was rejected as president. Mr. P.A.
+Taylor was requested to assume the presidency, and the vice-presidents
+who had resigned were, with myself, re-elected. Little battles of this
+sort were a running accompaniment of graver struggles during all these
+battling years.
+
+And through all the struggles the organised strength of the
+Freethought party grew, 650 new members being enrolled in the National
+Secular Society in the year 1878-79, and in July, 1879, the public
+adhesion of Dr. Edward B. Aveling brought into the ranks a pen of rare
+force and power, and gave a strong impulse to the educational side of
+our movement. I presided for him at his first lecture at the Hall of
+Science on August 10, 1879, and he soon paid the penalty of his
+boldness, finding himself, a few months later, dismissed from the
+Chair of Comparative Anatomy at the London Hospital, though the Board
+admitted that all his duties were discharged with punctuality and
+ability. One of the first results of his adhesion was the
+establishment of two classes under the Science and Art Department at
+South Kensington, and these grew year after year, attended by numbers
+of young men and women, till in 1883 we had thirteen classes in full
+swing, as well as Latin, and London University Matriculation classes;
+all these were taught by Dr. Aveling and pupils that he had trained. I
+took advanced certificates, one in honours, and so became qualified as
+a science teacher in eight different sciences, and Alice and Hypatia
+Bradlaugh followed a similar course, so that winter after winter we
+kept these classes going from September to the following May, from
+1879 until the year 1888. In addition to these Miss Bradlaugh carried
+on a choral union.
+
+Personally I found that this study and teaching together with
+attendance at classes held for teachers at South Kensington, the study
+for passing the First B.Sc. and Prel. Sc. Examinations at London
+University, and the study for the B.Sc. degree at London, at which I
+failed in practical chemistry three times--a thing that puzzled me not
+a little at the time, as I had passed a far more difficult practical
+chemical examination for teachers at South Kensington--all this gave
+me a knowledge of science that has stood me in good stead in my public
+work. But even here theological and social hatred pursued me.
+
+When Miss Bradlaugh and myself applied for permission to attend the
+botany class at University College, we were refused, I for my sins,
+and she only for being her father's daughter; when I had qualified as
+teacher, I stood back from claiming recognition from the Department
+for a year in order not to prejudice the claims of Mr. Bradlaugh's
+daughters, and later, when I had been recognised, Sir Henry Tyler in
+the House of Commons attacked the Education Department for accepting
+me, and actually tried to prevent the Government grant being paid to
+the Hall of Science Schools because Dr. Aveling, the Misses Bradlaugh,
+and myself were unbelievers in Christianity. When I asked permission
+to go to the Botanical Gardens in Regent's Park the curator refused
+it, on the ground that his daughters studied there. On every side
+repulse and insult, hard to struggle against, bitter to bear. It was
+against difficulties of this kind on every side that we had to make
+our way, handicapped in every effort by our heresy. Let our work be as
+good as it might--and our Science School was exceptionally
+successful--the subtle fragrance of heresy was everywhere
+distinguishable, and when Mr. Bradlaugh and myself are blamed for
+bitterness in our anti-Christian advocacy, this constant gnawing
+annoyance and petty persecution should be taken into account. For him
+it was especially trying, for he saw his daughters--girls of ability
+and of high character, whose only crime was that they were
+his--insulted, sneered at, slandered, continually put at a
+disadvantage, because they were his children and loved and honoured
+him beyond all others.
+
+It was in October, 1879, that I first met Herbert Burrows, though I
+did not become intimately acquainted with him till the Socialist
+troubles of the autumn of 1887 drew us into a common stream of work.
+He came as a delegate from the Tower Hamlets Radical Association to a
+preliminary conference, called by Mr. Bradlaugh, at the Hall of
+Science, on October 11th, to consider the advisability of holding a
+great London Convention on Land Law Reform, to be attended by
+delegates from all parts of the kingdom. He was appointed on the
+Executive Committee with Mr. Bradlaugh, Mr. Mottershead, Mr. Nieass,
+and others. The Convention was successfully held, and an advanced
+platform of Land Law Reform adopted, used later by Mr. Bradlaugh as a
+basis for some of the proposals he laid before Parliament.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+MR. BRADLAUGH'S STRUGGLE.
+
+
+And now dawned the year 1880, the memorable year in which commenced
+Mr. Bradlaugh's long Parliamentary battle. After a long and bitter
+struggle he was elected, with Mr. Labouchere, as member for
+Northampton, at the general election, and so the prize so long fought
+for was won. Shall I ever forget that election day, April 2, 1880? How
+at four o'clock Mr. Bradlaugh came into the room at the "George",
+where his daughters and I were sitting, flung himself into a chair
+with, "There's nothing more to do; our last man is polled." Then the
+waiting for the declaration through the long, weary hours of suspense,
+till as the time drew near we knelt by the window listening--listening
+to the hoarse murmur of the crowd, knowing that presently there would
+be a roar of triumph or a howl of anger when the numbers were read out
+from the steps of the Town Hall. And now silence sank, and we knew the
+moment had come, and we held our breath, and then--a roar, a wild roar
+of joy and exultation, cheer after cheer, ringing, throbbing, pealing,
+and then the mighty surge of the crowd bringing him back, their member
+at last, waving hats, handkerchiefs, a very madness of tumultuous
+delight, and the shrill strains of "Bradlaugh for Northampton!" with a
+ring of triumph in them they had never had before. And he, very grave,
+somewhat shaken by the outpour of love and exultation, very silent,
+feeling the weight of new responsibility more than the gladness of
+victory. And then the next morning, as he left the town, the mass of
+men and women, one sea of heads from hotel to station, every window
+crowded, his colours waving everywhere, men fighting to get near him,
+to touch him, women sobbing, the cries, "Our Charlie, our Charlie;
+we've got you and we'll keep you." How they loved him, how they joyed
+in the triumph won after twelve years of strife. Ah me! we thought the
+struggle over, and it was only beginning; we thought our hero
+victorious, and a fiercer, crueller fight lay in front. True, he was
+to win that fight, but his life was to be the price of the winning;
+victory for him was to be final, complete, but the laurel-wreath was
+to fall upon a grave.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by T. Westley, 57, Vernon Street,
+Northampton._ CHARLES BRADLAUGH AND HENRY LABOUCHERE.]
+
+The outburst of anger from the more bigoted of the Christian community
+was as savage as the outburst of delight had been exultant, but we
+recked little of it. Was he not member, duly elected, without
+possibility of assailment in his legal right? Parliament was to meet
+on April 29th, the swearing-in beginning on the following day, and Mr.
+Bradlaugh had taken counsel with some other Freethinking members as to
+the right of Freethinkers to affirm. He held that under the Act 29 and
+30 Vict. c. 19, and the Evidence Amendment Acts 1869 and 1870, the
+right to substitute affirmation for oath was clear; he was willing to
+take the oath as a necessary form if obligatory, but, believing it to
+be optional, he preferred affirmation. On May 3rd he presented himself
+and, according to the evidence of Sir Erskine May, the Clerk of the
+House, given before the second Select Committee on his case, he "came
+to the table and delivered the following statement in writing to the
+Clerk: 'To the Right Honourable the Speaker of the House of Commons.
+I, the undersigned, Charles Bradlaugh, beg respectfully to claim to be
+allowed to affirm, as a person for the time being by law permitted to
+make a solemn affirmation or declaration, instead of taking an oath.
+(Signed) Charles Bradlaugh.' And being asked by the Clerk upon what
+grounds he claimed to make an affirmation, he answered: 'By virtue of
+the Evidence Amendment Acts, 1869 and 1870.' Whereupon the Clerk
+reported to Mr. Speaker" the claim, and Mr. Speaker told Mr. Bradlaugh
+that he might address the House on the matter. "Mr. Bradlaugh's
+observations were very short. He repeated that he relied upon the
+Evidence Further Amendment Act, 1869, and the Evidence Amendment Act,
+1870, adding: 'I have repeatedly, for nine years past, made an
+affirmation in the highest courts of jurisdiction in this realm. I am
+ready to make such a declaration or affirmation.' Substantially those
+were the words which he addressed to the Speaker." This was the
+simple, quiet, and dignified scene which took place in the House. Mr.
+Bradlaugh was directed to withdraw, and he withdrew, and, after
+debate, a Select Committee was appointed to consider whether he could
+make affirmation; that Committee decided against the claim, and gave
+in its report on May 20th. On the following day Mr. Bradlaugh
+presented himself at the table of the House to take the oath in the
+form prescribed by the law, and on the objection of Sir Henry Drummond
+Wolff, who submitted a motion that he should not be allowed to take
+the oath, another Committee was appointed.
+
+Before this Committee Mr. Bradlaugh stated his case, and pointed out
+that the legal obligation lay on him to take the oath, adding: "Any
+form that I went through, any oath that I took, I should regard as
+binding upon my conscience in the fullest degree. I would go through
+no form, I would take no oath, unless I meant it to be so binding." He
+wrote in the same sense to the _Times_, saying that he should regard
+himself "as bound, not by the letter of its words, but by the spirit
+which the affirmation would have conveyed, had I been permitted to use
+it." The Committee reported against him, and on June 23rd he was heard
+at the Bar of the House, and made a speech so self-restrained, so
+noble, so dignified, that the House, in defiance of all its own rules,
+broke out over and over again into applause. In the debate that
+preceded his speech, members had lost sight of the ordinary rules of
+decency, and had used expressions against myself wholly gratuitous in
+such a quarrel; the grave rebuke to him who "was wanting in chivalry,
+because, while I can answer for myself and am able to answer for
+myself, nothing justified the introduction of any other name beside my
+own to make prejudice against me," brought irrepressible cheers. His
+appeal was wholly to the law. "I have not yet used--I trust no passion
+may tempt me into using--any words that would seem to savour of even a
+desire to enter into conflict with this House. I have always taught,
+preached, and believed the supremacy of Parliament, and it is not
+because for a moment the judgment of one Chamber of Parliament should
+be hostile to me that I am going to deny the ideas I have always held;
+but I submit that one Chamber of Parliament--even its grandest
+Chamber, as I have always held this to be--had no right to override
+the law. The law gives me the right to sign that roll, to take and
+subscribe the oath, and to take my seat there [with a gesture towards
+the benches]. I admit that the moment I am in the House, without any
+reason but your own good will, you can send me away. That is your
+right. You have full control over your members. But you cannot send me
+away until I have been heard in my place, not a suppliant as I am now,
+but with the rightful audience that each member has always had.... I
+am ready to admit, if you please, for the sake of argument, that every
+opinion I hold is wrong and deserves punishment. Let the law punish
+it. If you say the law cannot, then you admit that you have no right,
+and I appeal to public opinion against the iniquity of a decision
+which overrides the law and denies me justice. I beg your pardon, sir,
+and that of the House too, if in this warmth there seems to lack
+respect for its dignity. And as I shall have, if your decision be
+against me, to come to that table when your decision is given, I beg
+you, before the step is taken in which we may both lose our
+dignity--mine is not much, but yours is that of the Commons of
+England--I beg you, before the gauntlet is fatally thrown, I beg you,
+not in any sort of menace, not in any sort of boast, but as one man
+against six hundred, to give me that justice which on the other side
+of this hall the judges would give me, were I pleading there before
+them."
+
+But no eloquence, no plea for justice, could stay the tide of Tory and
+religious bigotry, and the House voted that he should not be allowed
+to take the oath. Summoned to the table to hear the decision
+communicated by the Speaker, he answered that decision with the words
+firmly spoken: "I respectfully refuse to obey the order of the House,
+because that order was against the law." The Speaker appealed to the
+House for direction, and on a division--during which the Speaker and
+Charles Bradlaugh were left together in the chamber--the House ordered
+the enforcement of Mr. Bradlaugh's withdrawal. Once more the order is
+given, once more the refusal made, and then the Serjeant-at-Arms was
+bidden to remove him. Strange was the scene as little Captain Cosset
+walked up to the member of Herculean proportions, and men wondered how
+the order would be enforced; but Charles Bradlaugh was not the man to
+make a vulgar brawl, and the light touch on his shoulder was to him
+the touch of an authority he admitted and to which he bowed. So he
+gravely accompanied his small captor, and was lodged in the Clock
+Tower of the House as prisoner until the House should further consider
+what to do with him--the most awkward prisoner it had ever had, in
+that in his person it was imprisoning the law.
+
+In a special issue of the _National Reformer_, giving an account of
+the Committee's work and of Mr. Bradlaugh's committal to the Clock
+Tower, I find the following from my own pen: "The Tory party, beaten
+at the polls by the nation, has thus, for the moment, triumphed in the
+House of Commons. The man chosen by the Radicals of Northampton has
+been committed to prison on the motion of the Tory ex-Chancellor of
+the Exchequer, simply because he desires to discharge the duty laid
+upon him by his constituency and by the law of the land. As this paper
+goes to press, I go to Westminster to receive from him his directions
+as to the conduct of the struggle with the nation into which the House
+of Commons has so recklessly plunged." I found him busily writing,
+prepared for all events, ready for a long imprisonment. On the
+following day a leaflet from my pen, "Law Makers and Law Breakers,"
+appealed to the people; after reciting what had happened, it
+concluded: "Let the people speak. Gladstone and Bright are for
+Liberty, and the help denied them within the House must come to them
+from without. No time must be lost. While we remain idle, a
+representative of the people is illegally held in prison. Northampton
+is insulted, and in this great constituency every constituency is
+threatened. On freedom of election depends our liberty; on freedom of
+conscience depends our progress. Tory squires and lordlings have
+defied the people and measured their strength against the masses. Let
+the masses speak." But there was no need to make appeals, for the
+outrage itself caused so swiftly a growl of anger that on the very
+next day the prisoner was set free, and there came protest upon
+protest against the high-handed action of the House. In Westminster
+Hall 4,000 people gathered to cheer Mr. Bradlaugh when he came to the
+House on the day after his liberation. In less than a week 200
+meetings had thundered out their protest. Liberal associations, clubs,
+societies, sent up messages of anger and of demand for justice. In
+Trafalgar Square there gathered--so said the papers--the largest crowd
+ever seen there, and on the Thursday following--the meeting was held
+on Monday--the House of Commons rescinded its resolution, refusing to
+allow Mr. Bradlaugh to affirm, and admitted him on Friday, July 2nd,
+to take his seat after affirmation. "At last the bitter struggle is
+over," I wrote, "and law and right have triumphed. The House of
+Commons has, by rescinding the resolution passed by Tories and
+Ultramontanes, re-established its good name in the eyes of the world.
+The triumph is not one of Freethought over Christianity, nor is it
+over the House of Commons; it is the triumph of law, brought about by
+good men--of all shades of opinion, but of one faith in justice--over
+Tory contempt of law and Ultramontane bigotry. It is the reassertion
+of civil and religious liberty under the most difficult circumstances,
+the declaration that the House of Commons is the creation of the
+people, and not a club of the aristocracy with the right of
+blackballing in its own hands."
+
+The battle between Charles Bradlaugh and his persecutors was now
+transferred to the law courts. As soon as he had taken his seat he was
+served with a writ for having voted without having taken the oath, and
+this began the wearisome proceedings by which his defeated enemies
+boasted that they would make him bankrupt, and so vacate the seat he
+had so hardly gained. Rich men like Mr. Newdegate sued him, putting
+forward a man of straw as nominal plaintiff; for many a weary month
+Mr. Bradlaugh kept all his enemies at bay, fighting each case himself;
+defeated time after time, he fought on, finally carrying the cases to
+the House of Lords, and there winning them triumphantly. But they were
+won at such heavy cost of physical strength and of money, that they
+undermined his strength and burdened him heavily with debt. For all
+this time he had not only to fight in the law courts and to attend
+scrupulously to his Parliamentary duties, but he had to earn his
+living by lecturing and writing, so that his nights away from the
+House were spent in travelling and his days in incessant labour. Many
+of his defeated foes turned their weapons against me, hoping thus to
+give him pain; thus Admiral Sir John Hay, at Wigton, used language of
+me so coarse that the _Scotsman_ and _Glasgow Herald_ refused to print
+it, and the editor of the _Scotsman_ described it as "language so
+coarse that it could have hardly dropped from a yahoo." August 25th
+found me at Brussels, whither I went, with Miss Hypatia Bradlaugh, to
+represent the English Freethinkers at the International Freethought
+Conference. It was an interesting gathering, attended by men of
+world-wide reputation, including Dr. Ludwig Buechner, a man of noble
+and kindly nature. An International Federation of Freethinkers was
+there founded, which did something towards bringing together the
+Freethinkers of different countries, and held interesting congresses
+in the following years in London and Amsterdam; but beyond these
+meetings it did little, and lacked energy and vitality. In truth, the
+Freethought party in each country had so much to do in holding its own
+that little time and thought could be given to international
+organisation. For myself, my introduction to Dr. Buechner, led to much
+interesting correspondence, and I translated, with his approval, his
+"Mind in Animals," and the enlarged fourteenth edition of "Force and
+Matter," as well as one or two pamphlets. This autumn of 1880 found
+the so-called Liberal Government in full tilt against the Irish
+leaders, and I worked hard to raise English feeling in defence of
+Irish freedom even against attack by one so much honoured as was Mr.
+Gladstone. It was uphill work, for harsh language had been used
+against England and all things English, but I showed by definite
+figures--all up and down England--that life and property were far
+safer in Ireland than in England, that Ireland was singularly free
+from crime save in agrarian disputes, and I argued that these would
+disappear if the law should step in between landlord and tenant, and
+by stopping the crimes of rack-renting and most brutal eviction, put
+an end to the horrible retaliations that were born of despair and
+revenge. A striking point on these evictions I quoted from Mr. T.P.
+O'Connor, who, using Mr. Gladstone's words that a sentence of eviction
+was a sentence of starvation, told of 15,000 processes of eviction
+issued in that one year. The autumn's work was varied by the teaching
+of science classes, a debate with a clergyman of the Church of
+England, and an operation which kept me in bed for three weeks, but
+which, on the other hand, was useful, for I learned to write while
+lying on my back, and accomplished in this fashion a good part of the
+translation of "Mind in Animals."
+
+And here let me point a moral about hard work. Hard work kills no one.
+I find a note in the _National Reformer_ in 1880 from the pen of Mr.
+Bradlaugh: "It is, we fear, useless to add that, in the judgment of
+her best friends, Mrs. Besant has worked far too hard during the last
+two years." This is 1893, and the thirteen years' interval has been
+full of incessant work, and I am working harder than ever now, and in
+splendid health. Looking over the _National Reformer_ for all these
+years, it seems to me that it did really fine educational work; Mr.
+Bradlaugh's strenuous utterances on political and theological matters;
+Dr. Aveling's luminous and beautiful scientific teachings; and to my
+share fell much of the educative work on questions of political and
+national morality in our dealings with weaker nations. We put all our
+hearts into our work, and the influence exercised was distinctly in
+favour of pure living and high thinking.
+
+In the spring of 1881 the Court of Appeal decided against Mr.
+Bradlaugh's right to affirm as Member of Parliament, and his seat was
+declared vacant, but he was at once returned again by the borough of
+Northampton, despite the virulence of slander directed against him, so
+that he rightly described the election as "the most bitter I have ever
+fought." His work in the House had won him golden opinions in the
+country, and he was already recognised as a power there; so Tory fear
+was added to bigoted hatred, and the efforts to keep him out of the
+House were increased.
+
+He was introduced to the House as a new member to take his seat by Mr.
+Labouchere and Mr. Burt, but Sir Stafford Northcote intervened, and
+after a lengthy debate, which included a speech from Mr. Bradlaugh at
+the Bar, a majority of thirty-three refused to allow him to take the
+oath. After a prolonged scene, during which Mr. Bradlaugh declined to
+withdraw and the House hesitated to use force, the House adjourned,
+and finally the Government promised to bring in an Affirmation Bill,
+and Mr. Bradlaugh promised, with the consent of his constituents, to
+await the decision of the House on this Bill. Meantime, a League for
+the Defence of Constitutional Rights was formed, and the agitation in
+the country grew: wherever Mr. Bradlaugh went to speak vast crowds
+awaited him, and he travelled from one end of the country to the
+other, the people answering his appeal for justice with no uncertain
+voice. On July 2nd, in consequence of Tory obstruction, Mr. Gladstone
+wrote to Mr. Bradlaugh that the Government were going to drop the
+Affirmation Bill, and Mr. Bradlaugh thereupon determined to present
+himself once more in the House, and fixed on August 3rd as the date of
+such action, so that the Irish Land Bill might get through the House
+ere any delay in business was caused by him. The House was then
+closely guarded with police; the great gates were closed, reserves of
+police were packed in the law courts, and all through July this state
+of siege continued. On August 2nd there was a large meeting in
+Trafalgar Square, at which delegates were present from all parts of
+England, and from as far north as Edinburgh, and on Wednesday, August
+3rd, Mr. Bradlaugh went down to the House. His last words to me were:
+"The people know you better than they know any one, save myself;
+whatever happens, mind, whatever happens, let them do no violence; I
+trust to you to keep them quiet." He went to the House entrance with
+Dr. Aveling, and into the House alone. His daughters and I went
+together, and with some hundreds of others carrying petitions--ten
+only with each petition, and the ten rigidly counted and allowed to
+pass through the gate, sufficiently opened to let one through at a
+time--reached Westminster Hall, where we waited on the steps leading
+to the passage of the lobby.
+
+An inspector ordered us off. I gently intimated that we were within
+our rights. Dramatic order: "Four officers this way." Up they marched
+and looked at us, and we looked at them. "I think you had better
+consult Inspector Denning before you use violence," I remarked
+placidly. They thought they had, and in a few moments up came the
+inspector, and seeing that we were standing in a place where we had a
+right to be, and were doing no harm, he rebuked his over-zealous
+subordinates, and they retired and left us in peace. A man of much
+tact and discretion was Inspector Denning. Indeed, all through this,
+the House of Commons police behaved admirably well. Even in the attack
+they were ordered to make on Mr. Bradlaugh, the police used as little
+violence as they could. It was Mr. Erskine, the Deputy
+Serjeant-at-Arms, and his ushers, who showed the brutality; as Dr.
+Aveling wrote at the time: "The police disliked their work, and, as
+brave men, had a sympathy for a brave man. Their orders they obeyed
+rigidly. This done, they were kindness itself." Gradually the crowd of
+petitioners grew and grew; angry murmurs were heard, for no news came
+from the House, and they loved "Charlie," and were mostly north
+country men, sturdy and independent. They thought they had a right to
+go into the lobby, and suddenly, with the impulse that will sway a
+crowd to a single action there was a roar, "Petition, petition,
+justice, justice," and they surged up the steps, charging at the
+policemen who held the door. Flashed into my mind my chief's charge,
+his words, "I trust to you to keep them quiet," and as the police
+sprang forward to meet the crowd I threw myself between them, with all
+the advantage of the position of the top of the steps that I had
+chosen, so that every man in the charging crowd saw me, and as they
+checked themselves in surprise I bade them stop for his sake, and keep
+for him the peace which he had bade us should not be broken. I heard
+afterwards that as I sprang forward the police laughed--they must have
+thought me a fool to face the rush of the charging men; but I knew his
+friends would never trample me down, and as the crowd stopped the
+laugh died out, and they drew back and left me my own way.
+
+Sullenly the men drew back, mastering themselves with effort, reining
+in their wrath, still for his sake. Ah! had I known what was going on
+inside, would I have kept his trust unbroken! and, as many a man said
+to me afterwards in northern towns, "Oh! if you had let us go we would
+have carried him into the House up to the Speaker's chair." We heard a
+crash inside, and listened, and there was sound of breaking glass and
+splintering wood, and in a few minutes a messenger came to me: "He is
+in Palace Yard." And we went thither and saw him standing, still and
+white, face set like marble, coat torn, motionless, as though carved
+in stone, facing the members' door. Now we know the whole shameful
+story: how as that one man stood alone, on his way to claim his right,
+alone so that he could do no violence, fourteen men, said the Central
+News, police and ushers, flung themselves upon him, pushed and pulled
+him down the stairs, smashing in their violence the glass and wood of
+the passage door; how he struck no blow, but used only his great
+strength in passive resistance--" Of all I have ever seen, I never saw
+one man struggle with ten like that," said one of the chiefs, angrily
+disdainful of the wrong he was forced to do--till they flung him out
+into Palace Yard. An eye-witness thus reported the scene in the Press:
+"The strong, broad, heavy, powerful frame of Mr. Bradlaugh was hard to
+move, with its every nerve and muscle strained to resist the coercion.
+Bending and straining against the overpowering numbers, he held every
+inch with surprising tenacity, and only surrendered it after almost
+superhuman exertions to retain it. The sight--little of it as was seen
+from the outside--soon became sickening. The overborne man appeared
+almost at his last gasp. The face, in spite of the warmth of the
+struggle, had an ominous pallor. The limbs barely sustained him....
+The Trafalgar Square phrase that this man might be broken but not bent
+occurred to minds apprehensive at the present appearance of him."
+
+They flung him out, and swift, short words were there interchanged. "I
+nearly did wrong at the door," he said afterwards, "I was very angry.
+I said to Inspector Denning, 'I shall come again with force enough to
+overcome it,' He said, 'When?' I said, 'Within a minute if I raise my
+hand.'" He stood in Palace Yard, and there outside the gate was a vast
+sea of heads, the men who had journeyed from all parts of England for
+love of him, and in defence of the great right he represented of a
+constituency to send to Parliament the man of its choice. Ah! he was
+never greater than in that moment of outrage and of triumphant wrong;
+with all the passion of a proud man surging within him, insulted by
+physical violence, injured by the cruel wrenching of all his
+muscles--so that for weeks his arms had to be swathed in bandages--he
+was never greater than when he conquered his own wrath, crushed down
+his own longing for battle, stirred to flame by the bodily struggle,
+and the bodily injury, and with thousands waiting within sound of his
+voice, longing to leap to his side, he gave the word to tell them to
+meet him that evening away from the scene of conflict, and meanwhile
+to disperse quietly, "no riot, no disorder." But how he suffered
+mentally no words of mine may tell, and none can understand how it
+wrung his heart who does not know how he reverenced the great
+Parliament of England, how he honoured law, how he believed in justice
+being done; it was the breaking down of his national ideals, of his
+pride in his country, of his belief that faith would be kept with a
+foe by English gentlemen, who with all their faults, he thought,
+held honour and chivalry dear. "No man will sleep in gaol for me
+to-night," he said to me that day; "no woman can blame me for her
+husband killed or wounded, but--" A wave of agony swept over his face,
+and from that fatal day Charles Bradlaugh was never the same man.
+Some hold their ideals lightly, but his heart-strings were twined
+round his; some care little for their country--he was an Englishman,
+law-abiding, liberty-loving, to his heart's core, of the type of the
+seventeenth-century patriot, holding England's honour dear. It was the
+treachery that broke his heart; he had gone alone, believing in the
+honour of his foes, ready to submit to expulsion, to imprisonment, and
+it was the latter that he expected; but he never dreamed that, going
+alone amongst his foes, they would use brutal and cowardly violence,
+and shame every Parliamentary tradition by personal outrage on a
+duly-elected member, outrage more worthy of a slum pot-house than of
+the great Commons House, the House of Hampden and of Vane, the House
+that had guarded its own from Royal violence, and had maintained its
+privileges in the teeth of kings.
+
+These stormy scenes brought about a promise of Government aid; Mr.
+Bradlaugh failed to get any legal redress, as, indeed, he expected to
+fail, on the ground that the officials of the House were covered by
+the House's order, but the Government promised to support his claim to
+his seat during the next session, and thus prevented the campaign
+against them on which we had resolved. I had solely on my own
+responsibility organised a great band of people pledged to refrain
+from the use of all excisable articles after a certain date, and to
+withdraw all their moneys in the Savings Bank, thus seriously
+crippling the financial resources of the Government. The response from
+the workers to my appeal to "Stop the supplies" was great and
+touching. One man wrote that as he never drank nor smoked he would
+leave off tea; others that though tobacco was their one luxury, they
+would forego it; and so on. Somewhat reluctantly, I asked the people
+to lay aside this formidable weapon, as "we have no right to embarrass
+the Government financially save when they refuse to do the first duty
+of a Government to maintain law. They have now promised to do justice,
+and we must wait." Meanwhile the injuries inflicted on Mr. Bradlaugh,
+rupturing the sheaths of some of the muscles of the arm, laid him
+prostrate, and various small fights went on during the temporary truce
+in the great struggle. I turned up in the House two or three times,
+haled thither, though not in person, by the people who kept Mr.
+Bradlaugh out, and a speech of mine became the subject of a question
+by Mr. Ritchie, while Sir Henry Tyler waged war on the science
+classes. Another joy was added to life by the use of my name--which
+by all these struggles had gained a marketable value--as author of
+pamphlets I had never seen, and this forgery of my name by
+unscrupulous people in the colonies caused me a good deal of
+annoyance. In the strengthening of the constitutional agitation in the
+country, the holding of an International Congress of Freethinkers in
+London, the studying and teaching of science, the delivering of
+courses of scientific lectures in the Hall of Science, a sharp
+correspondence with the Bishop of Manchester, who had libelled
+Secularists, and which led to a fiery pamphlet, "God's Views on
+Marriage," as retort--in all these matters the autumn months sped
+rapidly away. One incident of that autumn I record with regret. I was
+misled by very partial knowledge of the nature of the experiments
+performed, and by my fear that if scientific men were forbidden to
+experiment on animals with drugs they would perforce experiment with
+them on the poor in hospitals, to write two articles, republished as a
+pamphlet, against Sir Eardley Wilmot's Bill for the "Total Suppression
+of Vivisection." I limited my approval to highly skilled men engaged
+in original investigations, and took the representations made of the
+character of the experiments without sufficient care to verify them.
+Hence the publication of the one thing I ever wrote for which I feel
+deep regret and shame, as against the whole trend and efforts of my
+life. I am thankful to say that Dr. Anna Kingsford answered my
+articles, and I readily inserted her replies in the paper in which
+mine had appeared--our _National Reformer_--and she touched that
+question of the moral sense to which my nature at once responded.
+Ultimately, I looked carefully into the subject, found that
+vivisection abroad was very different from vivisection in England, saw
+that it was in very truth the fiendishly cruel thing that its
+opponents alleged, and destroyed my partial defence of even its less
+brutal form.
+
+1882 saw no cessation of the struggles in which Mr. Bradlaugh and
+those who stood by him were involved. On February 7th he was heard for
+the third time at the Bar of the House of Commons, and closed his
+speech with an offer that, accepted, would have closed the contest. "I
+am ready to stand aside, say for four or five weeks, without coming to
+that table, if the House within that time, or within such time as its
+great needs might demand, would discuss whether an Affirmation Bill
+should pass or not. I want to obey the law, and I tell you how I might
+meet the House still further, if the House will pardon me for seeming
+to advise it. Hon. members have said that would be a Bradlaugh Relief
+Bill. Bradlaugh is more proud than you are. Let the Bill pass without
+applying to elections that have taken place previously, and I will
+undertake not to claim my seat, and when the Bill has passed I will
+apply for the Chiltern Hundreds. I have no fear. If I am not fit for
+my constituents, they shall dismiss me, but you never shall. The grave
+alone shall make me yield." But the House would do nothing. He had
+asked for 100,000 signatures in favour of his constitutional right,
+and on February 8th, 9th, and 10th 1,008 petitions, bearing 241,970
+signatures, were presented; the House treated them with contemptuous
+indifference. The House refused to declare his seat vacant, and also
+refused to allow him to fill it, thus half-disfranchising Northampton,
+while closing every avenue to legal redress. Mr. Labouchere--who did
+all a loyal colleague could do to assist his brother member--brought
+in an Affirmation Bill; it was blocked. Mr. Gladstone, appealed to
+support the law declared by his own Attorney-General, refused to do
+anything. An _impasse_ was created, and all the enemies of freedom
+rejoiced. Out of this position of what the _Globe_ called "quiet
+omnipotence" the House was shaken by an audacious defiance, for on
+February 21st the member it was trying to hold at arm's length took
+the oath in its startled face, went to his seat, and--waited events.
+The House then expelled him--and, indeed, it could scarcely do
+anything else after such defiance--and Mr. Labouchere moved for a new
+writ, declaring that Northampton was ready, its "candidate was Charles
+Bradlaugh, expelled this House." Northampton, ever steadfast, returned
+him for the third time--the vote in his favour showing an increase of
+359 over the second bye-election--and the triumph was received in all
+the great towns of England with wild enthusiasm. By the small majority
+of fifteen in a House of 599 members--and this due to the vacillation
+of the Government--he was again refused the right to take his seat.
+But now the whole Liberal Press took up his quarrel; the oath question
+became a test question for every candidate for Parliament, and the
+Government was warned that it was alienating its best friends. The
+_Pall Mall Gazette_ voiced the general feeling. "What is the evidence
+that an Oaths Bill would injure the Government in the country? Of one
+thing we may be sure, that if they shirk the Bill they will do no good
+to themselves at the elections. Nobody doubts that it will be made a
+test question, and any Liberal who declines to vote for such a Bill
+will certainly lose the support of the Northampton sort of Radicalism
+in every constituency. The Liberal Press throughout the country is
+absolutely unanimous. The political Non-conformists are for it. The
+local clubs are for it. All that is wanted is that the Government
+should pick up a little more moral courage, and recognise that even in
+practice honesty is the best policy." The Government did not think so,
+and they paid the penalty, for one of the causes that led to their
+defeat at the polls was the disgust felt at their vacillation and
+cowardice in regard to the rights of constituencies. Not untruly did I
+write, in May, 1882, that Charles Bradlaugh was a man "who by the
+infliction of a great wrong had become the incarnation of a great
+principle"; for the agitation in the country grew and grew, until,
+returned again to Parliament at the General Election, he took the oath
+and his seat, brought in and carried an Oaths Bill, not only giving
+Members of Parliament the right to affirm, but making Freethinkers
+competent as jurymen, and relieving witnesses from the insult hitherto
+put upon those who objected to swearing; he thus ended an
+unprecedented struggle by a complete victory, weaving his name for
+ever into the constitutional history of his country.
+
+In the House of Lords, Lord Redesdale brought in a Bill disqualifying
+Atheists from sitting in Parliament, but in face of the feeling
+aroused in the country, the Lords, with many pathetic expressions of
+regret, declined to pass it. But, meanwhile, Sir Henry Tyler in the
+Commons was calling out for prosecutions for blasphemy to be brought
+against Mr. Bradlaugh and his friends, while he carried on his crusade
+against Mr. Bradlaugh's daughters, Dr. Aveling, and myself, as science
+teachers. I summed up the position in the spring of 1882 in the
+following somewhat strong language: "This short-lived 'Parliamentary
+Declaration Bill' is but one of the many clouds which presage a storm
+of prosecution. The reiterated attempts in the House of Commons to
+force the Government into prosecuting heretics for blasphemy; the
+petty and vicious attacks on the science classes at the Hall; the
+odious and wicked efforts of Mr. Newdegate to drive Mr. Bradlaugh into
+the Bankruptcy Court; all these are but signs that the heterogeneous
+army of pious and bigoted Christians are gathering together their
+forces for a furious attack on those who have silenced them in
+argument, but whom they hope to conquer by main force, by sheer
+brutality. Let them come. Free-thinkers were never so strong, never so
+united, never so well organised as they are to-day. Strong in the
+goodness of our cause, in our faith in the ultimate triumph of Truth,
+in our willingness to give up all save fidelity to the sacred cause of
+liberty of human thought and human speech, we await gravely and
+fearlessly the successors of the men who burned Bruno, who imprisoned
+Galileo, who tortured Vanini--the men who have in their hands the
+blood-red cross of Jesus of Nazareth, and in their hearts the love of
+God and the hate of man."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+STILL FIGHTING.
+
+
+All this hot fighting on the religious field did not render me blind
+to the misery of the Irish land so dear to my heart, writhing in the
+cruel grip of Mr. Forster's Coercion Act. An article "Coercion in
+Ireland and its Results," exposing the wrongs done under the Act, was
+reprinted as a pamphlet and had a wide circulation.
+
+I pleaded against eviction--7,020 persons had been evicted during the
+quarter ending in March--for the trial of those imprisoned on
+suspicion, for indemnity for those who before the Land Act had striven
+against wrongs the Land Act had been carried to prevent, and I urged
+that "no chance is given for the healing measures to cure the sore of
+Irish disaffection until not only are the prisoners in Ireland set at
+liberty, but until the brave, unfortunate Michael Davitt stands once
+more a free man on Irish soil." At last the Government reconsidered
+its policy and resolved on juster dealings; it sent Lord Frederick
+Cavendish over to Ireland, carrying with him the release of the
+"suspects," and scarcely had he landed ere the knife of assassination
+struck him--a foul and cowardly murder of an innocent messenger of
+peace. I was at Blackburn, to lecture on "The Irish Question," and as
+I was walking towards the platform, my heart full of joy for the
+dawning hope of peace, a telegram announcing the assassination was
+placed in my hands. Never shall I forget the shock, the incredulous
+horror, the wave of despair. "It is not only two men they have
+killed," I wrote, a day or two later; "they have stabbed the new-born
+hope of friendship between two countries, and have reopened the gulf
+of hatred that was just beginning to close." Alas! the crime succeeded
+in its object, and hurried the Government into new wrong. Hastily a
+new Coercion Bill was brought in, and rushed through its stages in
+Parliament, and, facing the storm of public excitement, I pleaded
+still, "Force no remedy," despite the hardship of the task. "There is
+excessive difficulty in dealing with the Irish difficulty at the
+present moment. Tories are howling for revenge on a whole nation as
+answer to the crime committed by a few; Whigs are swelling the outcry;
+many Radicals are swept away by the current, and feeling that
+'something must be done,' they endorse the Government action,
+forgetting to ask whether the 'something' proposed is the wisest
+thing. A few stand firm, but they are very few--too few to prevent the
+new Coercion Bill from passing into law. But few though we be who lift
+up the voice of protest against the wrong which we are powerless to
+prevent, we may yet do much to make the new Act of brief duration, by
+so rousing public opinion as to bring about its early repeal. When the
+measure is understood by the public half the battle will be won; it is
+accepted at the moment from faith in the Government; it will be
+rejected when its true character is grasped. The murders which have
+given birth to this repressive measure came with a shock upon the
+country, which was the more terrible from the sudden change from
+gladness and hope to darkness and despair. The new policy was welcomed
+so joyfully; the messenger of the new policy was slain ere yet the pen
+was dry which had signed the orders of mercy and of liberty. Small
+wonder that cry of horror should be followed by measures of vengeance;
+but the murders were the work of a few criminals, while the measure of
+vengeance strikes the whole of the Irish people. I plead against the
+panic which confounds political agitation and political redressal of
+wrong with crime and its punishment; the Government measure gags every
+mouth in Ireland, and puts, as we shall see, all political effort at
+the mercy of the Lord-Lieutenant, the magistracy, and the police." I
+then sketched the misery of the peasants in the grip of absentee
+landlords, the turning out on the roadside to die of the mother with
+new-born babe at her breast, the loss of "all thought of the sanctity
+of human life when the lives of the dearest are reckoned as less worth
+than the shillings of overdue rack-rental." I analysed the new Act:
+"When this Act passes, trial by jury, right of public meeting, liberty
+of press, sanctity of house, will one and all be held at the will of
+the Lord-Lieutenant, the irresponsible autocrat of Ireland, while
+liberty of person will lie at the mercy of every constable. Such is
+England's way of governing Ireland in the year 1882. And this is
+supposed to be a Bill for the 'repression of crime.'" Bluntly, I put
+the bald truth: "The plain fact is that the murderers have succeeded.
+They saw in the new policy the reconciliation of England and Ireland;
+they knew that friendship would follow justice, and that the two
+countries, for the first time in history, would clasp hands. To
+prevent this they dug a new gulf, which they hoped the English nation
+would not span; they sent a river of blood across the road of
+friendship, and they flung two corpses to bar the newly-opened gate of
+reconciliation and peace. They have succeeded."
+
+Into this whirl of political and social strife came the first whisper
+to me of the Theosophical Society, in the shape of a statement of its
+principles, which conveyed, I remarked, "no very definite idea of the
+requirements for membership, beyond a dreamy, emotional, scholarly
+interest in the religio-philosophic fancies of the past." Also a
+report of an address by Colonel Olcott, which led me to suppose that
+the society held to "some strange theory of 'apparitions' of the dead,
+and to some existence outside the physical and apart from it." These
+came to me from some Hindu Freethinkers, who asked my opinion as to
+Secularists joining the Theosophical Society, and Theosophists being
+admitted to the National Secular Society. I replied, judging from
+these reports, that "while Secularists would have no right to refuse
+to enrol Theosophists, if they desired it, among their members, there
+is a radical difference between the mysticism of Theosophy and the
+scientific materialism of Secularism. The exclusive devotion to this
+world implied in the profession of Secularism leaves no room for
+other-worldism; and consistent members of our body cannot join a
+society which professes belief therein."[27]
+
+H.P. Blavatsky penned a brief article in the _Theosophist_ for
+August, 1882, in which she commented on my paragraph, remarking, in
+her generous way, that it must have been written "while labouring
+under entirely misconceived notions about the real nature of our
+society. For one so highly intellectual and keen as that renowned
+writer to dogmatise and issue autocratic ukases, after she has herself
+suffered so cruelly and undeservedly at the hands of blind bigotry and
+social prejudice in her lifelong struggle for _freedom of thought_
+seems, to say the least, absurdly inconsistent." After quoting my
+paragraph she went on: "Until proofs to the contrary, we prefer to
+believe that the above lines were dictated to Mrs. Besant by some
+crafty misrepresentations from Madras, inspired by a mean personal
+revenge rather than a desire to remain consistent with the principles
+of 'the scientific materialism of Secularism.' We beg to assure the
+Radical editors of the _National Reformer_ that they were both very
+strangely misled by false reports about the Radical editors of the
+_Theosophist_. The term 'supernaturalists' can no more apply to the
+latter than to Mrs. A. Besant and Mr. C. Bradlaugh."
+
+H.P. Blavatsky, when she commented, as she occasionally did, on the
+struggles going on in England, took of them a singularly large-hearted
+and generous view. She referred with much admiration to Mr.
+Bradlaugh's work and to his Parliamentary struggle, and spoke warmly
+of the services he had rendered to liberty. Again, in pointing out
+that spiritualistic trance orations by no means transcended speeches
+that made no such claim, I find her first mention of myself: "Another
+lady orator, of deservedly great fame, both for eloquence and
+learning--the good Mrs. Annie Besant--without believing in controlling
+spirits, or for that matter in her own spirit, yet speaks and writes
+such sensible and wise things, that we might almost say that one of
+her speeches or chapters contains more matter to benefit humanity than
+would equip a modern trance-speaker for an entire oratorical
+career."[28] I have sometimes wondered of late years whether, had I
+met her then or seen any of her writings, I should have become her
+pupil. I fear not; I was still too much dazzled by the triumphs of
+Western Science, too self-assertive, too fond of combat, too much at
+the mercy of my own emotions, too sensitive to praise and blame. I
+needed to sound yet more deeply the depths of human misery, to hear
+yet more loudly the moaning of "the great Orphan," Humanity, to feel
+yet more keenly the lack of wider knowledge and of clearer light if I
+were to give effective help to man, ere I could bow my pride to crave
+admittance as pupil to the School of Occultism, ere I could put aside
+my prejudices and study the Science of the Soul.
+
+The long-continued attempts of Sir Henry Tyler and his friends to
+stimulate persecutions for blasphemy at length took practical shape,
+and in July, 1882, Mr. Foote, the editor, Mr. Ramsey, the publisher,
+and Mr. Whittle, the printer of the _Freethinker_, were summoned for
+blasphemy by Sir Henry Tyler himself. An attempt was made to involve
+Mr. Bradlaugh in the proceedings, and the solicitors promised to drop
+the case against the editor and printer if Mr. Bradlaugh would himself
+sell them some copies of the paper. But however ready Mr. Bradlaugh
+had always shown himself to shield his subordinates by taking his sins
+on his own shoulders, he saw no reason why he should assume
+responsibility for a paper over which he had no control, and which
+was, he thought, by its caricatures, lowering the tone of Freethought
+advocacy and giving an unnecessary handle to its foes. He therefore
+answered that he would sell the solicitors any works published by
+himself or with his authority, and sent them a catalogue of the whole
+of such works. The object of this effort of Sir Henry Tyler's was
+obvious enough, and Mr. Bradlaugh commented: "The above letters make
+it pretty clear that Sir Henry W. Tyler having failed in his endeavour
+to get the science classes stopped at the Hall of Science, having also
+failed in his attempt to induce Sir W. Vernon Harcourt to prosecute
+myself and Mrs. Besant as editors and publishers of this journal,
+desires to make me personally and criminally responsible for the
+contents of a journal I neither edit nor publish, over which I have
+not a shadow of control, and in which I have not the smallest
+interest. Why does Sir H.W. Tyler so ardently desire to prosecute, me
+for blasphemy? Is it because two convictions will under the 9th and
+10th Will. III. cap. 32, render me 'for ever' incapable of sitting in
+Parliament?" The _Whitehall Review_ frankly put this forward as an
+object to be gained, and Mr. Bradlaugh was summoned to the Mansion
+House on a charge of publishing blasphemous libels in the
+_Freethinker_; meanwhile Sir Henry Tyler put a notice on the Order
+Book to deprive "the daughters of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh" of the grant
+they had earned as science teachers, and got an order which proved to
+be invalid, but which was acted on, to inspect Mr. Bradlaugh's and my
+own private banking accounts, I being no party to the case. Looking
+back, I marvel at the incredible meannesses to which Sir Henry Tyler
+and others stooped in defence of "religion"--Heaven save the mark! Let
+me add that his motion in the House of Commons was a complete failure,
+and it was emphasised by the publication at the same time of the
+successful work, both as teachers and as students, of the "daughters
+of Mr. Charles Bradlaugh," and of my being the only student in all
+England who had succeeded in taking honours in botany.
+
+I must pause a moment to chronicle, in September, 1882, the death of
+Dr. Pusey, whom I had sought in the whirl of my early religious
+struggles. I wrote an article on him in the _National Reformer_, and
+ended by laying a tribute on his grave: "A strong man and a good man.
+Utterly out of harmony with the spirit of his own time, looking with
+sternly-rebuking eyes on all the eager research, the joyous love of
+nature, the earnest inquiry into a world doomed to be burnt up at the
+coming of its Judge. An ascetic, pure in life, stern in faith, harsh
+to unbelievers because sincere in his own cruel creed, generous and
+tender to all who accepted his doctrines and submitted to his Church.
+He never stooped to slander those with whom he disagreed. His hatred
+of heresy led him not to blacken the character of heretics, nor to
+descend to the vulgar abuse used by pettier priests. And therefore I,
+who honour courage and sincerity wherever I find them; I, who do
+homage to steadfastness wherever I find it; I, Atheist, lay my small
+tribute of respect on the bier of this noblest of the Anglo-Catholics,
+Edward Bouverie Pusey."
+
+As a practical answer to the numberless attacks made on us, and as a
+result of the enormous increase of circulation given to our
+theological and political writings by these harassing persecutions, we
+moved our publishing business to 63, Fleet Street, at the end of
+September, 1882, a shop facing that at which Richard Carlile had
+carried on his publishing business for a great time, and so seemed
+still redolent with memories of his gallant struggles. Two of the
+first things sold here were a pamphlet of mine, a strong protest
+against our shameful Egyptian policy, and a critical volume on
+"Genesis" which Mr. Bradlaugh found time to write in the intervals of
+his busy life. Here I worked daily, save when out of London, until Mr.
+Bradlaugh's death in 1891, assisted in the conduct of the business by
+Mr. Bradlaugh's elder daughter--a woman of strong character with many
+noble qualities, who died rather suddenly in December, 1888, and in
+the work on the _National Reformer_, first by Dr. Aveling, and then by
+Mr. John Robertson, its present editor. Here, too, from 1884 onwards,
+worked with me Thornton Smith, one of Mr. Bradlaugh's most devoted
+disciples, who became one of the leading speakers of the National
+Secular Society; like her well-loved chief, she was ever a good friend
+and a good fighter, and to me the most loyal and loving of colleagues,
+one of the few--the very few--Freethinkers who were large-hearted and
+generous enough not to turn against me when I became a Theosophist. A
+second of these--alas! I could count them on my fingers--was the John
+Robertson above mentioned, a man of rare ability and wide culture,
+somewhat too scholarly for popular propagandism of the most generally
+effective order, but a man who is a strength to any movement, always
+on the side of noble living and high thinking, loyal-natured as the
+true Scot should be, incapable of meanness or treachery, and the most
+genial and generous of friends.
+
+Among the new literary ventures that followed on our taking the large
+publishing premises in Fleet Street was a sixpenny magazine, edited by
+myself, and entitled _Our Corner_; its first number was dated January,
+1883, and for six years it appeared regularly, and served me as a
+useful mouthpiece in my Socialist and Labour propagandist work. Among
+its contributors were Moncure D. Conway, Professor Ludwig Buechner,
+Yves Guyot, Professor Ernst Haeckel, G. Bernard Shaw, Constance Naden,
+Dr. Aveling, J.H. Levy, J.L. Joynes, Mrs. Edgren, John Robertson,
+and many another, Charles Bradlaugh and I writing regularly each
+month.
+
+1883 broke stormily, fights on every hand, and a huge constitutional
+agitation going on in the country, which forced the Government into
+bringing in an Affirmation Bill; resolutions from Liberal Associations
+all over the land; preparations to oppose the re-election of disloyal
+members; no less than a thousand delegates sent up to London by clubs,
+Trade Unions, associations of every sort; a meeting that packed
+Trafalgar Square; an uneasy crowd in Westminster Hall; a request from
+Inspector Denning that Mr. Bradlaugh would go out to them--they feared
+for his safety inside; a word from him, "The Government have pledged
+themselves to bring in an Affirmation Bill at once;" roar after roar
+of cheering; a veritable people's victory on that 15th of February,
+1883. It was the answer of the country to the appeal for justice, the
+rebuke of the electors to the House that had defied them.
+
+Scarcely was this over when a second prosecution for blasphemy against
+Messrs. Foote, Ramsey, and Kemp began, and was hurried on in the
+Central Criminal Court, before Mr. Justice North, a bigot of the
+sternest type. The trial ended in a disagreement of the jury, Mr.
+Foote defending himself in a splendid speech. The judge acted very
+harshly throughout, interrupted Mr. Foote continuously, and even
+refused bail to the defendants during the interval between the first
+and second trial; they were, therefore, confined in Newgate from
+Thursday to Monday, and we were only allowed to see them through iron
+bars and lattice, as they exercised in the prison yard between 8:30
+and 9:30 a.m. Brought up to trial again on Monday, they were
+convicted, and Mr. Foote was sentenced to a year's imprisonment, Mr.
+Ramsey to nine months, and Mr. Kemp to three months. Mr. Foote
+especially behaved with great dignity and courage in a most difficult
+position, and heard his cruel sentence without wincing, and with the
+calm words, "My Lord, I thank you; it is worthy your creed." A few of
+us at once stepped in, to preserve to Mr. Ramsey his shop, and to Mr.
+Foote his literary property; Dr. Aveling undertook the editing of the
+_Freethinker_ and of Mr. Foote's magazine _Progress_; the immediate
+necessities of their families were seen to; Mr. and Mrs. Forder took
+charge of the shop, and within a few days all was in working order.
+Disapproving as many of us did of the policy of the paper, there was
+no time to think of that when a blasphemy prosecution had proved
+successful, and we all closed up in the support of men imprisoned for
+conscience' sake. I commenced a series of articles on "The Christian
+Creed; what it is blasphemy to deny," showing what Christians must
+believe under peril of prosecution. Everywhere a tremendous impulse
+was given to the Freethought movement, as men awakened to the
+knowledge that blasphemy laws were not obsolete.
+
+From over the sea came a word of sympathy from the pen of H.P.
+Blavatsky in the _Theosophist_. "We prefer Mr. Foote's actual position
+to that of his severe judge. Aye, and were we in his guilty skin, we
+would feel more proud, even in the poor editor's present position,
+than we would under the wig of Mr. Justice North."
+
+In April, 1883, the long legal struggles of Mr. Bradlaugh against Mr.
+Newdegate and his common informer, that had lasted from July 2, 1880,
+till April 9, 1883, ended in his complete victory by the judgment of
+the House of Lords in his favour. "Court after Court decided against
+me," he wrote; "and Whig and Tory journals alike mocked at me for my
+persistent resistance. Even some good friends thought that my fight
+was hopeless, and that the bigots held me fast in their toils. I have,
+however, at last shaken myself free of Mr. Newdegate and his common
+informer. The judgment of the House of Lords in my favour is final and
+conclusive, and the boasts of the Tories that I should be made
+bankrupt for the penalties, have now, for ever, come to naught. Yet
+but for the many poor folk who have stood by me with their help and
+sympathy, I should have long since been ruined. The days and weeks
+spent in the Law Courts, the harassing work connected with each stage
+of litigation, the watching daily when each hearing was imminent, the
+absolute hindrance of all provincial lecturing--it is hardly possible
+for any one to judge the terrible mental and pecuniary strain of all
+this long-drawn-out struggle." Aye! it killed him at last, twenty
+years before his time, sapping his splendid vitality, undermining his
+iron constitution.
+
+The blasphemy trial of Mr. Bradlaugh, Mr. Foote, and Mr. Ramsey now
+came on, but this time in the Queen's Bench, before the Lord Chief
+Justice Coleridge. I had the honour of sitting between Mr. Bradlaugh
+and Mr. Foote, charged with the duty of having ready for the former
+all his references, and with a duplicate brief to mark off point after
+point as he dealt with it. Messrs. Foote and Ramsey were brought up in
+custody, but were brave and bright with courage unbroken. Mr.
+Bradlaugh applied to have his case taken separately, as he denied
+responsibility for the paper, and the judge granted the application;
+it was clearly proved that he and I--the "Freethought Publishing
+Company"--had never had anything to do with the production of the
+paper; that until November, 1881, we published it, and then refused to
+publish it any longer; that the reason for the refusal was the
+addition of comic Bible illustrations as a feature of the paper. I was
+called as witness and began with a difficulty; claiming to affirm, I
+was asked by the judge if the oath would not be binding on my
+conscience; I answered that any promise was binding on me whatever the
+form, and after some little argument the judge found a way out of the
+insulting form by asking whether the "invocation of the Deity added
+anything to it of a binding nature--added any sanction?" "None, my
+Lord," was the prompt reply, and I was allowed to affirm. Sir Hardinge
+Giffard subjected me to a very stringent cross-examination, doing his
+best to entangle me, but the perfect frankness of my answers broke all
+his weapons of finesse and inuendo.
+
+Some of the incidents of the trial were curious; Sir Hardinge
+Giffard's opening speech was very able and very unscrupulous. All
+facts in Mr. Bradlaugh's favour were distorted or hidden; anything
+that could be used against him was tricked out in most seductive
+fashion. Among the many monstrous perversions of the truth made by
+this most pious counsel, was the statement that changes of publisher,
+and of registration of the _Freethinker_ were made in consequence of a
+question as to prosecuting it put in the House of Commons. The change
+of publisher was admittedly made in November; the registration was
+made for the first time in November, and could not be changed, as
+there was no previous one. The House of Commons was not sitting in
+November; the question alluded to was asked in the following February.
+This one deliberate lie of the "defender of the faith" will do as well
+as quoting a score of others to show how wickedly and maliciously he
+endeavoured to secure an unjust verdict.
+
+The speech over, a number of witnesses were called. Sir Hardinge did
+not call witnesses who knew the facts, such as Mr. Norrish, the
+shopman, or Mr. Whittle, the printer. These he carefully avoided,
+although he subpoenaed both, because he did not want the real facts to
+come out. But he put in two solicitor's clerks, who had been hanging
+about the premises, and buying endless _National Reformers_ and
+_Freethinkers_, sheaves of them which were never used, but by which
+Sir Hardinge hoped to convey the impression of a mass of criminality.
+He put in a gentleman from the British Museum, who produced two large
+books, presumed to be _National Reformers_ and _Freethinkers_; what
+they were brought for nobody understood, the counsel for the Crown as
+little as any one, and the judge, surveying them over his spectacles,
+treated them with supreme contempt, as utterly irrelevant. Then a man
+came to prove that Mr. Bradlaugh was rated for Stonecutter Street, a
+fact no one disputed. Two policemen came to say they had seen him go
+in. "You saw many people go in, I suppose?" queried the Lord Chief
+Justice. On the whole the most miserably weak and obviously malicious
+case that could be brought into a court of law.
+
+One witness, however, must not be forgotten--Mr. Woodhams, bank
+manager. When he stated that Mr. Maloney, the junior counsel for the
+Crown, had inspected Mr. Bradlaugh's banking account, a murmur of
+surprise and indignation ran round the court. "Oh! Oh!" was heard from
+the crowd of barristers behind. The judge looked down incredulously,
+and for a moment the examination was stopped by the general movement.
+Unless Sir Hardinge Giffard is a splendid actor, he was not aware of
+the infamous proceeding, for he looked as startled as the rest of his
+legal brethren.
+
+Another queer incident occurred, showing, perhaps more than aught
+else, Mr. Bradlaugh's swift perception of the situation and adaptation
+to the environment. He wanted to read the Mansion House deposition of
+Norrish, to show why he was not called; the judge objected, and
+declined to allow it to be read. A pause while you might count five;
+then; "Well, I think I may say the learned counsel did not call
+Norrish because ..." and then the whole substance of the deposition
+was given in supposititious form. The judge looked down a minute, and
+then went off into silent laughter impossible to control at the adroit
+change of means and persistent gaining of end; barristers all round
+broke into ripples of laughter unrestrained; a broad smile pervaded
+the jury box; the only unmoved person was the defendant who proceeded
+in his grave statement as to what Norrish "might" have been asked. The
+nature of the defence was very clearly stated by Mr. Bradlaugh: "I
+shall ask you to find that this prosecution is one of the steps in a
+vindictive attempt to oppress and to crush a political opponent--that
+it was a struggle that commenced on my return to Parliament in 1880.
+If the prosecutor had gone into the box I should have shown you that
+he was one of the first then in the House to use the suggestion of
+blasphemy against me there. Since then I have never had any peace
+until the Monday of this week. Writs for penalties have been served,
+and suits of all kinds have been taken against me. On Monday last the
+House of Lords cleared me from the whole of one set, and, gentlemen, I
+ask you to-day to clear me from another. Three times I have been
+re-elected by my constituents, and what Sir Henry Tyler asks you to do
+is to send me to them branded with the dishonour of a conviction,
+branded not with the conviction for publishing heresy, but branded
+with the conviction, dishonourable to me, of having lied in this
+matter. I have no desire to have a prison's walls closed on me, but I
+would sooner ten times that, than that my constituents should think
+that for one moment I lied to escape the penalties. I am not indicted
+for anything I have ever written or caused to be written. As my Lord
+at the very first stage this morning pointed out, it is no question
+with me, Are the matters indicted blasphemous, or are they not
+blasphemous? Are they defensible, or are they not defensible? That is
+not my duty here. On this I make no comment. I have no duty here of
+even discussing the policy of the blasphemy laws, although I cannot
+help thinking that, if I were here making my defence against them, I
+might say that they were bad laws unfairly revived, doing more
+mischief to those who revive them than to those whom they are revived
+against. But it is not for anything I have said myself; it is not for
+anything I have written myself; it is not for anything I have
+published myself. It is an endeavour to make me technically liable for
+a publication with which I have nothing whatever to do, and I will ask
+you to defeat that here. Every time I have succeeded I have been met
+with some new thing. When I first fought it was hoped to defeat my
+election. When I was re-elected it was sought to make me bankrupt by
+enormous penalties, and when I escaped the suit for enormous penalties
+they hope now to destroy me by this. I have no question here about
+defending my heresy, not because I am not ready to defend it when it
+is challenged in the right way, and it there be anything in it that
+the law can challenge. I have never gone back from anything I have
+ever said; I have never gone back from anything I have ever written; I
+have never gone back from anything I have ever done; and I ask you not
+to allow this Sir Henry Whatley Tyler, who dares not come here to-day,
+to use you as the assassin uses the dagger, to stab a man from behind
+whom he never dares to face."
+
+The summing up by Lord Coleridge was perfect in eloquence, in thought,
+in feeling. Nothing more touching could be imagined than the conflict
+between the real religious feeling, abhorrent of heresy, and the
+determination to be just, despite all prejudice. The earnest effort
+lest the prejudice he felt as a Christian should weigh also in the
+minds of the jury, and should cause them to pervert justice. The
+absolute pleading to them to do what was right and not to admit
+against the unbeliever what they would not admit in ordinary cases.
+Then the protest against prosecution of opinions; the admission of the
+difficulties in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the pathetic fear lest by
+persecution "the sacred truths might be struck through the sides of
+those who are their enemies." For intellectual clearness and moral
+elevation this exquisite piece of eloquence, delivered in a voice of
+silvery beauty, would be hard to excel, and Lord Coleridge did this
+piece of service to the religion so dear to his heart, that he showed
+that a Christian judge could be just and righteous in dealing with a
+foe of his creed.
+
+There was a time of terrible strain waiting for the verdict, and when
+at last it came, "Not Guilty," a sharp clap of applause hailed it,
+sternly and rightly reproved by the judge. It was echoed by the
+country, which almost unanimously condemned the prosecution as an
+iniquitous attempt on the part of Mr. Bradlaugh's political enemies to
+put a stop to his political career. Thus the _Pall Mall Gazette_
+wrote:--
+
+"Whatever may be the personal or political or religious aversion which
+is excited by Mr. Bradlaugh, it is impossible for even his bitterest
+opponents to deny the brilliance of the series of victories which he
+has won in the law courts. His acquittal in the blasphemy prosecution
+of Saturday was but the latest of a number of encounters in which he
+has succeeded in turning the tables upon his opponents in the most
+decisive fashion. The policy of baiting Mr. Bradlaugh which has been
+persisted in so long, savours so strongly of a petty and malignant
+species of persecution that it is well that those who indulge in it
+should be made to smart for their pains. The wise and weighty words
+used by the Lord Chief Justice in summing up should be taken seriously
+to heart: 'Those persons are to be deprecated who would pervert the
+law, even with the best intentions, and "do evil that good may come,
+whose damnation" (says the apostle) "is just."' Without emulating the
+severity of the apostle, we may say that it is satisfactory that the
+promoters of all these prosecutions should be condemned in costs."
+
+In the separate trial of Messrs. Foote and Ramsey, Mr. Foote again
+defended himself in a speech of marked ability, and spoken of by the
+judge as "very striking." Lord Coleridge made a noble charge to the
+jury, in which he strongly condemned prosecutions of unpopular
+opinions, pointing out that no prosecution short of extermination
+could be effective, and caustically remarking on the very easy form of
+virtue indulged in by persecutors. "As a general rule," he said,
+"persecution, unless far more extreme than in England in the
+nineteenth century is possible, is certain to be in vain. It is also
+true, and I cannot help assenting to it, that it is a very easy form
+of virtue. It is a more difficult form of virtue, quietly and
+unostentatiously to obey what we believe to be God's will in our own
+lives. It is not very easy to do it; and it makes much less noise in
+the world. It is very easy to turn upon somebody else who differs from
+us, and in the guise of zeal of God's honour to attack somebody of a
+difference of opinion, whose life may be more pleasing to God and more
+conducive to His honour than our own. And when it is done by persons
+whose own lives are not free from reproach and who take that
+particular form of zeal for God which consists in putting the criminal
+law in force against others, that, no doubt, does more to create a
+sympathy with the defendant than with the prosecutor. And if it should
+be done by those who enjoy the wit of Voltaire, and who do not turn
+away from the sneers of Gibbon, and rather relish the irony of Hume,
+our feelings do not go with the prosecutors, and we are rather
+disposed to sympathise with the defendant. It is still worse if the
+person who takes such a course takes it, not from a kind of notion
+that God wants his assistance, and that he can give it less on his own
+account than by prosecuting others--but it is mixed up with anything
+of partisan or political feeling, then nothing can be more foreign to
+what is high-minded, or religious, or noble, in men's conduct; and
+indeed, it seems to me that any one who will do that, not for the
+honour of God but for the purpose of the ban, deserves the most
+disdainful disapprobation."
+
+The jury disagreed, and a _nolle prosequi_ was entered. The net
+results of the trials were a large addition to the membership of the
+National Secular Society, an increase of circulation of Freethought
+literature, the raising of Mr. Foote for a time to a position of great
+influence and popularity, and the placing of his name in history as a
+brave martyr for liberty of speech. The offence against good taste
+will be forgotten; the loyalty to conviction and to courage will
+remain. History does not ask if men who suffered for heresy ever
+published a rough word; it asks, Were they brave in their
+steadfastness; were they faithful to the truth they saw? It may be
+well to place on record Mr. Foote's punishment for blasphemy: he spent
+twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four alone in his cell; his only
+seat was a stool without a back; his employment was picking matting;
+his bed was a plank with a thin mattress. During the latter part of
+his imprisonment he was allowed some books.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+SOCIALISM.
+
+
+The rest of 1883 passed in the usual way of hard work; the Affirmation
+Bill was rejected, and the agitation for Constitutional right grew
+steadily; the Liberal Press was won over, and Mr. Bradlaugh was
+beginning to earn golden opinions on all sides for his courage, his
+tenacity, and his self-control. A successful International Congress at
+Amsterdam took some of us over to the Northern Venice, where a most
+successful gathering was held. To me, personally, the year has a
+special interest, as being the one in which my attention was called,
+though only partially, to the Socialist movement. I had heard Louise
+Michelle lecture in the early spring; a brief controversy in the
+_National Reformer_ had interested me, but I had not yet concerned
+myself with the economic basis of Socialism; I had realised that the
+land should be public property, but had not gone into the deeper
+economic causes of poverty, though the question was pressing with
+ever-increasing force on heart and brain. Of Socialist teaching I knew
+nothing, having studied only the older English Economists in my
+younger days. In 1884 a more definite call to consider 299 these
+teachings was to come, and I may perhaps open the record of 1884 with
+the words of greeting spoken by me to our readers in the first number
+of the _Reformer_ for that year: "What tests 1884 may have for our
+courage, what strains on our endurance, what trials of our loyalty,
+none can tell. But this we know--that every test of courage
+successfully met, every strain of endurance steadily borne, every
+trial of loyalty nobly surmounted, leaves courage braver, endurance
+stronger, loyalty truer, than each was before. And therefore, for our
+own and for the world's sake, I will not wish you, friends, an 1884 in
+which there shall be no toil and no battling; but I will wish you,
+each and all, the hero's heart and the hero's patience, in the
+struggle for the world's raising that will endure through the coming
+year."
+
+On February 3rd I came for the first time across a paper called
+_Justice_, in which Mr. Bradlaugh was attacked, and which gave an
+account of a meeting of the Democratic Federation--not yet the Social
+Democratic--in which a man had, apparently unrebuked, said that "all
+means were justifiable to attain" working-class ends. I protested
+strongly against the advocacy of criminal means, declaring that those
+who urged the use of such means were the worst foes of social
+progress. A few weeks later the _Echo_ repeated a speech of Mr.
+Hyndman's in which a "bloodier revolution" than that of France was
+prophesied, and the extinction of "book-learning" seemed coupled with
+the success of Socialism, and this again I commented on. But I had the
+pleasure, a week later, of reprinting from _Justice_ a sensible
+paragraph, condemning the advocacy of violence so long as free
+agitation was allowed.
+
+The spring was marked by two events on which I have not time or space
+to dwell--the resignation by Mr. Bradlaugh of his seat, on the
+reiteration of the resolution of exclusion, and his triumphant return
+for the fourth time by an increased majority, a vote of 4,032, a
+higher poll than that of the general election; and the release of Mr.
+Foote, on February 25th, from Holloway, whence he was escorted by a
+procession a quarter of a mile in length. On the 12th of March he and
+his fellow-prisoners received a magnificent reception and were
+presented with valuable testimonials at the Hall of Science.
+
+Taking up again the thread of Socialism, the great debate in St.
+James's Hall, London, between Mr. Bradlaugh and Mr. Hyndman on April
+17th, roused me to a serious study of the questions raised. Socialism
+has in England no more devoted, no more self-sacrificing advocate than
+Henry Hyndman. A man of wide and deep reading, wielding most ably a
+singularly fascinating pen, with talents that would have made him
+wealthy in any career he adopted, he has sacrificed himself without a
+murmur to the people's cause. He has borne obloquy from without,
+suspicion and unkindness from those he served, and surrounded by
+temptations to betray the people, he has never swerved from his
+integrity. He has said rash things, has been stirred to passionate
+outbursts and reckless phrases, but love to the people and sympathy
+with suffering lay at the root of his wildest words, and they count
+but little as against his faithful service. Personally, my debt to him
+is of a mixed character; he kept me from Socialism for some time by
+his bitter and very unjust antagonism to Mr. Bradlaugh; but it was the
+debate at St. James's Hall that, while I angrily resented his
+injustice, made me feel that there was something more in practical
+Socialism than I had imagined, especially when I read it over
+afterwards, away from the magic of Mr. Bradlaugh's commanding
+eloquence and personal magnetism. It was a sore pity that English
+Socialists, from the outset of their movement, treated Mr. Bradlaugh
+so unfairly, so that his friends were set against Socialists ere they
+began to examine their arguments. I must confess that my deep
+attachment to him led me into injustice to his Socialist foes in those
+early days, and often made me ascribe to them calculated malignity
+instead of hasty and prejudiced assertion. Added to this, their
+uncurbed violence in discussion, their constant interruptions during
+the speeches of opponents, their reckless inaccuracy in matters of
+fact, were all bars standing in the way of the thoughtful. When I came
+to know them better, I found that the bulk of their speakers were very
+young men, overworked and underpaid, who spent their scanty leisure in
+efforts to learn, to educate themselves, to train themselves, and I
+learned to pardon faults which grew out of the bitter sense of
+injustice, and which were due largely to the terrible pressure of our
+system on characters not yet strong enough--how few are strong
+enough!--to bear grinding injustice without loss of balance and of
+impartiality. None save those who have worked with them know how much
+of real nobility, of heroic self-sacrifice, of constant self-denial,
+of brotherly affection, there is among the Social Democrats.
+
+At this time also I met George Bernard Shaw, one of the most brilliant
+of Socialist writers and most provoking of men; a man with a perfect
+genius for "aggravating" the enthusiastically earnest, and with a
+passion for representing himself as a scoundrel. On my first
+experience of him on the platform at South Place Institute he
+described himself as a "loafer," and I gave an angry snarl at him in
+the _Reformer_, for a loafer was my detestation, and behold! I found
+that he was very poor, because he was a writer with principles and
+preferred starving his body to starving his conscience; that he gave
+time and earnest work to the spreading of Socialism, spending night
+after night in workmen's clubs; and that "a loafer" was only an
+amiable way of describing himself because he did not carry a hod. Of
+course I had to apologise for my sharp criticism as doing him a
+serious injustice, but privately felt somewhat injured at having been
+entrapped into such a blunder. Meanwhile I was more and more turning
+aside from politics and devoting myself to the social condition of the
+people I find myself, in June, protesting against Sir John Lubbock's
+Bill which fixed a twelve-hour day as the limit of a "young person's"
+toil. "A 'day' of twelve hours is brutal," I wrote; "if the law fixes
+twelve hours as a 'fair day' that law will largely govern custom. I
+declare that a 'legal day' should be eight hours on five days in the
+week and not more than five hours on the sixth. If the labour is of an
+exhausting character these hours are too long." On every side now the
+Socialist controversy grew, and I listened, read, and thought much,
+but said little. The inclusion of John Robertson in the staff of the
+_Reformer_ brought a highly intellectual Socialist into closer touch
+with us, and slowly I found that the case for Socialism was
+intellectually complete and ethically beautiful. The trend of my
+thought was shown by urging the feeding of Board School children,
+breaking down under the combination of education and starvation, and I
+asked, "Why should people be pauperised by a rate-supported meal, and
+not pauperised by, state-supported police, drainage, road-mending,
+street-lighting, &c? "Socialism in its splendid ideal appealed to my
+heart, while the economic soundness of its basis convinced my head.
+All my life was turned towards the progress of the people, the helping
+of man, and it leaped forward to meet the stronger hope, the lofty
+ideal of social brotherhood, the rendering possible to all of freer
+life; so long had I been striving thitherward, and here there opened
+up a path to the yearned-for goal! How strong were the feelings
+surging in my heart may be seen in a brief extract from an article
+published second week of January, 1885: "Christian charity? We know
+its work. It gives a hundred-weight of coal and five pounds of beef
+once a year to a family whose head could earn a hundred such doles if
+Christian justice allowed him fair wage for the work he performs. It
+plunders the workers of the wealth they make, and then flings back at
+them a thousandth part of their own product as 'charity.' It builds
+hospitals for the poor whom it has poisoned in filthy courts and
+alleys, and workhouses for the worn-out creatures from whom it has
+wrung every energy, every hope, every joy. Miss Cobbe summons us to
+admire Christian civilisation, and we see idlers flaunting in the
+robes woven by the toilers, a glittering tinselled super-structure
+founded on the tears, the strugglings, the grey, hopeless misery of
+the poor."
+
+This first month of January, 1885, brought on me the first attack for
+my Socialistic tendencies, from the pen of Mr. W.P. Ball, who wrote
+to the _Reformer_ complaining of my paragraph, quoted above, in which
+I had advocated rate-supported meals for Board School children. A
+brief controversy thus arose, in which I supported my opinion, waiving
+the question as to my being "at heart a Socialist." In truth, I
+dreaded to make the plunge of publicly allying myself with the
+advocates of Socialism, because of the attitude of bitter hostility
+they had adopted towards Mr. Bradlaugh. On his strong, tenacious
+nature, nurtured on self-reliant individualism, the arguments of the
+younger generation made no impression. He could not change his methods
+because a new tendency was rising to the surface, and he did not see
+how different was the Socialism of our day to the Socialist dreams of
+the past--noble ideals of a future not immediately realisable in
+truth, but to be worked towards and rendered possible in the days to
+come. Could I take public action which might bring me into collision
+with the dearest of my friends, which might strain the strong and
+tender tie so long existing between us? My affection, my gratitude,
+all warred against the idea of working with those who wronged him so
+bitterly. But the cry of starving children was ever in my ears; the
+sobs of women poisoned in lead works, exhausted in nail works, driven
+to prostitution by starvation, made old and haggard by ceaseless work.
+I saw their misery was the result of an evil system, was inseparable
+from private ownership of the instruments of wealth production; that
+while the worker was himself but an instrument, selling his labour
+under the law of supply and demand, he must remain helpless in the
+grip of the employing classes, and that trade combinations could only
+mean increased warfare--necessary, indeed, for the time as weapons of
+defence--but meaning war, not brotherly co-operation of all for the
+good of all. A conflict which was stripped of all covering, a conflict
+between a personal tie and a call of duty could not last long, and
+with a heavy heart I made up my mind to profess Socialism openly and
+work for it with all my energy. Happily, Mr. Bradlaugh was as tolerant
+as he was strong, and our private friendship remained unbroken; but he
+never again felt the same confidence in my judgment as he felt before,
+nor did he any more consult me on his own policy, as he had done ever
+since we first clasped hands.
+
+A series of articles in _Our Corner_ on the "Redistribution of
+Political Power," on the "Evolution of Society," on "Modern
+Socialism," made my position clear. "Over against those who laud the
+present state of Society, with its unjustly rich and its unjustly
+poor, with its palaces and its slums, its millionaires and its
+paupers, be it ours to proclaim that there is a higher ideal in life
+than that of being first in the race for wealth, most successful in
+the scramble for gold. Be it ours to declare steadfastly that health,
+comfort, leisure, culture, plenty for every individual are far more
+desirable than breathless struggle for existence, furious trampling
+down of the weak by the strong, huge fortunes accumulated out of the
+toil of others, to be handed down to those who had done nothing to
+earn them. Be it ours to maintain that the greatness of a nation
+depends not on the number of its great proprietors, on the wealth of
+its great capitalists, or the splendour of its great nobles, but on
+the absence of poverty among its people, on the education and
+refinement of its masses, on the universality of enjoyment in life....
+Enough for each of work, of leisure, of joy; too little for none, too
+much for none--such is the Social ideal. Better to strive after it
+worthily and fail, than to die without striving for it at all."
+
+Then I differentiated the methods of the Socialist and the Radical
+Individualist, pleading for union among those who formed the wings of
+the army of Labour, and urging union of all workers against the
+idlers. For the weakness of the people has ever been in their
+divisions, in the readiness of each section to turn its weapons
+against other sections instead of against the common foe. All
+privileged classes, when they are attacked, sink their differences and
+present a serried front to their assailants; the people alone fight
+with each other, while the battle between themselves and the
+privileged is raging.
+
+I strove, as so many others were striving, to sound in the ears of the
+thoughtless and the careless the cry of the sufferings of the poor,
+endeavouring to make articulate their misery. Thus in a description of
+Edinburgh slums came the following: "I saw in a 'house' which was made
+by boarding up part of a passage, which had no window, and in which it
+was necessary to burn an oil lamp all day, thus adding to the burden
+of the rent, a family of three--man, wife, and child--whose lot was
+hardly 'of their own making.' The man was tall and bronzed, but he was
+dying of heart disease; he could not do hard work, and he was too
+clumsy for light work; so he sat there, after two days' fruitless
+search, patiently nursing his miserable, scrofulous baby in his dim
+and narrow den. The cases of individual hopeless suffering are
+heartbreaking. In one room lay a dying child, dying of low fever
+brought on by want of food. 'It hae no faither,' sobbed the mother;
+and for a moment I did not catch the meaning that the father had left
+to the mother all the burden of a child unallowed by law. In another
+lay the corpse of a mother, with the children round her, and
+hard-featured, gentle-hearted women came in to take back to their
+overcrowded beds 'the mitherless bairns.' In yet another a woman,
+shrunken and yellow, crouched over a glimmer of fire; "I am dying of
+cancer of the womb," she said, with that pathetic resignation to the
+inevitable so common among the poor. I sat chatting for a few minutes.
+'Come again, deary,' she said as I rose to go; 'it's gey dull sitting
+here the day through.'"
+
+The article in which these, among other descriptions, occurred was
+closed with the following: "Passing out of the slums into the streets
+of the town, only a few steps separating the horror and the beauty, I
+felt, with a vividness more intense than ever, the fearful contrasts
+between the lots of men; and with more pressing urgency the question
+seemed to ring in my ears, 'Is there no remedy? Must there always be
+rich and poor?' Some say that it must be so; that the palace and the
+slum will for ever exist as the light and the shadow. Not so do I
+believe. I believe that the poverty is the result of ignorance and of
+bad social arrangements, and that therefore it may be eradicated by
+knowledge and by social change. I admit that for many of these adult
+dwellers in the slums there is no hope. Poor victims of a civilisation
+that hides its brutality beneath a veneer of culture and of grace, for
+them individually there is, alas! no salvation. But for their
+children, yes! Healthy surroundings, good food, mental and physical
+training, plenty of play, and carefully chosen work--these might save
+the young and prepare them for happy life. But they are being left to
+grow up as their parents were, and even when a few hours of school are
+given them the home half-neutralises what the education effects. The
+scanty aid given is generally begrudged, the education is to be but
+elementary, as little as possible is doled out. Yet these children
+have each one of them hopes and fears, possibilities of virtue and of
+crime, a life to be made or marred. We shower money on generals and on
+nobles, we keep high-born paupers living on the national charity, we
+squander wealth with both hands on army and navy, on churches and
+palaces; but we grudge every halfpenny that increases the education
+rate and howl down every proposal to build decent houses for the poor.
+We cover our heartlessness and indifference with fine phrases about
+sapping the independence of the poor and destroying their
+self-respect. With loathsome hypocrisy we repair a prince's palace for
+him, and let him live in it rent-free, without one word about the
+degradation involved in his thus living upon charity; while we refuse
+to 'pauperise' the toiler by erecting decent buildings in which he may
+live--not rent-free like the prince, but only paying a rent which
+shall cover the cost of erection and maintenance, instead of one which
+gives a yearly profit to a speculator. And so, year after year, the
+misery grows, and every great city has on its womb a cancer; sapping
+its vitality, poisoning its life-blood. Every great city is breeding
+in its slums a race which is reverting through the savage to the
+brute--a brute more dangerous in that degraded humanity has
+possibilities of evil in it beyond the reach of the mere wild beast.
+If not for Love's sake, then for fear; if not for justice or for human
+pity, then for sheer desire of self-preservation; I appeal to the wise
+and to the wealthy to set their hands to the cure of social evil, ere
+stolidity gives place to passion and dull patience vanishes before
+fury, and they
+
+"'Learn at last, in some wild hour, how much the wretched dare.'"
+
+Because it was less hotly antagonistic to the Radicals than the two
+other Socialist organisations, I joined the Fabian Society, and worked
+hard with it as a speaker and lecturer. Sidney Webb, G. Bernard Shaw,
+Hubert and Mrs. Bland, Graham Wallas--these were some of those who
+gave time, thought, incessant work to the popularising of Socialist
+thought, the spreading of sound economics, the effort to turn the
+workers' energy toward social rather than merely political reform. We
+lectured at workmen's clubs wherever we could gain a hearing, till we
+leavened London Radicalism with Socialist thought, and by treating the
+Radical as the unevolved Socialist rather than as the anti-Socialist,
+we gradually won him over to Socialist views. We circulated questions
+to be put to all candidates for parliamentary or other offices,
+stirred up interest in local elections, educated men and women into an
+understanding of the causes of their poverty, won recruits for the
+army of propagandists from the younger of the educated middle class.
+That the London working classes to-day are so largely Socialist is
+greatly due to the years of work done among them by members of the
+Fabian Society, as well to the splendid, if occasionally too militant,
+energy of the Social Democratic Federation, and to the devotion of
+that noble and generous genius, William Morris.
+
+During this same year (1885) a movement was set on foot in England to
+draw attention to the terrible sufferings of the Russian political
+prisoners, and it was decided at a meeting held in my house to form a
+society of the friends of Russia, which should seek to spread accurate
+and careful information about the present condition of Russia. At that
+meeting were present Charles Bradlaugh, "Stepniak," and many others,
+E.R. Pease acting as honorary secretary. It is noteworthy that some
+of the most prominent Russian exiles--such as Kropotkin--take the view
+that the Tzar himself is not allowed to know what occurs, and is very
+largely the victim of the bureaucracy that surrounds him.
+
+Another matter, that increased as the months went on, was the attempt
+of the police authorities to stop Socialist speaking in the open air.
+Christians, Freethinkers, Salvationists, agitators of all kinds were,
+for the most part, left alone, but there was a regular crusade against
+the Socialists. Liberal and Tory journals alike condemned the way in
+which in Dod Street, in September, the Socialists' meetings were
+attacked. Quiet persistence was shown by the promoters--members of the
+Social Democratic Federation--and they were well supported by other
+Socialists and by the Radical clubs. I volunteered to speak on October
+4th (my first Sunday in London after the summoning and imprisoning of
+the speakers had commenced), but the attitude of the people was so
+determined on the preceding Sunday that all interference was
+withdrawn.
+
+Herbert Burrows stood for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets in
+the November of this year, and I find a paragraph in the _Reformer_ in
+which I heartily wished him success, especially as the first candidate
+who had put forward a demand for industrial education. In this, as in
+so many practical proposals, Socialists have led the way. He polled
+4,232 votes, despite the furious opposition of the clergy to him as a
+Freethinker, of the publicans to him as a teetotaler, of the
+maintainers of the present social system to him as a Socialist. And
+his fight did much to make possible my own success in 1888.
+
+With this autumn, too, began, in connection with the struggle for the
+right of meeting, the helping of the workmen to fair trial by
+providing of bail and legal defence. The first case that I bailed out
+was that of Lewis Lyons, sent to gaol for two months with hard labour
+by Mr. Saunders, of the Thames Police Court. Oh, the weary, sickening
+waiting in the court for "my prisoner," the sordid vice, the revolting
+details of human depravity to which my unwilling eyes and ears were
+witnesses. I carried Lyons off in triumph, and the Middlesex
+magistrates quashed the conviction, the evidence being pronounced by
+them to be "confusing, contradictory, and worthless." Yet but for the
+chance of one of us stepping forward to offer bail and to provide the
+means for an appeal (I acted on Mr. Bradlaugh's suggestion and advice,
+for he acted as counsellor to me all through the weary struggles that
+lasted till 1888, putting his great legal knowledge at my disposal,
+though he often disapproved my action, thinking me Quixotic)--but for
+this, Lewis Lyons would have had to suffer his heavy sentence.
+
+The general election took place this autumn, and Northampton returned
+Mr. Bradlaugh for the fifth time, thus putting an end to the long
+struggle, for he took the oath and his seat in the following January,
+and at once gave notice of an Oaths Bill, to give to all who claimed
+it, under all circumstances, the right to affirm. He was returned with
+the largest vote ever polled for him--4,315--and he entered Parliament
+with all the prestige of his great struggle, and went to the front at
+once, one of the recognised forces in the House. The action of Mr.
+Speaker Peel promptly put an end to an attempted obstruction. Sir
+Michael Hicks Beach, Mr. Cecil Raikes, and Sir John Hennaway had
+written to the Speaker asking his interference, but the Speaker
+declared that he had no authority, no right to stand between a duly
+elected member and the duty of taking the oath prescribed by statute.
+Thus ended the constitutional struggle of six years, that left the
+victor well-nigh bankrupt in health and in purse, and sent him to a
+comparatively early grave. He lived long enough to justify his
+election, to prove his value to the House and to his country, but he
+did not live long enough to render to England all the services which
+his long training, his wide knowledge, his courage, and his honesty so
+eminently fitted him to yield.
+
+[Illustration: NORWICH BRANCH OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE.]
+
+_Our Corner_ now served as a valuable aid in Socialist propaganda, and
+its monthly "Socialist Notes" became a record of Socialist progress in
+all lands. We were busy during the spring in organising a conference
+for the discussion of "The Present Commercial System, and the Better
+Utilisation of National Wealth for the Benefit of the Community," and
+this was successfully held at South Place Institute on June 9th, 10th,
+11th, the three days being given respectively, to the "Utilisation of
+Land," the "Utilisation of Capital," and the "Democratic Policy." On
+the 9th Mr. Bradlaugh spoke on the utilisation of waste lands, arguing
+that in a thickly populated country no one had the right to keep
+cultivable land uncultivated, and that where land was so kept there
+should be compulsory expropriation, the state taking the land and
+letting it out to cultivating tenants. Among the other speakers were
+Edward Carpenter, William Morris, Sidney Webb, John Robertson, William
+Saunders, W. Donnisthorpe, Edward Aveling, Charlotte Wilson, Mrs.
+Fenwick Miller, Hubert Bland, Dr. Pankhurst, and myself--men and women
+of many views, met to compare methods, and so help on the cause of
+social regeneration.
+
+Bitter attacks were made on me for my Socialist advocacy by some of
+the Radicals in the Freethought party, and looking back I find myself
+condemned as a "Saint Athanasius in petticoats," and as possessing a
+"mind like a milk-jug." This same courteous critic remarked, "I have
+heard Mrs. Besant described as being, like most women, at the mercy of
+her last male acquaintance for her views on economics." I was foolish
+enough to break a lance in self-defence with this assailant, not
+having then learned that self-defence was a waste of time that might
+be better employed in doing work for others. I certainly should not
+now take the trouble to write such a paragraph as the following: "The
+moment a man uses a woman's sex to discredit her arguments, the
+thoughtful reader knows that he is unable to answer the arguments
+themselves. But really these silly sneers at woman's ability have lost
+their force, and are best met with a laugh at the stupendous 'male
+self-conceit' of the writer. I may add that such shafts are specially
+pointless against myself. A woman who thought her way out of
+Christianity and Whiggism into Freethought and Radicalism absolutely
+alone; who gave up every old friend, male and female, rather than
+resign the beliefs she had struggled to in solitude; who, again, in
+embracing active Socialism, has run counter to the views of her
+nearest 'male friends'; such a woman may very likely go wrong, but I
+think she may venture, without conceit, to at least claim independence
+of judgment. I did not make the acquaintance of one of my present
+Socialist comrades, male or female, until I had embraced Socialism." A
+foolish paragraph, as are all self-defences, and a mischievous one, as
+all retort breeds fresh strife. But not yet had come the self-control
+that estimates the judgments of others at their true value, that recks
+not of praise and blame; not yet had I learned that evil should not be
+met with evil, wrath with wrath; not yet were the words of the Buddha
+the law to which I strove to render obedience: "Hatred ceases not by
+hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love." The year 1886 was a
+terrible one for labour, everywhere reductions of wages, everywhere
+increase of the numbers of the unemployed; turning over the pages of
+_Our Corner_, I see "Socialist Notes" filled, month after month, with
+a monotonous tale, "there is a reduction of wages at" such and such a
+place; so many "men have been discharged at -----, owing to the
+slackness of trade." Our hearts sank lower and lower as summer passed
+into autumn, and the coming winter threatened to add to starvation the
+bitter pains of cold. The agitation for the eight hours' day increased
+in strength as the unemployed grew more numerous week by week "We
+can't stand it," a sturdy, quiet fellow had said to me during the
+preceding winter; "flesh and blood can't stand it, and two months of
+this bitter cold, too." "We may as well starve idle as starve
+working," had said another, with a fierce laugh. And a spirit of
+sullen discontent was spreading everywhere, discontent that was wholly
+justified by facts. But ah! how patient they were for the most part,
+how sadly, pathetically patient, this crucified Christ, Humanity;
+wrongs that would set my heart and my tongue afire would be accepted
+as a matter of course. O blind and mighty people, how my heart went
+out to you; trampled on, abused, derided, asking so little and needing
+so much; so pathetically grateful for the pettiest services; so loving
+and so loyal to those who offered you but their poor services and
+helpless love. Deeper and deeper into my innermost nature ate the
+growing desire to succour, to suffer for, to save. I had long given up
+my social reputation, I now gave up with ever-increasing surrender
+ease, comfort, time; the passion of pity grew stronger and stronger,
+fed by each new sacrifice, and each sacrifice led me nearer and nearer
+to the threshold of that gateway beyond which stretched a path of
+renunciation I had never dreamed of, which those might tread who were
+ready wholly to strip off self for Man's sake, who for Love's sake
+would surrender Love's return from those they served, and would go out
+into the darkness for themselves that they might, with their own souls
+as fuel, feed the Light of the World.
+
+As the suffering deepened with the darkening months, the meetings of
+the unemployed grew in number, and the murmurs of discontent became
+louder. The Social Democratic Federation carried on an outdoor
+agitation, not without making blunders, being composed of human
+beings, but with abundant courage and self-sacrifice. The policy of
+breaking up Socialist meetings went on while other meetings were
+winked at, and John Williams, a fiery speaker, but a man with a record
+of pathetic struggle and patient heroism, was imprisoned for two
+months for speaking in the open air, and so nearly starved in gaol
+that he came out with his health broken for life.
+
+1887 dawned, the year that was to close so stormily, and Socialists
+everywhere were busying themselves on behalf of the unemployed, urging
+vestries to provide remunerative work for those applying for relief,
+assailing the Local Government Board with practicable proposals for
+utilising the productive energies of the unemployed, circulating
+suggestions to municipalities and other local representative bodies,
+urging remedial measures. A four days' oral debate with Mr. Foote, and
+a written debate with Mr. Bradlaugh, occupied some of my energies, and
+helped in the process of education to which public opinion was being
+subjected. Both these debates were largely circulated as pamphlets. A
+series of afternoon debates between representative speakers was
+organised at South Place Institute, and Mr. Corrie Grant and myself
+had a lively discussion, I affirming "That the existence of classes
+who live upon unearned incomes is detrimental to the welfare of the
+community, and ought to be put an end to by legislation." Another
+debate--in this very quarrelsome spring of 1887--was a written one in
+the _National Reformer_ between the Rev. G.F. Handel Rowe and myself
+on the proposition, "Is Atheism logically tenable, and is there a
+satisfactory Atheistic System for the guidance of Human Conduct." And
+so the months went on, and the menace of misery grew louder and
+louder, till in September I find myself writing: "This one thing is
+clear--Society must deal with the unemployed, or the unemployed will
+deal with Society. Stormier and stormier becomes the social outlook,
+and they at least are not the worst enemies of Society who seek to
+find some way through the breakers by which the ship of the
+Commonwealth may pass into quiet waters."
+
+Some amusement turned up in the shape of a Charing Cross Parliament,
+in which we debated with much vigour the "burning questions" of the
+day. We organised a compact Socialist party, defeated a Liberal
+Government, took the reins of office, and--after a Queen's Speech in
+which her Majesty addressed her loyal Commons with a plainness of
+speech never before (or since) heard from the throne--we brought in
+several Bills of a decidedly heroic character. G. Bernard Shaw, as
+President of the Local Government Board, and I, as Home Secretary,
+came in for a good deal of criticism in connection with various
+drastic measures. An International Freethought Congress, held in
+London, entailed fairly heavy work, and the science classes were ever
+with us. Another written debate came with October, this time on the
+"Teachings of Christianity," making the fifth of these set discussions
+held by me during the year. This same month brought a change, painful
+but just: I resigned my much-prized position as co-editor of the
+_National Reformer,_ and the number for October 23rd bore Charles
+Bradlaugh's name alone. The change did not affect my work on the
+paper, but I became merely a subordinate, though remaining, of course,
+joint proprietor. The reason cannot be more accurately given than in
+the paragraph penned at the time: "For a considerable time past, and
+lately in increasing number, complaints have reached me from various
+quarters of the inconvenience and uncertainty that result from the
+divided editorial policy of this paper on the question of Socialism.
+Some months ago I proposed to avoid this difficulty by resigning my
+share in the editorship; but my colleague, with characteristic
+liberality, asked me to let the proposal stand over and see if matters
+would not adjust themselves. But the difficulty, instead of
+disappearing, has only become more pressing; and we both feel that our
+readers have a right to demand that it be solved.
+
+"When I became co-editor of this paper I was not a Socialist; and,
+although I regard Socialism as the necessary and logical outcome of
+the Radicalism which for so many years the _National Reformer_ has
+taught, still, as in avowing myself a Socialist I have taken a
+distinct step, the partial separation of my policy in labour questions
+from that of my colleague has been of my own making, and not of his,
+and it is, therefore, for me to go away. Over by far the greater part
+of our sphere of action we are still substantially agreed, and are
+likely to remain so. But since, as Socialism becomes more and more a
+question of practical politics, differences of theory tend to produce
+differences in conduct; and since a political paper must have a single
+editorial programme in practical politics, it would obviously be most
+inconvenient for me to retain my position as co-editor. I therefore
+resume my former position as contributor only, thus clearing the
+_National Reformer_ of all responsibility for the views I hold."
+
+To this Mr. Bradlaugh added the following:--
+
+"I need hardly add to this how very deeply I regret the necessity for
+Mrs. Besant's resignation of the joint editorship of this Journal, and
+the real grief I feel in accepting this break in a position in which
+she has rendered such enormous service to the Freethought and Radical
+cause. As a most valued contributor I trust the _National Reformer_
+may never lose the efficient aid of her brain and pen. For thirteen
+years this paper has been richer for good by the measure of her
+never-ceasing and most useful work. I agree with her that a journal
+must have a distinct editorial policy; and I think this distinctness
+the more necessary when, as in the present case, every contributor has
+the greatest freedom of expression. I recognise in the fullest degree
+the spirit of self-sacrifice in which the lines, to which I add these
+words, have been penned by Mrs. Besant. "CHARLES BRADLAUGH."
+
+It was a wrench, this breaking of a tie for which a heavy price had
+been paid thirteen years before, but it was just. Any one who makes a
+change with which pain is connected is bound, in honour and duty, to
+take that pain as much as possible on himself; he must not put his
+sacrifice on others, nor pay his own ransom with their coin. There
+must be honour kept in the life that reaches towards the Ideal, for
+broken faith to that is the only real infidelity.
+
+And there was another reason for the change that I dared not name to
+him, for his quick loyalty would then have made him stubbornly
+determined against change. I saw the swift turning of public opinion,
+the gradual approach to him among Liberals who had hitherto held
+aloof, and I knew that they looked upon me as a clog and a burden, and
+that were I less prominently with him his way would be the easier to
+tread. So I slipped more and more into the background, no longer went
+with him to his meetings; my use to him in public was over, for I had
+become hindrance instead of help. While he was outcast and hated I had
+the pride of standing at his side; when all the fair-weather friends
+came buzzing round him I served him best by self-effacement, and I
+never loved him better than when I stood aside. But I continued all
+the literary work unaltered, and no change of opinions touched his
+kindness to me, although when, a little later, I joined the
+Theosophical Society, he lost his trust in my reasoning powers and
+judgment.
+
+In this same month of October the unemployed began walking in
+procession through the streets, and harshness on the part of the
+police led to some rioting. Sir Charles Warren thought it his duty to
+dragoon London meetings after the fashion of Continental prefects,
+with the inevitable result that an ill-feeling grew up between the
+people and the police.
+
+At last we formed a Socialist Defence Association, in order to help
+poor workmen brought up and sentenced on police evidence only, without
+any chance being given them of proper legal defence, and I organised a
+band of well-to-do men and women, who promised to obey a telegraphic
+summons, night or day, and to bail out any prisoner arrested for
+exercising the ancient right of walking in procession and speaking. To
+take one instance: Mr. Burleigh, the well-known war correspondent, and
+Mr. Winks were arrested and "run in" with Mr. J. Knight, a workman,
+for seditious language. I went down to the police-station to offer
+bail for the latter: Chief-Constable Howard accepted bail for Messrs.
+Burleigh and Winks, but refused it for Mr. Knight. The next day, at
+the police-court, the preposterous bail of L400 was demanded for Mr.
+Knight and supplied by my faithful band, and on the next hearing Mr.
+Poland, solicitor to the Treasury, withdrew the charge against him for
+lack of evidence!
+
+Then came the closing of Trafalgar Square, and the unexpected and
+high-handed order that cost some men their lives, many their liberty,
+and hundreds the most serious injuries. The Metropolitan Radical
+Federation had called a meeting for November 13th to protest against
+the imprisonment of Mr. O'Brien, and as Mr. Matthews, from his place
+in the House, had stated that there was no intention of interfering
+with _bona fide_ political meetings, the Radical clubs did not expect
+police interference. On November 9th Sir Charles Warren had issued an
+order forbidding all meetings in the Square, but the clubs trusted the
+promise of the Home Secretary. On Saturday evening only, November
+12th, when all arrangements were completed, did he issue a peremptory
+order, forbidding processions within a certain area. With this trap
+suddenly sprung upon them, the delegates from the clubs, the Fabian
+Society, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Socialist League,
+met on that same Saturday evening to see to any details that had been
+possibly left unsettled. It was finally decided to go to the Square as
+arranged, and, if challenged by the police, to protest formally
+against the illegal interference, then to break up the processions and
+leave the members to find their own way to the Square. It was also
+decided to go Sunday after Sunday to the Square, until the right of
+public meetings was vindicated.
+
+The procession I was in started from Clerkenwell Green, and walked
+with its banner in front, and the chosen speakers, including myself,
+immediately behind the flag. As we were moving slowly and quietly
+along one of the narrow streets debouching on Trafalgar Square,
+wondering whether we should be challenged, there was a sudden charge,
+and without a word the police were upon us with uplifted truncheons;
+the banner was struck down, and men and women were falling under a
+hail of blows. There was no attempt at resistance, the people were too
+much astounded at the unprepared attack. They scattered, leaving some
+of their number on the ground too much injured to move, and then made
+their way in twos and threes to the Square. It was garrisoned by
+police, drawn up in serried rows, that could only have been broken by
+a deliberate charge. Our orders were to attempt no violence, and we
+attempted none. Mr. Cunninghame Graham and Mr. John Burns, arm-in-arm,
+tried to pass through the police, and were savagely cut about the head
+and arrested. Then ensued a scene to be remembered; the horse police
+charged in squadrons at a hand-gallop, rolling men and women over like
+ninepins, while the foot police struck recklessly with their
+truncheons, cutting a road through the crowd that closed immediately
+behind them. I got on a waggonette and tried to persuade the driver to
+pull his trap across one of the roads, and to get others in line, so
+as to break the charges of the mounted police; but he was afraid, and
+drove away to the Embankment, so I jumped out and went back to the
+Square. At last a rattle of cavalry, and up came the Life Guards,
+cleverly handled but hurting none, trotting their horses gently and
+shouldering the crowd apart; and then the Scots Guards with bayonets
+fixed marched through and occupied the north of the Square. Then the
+people retreated as we passed round the word, "Go home, go home." The
+soldiers were ready to fire, the people unarmed; it would have been
+but a massacre. Slowly the Square emptied and all was still. All other
+processions were treated as ours had been, and the injuries inflicted
+were terrible. Peaceable, law-abiding workmen, who had never dreamed
+of rioting, were left with broken legs, broken arms, wounds of every
+description. One man, Linnell, died almost immediately, others from
+the effect of their injuries. The next day a regular court-martial in
+Bow Street Police Court, witnesses kept out by the police, men dazed
+with their wounds, decent workmen of unblemished character who had
+never been charged in a police-court before, sentenced to imprisonment
+without chance of defence. But a gallant band rallied to their rescue.
+William T. Stead, most chivalrous of journalists, opened a Defence
+Fund, and money rained in; my pledged bail came up by the dozen, and
+we got the men out on appeal. By sheer audacity I got into the
+police-court, addressed the magistrate, too astounded by my profound
+courtesy and calm assurance to remember that I had no right there, and
+then produced bail after bail of the most undeniable character and
+respectability, which no magistrate could refuse. Breathing-time
+gained, a barrister, Mr. W.M. Thompson, worked day after day with
+hearty devotion, and took up the legal defence. Fines we paid, and
+here Mrs. Marx Aveling did eager service. A pretty regiment I led out
+of Millbank Prison, after paying their fines; bruised, clothes torn,
+hatless, we must have looked a disreputable lot. We stopped and bought
+hats, to throw an air of respectability over our _cortege_, and we
+kept together until I saw the men into train and omnibus, lest, with
+the bitter feelings now roused, conflict should again arise. We formed
+the Law and Liberty League to defend all unjustly assailed by the
+police, and thus rescued many a man from prison; and we gave poor
+Linnell, killed in Trafalgar Square, a public funeral. Sir Charles
+Warren forbade the passing of the hearse through any of the main
+thoroughfares west of Waterloo Bridge, so the processions waited there
+for it. W.T. Stead, R. Cunninghame Graham, Herbert Burrows, and
+myself walked on one side the coffin, William Morris, F. Smith, R.
+Dowling, and J. Seddon on the other; the Rev. Stewart D. Headlam, the
+officiating clergyman, walked in front; fifty stewards carrying long
+wands guarded the coffin. From Wellington Street to Bow Cemetery the
+road was one mass of human beings, who uncovered reverently as the
+slain man went by; at Aldgate the procession took three-quarters of an
+hour to pass one spot, and thus we bore Linnell to his grave, symbol
+of a cruel wrong, the vast orderly, silent crowd, bareheaded, making
+mute protest against the outrage wrought.
+
+It is pleasant to put on record here Mr. Bradlaugh's grave approval of
+the heavy work done in the police-courts, and the following paragraph
+shows how generously he could praise one not acting on his own lines:
+"As I have on most serious matters of principle recently differed very
+widely from my brave and loyal co-worker, and as the difference has
+been regrettably emphasised by her resignation of her editorial
+functions on this Journal, it is the more necessary that I should say
+how thoroughly I approve, and how grateful I am to her for, her
+conduct in not only obtaining bail and providing legal assistance for
+the helpless unfortunates in the hands of the police, but also for her
+daily personal attendance and wise conduct at the police-stations and
+police-courts, where she has done so much to abate harsh treatment on
+the one hand and rash folly on the other. While I should not have
+marked out this as fitting woman's work, especially in the recent very
+inclement weather, I desire to record my view that it has been bravely
+done, well done, and most usefully done, and I wish to mark this the
+more emphatically as my views and those of Mrs. Besant seem wider
+apart than I could have deemed possible on many of the points of
+principle underlying what is every day growing into a most serious
+struggle." Ever did I find Charles Bradlaugh thus tolerant of
+difference of opinion, generously eager to approve what to him seemed
+right even in a policy he disapproved.
+
+The indignation grew and grew; the police were silently boycotted, but
+the people were so persistent and so tactful that no excuse for
+violence was given, until the strain on the police force began to
+tell, and the Tory Government felt that London was being hopelessly
+alienated; so at last Sir Charles Warren fell, and a wiser hand was
+put at the helm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+THROUGH STORM TO PEACE.
+
+
+Out of all this turmoil and stress rose a Brotherhood that had in it
+the promise of a fairer day. Mr. Stead and I had become close
+friends--he Christian, I Atheist, burning with one common love for
+man, one common hatred against oppression. And so in _Our Corner_ for
+February, 1888, I wrote:--"Lately there has been dawning on the minds
+of men far apart in questions of theology, the idea of founding a new
+Brotherhood, in which service of Man should take the place erstwhile
+given to service of God--a brotherhood in which work should be worship
+and love should be baptism, in which none should be regarded as alien
+who was willing to work for human good. One day as I was walking
+towards Millbank Gaol with the Rev. S.D. Headlam, on the way to
+liberate a prisoner, I said to him: 'Mr. Headlam, we ought to have a
+new Church, which should include all who have the common ground of
+faith in and love for man.' And a little later I found that my friend
+Mr. W.T. Stead, editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette,_ had long been
+brooding over a similar thought, and wondering whether men 'might not
+be persuaded to be as earnest about making this world happy as they
+are over saving their souls.' The teaching of social duty, the
+upholding of social righteousness, the building up of a true
+commonwealth--such would be among the aims of the Church of the
+future. Is the hope too fair for realisation? Is the winning of such
+beatific vision yet once more the dream of the enthusiast? But surely
+the one fact that persons so deeply differing in theological creeds as
+those who have been toiling for the last three months to aid and
+relieve the oppressed, can work in absolute harmony side by side for
+the one end--surely this proves that there is a bond which is stronger
+than our antagonisms, a unity which is deeper than the speculative
+theories which divide."
+
+How unconsciously I was marching towards the Theosophy which was to
+become the glory of my life, groping blindly in the darkness for that
+very brotherhood, definitely formulated on these very lines by those
+Elder Brothers of our race, at whose feet I was so soon to throw
+myself. How deeply this longing for something loftier than I had yet
+found had wrought itself into my life, how strong the conviction was
+growing that there was something to be sought to which the service of
+man was the road, may be seen in the following passage from the same
+article:--
+
+"It has been thought that in these days of factories and of tramways,
+of shoddy, and of adulteration, that all life must tread with even
+rhythm of measured footsteps, and that the glory of the ideal could no
+longer glow over the greyness of a modern horizon. But signs are not
+awanting that the breath of the older heroism is beginning to stir
+men's breasts, and that the passion for justice and for liberty, which
+thrilled through the veins of the world's greatest in the past, and
+woke our pulses to responsive throb, has not yet died wholly out of
+the hearts of men. Still the quest of the Holy Grail exercises its
+deathless fascination, but the seekers no longer raise eyes to heaven,
+nor search over land and sea, for they know that it waits them in the
+suffering at their doors, that the consecration of the holiest is on
+the agonising masses of the poor and the despairing, the cup is
+crimson with the blood of the
+
+"'People, the grey-grown speechless Christ.'
+
+... If there be a faith that can remove the mountains of ignorance and
+evil, it is surely that faith in the ultimate triumph of Right in the
+final enthronement of Justice, which alone makes life worth the
+living, and which gems the blackest cloud of depression with the
+rainbow-coloured arch of an immortal hope."
+
+As a step towards bringing about some such union of those ready to
+work for man, Mr. Stead and I projected the _Link_, a halfpenny
+weekly, the spirit of which was described in its motto, taken from
+Victor Hugo: "The people are silence. I will be the advocate of this
+silence. I will speak for the dumb. I will speak of the small to the
+great and of the feeble to the strong.... I will speak for all the
+despairing silent ones. I will interpret this stammering; I will
+interpret the grumblings, the murmurs, the tumults of crowds, the
+complaints ill-pronounced, and all these cries of beasts that, through
+ignorance and through suffering, man is forced to utter ... I will be
+the Word of the People. I will be the bleeding mouth whence the gag is
+snatched out. I will say everything." It announced its object to be
+the "building up" of a "New Church, dedicated to the service of man,"
+and "what we want to do is to establish in every village and in every
+street some man or woman who will sacrifice time and labour as
+systematically and as cheerfully in the temporal service of man as
+others do in what they believe to be the service of God." Week after
+week we issued our little paper, and it became a real light in the
+darkness. There the petty injustices inflicted on the poor found
+voice; there the starvation wages paid to women found exposure; there
+sweating was brought to public notice. A finisher of boots paid 2s.
+6d. per dozen pairs and "find your own polish and thread"; women
+working for 10-1/2 hours per day, making shirts--"fancy best"--at from
+10d. to 3s. per dozen, finding their own cotton and needles, paying
+for gas, towel, and tea (compulsory), earning from 4s. to 10s. per
+week for the most part; a mantle finisher 2s. 2d. a week, out of which
+6d. for materials; "respectable hard-working woman" tried for
+attempted suicide, "driven to rid herself of life from want." Another
+part of our work was defending people from unjust landlords, exposing
+workhouse scandals, enforcing the Employers' Liability Act, Charles
+Bradlaugh's Truck Act, forming "Vigilance Circles" whose members kept
+watch in their own district over cases of cruelty to children,
+extortion, insanitary workshops, sweating, &c., reporting each case to
+me. Into this work came Herbert Burrows, who had joined hands with me
+over the Trafalgar Square defence, and who wrote some noble articles
+in the _Link_. A man loving the people with passionate devotion,
+hating oppression and injustice with equal passion, working himself
+with remorseless energy, breaking his heart over wrongs he could not
+remedy. His whole character once came out in a sentence when he was
+lying delirious and thought himself dying: "Tell the people how I have
+loved them always."
+
+In our crusade for the poor we worked for the dockers." To-morrow
+morning, in London alone 20,000 to 25,000 adult men," wrote Sidney
+Webb, "will fight like savages for permission to labour in the docks
+for 4d. an hour, and one-third of them will fight in vain, and be
+turned workless away." We worked for children's dinners. "If we insist
+on these children being educated, is it not necessary that they shall
+be fed? If not, we waste on them knowledge they cannot assimilate, and
+torture many of them to death. Poor waifs of humanity, we drive them
+into the school and bid them learn; and the pitiful, wistful eyes
+question us why we inflict this strange new suffering, and bring into
+their dim lives this new pang. 'Why not leave us alone? 'ask the
+pathetically patient little faces. Why not, indeed, since for these
+child martyrs of the slums, Society has only formulas, not food." We
+cried out against "cheap goods," that meant "sweated and therefore
+stolen goods." "The ethics of buying should surely be simply enough.
+We want a particular thing, and we do not desire to obtain it either
+by begging or by robbery; but if in becoming possessed of it, we
+neither beg it nor steal, we must give for it something equivalent in
+exchange; so much of our neighbour's labour has been put into the
+thing we desire; if we will not yield him fair equivalent for that
+labour, yet take his article, we defraud him, and if we are not
+willing to give that fair equivalent we have no right to become the
+owners of his product."
+
+This branch of our work led to a big fight--a fight most happy in its
+results. At a meeting of the Fabian Society, Miss Clementina Black
+gave a capital lecture on Female Labour, and urged the formation of a
+Consumers' League, pledged only to buy from shops certificated "clean"
+from unfair wage. H.H. Champion, in the discussion that followed,
+drew attention to the wages paid by Bryant & May (Limited), while
+paying an enormous dividend to their shareholders, so that the value
+of the original L5 shares was quoted at L18 7s. 6d. Herbert Burrows
+and I interviewed some of the girls, got lists of wages, of fines, &c.
+"A typical case is that of a girl of sixteen, a piece-worker; she
+earns 4s. a week, and lives with a sister, employed by the same firm,
+who 'earns good money, as much as 8s. or 9s. a week.' Out of the
+earnings 2s. a week is paid for the rent of one room. The child lives
+only on bread and butter and tea, alike for breakfast and dinner, but
+related with dancing eyes that once a month she went to a meal where
+'you get coffee and bread and butter, and jam and marmalade, and lots
+of it.'" We published the facts under the title of "White Slavery in
+London," and called for a boycott of Bryant & May's matches. "It is
+time some one came and helped us," said two pale-faced girls to me;
+and I asked: "Who will help? Plenty of people wish well to any good
+cause; but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still
+fewer will risk anything in its support. 'Some one ought to do it, but
+why should I?' is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability.
+'Some one ought to do it, so why _not_ I?' is the cry of some earnest
+servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty.
+Between those two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution."
+
+I was promptly threatened with an action for libel, but nothing came
+of it; it was easier to strike at the girls, and a few days later
+Fleet Street was enlivened by the irruption of a crowd of match-girls,
+demanding Annie Besant. I couldn't speechify to match-girls in Fleet
+Street, so asked that a deputation should come and explain what they
+wanted. Up came three women and told their story: they had been asked
+to sign a paper certifying that they were well treated and contented,
+and that my statements were untrue; they refused. "You had spoke up
+for us," explained one, "and we weren't going back on you." A girl,
+pitched on as their leader, was threatened with dismissal; she stood
+firm; next day she was discharged for some trifle, and they all threw
+down their work, some 1,400 of them, and then a crowd of them started
+off to me to ask what to do next. If we ever worked in our lives,
+Herbert Burrows and I worked for the next fortnight. And a pretty
+hubbub we created; we asked for money, and it came pouring in; we
+registered the girls to receive strike pay, wrote articles, roused the
+clubs, held public meetings, got Mr. Bradlaugh to ask questions in
+Parliament, stirred up constituencies in which shareholders were
+members, till the whole country rang with the struggle. Mr. Frederick
+Charrington lent us a hall for registration, Mr. Sidney Webb and
+others moved the National Liberal Club to action; we led a procession
+of the girls to the House of Commons, and interviewed, with a
+deputation of them, Members of Parliament who cross-questioned them.
+The girls behaved splendidly, stuck together, kept brave and bright
+all through. Mr. Hobart of the Social Democratic Federation, Messrs.
+Shaw, Bland, and Oliver, and Headlam of the Fabian Society, Miss
+Clementina Black, and many another helped in the heavy work. The
+London Trades Council finally consented to act as arbitrators and a
+satisfactory settlement was arrived at; the girls went in to work,
+fines and deductions were abolished, better wages paid; the
+Match-makers' Union was established, still the strongest woman's
+Trades Union in England, and for years I acted as secretary, till,
+under press of other duties, I resigned, and my work was given by the
+girls to Mrs. Thornton Smith; Herbert Burrows became, and still is,
+the treasurer. For a time there was friction between the Company and
+the Union, but it gradually disappeared under the influence of common
+sense on both sides, and we have found the manager ready to consider
+any just grievance and to endeavour to remove it, while the Company
+have been liberal supporters of the Working Women's Club at Bow,
+founded by H.P. Blavatsky.
+
+[Illustration: STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.]
+
+The worst suffering of all was among the box-makers, thrown out of
+work by the strike, and they were hard to reach. Twopence-farthing per
+gross of boxes, and buy your own string and paste, is not wealth, but
+when the work went more rapid starvation came. Oh, those trudges
+through the lanes and alleys round Bethnal Green Junction late at
+night, when our day's work was over; children lying about on shavings,
+rags, anything; famine looking out of baby faces, out of women's eyes,
+out of the tremulous hands of men. Heart grew sick and eyes dim, and
+ever louder sounded the question, "Where is the cure for sorrow, what
+the way of rescue for the world?"
+
+In August I asked for a "match-girls' drawing-room." "It will want a
+piano, tables for papers, for games, for light literature; so that it
+may offer a bright, homelike refuge to these girls, who now have no
+real homes, no playground save the streets. It is not proposed to
+build an 'institution' with stern and rigid discipline and enforcement
+of prim behaviour, but to open a home, filled with the genial
+atmosphere of cordial comradeship, and self-respecting freedom--the
+atmosphere so familiar to all who have grown up in the blessed shelter
+of a happy home, so strange, alas! to too many of our East London
+girls." In the same month of August, two years later, H.P. Blavatsky
+opened such a home.
+
+Then came a cry for help from South London, from tin-box makers,
+illegally fined, and in many cases grievously mutilated by the
+non-fencing of machinery; then aid to shop assistants, also illegally
+fined; legal defences by the score still continued; a vigorous
+agitation for a free meal for children, and for fair wages to be paid
+by all public bodies; work for the dockers and exposure of their
+wrongs; a visit to the Cradley Heath chain-makers, speeches to them,
+writing for them; a contest for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets
+division, and triumphant return at the head of the poll. Such were
+some of the ways in which the autumn days were spent, to say nothing
+of scores of lectures--Secularist, Labour, Socialist--and scores of
+articles written for the winning of daily bread. When the School Board
+work was added I felt that I had as much work as one woman's strength
+could do.
+
+Thus was ushered in 1889, the to me never-to-be-forgotten year in
+which I found my way "Home," and had the priceless good fortune of
+meeting, and of becoming the pupil of, H.P. Blavatsky. Ever more and
+more had been growing on me the feeling that something more than I had
+was needed for the cure of social ills. The Socialist position
+sufficed on the economic side, but where to gain the inspiration, the
+motive, which should lead to the realisation of the Brotherhood of
+Man? Our efforts to really organise bands of unselfish workers had
+failed. Much indeed had been done, but there was not a real movement
+of self-sacrificing devotion, in which men worked for Love's sake
+only, and asked but to give, not to take. Where was the material for
+the nobler Social Order, where the hewn stones for the building of the
+Temple of Man? A great despair would oppress me as I sought for such a
+movement and found it not.
+
+[Illustration: MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.]
+
+Not only so; but since 1886 there had been slowly growing up a
+conviction that my philosophy was not sufficient; that life and mind
+were other than, more than, I had dreamed. Psychology was advancing
+with rapid strides; hypnotic experiments were revealing unlooked-for
+complexities in human consciousness, strange riddles of multiplex
+personalities, and, most startling of all, vivid intensities of mental
+action when the brain, that should be the generator of thought, was
+reduced to a comatose state. Fact after fact came hurtling in upon me,
+demanding explanation I was incompetent to give. I studied the
+obscurer sides of consciousness, dreams, hallucinations, illusions,
+insanity. Into the darkness shot a ray of light--A.P. Sinnett's
+"Occult World," with its wonderfully suggestive letters, expounding
+not the supernatural but a nature under law, wider than I had dared to
+conceive. I added Spiritualism to my studies, experimenting privately,
+finding the phenomena indubitable, but the spiritualistic explanation
+of them incredible. The phenomena of clairvoyance, clairaudience,
+thought-reading, were found to be real. Under all the rush of the
+outer life, already sketched, these questions were working in my mind,
+their answers were being diligently sought. I read a variety of books,
+but could find little in them that satisfied me. I experimented in
+various ways suggested in them, and got some (to me) curious results.
+I finally convinced myself that there was some hidden thing, some
+hidden power, and resolved to seek until I found, and by the early
+spring of 1889 I had grown desperately determined to find at all
+hazards what I sought. At last, sitting alone in deep thought as I had
+become accustomed to do after the sun had set, filled with an intense
+but nearly hopeless longing to solve the riddle of life and mind, I
+heard a Voice that was later to become to me the holiest sound on
+earth, bidding me take courage for the light was near. A fortnight
+passed, and then Mr. Stead gave into my hands two large volumes. "Can
+you review these? My young men all fight shy of them, but you are
+quite mad enough on these subjects to make something of them." I took
+the books; they were the two volumes of "The Secret Doctrine," written
+by H.P. Blavatsky.
+
+Home I carried my burden, and sat me down to read. As I turned over
+page after page the interest became absorbing; but how familiar it
+seemed; how my mind leapt forward to presage the conclusions, how
+natural it was, how coherent, how subtle, and yet how intelligible. I
+was dazzled, blinded by the light in which disjointed facts were seen
+as parts of a mighty whole, and all my puzzles, riddles, problems,
+seemed to disappear. The effect was partially illusory in one sense,
+in that they all had to be slowly unravelled later, the brain
+gradually assimilating that which the swift intuition had grasped as
+truth. But the light had been seen, and in that flash of illumination
+I knew that the weary search was over and the very Truth was found.
+
+I wrote the review, and asked Mr. Stead for an introduction to the
+writer, and then sent a note asking to be allowed to call. I received
+the most cordial of notes, bidding me come, and in the soft spring
+evening Herbert Burrows and I--for his aspirations were as mine on
+this matter--walked from Netting Hill Station, wondering what we
+should meet, to the door of 17, Lansdowne Road. A pause, a swift
+passing through hall and outer room, through folding-doors thrown
+back, a figure in a large chair before a table, a voice, vibrant,
+compelling, "My dear Mrs. Besant, I have so long wished to see you,"
+and I was standing with my hand in her firm grip, and looking for
+the first time in this life straight into the eyes of "H.P.B." I
+was conscious of a sudden leaping forth of my heart--was it
+recognition?--and then, I am ashamed to say, a fierce rebellion, a
+fierce withdrawal, as of some wild animal when it feels a mastering
+hand. I sat down, after some introductions that conveyed no ideas to
+me, and listened. She talked of travels, of various countries, easy
+brilliant talk, her eyes veiled, her exquisitely moulded fingers
+rolling cigarettes incessantly. Nothing special to record, no word of
+Occultism, nothing mysterious, a woman of the world chatting with her
+evening visitors. We rose to go, and for a moment the veil lifted, and
+two brilliant, piercing eyes met mine, and with a yearning throb in
+the voice: "Oh, my dear Mrs. Besant, if you would only come among us!"
+I felt a well-nigh uncontrollable desire to bend down and kiss her,
+under the compulsion of that yearning voice, those compelling eyes,
+but with a flash of the old unbending pride and an inward jeer at my
+own folly, I said a commonplace polite good-bye, and turned away with
+some inanely courteous and evasive remark. "Child," she said to me
+long afterwards, "your pride is terrible; you are as proud as Lucifer
+himself." But truly I think I never showed it to her again after that
+first evening, though it sprang up wrathfully in her defence many and
+many a time, until I learned the pettiness and the worthlessness of
+all criticism, and knew that the blind were objects of compassion not
+of scorn.
+
+Once again I went, and asked about the Theosophical Society, wishful
+to join, but fighting against it. For I saw, distinct and clear--with
+painful distinctness, indeed--what that joining would mean. I had
+largely conquered public prejudice against me by my work on the London
+School Board, and a smoother road stretched before me, whereon effort
+to help should be praised not blamed. Was I to plunge into a new
+vortex of strife, and make myself a mark for ridicule--worse than
+hatred--and fight again the weary fight for an unpopular truth? Must I
+turn against Materialism, and face the shame of publicly confessing
+that I had been wrong, misled by intellect to ignore the Soul? Must I
+leave the army that had battled for me so bravely, the friends who
+through all brutality of social ostracism had held me dear and true?
+And he, the strongest and truest friend of all, whose confidence I had
+shaken by my Socialism--must he suffer the pang of seeing his
+co-worker, his co-fighter, of whom he had been so proud, to whom he
+had been so generous, go over to the opposing hosts, and leave the
+ranks of Materialism? What would be the look in Charles Bradlaugh's
+eyes when I told him that I had become a Theosophist? The struggle was
+sharp and keen, but with none of the anguish of old days in it, for
+the soldier had now fought many fights and was hardened by many
+wounds. And so it came to pass that I went again to Lansdowne Road to
+ask about the Theosophical Society. H.P. Blavatsky looked at me
+piercingly for a moment. "Have you read the report about me of the
+Society for Psychical Research?" "No; I never heard of it, so far as I
+know." "Go and read it, and if, after reading it, you come
+back--well." And nothing more would she say on the subject, but
+branched off to her experiences in many lands.
+
+I borrowed a copy of the Report, read and re-read it. Quickly I saw
+how slender was the foundation on which the imposing structure was
+built. The continual assumptions on which conclusions were based; the
+incredible character of the allegations; and--most damning fact of
+all--the foul source from which the evidence was derived. Everything
+turned on the veracity of the Coulombs, and they were self-stamped as
+partners in the alleged frauds. Could I put such against the frank,
+fearless nature that I had caught a glimpse of, against the proud
+fiery truthfulness that shone at me from the clear, blue eyes, honest
+and fearless as those of a noble child? Was the writer of "The Secret
+Doctrine" this miserable impostor, this accomplice of tricksters, this
+foul and loathsome deceiver, this conjuror with trap-doors and sliding
+panels? I laughed aloud at the absurdity and flung the Report aside
+with the righteous scorn of an honest nature that knew its own kin
+when it met them, and shrank from the foulness and baseness of a lie.
+The next day saw me at the Theosophical Publishing Company's office at
+7, Duke Street, Adelphi, where Countess Wachtmeister--one of the
+lealest of H.P.B.'s friends--was at work, and I signed an
+application to be admitted as fellow of the Theosophical Society.
+
+On receiving my diploma I betook myself to Lansdowne Road, where I
+found H.P.B. alone. I went over to her, bent down and kissed her,
+but said no word. "You have joined the Society?" "Yes." "You have read
+the report?" "Yes." "Well?" I knelt down before her and clasped her
+hands in mine, looking straight into her eyes. "My answer is, will you
+accept me as your pupil, and give me the honour of proclaiming you my
+teacher in the face of the world?" Her stern, set face softened, the
+unwonted gleam of tears sprang to her eyes; then, with a dignity more
+than regal, she placed her hand upon my head. "You are a noble woman.
+May Master bless you."
+
+From that day, the 10th of May, 1889, until now--two years three and
+half months after she left her body on May 8, 1891--my faith in her
+has never wavered, my trust in her has never been shaken. I gave her
+my faith on an imperious intuition, I proved her true day after day in
+closest intimacy living by her side; and I speak of her with the
+reverence due from a pupil to a teacher who never failed her, with the
+passionate gratitude which, in our School, is the natural meed of the
+one who opens the gateway and points out the path. "Folly!
+fanaticism!" scoffs the Englishman of the nineteenth century. Be it
+so. I have seen, and I can wait. I have been told that I plunged
+headlong into Theosophy and let my enthusiasm carry me away. I think
+the charge is true, in so far as the decision was swiftly taken; but
+it had been long led up to, and realised the dreams of childhood on
+the higher planes of intellectual womanhood. And let me here say that
+more than all I hoped for in that first plunge has been realised, and
+a certainty of knowledge has been gained on doctrines seen as true as
+that swift flash of illumination. I _know_, by personal experiment,
+that the Soul exists, and that my Soul, not my body, is myself; that
+it can leave the body at will; that it can, disembodied, reach and
+learn from living human teachers, and bring back and impress on the
+physical brain that which it has learned; that this process of
+transferring consciousness from one range of being, as it were, to
+another, is a very slow process, during which the body and brain are
+gradually correlated with the subtler form which is essentially that
+of the Soul, and that my own experience of it, still so imperfect, so
+fragmentary, when compared with the experience of the highly trained,
+is like the first struggles of a child learning to speak compared with
+the perfect oratory of the practised speaker; that consciousness, so
+far from being dependent on the brain, is more active when freed from
+the gross forms of matter than when encased within them; that the
+great Sages spoken of by H.P. Blavatsky exist; that they wield powers
+and possess knowledge before which our control of Nature and knowledge
+of her ways is but as child's play. All this, and much more, have I
+learned, and I am but a pupil of low grade, as it were in the infant
+class of the Occult School; so the first plunge has been successful,
+and the intuition has been justified. This same path of knowledge that
+I am treading is open to all others who will pay the toll demanded at
+the gateway--and that toll is willingness to renounce everything for
+the sake of spiritual truth, and willingness to give all the truth
+that is won to the service of man, keeping back no shred for self.
+
+On June 23rd, in a review of "The Secret Doctrine" in the _National
+Reformer,_ the following passages occur, and show how swiftly some of
+the main points of the teaching had been grasped. (There is a blunder
+in the statement that of the seven modifications of Matter Science
+knows only four, and till lately knew only three; these four are
+sub-states only, sub-divisions of the lowest plane.)
+
+After saying that the nineteenth-century Englishman would be but too
+likely to be repelled if he only skimmed the book, I went on: "With
+telescope and with microscope, with scalpel and with battery, Western
+Science interrogates nature, adding fact to fact, storing experience
+after experience, but coming ever to gulfs unfathomable by its
+plummets, to heights unscalable by its ladders. Wide and masterful in
+its answers to the 'How?' the 'Why?' ever eludes it, and causes remain
+enwrapped in gloom. Eastern Science uses as its scientific instrument
+the penetrating faculties of the mind alone, and regarding the
+material plane as _Maya_--illusion--seeks in the mental and spiritual
+planes of being the causes of the material effects. There, too, is the
+only reality; there the true existence of which the visible universe
+is but the shadow.
+
+"It is clear that from such investigations some further mental
+equipment is necessary than that normally afforded by the human body.
+And here comes the parting of the ways between East and West. For the
+study of the material universe, our five senses, aided by the
+instruments invented by Science, may suffice. For all we can hear and
+see, taste and handle, these accustomed servitors, though often
+blundering, are the best available guides to knowledge. But it lies in
+the nature of the case that they are useless when the investigation is
+to be into modes of existence which cannot impress themselves on our
+nerve-ends. For instance, what we know as colour is the vibration
+frequency of etheric waves striking on the retina of the eye, between
+certain definite limits--759 trillions of blows from the maximum, 436
+trillions from the minimum--these waves give rise in us to the
+sensation which the brain translates into colour. (Why the 436
+trillion blows at one end of a nerve become 'Red' at the other end we
+do not know; we chronicle the fact but cannot explain it.) But our
+capacity to respond to the vibration cannot limit the vibrational
+capacity of the ether; to _us_ the higher and lower rates of vibration
+do not exist, but if our sense of vision were more sensitive we should
+see where now we are blind. Following this line of thought we realise
+that matter may exist in forms unknown to us, in modifications to
+which our senses are unable to respond. Now steps in the Eastern Sage
+and says: 'That which you say _may_ be, _is_; we have developed and
+cultivated senses as much superior to yours as your eye is superior to
+that of the jelly-fish; we have evolved mental and spiritual faculties
+which enable us to investigate on the higher planes of being with as
+much certainty as you are investigating on the physical plane; there
+is nothing _supernatural_ in the business, any more than your
+knowledge is supernatural, though much above that accessible to the
+fish; we do not speculate on these higher forms of existence; we
+_know_ them by personal study, just as you know the fauna and flora of
+your world. The powers we possess are not supernatural, they are
+latent in every human being, and will be evolved as the race
+progresses. All that we have done is to evolve them more rapidly than
+our neighbours, by a procedure as open to you as it was to us. Matter
+is everywhere, but it exists in seven modifications of which you only
+know four, and until lately only knew three; in those higher forms
+reside the causes of which you see the effects in the lower, and to
+know these causes you must develop the capacity to take cognisance of
+the higher planes.'"
+
+Then followed a brief outline of the cycle of evolution, and I went
+on: "What part does man play in this vast drama of a universe?
+Needless to say, he is not the only living form in a Cosmos, which for
+the most part is uninhabitable by him. As Science has shown living
+forms everywhere on the material plane, races in each drop of water,
+life throbbing in every leaf and blade, so the 'Secret Doctrine'
+points to living forms on higher planes of existence, each suited to
+its environment, till all space thrills with life, and nowhere is
+there death, but only change. Amid these myriads are some evolving
+towards humanity, some evolving away from humanity as we know it,
+divesting themselves of its grosser parts. For man is regarded as a
+sevenfold being, four of these parts belonging to the animal body, and
+perishing at, or soon after, death; while three form his higher self,
+his true individuality, and these persist and are immortal. These form
+the Ego, and it is this which passes through many incarnations,
+learning life's lesson as it goes, working out its own redemption
+within the limits of an inexorable law, sowing seeds of which it ever
+reaps the harvest, building its own fate with tireless fingers, and
+finding nowhere in the measureless time and space around it any that
+can lift for it one weight it has created, one burden it has gathered,
+unravel for it one tangle it has twisted, close for it one gulf it has
+digged."
+
+Then after noting the approaches of Western Science to Eastern, came
+the final words: "it is of curious interest to note how some of the
+latest theories seem to catch glimpses of the occult Doctrines, as
+though Science were standing on the very threshold of knowledge which
+shall make all her past seem small. Already her hand is trembling
+towards the grasp of forces beside which all those now at her command
+are insignificant. How soon will her grip fasten on them? Let us hope
+not until social order has been transformed, lest they should only
+give more to those who have, and leave the wretched still wretcheder
+by force of contrast. Knowledge used by selfishness widens the gulf
+that divides man from man and race from race, and we may well shrink
+from the idea of new powers in Nature being yoked to the car of Greed.
+Hence the wisdom of those 'Masters,' in whose name Madame Blavatsky
+speaks, has ever denied the knowledge which is power until Love's
+lesson has been learned, and has given only into the hands of the
+selfless the control of those natural forces which, misused, would
+wreck society."
+
+This review, and the public announcement, demanded by honesty, that I
+had joined the Theosophical Society, naturally raised somewhat of a
+storm of criticism, and the _National Reformer_ of June 30th contained
+the following: "The review of Madame Blavatsky's book in the last
+_National Reformer_, and an announcement in the _Star_, have brought
+me several letters on the subject of Theosophy. I am asked for an
+explanation as to what Theosophy is, and as to my own opinion on
+Theosophy--the word 'theosoph' is old, and was used among the
+Neo-platonists. From the dictionary its new meaning appears to be,
+'one who claims to have a knowledge of God, or of the laws of nature
+by means of internal illumination.' An Atheist certainly cannot be a
+Theosophist. A Deist might be a Theosophist. A Monist cannot be a
+Theosophist. Theosophy must at least involve Dualism. Modern
+Theosophy, according to Madame Blavatsky, as set out in last week's
+issue, asserts much that I do not believe, and alleges some things
+that, to me, are certainly not true. I have not had the opportunity of
+reading Madame Blavatsky's two volumes, but I have read during the
+past ten years many publications from the pen of herself, Colonel
+Olcott, and of other Theosophists. They appear to me to have sought to
+rehabilitate a kind of Spiritualism in Eastern phraseology. I think
+many of their allegations utterly erroneous, and their reasonings
+wholly unsound. I very deeply regret indeed that my colleague and
+co-worker has, with somewhat of suddenness, and without any
+interchange of ideas with myself, adopted as facts matters which seem
+to me to be as unreal as it is possible for any fiction to be. My
+regret is greater as I know Mrs. Besant's devotion to any course she
+believes to be true. I know that she will always be earnest in the
+advocacy of any views she undertakes to defend, and I look to possible
+developments of her Theosophic views with the very gravest misgiving.
+The editorial policy of this paper is unchanged, and is directly
+antagonistic to all forms of Theosophy. I would have preferred on this
+subject to have held my peace, for the public disagreeing with Mrs.
+Besant on her adoption of Socialism has caused pain to both; but on
+reading her article and taking the public announcement made of her
+having joined the Theosophical organisation, I owe it to those who
+look to me for guidance to say this with clearness.
+
+"CHARLES BRADLAUGH."
+
+"It is not possible for me here to state fully my reasons for joining
+the Theosophical Society, the three objects of which are: To found a
+Universal Brotherhood without distinction of race or creed; to forward
+the study of Aryan literature and philosophy; to investigate
+unexplained laws of nature and the physical powers latent in man. On
+matters of religious opinion the members are absolutely free. The
+founders of the society deny a personal God, and a somewhat subtle
+form of Pantheism is taught as the Theosophic view of the universe,
+though even this is not forced on members of the society. I have no
+desire to hide the fact that this form of Pantheism appears to me to
+promise solution of some problems, especially problems in psychology,
+which Atheism leaves untouched.
+
+"ANNIE BESANT."
+
+Theosophy, as its students well know, so far from involving Dualism,
+is based on the One, which becomes Two on manifestation, just as
+Atheism posits one existence, only cognisable in the duality force and
+matter, and as philosophic--though not popular--Theism teaches one
+Deity whereof are spirit and matter. Mr. Bradlaugh's temperate
+disapproval was not copied in its temperance by some other Freethought
+leaders, and Mr. Foote especially distinguished himself by the
+bitterness of his attacks. In the midst of the whirl I was called away
+to Paris to attend, with Herbert Burrows, the great Labour Congress
+held there from July 15th to July 20th, and spent a day or two at
+Fontainebleau with H.P. Blavatsky, who had gone abroad for a few
+weeks' rest. There I found her translating the wonderful fragments
+from "The Book of the Golden Precepts," now so widely known under the
+name of "The Voice of the Silence." She wrote it swiftly, without any
+material copy before her, and in the evening made me read it aloud to
+see if the "English was decent." Herbert Burrows was there, and Mrs.
+Candler, a staunch American Theosophist, and we sat round H.P.B. while
+I read. The translation was in perfect and beautiful English, flowing
+and musical; only a word or two could we find to alter, and she looked
+at us like a startled child, wondering at our praises--praises that
+any one with the literary sense would endorse if they read that
+exquisite prose poem.
+
+A little earlier in the same day I had asked her as to the agencies at
+work in producing the taps so constantly heard at Spiritualistic
+_Seances_. "You don't use spirits to produce taps," she said; "see
+here." She put her hand over my head, not touching it, and I heard and
+felt slight taps on the bone of my skull, each sending a little
+electric thrill down the spine. She then carefully explained how such
+taps were producible at any point desired by the operator, and how
+interplay of the currents to which they were due might be caused
+otherwise than by conscious human volition. It was in this fashion
+that she would illustrate her verbal teachings, proving by experiment
+the statements made as to the existence of subtle forces controllable
+by the trained mind. The phenomena all belonged to the scientific side
+of her teaching, and she never committed the folly of claiming
+authority for her philosophic doctrines on the ground that she was a
+wonder-worker. And constantly she would remind us that there was no
+such thing as "miracle"; that all the phenomena she had produced were
+worked by virtue of a knowledge of nature deeper than that of average
+people, and by the force of a well-trained mind and will; some of them
+were what she would describe as "psychological tricks," the creation
+of images by force of imagination, and in pressing them on others as a
+"collective hallucination"; others, such as the moving of solid
+articles, either by an astral hand projected to draw them towards her,
+or by using an Elemental; others by reading in the Astral Light, and
+so on. But the proof of the reality of her mission from those whom she
+spoke of as Masters lay not in these comparatively trivial physical
+and mental phenomena, but in the splendour of her heroic endurance,
+the depth of her knowledge, the selflessness of her character, the
+lofty spirituality of her teaching, the untiring passion of her
+devotion, the incessant ardour of her work for the enlightening of
+men. It was these, and not her phenomena, that won for her our faith
+and confidence--we who lived beside her, knowing her daily life--and
+we gratefully accepted her teaching not because she claimed any
+authority, but because it woke in us powers, the possibility of which
+in ourselves we had not dreamed of, energies of the Soul that
+demonstrated their own existence.
+
+Returning to London from Paris, it became necessary to make a very
+clear and definite presentment of my change of views, and in the
+_Reformer_ of August 4th I find the following: "Many statements are
+being made just now about me and my beliefs, some of which are
+absurdly, and some of which are maliciously, untrue. I must ask my
+friends not to give credence to them. It would not be fair to my
+friend Mr. Bradlaugh to ask him to open the columns of this Journal to
+an exposition of Theosophy from my pen, and so bring about a long
+controversy on a subject which would not interest the majority of the
+readers of the _National Reformer_. This being so I cannot here answer
+the attacks made on me. I feel, however, that the party with which I
+have worked for so long has a right to demand of me some explanation
+of the step I have taken, and I am therefore preparing a pamphlet
+dealing fully with the question. Further, I have arranged with Mr.
+R.O. Smith to take as subject of the lectures to be delivered by me at
+the Hall of Science on August 4th and 11th 'Why I became a
+Theosophist.' Meanwhile I think that my years of service in the ranks
+of the Freethought party give me the right to ask that I should not be
+condemned unheard, and I even venture to suggest, in view of the
+praises bestowed on me by Freethinkers in the past, that it is
+possible that there may be something to be said, from the intellectual
+standpoint, in favour of Theosophy. The caricatures of it which have
+appeared from some Freethinkers' pens represent it about as accurately
+as the Christian Evidence caricatures of Atheism represent that
+dignified philosophy of life; and, remembering how much they are
+themselves misrepresented, I ask them to wait before they judge."
+
+The lectures were delivered, and were condensed into a pamphlet
+bearing the same title, which has had a very great circulation. It
+closed as follows:--
+
+"There remains a great stumblingblock in the minds of many
+Freethinkers which is certain to prejudice them against Theosophy, and
+which offers to opponents a cheap subject for sarcasm--the assertion
+that there exist other living beings than the men and animals found on
+our own globe. It may be well for people who at once turn away when
+such an assertion is made to stop and ask themselves whether they
+really and seriously believe that throughout this mighty universe, in
+which our little planet is but as a tiny speck of sand in the Sahara,
+this one planet only is inhabited by living things? Is all the
+universe dumb save for _our_ voices? eyeless save for _our_ vision?
+dead save for _our_ life? Such a preposterous belief was well enough
+in the days when Christianity regarded our world as the centre of the
+universe, the human race as the one for which the Creator had deigned
+to die. But now that we are placed in our proper position, one among
+countless myriads of worlds, what ground is there for the preposterous
+conceit which arrogates as ours all sentient existence? Earth, air,
+water, all are teeming with living things suited to their environment;
+our globe is overflowing with life. But the moment we pass in thought
+beyond our atmosphere everything is to be changed. Neither reason nor
+analogy support such a supposition. It was one of Bruno's crimes that
+he dared to teach that other worlds than ours were inhabited; but he
+was wiser than the monks who burned him. All the Theosophists aver is
+that each phase of matter has living things suited to it, and that all
+the universe is pulsing with life. 'Superstition!' shriek the bigoted.
+It is no more superstition than the belief in Bacteria, or in any
+other living thing invisible to the ordinary human eye. 'Spirit' is a
+misleading word, for, historically, it connotes immateriality and a
+supernatural kind of existence, and the Theosophist believes neither
+in the one nor the other. With him all living things act in and
+through a material basis, and 'matter' and 'spirit' are not found
+dissociated. But he alleges that matter exists in states other than
+those at present known to science. To deny this is to be about as
+sensible as was the Hindu prince who denied the existence of ice
+because water, in his experience, never became solid. Refusal to
+believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all
+outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
+
+"One last word to my Secularist friends. If you say to me, 'Leave our
+ranks,' I will leave them; I force myself on no party, and the moment
+I feel myself unwelcome I will go.[29] It has cost me pain enough and
+to spare to admit that the Materialism from which I hoped all has
+failed me, and by such admission to bring on myself the disapproval of
+some of my nearest friends. But here, as at other times in my life, I
+dare not purchase peace with a lie. An imperious necessity forces me
+to speak the truth, as I see it, whether the speech please or
+displease, whether it bring praise or blame. That one loyalty to Truth
+I must keep stainless, whatever friendships fail me or human ties be
+broken. She may lead me into the wilderness, yet I must follow her;
+she may strip me of all love, yet I must pursue her; though she slay
+me, yet will I trust in her; and I ask no other epitaph on my tomb but
+
+"'SHE TRIED TO FOLLOW TRUTH.'"
+
+Meanwhile, with this new controversy on my hands, the School Board
+work went on, rendered possible, I ought to say, by the generous
+assistance of friends unknown to me, who sent me, L150 a year during
+the last year and a half. So also went on the vigorous Socialist work,
+and the continual championship of struggling labour movements,
+prominent here being the organisation of the South London fur-pullers
+into a union, and the aiding of the movement for shortening the hours
+of tram and 'bus men, the meetings for which had to be held after
+midnight. The feeding and clothing of children also occupied much time
+and attention, for the little ones in my district were, thousands of
+them, desperately poor. My studies I pursued as best I could, reading
+in railway carriages, tramcars, omnibuses, and stealing hours for
+listening to H.P.B. by shortening the nights.
+
+In October, Mr. Bradlaugh's shaken strength received its death-blow,
+though he was to live yet another fifteen months. He collapsed
+suddenly under a most severe attack of congestion and lay in imminent
+peril, devotedly nursed by his only remaining child, Mrs. Bonner, his
+elder daughter having died the preceding autumn. Slowly he struggled
+back to life, after four weeks in bed, and, ordered by his physician
+to take rest and if possible a sea voyage, he sailed for India on
+November 28th, to attend the National Congress, where he was
+enthusiastically acclaimed as "Member for India."
+
+In November I argued a libel suit, brought by me against the Rev. Mr.
+Hoskyns, vicar of Stepney, who had selected some vile passages from a
+book which was not mine and had circulated them as representing my
+views, during the School Board election of 1888. I had against me the
+Solicitor-General, Sir Edward Clarke, at the bar, and Baron Huddleston
+on the bench; both counsel and judge did their best to browbeat me and
+to use the coarsest language, endeavouring to prove that by advocating
+the limitation of the family I had condemned chastity as a crime. Five
+hours of brutal cross-examination left my denial of such teachings
+unshaken, and even the pleadings of the judge for the clergyman,
+defending his parishioners against an unbeliever and his laying down
+as law that the statement was privileged, did not avail to win a
+verdict. The jury disagreed, not, as one of them told me afterwards,
+on the question of the libel, but on some feeling that a clergyman
+ought not to be mulcted in damages for his over-zeal in defence of his
+faith against the ravening wolf of unbelief, while others, regarding
+the libel as a very cruel one, would not agree to a verdict that did
+not carry substantial damages. I did not carry the case to a new
+trial, feeling that it was not worth while to waste time over it
+further, my innocence of the charge itself having been fully proved.
+
+Busily the months rolled on, and early in the year 1890 H.P.Blavatsky
+had given to her L1,000, to use in her discretion for human service,
+and if she thought well, in the service of women. After a good deal of
+discussion she fixed on the establishment of a club in East London for
+working girls, and with her approval Miss Laura Cooper and I hunted
+for a suitable place. Finally we fixed on a very large and old house,
+193, Bow Road, and some months went in its complete renovation and the
+building of a hall attached to it. On August 15th it was opened by
+Madame Blavatsky, and dedicated by her to the brightening of the lot
+of hardworking and underpaid girls. It has nobly fulfilled its mission
+for the last three years. Very tender was H.P.B.'s heart to human
+suffering, especially to that of women and children. She was very poor
+towards the end of her earthly life, having spent all on her mission,
+and refusing to take time from her Theosophical work to write for the
+Russian papers which were ready to pay highly for her pen. But her
+slender purse was swiftly emptied when any human pain that money could
+relieve came in her way. One day I wrote a letter to a comrade that
+was shown to her, about some little children to whom I had carried a
+quantity of country flowers, and I had spoken of their faces pinched
+with want. The following characteristic note came to me:--
+
+"MY DEAREST FRIEND,--I have just read your letter to ---- and my heart
+is sick for the poor little ones! Look here; I have but 30s. of _my
+own money_ of which I can dispose (for as you know I am a pauper, and
+proud of it), but I want you to take them and _not say a word_. This
+may buy thirty dinners for thirty poor little starving wretches, and I
+may feel happier for thirty minutes at the thought. Now don't say a
+word, and do it; take them to those unfortunate babies who loved your
+flowers and felt happy. Forgive your old uncouth friend, _useless_ in
+this world!
+
+"Ever yours,
+
+"H.P.B."
+
+It was this tenderness of hers that led us, after she had gone, to
+found the "H.P.B. Home for little children," and one day we hope to
+fulfil her expressed desire that a large but homelike Refuge for
+outcast children should be opened under the auspices of the
+Theosophical Society.
+
+The lease of 17, Lansdowne Road expiring in the early summer of 1890,
+it was decided that 19, Avenue Road should be turned into the
+headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Europe. A hall was built
+for the meetings of the Blavatsky Lodge--the lodge founded by her--and
+various alterations made. In July her staff of workers was united
+under one roof; thither came Archibald and Bertram Keightley, who had
+devoted themselves to her service years before, and the Countess
+Wachtmeister, who had thrown aside all the luxuries of wealth and of
+high social rank to give all to the cause she served and the friend
+she loved with deep and faithful loyajty; and George Mead, her
+secretary and earnest disciple, a man of strong brain and strong
+character, a fine scholar and untiring worker; thither, too, Claude
+Wright, most lovable of Irishmen, with keen insight underlying a
+bright and sunny nature, careless on the surface, and Walter Old,
+dreamy and sensitive, a born psychic, and, like many such, easily
+swayed by those around him; Emily Kislingbury also, a studious and
+earnest woman; Isabel Cooper Oakley, intuitional and studious, a rare
+combination, and a most devoted pupil in Occult studies; James Pryse,
+an American, than whom none is more devoted, bringing practical
+knowledge to the help of the work, and making possible the large
+development of our printing department. These, with myself, were at
+first the resident staff, Miss Cooper and Herbert Burrows, who were
+also identified with the work, being prevented by other obligations
+from living always as part of the household.
+
+The rules of the house were--and are--very simple, but H.P.B.
+insisted on great regularity of life; we breakfasted at 8 a.m.,
+worked till lunch at 1, then again till dinner at 7. After dinner
+the outer work for the Society was put aside, and we gathered in
+H.P.B.'s room where we would sit talking over plans, receiving
+instructions, listening to her explanation of knotty points. By 12
+midnight all the lights had to be extinguished. My public work took me
+away for many hours, unfortunately for myself, but such was the
+regular run of our busy lives. She herself wrote incessantly; always
+suffering, but of indomitable will, she drove her body through its
+tasks, merciless to its weaknesses and its pains. Her pupils she
+treated very variously, adapting herself with nicest accuracy to their
+differing natures; as a teacher she was marvellously patient,
+explaining a thing over and over again in different fashions, until
+sometimes after prolonged failure she would throw herself back in her
+chair: "My God!" (the easy "Mon Dieu" of the foreigner) "am I a fool
+that you can't understand? Here, So-and-so"--to some one on whose
+countenance a faint gleam of comprehension was discernible--"tell
+these flapdoodles of the ages what I mean." With vanity, conceit,
+pretence of knowledge, she was merciless, if the pupil were a
+promising one; keen shafts of irony would pierce the sham. With some
+she would get very angry, lashing them out of their lethargy with
+fiery scorn; and in truth she made herself a mere instrument for the
+training of her pupils, careless what they, or any one else thought of
+her, providing that the resulting benefit to them was secured. And we,
+who lived around her, who in closest intimacy watched her day after
+day, we bear witness to the unselfish beauty of her life, the nobility
+of her character, and we lay at her feet our most reverent gratitude
+for knowledge gained, lives purified, strength developed. O noble and
+heroic Soul, whom the outside purblind world misjudges, but whom your
+pupils partly saw, never through lives and deaths shall we repay the
+debt of gratitude we owe to you.
+
+And thus I came through storm to peace, not to the peace of an
+untroubled sea of outer life, which no strong soul can crave, but to
+an inner peace that outer troubles may not avail to ruffle--a peace
+which belongs to the eternal not to the transitory, to the depths not
+to the shallows of life. It carried me scatheless through the terrible
+spring of 1891, when death struck down Charles Bradlaugh in the
+plenitude of his usefulness, and unlocked the gateway into rest for H.
+P. Blavatsky. Through anxieties and responsibilities heavy and
+numerous it has borne me; every strain makes it stronger; every trial
+makes it serener; every assault leaves it more radiant. Quiet
+confidence has taken the place of doubt; a strong security the place
+of anxious dread. In life, through death, to life, I am but the
+servant of the great Brotherhood, and those on whose heads but for a
+moment the touch of the Master has rested in blessing can never again
+look upon the world save through eyes made luminous with the radiance
+of the Eternal Peace.
+
+PEACE TO ALL BEINGS.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: This odious law has now been altered, and a married woman
+is a person, not a chattel.]
+
+[Footnote 2: "The Disciples," p. 14.]
+
+[Footnote 3: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 4: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 5: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 6: "Why I do not Believe in God." 1887.]
+
+[Footnote 7: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 8: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 9: "Life, Death, and Immortality." 1886.]
+
+[Footnote 10: "Life, Death, and Immortality." 1886.]
+
+[Footnote 11: "Life, Death, and Immortality." 1886.]
+
+[Footnote 12: Ibid.]
+
+[Footnote 13: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 14: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 15: "The True Basis of Morality." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 16: "Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 17: "On the Nature and Existence of God." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 18: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 19: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 20: "The Gospels of Christianity and Freethought." 1874.]
+
+[Footnote 21: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 22: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 23: "The Gospel of Atheism." 1876.]
+
+[Footnote 24: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 25: "A World without God." 1885.]
+
+[Footnote 26: "The Christian Creed." 1884.]
+
+[Footnote 27: _National Reformer_, June 18, 1882]
+
+[Footnote 28: _Theosophist_, June, 1882.]
+
+[Footnote 29: I leave these words as they were written in 1889. I
+resigned my office in the N.S.S. in 1890, feeling that the N.S.S. was
+so identified with Materialism that it had no longer place for me.]
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF BOOKS QUOTED.
+
+"Autobiography," J.S. Mill, 184
+
+"Christian Creed, The," 173
+
+"Freethinkers' Text-book," 144
+
+"Gospel of Atheism, The," 145, 152, 158, 168
+
+"Gospels of Christianity and Freethought," 164
+
+"Life, Death, and Immortality," 147, 149, 150
+
+_Link_, The, 333
+
+_National Reformer_, The, 79, 80, 280, 346-50, 354
+
+_Our Corner, _286, 329
+
+_Theosophist_, The, 282, 288
+
+"True Basis of Morality," 156
+
+"Why I do Not Believe in God," 146
+
+"World without God," 165, 169, 172
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+Affirmation Bill brought in, 287
+  rejected, 299
+Atheist, position as an, 139
+Authorship, first attempts at, 84.
+
+Bennett, D.M., prosecution of, 232
+Blasphemy prosecution, 283, 287, 289
+Blavatsky, H.P., 189, 337
+  meeting with, 341
+"Bloody Sunday," 324
+Bradlaugh, Charles, first meeting with, 135
+  as friend, 137
+  in the Clock Tower, 258
+  and the scene in the House, 265
+  _v_. Newdegate; result, 289
+  prosecuted for blasphemy, 283, 289
+
+Confirmation, 51
+
+Daughter, application to remove, 213
+  denied access to, 219
+Death of father, 21
+  of mother, 126
+Doubt the first, 58
+
+"Elements of Social Science," 196
+Engagement, 69
+Essay, first Freethought, 113
+
+Fenians, the, 73
+_Freethinker_ prosecution, 283, 287, 296
+Freethought Publishing Company, the, 285
+
+Harrow, life at, 30
+Hoskyns, Rev. E., libel action against, 359
+
+Knowlton pamphlet, the, 205
+  prosecution, 208
+  trial, 210
+
+"Law of Population, The," 212, 210
+"Law and Liberty League," the, 326
+Lecture, the first, 181
+Linnell, the Trafalgar Square victim, 316
+  funeral of, 327
+_Link_, founding of the, 331
+
+Malthusian League formed, 229
+Malthusianism and Theosophy, 240
+Marriage, 70
+  tie broken, no
+Match-girls' strike, 335
+  Union, established, 336
+
+_National Reformer,_ the, 134
+  first contribution to, 180
+  resignation of co-editorship, 320
+National Secular Society joined, 135
+  elected vice-president of, 202
+  resignation of, 357
+Northampton Election, 183
+  struggle, 253, 344
+
+Oaths Bill, the, 314, 329
+_Our Corner_, 286, 314
+
+Political Opinions, 174
+Pusey, Dr., 109, 284
+
+Russian politics, 311
+
+Scientific work, 249
+School Board, election to, 338
+Scott, Thomas, 112, 127
+Socialism, 299
+  debate on, between Messrs. Bradlaugh and Hyndman, 301
+Socialist debates, 318, 319
+Socialists and open-air speaking, 312
+  Defence Association, 323
+Stanley, Dean, 23, 122
+
+Theosophical Society, the, 180
+  joined, 344
+  headquarters established, 361
+Theosophy and Charles Bradlaugh, 350
+  the National Secular Society, 357
+Trafalgar Square, closing of, to the public, 323
+Truelove, Edward, trial of, 225
+
+Voysey, Rev. Charles, 106
+
+Working Women's Club, 337, 360
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Annie Besant, by Annie Besant
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