Part 8 (1/2)
Nor was ”D” the only friend brought to us by our foes I cannot ever think of that tiht me first into close intimacy with Mrs Annie Parris--the wife of Mr
Touzeau Parris, the Secretary of the Defence Co struggle, and during the, for le that succeeded it, over the custody ofand sisterly of friends One or two other friendshi+ps which will, I hope, last my life, date from that same time of strife and anxiety
The a the Knowlton and succeeding prosecutions gives sole The Defence Fund Co subscriptions a 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 pa 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 pas 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 paiven 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 hile some anonymous friend sent to e 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 DM Bennett, sold a book hich he did not agree, and was i hiland We entertained hi, and I was deputed as spokesman to present hi speech, quoted here in order to show the spirit then anih 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,the truth than those who shrink when the hour of danger colish 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 ht that we claim to welcoland There are those who taunt us ant of loyalty, and with the name of infidels In what church will they find men and women more loyal to truth and conscience? The na 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 theo in circuuest hinises thehis er, 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 woht 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, eht 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 frolory of the jail, that was his for no criht to publish that wherein the noblest thought is uttered in the bravest words And next to hiht culture, university degree, position in ht, 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, e have passed away, the hich we shall have dropped froht to honour at this hour in truth honours us, in that he allows us to offer hiive 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 ht 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 ht of free speech which is the heritage of all One of the land, Richard Carlile, turned bookseller to sell books that were prosecuted This otry 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 freeuest shows that in all this England and Aave Milton to the world can yet bring forth ues asunder Because our friend was loyal and true, prison had to hiarb of the convict than to wear that of the hypocrite The society we represent, like his society in Aht, speaks for free speech, claiht 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 DM Bennett
”'In asking you to accept at the hands of the National Secular Society of England this symbol of cordial sy into act the e, and it is as Truthseeker that we do you hoht
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 freedoraced 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 country We sent you greeting in your captivity; we rejoiced when the tiht 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 ret
”'Charles Bradlaugh, _President_'
”Soldier of liberty, we give you this Do in the future the saood 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 fronominy 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 coain I gave up Neo-Malthusianis part of the outcome of two years' instruction from Mdme HP Blavatsky, who showed ht be while arded only as the most perfect outcome of physical evolution, it holly inco, whose material form and environment were the results of his own mental activity Why and how I embraced Theosophy, and accepted HP Blavatsky as teacher, will soon be told in its proper place Here I am concerned only with the why and how of , for which I had fought so hard and suffered so much
When I built ed all actions by their effect on huarding anism that lived on earth and there perished, with activities confined to earth and limited by physical laws The object of life was the ulti-up of a physically, mentally, morally perfect man by the cumulative effects of heredity--arded as the outcome of material conditions, to be slowly but surely evolved by rational selection and the trans 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 huard to the rational co-operation with nature in the evolution of the human race, it becaeneration 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 theproblems for solution in the older countries is that of poverty, the horrible slu fa an uncertain 10s, 12s, 15s, and 20s a week; since an is 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 e is often avoided, or delayed till late in life, froe is followed by its shadow, the prevalence of vice and the moral and social ruin of thousands of wo of the duty of liical 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 Materialise to any but healthywithin the lih health and physical well-being of thechildren into the world unless the conditions for their fair nurture and develop it as hopeless, as well ason the conjunction of nominal celibacy idespread prostitution as inevitable, from the constitution of huically--advises deliberate restriction of the production of offspring, while sanctioning the exercise of the sexual instinct within the lihest physical and nity of society, and the self-respect of the individual
In all this there is nothing which for one acy, unbridled self-indulgence On the contrary, it is a well-considered and intellectually-defensible sche all natural instincts asto 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 pro 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 wehis future evolution If he be related but to terrestrial existence, he is but the loftiest organis to see his past and his future, how shouldcauses of his present woe? I brought a material cure to a disease which appeared to in; but hohen 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 ithened the disease itself, and ensured its reappearance in the future? This was the view of the problem set before me by HP Blavatsky when she unrolled the story of in and his destiny, showedof man, and the true relation between his past, his present, and his future
For what is ence, eternal and uncreate, treading a vast cycle of human experience, born and reborn on earthslowly into the ideal man He is not the product of matter, but is encased in matter, and the forms ofFor 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 byround hi subtlest ies, forible 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 coeny, help to form the tenuous model into which theof 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 outco this to the Neo-Malthusian theory, we see in sexual love not only a passion which man has in coe of evolution, a necessary part of human nature, but an animal passion that may be trained and purified into a human eress, one of the factors in hurowth But, instead of this, man in the past has made his intellect the servant of his passions; the abnormal developreater andwith it of the intellectual ele created thought-for 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 radation, and the satisfaction of its is in civilised countries lies at the root of our worst social evils This excessive developainst, and the instinct reduced within natural li self-indulgence within the ence outside it By none other road than that of self-control and self-denial canthe causes which will build for theher type for their future return to earth-life They have to hold this instinct in complete control, to trans affection, to develop the intellectual at the expense of the anie, 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 radual--for with the mass it cannot be sudden--restriction of the sexual relation to the perpetuation of the race