“’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.”