Autobiographical Sketches by Annie Besant (essential books to read txt) 📖

"very poor", and who had had thirteen children and was expecting another, wrote saying, "if you want money we will manage to send you my husband's pay one week". An army officer wrote thanking us, saying he had "a wife, seven children, and three servants to keep on 11s. 8d. a day; 5d. per head per diem keeps life in us. The rest for education and raiment." A physician wrote of his hospital experience, saying that it taught him that "less dangerous preventive checks to large families [than over-lactation] should be taught to the lower classes". Many clergymen wrote of their experience among the poor, and their joy that some attempt was being made to teach them how to avoid over-large families, and letter after letter came to me from poor curates' wives, thanking me for daring to publish information of such vital importance. In many places the poor people taxed themselves so much a week for the cost of the defence, because they could not afford any large sum at once.

As soon as we were committed for trial, we resigned our posts on the Executive of the National Secular Society, feeling that we had no right to entangle the Society in a fight which it had not authorised us to carry on. We stated that we did not desire to relinquish our positions, "but we do desire that the members of the Executive shall feel free to act as they think wisest for the interest of Freethought". The letter was sent to the branches of the Society, and of the thirty-three who answered all, except Burnley and Nottingham, refused to accept our resignation. On the Executive a very clever attempt was made to place us in a difficult position by stating that the resignations were not accepted, but that, as we had resigned, and as the Council had no power to renew appointments made by the Conference, it could not invite us to resume our offices. This ingenious proposal was made by Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, who all through the trial did his best to injure us, apparently because he had himself sold the book long before we had done so, and was anxious to shield himself from condemnation by attacking us. His resolution was carried by five votes to two. Mr. Haines and Mr. Ramsey, detecting its maliciousness, voted against it. The votes of the Branches, of course, decided the question overwhelmingly in our favor, but we declined to sit on the Executive with such a resolution standing, and it was then carried--Mr. Holyoake and Mr. Watts only voting against--that "This Council acknowledge the consideration shown by Mr. Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant for the public repute of the National Secular Society by tendering their resignations, and whilst disclaiming all responsibility for the book, 'Fruits of Philosophy', decline to accept such resignations". So thoroughly did we agree that the Society ought not to be held responsible for our action, that we published the statement: "The Freethought party is no more the endorser of our Malthusianism than it is of our Republicanism, or of our advocacy of Woman Suffrage, or of our support of the North in America, or of the part we take in French politics". I may add that at the Nottingham Conference Mr. Bradlaugh was re-elected President with only four dissentients, the party being practically unanimous in its determination to uphold a Free Press.

The next stage of the prosecution was the seizure of our book packets and letters in the Post-office by the Tory Government. The "Freethinker's Text Book", the _National Reformer_, and various pamphlets were seized, as well as the "Fruits of Philosophy", and sealed letters were opened. Many meetings were held denouncing the revival of a system of Government _espionage_ which, it was supposed, had died out in England, and so great was the commotion raised that a stop was soon put to this form of Government theft, and we recovered the stolen property. On May 15th Mr. Edward Truelove was attacked for the publication of Robert Dale Owen's "Moral Physiology", and of a pamphlet entitled "Individual, Family, and National Poverty", and as both were pamphlets dealing with the Population Question, Mr. Truelove's case was included in the general defence.

Among the witnesses we desired to subpoena was Charles Darwin, as we needed to use passages from his works; he wrote back a most interesting letter, telling us that he disagreed with preventive checks to population on the ground that over-multiplication was useful, since it caused a struggle for existence in which only the strongest and the ablest survived, and that he doubted whether it was possible for preventive checks to serve as well as positive. He asked us to avoid calling him if we could: "I have been for many years much out of health, and have been forced to give up all society or public meetings, and it would be great suffering to me to be a witness in court.... If it is not asking too great a favor, I should be greatly obliged if you would inform me what you decide, as apprehension of the coming exertion would prevent the rest which I require doing me much good." Needless to add that I at once wrote to Mr. Darwin that we would not call him, but his gentle courtesy has always remained a pleasant memory to me. Another kind act was that of the famous publisher, Mr. H.G. Bohn, who volunteered himself as a witness, and drew attention to the fact that every publisher of serious literature was imperilled by the attempt to establish a police censorship.

The trial commenced on June 18th, in the Court of Queen's Bench at Westminster, before the Lord Chief Justice of England and a special jury. Sir Hardinge Giffard, the Solicitor-General of the Tory Government, Mr. Douglas Straight, and Mr. Mead, were the prosecuting counsel. The special jury consisted of the following: Alfred Upward, Augustus Voelcker, Captain Alfred Henry Waldy, Thomas Richard Walker, Robert Wallace, Edmund Waller, Arthur Walter, Charles Alfred Walter, John Ward, Arthur Warre; the two talesmen, who were afterwards added to make up the number, were George Skinner and Charles Wilson.

The Solicitor-General made a bitter and violent speech, full of party hate and malice, endeavoring to prejudice the jury against the work by picking out bits of medical detail and making profuse apologies for reading them, and shuddering and casting up his eyes with all the skill of a finished actor. For a man accustomed to Old Bailey practice he was really marvellously easily shocked; a simple physiological fact brought him to the verge of tears, while the statement that people often had too large families covered him with such modest confusion that he found it hard to continue his address. It fell to my lot to open the defence, and to put the general line of argument by which we justified the publication; Mr. Bradlaugh dealt with the defence of the book as a medical work--until the Lord Chief Justice suggested that there was no "redundancy of details, or anything more than it is necessary for a medical man to know"--and strongly urged that the knowledge given by the pamphlet was absolutely necessary for the poor. We called as witnesses for the defence Miss Alice Vickery--the first lady who passed the examination of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, and who has since passed the examinations qualifying her to act as a physician--Dr. Charles Drysdale, and Mr. H.G. Bohn. Dr. Drysdale bore witness to the medical value of the pamphlet, stating that "considering it was written forty years ago ... the writer must have been a profound student of physiology, and far advanced in the medical science of his time". "I have always considered it an excellent treatise, and I have found among my professional brethren that they have had nothing to say against it." Mr. Bohn bore witness that he had published books which "entirely covered your book, and gave a great deal more." Mr. Bradlaugh and myself then severally summed up our case, and the Solicitor-General made a speech for the prosecution very much of the character of his first one, doing all he could to inflame the minds of the jury against us. The Lord Chief Justice, to quote a morning paper, "summed up strongly for an acquittal". He said that "a more ill-advised and more injudicious proceeding in the way of a prosecution was probably never brought into a Court of Justice". He described us as "two enthusiasts, who have been actuated by the desire to do good in a particular department of Society". He bade the jury be careful "not to abridge the full and free right of public discussion, and the expression of public and private opinion on matters which are interesting to all, and materially affect the welfare of society." Then came an admirable statement of the law of population, and of his own view of the scope of the book which I present in full as our best justification.

"The author, Doctor Knowlton, professes to deal with the subject of population. Now, a century ago a great and important question of political economy was brought to the attention of the scientific and thinking world by a man whose name everybody is acquainted with, namely, Malthus. He started for the first time a theory which astonished the world, though it is now accepted as an irrefragable truth, and has since been adopted by economist after economist. It is that population has a strong and marked tendency to increase faster than the means of subsistence afforded by the earth, or that the skill and industry of man can produce for the support of life. The consequence is that the population of a country necessarily includes a vast number of persons upon whom poverty presses with a heavy and sad hand. It is true that the effects of over-population are checked to a certain extent by those powerful agencies which have been at work since the beginning of the world. Great pestilences, famines, and wars have constantly swept away thousands from the face of the earth, who otherwise must have contributed to swell the numbers of mankind. The effect, however, of this tendency to increase faster than the means of subsistence, leads to still more serious evils amongst the poorer classes of society. It necessarily lowers the price of labor by reason of the supply exceeding the demand. It increases the dearth of provisions by making the demand greater than the supply, and produces direful consequences to a large class of persons who labor under the evils, physical and moral, of poverty. You find it, as described by a witness called yesterday, in the overcrowding of our cities and country villages, and the necessarily demoralising effects resulting from that over-crowding. You have heard of the way in which women--I mean child-bearing women--are destroyed by being obliged to submit to the necessities of their position before they are fully restored from the effects of child-birth, and the effects thus produced upon the children by disease and early death. That these are evils--evils which, if they could be prevented, it would be the first business of human charity to prevent--there cannot be any doubt. That the evils of over-population are real, and not imaginary, no one acquainted with the state of society in the present day can possibly deny. Malthus suggested, years ago, and his suggestion has been supported by economists since his time, that the only possible way of keeping down population was by retarding marriage to as late a period as possible, the argument being that the fewer the marriages the fewer would be the people. But another class of theorists say that that remedy is bad, and possibly worse than the disease, because, although you might delay marriage, you cannot restrain those instincts which are implanted in human nature, and people will have the gratification and satisfaction