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 he