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