Theosophy - National Karma by K.E.Mills - from the magazine Lucifer and reprinted in Theosophical Siftings - Volume 3
National Karma
by KATE E. Mills,
F.T.S.
reprinted
from “Theosophical Siftings” Volume - 3 -
[The Theosophical Publishing Services do
not hold themselves responsible
for any opinions expressed
in signed articles.]
[Page
3] THE
paper of Professor J. R. Buchanan, M.D., in the Arena for
August, entitled "The
Coming Cataclysm of America and Europe", is of profound
interest to Theosophists. The Professor maintains, and to
quote from the summary of his article given in the September
number of the Review of Reviews, " that periodicity
is a law of nature, and that we are now approaching our revolutionary
period. From 1910 to 1916 America will be devastated by a
frightful war — a
labour and capital war and black and white war — in
which the Church will be shattered and the marriage relation
approximated to freedom. . . . The Atlantic coast of the
United States will be devastated by a great tidal wave. The
greatest horror will culminate at New York and Jersey City.
... In the midst of all these terrors of war and flood there
will occur a geological convulsion, before which all the
earthquakes of the past will seem the merest trifles. After
six years the war and horror will culminate, after terrible
loss of human life and immense destruction of great cities,
in the nationalization of everything on Edward Bellamy's
principles. Europe, too, has its great calamity. . . . The
beginning of the tragedy will approach with the beginning
of the century, and the war will develop in about fifteen
years. Two years of sanguinary revolution will be her volcanic
outburst from the pent-up fires that are smouldering now
in human bosoms". And
so continues this prophet of woe; and a watcher says, "So
be it". To those of us who belong to the Theosophical
Society there is hope and salvation for the sin-ridden world,
even when we feel that we must walk through the fiery waves
of suffering ere we can hope to be purified and consecrated
to our glorious task of helping to push the good ship Progress
through the surf of the sea of human misery as we aid at
the launch of the twentieth century.
Purified through suffering we must be, for we are not strong
enough.
Honestly, and
without self-delusion, let us look at the situation — we
English Fellows of the Theosophical Society. We have been
called to enter upon a new life. To us has been whispered
a secret from the book of destiny. The solidarity of humanity
has become an acknowledged fact. The pain of one is the
pain of all. The degradation of the meanest tarnishes the
lustre of the highest. Upon us, as the banded army of progress,
rests the duty of storming the fortress of avarice; of
laying low [Page
4] the castle of
indolence; of cutting a pathway and building a bridge that
wealth, refinement and knowledge may pass unscathed from
the rich to the poor; that the dignity of toil, the discipline
of sacrifice, the beauty of willing service may send its
quickening force from the poor to the rich.
Fifteen years of stormy strife have passed over our Society,
and, at least, some of our comrades have been enrolled in
the army of battle.
While gratefully acknowledging the victories of the past,
let us examine the camping-ground of the present.
This is what we see: Vast undulatory plains, and, beyond,
great cities, both rich with the wealth of the nation. Those
who study these things have stated that, reckoned in pounds,
one billion two hundred and fifty million is the total sum
of these riches.
Great is the power
of wealth — great for destruction
and blessing — and those who have sworn to make war
to the death on the hydra-headed tyrants of sloth and selfishness,
find in this produce of nature, and the labour of man, a
subtle foe that paralyses their limbs and sends up its intoxicating
fumes to their brains and bewilders their senses. For a curious
thing has happened on this field of battle, which, more than
all else, shall test the strength and the skill of the army
of progress.
Prompt and sleepless to guard their own interest, the dwellers
of cities have crept like a thief in the night and laid the
strong hand of power on the stores of the nation. And, alarmed
at the exit, the burghers run after and snatch what they
can for their wives and children.
So at the dawn of the day of battle this meets the eye of
the soldiers.
Less than a third of the people have seized and hold nearly
two-thirds of the produce. Now here is the problem.
Twenty-five million
persons of the poorest and weakest of brain, heart, and
soul have got to be taught, clothed, and fed with the pitiful
portion that is left from the spoils of the spoiler. Four
hundred and fifty million left over to rear and make strong
for the struggle for life; twenty-five million of people.
Less, to count heads, than thirty-five pounds a year, and
supply all the wants of each adult creature. The problem
is perplexing. Not the less so that out from the walls
of the wealth-bounded city the "have-alls" keep
throwing, when the fancy may strike them, or the wails of
the hungry break the calm of their slumbers, gifts, alms,
and donations, subscriptions and sermons, all of which are
gulped down with a curse for thanksgiving.
But the worst
of the trouble is this: we who are banded together to fight
against cruelty and wrong are smeared with the mud of that
city of wealth and corruption. Most have been reared on
the spoil of the spoiler. In our brains are the fumes of
the incense our parents have lighted to make thick the
air that surrounds us, and keep out the sight of the [Page
5] close-lying sorrow.
Our hearts have been seared by the sight of want and distress
at our doors. Our ears have been deafened by the cry of our
sisters cast out and trodden to death because they were poor
and polluted.
We know that poverty, anxiety, and that which
springs from these conditions makes the average length of
life of the artisan classes little more than half that of
their professional brothers. We know that from fifty to fifty-five
per cent, of the infants of the working classes die before
they reach five years old. How should it be otherwise when
their mothers are at work, weaving and washing, making all
bright and clean, for their rich sisters, who only lose eighteen
per cent., or less than one in five, instead of one in two
of their dear children ? And yet these working-men and women
have hearts as sore, as they hear the dull sod fall upon
the tiny coffin as would be those of their wealthy employers.
We know that the Mansion House Relief Committee Report four
years ago told us there would be from seven and eight thousand
men apply daily, and apply in vain, at the docks of
London for labour, for the splendid remuneration of four
pence an hour. We know the smiling, gracefully-clad ladies
will ask in all seriousness. “Do you think the working-men do
right to strike ?" Would that politeness permitted the
counter question, " Do you think, madam, your white
skirt is right to wear while children are dying for the want
of a portion — only a small portion — of that
labour you so thoughtlessly absorb ?
Would they see, do we ourselves see, and
act as if we saw,
that at Bethnal Green the infantile death-rate is twice that
of Belgravia ?
Well, we say,
we must be clean, even if all through the summer months
the washerwoman toils for sixteen hours a day, and no one
asks what becomes of her baby, and if that is clean. We
cannot do without house and pretty furniture. We have come
to regard these things as a sign of moral worth — as
a passport of respectability. Like Carlyle's witness, we
must "keep a gig". Have we not been taught from
our youth up that the race is to the swift, the battle to
the strong ? Is not success in the struggle for existence
proof positive that we who survive are the "fittest",
notwithstanding "when
we regard the general tone of feeling of our age, whether
as expressed in its literature, in its social intercourse,
or even more, perhaps, in its amusements, do we not find
ourselves in the presence of a society from which real gladness
has well-nigh died out, in which hope is almost extinct ? " In
spite of our material successes — our victory in the "struggle" — we
are human. The sorrows of the crushed and wounded weigh upon
our spirits. In our pleasant homes we cannot shut out the
thought that "in London there are 60,000 families who
live in single rooms, and 30,000 who have no regular homes
at all". [Page 6]
In the security of a well-ordered
city we are haunted by the remembrance that 73,000 criminals
are yearly arrested, that statistics show that "in
1887 the actual prison population was 14,966, and the total
number of persons imprisoned was 163,048. The metropolitan
prisons contain about 21 per cent, of the whole prison population".
We may try to
console ourselves with the thought that these criminals
are more comfortably housed and fed in prison than they
would be out of prison; but we fail to convince ourselves
that existing prison regulations, splendid as they may be
for the physical man, are educational establishments well
fitted to prepare the delinquents to create good Karma for
the "morrow",when, their term of punishment expired,
they shall start afresh on the treadmill of free life outside
the prison walls.
As we gather round
the social board, and feel a glow of hospitable pride as
we glance down the long table, bright with silver and glass,
and lovely with flowers, the thought will invade us that
we are the leaders of the masses, that our pleasures are
also their pleasures. Our feasts are made elegant to the
eye; but they appeal to the lower nature of man, and from
them, too often, baseness and cruelty result. The softly-lighted
banqueting-halls, gay with fruits and flowers, and well-dressed
guests, find their counterpart in 180,000 public-houses
flashing their garish splendours about the highways and
by-ways of "merry England" ;
and the dark nights find in London alone over 20,000 of these
death-traps set to stupefy our people.
As we sip our
wine, and join in the flow of happy converse, can we forget
that here, in the capital of our boasted civilization, "about
30,000 persons are yearly arrested for drunkenness; of these
15,600 are women ? " Fair and bright may look to the
glance of the passing stranger the placid interiors of our
far-famed English homes, but let us study the reports of
the bankruptcy courts; let us read the report of the Registrar-General,
no later back than 1889, and we shall see that "in
London one person in every five will die in the workhouse,
hospital, or lunatic asylum", and from equally reliable
resources we can learn that in the third week of December,
1886, no less than 103,968 paupers were relieved, without
including vagrants and criminals.
But what, it maybe asked, has all this disagreeable fact,
which good breeding should teach us to keep out of sight,
to do with the army of progress?. What have Theosophists
to do with these social troubles ?
Does not the doctrine
of Karma prove beyond dispute that this suffering must
be? that the sufferers have earned their suffering
? that all things are arranged, in this best of all possible
worlds, with rigid justice ? Are we not told that the "Brotherhood" is
to be a fraternity of [Page 7] mind and spirit, not of
necessity a Brotherhood of property, where those that have
shall share with those that have not ?
Fellow soldiers,
comrades in the fight, let us not deceive ourselves! Let
us not hug the selfish thought to our hearts. What do our
Teachers say ? " Let not the fierce sun
dry one tear of pain before thyself hast wiped it from the
sufferer's eye. But let each burning human tear drop on thy
heart and there remain, nor ever brush it off, until the
pain that caused it is removed."
The human tear-drops have reached society's heart, and the
low sigh of wailing anguish is rushing on the wind. Those
who call themselves Socialists may not be right in their
attempted remedies for the sin-sick world. We Theosophists
do not think they are, but they voice the misery of those
who have, and know not how to give wisely to those who have
not.
The 25,000,000
persons whose share of the national wealth is less than ₤35
per head for each adult may be reaping that which they
have sown. But we have heard something about national Karma,
and we cannot help asking ourselves whether we, the absorbers
of the surplus, may not be making each for himself a future
of want, and, perhaps, of degradation.
Not only the disciplinary effect of poverty and the perpetual
struggle for bread on the toilers has to be considered, but
the educational effect of a life of ease and luxury in the
midst of want has to be thought of.
Let it be granted that we have the right to all refinements,
all the aid in the upward progress which wealth can give
us, and the question remains, for each one to answer for
himself, whether we are using this wealth, which we may look
upon as a condition in mental and moral advancement, in the
best manner possible when we absorb it in personal and social
luxury. And here it may be well to state that the word luxury
is used to denote all expenditure of the common fund of national
wealth beyond what is needed for the maintenance of body
and mind in the highest state of efficiency, as an instrument
for the Higher Ego. We cannot spend our force in two ways
at once. Either we must give up all hope of bringing light
into Earth's dark places, or we must give up our present
habits of labour absorption.
For Theosophists
at least, there are questions of Karma to reckon with.
There is the Karma now being worked out by the down-trodden
masses, worked out in such conditions that it can scarcely
fail to renew the crop of evil and generate fresh causes
of future suffering. The money that is absorbed in personal
luxury would at least do something towards placing some
of the children, some of the young men and maidens, in
surroundings that would be favourable to the growth [Page
8] of the best, instead of the worst, that is in them.
There is the Karma that the rich are generating. Here we
face the question. We know the state of the country.
We know that if we expend our forces in nursing and
cultivating our already abnormal desires for comfort, for
luxury, for the pleasures of the senses, of beauty and sweetness — innocent
and good as these may be when not founded, as with us, on
hideous sights and sounds, pushed back into the darkness
of the alleys, but haunts us still — we know that we
are making ourselves bankrupt for the work that serves.
Not only are we enervated, and so have little power to help,
but our reserves are exhausted, and we have no longer the
means at our disposal. We have swallowed our cake and then,
like children, we lament that we have no bread to feed the
hungry. We all think to draw a line somewhere, and balance
our personal expenditure with our personal income, so that
we have a good margin left over for charity. But in the unconscious
competition in which most of us are engaged, the margin is
too apt to be encroached upon. A successful speculation,
a splendid professional reputation, a good stroke of business,
results in a bigger house in removal to a more fashionable
neighbourhood, increased personal expenditure. The coveted
picture is bought, or the long-delayed tour is taken ; indulgences
before sternly repressed are permitted, with the consoling
thought, "we can afford it". But
can we? That is the question. True, we may have money enough.
But have we character enough ? Have we built up in the past
such a reservoir of virtue that we can afford to miss this
golden opportunity of doing loving deeds ? Are we so cased
in the panoply of mercy that we need not fear that one arrow
from the bow of worldly-mindedness can penetrate our armour
? Are we, in truth, quite sure that we have attained the
hill top, and are content to be as nothing in the eyes of
man ? If we have not reached this goal, we who profess to
see in Theosophy the guide of life, we who desire, however
feebly, to walk along the path, we, at least, cannot afford
it.
And another aspect
of the question presents itself to him who is desirous
to act "today"; to him who
sees in the misery of great cities the working of Karma,
and who knows that the actions of the present generation
are building up a future of happiness or woe for "tomorrow".
Experience of our own weakness, and the object-lesson in
constant progress, which is given by our fellow-men, teach
that there is practically no limit to our power of labour
absorption. The love of luxury grows by what it feeds upon.
As he who has set himself to scale the heights of being knows,
after ages of struggle and conquest, that he is but at the
foot of the mountain, and that before him long vistas still
stretch, through which he must toil, so he who is sunk in
the pleasures of material [Page 9] existence cannot see the
end of the descent into Avernus. Each sense starts up with
new and ever new demands, till eye and ear, taste, smell,
and feeling become as so many urging demons tempting man
to his destruction.
Now, we are willing
to absorb about two lives apiece, that we may "have things decent" around
us. It may be, with our love of flowers, our delight in
soft draperies, shining silver, glittering crystal, that
we could find it in our hardened hearts to absorb any number
of lives that our money could buy, and think it no sin.
But this shows us the need to place a limit on our desires.
There is no danger like the danger of drifting. Modern luxury,
self-indulgence, and the sweating-dens, which are their outcome,
have been brought about by drifting.
Not one woman
in a hundred — men may be different — knows,
or, at any rate, realizes that in her pretty drawing-room,
her dainty dinners, her elegant dresses, she is absorbing
lives. Yet it would be well that our board schools
and high schools taught the outlines of political economy,
with illustrations taken from life. It would be well that
men and women should know that their "being decent" means
the neglected babes of the East-end toiler being dead.
Now, what limit
shall we put upon our desires? It is a question of moment
for Theosophists. In this incarnation but few of us will
gain "the faculty to slay the lunar
form at will".But we may attain to some knowledge of
self. We may learn a little bit of the lesson of giving up
self to non-self. We may let our soul lend its ear to every
cry of pain like as the lotus bares its heart to drink the
morning sun". The first letters of the sweet lesson
of Renunciation all may begin to learn.
And it is time
to begin. We may confuse ourselves with formulas of "Destiny" and "Karma", and
leave the duty that looks afar off undone, till the duty
at our doors is forgotten. As a straw shows the way the
wind is blowing, so a small thing, relatively, shows that
with us Theosophists there must be something wrong — something
that needs the personal attention of each one of us.
Charity, it is
said, begins at home, but Theosophists do not much care
for charity of the money-giving order. But then they care
for Justice; and a person whose expenditure is so regulated
that it ignores the claims of justice, stands much in need
of a warning to curtail his expenditure.
Have we, who have
considered ourselves strong enough to come forward and
claim to be enrolled in the band of pioneers to a higher
and better life — have we so freed ourselves
from the trammels of life as to be able to do our duty bravely
and faithfully to our comrades in the fight ? Or do we seek
to do battle with the shackles of self-love around us, [Page
10] sitting in easy chairs, and dreaming of the millennium
? Let facts speak. In the September number of Lucifer,
Mrs. Besant, as treasurer of the Headquarters Building Fund,
has this statement to make: "The burden of the undertaking" (of
the establishment of headquarters of the Theosophical Society) "falls
very unequally upon those who share its advantages, the members
of the staff residing at headquarters who have all given
up comfortable private homes and the freedom of individual
dwellings, and some of whom have given up in exchange for
mere board and lodging appointments at which they earned
their living, are those on whom also the chief cost of establishing
the new headquarters falls. It will be seen below (in the
statement of account appended to the above in Lucifer)
that more than half the monetary contributions came from
them. In addition to this, the members have each furnished
his or her room, and among them have almost entirely furnished
the two common rooms — the drawing-room and general
work-room. . . . The heavy expenditure has been on building
the new rooms required for the work of the Society, altering
the interior of the house to accommodate the very large "family" of
workers, relaying the drain-pipes, and building necessary
sanitary accommodation; . . . but the Society, whose work
makes it necessary that these rooms should be provided and
the three secretaries maintained, ought not to allow the
main cost of this provision of maintenance to fall on five
or six persons, who give their time and work, as well as
all else they have, to the Society".
How is it that
when a week of self-denial of poor Salvation lads and lasses
can bring in £20,000 to the Salvationists'
headquarters, a miserable ₤136.3s. is all that after
fifteen years of Theosophic teaching the European Theosophists
of the General Society have to offer for their Headquarters
Fund ?
There can be but
one explanation. More has not been given because "self-denial" is
an unknown quantity. Self-indulgent habits in personal
expenditure bring empty pockets. When the demand comes
for some felt want there is no reserve in hand to draw
upon. And justice suffers. For it is not just that some
half-a-dozen self-devoted people should have to bear the
burden entailed by the work of a society the advantages
of which all fellow Theosophists share. But this small
illustration of a gigantic evil is useful to draw our attention
to the common national habit of labour-absorption, and
to point its inevitable result.
The labourers
of the T.S., like the labourers of the nation, have not
only to do all the work, but also to furnish the "abstinence" which
is the basic foundation of that capital upon which the absorbers
subsist. If this state of things is to continue, self-respect,
justice, and common honesty will become traditions of the
past. [Page 11]
Surely it was with prescience of coming events
that the founder of the T.S. wrote in the "Key
to Theosophy" these
words: "No Theosophist has the right to this name unless
he is thoroughly imbued with the correctness of Carlyle's
truism, 'The end of man is action, and not thought, though
it were the noblest', and unless he sets and models his daily
life upon this truth. The profession of a truth is not yet
the enactment of it; and the more beautiful and grand it
sounds, the more loudly virtue and duty is talked about instead
of being acted upon, the more forcibly it will always remind
one of the Dead Sea fruit. Cant is the most loathsome of
all vices, and cant is the most prominent feature of the
greatest Protestant country of this century — England."
Well, it certainly
looks like it. There are many indications that a general
feeling is growing up that common justice would do more
for the wretched toilers who "drag the
coach" than all the charity that is poured out like
water.
But what society wants is a recognised limit to legitimate
personal expenditure in view of children dying of neglect
and millions of beings in the centres of civilization creating
individual and national Karma in gin-palaces and places too
evil to be mentioned. To those really in earnest in their
desire to lessen the misery around them, this limit might
be suggested: To take as little as possible from the common
stock of the nation's produce, and to give to that stock
as much.
Here is a limit at once clear and simple.
It saves vain questioning as to the legitimacy of this or
that indulgence; it reaches the understanding of the meanest
intelligence; it regulates the expenses of the richest as
of the poorest. Can any given product of labour be dispensed
with without loss to man as a labouring, loving instrument
of the silent God ? If the answer is "Yes", then
dispense with it.
We may have thought
the saying of the Great Initiate, who desired the rich
man to sell all that he had and give to the poor, if he
would become a disciple, a very hard saying, but it was
a simple enunciation of a great truth. The yoke of the
follower of the Master is easy, the burden light, but only
when the "eye is single". You cannot
take your luggage with you into battle. That is the
burden we bind upon our backs, a burden too heavy to be borne.
We Theosophists, with a few bright exceptions, who, with
rare insight, have stripped themselves free of useless trappings,
think to serve "God and Mammon"; we will draw
to ourselves all the bright glory of Ancient Wisdom; we
will listen to the voice of our Higher-Self, and the divine
spark within us shall receive attention. But why should we
make ourselves peculiar ? Why give up habits to which we
are accustomed ? Why not do as others do ? We are not [Page
12] miracle workers that we can change the conditions
of existence and reverse the experience of mankind. " Ye
cannot serve God and Mammon".
We are standing
on the eve of a social revolution, if history is to be
relied upon for precedent. The cycle of 600 years has run
out, and the signs of social ferment, which accompany these
upheavals, are upon us. Let us see what is the lesson of
the past, and judge what we must look for in the near future.
In 1222, as we know, Genghis Khan personified brute force,
swept like a living scourge over the Eastern Continent,
changing the face of things from the land we now call Turkey
to far Cathay. Six hundred years earlier occurred the Hegira.
Move backwards again 600 years, and the Star of Bethlehem
arises. Yet, again, look back for a like period, and the
Light of Asia, Lord Buddha, throws athwart the gloom his
bright and gentle rays. Since then we have travelled slowly
into darkness, deep and ever deeper. Now, we look forward
to the Revolution that shall herald in the dawn, and having
touched the depths of materialism, we prepare for the upward
curve that shall bring us to the light of Spirituality. But,
if the first lifting of the clouds of night has awakened
us, if the very fact of our having turned for guidance to
wisdom of the past, which, like its source, is the same yesterday,
today, and for ever, proves us heralds of the coming day,
is it fitting that the rising sun finds us smothered in the
down of pillows, stretching our limbs in the soft wantonness
of scarcely broken slumber ?
Rise! for the day is passing,
And you lie dreaming on;
The others have buckled their armour
And forth to the fight are gone!
A place in the ranks awaits you;
Each man has some part to play;
The Past and the Future are nothing —
In the face of the stern today!
We are too much
inclined to think when we are called upon to take our share
of the rough labour of life that the "evolution
of society", "division of labour", or some
other meaningless formula, muttered with more or less blind
faith in its efficacy, will act like a charm and relieve
us of our duty. We are inclined to look upon the advise to
take as little and give as much to the world's store as the
exaggerations of enthusiasm. But it is not so; for by so
doing — for love's sweet sake — we call the hidden
force of nature to our aid.
The burdens nature puts upon us she helps us to carry. Those
we put upon our own shoulders she lets us faint under, that
at last, learning wisdom in the school of experience, we
may throw them down.
When we read in "What to Do" that
in Russia the harvest cannot [Page 13] be
gathered in for want of hands, while men and women are
devising amusements to work off their superfluous vitality,
we think that things are in a totally different condition
here, and that Count Tolstoi's advice to people to leave
their recreation and recruit themselves with honest work
is inappropriate. But, in truth, things are not so different
as they seem. Here the labourers want leaders as well as
in Russia. Leaders in labour and leaders in the social
amenities which should follow labour in all classes. The
poor as well as the rich meet the softening influences
of art, of gentle intercourse, of beauty, of sight and
sound, the stimulant of music and poetry, to make their
lives noble, and enable them to reach the full stature
of their manhood. The rich need the discipline of labour,
real productive toil, not the sham business of unoccupied
leisure, which fills up the time of our moneyed classes.
It is very good of our public men to come forward and lecture
the masses upon the dignity of labour. But something more
is wanted. They must show that they honour the calling
of the manual labourer by bringing up their children as
artisans and labourers if needs be; otherwise they waste
their breath. As the rich are, so will those beneath them
strive to become. "Already
we hear", says the Pall Mall Budget, of September
II th, writing on Dr. Rhode's lecture at Leeds, "of harvesting
delayed for want of labour. The better class labourers have
gone into the towns or the colonies; and we know of villages
where old men and boys have the bulk of the field work to
do". And it must be so, for the lives of the agricultural
labourers, in existing conditions, are little better than
the lives of the brutes they tend. We have opened schools,
and given the poor a glimpse of a higher state of being,
and they leave the soil to rush to towns, let the charmer
charm never so wisely from the agreeable altitude of the
local platform. How pleasant it is to pass our time in the
open air in the warm days of autumn ! how lovely are the
hop-gardens with their fragrant burdens drooping from the
slender poles! Could we not fancy that growing boys and girls
might gather hops and health and all the genial influences
of Nature once a year, when they crowd from our cities for
the summer outing of the poor, without the curse of greed
laying its heavy hand upon them, so that the sweet air of
heaven becomes laden with a curse, even as the dense atmosphere
of slums from which they have fled ? But look at this picture
given by that trustworthy paper, the Inquirer, and noticed
in the Daily News of September 15th 1890:—
"Hop-growers
are now compelled by law to provide [hop-pickers] shelter;
but in some instances, we are assured, the only protection
afforded is some old army tents, through which the merciless
rain penetrates when the strong night wind has not blown
them away. Many of the hoppers, [Page
14] according
to this authority, are received in wooden huts like rows
of pig-sties, in which light enters only by the open door
or an aperture in the roof that admits wind and rain. In
these whole families herd, and male and female assume the
indecent habits of brutes. Many of the most wretched concentrate
at Maidstone, and the Local Board there philanthropically
fastened a strip of thin calico round the verandah of a storehouse
which stands in the cattle market; but during a rough night
the calico gets torn to shreds, and sometimes as many as
six hundred badly-clad, half-starved people are exposed to
the fitful fury of the storm. A year or two ago one poor
emaciated woman dragged herself thus far and died during
the night. The doctor, at the inquest, said that death was
caused by starvation and neglect, and her life might probably
have been saved had medical assistance been procured". Now,
the death of one poor woman, or of a hundred, does not matter.
The load of life must be gladly laid down when carried along
in such conditions. What is of consequence is that towns
which would pour out money like water for bunting and folly,
were some great personage to spend an hour in their neighbourhood,
to open a hospital, bridge, or museum, should allow such
an object-lesson to be given in its market-place to the rising
generation; an object-lesson in callous indifference to human
suffering, human misery, and carelessly induced human degradation.
Let the poor suffer
in silence, by all means, if such is their Karma, but let
not the rich be permitted to absorb their bodies and souls
in such fashion as shall generate a fresh crop of evil
without protest. It may not be the duty of Theosophists
at the present stage of the Society's growth to concern
themselves much with physical philanthropy, and it is not
for the bodies of the toilers I am pleading; but I want
to point out the mental effects which cannot fail to be
induced by the possession and absorption of wealth amidst
the grinding poverty around us.
"Kill out
all sense of 'separateness' !" Feel
that each shivering creature crouching in that cattle market,
screened from the gaze of the passing stranger by a thin,
wind-torn piece of calico, is indeed a sister, doing battle
with the lower nature, striving as best she can to learn
the lesson of this earth life that she may the quicker enter
into her heritage of God-given womanhood, and ask if her
claim on humanity is fully met, if her credit-note is duly
honoured, when to her is assigned the open "verandah
of a storehouse which stands in the cattle market" for
lodging.
Let us not forget
in our joyous recognition of the treasures offered to the
intellect in the teachings of the wisdom-religion that
if through the Hall of Wisdom we would reach the Vale of
Bliss, we must close fast our senses against the great
dire heresy of separateness that weans us [Page
15] from
the rest. Glorious and beautiful are the truths we have to
make known, as Theosophists, to a waiting world, but these
truths can only be shown with the full splendour of the Light
of Love upon them, when by action we prove ourselves ready
to give what "is due to humanity to our fellow-men
. . . and especially that which we owe to all those who are
poorer and more helpless than we ourselves"; till we
show in our lives that we realize that" this is a debt
which, if left unpaid during life, leaves us spiritually
insolvent and moral bankrupts in our next incarnation".