In October, then, Colonel Olcott, who was just returning to India, got a letter from a Mr. Abbott Clark, of Orange County, California, a gentleman who was under no sort of suspicion of having anything to do with Mahatmas. And in this, if you please, there had somehow found its way into the envelope a slip of paper bearing a message in the M script, with signature, but with seal too blurred to distinguish, in facsimile as follows:—

So much is in the usual red pencil; the part represented by shading above is smudged, as is the red blotch which represents the seal, apparently by being rubbed with the finger. Across a margin of the paper is the following postscript, in the black carbon usually devoted to the seal impression:—

Rather cryptic, this missive; but the meaning seems to be this. The Mahatma has to explain to the suspicious Colonel several things: why the missives habitually come in letters from Mr. Judge; why, nevertheless, Mr. Judge knows nothing of them; why he, the Master, has used a bogus seal which bungles his own cryptograph; and, above all, why the impressions of that seal have been illegible ever since an exposure of it was threatened. He hints, accordingly, that he “uses” Mr. Judge to assist in some undefined psychic way in the precipitation process; but Judge’s part in this is unconscious—it must be “when he does not know.” Also, the thing precipitated “fades out often”—and plump on the word comes an illustration.

In saying that “Judge did not write Annie” (i.e., Mrs. Besant, for this spirit is a familiar one), the Master is misinformed, as we have seen. Mr. Judge had just “written Annie,” enclosing the Master’s own warning against Colonel Olcott. Lastly, the remark about “facit per alium” (the Mahatma can use a tag of lawyers’ Latin on occasion) seems to mean that when Colonel Olcott had the “flap-doodle” seal made he was unconsciously prompted by the Master himself, who had now adopted it, overlooking the blunder in engraving. The prescience which foresaw that the “precipitation” would give out in just this letter is no less remarkable than that which provided for an unexpressed doubt by the assurance, “No, it is not pencil.”

But for Colonel Olcott the gem of this letter was none of these. It was the reference to the Panjab seal as the “Lahore brass.” All that Mr. Judge knew, as we have seen, was that the seal was made at a “certain city in the Panjab.” Mr. Judge’s Mahatma assumes that this city was the capital of the province. It was a likely guess—a good shot, if such a phrase may be used of the mental processes of a Tibetan sage—and one calculated to end the Colonel’s doubts—if correct. But that is just what it was not. The city at which the Colonel got the seal was quite another city; so the Mahatma, though he hints that he psychically presided over the purchase, does not even know where that purchase took place!

The result of this unlucky lapse of memory on the part of the Master was that the missive made bad worse. Despite the distance of California, where Mr. Clark’s envelope was posted, from New York, and the offices of Mr. William Q. Judge, the Colonel suspected Mr. Judge’s hand in it. He wrote to Mr. Clark, and discovered that Judge had spent two days in Orange County at the very date when the Master availed himself of Mr. Clark’s envelope. Thereupon the Colonel formed his own ideas as to how the Master had “used” his favourite chela on that occasion.

Can we wonder that the Master was incensed by this incorrigible scepticism—a spirit, as the Colonel himself had formerly taught, and as the event was to prove but too surely—fatal to Theosophy?

Persuasion failing, the Master resorted to threats!

In January, 1892, the Colonel received an amicable letter from Mr. Judge, reproaching him for not writing. On opening it, he found written along the margin of the first page the following laconic message in Mahatma script (signed, but again no seal: much reduced here):—

“Him” presumably means Judge. The bearing of the threat will be intelligible to readers of the last Chapter. Certain rumours from Avenue-road made it intelligible also to Colonel Olcott. The Master of Wisdom, the unapproachable sage of the Himalayas, He-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed by Mrs. Besant and the whole Theosophical Society, had thrown off the mask of benignity. Here he was plainly adopting, as a weapon against his own unlucky president, that impossible accusation which represents the lowest point of ethical squalor yet touched, in this story at any rate, by Theosophic “brotherhood”! This was miching Mallecho, thought the Colonel; it meant mischief with a vengeance. The voice was the voice of the Mahatma, but again the Colonel thought it the hand of Judge. So he wrote with some natural heat to ask that gentleman what he meant by his “base insinuation.”

Only to receive, however, the blandly innocent reply:—

I have puzzled my head over your reference to “poison,” as if in one of mine; as I never referred to it I cannot catch on, and have given it up in despair.

After this the Colonel seems to have given the Mahatma up in despair, too. But the Mahatma, on his part, was busily pushing up a column to take the Colonel in the flank, and bring this story to a crisis.

Secure in the support of Mrs. Besant, he was to make the pusillanimous president resign his office, and to enthrone William Q. Judge in his place!

“I did my utmost to prevent a public Committee of Enquiry of an official character.”—Mrs. Besant at T.S. Convention, July 12, 1894.

How even a “psychologised baby” like Colonel Olcott came to succumb to a movement for ousting him from office, backed by such methods as we have examined, is to me a mystery. No doubt he had his own reasons for avoiding a contest in disclosures with his old colleague Mr. Judge, who knows so much about Theosophy ever since the days of its foundation. At any rate, succumb he did. On receiving an emissary from Avenue-road, early in 1892, he threw up the cards in the unequal game with the Mahatma, and formally resigned his presidency.

Then was seen a touching sight. Cæsar pushed away the crown. Mr. Judge was loth to succeed. Who could doubt it? Why, he got a “message” countermanding the resignation, and forwarded it to the Colonel (March, 1892), just too late to be acted on before the American Convention in April, which, with decent reluctance, acclaimed Mr. Judge for the vacant office.

But now came a hitch. Colonel Olcott took the anti-resignation message au grand sérieux. He forgot all his doubts about Mr. Judge’s Mahatma missives in his simple joy at the tenor of this last one. It was but a typed copy which Mr. Judge sent him. Never mind, it was a declaration of peace; and if ever there was a man of peace it is the Colonel, despite his American brevet. He could not disobey the Master; he did withdraw his resignation. Such was his answer to Mr. Judge.

Mr. Judge expressed his delight. But in absence of mind—possibly excess of joy—he quite forgot to mention either the Master’s message or the Colonel’s consent at Avenue-road when, in the following July, the time came to make his succession to the Colonel’s office definite.

The result was that Mr. Judge was then and there elected president for life. Some voices were for a term; but Mrs. Besant arose in her eloquence and “swept up the floor” (in the phrase of one Theosophic enthusiast), and the election was “for life.” Alas! Contracts entered into for that period are notoriously apt to give out at an earlier date.

Perhaps one thing which explains the Colonel’s small show of fight is the fact that he was to be consoled with an “Olcott Pension Fund.” Unhappily the treasurer defalcated some eight or nine thousand rupees, and then committed suicide. Ill-luck seemed to dog the vanquished president.

But now came the turn of the tide.

On the announcement of Judge’s election, Colonel Olcott indignantly wrote to Avenue-road to point out that there was no vacancy. And he printed in the Theosophist the Master’s message which had led him to withdraw his resignation.

He did more. The Theosophist, the official journal of the Indian section, has come to be Colonel Olcott’s private property, just as Lucifer is Mrs. Besant’s, and The Path Mr. William Q. Judge’s—an illustration of the odd mixture of private and official capacities in this society. And now the Colonel plucked up heart to publish in his paper the first note publicly heard of criticism—yes, actual criticism—of Mr. Judge’s Mahatma.

Privately, there had been some troubled bleatings heard already among some of the less docile of the Theosophic sheep. Mr. Judge had been obliged to take up the cudgels for the merits of some of his Mahatma missives as philosophic compositions. I find him claiming (in the true oracular spirit) that:—

A very truism, when uttered by a Mahatma, has a deeper meaning for which the student must seek, but which he will lose if he stops to criticise and weigh the words in mere ordinary scales.

A sentiment printed with approbation in Mrs. Besant’s paper. Again, he is parrying inquisitive questions about the Master’s seal. He “does not know” what they mean. An inquirer sends him a sample letter with a good impression to look at—one which had come from Mr. Judge himself, I presume—and gets it back with the impression rubbed out (“it fades out often,” as we have seen above), and the puzzled remark from Mr. Judge, “Where is your seal? I don’t see one.” Finally, pressed, Mr. Judge declares that “Whether He” (the Master) “has a seal, or uses one, is something on which I am ignorant.”

It was on this statement—which involves a total lapse of memory on Mr. Judge’s part of events narrated in Chapter V.—that he was challenged in the Theosophist of April, 1893, in an article signed by Messrs. W. R. Old and S. V. Edge, both T.S. officials (secretaries, Indian section). The article is hardly what would be called trenchant by non-Theosophical standards. But it just pointed out that little discrepancy in a polite foot-note; and that was enough.

If there is one thing more than another which is deemed to be bad form in circles Theosophical, it is to corner a Theosophist on a definite matter of fact. Anything undraped in verbiage is considered nude, even to indecency. The voice of questioning has to be stifled at once.

By virtue of their joint position as Outer Heads of the Esoteric section, to which they were elected under warrant of the very seal in question, Mrs. Besant and Mr. Judge promptly “suspended” Messrs. Old and Edge from their Esoteric membership.

In December, Mrs. Besant went to India. She had, therefore, thrown over the Mahatma’s warning. But she had not thrown over the Mahatma—not a bit. She declared that nothing on earth would induce her to give up believing that the missives were indeed “precipitated” by Mahatma M, unless Mahatma M in person appeared and repudiated them. If a person who had been told that the Man in the Moon daily “precipitated” the Times leading articles should decline to be convinced of the contrary till he heard it from the lips of the Man in the Moon himself he would probably be “of the same opinion still” for some considerable time.

In India, Mrs. Besant suddenly changed her mind. Had the Master indeed appeared and fulfilled her conditions? She does not say so. Yet it can scarcely have been on any mere, dull ground of fact and argument. She was presented with a set of depositions establishing all of the substantial facts of this narrative, given under the names of those personally cognisant of them, with Colonel Olcott at their head, and summed up in the form of certain definite charges against William Q. Judge. But many of these facts she already knew herself, as well as anybody, and made naught of.

What did work the miracle, then?—As far as I can make out, it was this. Mrs. Besant sat at the feet of G. N. Chakravati. And G. N. Chakravati just mentioned that he did not believe in Judge.

This is the Hindu gentleman who was sent to represent the Theosophical Society at the Chicago Parliament of Religions, at an expense of £500. This is the teacher who has made “Annabai” so far a Hindu that she now protests against harsh mention even of the child-widow horrors, the 12,000 temple prostitutes of Madras, and the other religious indecencies of Hinduism. As Mr. Bradlaugh led Mrs. Besant from the Church to Materialism, as Mr. Herbert Burrows went hand-in-hand with her from Materialism to Madame Blavatsky, as Judge made her believe in Judge, so she could only abandon Judge with the aid of G. N. Chakravati. Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that, blessed by this worthy pundit, the case formulated against Mr. Judge became strong—convincing—irresistible. Mrs. Besant’s mind blossomed in a day into the full-blown view that she had been deluded, that Judge had himself written the missives to which she had pinned her faith—written them all with his own hand.

Appalling bathos!—and one which an Enquiry must needs result in publishing to all the world. Yet an Enquiry there must be. The Indian section was threatening to secede from the society if Mr. Judge’s presidency were confirmed with the scandal unsifted. Judge himself, offered the alternative by cablegram of resigning all his offices quietly or facing a “full publication of the facts,” replied in a defiant sense which showed his conviction that there were others to whom “full publication of the facts” (which it was easy to threaten, but which it has been left for an outsider to carry out) would be more ungrateful even than to himself. What was Mrs. Besant to do?

A happy thought struck her. She offered to adopt the charges, turn prosecutor, and conduct the case against Mr. Judge herself.

The signatories of the evidence were delighted—especially Colonel Olcott, who got behind Mrs. Besant now with the same alacrity as previously behind Messrs. Old and Edge.

By this bold, yet simple stroke, the evidence, documents, and whole control of the case passed into Mrs. Besant’s hands, where they, as she fondly hopes, or hoped, now remain.

Not altogether!

The Chairman felt it his imperative duty to demand of the hon. gentleman whether he had used the expression “a humbug” in a common sense?

Mr. Blotton had no hesitation in saying that he had not—he had used the word in its Pickwickian sense. (Hear, hear.) He was bound to acknowledge that personally he entertained the highest esteem for the hon. gentleman; he had merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view.

Mr. Pickwick felt much gratified by the candid explanation of his hon. friend. He begged it to be at once understood that his own observations had been merely intended to bear a Pickwickian construction. (Cheers.)—The Pickwick Papers.

We have now seen how, step by step, as by a resistless nemesis the rival Theosophical leaders were led on to bring their quarrel to that which neither of them had much stomach for—an inquiry into evidence. Bluff meeting bluff, the thing got as far as the summoning from three continents of a Committee of Investigation representing both parties. “Investigating” hidden forces in nature, as we saw in Chapter II., is one of the professed “Objects” of the Theosophical Society. The present chapter is to show what the Theosophical idea of investigating is like.

There lies before me a pamphlet, reprinted from Lucifer of August last, which bears the facetious title, “AN INQUIRY Into Certain Charges against the Vice-President, Held in London, July 1894.” Anybody is at liberty to get this publication—and make what head or tail of it he can.

The plain matter of fact which lay behind the proceedings in question was this. Mrs. Besant and Colonel Olcott had given away their friends and compromised with Judge on the terms that he should give Olcott back his presidency, Judge’s election thereto being declared null and void, while they on their part should suppress the evidence which the Judicial Committee had been summoned to report on.

Mr. Judge had protested in a vehement circular, when first called on by the President to appear before the committee, against one of his accusers proposing to preside at his trial. There was reason in the objection at the time. He could not foresee that the proceedings would take the form of the presiding judge and the counsel for the prosecution combining to prevent the case from going to the jury.

This being the plain English of the affair, let us now see how it reads translated into what I may call Theosophistry.

The first part of the pamphlet consists of the Judicial Committee’s minutes. Of this, six-sevenths is devoted to an “Address of the President-Founder” proving that they ought to do nothing. The remaining page is devoted to doing it.

The “charges of misconduct preferred by Mrs. Besant against the vice-president” are nowhere formally stated at all. They are incidentally summarised by the president as follows:—

“That he practised deception in sending false messages, orders, and letters, as if sent and written by ‘Masters.’ ... That he was untruthful in various other instances enumerated.”

The bulk of the address is occupied in discussing with great solemnity various reasons alleged by Mr. Judge why these charges should not be gone into by the committee.

One or two of these, such as the vice-president’s discovery that he had never been really vice-president at all, and the contention that, whichever way the decision went, it must “offend the religious feelings” of some member or another, and that this was against the rules of the society—these were, after the due amount of pomposity, declared against by the president.

But there were two other pleas of such irresistible force and weight that the president found himself convinced by them “that this inquiry must go no further.” Stripped of prolix circumlocutions, these may be put as an alternative, thus:—

Either the Mahatma missives are genuine or they are fabricated.

(a) If found to be genuine, that implies the affirmation of the existence of Mahatmas as a Theosophic dogma, and the abandonment of the society’s precious “neutrality.” Which is unconstitutional.

(b) If found to be bogus missives produced by the vice-president, then it is obvious that he must have done it in his private capacity; the production of bogus documents being no part of his official duties. Therefore he cannot be tried for it by an official tribunal.

Could anything be more delicious than this dilemma? It is worthy of a trial scene in Gilbertian comic opera.

Mrs. Besant, like the president, was “convinced that the point was rightly taken.” There was nothing more to be said.

The Judicial Committee “resolved” in the same sense, without any inconvenient discussion, and forthwith committed hara-kiri with the complaisance of a Chinese nobleman. Not only had they not investigated the case, but, as far as I can make out, they had not even heard what it was, except in the most abstract of summaries. Having gravely adjusted the bandage over each other’s eyes, they separated with a good conscience. For many of them—worthy investigators!—I believe I am the first to remove the bandage, and set them blinking at the truth.

From (a) it follows, as the president pointed out en passant in the course of his Address, that every Theosophist is in future free to circulate Mahatma messages, but no Theosophist to test their genuineness.

From (b) it equally follows that no officer of the society is in future responsible to it for any misdeed whatever, since such misdeed cannot well be among his official duties.

Perhaps it is not very surprising that the result of the Judicial Committee, which had been gathered to its task from the ends of the earth, was received with disgust by the generality of members then met in London for one of their interminable conventions. A demand was even heard for a private jury of honour; or, failing that, for publication of the case for both sides, the course to which one side, as we saw, had affected to pledge itself. Mr. Judge found himself unable to refuse his assent to the jury proposal. Again Mrs. Besant dashed in and triumphed in the sacred cause of obscurantism. At the third session of the convention she announced that she and Mr. Judge had agreed upon a couple of statements representing their different points of view, and proposed that the convention should hear these, accept them, and let the matter drop. These two statements compose the second part of the pamphlet; and they are at least as bewildering as the first.

“We come to you, our brothers, to tell you what is in our hearts,” Mrs. Besant read out. Her endeavour to “tell” fills four pages. The following are the sentences which gyrate least round the point:—

I do not charge, and have not charged, Mr. Judge with forgery in the ordinary sense of the term, but with giving a misleading form to messages received psychically from the Master in various ways.... Personally I hold that this method is illegitimate.... I believe that Mr. Judge wrote with his own hand, consciously or automatically I do not know, in the script adopted as that of the Master, messages which he received from the Master, or from chelas; and I know that in my own case I believed that the messages he gave me in the well-known script were messages directly precipitated or directly written by the Master. When I publicly said that I had received, after H. P. Blavatsky’s death, letters in the writing that H. P. Blavatsky had been accused of forging, I referred to letters given to me by Mr. Judge, and as they were in the well-known script I never dreamt of challenging their source. I know now that they were not written or precipitated by the Master, and that they were done by Mr. Judge; but I also believe that the gist of these messages was psychically received, and that Mr. Judge’s error lay in giving them to me in a script written by himself and not saying so.... Having been myself mistaken, I in turn misled the public.

The rest of Mrs. Besant’s statement is easily summarised. Part is devoted to minimising the importance of the question whether Mr. Judge wrote, or the Mahatma precipitated, the letters, by remarking that after all it did not matter so very much, as Mahatmas sometimes communicate (like spiritualist “controls”) by allowing ordinary people to write for them. “It is important,” quoth Mrs. Besant, naïvely, “that the small part generally played by Masters in these phenomena should be understood”—a remark with which the present writer quite agrees, and a main object of the present narrative. But in the sense in which Mrs. Besant meant it, it was not very relevant to an inquiry entirely dealing with letters passed off as having been precipitated, and precipitated without Mr. Judge’s knowledge, by the Mahatma himself.

Beyond this, Mrs. Besant’s statement consists about equally of blame directed at the untheosophical “vindictiveness” of Mr. Judge’s accusers in pressing an inquiry “painful” to Mr. Judge, and of laudatory tributes to the character and Theosophical activity of Mr. Judge himself.

Down Mrs. Besant sat, and up rose Mr. Judge, and read his statement. It contained the following sentences:—

I repeat my denial of the said rumoured charges of forging the said names and handwritings of the Mahatmas, or of misusing the same.... I admit that I have received and delivered messages from the Mahatmas ... they were obtained through me, but as to how they were obtained or produced I cannot state.... My own methods may disagree from the views of others.... I willingly say that which I never denied, that I am a human being, full of error, liable to mistake, not infallible, but just the same as any other human being like to myself, or of the class of human beings to which I belong. And I freely, fully, and sincerely forgive anyone who may be thought to have injured or tried to injure me.

Now, so far as these sentences were an answer at all to such charges as Mrs. Besant’s statement had allowed itself to convey, they were certainly a flat contradiction. But that point was naturally overlooked by eyes moist from the affecting “forgiveness” of Mr. Judge’s peroration, and his very handsome, if somewhat tautologously expressed, admission that he was only a “human being.” Without a word more, nemine contradicente, it was

Resolved: that this meeting accepts with pleasure the adjustment arrived at by Annie Besant and William Q. Judge as a final settlement of matters pending hitherto between them as prosecutor and defendant, with a hope that it may be thus buried and forgotten, and—

Resolved: that we will join hands with them to further the cause of genuine brotherhood in which we all believe.

These resolutions were proposed by the Mr. Keightley (M.A. Cant.) whose name has occurred so often in our story among the bamboozled ones, and seconded by Dr. Buck, one of the nominees from Mr. Judge’s section to the abortive committee.

And there ends the Pamphlet—and the “Enquiry.” It has since appeared that the “joining of hands” between Mrs. Besant and Mr. Judge was for footlight purposes only; for no sooner was the curtain rung down than the two joint Outer Heads found they could no longer work together, and settled the matter by splitting the Esoteric section into independent dominions, Mr. Judge taking America, and Mrs. Besant Europe—to which she has since added India.

The result is one on which Mr. William Q. Judge must be congratulated. He retains all his offices as head of his lodge, of his section, and of the American Esoteric section; retains his vice-presidency of the whole society; retains the status of heir-presumptive, at least, to the presidency; retains, also, I suppose, either he or his Mahatma, the brass “flap-doodle,” to say nothing of the Blavatsky relic, with full freedom to continue using the same as heretofore.

In a word, the Theosophical Society has chosen to stand or fall with its vice-president.

Theosophy is a religion as well as a philosophy, and the T.S. masquerades as in some sort a Church. Imagine the situation, then, in any other religious denomination. Suppose that the Archbishop of Canterbury were to put forth missives which he alleged to have fluttered down direct from St. Augustine in heaven; and suppose after Convocation had governed the Church for years in conformity with directions so received, the Archbishop of York were to declare at a Church Congress his belief that his esteemed brother, whose services to the Church were beyond all praise, had written the missives himself, an expedient “which I personally hold to be illegitimate,” but into the details of which he begged the Congress not to pry: suppose, then, that the Archbishop of Canterbury on his part declared himself, like Mr. Pickwick, “much gratified with the candid explanation of his hon. friend,” that he “merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view”—supposing all this, can you imagine the Church Congress rising as one man to “bury” the dispute, and “join hands” with the embracing disputants?

Probably not. But then, as Mrs. Besant remarked, the “standards of the world” are “lower” than those of the Theosophical Society—and of the “Pickwick Club.”

Nevertheless, I must ask leave to break in on the harmonious scene with a few troublesome questions.

“Next in importance, or perhaps equal in value, to Devotion, is Truth.”—Circular on “Occultism and Truth,” signed by H. S. Olcott, Annie Besant, B. Keightley, &c., July, 1894.

In my first chapter I set out certain conclusions. In succeeding chapters I have given the facts on which my conclusions were based. I now assert that the evidence for those facts, be it good or bad, is that of the Theosophical leaders themselves, written and signed as the case against the Vice-President, and adopted by Mrs. Besant as true. If it be not true, then Colonel Olcott, Mr. B. Keightley, Mr. W. R. Old, and the other official witnesses must be guilty of a conspiracy, as I said at the outset, “even more discreditable to the personnel of the society.” It is not I who accuse Mr. Judge. It is Mr. Judge and his colleagues who accuse each other. The rank-and-file of the Theosophists have paid their money; they may now take their choice.

The fact is, before Mrs. Besant got hold of the evidence, at least one set of complete and duly witnessed copies had been made, together with facsimiles of the documents. It is these which lately fell into my hands, under circumstances which left me free to take, as I do take, the moral and legal responsibility of that publication which the president first promised and afterwards shirked.

In regard to Mr. William Q. Judge, vice-president, I do not feel called on to labour any theory of my own as to that gentleman’s character and conduct. As the Society for Psychical Research long ago remarked, the precise line between rogue and dupe in the Theosophical Society has never been easy to draw. On any view of Mr. Judge I have at least as much respect for him as for his virtuously vacillating superior, whose mind seems to have been made up for him from one stage to another by whatever party happened to be at the moment nearest and most peremptory. With the facts of the preceding narrative before him, the reader can form his own opinion about both officials.

Equally unable am I to state what Mr. Judge’s own version of Mr. Judge’s acts may be. I have read and re-read his “statement” at the “Enquiry,” and his circular issued just previously. In these I have groped—faint, yet pursuing—among the mazes of that Theosophical verbiage which always seems to be coming to the point; but for me at least it has never quite got there. Where the denials are most explicit, the thing denied is vaguest; where admission is most candid, the thing admitted is least relevant to the issue. Mr. Judge admits, for instance, that he is a “fallible human being”; he denies that he has “forged.” I, for one, should never dream of disputing either position. The verb, to forge, definitely connotes in English the imitation of the signature of a person who really exists, and who has also an existent banking account. The worst I should dream of imputing to Mr. Judge in this connexion is the imitation of someone else’s imitation of the feigned signature of somebody who never existed.

Mr. Judge must see that between the mere human fallibility to which he confesses, and the felony of which no one has accused him, it does not need a sensitive ear to distinguish whole octaves of intervening notes. Thanks to Mrs. Besant, he has not yet been obliged to locate himself at any one point of the gamut. But, for all I know, he may now come forward and twit his associates with deficient humour for not seeing that the whole thing was just a rollicking hoax. Throwing off the rôle of an interpreter of Tibet, he may appear as William Q. Judge, the American Humorist. He might fairly claim that many have performed under a like title much less divertingly. He might say that the joke was so obvious that it never struck him his colleagues would take it seriously; that their evident determination not to spoil sport was an invitation no joker could have resisted; and that he only kept it up so long for the fun of seeing, through a graduated scale of absurdity, how much they really would stand. Of course, to carry through a big practical joke one may be excused a few taradiddles, to which the moralist might apply a harsher name. No doubt some might question the taste of making a friend’s funeral the starting-point of even the most innocent mauvaise plaisanterie. But American humour has never spared the cemetery.

From my own position, then, and Mr. Judge’s position, I now pass to Mrs. Besant’s. This is interesting from its bearing on the curious psychological puzzle offered by Mrs. Besant’s own mind, to the study of which she herself continually invites the public. Let us accept the invitation for a moment.

I take Mrs. Besant’s statement at the so-called “Enquiry,” that she believed now that Judge wrote with his own hand the missives which he had induced her, and she had induced the public, to regard as precipitations from Tibet of the kind which “some people would call miraculous.”

Apparently Mrs. Besant considers that this avowal sufficed to clear her honour towards her colleagues and the public whom she had “misled.” To me it appears admirably calculated to mislead them again. Remember, even those whom Mrs. Besant was addressing—much more the outside public—were ignorant of the facts. Mrs. Besant had taken good care of that.

They did not know, as the reader does, the circumstances which surrounded these various missives: The “Master Agrees” missive, the Telegram missive, the Cabinet missive, the “Note the Seal,” the “Judge’s Plan is Right,” the “Judge is the Friend,” the Envelope Trick, the “Withold,” the “Master will Provide,” the Bank-note, the Inner Group, the “Grave Danger Olcott,” the “Judge is not the Forger,” the “Follow Judge and Stick,” and the Poison Threat missive—as I have severally named them.

Referring to those circumstances, as the reader now knows them, I ask of what did and does Mrs. Besant mean to convict Mr. Judge?

If Judge “wrote with his own hand” the answers got from the cabinet oracle (May 23, 1891), did he also use sleight-of-hand or some similar artifice to make her accept the answers as precipitated in a sealed envelope in a closed drawer?

If Judge “wrote,” &c., the slip “Judge’s plan is right,” the sudden appearance of which among Mrs. Besant’s papers made her and him joint officials on May 27, 1891—did he also place it among those papers on purpose to be so discovered?

If Judge “wrote” &c., Mrs. Besant’s message of July 12, 1891, which was across the inside flaps of a closed envelope—did he also insert the writing by the trick described in the chapter which I entitled “Every Man his Own Mahatma”?

If Judge “wrote,” &c., all the various letters, notes, and endorsements to which the “Mahatma’s” signature and seal were attached, missives backing Judge’s own views, raising Judge’s own Theosophical status, and bluffing other “servants” of that “Master,” to whom he and they cannot allude without capital letters—did he also “with his own hand” take and affix the seal which he has persistently denied having ever set eyes on?

If Mrs. Besant did not mean all this, and much more which hangs by the same logic, then her Statement grossly calumniated Mr. Judge to the few who knew the tenor of the case against him.

If she did mean it, then her Statement completely hoodwinked her audience and the public.

For will anybody assert that this, which has just been outlined, or anything like it, was the picture naturally called up by Mrs. Besant’s carefully worded description of “Mr. Judge’s error” as the negative one of “not mentioning” certain circumstances, her suggestion that personal opinions might reasonably differ on the “legitimacy” of his methods, her laudatory allusions to his general character and Theosophic services, her public sanction of a statement on his part which on this theory must have been utterly misleading, her eager lead in the attempt to cloak up for ever the Great Mahatma Hoax, and to shield the hoaxer?

But there is another point. Mrs. Besant professes still to cling to the belief that the Mahatmas had something to do with the letters. Mr. Judge wrote them, she says, but what he wrote he had first “received psychically from the Master.”

Nobody can prove that those missives, or, for that matter, these articles, or Shakespeare’s plays, were not due to the Master’s “psychical” authorship. Mr. Judge and Mrs. Besant are both quite free to say so. But again I must point out to Mrs. Besant the logical inferences from her position. In the attempt to hold on to one spar in the general wreck, she just says enough to inculpate the Mahatma, and not enough to exculpate Mr. Judge.

For, to apply theory once more to concrete fact: Does Mrs. Besant attribute to the Mahatma the preposterous insinuations against Colonel Olcott? And does she mean that the Mahatma made these insinuations and various direct false statements in order to co-operate with Mr. Judge in shielding from discovery a prolonged use of a bogus imitation of the Mahatma’s own seal and signature?

In this case, we are entitled to challenge Mrs. Besant to say whether she herself now believes that the insinuations against Colonel Olcott were justified. If yes, then I can only leave her to settle that matter with the Colonel. If no, then what becomes of the supernal wisdom and lofty character of “Those Who to some of us are most sacred”? Must it not be confessed that They have made uncommon fools of Themselves?—not to give a stronger name to the extremely shady methods of which Tibetan diplomacy is thus found guilty.

The public will await satisfactory answers to these questions. It will not, I hope, for a moment suspect Mrs. Besant of conscious fraud, or of sordid motives. I most certainly do not. With some of the lesser fry, who would be bankrupt in every sense if Theosophy failed them, the consideration of pleasant board and lodging at other people’s expense may be a governing one. With Mrs. Besant, who brings far more to the organisation in the shape of gate-money, no doubt, than she ever condescends to accept from it, the motives are subtler. Had she boldly cut herself free from the rottenness at the core of the Theosophic movement as soon as it was shown to her, she might have saved her reputation for straightforwardness, if not for intelligence. In choosing instead the equivocal policy of hushing up a scandal at all costs, she doubtless convinced herself that she was acting only for the ends of edification and the good of her church. That is the old, old story of priestcraft, and Mrs. Besant has been playing the high priestess now for three years. But were there not also some more personal motives at work? There is one thing which even the most candid hate to confess—and that is, that they have been thoroughly bamboozled. It does not improve matters when they have themselves helped in their own bamboozlement. To confess how recklessly inaccurate were her statements about “the same handwriting,” the “semi-miraculous precipitation,” the absolute assurance of her own senses, and so forth; to let the public see for itself the childish twaddle which she accepted, and helped to force upon others, as profound and oracular: all this would have been a sad come-down from the Delphic tripod. I do not wonder the poor lady shrank from it. I do wonder that Mrs. Besant cared to evade it at the expense of a sort of confidence-trick. To this has come the woman whom we once thought, whatever her other faults, at least fearless and open—the woman whose epitaph, so she tells us, is to be—

Lastly, a few words to the rank-and-file of the Theosophical Society, a large proportion of whom are now gathering open-mouthed at Adyar. In Madame Blavatsky few of the better-informed of the flock nowadays affect to believe—except in public. They cling to her gifts, perhaps; they have thrown over her morals. For fresh evidence has been coming to light, ever since that strange woman died, as to the tricks to which she condescended, and encouraged her chelas to condescend; and poor Colonel Olcott, though he continues to work the old gold-mine in print, has been driven even there to enunciate the theory that Madame Blavatsky herself was really killed at the battle of Mentana, and her body thereafter occupied by seven distinct spirits who, of course, are not responsible for contradicting each other. Till May, 1891, Madame was the principal witness to the objective existence and attributes of Mahatmas. Since that date, the principal witness is William Q. Judge. Soon the faithful at Adyar will be filing into the Occult Room to gaze through peep-holes at the two August Portraits, illuminated and set off by all the artifices associated here with exhibitions by M. Jan van Beers. Will they dare, any of them, to ask their officials plainly what evidence they can now offer that either of the subjects of those fancy portraits ever existed?

And if on this and other questions suggested by these chapters, Mrs. Besant, President Olcott, and Vice-President Judge do not succeed in satisfying their followers——what next? No doubt each member of the trinity will sit secure in his or her autocracy in his or her own continent, owning there, as I understand, the official organ and the publishing plant which the society as a whole has built up into prosperity. Yet something, surely, may be done by those who do not care to remain unwilling parties to the Great Mahatma Hoax, to recover their own self-respect, if not to save the Theosophical Society.

It is for them to decide whether the society, on its non-fraudulent side, is worth saving. It may be a kind of university extension for the popularising of Eastern philosophies. Or it may be, as some rather think, a mere smattering of catch-words out of cribs for the use of Mutual Mystification clubs, tending to a certain indigestion in the mental processes and a flatulent style of English composition. In either case there is no reason why the organisation should revolve about a vortex of tomfoolery and legerdemain into which honest members are apt to be sucked before they realise its true nature.