CHAPTER XIII.
QUESTIONS AND CHALLENGES.
“Hath he said anything?”
“He hath, my lord; but, be you well assured,
No more than he’ll unswear.”—“Othello.”
“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.