Page:Isis very much unveiled - being the story of the great Mahatma hoax (IA b24884273).pdf/110

of its “President-Founder.” Secondly, because, even as regards Mr. Old’s part, the character of a witness is only a relevant consideration where the truth of his testimony is disputed. What I am now about to say is said, therefore, merely in justice to Mr. Old himself. The attack on him has two lines. It is said that he had to perjure himself to give any information whatever. It is hinted that what information he did give was given for money. The former charge turns entirely on the “sacred oath” humbug, which I have discussed already. As to the latter, it is true to my knowledge that for the part he has taken in fulfilling what he regards as a public duty to truth, Mr. Old neither asked nor received any consideration whatever. My own acquaintance with Mr. Old began in an odd way, not without bearing on the question of his sincerity. At the time of the Salvation Army riots at Eastbourne, a gallant old Englishman, who could not bear that women, under any provocation, should be publicly assaulted in English streets, went down there to stand up for the “Hallelujah lasses.” He asked, through the Pall Mall Gazette, for five hundred Englishmen to help. He got five. This Quixotic gentleman, this modern Sieur de Marsac, was my friend Mr. Charles Money, of Petersfield. I went myself to see that he did not get his head broken more than was necessary. His company, as seedy a lot of knights-errant as ever I saw, consisted mainly of Cockney journalists who did not believe in God. But one—a spruce, slight youth—declared himself a Theosophist. The adventurers spouted to a yelling mob, got off with whole skins, and by testimony of the local police actually achieved their end. But Mr. Money and one other were knocked about a bit in the crowd. That other—he quitted himself like a man—was Mr. W. R. Old, Theosophist. I may be wrong: it was but a street row; but I regard that as a more practical service on Mr. Old’s part to the “Universal Brotherhood of Humanity” than all the hundredweights of vapid moralising on the subject ever vomited from “The H.P.B. Press.”