War.–the Lunacy Laws
I Hope Spiritualists will keep in view these two matters, War and the Lunacy Laws.
We pride ourselves on being a free and enlightened people; and so we are, in some respects, and when our purely animal and money-grubbing instincts and our prejudices do not step in.
But when they do, and this they are doing portentously now in both politics and religion, observe what happens.
Enlightened Englishmen are not sufficiently wise to see that they are being driven into war because the army wants to justify its existence; because some journalists rave; because the strangely Oriental genius who has forced his rule on the aristocracy of England, while he mocks and flouts them openly, would finish his bizarre career in a blaze of blue fire for which the British shopkeeper may pay. And it seems extremely probable that Englishmen will be silly enough to obey; not seeing that war of all kinds is a barbarous anachronism, and that this war, of all its kind, is the wickedest and most indefensible.
Free Englishmen, valuing their own liberty as their choicest possession, will stand by and look on while a lady, sane as any of themselves, is locked up in a madhouse, on the information of any secret spy who may worm out of her, by means on which all English honesty and honour should cry shame, opinions which chance to be unpopular.
I should have thought that Englishmen would summarily disown and discountenance such unmanly tactics; and so they would, if they were only introduced into their daily lives sufficiently often for them to see their outcome—the sapping of that national character for uprightness and down rightness of which we boast ourselves.
I should have thought that to treat a person as insane, because we disagree with her opinions, is a manifest confession of our inability to combat them in any other way. And I should have thought that the mad doctors with their tactics, their entrapping into admissions, and all their paraphernalia of torture, are more suited to the age of the Inquisition than to this epoch of sweetness and light.
It was right that The Spiritualist, as the organ of those who are at least more acquainted with free thought and rational act than those who condemn their opinions as evidence of insanity, should protest against such words and deeds; and I trust that whatever a man may think about Spiritualism and its moot questions, he will have no difficulty in joining heart and soul in any effort to prevent these detestable tactics from succeeding.
Mr. C.E. Williams and a Materialised Spirit
India, Wednesday April 3, 1878
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Editor's notes
Sources
London Spiritualist, No. 297, May 3, 1878