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EDWARD CARPENTER, GEORGE MERRILL, and THE POLICE INVESTIGATION for INDECENCY |
| The Edward Carpenter Archive by Simon Dawson |
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EDWARD CARPENTER, GEORGE MERRILL, and THE POLICE INVESTIGATION for INDECENCY |
| The Edward Carpenter Archive by Simon Dawson |
Note - This is the transcribed text of Mr O'Brien's letter which triggered the investigation.
Page numbers in the original letter are marked by [1], [2] etc.
Images of the original letter can be seen Here.
[1]16th May 09
Dronfield, Nr. Sheffield
To the Right Honourable Herbert Gladstone MP
Home Secretary to His Majesty's Gov't
My dear Sir,
In the enclosed pamphlet you will find evidence that a man called Edward Carpenter, who lives only a few miles from here, is one of the leading spirits in a secret society of a political character composed of persons bound together by homosexual practices carried on amongst themselves,
Page 1 of Mr O'Brien's original 38 page letter
I enclose a list of the man's openly circulated writings, so [2] that you may be able to verify the quotations made from them in my pamphlet; and if you wish to see a copy of his privately-circulated advocacy of sexual inversion I shall be glad to send you one.
What I want to ask you before going any further is this plain question - supposing that you have reasons given for believing that this man is one of the leaders of a criminal and a secret society bent upon destroying civilisation, will it then be your duty to take action against him?
[3] I am already spending between fifteen and twenty pounds of my own savings in printing and circulating pamphlets against the man. Nearly all the copies of these pamphlets are given away in order to get them into the hands of the public; for booksellers and newsagents dare not sell them. So that I am not doing this for material gain. I am doing it because I know that it is my duty before God and man to do it.
See Here for images of O'Brien's pamphlet
"SOCIALISM and INFAMY. The Homogenic or Comrade Love Exposed" (pdf document)
Sexual inversion spells ruin for any country, and any man who advocates it and spreads the practice of it among the people of these islands is [4] doing infinitely more mischief to human society than the greatest criminal hung and unhung.
In a letter which appeared in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph on or about April the 12th I asked Edward Carpenter whether he was willing to be present when I read his pamphlet called Homogenic Love before a public audience, but he refused to face such a list, as you may see if you read the concluding words of a letter of his which appeared in the [5] same newspaper on 17 April. Why did he refuse?
If he does not advocate sexual inversion why should he be afraid of a public list? And even if he does advocate it he ought surely to have the clock and the manliness to do what other advocates even of bad doctrines have often not been afraid to do. For history shows that there have been times when the vilest doctrines have been openly proclaimed. If this infamy called "comrade Love" is such a glorious and splendid thing; if it is such [6] "a valuable social force"; if, in cases, it is such an indispensable factor in the production of the noblest human character, if it is a bond of political and social union "of the most lasting and passionate compulsion"; if it is a useful aid to "social and heroic work", and if it has other advantages both for individuals and for the community at large - as its advocate says that it has - why should it not be openly and boldly proclaimed to the whole world? Why should it be sent through the country in privately [7] circulated pamphlets? Why should the "comrades" thus be able to selfishly keep all its inestimable blessing to themselves? If its advocate possesses "to a very large degree", the spirit of Christ, as he was said the other day by an admirer who wrote in the before-mentioned newspaper to possess, why should he be afraid of openly preaching it, as Christ is said to have openly preached his doctrines?
Christ, so we are told, lived a life of suffering and died a death of agony for the sake of his principles. Surely [8] this a great Socialist Prophet of the Caldwell Valley may at least be expected to face the ordeal of a public audience for the sake of his. One correspondent whose letter appeared in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph on April 22nd, suggested that he should (read??) Homogenic Love "to a gathering of educated Sheffield gentlemen - say doctors and head school masters- so that they might hear it read and discuss its character", but he has not yet accepted that proposal. In fact, his whole action in the matter has up to the present been that of a shirking, [9] skulking coward, and not of a man at all. He began his defence against my attack with a falsehood he had to which retract at a later period. In a letter which appeared in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph on the 6th April he said - "I make no secret of my writings. In fact it would be senseless for an author to do that; and Mr O Brien's suggestion that he has unearthed things that I have endeavoured to conceal is absurd on the face of it". But in his letter which appeared in the same newspaper on April 17th, he said in reference to Homogenic Love - "only a few copies were printed and those privately, for the simple [10] reason that the pamphlet was not intended for general circulation, but only in order to be sent to a few scientific friends, for the purpose of comparing notes and obtaining more information on a subject then new to me".
I know of three persons in Holmsfield who have read this vile production. Not one of them is a scientific man. I know of four who have read it in Sheffield. Not one is a man of science. In a note at the beginning of its we are told that the pamphlet is one of a series on sex questions, but that it is thought it best at present [11] to print it for private circulation only. Instead of defending his pamphlet and the vile teaching in it, the Socialist Prophet has written a pack of lies about it.
He has taken refuge in falsehood, but it will not avail him. The Power fighting against him will never fail and never rest until it has meted out unto such an infernal monster the punishment which he has long so justly deserved.
Some of the readers of my pamphlets have said that it is too severe upon him. Is it possible to be too severe upon [12] infamy such as his? A friend of his told me that he should have left the matter alone. I asked that friend if he would have acted in that way if a son of his own had been poisoned and morally ruined by the teaching of this Prophet. When the thing is brought home to them in this way the apologists for Sodom and Gomorrah are silenced. It is the young and inexperienced who are made victims of this iniquity. From "embrace and endearment" between persons of the same sex they are led on through the different stages of it until they reach the last. In ever widening circles [13] it spreads in the secrecy and darkness through a community until at last a time comes when society is full of it.
"This vice," says Voltaire, "was so common at Rome, that it was impossible to punish - a crime which almost everyone committed. Octavius Augustus, that murderer, debaucher, and coward who exiled Ovid, thought it right in Virgil to sing the charms of Alexis. Horace, his other political favourite, constructed a small odes on figurines; and this same Horace, who praised Augustus for reforming manners, speaks in his satires [14] in much the same way of both boys and girls. Yet the ancient law "Scantinia", which forbade pederasty, always existed, and was put in force by the Emperor Philip, who drove away from Rome the boys who made a profession of it. If, however, Rome had ????? And licentious students, like Petronius, it had also such preceptors as Quintilian; and attend to the precautions he lays down in his chapter of "The Preceptor", in order to preserve the purity of early youth."
"Cavendium non solum crimine turpitudinis, sed etiam suspicione". We must not only [15] beware of a shameful crime, but even of the suspicion of it" - "Philosophical Dictionary, article on Socratic Love"
I am afraid that there are fewer persons in this country today who who are as anxious to preserve the purity of early youth as Quintilian was.
Everywhere I have found fear and reluctance to handle this question. People appear to think that evil carried on beneath the surface of society in a sly, crafty, subtle, clever and quiet way is not a thing that ought to be exposed and fought against? I do not believe [16] that your honourable and respected father would have taken this view. Whenever wrong was done in any part of the world, and he knew of it, his custom always was to speak out against it, and do all that lay in his power to put it down. So far as he knew his duty, he did it to the best of his ability like a man; and I am firmly convinced that if he had been at the head of the British government today, and had known of the existence of a vile political society, whether large or small, that aimed, by the express acknowledgement of [17] one of its Prophets and leaders, at the destruction of civilisation, he would have left no stone unturned to rid this country and the world of such a deadly and destructive pest.
He would have thought of the young men and the young women of today and of the days to come, and in their interest, and on their behalf, he would have struck as hard at their enemies as ever old Ulysses struck when he pitilessly slew the witches who occupied his palace, consumed his substance, and sought to destroy his honour.
[18] of what use is it to spend millions in building dreadnoughts to defend yourselves against foreign enemies when you allow a domestic cancer, whose heart is in the very centre of your island, to eat away the very foundations of national and imperial strength, your greatest enemies are inside your own borders and they are not your enemies only. They are the enemies of all mankind. In crushing of them you will be doing a service not to your own country alone, but to every [19] country in the world. Sexual inversion spells depopulation where it spreads. Referring to depopulation in his own country, M.de Foville (??) has recently asked - "Is it the beginning of the end?" - "In another 25 years", he continues "there will be 2 Germans for every Frenchman, without counting the sons of the Fatherland scattered all over the globe by emigration. Thus France is marching with quickened step to her doom." If the present downward movement continues "France will soon be ripe for invasion. It is the [20] only fate awaiting a country which is capable of supporting 80,000,000 inhabitants and is content with half that number."
God is not mocked. The Omnipotent (whose truths about the disaster to which infamous conduct leads, for individuals and for nations alike, are laws forbidding such conduct) cannot be set at defiance with impunity. It is virtue alone which makes a nation or an empire strong. Sodom and Gomorrah may cover their seas with fleets and their shores with armies, but all these will avail them nothing in the day of trial [21] if the character of their people is what it must become if the teaching of this infamous Socialist Prophet makes headway among the young men and young women whose minds it is intended to corrupt and whose lives it is meant to blast beyond all possibility of reform.
Dealing with the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire on page 287 of the issue of Macmillan's Magazine for August 1869, Professor Seeley says that "the Empire perished for lack of men" and every well-informed student of history [22] knows that although the destructive infamy which these advocates of sexual inversion laud to the skies did not actually annihilate the descendants of early Rome, yet that, along with other social evils, it did a great deal in this direction. It is to this state that the Socialist Prophet and his vile disciples are working and scheming and plotting and continuing in darkness and secrecy to reduce England and every other civilised country in the world; and for the evil which they are seeking to do the whole lot of them deserve [23] to be exterminated like vermin off the face of God's earth. Why cannot they be content to keep their abominable practices to themselves? Why should they endeavour to lead others into the lost condition to which they have themselves sunk?
Is there not enough natural vice in the country? - If indeed, any form of vice can ever be natural. But to use the vice of homosexuality as a sort of social and political current holding persons together in a bond of so-called "comradeship", is surely, I should think, to carry it to such a length as to bring them within the [24] reach of the laws of any civilised country. Is there any right-minded father of a family who would like this kind of thing, or even the sentiment of it - for the sentiment is the root out of which all its forms grow - to be introduced either openly or secretly among his growing sons and daughters? Of what avail is it for parents to endeavour to instil into the minds of their children lofty and pure ideals of friendship, such as those of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and similar teachers - ideals which have nothing of a physical or carnal taint in them - [25] when all their efforts in this direction, when all the labourers to do their duty as parents, are being sapped and undermined by these vile advocates of sexual inversion, not one of whom dare get up on a public platform and lay before a public audience the revolting and loathsome ideas which they set forth in their privately and openly circulated books and pamphlets? These men - for the Socialist Prophet is only one among the rest, only one of the diseased school to which he belongs - claim [26] that they have a gospel to preach and a practice to justify. Why do they not come out into the open to preach that gospel and justify that practice? Why do they not do what all the great teachers of the world have done? Are they afraid of unpopularity? Are they afraid of suffering? Do they dreaded the anger of an outraged public? - Of a public which they have not yet sufficiently poisoned with their vile writings to make it safe for them to take a bolder course? The Socialist [27] Prophet says that he believes that the Uranian men, or, in other words, the homosexual men - for Uranian is but a timid substitute for the plain English of Homosexual - are superior to the normal men in respect of the love feeling, "which is gentler, more sympathetic, more considerate, more a matter of heart and less one of more physical satisfaction than that of ordinary men." (The Intermediate Sex, page 128)
Very well, then, if they are such superior persons to the rest of us, why cannot they come out openly and [28] preach their superior gospel like other teachers have done? The extensive Appendix at the end of The Intermediate Sex contains the special pleadings of a number of homosexual writers on behalf of their erotic and shocking insanity. Why not give public audiences the benefits of these arguments, just as such audiences are given the benefit of arguments for other practices that make for the good of individuals and for that of society at large?
[29]The Intermediate Sex, which is certainly one of the most villainous productions that it has been my painful duty to read, contains a considerable portion of the privately circulated pamphlet called Homogenic Love, but not by any means the whole of it, and the strongest passages, especially those which, by referring to physiology, most immediately show the sexual character of the passion advocated, are not to be found anywhere in it. Evidently the Prophet thinks that by veiling his [30] meaning in this manner he has succeeded in keeping himself out of the clutches of the law. He is a clever and cunning instrument of hell and destruction, and worthy of the of the Father of his, whom he serves. In my humble judgement it would be worse than folly to allow him without opposition to go on spreading his vile corruption amongst all classes until his deluded disciples have become a numerous enough to accomplish his own and their insane purposes, or at any rate to work an [31] immense amounts of evil in the desperate attempt to accomplish it. For the band of criminals to which he belongs will, when they think they are able to do so, arise and attempt to sweep away not only civilisation, but also all those who desire it to remain and to go on improving until the end of time. They will do for the civilisation of modern times did for that of Greece and Rome, which was ruined from within before it fell before the blows of external enemies.
It is the duty, then, of those among us who see this threatening [32] evil, to do all that lives in our power to avert it, by opposing with voice and pen, as well as in every other effective way, the infernal fiends who are working so energetically to bring it upon us or upon our children. I feel absolutely certain that this infamous conspiracy against the light and the right is contrary to the spirit of the laws of this land, whether it is contrary to the letter or not, and I am strongly inclined to think that if any man took the trouble to make [33] researches into the matter he would find that this diabolical movement is in conflict also with the letter of the laws.
Be this, however, as it may our duty is clear. Against a movement of such a character we ought to be prepared to use every possible weapon not absolutely condemned by conscious and reason. The famous conspiracy of Catalina, who conspired with a gang of wretches as dissolute and bankrupt at himself to extirpate the Senate, plunder the Treasury, [34] and set Rome on fire, was a mere storm in a teacup in comparison with that of persons whose openly proclaimed object is to sweep away civilisation and make the vilest, lowest and most debasing practices be openly tolerated in human society.
Catalina and his worthless followers sought to set a city on fire. Wretches of the type of Whitman and Carpenter seek to set the minds and hearts of all mankind on fire, not with any fire that dies out through lack of fuel, [35] but with the fire of hell itself, which burns eternally in the souls of these fiends, and with which they seek to drag down to everlasting perdition all the sons of men. It is not one city or one country; it is every city and every country - nay, it is the human race itself which these conspirators are seeking to destroy. In being at war with civilisation they are at war with humanity; for civilisation is the path of humanity's progress [36] from darkness to light, and on that path it cannot go back without taking a course that must ultimately end in mental, moral, and physical destruction.
If there is no action which you can take in this matter I shall be glad of your advice as to the best method of fighting against the poison to which I have here drawn your attention. I do not see why persons who are undermining the very foundation of human society [37] should be allowed to have everything their own way simply because they work in secret instead of in the light of open publicity. Evil done in darkness is evil still. It's effect upon the rising generation is just the same as is that of the same evil done in a more open and straightforward manner. I am circulating the enclosed pamphlet because I know of no other way in which I can fight against the deadly and destructive thing [38] with which it deals. If you know of any organised body in the country that would be likely to take up the question and do anything to counterwork the mischief now being done by the Socialist Prophet and his disciples, I shall be very much obliged to you for any information about such a body. I have called the attention of the local police to the fact that the Prophet teaches sodomy, and they know quite well that . . . . . .