An interesting article attributed to Blavatsky in her Collected Writings. The style doesn't seem to resemble Blavatsky. It's closer to Mabel Collins in style, but with themes closer to Annie Besant. However Collins had just left the magazine and Besant wasn't on board yet. Despite this difficulty, I think that it does give a decent basis and outline for strategies of social activism and is still quite relevant for today.
THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE
[Lucifer, Vol. IV, No. 20, April, 1889, pp. 104-111]
It is the debased taste of the rich which has rendered a surfeit of meat necessary for the maintenance of his powers in the eyes of the artisan, and so, at a price far beyond his slender resources, he adopts a diet which wastes the tissues and disquiets the system. And if the advisability of a sudden change of diet is contested, at least moderation in flesh eating should be recommended, and a proof of the possibility of maintaining one’s full powers given by those who desire the physical and moral sanity of the race. Setting aside all argument drawn from not generally accredited sources, such as the codes of the great teachers of the past, and the synthesis of all experience, physical, psychic, and spiritual, we may bring into court the medical faculty who are unanimously of the opinion that a reduced quantity of meat would improve the general health, and that many of the common ailments are due solely to excess in the use of animal food in particular, and to overfeeding in general; while chemical analysis proves conclusively that vegetable food, especially cereals, contain nutritive qualities vastly in excess of animal.
Moreover, if the false feeling of degradation in the performance of so-called menial offices, were removed by the example of the money and mind castes performing such offices themselves, or at least encouraging every invention and supporting every effort for minimizing such labour, many of the troubles which are daily taxing the resources of our housekeepers to the utmost, would be removed, and a solution to the difficult problem of the servant question arrived at; the present absurdity of domestic service would find no place, and instead of one thousand little backs bent over one thousand little kitchen ranges preparing one thousand little dinners, we should have a sane cooperative system whereby the small worries of domesticity which destroy the harmony of so many homes, would be banished.
If such sanitary measures, therefore, were adopted, we should have physical and mental powers continuing into old age, instead of a general belief that fifty or sixty years terminates the average man’s usefulness and there then remains nothing for him but a life of inactivity and general feebleness. Of course this applies to the average individual; for we have sufficient instances of mental giants who continue their labours till the closing hours of life; these, however, intuitively or naturally practice moderation and plainness in eating, and often give striking proofs of extraordinary abstemiousness.
If, then, such moderation of private life was practised by the accredited leaders of society, no inducement to excess would offer itself to their followers; or even if the animal still rioted in the masses, it would not be shamefully encouraged in its madness by the excesses of respectability.
Thus the necessary physical requirements of all classes would be reduced to a level, and a basis obtained on which to build a firm fabric of national progress towards the realization of human unity. Meantime the mental evolution of all classes would also make vast strides, and the impulses given to study and the development of artistic tastes, would bring the real genius of the nation to the front and not confine the recruiting of professions to the money caste, irrespective of individual capacity. The present false standard of taste would fall out of date as completely as the wonderful cottage ornaments of the near past, and neatness in private decoration would, by harmonious surroundings, induce a harmony of thought and feeling.
Who, for instance, could indite a poem or work of inspiration in an over-ornamented drawing-room of the modern style, with its heterogeneous and multicolored collection of bric-a-brac and trifles? But with harmonious surroundings and following such a mode of life, the individual would develop within him the larger instincts of his nature, and the flower of self-sacrifice, then finding a congenial soil, would blossom in the hearts of the many and thus, destroying all narrowness of judgment and begetting an ever widening interest in the general welfare, would develop new social organizations and institutions; the tone of the nation would be elevated and true worth become the standard of judgment among its citizens.
Moreover, seeing that we have already proof of such an ideal being dimly sensed in all nations of the white race in the increasing discontent of nearly all classes with the existing state of affairs, no nation would stand alone in this, but the wave of progress would sweep simultaneously through all the sub-races of the race and beget a general desire to establish healthy relationships between nations and to foster every effort to unite the larger units of the race into one harmonious whole. Further, a belief in the essential unity of all souls would create stronger dissatisfaction with the existing state of social relations between the sexes, the potentialities of woman would be studied and opportunity given for that development which has previously been denied to womankind. Plain justice would demand the same ostracism of male harlots which is now meted out with so much severity to the female sex alone, and either the same leniency extended to women as is now given to men, or the higher moral standard and wisdom of awakened humanity, would compel the supply in harlotry to cease by the extinction of the demand.
To prepare, therefore, a ground in which this consummation could be achieved, it would be necessary to extend the full benefits of intellectual training to women; to encourage and advocate the necessity of athletic exercises for girls and to provide for the same in the schools of the state; to jealously guard the health of the women working classes by sanitary improvements in all manufactories and labour establishments, and to kill out the evil of over-long hours of sedentary occupation in vitiated atmospheres. Moreover, it should be made possible for women in the position of the present daughters of the lower middle classes and of parents with limited incomes to follow a calling in life, instead of being forced, against their wills and finer instincts, into the matrimonial market, to gain their bread and cheese at the price of discontented motherhood.
No doubt the establishment of international leagues for mutual help and on a basis other than that of self-interest will, at the present time, appear to the majority the acme of folly; but when the race has, in its social institutions, given valid proof of the efficacy of the method, the change of base becomes a possibility. The spread of education and the ability to study original authorities and to get at facts at first hand would rapidly clear away the clouds of national and sectarian prejudice, and the birth of the God within would render it impossible to poison the young minds of the race by inoculating them with the virus of dogmatism and of past national pride and passion as treasured in the orthodox theological and historical textbooks of the times; the past triumphs of the animal in individual nations would be regarded merely as the obscuration of the spiritual and yet so ordered in the economy of nature that the sun of humanity should finally shine forth more gloriously in contrast to the darkness of the past. Thus the necessity for keeping up large armies and fleets would cease, and the enormous wealth so saved could be turned into channels of national improvement, thus pointing the way for the desertion of national forces from the ranks of the animal to the standard of the divine.
It would be long to trace, even roughly, the possibilities of international cooperation which, in its turn, would be extended to racial cooperation of which the potentialities almost surpass description and reach that consummation of which the Theosophical Society has planted the first openly conscious germ, in endeavouring to form the nucleus of a universal brotherhood of humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or colour; what the potentialities of this glorious humanity may be, none but the student of the Science of Life can dream, as he alone can sense the labours of the Eldest Brothers of the Race for their poorer brethren.
Let us then, aspiring to the divine, now and within, fight down the
animal, that so we may be enabled to tell friend from foe in the greater
battle, and, awakened by the cry, “Thou art thy brother’s keeper,” gird
on shield and buckler for the cause of the divine Unity of Humanity in
the struggle for existence.
PHILANTHROPOS.
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