Secret drugs, cures and foods : report of the Royal Commission on (Volume 1).
- Australia. Royal Commission on Secret Drugs, Cures and Foods.
- Date:
- 1907
Licence: In copyright
Credit: Secret drugs, cures and foods : report of the Royal Commission on (Volume 1). Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.
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![5. The mightkst conqueror the world has known was King Etzel. Void of mercy or remorse, it is recorded of him that he caused, on one occasion and at one time, three millions of people to he slain. But all the lives that he took were few compared with the mischief wrought by one woman of our own day, Mrs. Annie Besant. It is everywhere conceded that her pamphlet, sold by the hundred thousand, urging the practice of what Dr. Bergeret properly calls “ genesic frauds,” of artificial interferences with the sexual function, was the real and proximate cause of the decline in Anglo-Saxon productiveness. It has cost Australia already more than a million lives, many of whom would have been now mature citizens of our own flesh and blood. What it has cost in moral and physical degradation of the living, in diseases of mind and body, and infantile degeneration, no one can ever estimate. 6. Drink conquered Etzel, his devastations ended, and mankind recovered. But the other introduced into our nation and race a malady that, so far as we can know or see, is malignant. Our people “ refuse the waters of Shiloah that go softly ”— the pure and living stream that sprang up in and gently flowed through the city. And whither are we told to turn ? “ Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, And unto wizards that peep and that mutter : ‘ Should not a people seek unto their god 1—for the living to the dead 1 ’ To the law and to the testimony ! If they speak not according to this word It is because there is no light in them.” 7. In the last number to hand of the Review of Reviews the prophetess is again held up to our admiration and thus she tells of the wizards to whom we are to seek :— [The Review of Reviews for Australasia, 1 February, 1907.] THE SCIENCE OF YOGA. By Annie Besant. Mrs. Besant discourses in the “ Annals of Psychical Science ” for November on Hatha-Yoga and Baja-Yoga. Mrs. Besant gives a marvellous and somewhat novel account of the control some Yogis have over their bodies :—. The Control of the Body. All the interior of the body should be absolutely clean. The Yogis have a habit of bathing the interior of their bodies as they do the exterior. They do it sometimes by swallowing through the mouth quantities of water; but they frequently do it also by reversing the peristaltic action of the intestines—they take in water by the lower orifice and eject it by the mouth. I have seen a man who could do that for two or three minutes; he placed himself in water and, after a few moments of these reversed peristaltic movements, he ejected from his mouth what seemed like a fountain of water as long as it was desired that he should do so. This experiment is not beautiful, but it is interesting, because it shows the power of the human will when directed upon a portion of the body. It is not then surprising that experiments can be carried out with the human body which seem even less credible. The results of all these practices is a marvellous state of health, a bodily strength that nothing can break. 8. Such are the deceptions, and the disgusting distortions of the natural functions, which are held up to our admiration by the editor of the Review of Reviews, one of the snippet-serials which live, like epiphytes, upon the juices of healthy journalism. It exists by and for advertisements, and of what kind are they ? 9. Alcoholic frauds, alleged drink cures, and amongst others the Yonkerman consumption swindle which contains, or does not contain, a little copper-salt, just as the notion takes the vendors. It is easy for the editor who receives the coin which comes from the pitiable sufferers to say that he himself believes in the alleged cure. So he pretends to believe, and asks his readers to believe, that a pagan wizard can really create a vacuum in an absolutely flaccid tube—the colon—and then by peristalsis against the resistance of the sphincter and the whole gastro-intestinal tract and oesophagus, can play a fountain, like a force pump, out of his mouth ! Suppose it had been recorded of the Christ, the Saviour of mankind, that lie had performed in public such a useless prodigy to prove His holiness. The suggestion is intolerable, and yet we are asked to turn from that Eace which was irXpprjq yapiros /cod a\r)6eiaq “ full of affection and honesty,” from the Header of minds and bodies, from the only Exenvplar Whose beauty but increases by distance, from the Figure which is ever amongst us; Whose Law is the only law; Whose Life is the only life ; 'Whose M ay is the only way for mankind whilst the earth be habitable—we are to turn from Him, the first and last hope for this or any nation, to trust in the filthy tricks of thaumaturgists, and -ethers, as taught by Mrs. Annie Besant! 10.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28037388_0024.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
