English Newspaper Slanders Russian Lady

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 7 pages

A letter to the Amrita Bazar Patrika of 3 March 1881, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings III. The occasion was an attack in the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette — which she renames in passing as the un-Civil and more-cowardly-than-Military Gazette, on the ground that it is ever ready to attack defenceless women. The paper had taken a sentence from a private joking letter of Colonel Olcott's to an intimate friend, quoted at second hand in the New York World — "I have not one cent, neither has Blavatsky" — and, pretending to read it literally, built from it a column of slanderous insinuation warning the natives that the two were no better than penniless adventurers.

Her reply is characteristically direct about the paper's motives and about her own practice. Friends at Lahore implored her to answer in the paper that published it; her answer is that the Gazette seems ever ready, whether the calumnies come from its editors or from outsiders, to open its columns to filthy abuse as though they were so many sewers. The file belongs with Foul conspiracies and blatant lies and Truth is exiled from the press elsewhere in this section, which together form the record of how she dealt with a hostile press — not by ignoring it, but by answering in print each time and letting the exchange stand.

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