as President, will defend to the utmost the right of each to speak his thought--believers and non-believers of every type; but I will not recognise the right of any to impose upon the Society a dogma of unbelief, any more than a dogma of belief. Only by that liberty of all can we live and grow; only by the perfect freedom, and the recognition of every man's right to speak, no matter what he says, can the health of the Society be secured. For in the years that lie before us there is much new knowledge to be gained, many new facts to be discovered, many new experiences to go through, and we must not discourage the seekers and investigators by making it difficult for them to speak amongst us. We need every fact that any human being can bring to us. We have the right to challenge the fact and investigate it, and either to say: "It is fact"; or: "To me it is not fact"; but we have no right to say to any human being: "You shall not search nor speak," for that would be the death-knell of our liberty, that the denial of the foundation on which we stand. And so let us go forward to a future, I hope, fairer than anything we have in our past. Let us welcome all thought, all refusal of thought, all investigation, all speech, however different it may be from our own speech and thought, and doing this with full respect of each for each, full recognition that minds are different, and that each mind has its own sphere in which it can do useful work for all, let us encourage in our Society every school of thought, every form of opinion, every expression of thought which is in a man's mind. And out of all that clash of opinion, out of all that discussion, Truth should come out stronger, richer, larger than ever. And never mind if sometimes falsehoods are spoken; never mind if sometimes mistakes are made. An old scripture says: "Truth conquers, not falsehood"; for God is Truth, and nothing that is not drawn from His Life can live, nothing that is drawn from His life can die; and realising that, we can go forward fearlessly into the unknown future, sure that to brave hearts and true lives every experience, every failure, every mistake, is only another rung of the ladder by which we climb from ignorance into knowledge, from the bondage of matter into the liberty of Spirit. * * * * * End of Project Gutenberg's London Lectures of 1907, by Annie Besant