ABSTRACT
During the course of the Bradlaugh-Besant trial, Besant dashed off her own pamphlet on population, The Law of Population: Its Bearing Upon Human Conduct and Morals, published in London in 1877. In 1888 an Australian bookseller in New South Wales was arrested, tried, and fined five guineas and costs for selling TheLaw of Population. His conviction was set aside in December 1888 by the Senior Puisne Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Mr. Justice Windeyer. Besant continued to work in London for the Neo-Malthusian League, of which she was the secretary from the time it was founded in 1878, until she became a Theosophist. Theosophy, Besant had discovered, was incompatible with the Neo-Malthusian ideals of The Law of Population. Theosophy was founded in 1875 in New York by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and an American Civil War veteran, Colonel H. S. Olcott.
