letter did not remain on the table. Under cover of the blotting pad and

various nervous movements it was conveyed to the medium's lap, and from there to a shallow tray on the floor under the table. The medium, he noticed, sat close to a door which led into an adjoining room, and he believes that the tray was pulled by a string from under the table into the next room. An expert whom he afterwards sent to examine the house, under cover of a sitting, verified his conjecture that there was space enough at the bottom of the door to pull a shallow tray through. In the next room it was easy for Miss Bangs No. 2 to open the letter, write the reply, and seal the envelope again. Even wax seals offer no difficulty to mediums. The letter was re-conducted to the table in the same furtive way. A desperate Spiritualist may say that his hypothesis is simpler than this. But there is one little difficulty. No such person had ever existed as the supposed dead relative to whom Mr. Carrington addressed his letter! He had hoaxed the hoaxer.

Here were two quiet and inoffensive-looking spinsters earning a good living by deceptive practices (this and the spirit-painting trick) which they had themselves, apparently, originated, and which taxed the ingenuity of an expert conjurer to discover. What chance has the ordinary inquirer, much less the eager Spiritualist, against guile of this description? A boy of sixteen can buy a box of conjuring apparatus for a guinea. It contains only tricks which have been scattered over the country for years. Yet in your own drawing-room he can, after a little practice, cheat your eyes every time, although you know that there is trickery, and are keenly on the look-out for it. What chance have you, then, against a man or woman who has been conjuring for twenty years? What chance have you in a poor light? What earthly chance have you in the dark? It is amazing how inquirers and Spiritualists forget this elementary truism. They tell you repeatedly, with the air of supreme experts in conjuring, that "there was no possibility of fraud." That is sheer self-deception. Even expert conjurers have been completely deceived by mediums, as Bellachini was with Slade (a confessed impostor) and Carrington was with Eusapia Palladino. The man who tells you that there was no fraud because he saw none is as foolish as the man who expects _you_ either to explain where the fraud was or else embrace Spiritualism.

There is one other method of receiving messages which we must briefly notice. It is, to Spiritualists, the most impressive of all. The ghost of the dead _talks directly to you_. A "direct voice" medium is, of course, required, and some kind of trumpet is provided by the medium through which the spirit speaks to you. If you are known to the medium, or if you have a good imagination and are very eager, you can recognize the very accents of your dead wife or mother-in-law. But there is one disadvantage of this impressive phenomenon. It must take place in complete darkness; and we remember the warning of that high and experienced psychic authority, Dr. Maxwell, that the man who seeks any kind of phenomena in complete darkness is wasting his time.

Spiritualist writers are amusing when they try to reconcile us to the conditions which their mediums have imposed on them. Are there not certain conditions for the appearance of all scientific phenomena, they ask us? Most assuredly. You cannot grow carrots without soil, and so on. Is not darkness a condition of certain scientific processes? Again, most certainly. The photographic plate must be prepared in the dark, or in a dull red light. Therefore.... That is just where the Spiritualist fails. If the darkness under cover of which the photographic chemist prepares his plates lent itself equally to cover fraud or to protect his operations, there would be a parallel. As it is, there is no parallel.

The red light of the photographer can serve only one purpose. When the medium uses it, there are two purposes conceivable. One is, on the Spiritualist theory, that white light may interfere with the "magnetism," or the "psychic force," or whatever the latest jargon is. The other conceivable purpose is that it may cover fraud. Everybody admits that the darkening of the planet since 1848 has covered "a vast amount of fraud," to use the words of Baron Schrenck. Few people admit that it has favoured real phenomena. It is therefore quite absurd to attempt to reconcile us to the darkness by the analogy of photographic operations. There is no analogy at all. In the one case the poor light certainly favours fraud, and does not certainly do anything else. In the other case the red light never covers fraud, but has a single clear purpose.

Red light, as I have said, is the most tiring for the eye of all kinds of light. The man who thinks that he can control the hands and feet of seven mediums in such a light cannot expect to be taken seriously. He can expect only to be taken in. But the man who pays any attention to phenomena for which the medium requires pitch darkness is even worse. Why not simply _imagine_ that the dead still live, and save the guinea? You have not the slightest guarantee of the genuineness of the phenomena. Imagining that you can recognize the voice or the features is one of the oldest of illusions.

In the summer of 1912 our Spiritualists were elated by the discovery of a new medium of the most powerful type. Mrs. Ebba Wriedt came from that perennial breeding-ground of great mediums, the United States, where she had long been known. In 1912 she illumined London. Through her W. T. Stead was able once more to address Spiritualists _viva voce_. One recognized the familiar voice unmistakably. Scepticism was ludicrous. Did not a Serbian diplomatist talk to the spirit in Serb, which Mrs. Wriedt did not know, and answer for the genuineness of the phenomena? _Light_ had wonderful columns on Mrs. Wriedt's marvels. She was, the editor of a psychic journal said, "the pride and the most convincing argument of the whole Spiritualist and Theosophical world." In admiring her powers, even the mutual hostility of Spiritualist and Theosophist was laid aside, it seems.

Norwegian Spiritualists were eager to avail themselves of this rare gift, and they asked if Norwegian spirits could speak through the great medium. After consulting the spirits--a cynic would say, after practising a word or two of Norwegian--Mrs. Wriedt replied in the affirmative, and boldly crossed the sea.

There is, of course, no intrinsic reason, on the Spiritualist theory, why spirits should be confined to the language of the medium. In "direct voice" they do not even have to use her vocal organs. A trumpet lies on the ground or the table, and the spirits lift it up and megaphone (very softly) through it. It is quite inexplicable to those of us who are mere inquirers why the spirits must always talk English in England, American in America, and so on. Even when they try, as in the case of the Thomas brothers, to talk their native American to us in England, the result is half bad American and half Welsh-English. It would be much more impressive to our hesitating generation if a half-dozen foreigners were brought to the sitting, and each had a real conversation--not a word or two--with a ghost of his own nationality. Somehow the spirits insist on speaking the language, and even the dialect, of the medium. We shall consider in the next chapter a few supposed variations from this unfortunate rule of spirit-intercourse.

Well, Mrs. Wriedt went to Norway, and confronted her new inquirers with all the solidity and confidence of the well-built American matron. Somehow, the vocabulary of the Norwegian dead, who came along, was very limited. They could say only "Yes" or "No" in Norwegian. Otherwise the first séance was very good. To make up for their culpable ignorance of their native tongue the Norwegian ghosts scattered flowers about the dark room, gave ghostly music, and did other marvellous things. But there were two ladies and a professor--Frau Nielsen and Frau Anker and Professor Birkeland--who did not like this "Yes" and "No" business. It was scriptural, but not ladylike. So the professor held Mrs. Wriedt's hands very firmly at the second séance, and for twenty minutes the spirits were dumb. They always resent such things, as every Spiritualist knows. The trumpets lay on the floor, neglected and silent.

At length Professor Birkeland heard some very faint explosive sounds which his ears located in the trumpets or horns (in shape something like the old coach-horn). He looked steadily and saw them move slightly, a phosphorescent light in them making the movements clear. A good Spiritualist would have seen that this was the beginning of manifestations, and he would have paid close attention to the trumpets and relaxed his hard control of Mrs. Wriedt. The professor was, however, of the type which mediums call "brutal." He jumped up, switched on the electric light, and, before the Spiritualists could interfere, had snatched the two trumpets from the floor and bolted to the nearest analytic chemist. So the curtain fell on one more glorious act in the Spiritualist drama. Mrs. Wriedt had put in the trumpet particles of metallic potassium which, meeting the moisture she had also thoughtfully provided, explained the "psychic movements." Close examination disclosed that on other occasions she had used Lycopodium seeds to produce the same effect.

Professor Birkeland did not discover how the voices were produced, but they offer no difficulty. The trumpets were, he found, telescopic. Each consisted of three parts, and could stretch to nearly three feet. When some guileless lady, who is controlling the medium, allows a hand to stray in the usual way, the trumpet is seized, and it will give a "direct voice" over the heads of the sitters or close to any one of them. When the trumpet remains on the ground during the ghostly message, the medium has a rubber speaking-tube fitted to it. When no trumpet is provided at all, it makes no difference. The medium has thoughtfully brought one of these telescopic aluminium tubes in his trousers. It folds up to less than a foot. In some of the earlier cases, possibly still in some cases, the medium's little daughter, who sits demure and mildly interested on the couch before the light is switched off, mounts the furniture in the dark, and obligingly impersonates the ghost.

No one would accuse Mr. Crawford, of Belfast, of being ultra-critical, yet his experience confirms my conclusions. His marvellous experiences with the pious Kathleen drew the attention of the Spiritualist world, and all sorts of mediums came to help. First he tried the clairvoyants. But they saw such weird and contradictory things that he was worried. None of them saw the wonderful "psychic cantilever" which he thought the spirits made to lift the table, but they all saw ghostly hands where he did not want them; and the worst of it was that the same spirits which had confirmed his theory of a cantilever, and even allowed him to take a photograph (which he has meanly refused to publish) of it, now joyously confirmed the quite different theory of the Spiritualist clairvoyants.

So he gave it up, and next tried a "direct voice" medium. He is fairly polite about the result. He got plenty of voices from all quarters--in total darkness. Not only did a voice come from the ceiling, but a mark was made on it. The medium's silk coat was frivolously taken off her by the ghosts, and flung on the lap of one of the sitters. Strangely, these things do not impress him as much as the raising of a two-pound stool to a height of four feet does. He drops dark hints that things were said about this "direct voice" medium. She was a big woman, and she was not searched; and telescopic aluminium tubes take up little room. Mr. Crawford put his little electrical register near her feet, and she was "annoyed and nervous." In short, Mr. Crawford seems to have formed the same opinion as any sensible person would in the circumstances.[15]

We have still to examine the claims of the automatic writers; but, after all this, the reader will not expect much. Never yet was a message received which could not have been learned by the medium in a normal way. The overwhelming mass of the messages which are delivered daily in every country are fraudulent. In an amusing recent work (_The Road to En-Dor_) two officers have shown us how easy it was to dupe even educated men by these professions of marvellous powers. The advantage is on the side of the conjurer every time, and the sitter has little chance. Let the mediums come before a competent tribunal. All sorts of inducements have been offered to them to do so, but they are very shy of competent investigators. In 1911 an advertisement in the _Times_ offered £1,000 to any medium who would merely give proof of possessing telepathic power, and there was not a single offer. This year Mr. Joseph Rinn, a former member of the American Society for Psychical Research and a life-long inquirer, has deposited with that Society a sum of £1,000 for any evidence of communication with the dead under proper conditions. There will again be no application. Mediums prefer a simpler and more reverent audience, even if the fees be smaller. But those who consult them under their own conditions, knowing that fraud has been practised under those conditions from San Francisco to Petrograd ever since 1848, must not talk to us about "evidence."

FOOTNOTES:

[14] The chapter should be read in Truesdell's racy book, which is now unfortunately rare, _Bottom Facts Concerning the Science of Spiritualism_ (1883), pp. 276-307.

[15] These experiments are recorded in his _Experiments in Psychical Science_ (1919), pp. 134-35 and 170-89.