It might well be urged, “Why should Hope go into the dark room at all? Why should he not allow the sitter to charge his carrier by himself and so remove all possibility of transposition?” It is natural that Hope should show the stranger where the various conveniences of the dark room are, but apart from this there is the reason that Hope in the course of his career has had all sorts of tricks played upon him by dishonest investigators, and that he has to protect himself, so far as he can, against doctored plates or plates with extras already prepared which will be ascribed to him and made the ground for charges. I have heard him tell such instances. When he knows his sitter he has no objection at all to leaving him alone in the dark room.

In 1919 the Society which I have already referred to as the S.S.S.P. presented Hope with a new camera. Mr. Barlow, Mr. Pearse and Mr. Walker—all experienced photographers—were the three delegates who conveyed it to Crewe. On this occasion photographs were taken with the new carriers and camera, Mr. Barlow loading the carrier with his own plate alone in the dark room. In developing, all three delegates went into the dark room, but Hope did not accompany them. Three out of four slides showed no supernormal result, but the fourth showed three faces, one clearly recognised. “We were carefully watching Mr. Hope all the time and are absolutely sure that there was no trickery.” The document, which contains a detailed account of these facts, is signed by all three observers. Could any case be more satisfactory and more final?

I have said that professional photographers were among the sitters. I would instance as a good example Mr. A. R. Gibson, of Nottingham, who testifies that he took every possible precaution against deceit, and that none the less he received an excellent likeness of his dead son which does not correspond to any existing photograph and is recognised by all who knew the lad.

There is one final case to which I would particularly desire to draw attention because it is exactly parallel to that of Mr. Price, but had a diametrically opposite result. The inquirer, too, has the advantage of being absolutely impartial, which cannot be said of the two conjurers nor of Mr. Dingwall, who was behind them—and even with every intention to be honest, a strong bias can distort the results. The case to which I refer is that of Mrs. St. Clair Stobart, of 7, Turners Wood, Hampstead Garden Suburb, who sat to Mr. Hope in March, 1921. Before the sitting Mrs. Stobart’s plates were marked with a secret mark, which she herself did not know, by the Kodak Company. The result is told in full in Psychic Science for October of this year. Briefly, after every conceivable precaution by Mrs. Stobart and her husband, two extras were got in four attempts, one a head only and the other a full-length figure of a woman, clothed in the usual filmy drapery. “Mr. Hope never handled the plates at all.” Mrs. Stobart concludes: “I took the negatives to the Kodak Company—to the manager and chief assistant. ‘Are these the plates you marked? Can you see the marks?’ I asked. ‘Oh yes,’ they replied. ‘Look, here they are—a tiny circle enclosing a cross.’ And for the first time I saw the marks which they had put. The Kodak Company allow me to say that their affirmation as to this can be used freely.”

Now surely this is very important. There seems no loophole for error, and it entirely reverses the results of the S.P.R. Why should more credit be given to one than the other? Of the two, Mrs. Stobart’s is undoubtedly the more scientific, for we have no story of plates being left about for twenty-four days before an experiment, and, as I have pointed out, there is no possible bias. Taken with all the other examples which I have given, and with those given later by Mr. Barlow, I claim that no reasonable man can doubt that Hope’s hands are clean. It is the S.P.R. clique with their tortuous methods, and with their mystery plate unexplained, who can most reasonably be accused of a want of frank, straightforward dealing. It is sad to think that a society which has done good work in the past, and which has been made famous by the labours of great spiritualists like Myers and Hodgson, Barrett and Crookes, should be mixed up at all with so ugly a business handled in so questionable a way.

Before bringing to an end this short sketch of the work of the Crewe Circle, I would beg the reader to consider the positive cases which I have laid before him and to remember that in order to establish the intervention of external, intelligent forces—which is our sole and only aim—we have only to make one case good. One positive case outweighs all the negative ones which the industry of the most energetic “exposer” could collect. Our enemies take the perverse course of dwelling entirely upon negative results, a line of reasoning which would have killed any science in the world. They know, as a matter of fact, very little about the subject, for starting, as they do, with the presumption that it is a palpable fraud, they do not devote to it the time and the close study which it calls for.

There is only one body in this country which can claim any authority, and that is the S.S.S.P., or Society for the Study of Supernormal Pictures, of which Dr. Abraham Wallace is President, while I share with Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Blackwell the honour of being vice-president. We number among our members Miss Scatcherd, whose experience is probably unique, Mr. Coates, who has written two excellent books upon the subject, Colonel Baddeley, Major Spencer, whose experiments have extended over many years, Colonel Johnson, a pioneer investigator, professional and expert photographers, and others of all shades of opinions, save that all, so far as I know, are convinced by actual experience of the reality of the phenomenon. Of its methods and curious, almost inconceivable and most freakish manifestations we have collected a mass of material and have even cleared a few permanent pathways among the jungle.

It is to this society, and not to the S.P.R. as at present conducted, that the world may look for accurate information upon this subject. It would not be reasonable for me to go at any length here into the results obtained. I would only say that so far as my own conclusions go, basing my studies upon the photographers of the past as well as the present, I think that the evidence is strong that there is on the other side an intelligent control for each photographic medium, whose powers are great but by no means unlimited and who endeavours to give us convincing results each in his own characteristic way. These results are sometimes obtained by actual materialisations, sometimes by precipitations of pictures apart from exposure, sometimes, as I believe, by the superposition of screens which have the psychic face already upon them, and which give marks as of a double exposure. Among the powers of the control is to build up a simulacrum which may be the image of someone who is still alive, or he may produce upon the plate facsimiles of pictures and portraits which do at present exist, but which are entirely beyond the normal reach of the medium. All these and other equally strange points I could illustrate by many examples, but their mere recital will show how many snares lie before the explorer, and how many things might seem to be fraudulent when they are really the doing not of the medium but of the control.

Any further expansion of this fascinating subject would be out of place on my part, since I am by no means one of the authorities, and can only claim that I study and assimilate the results of others, to which, of course, I add my own personal experience. I have, however, asked Mr. Barlow, the Honorary Secretary of this Society, whose experience is so extensive as to be almost unrivalled, to add a short essay upon the subject, with an account of some of the cases which bear upon the matter.