Mediums are the priests of the Spiritualist religion. They are the indispensable channels of communication with the other world. They have, not by anointing, but by birthright, the magical character which fits them alone to perform the miracles of the new revelation. From them alone, and through them alone, can one learn the conditions under which manifestations may be expected. Were they to form a union or go on strike, the life of the new religion would be more completely suspended than the life of any other religion. They control the entire output of evidence. They guard the gates of the beyond. They are the priests of the new religion.

Now it will not be seriously disputed that during the last three quarters of the century these mediums or priests have perpetrated more fraud than was ever attributed to any priesthood before. A few weeks ago Spiritualists held a meeting in commemoration of the "seventy-second anniversary" of the birth of their religion. That takes us back to 1848, the year in which Mrs. Fish, as I will tell later, astutely turned into a profitable concern the power of her younger sisters to rap out "spirit" communications with the joints of their toes. There have been some quaint beginnings of religions, but the formation of that fraudulent little American family-syndicate in 1848 is surely the strangest that ever got "commemoration" in the annals of religion. And from that day until ours there is hardly a single prominent medium who has not been convicted of fraud. Any person who cares to run over Mr. Podmore's history of the movement will see this. There is hardly a medium named in the nineteenth century who does not eventually disappear in an odour of sulphur.

Podmore was one of the best-informed and most conscientious non-Spiritualists who ever wrote on Spiritualism. If one prefers the verdict of the French astronomer Flammarion, who believes that mediums do possess abnormal powers and has studied them for nearly sixty years, this is what he says:—

It is the same with all mediums, male and female. I believe I have had nearly all of them, from various parts of the world, at my house during the last forty years. One may lay it down as a principle that all professional mediums cheat, but they do not cheat always.[1]

If you are inclined to think that this applies only to professional mediums, whose need of money drives them into trickery, listen to this further verdict, which M. Flammarion says he could support by "hundreds of instances":—

I have seen unpaid mediums, men and women of the world, cheat without the least scruple, out of sheer vanity, or from a still less creditable motive—the love of deceiving. Spiritualist sÉances have led to very useful and pleasant acquaintanceships, and to more than one marriage. You must distrust both classes [paid and unpaid].[2]

Listen to the verdict of another man who believes in the powers of mediums, and who has studied them enthusiastically for thirty years, a medical man with means and leisure—Baron von Schrenck-Notzing[3]:—

It is indisputable that nearly every professional medium (and many private mediums) does part of his performances by fraud.... Conscious and unconscious fraud plays an immense part in this field.... The entire method of the Spiritualist education of mediums, with its ballast of unnecessary ideas, leads directly to the facilitation of fraud.

If this is not enough, take another gentleman, Mr. Hereward Carrington, who has studied mediums for two decades in various parts of the world, and who also believes that they have genuine abnormal powers:—

Ninety-eight per cent. of the [physical] phenomena are fraudulent.[4]

These are not men who have dismissed the phenomena as "all rot." They believe in the reality of materializations or levitations. They are not men who have been recently converted, in an emotional mood. They have spent whole decades in the patient study of mediums. I could quote a dozen more witnesses of that type; but the reader will be able to judge for himself presently.

Some Spiritualists try to tone down this very grave blot on their religion by distinguishing between the professional medium and the unpaid. The men I have quoted warn us against this distinction. It is quite absurd to think that money is the only incentive to cheat. The history of the movement swarms with exposures of unpaid as well as paid mediums. An unpaid medium who can display "wonderful powers" becomes at once a centre of most flattering interest; and we shall see dozens of cases of this vanity leading men and women of every social position into fraud and misrepresentation, even in quite recent times. All that one can say is that there is far less fraud among unpaid mediums. But there are far less striking phenomena among unpaid mediums, as a rule, and so this helps us very little. The "evidence" afforded by mediums like Mr. Vale Owen, and the myriads of quite recent automatic writers and artists, is absolutely worthless. What they do is too obviously human.

We must remember, also, that the distinction between "paid" and "unpaid" is not quite so plain as some think. Daniel Dunglas Home is always described by Spiritualists as an unpaid medium, but I will show presently that he lived in great comfort all his life on the strength of his Spiritualist powers. Florence Cook, Sir William Crookes's famous medium, is described as "unpaid," because she did not (at that time) charge sitters; but she had a large annual allowance from a wealthy Spiritualist precisely in order that she should not charge at the door. To take a living medium, and one very strongly recommended to us by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle under the name of "Eva C." (though it has been openly acknowledged by her patrons on the continent for six years that her name is Marthe Beraud): she has lived a luxurious life with people far above her own station in life for fifteen years, in virtue of her supposed abnormal powers.

The distinction is, in any case, useless. When Spiritualists try to conciliate us to their wonderful stories by telling us that the medium was "unpaid," they do not know the history of their own movement. The most extraordinary frauds have been perpetrated, even in recent years, by unpaid mediums, or ladies of good social position. Flammarion, Maxwell, Ochorowicz, Carrington, and all other experienced investigators give hundreds of cases. Not many years ago Professor Reichel, tired of examining and exposing professional mediums, heard that the daughter of a high official in Costa Rica was producing wonderful materializations. He actually went to Costa Rica to study her, and he found that she was tricking (dressing a servant girl as a ghost) in the crudest fashion, as I will tell later. The daughter of an Italian chemist, Linda Gazerra cheated scientific and professional men for three years (1908-11), but was at last found to conceal her "ghosts" and "apports" in her false hair and her underclothing. There is no such thing as a guarantee against fraud in the character of the medium. Every case has to be examined with unsparing rigour.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle meets the difficulty by cheerfully distinguishing between white, black, and grey mediums: the entirely honest, the entirely fraudulent, and those who have genuine powers, but cheat at times when their powers flag and the sitters are impatient for "manifestations." It is a familiar distinction. To some extent it is a sound distinction. We all admit black mediums. The chronicle of Spiritualism, short as it is, contains as sorry a collection of rogues, male and female, as any human movement could show in seventy years. Politics is spotless by comparison. Even business can hold up its head. For a "religion" the situation is remarkable.

Next, we all admit white mediums. We all know those myriads of innocent folk, tender maidens and nervous spinsters, neuropathic clergymen and even quite sober-looking professional men, who bring us reams and rivers of inspiration through the planchette and the ouija board and the crystal and automatic writing. Bless them, they are as guileless, generally, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself. I have seen them—seen men and women of such social standing that one dare not breathe a suspicion—stoop to trickery more than once in order to get communications of "evidential value." But there are tens of thousands of amateur mediums of this kind who are as honest as any of us. We all admit it. It is sheer Spiritualistic nonsense to say that we dismiss the whole movement as fraud. We do not question for a moment the honesty of these myriads of amateur mediums. What we say is that the evidential value of their work would not convert a Kaffir to Spiritualism. Dr. J. Maxwell, a distinguished French lawyer and doctor, who has been a close investigator of these things for decades and believes in mediumistic powers, says:—

I share M. Janet's opinion concerning the majority of Spiritualist mediums. I have only found two interesting ones among them; the hundred others whom I have observed have only given me automatic phenomena, more or less conscious; nearly all were the puppets of their imagination.[5]

No, Spiritualism does not rely at all on these innocent and useless productions. Invariably, your Spiritualist opponent turns sooner or later to the big, striking things, the "physical phenomena," the work of the "powerful" mediums.

Now, which of these were ever "white"? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, when he came to this important point, named four "snow-white" mediums. He could, he added, name "ten or twelve living mediums"; but since he did not, we still hunger for the names. The four spotless ones were Home, Stainton Moses, Mrs. Piper, and Mrs. Everett—not a great record for seventy years (since Home began in 1852). Mrs. Piper we will discuss later, but I may say at once that a man for whom Sir Arthur has a great respect as a psychic expert, Dr. Maxwell, speaks of Mrs. Piper's "inaccuracies and falsehoods" with great disdain. Who Mrs. Everett may be I do not know. If Sir Arthur means the Mrs. Everitt of forty years ago, I insist on transferring her to the flock of the black sheep. In later chapters we will examine the performances of Stainton Moses and Home, and probably the reader will agree with me that these snow-white lambs were two of the arch-impostors of the Spiritualist movement. But a word of general interest may be inserted here.

The snow-white Daniel, whom Sir W. Barrett and Sir A. C. Doyle and all other Spiritualists quote as one of the pillars of the movement, as a spotless worker of the most prodigious miracles, was quite the most successful and cynical adventurer in the history of Spiritualism. He was no "paid adventurer," says Sir A. C. Doyle in his New Revelation (p. 28), but "the nephew of the Earl of Home." To the general public that statement suggests a cultivated and refined member of the British aristocracy, above all suspicion of fraud. It is the precise opposite of the truth. Even Daniel himself never pretended that he was more than a son of a bastard son of the Earl of Home. He appears first as a penniless adventurer in America at the age of fifteen, and he lived on his Spiritualistic wits until he died. He married a wealthy Russian lady in virtue of his pretensions, and his second marriage was based on the same pretensions. It is true that he did not charge so much a sitter. He had a more profitable way. He lived—apart from his wives and a few lectures (supported by his followers)—on the generosity of his dupes all his life.

In the Debate Sir A. C. Doyle tried to defend him against one grave charge I brought against the white lamb. In 1866 a wealthy London widow, Mrs. Lyon, asked Daniel to get her into touch with her dead husband. The gifted medium did so at once, of course. For this he received a fee of thirty pounds, nominally as a subscription to the Spiritual AthenÆum, of which he was paid secretary. Daniel stuck to the lady, and got immense sums of money from her; and a London court of justice compelled him to return the lot.

Now, Sir A. C. Doyle, who said several times in the Debate that I did not know what I was talking about, while he had read "the literature of my opponents as well as my own," asserts: "I have read the case very carefully, and I believe that Home behaved in a perfectly natural and honourable manner." He quotes Mr. Clodd (who has, apparently, been misled by Podmore's too lenient account of the case), but I prefer to deal with Sir Arthur's own assurance that he has "read the case very carefully."

It was on in London, under Vice-Chancellor Gifford, from April 21 to May 1, 1868. Sir A. C. Doyle seems to regard Mrs. Lyon's affidavit as waste-paper. She swears that Home brought a fictitious message from her dead husband, ordering her to adopt Daniel and endow him, and she gave him at once £26,000. She swears that, when Home's birthday came round, another fictitious message ordered her to give Daniel a further fat cheque, and she gave him £6,798. Sir A. C. Doyle may set aside all this as "lies," because he is determined to have at least one snow-white medium in the nineteenth century, and his cause cannot afford to lose Home's miracles. But when he and other writers say that Home was acquitted of dishonourable conduct, they are, if they have read Gifford's decree, saying the exact opposite of the truth. It is enough to mention that Vice-Chancellor Gifford decided that "the gifts and deeds are fraudulent and void," and he added:—

The system [Spiritualism], as presented by the evidence, is mischievous nonsense—well calculated on the one hand to delude the vain, the weak, the foolish, and the superstitious; and on the other to assist the projects of the needy and the adventurer. Beyond all doubt there is plain law enough and plain sense enough to forbid and prevent the retention of acquisitions such as these by any medium, whether with or without a strange gift.

That is the official judgment which Spiritualists constantly represent as acquitting Home of fraud! This man, scornfully lashed as a greedy impostor from the British Bench, is the snow-white medium recommended to the public by Sir A. C. Doyle, Sir W. Barrett, Sir W. Crookes, and Sir O. Lodge. Sir Arthur adds in his Vital Message (p. 55) that "the genuineness of his psychic powers has never been seriously questioned." That statement is hardly less astounding. Home's performances, which we will examine in the third chapter, were regarded by the overwhelming majority of the cultivated people of his time as trickery of the most sordid description from beginning to end. Has Sir A. C. Doyle never heard of Browning's "Sludge"? It expressed the opinion of nearly all London.

As to Stainton Moses, the other lamb, an ex-minister who ran Home close in sleight-of-hand and foot (in the dark), it is enough to say, with Carrington, that "no test conditions were ever allowed to be imposed upon this medium." Spiritualists ought to quote that whenever they quote the miracles of Stainton Moses. His tricks were always performed—in very bad light (if any)—before a few chosen friends, who had not the least inclination to look for fraud. Home was never exposed, though he was once caught, because he chose his sitters. But Stainton Moses chose a far more exclusive circle of sitters, and never once had a critical eye on him. We shall see that the tricks themselves brand him as a fraud. He was not exposed; but it was the sitters who were lambs, not Stainton Moses.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in effect, recommends two further mediums as snow-white. One is Kathleen Goligher, of Belfast, whose performances shall speak for her in our third chapter. The other is "Eva C.," whose miracles will be examined in the second chapter. We shall see that she was detected cheating over and over again. At the present juncture, however, I would make only a few general remarks about this living "lamb."

In a work which was published in 1914—in German by Baron von Schrenck-Notzing, and in French by Mme. Bisson (they are not two distinct books, as Sir A. C. Doyle says)—there are 150 photographs of "materializations" with this medium. We shall see that they tell their own story of crude imposture. In the introductory part of his book Baron Schrenck describes the character of the lady (pp. 51-4). He says, politely, that she has "moral sentiments only in the ego-centric sense" (that is to say, none); that she "behaves improperly to herself"; that she "lost her virginity before she was twenty"; and that she has "a lively, erotic imagination" and an "exaggerated idea of her charms and her influence on the male sex." That is bad enough for a snow-white Vestal Virgin, a sacred portal of the new revelation. But worse was to follow; and it was evident to me during the Debate that, while Sir A. C. Doyle twitted me with knowing nothing about these matters, he was himself quite ignorant of the developments of this case six years before. The young woman's real name, Marthe Beraud, had been concealed by Baron Schrenck, and her age mis-stated by six years, for a very good reason—she is the "Marthe B." who was recommended to us in 1905 as a wonderful medium by Sir Oliver Lodge, and who was detected and exposed (in Algiers) in 1907! Baron Schrenck was forced to acknowledge her real age and name in 1914.

Where, then, are the snow-whites? Does Sir A. C. Doyle want us to go back to the pure early days of the movement? Take the Foxes, who began the movement. In 1888 Margaretta Fox, who had married Captain Kane, the Arctic explorer, and had been brought to some sense of her misconduct by him, confessed (in the New York Herald, September 24) that the movement was from the start a gross fraud, engineered for profit by her elder sister, and that the whole Spiritualist movement of America was steeped in fraud and immorality.

Perhaps Sir A. C. Doyle would plead that this appalling outburst of fraud, which poured over America from 1848 to 1888, was only the occasion of the appearance of genuine mediums. Well, who are they? Take the mediums who founded Spiritualism in England from 1852 onward. Was Foster white? As early as 1863 the Spiritualist Judge, Edmonds, learned "sickening details of his criminality." Was Colchester, who was detected and exposed, white? What was the colour of the Holmes family, whose darling spirit-control, "Katie King," got so much jewellery from poor old R. D. Owen before she was found out? Are we to see no spots on the egregious "Dr." Monck, who pretended that he was taken from his bed in Bristol and put to bed in Swindon by spirit hands? Or in corpulent Mrs. Guppy (an amateur who duped A. Russel Wallace for years), who swore that she had been snatched from her table in her home at Ball's Pond, taken across London (and through several solid walls) for three miles at sixty miles an hour, and deposited on the table in a locked room? Was Charles Williams white? He was, with Rita, detected by Spiritualists at Amsterdam in 1878 with a whole ghost-making apparatus in his possession. Were Bastian and Taylor white? They were similarly exposed at Arnheim in 1874. Was Florence Cook, the pupil of Herne (the transporter of Mrs. Guppy at sixty miles an hour) and bewitcher of Sir W. Crookes, white? We shall soon see. Was her friend and contemporary ghost-producer, Miss Showers, never exposed? Or does Sir A. C. Doyle want us to believe in Morse, or Eglinton, or Slade, or the Davenport brothers, or Mrs. Fay, or Miss Davenport, or Duguid, or Fowler, or Hudson, or Miss Wood, or Mme. Blavatsky?

These are not a few black sheep picked out of a troop of snowy fleeces. They are the great mediums of the first forty years of the movement. They are the men and women who converted Russel Wallace, and Crookes, and Robert Owen, and Judge Edmunds, and Vice-Admiral Moore, and all the other celebrities. They are the mediums whose exploits filled the columns of the Spiritualist, the Medium and Daybreak, and the Banner of Light. Cut these and Home and Moses out of the chronicle, and you have precious little left on which to found a religion.

Spiritualists think that they lessen the reproach to some extent by the "grey" theory. Some mediums have genuine powers, but a time comes when the powers fail and, as the audience presses for a return on its money, they resort to trickery. That is only another way of saying that a medium is white until he is found out, which usually takes some years, as the conditions (dictated by the mediums) are the best possible for fraud and the worse possible for exposure.

But Sir A. C. Doyle is not fortunate in his example. Indeed, nearly every statement he made in his debate with me was inaccurate. Eusapia Palladino was a typical "grey," he says. "One cannot read her record," he assures us, "without feeling that for the first fifteen years of her mediumship she was quite honest." An amazing statement! Her whole career as a public medium lasted little more than fifteen years, and she tricked from the very beginning of it. In his New Revelation Sir Arthur assures the public that she "was at least twice convicted of very clumsy and foolish fraud" (p. 46).

Such statements are quite reckless. Eusapia Palladino tricked habitually, on the confession of Morselli and Flammarion and her greatest admirers, from the beginning of her public career. Eusapia began her public career in 1888, but was little known until 1892. She was exposed at Cambridge by the leading English Spiritualists in 1895, only three years after she had begun her performances on the great European stage. Myers and Lodge reported that not one of her performances (in 1895) was clearly genuine, and that her fraud was so clever (Myers said) that it "must have needed long practice to bring it to its present level of skill." Mr. Myers was quite right. She had cheated from the start. Schiaparelli, the great Italian astronomer, investigated her in 1892, and said that, as she refused all tests, he remained agnostic. Antoniadi, the French astronomer, studied her at Flammarion's house in 1898, and he found her performance "fraud from beginning to end." Flammarion himself reports that she tried constantly to get her hands free from control, and that she was caught lowering a letter-scale by means of a hair. Thus her common tricks had begun as early as 1898, 1895, and even 1892.

"Our hands are clean," Sir A. C. Doyle retorted to my charge of fraud. That is precisely what they are not. Spiritualists have from the beginning covered up fraud with the mantle of ingenious theories, like this "grey" theory. Fifty years ago (1873) a Mr. Volckmann, a Spiritualist, grasped "Katie King," the pretty ghost who had duped Professor Crookes for months. He at once found that he had hold of the medium, Florence Cook; but the other Spiritualists present tore him off, and put out the feeble light; so Florence Cook continued for seven years longer to dupe Spiritualists, until she was caught again in just the same way in 1880. From the earliest days of materializations there were such exposures, and the Spiritualists condoned everything. The medium, they said, when the identity of ghost and medium was too solidly proved, had acted the part of ghost unconsciously, in a state of trance. The ghosts had economized, using the medium's body instead of making one. Some even said that the ghost and medium coalesced again (to save the medium's life!) when a wicked sceptic seized the phantom. Some said, when gauzy stuff, such as any draper sells, or a curl of false hair, was found in the cabinet, that the spirits had forgotten to "dematerialize" it. Some laid the blame on "wicked spirits" who got snow-white mediums into trouble. Some learnedly proved that thoughts of fraud in the mind of sceptics present had telepathically influenced the entranced medium!

These things are past, Sir A. C. Doyle may say. Not in the least. In the decade before the War exposures were as frequent as in the palmy days of the middle of the nineteenth century, and Spiritualist excuses were just as bad. Craddock, the most famous materializing medium in England, who had duped the most cultivated Spiritualists of London for years, was caught and fined £10 and costs at London in 1906. Marthe Beraud, the next sensation of the Spiritualist world, was caught in 1907, and had to be transformed into "Eva C." Miller, the wonderful San Francisco maker of ghosts, was exposed in France in 1908. Frau Abend, the marvel of Berlin and the pet of the German Spiritualist aristocracy, was exposed and arrested in 1909. Bailey, the pride of the Australian Spiritualists, was unmasked in France in 1910. Ofelia CorralÈs, the next nine days' wonder, passed among the black sheep in 1911; and Lucia Sordi, the chief medium of Italy, was exposed in the same year. In 1912 Linda Gazerra, the refined Italian lady who had duped scientific men and the Spiritualist world for three years, came to the same inevitable end; and Mrs. Ebba Wriedt, the famous American direct-voice medium, met her disaster in Norway. In 1913 it was the turn of Carancini; in 1914 of Marthe Beraud in her new incarnation, "Eva C."

We will consider the trickery of these people in detail later. This mere list of names, of more than national repute, gathered from one single periodical (the German Psychische Studien), shows how the mischievous readiness of Spiritualists to find excuses, and their equally mischievous readiness to admit "phenomena" where real control is impossible, make the movement as rich in impostors to-day as it was half a century ago. It must be understood that behind each of these leading mediums—men and women of international interest—are thousands of obscurer men and women who cheat less cultivated and less critical folk, and are never detected. It is therefore useless to divide mediums into professional and amateur, or into black, white, and grey. You take a very grave risk with every one of them. You need a close familiarity with all the varieties of fraud, and these we will now carefully examine. We will then consider more patiently and courteously what phenomena remain in the Spiritualist world which are reasonably free from the suspicion of fraud.