large sum of money upon him,
endeavoured to regain, and did regain, this money by her unsupported
assertion that he had persuaded her illicitly to make him the
allowance. The facts of his life are, in my judgment, ample proof of
the truth of the Spiritualist position, if no other proof at all had
been available. It is to be remarked in the career of this entirely
honest and unvenal medium that he had periods in his life when his
powers deserted him completely, that he could foresee these lapses, and
that, being honest and unvenal, he simply abstained from all attempts
until the power returned. It is this intermittent character of the
gift which is, in my opinion, responsible for cases when a medium who
has passed the most rigid tests upon certain occasions is afterwards
detected in simulating, very clumsily, the results which he had once
successfully accomplished. The real power having failed, he has not
the moral courage to admit it, nor the self-denial to forego his fee
which he endeavours to earn by a travesty of what was once genuine.
Such an explanation would cover some facts which otherwise are hard to
reconcile. We must also admit that some mediums are extremely
irresponsible and feather-headed people. A friend of mine, who sat
with Eusapia Palladino, assured me that he saw her cheat in the most
childish and bare-faced fashion, and yet immediately afterwards
incidents occurred which were absolutely beyond any, normal powers to
produce.

Apart from Home, another episode which marks a stage in the advance of
this movement was the investigation and report by the Dialectical
Society in the year 1869. This body was composed of men of various
learned professions who gathered together to investigate the alleged
facts, and ended by reporting that they really WERE facts. They were
unbiased, and their conclusions were founded upon results which were
very soberly set forth in their report, a most convincing document
which, even now in 1919, after the lapse of fifty years, is far more
intelligent than the greater part of current opinion upon this subject.
None the less, it was greeted by a chorus of ridicule by the ignorant
Press of that day, who, if the same men had come to the opposite
conclusion in spite of the evidence, would have been ready to hail
their verdict as the undoubted end of a pernicious movement.

In the early days, about 1863, a book was written by Mrs. de Morgan,
the wife of the well-known mathe