on and the terrible necessity of preserving the peace
by conciliatory statesmanship, that four years of bloody horror and
devastation might have been spared.

Will the time ever come when nations shall be guided by wisdom
sufficient to avoid convulsions and calamities? Not until there is
sufficient intelligence and wisdom to appreciate the _science of man_,
to understand the wondrous faculties of the human soul, to follow
their guidance, and to listen to the wisdom of our ancestors as they
speak to us from a higher world.

The prophecies to which I would call attention now, came from the
upper world, and came unheeded and unproclaimed! Great truths are
always buried in silence, if possible, when they first arrive. It is
probable that the grandest prophecies in their far-reaching scope will
always come from such sources, and the grandest seers will be
inspired. The grandest prophecy of the ultimate destiny and power of
"Anthropology" came to me direct from an exalted source in the spirit
world, and no human hand had aught to do with its production. But the
human psychometric faculty has the same prophetic power in a more
limited and more practical sphere. We have no reason to affirm that
the wonderful personal prophecies of Cazotte on the brink of the
French Revolution, stated in the "Manual of Psychometry," were at all
dependent on spiritual agency.

The prophecy of our great American calamity, which purports to have
come from the spirit of Gen. Washington, appears in a book published
by Josiah Brigham in 1859, of which few of my readers have any
knowledge. The messages were written by the hand of the famous medium,
Joseph D. Stiles, between 1854 and 1857, at the house of Josiah
Brigham in Quincy, Mass., and were published at Boston in 1859, in a
large volume of 459 pages, entitled "Messages from the Spirit of John
Quincy Adams." The medium was in an unconscious trance, and the
handwriting was a fac-simile of that of John Quincy Adams. But other
spirit communications are given, and that which purports to come from
Washington was in a handwriting like his own, though not of so bold
and intellectual a style. I quote the portion of his message which
relates to the war of secession, as follows:

"The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, when they had attained the summit of
imperial wickedness and licentiousness, as the Bible informs us, fell
from their high estate by the visitation of natural penalties, and the
righteous judg