d
fraud. The evidence is strong that the organized system of spiritualism
in America, with its associations and lyceums and annual camp-meetings,
and its itinerancy of mediums and trance speakers, is a system of mere
imposture. In the honest simplicity of many of its followers, and in the
wicked mendacity of its leaders, it seems to be on a par with the other
American contribution to the religions of the world, Mormonism.

FOOTNOTES:

[316:1] For condensed statistics of American immigration, see
"Encyclopaedia Britannica," 9th ed., s. vv. "Emigration" and "United
States." For the facts concerning the Roman Empire one naturally has
recourse to Gibbon. From the indications there given we do not get the
impression that in the three centuries of the struggle of the empire
against the barbarians there was ever such a thirty years' flood of
invasion as the immigration into the United States from 1840 to 1869.
The entrance into the Roman Empire was indeed largely in the form of
armed invasion; but the most destructive influence of the barbarians was
when they were admitted as friends and naturalized as citizens. See
"Encyclopaedia Britannica," vol. xx., pp. 779, 780.

[318:1] Jacobs, "The Lutherans," p. 446.

[321:1] Bishop O'Gorman, "The Roman Catholics," p. 375. The atrocity of
such a plot seems incredible. We should have classed it at once with the
Maria Monk story, and other fabulous horrors of Dr. Brownlee's
Protestant Society, but that we find it in the sober and dispassionate
pages of Bishop O'Gorman's History, which is derived from original
sources of information. If anything could have justified the animosity
of the "native Americans" (who, by the way, were widely suspected to be,
in large proportion, native Ulstermen) it would have been the finding of
evidence of such facts as this which Bishop O'Gorman has disclosed.

[321:2] The subject is reviewed in detail, from opposite points of view,
by Bishop O'Gorman, pp. 489-500, and by Dr. Daniel Dorchester,
"Christianity in the United States," pp. 618-621. One of the most recent
estimates is that presented to the Catholic Congress at Chicago, in
1893, in a remarkable speech by Mr. M. T. Elder, of New Orleans.
Speaking of "the losses sustained by the church in this country, placed
by a conservative estimate at twenty millions of people, he laid the
responsibility for this upon neglect of immigration and colonization,
i.e., neglect of the rural population. From this