nine
years it has grown to ten or fifteen millions of believers, with
thousands of mediums, a literature printed in every known
language, and converts in every quarter of the globe."

With all these facilities and all this success, it surely has been able to
make good its claims, and fulfil its promises, if its nature is such as it
assumes, and its promises are good for anything; and its course should be
marked by a great decrease of crime, by the promotion of virtue and a
general improvement in the moral tone of society, wherever it has gone.
For nearly fifty years it has now been operating in the world; and with
all its glowing professions of what it was able to do, and its millions of
converts, "energized to all that is good and elevating," its impress for
good should everywhere be seen.

But what are the facts?--Just the reverse of what has been promised. Free
love, which is free lust, has followed in its wake; homes have been
ruined, families scattered, characters blighted; while insanity and
suicide have been the fate, or the last resort, of too many of its
victims. And outside of its own ranks, in the world at large, the fifty
years since the advent of Spiritualism have been years of increase of
crime and every evil in a fast growing ratio. Liquor drinking, tobacco
using, gambling, prostitution, defalcations, robberies, bribery, municipal
corruption, divorces, thefts, insanity, suicide, and murder, have
increased in far more rapid ratio than the population itself.

The reader will remember the testimony of Dr. Randolph, p. 105, that five
of his friends destroyed themselves, and he attempted it for himself, by
direct spirit influences. The Philadelphia _Record_, of Feb. 17, 1894,
speaks of the suicide of May Brooklyn in San Francisco, Cal.:--

"The letters and papers left by the dead woman show plainly that
in her grief over the death of Lovecraft she had dabbled in
Spiritualism, and had finally reached the conclusion that her only
chance of happiness lay in joining her lover in the other world."

A few figures, as samples, will be given just to emphasize the general
statements. The following is from the Chicago _Tribune_ of Jan. 1, 1893:--

"The number of persons who have committed suicide in the United
States during the year (1892), as gathered from telegraph and mail
report to the _Tribune_, is 3860, as compared with 3331 last year
(1891), 2640 in 1890, a