“Humbug and idiocy!” cried the doctors.
“A cracking of the toe-joints!” said Conjurer Anderson.
“A scientific trick!” insisted Professor Faraday.
“Spirits are the last thing I’ll give into,” said Sir David Brewster.
“O ye miserable mystics!” cried the eloquent Ferrier, “have ye bethought yourselves of the backward and downward course which ye are running into the pit of the bestial and the abhorred?”
“How very undignified for a spirit to rap on tables and talk commonplace!” objected the transcendentalists, who looked for Orphic sayings and Delphian profundities.
To all which the investigators replied: We merely take facts as we find them. The conjurers and the professors fail to account for what we see and hear. Sir David may give or refuse what name he pleases: the phenomena remain. Professor Ferrier may wax indignant; but his indignation does not explain why tables, guitars, and tumblers of water are lifted and carried about by invisible and impenetrable intelligent forces. We are sorry the manifestations do not please our transcendental friends. Could we have our own way, these spirits, forces, intelligences—call them what you will—should talk like Carlyle and deport themselves like Grandison. Could we have our own way, there should be no rattlesnakes, no copperheads, no mad dogs. ’T is a great puzzle to us why Infinite Power allows such things. We do not see the use of them, the cui bono? Still we accept the fact of their existence. And so we do of what, in the lack of a name less vague, we call spirits. There are many drunkards, imbeciles, thieves, hypocrites, and traitors, who quit this life. According to the transcendental theory, these ought to be converted at once, by some magical presto-change! into saints and sages, their identity wholly merged or obliterated. If the All-Wise One does not see it in that light, we cannot help it. If He can afford to wait, we shall not impatiently rave. It would seem that the Eternal chariot-wheels must continue to roll and flash on, however professors, conjurers, and quarterly reviewers may burn their poor little hands by trying to catch at the spokes.
“I did not bargain for this,” grumbles the habitual novel-reader, resentfully throwing down our book.
Bear with us yet a moment longer, injured friend.
During these same fourteen years of which we have spoken, the Slave Power of the South having, through the annexation of Texas, plunged the country into a war with Mexico for the extension of the area of slavery, met its first great rebuff in the establishment of California as a Free State of the Union.