Miss Dallas tries, in her Mors Janua Vitæ, to soften the blow, but her pleas are useless. The final failure utterly stultifies all the days and months of supposed messages. And this is not the only case. Hodgson had adopted a similar test, and it was a ghastly failure. Other Spiritualists left sealed messages when they died, and not a syllable of one of them has been read. Our Spiritualists do not get into communication with the dead. This is negative evidence, but it is far more impressive than any of the rhetorical and inaccurate accounts of experiences which they give us. It is precise and unmistakable. Every Spiritualist who dies now knows that this is the supremely desired test, yet we have twenty years of complete, unmitigated failure. Men like Sir O. Lodge tell us that they recognize the personality of Hodgson beyond mistake in the messages they get through mediums; but the one sure test, the getting of the key to the cipher-messages which Hodgson left behind, is an absolute failure. It would become our Spiritualists to strike a more modest note, and not assure the ignorant public, as Sir A. C. Doyle does, that the time for proof has gone by and it is for their opponents now to justify themselves. The experience of the last twenty years has been deadly to Spiritualist pretensions.
The truth is that here again Spiritualists had been led into their belief, that messages from the spirit-world were easy and common, by a vast amount of mediumistic trickery. The earliest method was by raps, and we have seen that since 1848 this performance has been a matter of trickery. The next way was to rap out messages with a leg of the table, which was merely a variation of the table-lifting we have studied. These forms are so often used by amateur mediums that it is necessary to recall our warning that the distinction between paid and unpaid mediums is not of the least use. Carrington, Maxwell, Podmore, and Flammarion give numbers of instances of cheating by men and women of good social position. Carrington tells of an American lawyer who deliberately—not as a joke—made his friends believe that he could make a poker stand upright and do similar abnormal phenomena. He did his tricks by means of black threads. Podmore gives a similar case in England. Flammarion tells us of a Parisian doctor's wife who cheated flagrantly in order to get credit for abnormal powers. This sort of prestige has as much fascination for some people as money has for others.
The professional mediums, however, early developed in America the trick of receiving messages from spirits on slates, and this is fraud from beginning to end. The supreme artist in this field was Henry Slade, whom Sir A. C. Doyle regards as a genuine intermediary between the lofty spirits of the other world and ourselves. As Truesdell's account of the way in which he unmasked Slade as early as 1872 contains one of the richest stories in the whole collection of Spiritualist anecdotes, one would have thought that a story-teller like Sir A. C. Doyle could not possibly have forgotten it. From it we learn that Slade was from the outset of his career an adroit and brazen and confessed impostor.
Truesdell paid the customary five dollars, and received pretty and edifying, but inconclusive, messages from the spirits. Incidentally he detected that the spirit-touches on his arms were done by Slade's foot, to distract his attention; but he could not see the method of the slate-trick. However, as the main theme of the messages was an exhortation to persevere in his inquiries (at five dollars a sitting to the medium), he made another appointment. It was on this occasion that he left a misleading letter in his overcoat in Slade's hall, and found the spirits assuming that he was "Samuel Johnson, Rome, N.Y." But before Slade entered the room, or while Slade was going through his overcoat-pockets, he rapidly overhauled Slade's room. He found a slate with a pious message from the spirits already written on it, signed (as was usual) by the spirit of Slade's dead wife, Alcinda. Beneath the message Truesdell wrote "Henry, look out for this fellow—he is up to snuff! Alcinda," and replaced the slate. Slade came in, and gave a most dramatic performance. In his contortions, under the spirit-influence, he drew the table near to the hidden slate, and "accidentally" knocked the clean slate off the table. Of course, he picked up the prepared slate. His emotions can be imagined when he read the words which Truesdell had written on it. After a little bluster, however, he laughingly acknowledged that he was a mere conjurer, and he told Truesdell many tricks of his profession.[14]
This was in 1872. Four years later Slade came to London, where Sir E. Ray Lankester and Sir Bryan Donkin again exposed him. Sir E. Ray Lankester snatched the slate before the message was supposed to be written on it, and the message was already there. He prosecuted Slade, who was sentenced to three months' hard labour. He had charged a guinea a sitter. But a few words had been omitted from the antiquated form of the charge (which I have previously given in the case of Craddock), and before Slade could be again prosecuted he fled to the continent. There, we saw, he duped a group of purblind professors, and he returned to America in higher repute than ever. In 1882 an inspector of police at Belleville, in Canada, snatched the slate just as Sir E. Ray Lankester had done, and exposed him again. He escaped arrest only by a maudlin appeal for mercy; and on his return to the States he succeeded in persuading the Spiritualists—who solemnly stated this in their organ, the Banner of Light—that the man exposed at Belleville was an impostor making use of his name! In 1884 he faced the Seybert Committee, and its sharp-eyed members saw and exposed every step in his trickery. Eventually, as I have said, he lived in drink and misery, developed Bright's disease, and died in the common asylum. Such was the man whom Sir A. C. Doyle seriously regards as the chosen instrument of his spiritual powers.
The Seybert Committee found two different kinds of writing on Slade's slates. Some messages were short and badly written, and they concluded that these were written by him with one finger while he held the slate under the table (as the custom was) to receive a spirit-message. Other messages were relatively long, well written, and dignified; and they regarded these as prepared in advance. Both points were fully verified. At one sitting they noticed two slates resting suspiciously against the leg of the table. These doubtless had messages written on them, and were to be substituted for the blank slate when this was supposed to be put under the table. Slade would then produce the sound of the spirits writing by scraping with his nail on the edge of the slate. On this occasion, however, Slade saw that they had their eyes on the slates and he dare not use them. But one of the members of the committee, determined to do his work thoroughly, carelessly knocked the two slates over with his foot, and the messages were exposed.
The reception of messages from the spirits on slates may linger in rural or suburban districts, but it has lent itself to such trickery, and been exposed so thoroughly, that mediums have generally abandoned it. For whole decades it was the chief way of communicating with the spirits, and weird and wonderful were the artifices by which the medium defeated the growing sense of caution of the sitters. In spite of the exposures of Slade, the English medium Eglinton adopted and improved his methods, and he was one of the bright stars of the Spiritualist world for twenty years. He was detected in fraud as early as 1876. At that time he gave materialization-séances, at which the ghostly form of "Abdullah" appeared. Archdeacon Colley found the beard and draperies of Abdullah in his trunk. But exposure never ruins a medium in the Spiritualist world, and ten years later Eglinton was the most successful and respected medium in England, especially for slate-messages.
Hodgson more than suspected him, and he at last found a man, Mr. S. J. Davey, who was able to reproduce all his tricks. He wrote messages while he held the slates under the table, and he substituted prepared slates for clean slates under the noses of his sitters. Perhaps the most valuable part of his experience was this substitution, which is one of the fundamental elements of mediumistic trickery. Spiritualists—indeed, inquirers generally—honestly flatter themselves that they have taken care that there was no deception of this kind. Such confidence is foolish, as the professional conjurer does this kind of substitution under our eyes habitually, and we never see him do it. In order to make people more cautious Davey, with Dr. Hodgson's connivance, set up as a medium and gave sittings to Spiritualists. They afterwards sent accounts of their experiences to the Society for Psychical Research. They were, as usual, certain that there was no trickery, and that the messages were genuine. Davey then wrote correct accounts of what he had done, and it was seen that the accounts of the sitters were inaccurate and their observation faulty. Some of them indignantly retorted that Davey was a genuine medium, but found it more profitable to pose as a conjurer and exposer of mediums!
In a work specially devoted to this subject (Spirit Slate Writing and Kindred Phenomena, 1899) Mr. W. E. Robinson gives about thirty different fraudulent ways of getting spirit-messages. Indeed, many of these may be sub-divided, and you get scores of methods. One method, for instance, is to write a message with invisible fluid on paper, seal the apparently blank paper in an envelope, and then let the message appear and pretend that the spirits wrote it. Mr. Robinson gives thirty-seven different recipes for the "invisible ink," and sixteen of these require only heat, which is easily applied, to develop them. In other cases the inside of the envelope has been moistened with a chemical solution which develops the hidden writing. One medium used to put an apparently blank sheet of paper in a clear bottle and seal it. Here trickery seemed impossible, and the sitter was greatly impressed at receiving a pious message on the paper. But the message had been written in advance with a weak solution of copper sulphate, and the bottle had been washed out with ammonia, which develops it.
In slate-messages much use is made of a false flap, or a loose sheet of slate which fits imperceptibly on one side of the framed slate. It conceals the message written on the slate, and is removed under the table or under cover of a newspaper. A sheet of slate-coloured silk or cloth is sometimes fitted on the slate, and it is drawn up the medium's sleeve or rolled into the frame of the slate. Invisible messages may be written on the slate with onion or lemon juice, and developed by lightly passing over them a cloth containing powdered chalk. Double-frame slates lend themselves to infinite trickery. Slates are provided by "the trade" with false hinges and all kinds of mechanism. But even when the sitter brings his own slates, as Zöllner did, and ties them up and seals them, the medium is not baffled. They are laid aside, for the spirits to write on at their leisure. At the first convenient opportunity the medium removes the wax, without spoiling the seal, by passing a heated knife-blade or fine wire beneath it, and, after untying the strings, heats the under-surface of the wax and sticks it on again.