Sir Arthur Conan Doyle meets the difficulty by cheerfully distinguishing between white, black, and grey mediums: the entirely honest, the entirely fraudulent, and those who have genuine powers, but cheat at times when their powers flag and the sitters are impatient for "manifestations." It is a familiar distinction. To some extent it is a sound distinction. We all admit black mediums. The chronicle of Spiritualism, short as it is, contains as sorry a collection of rogues, male and female, as any human movement could show in seventy years. Politics is spotless by comparison. Even business can hold up its head. For a "religion" the situation is remarkable.
Next, we all admit white mediums. We all know those myriads of innocent folk, tender maidens and nervous spinsters, neuropathic clergymen and even quite sober-looking professional men, who bring us reams and rivers of inspiration through the planchette and the ouija board and the crystal and automatic writing. Bless them, they are as guileless, generally, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself. I have seen them—seen men and women of such social standing that one dare not breathe a suspicion—stoop to trickery more than once in order to get communications of "evidential value." But there are tens of thousands of amateur mediums of this kind who are as honest as any of us. We all admit it. It is sheer Spiritualistic nonsense to say that we dismiss the whole movement as fraud. We do not question for a moment the honesty of these myriads of amateur mediums. What we say is that the evidential value of their work would not convert a Kaffir to Spiritualism. Dr. J. Maxwell, a distinguished French lawyer and doctor, who has been a close investigator of these things for decades and believes in mediumistic powers, says:—
I share M. Janet's opinion concerning the majority of Spiritualist mediums. I have only found two interesting ones among them; the hundred others whom I have observed have only given me automatic phenomena, more or less conscious; nearly all were the puppets of their imagination.[5]
No, Spiritualism does not rely at all on these innocent and useless productions. Invariably, your Spiritualist opponent turns sooner or later to the big, striking things, the "physical phenomena," the work of the "powerful" mediums.
Now, which of these were ever "white"? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, when he came to this important point, named four "snow-white" mediums. He could, he added, name "ten or twelve living mediums"; but since he did not, we still hunger for the names. The four spotless ones were Home, Stainton Moses, Mrs. Piper, and Mrs. Everett—not a great record for seventy years (since Home began in 1852). Mrs. Piper we will discuss later, but I may say at once that a man for whom Sir Arthur has a great respect as a psychic expert, Dr. Maxwell, speaks of Mrs. Piper's "inaccuracies and falsehoods" with great disdain. Who Mrs. Everett may be I do not know. If Sir Arthur means the Mrs. Everitt of forty years ago, I insist on transferring her to the flock of the black sheep. In later chapters we will examine the performances of Stainton Moses and Home, and probably the reader will agree with me that these snow-white lambs were two of the arch-impostors of the Spiritualist movement. But a word of general interest may be inserted here.
The snow-white Daniel, whom Sir W. Barrett and Sir A. C. Doyle and all other Spiritualists quote as one of the pillars of the movement, as a spotless worker of the most prodigious miracles, was quite the most successful and cynical adventurer in the history of Spiritualism. He was no "paid adventurer," says Sir A. C. Doyle in his New Revelation (p. 28), but "the nephew of the Earl of Home." To the general public that statement suggests a cultivated and refined member of the British aristocracy, above all suspicion of fraud. It is the precise opposite of the truth. Even Daniel himself never pretended that he was more than a son of a bastard son of the Earl of Home. He appears first as a penniless adventurer in America at the age of fifteen, and he lived on his Spiritualistic wits until he died. He married a wealthy Russian lady in virtue of his pretensions, and his second marriage was based on the same pretensions. It is true that he did not charge so much a sitter. He had a more profitable way. He lived—apart from his wives and a few lectures (supported by his followers)—on the generosity of his dupes all his life.
In the Debate Sir A. C. Doyle tried to defend him against one grave charge I brought against the white lamb. In 1866 a wealthy London widow, Mrs. Lyon, asked Daniel to get her into touch with her dead husband. The gifted medium did so at once, of course. For this he received a fee of thirty pounds, nominally as a subscription to the Spiritual Athenæum, of which he was paid secretary. Daniel stuck to the lady, and got immense sums of money from her; and a London court of justice compelled him to return the lot.
Now, Sir A. C. Doyle, who said several times in the Debate that I did not know what I was talking about, while he had read "the literature of my opponents as well as my own," asserts: "I have read the case very carefully, and I believe that Home behaved in a perfectly natural and honourable manner." He quotes Mr. Clodd (who has, apparently, been misled by Podmore's too lenient account of the case), but I prefer to deal with Sir Arthur's own assurance that he has "read the case very carefully."
It was on in London, under Vice-Chancellor Gifford, from April 21 to May 1, 1868. Sir A. C. Doyle seems to regard Mrs. Lyon's affidavit as waste-paper. She swears that Home brought a fictitious message from her dead husband, ordering her to adopt Daniel and endow him, and she gave him at once £26,000. She swears that, when Home's birthday came round, another fictitious message ordered her to give Daniel a further fat cheque, and she gave him £6,798. Sir A. C. Doyle may set aside all this as "lies," because he is determined to have at least one snow-white medium in the nineteenth century, and his cause cannot afford to lose Home's miracles. But when he and other writers say that Home was acquitted of dishonourable conduct, they are, if they have read Gifford's decree, saying the exact opposite of the truth. It is enough to mention that Vice-Chancellor Gifford decided that "the gifts and deeds are fraudulent and void," and he added:—
The system [Spiritualism], as presented by the evidence, is mischievous nonsense—well calculated on the one hand to delude the vain, the weak, the foolish, and the superstitious; and on the other to assist the projects of the needy and the adventurer. Beyond all doubt there is plain law enough and plain sense enough to forbid and prevent the retention of acquisitions such as these by any medium, whether with or without a strange gift.