Listen to the verdict of another man who believes in the powers of mediums, and who has studied them enthusiastically for thirty years, a medical man with means and leisure--Baron von Schrenck-Notzing[3]:-- It is indisputable that nearly every professional medium (and many private mediums) does part of his performances by fraud.... Conscious and unconscious fraud plays an immense part in this field.... The entire method of the Spiritualist education of mediums, with its ballast of unnecessary ideas, leads directly to the facilitation of fraud. If this is not enough, take another gentleman, Mr. Hereward Carrington, who has studied mediums for two decades in various parts of the world, and who also believes that they have genuine abnormal powers:-- Ninety-eight per cent. of the [physical] phenomena are fraudulent.[4] These are not men who have dismissed the phenomena as "all rot." They believe in the reality of materializations or levitations. They are not men who have been recently converted, in an emotional mood. They have spent whole decades in the patient study of mediums. I could quote a dozen more witnesses of that type; but the reader will be able to judge for himself presently. Some Spiritualists try to tone down this very grave blot on their religion by distinguishing between the professional medium and the unpaid. The men I have quoted warn us against this distinction. It is quite absurd to think that money is the only incentive to cheat. The history of the movement swarms with exposures of unpaid as well as paid mediums. An unpaid medium who can display "wonderful powers" becomes at once a centre of most flattering interest; and we shall see dozens of cases of this vanity leading men and women of every social position into fraud and misrepresentation, even in quite recent times. All that one can say is that there is far less fraud among unpaid mediums. But there are far less striking phenomena among unpaid mediums, as a rule, and so this helps us very little. The "evidence" afforded by mediums like Mr. Vale Owen, and the myriads of quite recent automatic writers and artists, is absolutely worthless. What they do is too obviously human.