These illustrations will suffice to show the reader what subtle and artful trickery is used in this department of Spiritualism. He will know what to think when a Spiritualist friend, who could not detect the simplest conjuring trick, shows him a spirit-photograph and says that he took care there was no fraud. The ordinary members of the Spiritualist movement are as honest as any, but their eagerness--natural as it is--puts them in a frame of mind which is quite unreasonable. The trickery of this class of mediums has been developing for nearly sixty years, and it has to find new forms every few years as the older forms are exposed. The mediums have become expert conjurers and even, in some cases, expert chemists--or they have expert chemists in collusion with them--and it is simply foolish for an ordinary person to think that he can judge if there has been fraud. We must have at least one elementary safeguard. No part of the apparatus employed must belong to the medium or be manipulated by him; and the photograph must not be taken on his premises. Every Spiritualist who approves a photograph taken under other conditions is courting deception and encouraging fraud. And instead of finding even the leading Spiritualists setting an example of caution in face of the recognized mass of fraud in their movement, we find them exhibiting a bewildering hastiness and lack of critical faculty. Most readers will remember how Sir A. C. Doyle sent to the _Daily Mail_ on December 16, 1919, a photograph of a picture of Christ which had, he said, been "done in a few hours by a lady who has no power of artistic expression when in her normal condition." The picture was, he said, "a masterpiece"; so wonderful, in fact, that "a great painter in Paris" (not named, of course) "fell instantly upon his knees" before such a painting. It was "a supreme example" of a Spiritualist miracle. The sequel is pretty well known. On December 31 the artist's husband wrote a letter to the _Daily Mail_, of which I need quote only one sentence:-- Mrs. Spencer wishes definitely to state once and for all that her pictures are painted in a perfectly normal manner, that she is disgusted at having "psychic power" attributed to her, and that she does not cherish any ludicrous and mawkish sentiments about helping humanity by her paintings. FOOTNOTE: [11] I might add that Mrs. Gladstone is not at all recognized by her own son in Mr. Wynne's photograph. The other figure seems to me certainly a reproduction of a photograph or bad picture of Gladstone. CHAPTER V A CHAPTER OF GHOSTLY ACCOMPLISHMENTS