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. Ever_e_tt may be I do not know. If Sir Arthur means the Mrs. Ever_i_tt 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.