We are therefore reduced to the Spiritualist claim that a medium really receives information from spirits, and we have to see on what sort of evidence this is based. Now there is an aspect of this question which even the leading Spiritualists do not face very candidly. More than twenty years ago it was felt, and rightly felt, by Spiritualists that at least a long step forward would be made if they left sealed or cipher-messages at death, and communicated the contents or the key of these from "beyond." It is well known how Myers left with Sir Oliver Lodge a sealed message of this description. A month after his death he "got into touch" with Lodge through the medium Mrs. Thompson. Unhappily he had forgotten all about the message, and even about the Society for Psychical Research! Next the supremely gifted Mrs. Verrall got into touch with Myers. By this time--it was the end of 1904--Myers had had time to get adjusted, and was talking more or less rationally through Mrs. Verrall. If there had not been a very material test in reserve, Sir O. Lodge and his friends would have sworn that the messages were from the spirit of Myers. As it was, they were so confident that on December 13, 1904, they solemnly opened the precious envelope. They were struck dumb when there was not the least correspondence between Mrs. Verrall's message from Myers and the message he had left in the envelope. 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.