A CLEARING HOUSE AND CENTRAL BUREAU FOR MEDIUMS.
THE chief difficulty for those who adopt fraud on the part of spiritualistic mediums is that the medium must, in order to carry on his or her frauds properly, be a person of large possessions or else charge very large fees, and be able to command substantial credits. But mediums are not very highly paid. Five sittings a day at a guinea a sitting for 200 days in the year would only bring in £1,050 a year gross and say £500 netl The present writer at one time tried to calculate the kind of intelligence department which Mrs. Piper would have had to establish throughout America in order to enable her to find out the kind of things she used to tell her sitters about their private lives. No doubt a great deal of the information could have been obtained after patient investigation by a staff of highly trained detectives, but it would have been an expensive job. Even the picturesque notion that the mediums all over the world pool their information will not work. If there may be combination of this kind there can also be competition, and of a very fierce kind, which would soon lead to somebody giving the whole show away, or else blackmailing th3 organization in such a way as to drive it into bankruptcy. Tne legitimate expenses of a Central Bureau or clearing house for mediums, if it was to be in the least efficient, would be extremely high. One has to imagine a highly paid gentleman at the top equipped with young lady shorthand-typists, card-indexes, folders, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of an office. To him mediums, we must assume, would write in some such terms as :- "Dear Sir,—I am going to have a sitting with a Mr. Jones David Llewellyn Williams of West Kensington. I am not quite sure, however, whether he is a Welsh gentleman of that name who lost a son in the war, or whether he is an American visitor, or a private secretary to a Cabinet Minister. Please let me have at once full particulars as to his birth, marriage, number of children, indeed all the particulars as set forth in Form 48, and also in Special Service Form B6. In order to get local colour I should like an A 1 man put on to watch his house, both in London and also in Wales. A woman should also get in touch with his servants and induce them to read and copy some of his letters. She should also find out from the servants whether there are any peculiar circumstances connected with his rings, cuff-links, watch and chain, or pocket-book or walking-stick. The female investigator, if she can get access to his library, should take down some volume, noting its place carefully, and copy out some passage of a general character which can, however, be made to appear as highly significant in respect of a message. ' Please lose no time over this investigation, as the sitter says he will be leaving London in a week's time, and could not sit later than next Friday. With regret that I have to press you in this matter.—Believe me, yours faithfully, CAMILLA PYrnorme."
For acting on such a letter as this the " Central Clearing House for Mediums " could hardly ask a lower fee than £30. But as we have said, mediums' fees are often as low as £1 ls. a sitting.
Possibly our calculations are wrong, but at any rate those who are going to rely upon the fraud hypothesis, which, once again, we by no means banish, ought to meet this question of expenses. Anyway, the idea of a Spiritualistic Intelligence Department is a very curious and interesting one, and we are rather surprised that it has not been used by one of our novelists or short-story writers. If we remember rightly, Gaboriau or Fortune du l3oisgobay began a novel with an account of a vast blackmail bureau in Paris where the dossiers of everybody of note in France were kept and indexed. You had only to step in and pay your fee and you would promptly be given an amount of information sufficient to blackmail anybody from a cardinal to a single- handed cook, and in a manner which would compel the victim to pay at sight or retire to Uganda.
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