THE SENTENCE IN THE SLADE CASE.
TIME Magistrate's decision in the Slade case will not, we think, 1 receive everywhere the applause which it received on Tues- day at Mr. Nfaskelyne's entertainment, when " Psycho " an- nounced the sentence just pronounced to an uproariously ap- proving audience. A great many people with a taste for enjoying scorn as the highest of intellectual gratifications will doubtless be gratified by a severe blow dealt to a super- stition they despise—the intolerance of the intellect not "having died out of modern life as completely as intolerance of the heart —but a great many more who also believe it to be a super- stition will doubt whether this is the way to put down a superstition, however contemptible ; and they, we think, will be the wiser of the two parties. We have no quarrel with Mr. Flowers, who was only too scrupulously fair in his investigation of the case, and whose good-humoured patience and impartiality were the admiration of all in Court, and we have no doubt, until a superior Court otherwise decides, of the legality of his decision ; but we cannot deny that the sentence—the first in- flicted for the offence, and inflicted on a foreigner for acts not illegal in his own country—impresses us as a severe application of a law intended for a different object which may produce much social mischief. The question is, no doubt, surrounded bydifficulties, arising from the necessity of punishing practices akin in form, though not in effect, to Mr. Slade's ; but still we contrive in some analogous matters to avoid confusing offences which are essentially, though not obviously and recognisably, distinct, and we ought, as we conceive, to do so here. We make void a gift, say, to the Catholic Church, obtained on a death-bed by spiritual terror, but we do not annul a gift obtained by the same means while the patient is in possession of his health, and the reason for the distinction applies also to the distinction we wish to point out between for- tune-tellers and "mediums." The priest who threatens hell to the living in order to obtain money for a new church is morally no better than the priest who threatens hell to the dying in order to obtain a legacy, but the law regards his influence in a very different light, because of the difference in the resisting capacity of his subject. If the rich and healthy Catholic chooses to believe that he can purchase absolution from Heaven by establish- ing a new source of religious teaching, the law allows him to do so ; but when he is sick unto death, or even within six months of death, the law forbids him, legislators judging, and rightly _ judging, that presumptive freedom to act is essential to the validity of a gift. The healthy man may not be really free, but to assume that he is incapable of acting voluntarily would be to endanger all freedom of religious conviction, and therefore of moral action, and consequently, religious gifts made during life are in all countries legal. The distinction between fortune-tellers and "mediums "is precisely of that kind. There can be no doubt that knavish persons, sometimes possessed by the queer astrological fancies which are more widely diffused among our ignorant classes than the cultivated suspect, do deceive the ignorant in the grossest manner ; extract astonishing amounts from servant-girls on pre- tence of telling them their future husbands, and very often—in London, at all events—play a part little better than that of pro- curesses. They are punished, and rightly, whenever they are caught, which is comparatively very seldom. There can be no doubt either that knavish persons, possessed, some of them, of considerable knowledge of psychology, do deceive inquirers, do receive large fees, and do sometimes use their influence—as was assumed by the Court in the case mentioned by Mr. Flowers—to extract great sums of money from their dupes. It seems at first sight only fair that they should be punished like the fortune-tellers, and as far as their moral guilt is concerned, that may be quite true, in- deed when they are conscious impostors, as the majority un- doubtedly are, it is quite true, but then is that the whole ques- tion? Is not the voluntariness of the victim to be taken into consideration ? The wretched servant-girl who pays her three pounds to know if her future husband is dark or fair, is not a free agent, is enslaved by an influence which is not her fault,—her hereditary ignorance. She is in the position of a blind man whose tray is robbed when his dog is dead, and who needs special protection both on account of his helplessness and on account of his inability to give indubitable testimony. But to affirm that either Professor Lankester, who does not believe in spiritualism, or Mr. Wallace, who does, is in that position—is in any way so enslaved or blind as to have parted with free-will—is to assert a paradox which shocks the instinctive conscience of man- kind. The medium's visitor may be a man with an overpowering hunger after the wonderful, or a man who is mastered by a desire to communicate with a lost object, or a man whose ideas of evi- dence are disturbed by a priori conclusions about the effluent potency of mind, but he cannot be fairly described as in any way deprived of his free-will. He knows what he is buying just as much when he pays his pound to Slade as a man knows who pays his five shillings to Maskelyne, because he is certain that some- how or other " Psycho "is an electrical machine. The judgment of the latter may be weakened by a prepossession, but he is none the less a free agent, quite as difficult to rob as anybody else. No one would dream of punishing Mr. Maakelyne, if that extremely clever mechanician and conjuror stated that his dynamic force was electricity, while it was really a child hidden in a box, which ex- pands like a camera after it has been examined by the public,
because no one would by that assertion be deprived of his own power of judging for himself, or be obliged to go to the Egyptian Hall if he wanted to stay away. And we cannot see that any one who visits a medium is deprived of that power by any cause, except the causes which make him, or may make him, incapable of judging of a creed or of any assertion material proof of which cannot be advanced. The medium does not victimise the ignorant, but imposes, if he does impose, on people of cultivation, or at all events, people who are in the pecuniary position which is supposed to give them means of so cultivating themselves as to know ordi- nary truth from falsehood. If they are cheated out of their money by false pretences, as the present writer, an indurated sceptic on all such points, firmly believes they are, punish them for that, by all means, but do not punish on the mere theory that to profess falsely a belief in a superstitious fancy in order to earn a living is a criminal offence. How many priests and augurs must there not be on earth who, for that reason, would, if the law were equal, be liable to hard labour ? It may be said, and the physicists have great pleasure in saying it, that the people who believe in spiritualism and psychic force and all that kind of thing, need protection from their deceivers just as much as the servant- girls need it from fortune-tellers, but after all, laws and penal sentences ought not to be based on clever epigrams. One does not send a Pope to the treadmill, even if one has the faith of Dr. Cumming or Gavazzi. Everybody at heart knows that the " in- quirers " do not need it ; knows that as some of the keenest of mankind believe in Hindooism, as some of the widest-minded of mankind are ready to die for Infallibility, as Dr. Johnson believed in the "Cock-Lane Ghost," so men who not only investigate, but actually accept the manifestations shown by " mediums," are, nevertheless, perfectly competent to take care both of themselves and their money. To take care of them in their own despite by penal laws is only fair on the principle on which it would be fair for the English in India, as the more intellectual class, to punish every priest of any new faith visibly inconsistent with the known laws of nature and physics. Why not make it penal to exhibit a sweating Buddha, as the priests do in Kattiawar ?
But we shall be told, here is a grovelling superstition, which, if it ever prevails widely, will work great mischief, and by a legal accident, arising from the secret belief of our ancestors that some day somebody might call up spirits, we have the means of putting it down, and why should we not put it down? Just for the same reason that in India you do not put down any superstition not directly or indirectly involving life,—and for this reason besides, that this particular superstition is not to be put down. The Roman Catholic Church has been at the work through the ages with fire and faggot, and has not suc- ceeded yet. She knows of no offence against the Church—and her list of offences is pretty long—so deadly as the search for that supernatural, or infra-natural, or extra-natural knowledge which she, with her wonderful consistency, and still more wonderful re- collection of her antique conflicts, sets down broadly and finally as the prerogative of the Prince of Darkness, whom it is her business to crush. She has done her utmost to crush out the disposition to inquire into it, and she has failed, and so will the British magistracy. All they will do is to substitute for public seances, which can be observed and restrained, secret seances, which will be beyond control ; to forbid inquiry in private dwellings, where the "medium" is unaided, and substitute inquiry in secret places where the medium has every advantage of prearrangement ; to suppress Slade, who is comparatively innocuous, and call up Cagliostro, who may be very noxious indeed. The way to kill an occult science is not to send its practitioners to the cellar, but to encourage them to practise in Piccadilly. The plain truth of the matter—as it appears, at all events, to a man who is. as we have said, an indurated sceptic in all such things, and who has seen a mango grow from the seed and a juggler disappear instantaneously from the deck of a ship, and knows or fancies he knows how either trick was done—is that the belief in art-magic and the disposition to inquire into phenomena apparently ultra-natural revive periodi- cally, whenever accepted faiths are shaking, or accepted physical knowledge is enormously and suddenly increased. A society suddenly amazed by a new learning, as Europe was in the Renais- sance, or by a new cosmogony, as in the fifteenth century, or by a new set of religious and philosophic ideas, as in the later years of
Louie XV., loses its old landmarks, thinks anything possible, and either believes marvels or, which is the much more frequent pheno- menon, sees no reason why it should not investigate marvels. Its sense of the limitations of power is temporarily obscured. A set of men acquainted with unknown physical facts, as the "sorcerers"
probably were—one. of them, it is nearly certain, anticipated Professor Pepper—or unknown physiological facts, saws presume Mesmer to have been, take advantage of their opportunity, and are followed by a crowd of charlatans, conjurors, and mere rogues, who take advantage of the excitement so created. By- and-by the few facts which generally underlie every such movement become fairly known, the grosser impostors are .exposed, the excitement dies away, and unless persecution supervenes, the new idea is relegated to obscurity, until the time for an advance of the intellect and consequent loosening of the landmarks comes round again. If, however, there is persecution, the spirit of faith, superstition, intelligent curiosity—call it what you like—is driven inwards, and you have imbedded in society for years, sometimes for ages, a sect or faction of Rosicrucians, Illuminati, or Initiated, who think they know something the world does not, and who are very often as noxious as quack doctors. That is the regular result of stopping a pro- fession, or a roguery—we care not which—that professes to reveal what people, under certain conditions of circumstance, fancy is not beyond the grasp of human knowledge. No amount of ridicule will prevent a man who thinks there is something in Mr. Slade which is not in himself, from going on thinking so, and no amount of treadmill will prevent Mr. Slade, whether he be what some of his visitors think him, or a conscious impostor, or a man who supplements a certain skill by acute frauds, from availing himself of that condition of the general mind. There is nothing lost in such inquiries, except time to the inquirers, and perhaps a little temper among those who watch, and nothing gained by their prohibition under penalties, except a great increase of the secret and weakening doubt whether there is not "something in it." You might as well attempt to put down Spiritualism by autos da fe, as attempt to suppress Slades by the treadmill.
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