Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 10 December 1908, Page 9

Current Topics

A Maori War-Cry ' The war-cry of the Maoris who welcomed the American Fleet at Auckland/ says the Boston. Pilot, ' is several laps ahead of any college cheer yet recorded.' It takes a Maori to put ' beef ' into a war-cry. Faith Healing ' The Anglican Bishop of Christchurcli is evidently desirous of giving faith-healing (or mental healing) a trial in his diocese. He invites tho local medicos to co-operate with clerical and other persons who claim the gift of healing. But the medical profession will no more sniff the same air as the ' psychotherapists ' (as the new quacks grandiloquently call themselves) than it will touch hands or brush coat-tails with the bone-setter or the ' cancer-curer ' or the ' magnetic healer ' or otlier-such irregular practitioners. Faith-healing or ' Christian Science ' (which is neither scientific nor Christian) made a multi-millionaire of Mrs. Eddy. We are not aware that it did any good to the bodily or spiritual health of Mrs. Eddy's adherents. Calling it ' psychotheraphy ' may make it sound better ; it is doubtful that it will make it do any better. And both the JMdyites and their brothers and sisters, the ' psychotherapists,' seem to draw the line at broken bones and missing eyes, , and bunions and corns and warts and freckles and a large and varied assortment of the other ills that flesh is heir to. Just over ten years ago, for instance, a pair of faithhealers (or psychotherapists, as we must, it appears, now call them) called upon Dr. Henson, a popular Baptist minister of Chicago. Like Polyphemus and Lord Wolseley and sundry other great personages of myth and history, Dr. Henson has only one good eye. The other was ' lost or mislaid, stoleu or strayed.' Dr. Henson's visitors were of his own faith. They were also firm believers in the Eddyite cult, and it had occurred to them that their pastor would be greatly improved if the empty socket were filled witli an eye like unto the other. The object of their visit was to see him about the replacing of the missing orbit. 'We have been praying for you,' said they, ' that you may have two perfect eyes, and have now come to pray with you Will you not ask the Lord right here and now to give you a new eye?' Dr. Henson piomptly made reply — and that reply rather took his visitors aback. ' What kind of teeth have you?' he asked the visiting brother. 'Why — why, that's a strange question,' stammered the good man, ' but I don't mind telling you that my teeth are mostly false.' ' What kind of teeth do you use, sister ?' he asked the lady healer. ' Same kind,' she frankly admitted. ' Well, good friends,' added Dr. Henson, ' you go and ask God to grow some new teeth in your mouths. According to your theory, He will do it without delay. When you get your teeth, come around, and we'll see what can be done about that new eye.' But the healers, or ' psychotherapists,' came not. Dr. Henson still looks down on his big congregation with one eye. And we have reason to think that his ' psychotherapic ' visitors are still grinding their hominy and their buckwheat cakes with artificial molars. We hardly think the new brigade of Christchurch healers will have better success with missing orbits, or lost teeth, or shivered ' timbers,' or that their methods will liave a more persuasive power with the bacillus of tuberculosis, or of typhoid, or of plague, or of chicken-pox or «wine-fever. Our Loafers If we are to believe Mark Twain, we are all naturally lazy — born tired, perhaps. But most people stand up and fight the indolence in their nature, and (after, perhaps, many a round) floor it with a knock-out blow. They are thereafter steam-engines of acquired activity, of smaller or greater horse-power. And these are the people who, in the great forge of life, shape the destinies of nations and of men. Others give in from the start. These are the iLlaggards of our schools, the loafers of our streets, the able--bodied parasites that laze on public charity and sot their lives away in ignoble idleness or vice. Many of them never reach even the easy pretence of toil and effort of Black,

whom Mark Twain found one summer morning at Hannibal, on the banks of the Mississippi, sprawling under a tree, idly listening to the songs of the birds and watching the steamers as they puffed up and down the waters of North America's mightiest river. ' What are you here for ?' queried* Twain. ' I'm here,' Black replied, ' for to pile them bales on the wharf. 3 'Oh! And now you are resting, are you?' ' No, I ain't resting, because I ain't tired; I'm just waiting for the sun to sink down behind that there hill, so's I kin knock off work.' m Many able-bodied fellows are, like Black, happiest wh«n idle. And indefinite inactivity has not, upon them, tl>e effect which idleness had once upon a time upon a man who (as Chesterfield says) hanged himself for sheer weariness of putting on and pulling off his shoes and stockings every day. Like a black tribe in Darkest Africa, described by Stanley, they hold that constant labor kills a man but strengthens a woman. So they leave the support of their families to their wives, or throw them upon, public charity, without the shame or the remorse that serves as a spur to action. This class is a tribulation to our agencies, both public and private, for the distribution of charity. Mr. Gallaway (Dunedin) presses for the formation of labor colonies, where those idlers shall be compelled to toil. The city of Richmond (Virginia) has, we think, a municipal farm where ' soaks ' and ' bums ' and loafers are sent to till the soil, raise crops, fell trees and chop them into firewood for sale to the civic householders, and, generally, to learn in toil and sweat the error of their ways. The practical Hollanders have a still more emphatic way of dealing with the tramp and loafer problem. There are in that model country of windmills and sluggish canals, six State model farms, occupying a total area of six thousand acres. Able-bodied men applying for public relief are sent to one or other of these farms. They are trained In agricultural pursuits, and, if their progress is satisfactory, they are afforded an opportunity of renting small holdings for themselves. Able-bodied vagrants and ne'er-do-weels are sent to a penal labor colony. They are compelled to work, however strong may be their disinclination to honest toil. A single term of experience in the penal labor colony is usually more than enough for even the hardened vagrant. By these two methods Holland has almost extinguished the race of her able-bodied paupers. A goodly measure of success could hardly fail to be achieved by a similar plan of dealing with the married loafer who is so sore a' trial to the charitable organisations of this Dominion. The Crinoline Again ? The London Graphic threatens a long-suffering world with an early revival of the crinoline. It publishes a recent portrait of a Parisian fayre ladye circled round about by the fortress of silk-covered steel that made such hideous caricatures of the fashionable womanhood of half a century ago. And (we are told) the autocrats that ruie the world of fashion are contemplating the early re-intro-duction of this expansive and expensive mode. 'After fashions have had their day,' says the Philosopher of the Sandwich Islands, ' then is the time to despite them.' All the world wondered how English womanhool ever tolerated that early crinoline, the monstrous, drumshaped, whalebone structure of the Elizabethan period, the fardingale. Pepys's Diary records the wide-eyed astonishment with which, on May 30, 1662, the English CWrt witnessed these extraordinary pieces of feminine architecture upon the newly arrived Queen Catherine of Braganza and the ladies who composed her suite. Then, as now, Paris set the fashion to Europe. The fardingale, however, fell into disfavor. But that was- after it had had its daythen (on the philosopher's dictum) the world could afford to pelt it with scorn. The year 1711 saw it revived— but modified somewhat in the direction of the crinoline of the fifties and sixties. During the last half of the eighteenth century the great, hooped, balloon-skirts reached extraordinary dimensions. The darkest hour is that before the dawn, and the utter extragance of the eighteenth century crinoline (as we may call it by anticipation) led to its abandonment in private life. " But it continued as a court dress till the days of George IV. The despised fashion became again a thing of beauty during and after the

Crimean war (till about 1866). ' An old copy of the lllusttated London News of the Crimean days, in our possession, is a curious comment on the vagaries of fashion, witlx its numerous engravings of vast crinolines that are said to have measured up to fifteen feet in circumference — which, gives a diameter of about five feet. Billings wrote of the crinolines in their day that, however absurd, they held their own ' and grew nisely.' He commended them for a hot day, and wished that lie could sit in one of them all through the sizzling glow of an American July and AugustEnclosed in one of them (said he) ' a feller wud be as cool as a dog's nose in a wire muzzle.' Even follies may have their uses. But we rather think the tramway people will have to revise their rates if the crinoline ' comes in ' again. Mending the Lords The British House of Lords still serves, to some extent, the xiseful purpose of a brake upon hasty, ill-advised, an! ■ panic legislation. But it has long since abdicated one of the chief functions of a revising Chamber — that of the cool, judicious, and independent arbiter between conflicting parties in the elective House; it has become a frankly and thorough-going partisan assembly, in the Tory interest, and a clog upon democratic and progressive legislation. Attempts to reform the Lords from outside have thus far been as idle as the game of dropping buckets into empty wells and drawing them up again. There lies more promise in the efforts to reorganise the Gilded Chamber from within. Some time ago Lord Newton introduced a Bill reducing the right of a seat in the Upper House to Peers unless elected as representative Peers by the hereditary members of their Order, or "unless they had held high office under the Crown in the army, navy, civil service, or in the diplomatic career. Lord Rosebery's Bill follows, to a great extent, the same general lines — so far as one may judge of its purport from the brief cabled summaries that; appear in the daily papers. Such a reform would prevent the repetition of the gruesome spectacle, the libel upo-i legislative methods, that shocked the public eye on September 8, 1893, when great bodies of habitually absentee hereditary legislators — including the halt, the blind, the lame, the decrepit, and (it is said) even the imbecile and the insane — were raked into the House of Lords to wreck the Home Rule Bill which had been carried in the House of Commons by a majority of thirty-four. The London correspondent of the New York Sun of September 10, 1893, described the ' august ' assembly as he saw it on that occasion in the Gilded Chamber : ' I have seen assemblies that compared with it, but nowhere outside of gaols, almshouses ,or hospitals for the insane. No one studied the four hundred figures upon the plush benches without suffering almost a deathblow to his faith in human nature. It was not the feebleness of age that stood out, it was th*j senility of youth, the wreck of middle life, the tottering imbecility of dissipated years. The presence of such intellectual giants as Salisbury, Rosebery, and Playfa^r served but to furnish the contrast. Readers are familiar with caricatures of the average British peer as a repulsiva oreatuie, with sloping forehead and retreating chin. The indictment must stand. A composite photograph of tbs Lords who hold their seats by inheritance would be the personification of weakness — montal, moral, and physical — self-indulgence, bigotry, and intolerance. . . If their faces and forms should once be depicted before the English people, their political doom would be sealed.' A Spiritistic Fraud It was, we believe, an eighty-year-old Portland man who was induced, after a half century of steady absenteeism, to attend a local .church a fe"w years ago. ' You are never too old to learn,' said he confidentially to a friend on his return. ' Now, I always thought that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife, and I find they were nothing but cities.' Catholic writers on the phenomena of spiritism are likewise none too old to learn. And, from personal knowledge, we feel sure that the old Portlander's revision of his notions afoout Sodom and Gomorrah would be a mere bagatelle compared with their altered views on .the subject of mediumistic spiritism if they could only be induced to go to school for even six months to a smart conjuror, well versed in the earlier and later and latest

developments of « spook ' production, < spirit ' photography and the manipulation of the marvellously skilful frauds. of ' spirit ' writing and ' spirit ' drawing We write with knowledge of our subject. We write, too, with a feeding of the deepest regret that authors of such widely accepted authority (among Catholics) on this thome as Mr. Raupert and the late Dr. Lapponi should, for lack of even an elementary practical knowledge of the thousand-and-ono prestiges of 'spook' conjuring frauds, have packed into their books so many erroneous and misleading and mischievous notions as to the real facts and the true significance of mediumistic spiritist ' manifestations.' * We have been led to pen these preliminary reflections by the perusal of an article by a non-Catholic writer, Mr. John Townsend Trowbridge, in the October North American Review, on ' Early Investigations in Spiritualism.' The article makes sad reading, in so far as it is a revelation of the extent to which earnest and well-meaning persons may be misled by even the most clumsy and inartistic frauds of interested adventurers. We mention here the only piece of really skilful mediumistic manipulation that is recorded in the article in question, and we mention it just because it was, in Mr. Trowbridge's estimation, the crowning evidence of the reality of the phenomena which made him a convinced spiritist. Briefly stated, the ' manifestation ' which, of all others, got him down, was the following: (1) Mr. Trowbridge wrote, on a piece of paper, the name of a deceased friend with whom he wished to communicate. Other names of persons were also written, but merely to baffle or test the medium, and' with no intention of communicating with them. (2) The paper or papers were folded. (3) The intervening stages of the performance are not described. But (4) after some time, Mr. Trowbridge received a message, written in red letters on the medium's (baie) arm, and purporting to have come from the former's deceased friend, whose name (it appears) was correctly chosen from among the others that had beeu written on the folded paper. The same performance, we. may add, made a profound impression upon a Catholic writer who has for some time past been writing inexpertly on mediumistic spiritism. As a conjuring illusion, this ' manifestion ' is a rather pretty one. As a spiritistic ' manifestation,' it is, through and through, a fraud. To the present writer's personal knowledge, this particular illusion has been in the possession of the conjuring fraternity for at least over twenty-one years. In private circles we have gone many and many a time through the whole performance described by Mr. Trowbridge, and exposed in full detail the gross fraud and trickery with which it is packed from beginning to end. Our esteemed friends, the Provincial of the Marist Fathers in New Zealand, anl Father O'Connell, S.M., were, we believe, the last to whom we demonstrated or described the various stages of this cruel deception that has been practised — sometimes for a very valuable consideration — on many loving and too trusting souls. * A written description and exposure of Lhe various stages of this piece of trickery would be too long and (as to some of its movements) too technical for the average reader. But, briefly, we may state that this fraud is worked by a combination of 'hanky-panky' and of conjuring. In the first place, x the writer of the names unconsciously — but practically invariably — furnishes the medium with tho means of accurately determining, among a number of names submitted, the name of the person with whom communication is desired. This the victim does on a method akin to that which enables the so-called ' thought reader ' (really a- muscle-reader) to find a pin or "button or sewing-needle hidden under (say) the seat of a chair in the next room. A demonstration of this bit of ' hanky-panky ' would make perfectly clear almost at a^glance what could be explained only by an engraving, accompanied by extended explanation. For the rest, the medium gets possession of the folded paper or papers by one or other of some dozen of well-known conjuring sleights. A rapid glance at the names is sufficient for the skilled eye to pick out the name desired—the knowledge of which is obligingly, but quits unconsciously, supplied by the. earnest and trusting inquirer. A very brief alleged 'spirit message' is th<m

' precipitated ' on paper — ' and the same with intent to deceive ' ; or it appears within a sealed slate (packed with tricks that are vain); or (as in Mr. Trowbridge's case) it is made to appear in red. letters scratched upon the bared arm of the medium. For the red letters,' the sole apparatus required is the sharpened stem of a wooden mateh — which is usually let into the under-side of the leaf of the seance-table by the aid of a bradawl. The match-stem is a crude pen ; the ' writing ' is speedily done by rubbing the* bared arm against it; and half a dozen rapid and vigorous rubs of the other hand give the straggly letters the red and fiery appearance that completed the illusion. This is but one of a thousand illusions — some clumsy, many clever, some marvels of skill and cunning — that have deceived tens of thousands of people and led well-meaning Catholic writers, imversed in such wiles, to give such misleading and exaggerated descriptions of the phenomena of mediumistic seances. In the course of a series of articles on the subject two years ago, we outlined the broad features of the methods of deception practised by leading professional mediums. We expressed the conviction that, back of the wholesale chicanery with which mediumism is saturated, there is a thin, small film of genuine phenomena that defy natural explanation. I\t represents, to our mind, a very, very small fraction of one per cent, of the sum total of the ' manifestations ' that have so captured the fancy and impressed the imagination of our Catholic writers on the subject of spiritism. And we are convinced that these few and rare genuine phenomena are not to be looked for in the performances of the professional medium. For ways that are dark and for tricks that are vain, the • meejum ' is peculiar. Which the same we are free to maintain.