that it was determined to invite Mrs. Piper to visit England and submit to investigation under conditions that would make fraudulent acquisition of knowledge impossible. The plan, as actually carried out, was to make her virtually a prisoner in the home of Mr. Myers. Her baggage was searched, her mail opened; yet at no time was evidence forthcoming even remotely suggesting that she obtained her trance information by normal means. Not all of the séances she gave while in England were equally impressive; but at many of them her utterances seemed to be so strikingly evidential of the identity of the "spirit" purporting to communicate through her that many members of the Society felt that their quest was nearing its end. Others, under the leadership of Mr. Podmore, frankly expressed their conviction that, although no charge of fraud could be successfully laid against her, everything she had communicated of evidential value might be satisfactorily accounted for by the hypothesis of telepathy between living minds. Dr. Hodgson himself, who returned to the United States with Mrs. Piper, was strongly opposed to accepting the spiritistic view, as appeared from a lengthy report issued by him after four years more of unremitting investigation. But almost before this report was in print Mrs. Piper's mediumship entered into a new phase that shook his skepticism to its foundation. Hitherto she had been "controlled" chiefly by a motley band of "spirits" who gave themselves Latin names, refused to reveal their identity, but claimed to act as intermediaries, so to speak, be tween the sitters and their deceased acquaintances. Now, following the death of a close friend of Dr. Hodgson's, the Latin "controls were gradually ousted, and the friend's "spirit" began to take their place, giving such convincing proofs of his identity that Dr. Hodgson felt that the telepathic hypothesis would no longer suffice, and that he really was in communication with the man he had known so well in life. In 1898 he publicly announced his acceptance of the spiritistic hypothesis as the only one adequate to explain all the facts, and two years later a similar announcement was made by another investigator of Mrs. Piper, Professor J. H. Hyslop, who believed that he had been brought into touch through her with dead relatives and friends. From that day to the present a warm controversy has been in progress, both in England and in the United States, between the advocates of the telepathic and the spiritistic hypothesis as explanatory of the phenomena manifesting through Mrs. Piper and other automatic mediums who have since sprung into prominence-more especially certain Englishwomen, Mrs. Verrall, Mrs. Thompson, Mrs. Forbes, and Mrs. Holland. In this country, however, it must be said, there has been at no time the sustained and earnest interest in psychical research evident in England. The work of organized investigation has practically been left to four men-Professor James, Professor Hyslop, the late Dr. Hodgson, and, more recently, Mr. Hereward Carrington. The American Society for Psychical Research, founded under such auspicious circumstances in 1884, lapsed in 1889 into a mere branch of the English Society, and, although reorganized as an independent body in 1906, its work has since been carried on almost single-handed by Professor Hyslop. Believing firmly, as he does, in the superiority of the spiritistic to the telepathic hypothesis as explanatory of the phenomena in question, it is inevitable that the publications of the American Society should be dominantly spiritistic in tone. And they are so much so that, as a matter of fact, criticism of the spiritistic hypothesis and advocacy of the telepathic comes not so much from members of the Society as from investigators not connected with it. In the English Society a different situation prevails, though even there it almost seems as though the advocates of telepathy as against spiritism are constantly becoming fewer. Every year witnesses new accessions to the spiritistic camp. The latest "convert" is Sir Oliver Lodge, who, after more than twenty years of investigation, has at last proclaimed his belief that telepathy "is strained to the breaking point" when applied to explain all the phenomena of the Piper-Verrall-Thompson-Forbes-Holland group of mediums. Yet it would be doing the Society a grave injustice to infer that, because individual members affirm that satisfactory proof of spirit communication has been obtained, it, as a Society, indorses this view. On the contrary, from the beginning it has been consistently cautious in its pronouncements. Beyond accepting telepathy as proved-which, by the way, is as yet not the opinion of the scientific world, notwithstanding that the evidence to sustain it has been constantly strengthened with the passage of time-the Society for Psychical Research has reached almost no positive conclusions. And there seems to be no warrant for believing that it will now so far depart from the standards set by its founders as, in the words of an indignant but hasty critic, to "cease to be an organization for scientific inquiry and turn itself into an organization for the propagation of spiritism." One criticism, however, may in all fairness be made. In concentrating their efforts on the study of the "evidential " phenomena of the automatic mediums, the members of the Society have of recent years unquestionably neglected the important field for investigation opened up by the researches of Myers and Gurney in the subconscious nature of man. neglect, though, is probably only a passing phase, and one day we shall, it is likely, find them, under the inspiration of some second Myers or second Gurney, probing once more into the mysteries of the "subliminal" with results still more beneficial to mankind, and adding appreciably to the Society's present record of solid and valuable achievement. I Pericles Of Smyrna and New York With Drawings by Wladyslaw T. Benda T now appears that the worthy Powhatan was visibly alarmed over the immigration of Captain Smith and his broken-down gentlemen. The English were an unassimilable race, as were later the Germans, the Scotch, the Irish, the Scandinavians, the French Canadians, the Italians, the Poles, the Slovaks, the Jews, the Bohemians, and the others. Yet they have come, and are being more or less imperfectly swallowed and digested. Now a new nation arrives. Not so very new, for there were Greeks in the world before Columbus or Isabella. Even though the modern Greek be only half a descendant of his putative forefather even though he be, as his German detractors insist, more Slav than classic Hellene, still he may boast of a measurable antiquity. However that may be, he, the most recent of immigrants, has come, and, if you may trust the word of all the world from the Italian bootblack to the dispossessed candy merchant of any nationality other than Greek, he is superfluous and unwelcome, as ardently unwelcome as were those ancient Greeks who migrated to Troy in a certain wooden horse. When, forty years ago, a son and heir was born to the Greek bazaar-keeper Michael Antonopulo, of Smyrna, Turkey, it seemed eminently fit and proper to name the child Pericles. Christian names had gone out of fashion. The Greeks are excellent Christians, of a Christianity so ancient that it almost antedates Christ. But forty years ago, as to-day, there was alive in Greece and among the Greeks in Turkey a strong, enthusiastic nationalist spirit, and the Hellenes went back in their dreams beyond the dreary centuries of decline under Rome and Christianity to a glorious antiquity when the world beyond Greece was barbarian. Thus it happened that thirty puling infants of Smyrna were endowed with the name of Pericles, and of these, one, Pericles Antonopulo, was destined, after many adventures, to become one day a dishwasher in the New York Yale Club. At the age of twenty, Pericles was a student at the University of Athens. Like his fellow-Greeks from Turkey and other parts of "enslaved Greece," he had come for culture to Athens, the core and center of Hellenism. Here he studied philosophy, history, and the literature of his people. Then, in a village of Thessaly, he taught school. Not the pay attracted him, nor the tenure of office. He received but thirty dollars a month, and even this stipend was dependent on changes in the transient Ministries. But Pericles had a dream of a future Greek Empire, reestablished upon the ruins of Turkey, and to realize this dream through preaching the enthusiastic university man was willing to devote himself to a Thessalian village school. Otherwise it was dull work, this weary round of lessons to uninspired, game-loving youngsters. Even of the "dream" they tired. In vain did Pericles declaim on the splendid heritage of modern Greece. He pictured the new Greece sweeping over Epirus, Macedonia, and Thrace, embracing Asia Minor, absorbing Crete and the Ægean Islands, finding anew its old capital in the sunlit city of Constantine. The millions of "enslaved Greece" would rise at the call of their brothers, the Turks would vanish from the earth, and the brutal Bulgarians and their barbarous coadjutors, the Russians, would be shattered by the prowess of Thermopyla and Marathon. The golden age of Athens would return. Greece, with its warriors, statesmen, poets, dramatists, sculptors, and philosophers-Greece, the epitome of all that was noble in mankind, would rise afresh after its sleep of two millenniums. The world's history would end, as it had begun, with Greece. All day long Pericles spoke of the new Greek Empire; all night long he dreamed of the new Greek Empire. For the sake of the new Greek Empire he did not marry; he would not give hostages, when his country might at any moment call him. Nightly, before going to bed, Pericles said to his landlord, "I shall sleep lightly to-night; to-morrow there may be war." When, finally, in 1897, the war broke out, Pericles cried with joy. At last the Mussulman was doomed; victorious Greece would sweep over Turkey as er! sweeps the resistless sea at high tide over the shore. In a few months his disillusionment was complete. The ill-disciplined, ill-conditioned, outgeneraled Greeks were no match for the Turk. "We have defeated ourselves," cried Pericles, as again and again he heard the order to retreat. When you have waited two thousand years for the fulfillment of an ideal, you are willing to wait a little longer. Pericles saw that if Greece were ever to come again into her own, she must build anew, preserve her traditions, clean up her politics, and, above all, get rich. Money today was what the bravery of Leonidas, the strategy of Miltiades, and the statesmanship of Pericles were two thousand years ago. Thus it happened that Pericles Antonopulo, once of Smyrna, began to think of America as the treasure-house of Greece. He had heard of Greeks who in Chicago, Brooklyn, Providence, Worcester, in hundreds of places unknown to classical geography, had acquired money as naturally and easily as the bee gathers honey. "What a dull peasant, an unlettered shepherd, or a rude baker's apprentice could do; what was easy for slow Achilles or foolish Agamemnon, could hardly tax the courage of a scholar, a gentleman, and a patriot." So Pericles sailed from Piræus, and on a certain September day landed on the pier in New York. Demetrius, a former pupil, met him. Demetrius was not a scholar nor a gentleman, but a peasant and a son of fifty generations of peasants. Yet Demetrius had succeeded. He had begun at the bottom-he had blacked shoes. Then, in rapid succession, he had been fruit peddler, fruit push-cart man, fruiterer, and fruit importer. Now, in his thirty-dollar American suit, he seemed half proud and half ashamed of his educated friend, whom he associated alternately with the University of Athens and the steerage deck of the Friedrich der Grosse. As for Pericles, there was at first a slight condescension in his attitude towards his one-time pupil, but as he noted the superior air which the gilded and crassly Americanized Demetrius affected towards all the gibbering hackmen and runners, a change came WHEN, FINALLY, IN 1897, THE WAR BROKE OUT, PERICLES CRIED WITH JOY " Pericles pondered. Why not? Were not all men alike? Here in the land of the barbarian he might as well put any pride of self in his empty pocket. That afternoon he became dishwasher in the Yale Club and began his struggle for a foothold. The Yale Club of New York is a delectable place, where the service is so unobtrusive that the pleasant, well-fed clubmen believe that comfort is a thing. spontaneous. They talk well in the Yale |