CHAPTER 16

STEAD AND SPIRITUALISM: THE 'LETTERS FROM JULIA'

'Many thousands have said: "It was all to me so much humbug until Stead went in for it." . . . All honour to Stead for the scorn, for the obloquy, for the sadness, and for the pain which his quest brought to him. . . . Things to me inexplicable came within the circle of his experience and though I, like Thomas, demand such things in my own experience for final conviction, far be it from me to assert or imagine that a kind Creator had not vouchsafed to him what He has denied to me.' - Mr. E. S. Hole, in Sheffield Daily Telegraph, May I9I2.
'I am addressing myself solely to those who are willing to admit that there is at least an "off chance" that all the religions and most of the philosophies - to say nothing of the universal instinct of the human race - may have had some foundation for the conviction that there is a life after death. Put the percentage of possibility as low as you like, if there be even the smallest chance of its truth, it is surely an obvious corollary from such an admission that there is no subject more worthy careful and scientific examination. Is it a fact or is it not? How can one arrive at a certainty on the subject? It may be that this is impossible. But we ought not to despair of arriving at some definite solution of the question one way or the other, until we have exhausted all the facilities for investigation at our disposal. Nothing can be less scientific than to ignore the subject and to go on living from day to day in complete uncertainty whether we are entities which dissolve like the morning mist when our bodies die, or whether we are destined to go on living after the change we call death.' - W. T. Stead in Preface to After Death, the revised and enlarged edition of Letters from Julia.

I

JULIA

	T HE reader will have noted that saying of Stead's about his being I remembered a hundred years hence, if at all, as Julia's Amanuensis. 
	Who was Julia? Stead's fellow-spirtualists know her story by heart, but for most of his other friends and admirers the name has very vague associations. 'A spook of some kind who was by way of writing all sorts of queer things with Stead's hand' - that would be their answer to the question. There are, I am sure, many thousands among them who, for all their interest in Stead's character and achievements, have never made acquaintance with the volume, first issued in 1897, entitled Letters from Julia, or Light from the Borderland, received by automatic writing from one who has gone before. Yet it had to be reprinted seven times during the subsequent twelve years and it has been translated into French, German, Italian, Russian, and Hindustani, and there have been editions of it also in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland.1 In 1914 it came out in a new and enlarged form under the title After Death, with a long Preface which Stead had written in 1909, and an introductory note by his daughter. Stead had intended to use the Preface as soon as a second series of the Letters should be completed. 'This later series,' Miss Stead tells us, 'was never finished, and the fifteen letters which were wntten by Julia in the same manner as those already, i.e. through my father's hand, are of so much interest, in that they open up new lines of thought and show how in some matters Julia has changed her views as she has gained more knowledge of the life across the Border, that I have decided to include them in this volume- unfinished as they are - just as they were given to my father by Julia.'
	It seems to me quite clear that readers who are anxious to form any kind of opinion worth having upon Julia and the part she played in Stead's development must read this volume through for themselves. Therefore I shall not attempt to treat of it in any detail. I shall note merely a few points of special interest - things which Stead recorded often enough elsewhere but which cannot be passed over without mention in his biography.
Here, to begin with, is Stead's own account in the Preface of the one supernatural gift to which he laid claim,- the gift which enabled Julia to employ him as her 'amanuensis':
	'I have what is called the gift of automatic handwriting. By that I....next page...
<Footnote:
 1 Miss Felicia Scatcherd, one of Stead's greatest friends and one of those in warmest sympathy with him in regard to spiritualism, tells me that Letters from Julia appeared also as a serial in the leading modern Greek review, founded by Dr. Drakoules. End Footnote>
mean that I can, after making my mind passive, place my pen on paper, and my hand will write messages from friends at a distance; whether they are in the body or whether they have experienced the change called death, makes no difference.
	'The advantage of obtaining such automatic messages from a friend who is still on this side of the grave is that it is possible to verify their accuracy by referring to the person from whom the message comes. I may say, in order to avoid misapprehension, that in my case the transmitter of the message is seldom conscious of having transmitted it and is sometimes surprised and annoyed to find that his unconscious mind has sent the message.'

	Here Stead proceeds to give his favourite illustration of the way in which messages thus came to him from the living: the case of a friend of his, a lady who had been spending the week-end at Haslemere and who had promised to lunch with him on the following Wednesday if she returned to town. Late on the Monday afternoon he wished to know whether she was in fact returning and placing his pen on paper he 'mentally asked her' the question. Whereupon his hand wrote as follows:

	'I am very sorry to tell you I have had a very painful experience of which I am ashamed to speak. I left Haslemere at 2.27 p.m. in a second-class carriage in which there were two ladies and one gentleman. When the train stopped at Godalming the ladies got out and I was left alone with the man. Mter the train started he left his seat and came close to me. I was alarmed and repelled him. He refused to go away and tried to kiss me. I was furious. We had a struggle. I seized his umbrella and struck him, but it broke and I was beginning to fear that he would master me when the train began to slow up before arriving at Guildford station. He got frightened, let go of me and before the train reached the platform he jumped out and ran away. I was very much upset. But I have the umbrella.'

	Stead says that he then sent his secretary to her - presumably to her London home - with a note saying merely that he was very sorry to hear what had happened, and adding: 'Be sure and bring the man 5 umbrella on Wednesday.' She wrote in reply: 'I am very sorry you know anything about it. I had made up my mind to tell nobody. I will bring the broken umbrella, but it was my umbrella, not his.'

	That, he declares, was the only mistake in the message which he had received. Since then, he proceeds to say, he had been in the habit of receiving automatic messages from many of his friends in the same way: 'In some the percentage of error is larger, but as a rule the messages are astonishingly correct.'
	Now we come to messages from the dead and in the first instance to the messages from Julia.
	One of the most notable among Stead's associates in the early 'Nineties was Lady Henry Somerset, so famous in the world of social reform. While visiting her in 1892 at Eastnor Castle in Somerset, he met a young American lady, Miss E. This Miss E had had a great friend, also an American, named Julia Ames, whom Stead himself had met in London in 1890. Miss E and Julia Ames had been like sisters and they had promised that whichever died first would return to show herself to the other in order to demonstrate the reality of the world beyond the grave. Shortly after this pledge had been given, Julia Ames died. 'Within a few weeks,' according to Stead, 'she aroused her friend from her sleep in Chicago, and showed herself by her bedside looking radiantly happy. Mter remaining silent for a few minutes she slowly dissolved into a light mist which remained in the room for half an hour.'
	It was some months later that Miss E came back to England and was at Eastnor Castle. Here Julia reappeared for a second time to her one evening. Stead says that Miss E 'was wide awake and again she saw Julia as distinct and as real as in life.' No words were spoken. Miss E told Stead the strange story and asked him, knowing his intense interest in all such things, whether he could get her a message from Julia.

	'I offered to try (Stead tells us), and next morning, before breakfast, in my own room, my hand wrote a very sensible message, brief but to the point. I asked for evidence as to the identity of the transmitter. My hand wrote: "Tell her to remember what I said when last we came to Minerva." I protested that the message was absurd. My hand persisted and said that her friend would understand it. I felt so chagrined at the absurdity of the message that for a long time I refused to deliver it.'

	When at last he did so Miss E exclaimed, 'Did she actually write that? Then it is Julia herself and no mistake.'
	'How,' Stead asked, bewildered, 'could you come to Minerva?'
	'Oh,' Miss E replied, 'of course, you don't know anything about that. Julia, shortly before her death, had bestowed the pet name of "Minerva" upon Miss Willard, the founder of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and had given her a brooch with a cameo of Minerva. She never afterwards called her anything but Minerva, and the message which she wrote with your hand was substantially the same that she gave to me on the last time when Minerva and I came to bid her good-bye on her death-bed.'
	'Here again,' Stead points out, 'there was a slight mistake. Minerva had come to her (Julia) instead of Julia going to Minerva, but otherwise the message was correct.'
	Having given several other such instances, Stead comes to his communications with his son, Willie, who had died in December 1908. He declares that he had long been convinced of the possibility of intercourse with the departed, but had always said: 'I will wait until some one in my own family has passed beyond the grave before I finally declare my conviction on this subject.'

	'Twelve months ago this December (he continues) I saw my eldest son, whom I had trained in the fond hope that he would be my successor, die at the early age of thirty-three. The tie between us was of the closest. No one could deceive me by fabricated spurious messages from my beloved son.
	'Twelve months have now passed, in almost every week of which I have been cheered and comforted by messages from my boy, who is nearer and dearer to me than ever before. The preceding twelve months I had been much abroad. I heard less frequently from him in that year than I have heard from him since he passed out of our sight. I have not taken his communications by my own hand. I knew him so well that what I wrote might have been the unconscious echoes of converse in the past. He has communicated with me through the hands of two slight acquaintances and they (the communications) have been, one and all, as clearly stamped with the impress of his own character and mode of thought as any of the letters he wrote to me during his sojourn on earth.
'After this, I can doubt no more. For me the problem is solved, the truth is established, and I am glad to have this opportunity of testifying publicly to all the world that, so far as I am concerned, doubt on this subject is henceforth impossible.'

	The certainty that he was in spiritual communion with his son would naturally be the climax, so to speak, to Stead's apprenticeship to spiritualism; but, as a matter of fact, there does not seem to have been any uncertainty in his convictions at any previous period since the earliest of the Julia messages. On another page in his Preface we find him saying:

	'The practice of communicating with my departed friends has been to me for fifteen years a source of constant inspiration, consolation and encouragement. I am still in intimate and friendly converse with Julia. Nor have I directly or indirectly found the practice hurtful. On the contrary it has been most helpful. But I have never carried the practice to an extreme. Half an hour a day on an average is the maximum time allotted to a communication with those on the other side. Nor have I ever permitted any of the Unseen to use my hand without my own consent or without Julia's assent. To have enjoyed such a friendship without interruption for so many years I count among the greatest privileges of my life.'

	After another allusion to the 'comfort unspeakable' which he has derived from his talks with his dead son, Stead continues:

	'But for this, I should never have persisted in a practice which has brought with it much material loss and no slight discredit. No one who knows anything of the prejudice that exists on the subject will deny that I have no personal interest to serve in taking up the exceedingly unpopular and much-ridiculed position of a believer in the reality of such communications. For years I have laboured under a serious disadvantage on this account in many ways, both private and public. My avowal of my conviction in this matter has been employed to discount and discredit everything I have done or said or written. But these disadvantages are as dust in the balance compared with the comfort and consolation I have derived from my communications with those on the other side.'

	After this general confession of faith, Stead proceeds to give his reasons for believing that the 'intelligence' which moved his hand when the Letters from Julia were written could not possibly have been his own and must have been that of Julia Ames:
	'Yet (he proceeds), while the source of these messages is a matter of the first importance in so far as they bear testimony to things not within human ken, the intrinsic value of three-fourths of the Letters from Julia is no more dependent upon theories as to their origin than the merits of Shakespeare's plays depend upon theories of their authorship. Grant, if you will, that the Letters were written solely by my unconscious self, that would in no way impair these eloquent and touching pleas for the Higher Life. I only wish my unconscious self could write so well.
	'The most extraordinary thing about these Letters is the way in which they have been welcomed by men of all creeds and of none. Protestants and Catholics and Greek Orthodox have assured me that Julia has expressed the faith which they hold. Mrs. Besant told me that Julia must have been employed by one of the Masters to teach me the truths of Theosophy which I would not receive through any other channel. A Sikh professor assured me that with the exception of two immaterial points of detail, Julia's letters might be translated and circulated as an exact statement of the Sikh faith. The distinguished editor of the Hindoo Spiritual Magazine expressed his surprise that a Western writer should have been able to set forth so lucidly the essential truth of the Hindoo religion.'

	These last two paragraphs call for consideration, but first it will be well - turning away from the printed book before us - to glance for a few moments at a very interesting document in Stead's own handwriting which has never seen the light.

II

SOME JULIA MESSAGES

	One of the strangest items preserved among Stead's papers is a manuscript record of messages from Julia during the months August 1892-January 1893. This record was made in the November-December pages of a Letts's Diary for 1894-a foolscap~sized volume. The handwriting is unmistakably Stead's own, but modified in a variety of ways. For the most part it is very scrawly and uneven and it is more of a back-hand than Stead wrote usually. Here and there the writing is almost normal. At other times it becomes quite wild and mad-looking and degenerates into meaningless or incomprehensible scribbles or flourishes. Had this MS. been begun in a Diary for 1892 and finished in one for 1893, one would assume it to be the original record of the messages. It has no appearance whatever of being a mere transcript. How came it into a Diary for 1894?
	However that may be, it is certainly full of interest.
	On the top of the first page is scrawled: 'August 9, 1892. N.G.B., W.T.S.' Underneath comes: 'Julia Ames.' Here are the two opening paragraphs:

	'I will try but my life does not divide itself into days as yours does. So that it does not fall naturally into days.
	'Yes, I think if I were to tell you my experiences on this side it would be better. No, not at all, for I will tell you much more than I tell Hoodie. You see you are to me now nlore than Hoodie or anyone else. You are the one chosen medium by whom I may communicate with the world of men.'

	The entry for August II is of interest, especially if compared with the opening passages of the Letters in After Death:

	'I want to tell you more about the experience I had when I passed over as this is quite different. I will tell you how I felt when I first saw my body lying in bed. I ought to have told you that when I found myself standing by the bedside, I was completely dressed. I did not recognize myself as being anything different from what I had always been. I felt just the same. I had on the same kind of clothes and was, so far as I could see, just the same - nothing was altered. My clothes were the old dress and underclothing I had always worn. The first thing that made me see that I was different was discovering my old body lying in the bed. It seemed so strange to see myself lying quite still and to know that I was not myself but only the cast-off chrysalis of my real self. When I looked at it as it lay there I felt somewhat sorry, for I had been in the old thing for nearly thirty years or more, and when you have worn a dress or a body so long you kind of feel attached to it. And there it lay quiet and silent and senseless, and I looked at it and wondered what would happen now I was outside of it. I was just a bit frightened, but I was consoled because everything seemed so familiar. It was just the same as it always was. But it was not till the door opened and Mrs. Willard entered and began to cry over my old body that I really began to realize that I was really what you call dead. And yet I was never more alive in my whole existence.'

	The entry for August z3 ends in the mad kind of handwriting which I have described, the words 'No, No, No' and 'The Lord Liveth,' being in very large letters. The punctuation is exactly as given here:

	'No you are not a weak miserable wretched creature you are a poor mean worm in yourself But you are the destined instrument of the truth and it will be mighty mightier far than you imagine Oh my dear dear dear friend how I envy you the opportunities you will have You will deliver mankind from the fear of death and bring them into the living presence of spirit. Yes that paper will be your throne the world will hear and listen and believe. My dear William Have you lost hold of the Hand of God? Julia Ames. No I will write no more today. NO, NO, NO, the Hand of God never leaves hold of you. Courage pray more. Read the Bible more and Remember THE LORD LIVETH Goodbye JULIA AMES'

	The entire manuscript, if it fell into the hands of somebody who knew nothing of Stead and Julia and psychical occurrences in general, would be dismissed immediately as the product of a mind unhinged; but, apart from the erratic penmanship, it is not really so astonishing to anyone who has read either After Death or the letters which Stead wrote to his fellow Spiritualists during the last few years of his life. These particular messages from Julia seem to present merely a distorted dream-like reflection of the workings of Stead's own brain. They touch, as dreams do, upon most of the people and affairs to the fore in his life. Nearly a dozen of his women helpers and secretaries, for instance, are alluded to by name and their characters and cap-abilities commented upon. This one, Julia says, 'is too sharp with her tongue'; that one is in danger of becoming too fond of him: of them all, there is only one 'materializing medium' - only one, that is, with whom Julia feels she could 'materialize.' There is much talk of Miss Willard ('Minerva') and of Lady Henry Somerset. There are messages from the Prince Consort, who, in collaboration with John Brown,1 is going to help Stead with a character sketch of Queen Victoria, on the express condition that nothing is printed 'to which Her Majesty
1 Queen Victoria's Highland body-servant.
	
may take exception'; from Parnell - an uncomplimentary remark about Mr. Healy; and from Tennyson. Stead's friend, Mr. M. H. Spielmann, Julia knows to be a bit of a sceptic in regard to her - she thinks, however, she can devise a test that will convince even him. There are a number of prophecies about matters concerning which Stead is anxious. Morley's majority at the forthcoming Newcastle election is to be 1,400; it turns out to be 1,700, but Julia is not put out of countenance by the slight discrepancy: 'this was due,' she explains, 'to the fact that more voted than I expected.' Most of the prophecies are with regard to Stead himself and of a cheerful description. He will found his paper, and it will be a great success. He will, moreover, become 'a wonderful clairvoyant.' Even those prophecies which would be discouraging to most men are of a kind which to Stead are welcome - in fact they but confirm premonitions long harboured almost gleefully. 'You will go to gaol at least twice,' Julia tells him; and she adds: 'You will probably be killed in a riot.'

	I have said that one of the messages was from Tennyson. This had reference to a matter to which Stead had given much attention and about which he had become quite excited - namely, a poem which some one using his hand had written out and which purported to be an unpublished poem of Tennyson's. According to Julia, Tennyson's own statement, as made through her to Stead, was as follows:

	'My wife has read my poem. She has tried not to believe that it is mine, but my son Hallam has read it. He says it is a rough draft of a poem which I intended to write, but that it is due to my reputation to suppress it. My reputation! What is my reputation compared to the truth? I wish I had published it during my life. I wish you would not delay in writing about it to Swinburne. He is a judge. He would not resent your letter. Myers is an opinionated poetaster whose judgement is merely superficial. I think you will find that Morley and Meredith will think the poem is my own. I will write and tell you what to do when you see my son Hallam Tennyson.'

	Presumably Stead had submitted the MS. of the poem to Mr. F.	W. H. Myers, distinguished in the world of letters as in that of
Psychical Research, and had been dissatisfied with his opinion.
	Among a number of other friends whom he consulted was E. T. Cook, whose reply dated June 2, 1893, is very interesting. Assuming, as he of course was perfectly willing to do, that the verses came into existence upon paper in the way attested, Cook was faced - so he said - with two alternatives: either Tennyson wrote them or Stead did. He proceeds:

	'The former would be a miracle, the latter in accordance with known laws of unconscious cerebration. Therefore the evidence for the former must be overwhelming. But is it? Counsel for the miracle would have to make out that you were such an unpoetical fool that you couldn't have written them by any unconscious action of your brain. If I were on the Jury, knowing your versatility I should pay no attention to such an argument and should merely conclude that your extraordinarily reckless and sympathetic brain had broken out in a new place. I should support my conclusion by the internal evidence of the verses themselves. They are not good enough for Tennyson; though they are remarkable enough to be the first fruits of your latent powers in this new line.'

III

WHAT ARE WE TO THINK ABOUT IT ALL?
	
	For the reader who hesitates to accept the Letters from Julia as a revelation, they have at least the interest of a mystery - a mystery which is not to be explained by any theory of coincidence or mere accident.
I am far too ill-versed in psychic matters to venture on any reflections of my own upon the general question, but there is one aspect of it which I may perhaps discuss without presumption - that question of Julia's superiority to Stead as a writer on which he himself provokes debate in the lines cited on page 330. Is it really to be admitted that Julia's 'eloquent and touching pleas for the Higher Life,' as Stead calls them, were beyond the reach of his own uninspired pen? On this, the reader will form his own opinion. For my part, I cannot admit what Stead maintains. Most of Julia's pages convey but little to me and awake in me no feeling of admiration - no feeling of any kind except boredom or impatience; a few pages, here and there, strike me as a not very successful example of the kind of writing which has won so great a popularity for Mr. Ralph Waldo Trine, whose books, like these Letters of Julia, have an immense circle of readers outside the English-speaking world. On the other hand, when I do come upon something of Julia's which seems to me striking or stimulating I say to myself at once - How like old Stead! Among these, are the pages in which Julia discourses on the modernizing of the Rosary and those in which she suggests the founding of her Bureau.
	The 'Companionship of the Rosary' must appeal, one imagines, to a wider audience than anything else in the book. Just at first, of course, the mere words, 'to modernize the Rosary,' grate upon the ear. All devout Catholics, and most reverers of tradition, are apt to be horrified by the notion of Stead and his 'spook' thus tampering with a rite so time-honoured and sacred, and I have no doubt that many must continue to view the proceeding with distaste and disapproval. But to others not thus inevitably prejudiced against it, there is something really beautiful in the method here suggested for keeping watch and ward over not our friends merely but also our enemies. The daily observation of this new Rosary of Stead's could not fail, surely, to be a most beneficent practice.1
	It consists merely in preparing a list (1) of persons, (2) of causes, to whom and to which you are in some relation. 'Go through them all seriatim every morning before you begin your daily work, thinking -What can I do for this? What ought I to do? And when you finish, jot down for your guidance any suggestion that may have occurred to you.'2
	Thousands must have hearkened to these words and profited by them. 'I am not an admirer of your Spooks,' one of Stead's most famous friends wrote to him on receiving a copy of the first edition of the Letters, 'but I am reluctantly obliged to admit that "Julia" has one good idea. The Rosary is excellent and I am going to adopt it and.to make you a Companion of mine.
	This particular 'Companion' - Lord Milner - was likely to carry the idea out more thoroughly than Stead himself ever did. Stead was incorrigibly unmethodical. I have before me, as I write, the little 'Letter Register' book bound in red leather - a Christmas Present to him, probably from one of his children - in which he inscribed his own List. It begins elaborately enough, with a title-page, thus:

COMPANIONS OF MY ROSARY

Compiled, December 1897
W. T. Stead
1 He thought of it himself first, in pre-Julia days, at Holloway Gaol.
2 Stead, After Death, p.202.

	And on the page opposite Stead has written out carefully the names of his wife, his six children and his brothers and sisters. The names of thirty or forty other members of his family circle follow on the second and third pages. Next come Stead's friends from early childhood - some thirty of them; then seven old school-fellows; forty or fifty names chiefly masculine, connected with Newcastle and Howden; and, under the heading 'Girls, Howden,' a group of no fewer than thirty young women - Stead has the Christian names of all of them by heart!
	The sections which follow were less easy to complete, Stead's circle having grown so swiftly and enormously. There are but few omissions, perhaps, from the Northern Echo group of a hundred or so, but when we reach the Pall Mall period it is obvious that Stead is losing breath a bit - the pace is getting too much for him; and a 'Miscellaneous Circle, 1880-1890,' which might well have filled a dozen pages occupies but two. However, a large proportion of the principal names are duly recorded; and, after all, in Stead's case a more comprehensive catalogue would have been excessive - he could not have said his Rosary for the beads. Even as things were, he gave far more time and thought to his fellow-men than, in the interests of his own worldly welfare, he could afford.
	Julia's Bureau seems to me just as Stead-like as the 'Companionship of the Rosary,' and Julia's admonitions to Stead on the subject sound merely like the voice of conscience. 'Why is the Bureau I wrote to you about years ago not established?' we find her saying to him in September 1896. 'All because of one thing and one thing only. You have no time. That is to say, that all the time you have, you spend on this whirling, transitory life. It will not do. Your world will gain no glimpse of the other side, open we the chinks never so widely, when the whole day is spent in the desperate pursuit of an unceasing multitude of this world's affairs.' And there is nothing that is not entirely typical of the working of Stead's own mind in what she says to him on the subject three months later. 'When you have established the Bureau of which I have written to you so often, you will be pestered with many who will want to get into communication with those on the "other side" for no good purpose. The "Two Worlds" will help each other much. But they can also hinder much. And when the hindering exceeds the help, then the door is closed!'
	It is in this letter that Julia describes to Stead the three classes of persons who are certain to seek to communicate, to their own hurt: those who have no self-reliance, the idly curious, and partners in sin.
	'Then do you think we had better drop the idea?' Stead represents himself as asking.
	Julia replies:
	'My dear friend, what nonsense you talk! Do you propose to drop navigation because you hear of storms and rocks and quicksands? No! no! no! What is necessary is to recognize that the Borderland is as important (at least) to cross as the Atlantic, but that it is not any more safe. What you seem to forget is that the Bureau with all its risks, will do what is the most important thing of all. It will practically abolish the conception of death, which now prevails in the world. You have become mere materialists. We must break through the wall of matter which is stifling your souls. And the Bureau will make a way for the light from beyond to shine through.'1
	Are not these the authentic accents of Stead himself?
However that may be, the entire story of Julia is of fascinating interest and should be examined in detail not only in After Death and in Miss Stead's Life of her father in which, writing as one who shares all his convictions unquestioningly, she gives special prominence to his psychic interests and pursuits, but also in Miss Edith Harper's Stead the Man, and in Borderland, the periodical in the editing of which Stead co-operated with his first psychical instructress, Miss Goodrich-Freer, during the years 1894-7.
Not feeling qualified myself to go more fully into these difficult

	 When, at last, in October 1908, Stead decided that Julia's Bureau must come into existence forthwith, he did so on Julia's assurance that the money required for it would be forthcoming 'from America.' And sure enough it did in the way Miss Stead describes in My Father. Stead's article, 'How I Know the Dead Return,' written in the following December and printed in the New York American (as well as in the Fortnightly Review) caught the attention of Mr. Hearst, the proprietor of that journal, and Mr. Hearst cabled on Christmas Eve asking him to become its Special Correspondent in London at £500 a year. 'I wonder if this is the money Julia means?' Stead remarked to his daughter, 'but we want £1,000 and this is only £500 - anyhow let's go double or quits!' And he replied that he would accept the post on condition he received £1,000 a year. Mr. Hearst agreed and Stead, who received the answering cablegram at Hayling Island, telegraphed at once triumphantly -Estelle Stead,
5 Smith Square, Westminster.
Doxology Julia vindicated. American accepts.
	L.S.-VOL. I.	

matters, I shall close the present chapter with some very wise and thoughtful reflections upon this aspect of Stead's character written by one who knew him well, Mr. A. G. Gardiner. They are from a review of Miss Stead's book.1

	'It must be admitted that Miss Stead is right in regarding her father's interest in Spiritualism as fundamental to an understanding of his motives and activities. All that he did had its roots in the visionary. Spiritualism, automatic writing, telepathy, spirit photography, and the rest belonged to his later life, but they were the inevitable developments of a mind whose allegiance was never to the five senses of the normal man, but always to some sixth sense that constituted for him the only valid governance of life. "Voices" and visions were the substantial realities of this phantasmal world. Had he lived in an earlier age he would have been the founder of a new religion or the furious Crusader on behalf of an old one. He would have been worshipped by crowds of disciples, and miracles and legends would have gathered round his name.

	'It is not the purpose here, nor is it necessary, to discuss the merits of psychical phenomena. The sceptic, housed within his five senses, will never understand the visionary; but if he is wise he will leave room for potentialities that are hidden from him; he will admit that there may be a vision that transcends his material horizon and an audition that catches strains unheard by his ear. No doubt there is credulity and fraud. The ease with which fraud is practised, indeed, is one of the most serious obstacles with which the serious visionary has to deal. But, though Sludge the  Medium no doubt deserved all Browning's anathemas, there are a thousand testimonies that cannot be dismissed with Sludge, and at the end of all the sceptic will find the large tolerance of Hamlet's phrase the truest wisdom.  All that we are concerned with here is William Stead's sincerity. He believed with all his heart and brain. He would have joyfully gone to the stake for his belief. And what a figure of triumphant exaltation he would have made at the stake! What hymns and psalms and spiritual songs he would have sung! What speeches and prayers he would have uttered! But he was denied this splendid penalty. He had instead to pay a less heroic, but heavier price. He saw himself looked at askance by old friends, mocked at, and passed by. He bore it all with extra-ordinary cheerfulness and courage.'
1 Review of Reviews for October 1913.

	After bearing witness to Stead's inexhaustible goodwill and complete freedom from personal animosity, Mr. Gardiner returns to the question of his 'eccentricity' and what it entailed for him:

	'But the point here is that he knew all the time the price that he had to pay for what the world regarded as his eccentricity, and that he paid it willingly. He ignored personal consequences and never based his calculations on material loss or gain. He was a visionary from his cradle - a visionary with an overwhelming love of his fellow-men -and he had the visionary's recklessness and reliance upon emotion. "Great thoughts spring from the heart," says Vauvenargues, and Stead always relied upon the impulse of the heart. "I never ponder; when I do I go wrong," he said. This intensity of feeling was revealed in the boy. Miss Stead tells how as a child he sobbed himself to sleep at the thought of his lost condition, and how at school at Silcoates he shared in an extraordinary revival movement among the boys. He could date the moment of his boyish conversion, and his letter to his sister, pleading with her to "come to Jesus," would be difficult to rival in the religious experience of a child of thirteen. Long before he began his career as the "St. Paul of Spiritualism" he had become the subject of premonitions, spiritual intimations, impulses from without which were the governing influences of his actions. He always felt himself in the hands of invisible powers, an instrument whose task was ordained, a soldier who was moving on to serve m great fields of action where his role was fixed. When the premonition came to him at Darlington that he was going to London he communicated the fact to friends as he might have communicated the contents of a letter. The story, told in his own words, of how he was "warned" to be ready by a certain date to succeed Mr. Morley as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, of how he communicated the fact to the proprietor and Mr. Morley, of the rather chill disdain with which the latter received the prophecy that he was going into Parliament, of the fulfilment of that prophecy through the sudden death of Ashton Dilke and Mr. Morley's election for Newcastle - all this shows the extent to which he was under the dominion of his supernatural counsellors and the candour with which he declared his faith. "No one," he said, "can have premonitions such as I have had without feeling that such premonitions are the only certainties of the future. They will be fulfilled, no matter how incredible they may appear; and amid the endless shifting circumstances of our life, these fixed points, towards which we are inevitably tending, help to give steadiness to a career and a feeling of security to which the majority of men are strangers." ,

	Having enlarged a little on the irresistible appeal made by Spiritualism to a mind 'so eager for visions, so anxious to bridge the gulf between the visible and the invisible,' and having recalled how Stead 'moved in a world where spiritual presences were more real than the figures he passed in the street,' Mr. Gardiner thus concludes his truly admirable appreciation:

	'Whatever view we take of this phase of William Stead's life it would be foolish to attempt to divorce it from his general career - to treat it as an aberration from the main current of his character. It was as proper to him as his youthful agonies over his lost soul or his pleadings with his little sister. He was a spirit who refused to remain in the( prison of the senses. The passion to penetrate the mysteries of the( unseen sprang from the same qualities as those which made him the( incomparable journalist. He was aflame with enthusiasm for human ity. The slow processes of reform made no appeal to his impatient spirit. He must have a consuming fire from heaven, though he had( to storm the invisible and bring the divine flame himself. . . .
	'There has never been in English journalism a more versatile or be wildering figure, or one that challenged the judgement of his fellows ii so many ways. But to all of us, whatever our opinion of his opinions he was the prince of our craft. We shall not look upon his like again With all his very obvious defects, there was in him a certain greatness of spirit, a spaciousness of atmosphere, a universal benevolence that make him a noble memory. He did not belong to our narrow way and our timid routines. The wide waters of the Atlantic are a fitting grave for his bones.'

END OF VOLUME ONE:  The Life of WT STEAD by  Frederic Whyte