A WARE in the past of your love of justice and fair play, I most earnestly solicit the use of your columns to reply to an article by Dr. G. M. Beard in relation to the Eddy family in Vermont. He, in denouncing them and their spiritual manifestations in a most sweeping declaration, would aim a blow at the entire spiritual world of to-day. It appears that to-day the learned gentleman is more hungry than ever. I do not know Dr. Beard personally, nor do I care to know how far he is entitled to wear the laurels of his profession as an M. D., but what I do know is that he may never hope to equal, much less to surpass, such men and savants as Crookes, Wallace, or even Flammarion, the French astronomer, all of whom have devoted years to the investigation of Spiritualism. Now to the Eddys.
Spiritualism is defunct.
Dr. Beard has killed it with one word. Henceforth you must be considered as demented, psychologized lunatics, and so must it be with the many thousands of Spiritualists who have seen and talked with their friends and relatives departed, recognizing them at Moravia, at the Eddys', and elsewhere throughout the length and breadth of this continent. But Dr. Beard seems to be as partial in his selections as he is clever in detecting the said tricks. I admit that I was the only one to recognize them, the rest of the audience not having been with me in my numerous travels throughout the East, but their various dresses and costumes were plainly seen and closely examined by all. The first was a Georgian boy, dressed in the historical Caucasian attire, the picture of whom will shortly appear in The Daily Graphic .