Transvaal Government would allow Dr. Jameson to come in unmolested, the Committee would guarantee with their lives that he should leave again peacefully with the least possible delay. The offer made by the Government which has been commonly referred to as the armistice was neither accepted nor rejected. All that I undertook to do was to report what had taken place to the Committee at Johannesburg. From that moment we were as free as we had been before the interview to begin hostilities.

I think to-day as I thought at the time that it would have been an act of the grossest folly to send out a force on foot to meet an ally who we had not the slightest ground for believing was in any need of our aid, in direct opposition to the commands of the High Commissioner, and moreover as a declaration of hostilities against the Government which we were hopelessly unprepared to fight. The mere fact of the invasion having occurred prior to the internal rising put us hopelessly in the wrong.

The British Government had declared itself in definite terms from which they could not retreat, and we had the combined Transvaal and Orange Free State as opponents.

The only solution, therefore, lay in relying upon the strong arm of Great Britain through Her Majesty's High Commissioner, whose services had been accepted with a view to a peaceful settlement. He arrived in Pretoria on Saturday, the 4th of January, 1896, but did not meet President Kruger until the following Monday. He appears to . have relied entirely upon information supplied to him by the Transvaal Government, for he persuaded Johannesburg to disarm upon the ground that the lives of Dr. Jameson and his men were in our hands -an error into which he would not have fallen had he made inquiries as to the terms of surrender from the imprisoned officers. He held no communication with our party, and hence was probably not aware of the minute passed by the Executive Council which had been handed to us. The German White Book upon this subject is rather interesting, more particularly telegram No. 20, from the Consul in Pretoria to Berlin, in which he states: President Kruger has explained to me and to the French and Dutch Consuls, that his Government will only ask Sir Hercules Robinson, who arrives here to-morrow, to induce the revolutionary party to lay down their arms.' The discussion and consideration of grievances was omitted. It would be interesting to review His Excellency's negotiations in detail, but that would entail an article of undue length.

6

The motives of all concerned were perfectly honourable.

The goal aimed at was a just and reasonable one, and, but for a little too much self-confidence and impatience, quite within the range of accomplishment.

The enthusiasm of the people in Johannesburg was unbounded,

and had we been in possession of 25,000 rifles we could have placed them all in willing hands during Tuesday and Wednesday.

It may not have occurred to some of our hostile critics that the responsibility for the safety of the huge unarmed population of Johannesburg rested upon the shoulders of the Reform Committee and not upon those of the force from the Bechuanaland border.

Before passing from what must be regarded as the personal aspect of the question, I am bound to observe that I cannot understand how 'transport riders and others coming from the direction of Johannesburg' could have informed the invading party early on Tuesday morning at Doornport that Johannesburg had risen, nor can I find justification for Sir John Willoughby's statement that his force had been 'urgently called in to avert massacre, which we had been assured would be imminent in the event of a crisis such as had now occurred,' seeing that the only crisis' which had occurred at that time was caused by their forbidden invasion, more particularly after having themselves dated the letter of invitation, and telegraphed on the 27th of December to Dr. Harris: We will make our own flotation and publish the letter.'

I share Sir John Willoughby's desire to avoid petty controversy, or I should analyse his report in much greater detail and criticise it by the light of comparison with a report upon the same subject written by four of the officers who accompanied the expedition which is in my possession.

LIONEL PHILLIPS.

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

AND AN ALLEGED HAUNTED' HOUSE

I

ONE of the obvious snares into which we all fall when we talk of what we don't understand is that of misusing the nomenclature of the subject, an error which we may generally avoid by refraining from talk until we are better informed. When, however, we are discussing what nobody understands we have the further difficulty that the nomenclature itself is provisional, probably inadequate, and not improbably confused. Thus, when we say that the subject of this paper is Psychical Research in general and its application to haunted houses in particular, we beg the question twice over at starting. The very term 'Psychical Research' is misleading, as involving the a priori assumption that the special phenomena under observation are necessarily psychical, and not, as is the case in the majority of instances, psychological or even physiological; that is to say, phenomena of brain or body, and not of that undefined and mysterious residuum of the individual which we vaguely designate as Soul. It would be more satisfactory could we substitute some phrase which should rather connote the inquiry into certain special phenomena with the view of ascertaining what claim they have to the qualification 'psychic.'

To talk about 'Haunted Houses' involves us in an assumption even more difficult to maintain than the other. We agree, most of us, to accept the classification 'psychic' as implying, at least, a tenable hypothesis. The classification 'haunted' commits us to very much more. It demands, at the outset, the acceptation of certain views as to life and death, time and eternity, the persistence of the individual and (to make use of phrases which are part of the slang of the subject) 'spirit identity' and 'spirit return.' Such a term used generically can only be applied by reasonable persons to a house in which there occur certain phenomena of sight or sound which cannot be traced to normal physical causes, and which, in the absence of any other explanation, are assumed to be of super-normal origin. As our unit of thought, for the moment, is the reasonable person, we will take it for granted that he will not complicate the problem by begging the question still further, and talking about the 'supernatural.'

It would be in vain to deny that a great many reasonable persons don't want to talk about the subject at all, and no other reasonable person is anxious to force it upon them. They dismiss the problem as non-existent, the evidence as superstition, the inquiry as futile. The reasonable person, perhaps, reflects that these things might seem to them less infinitely little if they knew less infinitely little about them; but being at the present stage of things not in a position to tell them much more, he accepts the great lesson of Nature and of Time, and-waits.

That observant rascal Sludge puts into a nutshell the position I seek to maintain for the moment.

One looks at the roll of the Society for Psychical Research, and undoubtedly one finds the names of a great many of your clever people;' men, one may assume, who have stumbled on the fact they can't explain and who are looking to the Society for the collection and collation of the evidence which in the present rudimentary state of knowledge on the subject is of far more consequence than theory.

The Society has had as Presidents five men of conspicuous position: Professor Sidgwick, Professor Balfour Stewart, F.R.S., Professor William James of Harvard, Sir William Crookes, F.R.S., and Mr. Arthur Balfour, F.R.S. (his political distinctions, except as adding to the weight of his name, are of less consequence in this relation than his position in science). On the Council of the Society we find other names distinguished in natural science: Lord Crawford, Lord Rayleigh, Professor Oliver Lodge, Professor Thomson, as well as those of several medical men of wide reputation. Among vice-presidents and honorary members we find scholars such as Mr. Gladstone; other distinguished men of science, Alfred Russel Wallace and Professor Langley of Washington (so well known in connexion with his invention of flying machines), and, perhaps to some minds more naturally, the artists John Ruskin and G. F. Watts. Lord Tennyson when among us. grouped with these. To single out well-known names, such as the Marquis of Bute or the Bishop of Ripon, from among the crowd of members and associates, would be invidious, but their abundance is at least significant.

To appreciate the popularity of this Society from another point of view, one has only to turn to its lately published lists. To use the schoolboy formula, a good many will take their dying oath who won't bet sixpence, and it is instructive to observe that, not counting the 422 members of the American branch nor various officials and honorary members, there are 696 persons willing to 'bet' a guinea and 182 willing to bet two. The Society pays small salaries to a

secretary and to the editor of its Proceedings, and presumably a heavy printer's bill; but when one reflects that all other work is honorary and that it has received some handsome gifts and legacies, one thinks wistfully of possible investigation of the hidden lore of Egypt and of India, of the curious gifts of decaying races, of rites, and traditions, and powers as yet recorded only as curiosities of folk-lore, and which the missionary, and the sword, and the gin-bottle will but too soon render 'extinct as moly.'

'Your clever people' who are interested in what, for want of a better name, we call Psychical Research, are apparently sufficiently numerous to make the study at least reputable. It is not necessary to suppose that all are interested from the same point of view, or in the same degree; nor that, in giving their names to the Society, they pledge themselves, unless they specifically say so, either to the methods or the theories of the small group of real workers. To quote again the astute Sludge, many are

Bidding you still be on your guard, you know,
Because one fact don't make a system stand,

Nor prove this an occasional escape

Of spirit beneath the matter.

When the work of the Society began, in 1882, there was not, one gathers from the published list of 'Principal Contents of the Proceedings,' the desire for any other policy than that of being on your guard, you know.' The historic sequence of first making a system stand,' and afterwards of proving 'the escape of spirit beneath the matter,' belongs to a later period.

If we judge the work of the Society by its published documents, we shall find, I think, that its history may be divided into two periods, that of 1882-89 and that from 1890 to the present time. The first period may be distinguished as that of inquiry into phenomena mainly spontaneous, and occurring in the normal state; with the exception of the special study of the hypnotic states, mainly from the point of view of somnambulism. During the later period we hear very little of spontaneous phenomena, very little of the kind of criticism for which we were mainly indebted to Mrs. Sidgwick, whose calm judgment has won the confidence of all.

'Your clever people' have probably found among the facts they can't explain some apparently well-attested stories of phantasms of the dead, many instances of premonition and, if they are observant, very frequent examples of Thought Transference; and they must have welcomed a collection of the experiences of others in this direction. They have all heard people talking in their sleep and in delirium, and they may have been interested that a similar condition should be harmlessly and painlessly reproduced for exploration. Somnambulism is an affair of everyday life, and we want to know the