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VIEWS FROM THE WATCH TOWER

INTERNATIONAL CONCILIATION

(EXTRACT FROM AN ADDRESS BY HON. ELIHU ROOT)

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“THERE is a peculiar situation created when a diplomatic question arises between two countries. It is the duty of the diplomatic representatives to argue each the cause of his own country; he cannot turn his back upon an opponent in that friendly contest and state to his countrymen the weakness of his own position and the strength of the other side’s position, and it is one of the great difficulties of peace-making and peace-keeping that the orators, the politicians, the stump speakers, aye, often the clergymen of each country, press and insist upon the extreme view of their own country, and impress upon the minds of the great masses of people who have not studied the question, the idea that all right is upon one side and all wrong upon the other side.

“If you would help to make and keep peace, stand behind the men who are in the responsible positions of government, ready to recognize the fact that there is some right on the other side.

“War comes today as the result of one of three causes: either actual or threatened wrong by one country to another, or as the result of a suspicion by one country that another intends to do it wrong, and upon that suspicion, instinct leads the country that suspects the attack, to attack first; or, from bitterness of feeling, dependent in no degree whatever upon substantial questions of difference, and that bitterness of feeling leads to the suspicion, and the suspicion in the minds of those who suspect and who entertain the bitter feeling, is justification for war. It is their justification to themselves. The least of these three causes of war is actual injustice. There are today acts of injustice being perpetrated by one country upon another; there are several situations in the world today where gross injustice is being done. I will not mention them, because it would do more harm than it would good, but they are few in number.

“By far the greatest cause of war is that suspicion of injustice, threatened and intended, which comes from exasperated feeling. Now, feeling, the feeling which makes one nation willing to go to war with another, makes real causes of difference of no consequence. If the people of two countries want to fight, they will find an excuse—a pretext—find what seems to them sufficient cause, in anything. Questions which can be disposed of without the slightest difficulty between countries really friendly, are insoluble between countries really unfriendly. And the feeling between the peoples of different countries is the product of the acts and the words of the peoples of the countries themselves, not of their government. Insult, contemptuous treatment, bad manners, arrogant and provincial assertion of superiority are the chief causes of war today.”

SPIRITISM CONQUERING SCIENTISTS

We reiterate our warnings re all that disregard the Divine assurance that the dead are dead and that resurrection is their only hope. The Bible alone gives us the key to Spiritism’s power, showing that it is by the fallen angels, demons, who personate the dead so as to deceive mankind and to favor various falsities and superstitions built upon the error that the dead are alive. The Bible also foretells that at this time the wise men of the world will be deceived. Note the evidence of this in the following item which is going the rounds of the press:—

“Mme. Blavatsky was exposed in India by a strenuous Australian investigator, Richard Hodgson, who afterward settled down in Boston, where he became head of the old American branch of the British Society for Psychical Research, and where also he met Professor James, who took him to see Mrs. Piper. Dr. Hodgson studied this woman for eighteen years and she convinced him that telepathy, automatic writing and communication with the dead were bona fide phenomena. To give her a special test, Dr. Hodgson arranged a unique course of experiments, in which he was aided by Dr. James H. Hyslop, professor of logic and ethics at Columbia.

MASKED HIMSELF AND DISGUISED VOICE

“The professor masked himself and disguised his voice during his visits to her, and while she lay unconscious, with her head upon a pillow resting on a table, her hand wrote out messages alleged to come from his father. She converted Hyslop to the spiritistic hypothesis, and his announcement of the fact made a stir in the scientific world. He and Hodgson formed a compact that whoever died first would communicate with the other, and Professor Hyslop expressed some time ago his satisfaction that he has received messages from Hodgson since the latter’s death.

LOMBROSO AND FLAMMARION CONVERTED

“Across the deep no less a proportion of thinking men have turned their thoughts in the same direction. Caesare Lombroso, the great Italian criminologist and anthropologist, after having studied the medium, Eusapia Paladino, has announced his belief in disembodied spirits, although he does not indorse the theory of the return of the dead. Professor Charles Richet, of the Faculty of Medicine, Paris, is a French leader in psychical research work and claims to have photographed the spirit of a Spanish soldier, while Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer, is now an aggressive convert to Spiritism. He says that he has proved that such phenomena as the movement of chairs without contact and the suspension of heavy tables in space are bona fide.

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“No less than an ex-prime minister has recently been a leader of the ghost hunters of England, where he recently served as president of the Society of Psychical Research. He insists that science cannot explain the psychic wonders which he has witnessed. While he headed the society it made a special investigation of 350 cases of aparitions of the dying in England and Wales, and of these fifty-two cases were accepted as beyond the laws of chance or the possibility of fraud.

EDITOR STEAD NOW A MEDIUM

“William T. Stead has become a medium, so he now says—a writing medium, not one of the tambourine and trumpet band. At first the noted editor accepted telepathy and claimed to have written down the thoughts of living men many miles away. Then, of late years, he alleges, he has gotten into close communion with the dead. But it is only this year that he claims to have developed automatic writing, his right arm becoming impassive while its fingers guide a pen over paper on which appear letters from his son, the brilliant young writer, William, who died a year ago last Christmas eve. Mr. Stead claims that this writing appears without his exercising any will power to either hold the pen or move it.

SIR OLIVER LODGE NOW A SPIRITIST

“If the English-speaking public was surprised to hear that Mr. Stead had strayed thus far into the spiritualist camp, it was startled to learn a few months ago that Sir Oliver Lodge, head of the University of Birmingham, had announced his belief in such communication with

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those beyond the grave. In a recent journal of the Society for Psychical Research he has given details of messages which he claims to have received from dead members of the society through the pen of a writing medium.”

SUGGESTION A POTENT WEAPON

“The spread of Eddyism and the Emmanuel movement merely emphasises the fact that we have another potent weapon at our command,” said Dr. William H. Dieffenbach, of New York, in his annual presidential address to the National Society of Physical Therapeutics, affiliated with the American Institute of Homeopathy, which was recently in session in Detroit.

“The use of suggestion to patients,” continued the doctor, “should be studied and taught as should every other agent promising relief in the cure of the sick.”

SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS

“I have careful records of about five hundred death-beds, studied particularly with reference to the modes of death and the sensations of the dying. Ninety suffered bodily pain or distress of one sort or another, eleven showed mental apprehension, two positive terror, one expressed spiritual exaltation, one bitter remorse. The great majority gave no sign one way or the other; like their birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.”—Prof. Ossler.

JEWISH COLLEGE IN PALESTINE

Jacob Schiff, the New York banker, has placed $100,000 at the disposal of the Central Jewish Relief League toward establishing a technical college for Jews in Palestine. The college is expected to attract Jews from all parts of the world. It will be located at Haifa.

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— August 1, 1909 —