SPIRITUALISTS 299 



I committed the paper to support of him, but in no sense 

 as an opponent of Lord Salisbury. The election had been 

 grand, and one of our cartoons represented the eighteen 

 members for Kent, all Unionists. All seemed to be 

 going well, except for a fighting paper with convictions 

 such as mine were and still are. For a while the after- 

 math of political excitement lasted, and even on 26th March 

 1887 a cartoon of Messrs Gladstone and Parnell in the 

 pillory, with Sir William Harcourt in the stocks, below 

 them, proved very popular. Another, on gth April 1887, 

 showed the Gladstonians being taken to the Tower, through 

 the Traitors' Gate. Many other very striking cartoons 

 were brought out, but the Opposition was too feeble to be 

 worthy of them, and the palmy days of the paper seemed 

 to have ended. It had been a desperately strenuous life 

 so far, to combine responsibility for finance, politics and 

 editorial work with business management which was 

 more or less hopeless. Once I was induced by Tasker 

 to attend a spiritualistic seance of his own in one of the 

 rooms of the office. There were three or four persons 

 present besides myself and Tasker, and after the table 

 had dashed about in ridiculous fashion it rapped out the 

 letters spelling CHARLES PEACE, whereupon its evolutions 

 became so violent that its legs were broken and the seance 

 came to an end. Naturally I thought at the time that 

 the show was humbug, but later on those other men all 

 proved to be " undesirables," and it seemed really curious 

 that Charles Peace should have come into such congenial 

 society. Neither Tasker nor myself had any suspicion 

 of any of them at the time. 



In the spring of 1887 some one of our contributors 

 I think it was William Mackay took the Middlesex 

 Magistrates to task for licensing the Alhambra and 

 refusing the Empire's licence. The innuendo in the 

 paragraph was not obscure, and unfortunately contained 

 the undoubted substratum of truth which served to 

 explain the yearly renewals for so long of the licence of the 

 old Argyle Rooms. 



