viii 



INTRODUCTION. 



sophy speculated on. The facts beat me." By slow degrees he 

 came to believe in the existence of a number of preterhuman 

 intelligences of various grades, and that some of these, though 

 invisible and intangible to us, can and do act on matter and 

 influence our minds. He was thus led to attack the ct priori 

 arguments against miracles, and to believe that many of the 

 so-called spiritualistic phenomena are genuine and occasioned 

 by unseen beings. He further championed spiritualism as 

 teaching valuable moral lessons, and leading to moral and 

 spiritual improvement, when rightly followed out. Here he 

 claims that he does not depart in any way from scientific 

 principle. The cardinal maxim of spiritualism," he says, "is 

 that every one must find out the truth for himself. It makes 

 no claim to be received on hearsay evidence ; but on the other 

 hand it demands that it be not rejected without patient, honest, 

 and fearless inquiry." 



In yet another field Mr. Wallace has proved himself a bold 

 originator. His early gained knowledge of land-tenure and the 

 condition of tenants and labourers gave him an experience 

 which with riper years produced the conviction that there was 

 no way to remedy the evils resulting from landlordism but 

 the adoption of a properly guarded system of occupying owner- 

 ship under the State as landlord. He has endeavoured to 

 show the necessity and the practicability of his views in his 

 work entitled " Land Nationalisation, its Necessity and its 

 Aims," first pubhshed in 1882. In a third edition he has added 

 an appendix on the nationalisation of house property, the State 

 being destined, he believes, to become sole ground landlord. 

 A later work of his on " Bad Times," 1885, is an essay on the 

 then existing depression of trade, tracing it to the evils caused 

 by great foreign loans, excessive war expenditure, the increase 

 of speculation, and of millionaires, and the depopulation of the 

 rural districts. Among other remedies he is strongly in favour 

 of the increase of labourers' allotments, and of personal culture 

 of the land by the occupier. In the same year his zeal and 

 fearlessness in championing causes which he identifies with 

 that of liberty, were exhibited in a pamphlet entitled " Forty- 

 five Years of Registration Statistics," in which he sought to 

 prove vaccination both useless and dangerous. Beside all this, 

 Mr. Wallace has been a frequent contributor to scientific trans- 

 actions, and to the leading magazines and reviews. Finally, 



