much interest in these matters in America as in Europe. The Swedenborgians, Shakers, Rappites, etc, saw spiritual agency in all little-understood phenomena. The Churches were as yet imperfectly organised, and millions lay entirely beyond their influence and ready to entertain any religious novelty. Most of the population of twenty million people was distributed over the enormous area of the States, in small villages or towns which were very poorly controlled by the culture of the cities. Railways were only just beginning. The provincial papers were culturally low, parochial, and sensational. Life was very monotonous. Ideas of what was normal or abnormal were very primitive. Mesmeric healers, phrenologists, and all kinds of frauds and fanatics had good conditions for prospering.
Three instances may be given of the peculiarly favourable condition of the American atmosphere. Mrs. Emma Hardinge tells us in her history of the early movement,[1] that disturbances such as those which originated Spiritualism in Hydesville in 1848 had occurred among the Shakers as early as 1830. Mrs, Hardinge is very imaginative and unreliable, and the Shakers are so very much more imaginative and unreliable, that the historian must not offer this statement too seriously; but we cannot doubt that they gave her the information. They said that in 1830 their homes were disturbed by raps and the movement of furniture; their members were possessed by spirits and fell Into trances. In
- ↑ History of Modern American Spiritualism (1870), p. 27.
