Page:Spiritualism-1920.djvu/23

18 Europe. Whole sects, like the Rappites, migrated to the land of freedom; just as the Pilgrim Fathers had done, and as the Doukhobors would do at a later date.

There was thus a large and independent population in America prepared to deal boldly with new ideas. America was also at that time more sceptical than most countries of the old world: perhaps more sceptical than it is to-day. Many of the founders of the Republic—Paine, Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, etc.—had been Deists, and their close intercourse with the French during the Revolution had given them very advanced ideas. Benjamin Franklin had actually been a member of the commission which the French Government had directed the Faculty of Medicine and the Academy of Science to set up in 1782, to inquire into animal magnetism. He was quite familiar with the strange sights which were witnessed in Paris in those days: the rows of patients sitting round a tub containing bottles covered with water, the bent iron rods which went from the bottles to the diseased parts of the patients, and the convulsions and hysterical laughter and blood-spitting which the strain on the imagination—the "magnetic force"—produced. He knew the clairvoyants, and the somnambules, and the mesmeric healers who beguiled the hours of the French aristocracy during the years when the clouds of the Revolution were gathering, unnoticed, behind them.

Franklin was himself one of the founders of the science of electricity, and there was naturally as