Mrs. De Morgan observes that after the seances with Mrs. Hayden she and her friends experimented in private, "and it was found that a number of persons, both in and out of my own family, possessed the faculty of mediumship in a greater or less degree."
NOTE TO CHAPTER X
WERE THE DAVENPORTS JUGGLERS OR SPIRITUALISTS?
As Mr. Houdini has seemed to question whether the Davenports themselves ever asserted that they were Spiritualists, it may clear the matter up finally to quote the following from a letter written by them in 1868 to the Banner of Light, the leading Spiritualist journal in the United States. Dealing with the report that they were not Spiritualists, they wrote:
It is singular that any individual, sceptic or Spiritualist, could believe such statements after fourteen years of the most bitter persecution and violent opposition, culminating in the riots of Liverpool, Huddersfield, and Leeds, where our lives were placed in imminent peril by the fury of brutal mobs, our property destroyed, and where we suffered a loss of seventy-five thousand dollars, and all because we would not renounce Spiritualism, and declare ourselves jugglers, when threatened by the mob, and urged to do so. In conclusion, we have only to say that we denounce all such statements as base falsehoods.
END OF VOL. I