s their knowledge of
the world grew broader, of the monstrous evil to which, innocently at
first, they had given birth. So at intervals they were filled with
despairing despondency and remorse. Their weaknesses, their
self-indulgence, their lack of providence for themselves, are largely
attributable to these causes. It could not be said of them that they were
ever remarkably selfish, or cold-hearted or calculating. Such a character,
however, has of right been coupled with the name of their elder sister,
who by reason of the ties of blood and of her older experience ought long
ago to have led them out of the by-ways of imposture, instead of
persistently seeking to shut off their escape from this horrible bondage,
and to plunge them deeper into the mire of guilt and infamy, so that the
chance of their rising above it, and denouncing it, might grow less and
less.

The impulse to set herself right on the record of the world, after years
of enslavement in the hateful gyves of charlatanism, must stand to Maggie
Fox's credit alone. It sprang from her own bosom, not from the
inspiration, suggestion or persuasion of any one else. Returning from
Europe in September, 1888, after a peculiar experience, which had
convinced her that those chiefs of spiritualistic fraud who feared her and
her sister, because they held the key of the whole of the artificial
mystery, were bent upon persecuting them into an abject silence, she at
once put in execution the resolution which had been so long in process of
growth, but until then had never been fully ripened.

This was to effect the unqualified exposure of the false system of
Spiritualism. She naturally chose as a medium for her repentant message to
the world, that great cosmopolitan journal, the _New York Herald_, which
is known in every corner of the earth, and is ever ready to perform an
important service to mankind. Before she started on her homeward voyage,
she committed herself once and for all to this courageous and worthy step.

The disclosures regarding the notorious Madam Diss De Barr had offended
Mrs. Kane more than anything which had occurred in Spiritualism in a long
time, for they presented the enforced association of her name and the
simple, childish origin of the "Rochester knockings," with the gross and
revolting frauds which had been their outgrowth. So imbued had she become,
by this time, with the idea that the developed system of Spiritualism was
something to be loathed,