h, or not?" asked Rapley.

He is a plain man, not easily put down and liking a plain answer. He got
it.

"The Dardanelles," said the Authority, "could easily be denationalized
under a quadrilateral guarantee to be made a pars materia of the pactum
foederis."

"That ought to hold them," I murmured.

The Authority felt now that he had pretty well settled the map of
Europe. He rose and shook hands with us all around very cordially. We
did not try to detain him. We felt that time like his was too valuable
to be wasted on things like us.

"Well, I tell you," said Rapley, as we settled back into our chairs when
the Great Authority had gone, "my own opinion, boys, is that the United
States and England can trim Germany and Austria any day in the week and
twice on Sunday."

After which somebody else said:

"I wonder how many of these submarines Germany has, anyway?"

And then we drifted back into the humbler kind of war talk that we have
been carrying on for three years.

But later, as we walked home together, Rapley said to me:

"That fellow threw a lot of light on things in Europe, didn't he?"

And I answered:

"Yes."

What liars we all are!

IV. Personal Adventures in the Spirit World

I do not write what follows with the expectation of convincing or
converting anybody. We Spiritualists, or Spiritists--we call ourselves
both, or either--never ask anybody to believe us. If they do, well and
good. If not, all right. Our attitude simply is that facts are facts.
There they are; believe them or not as you like. As I said the other
night, in conversation with Aristotle and John Bunyan and George
Washington and a few others, why should anybody believe us? Aristotle,
I recollect, said that all that he wished was that everybody should know
how happy he was; and Washington said that for his part, if people
only knew how bright and beautiful it all was where he was, they would
willingly, indeed gladly, pay the mere dollar--itself only a nominal
fee--that it cost to talk to him. Bunyan, I remember, added that he
himself was quite happy.

But, as I say, I never ask anybody to believe me; the more so as I was
once an absolute sceptic myself. As I see it now, I was prejudiced. The
mere fact that spiritual seances and the services of a medium involved
the payment of money condemned the whole thing in my eyes. I did not
realize, as I do now, that these _medii_, like anybody else, have got to
live; otherwise they wo