Queen Victoria and Spiritism.

One reads in the Salut public of Lyon, of June 3, 1866, in the news from Paris:

"During his short stay in Paris, Lord Granville said to some friends that Queen Victoria showed herself more preoccupied than she had ever been seen at any period of her life, regarding the Austro-Prussian conflict. The noble lord, president of the privy council of H. B. M., added that the queen believed she was obeying the voice of the deceased Prince Albert, sparing nothing to avoid a war that would set fire to all of Germany. It was under that impression, which does not leave her, that she wrote several times to the king of Prussia, as well as to the emperor of Austria, and that she would also have addressed an autograph letter to the Empress Eugénie, imploring her to join her efforts to her own in favor of peace."

This fact confirms what we published in the Spiritist Review of March 1864, under the title of A queen medium. There it was said, according to a correspondence from London, reproduced by several newspapers, that Queen Victoria conversed with the Spirit of Prince Albert and took his counsel in certain circumstances, as she did during the lifetime of the latter. We refer to that article for the details of the fact and for the reflections to which it gave rise. Moreover, we can affirm that Queen Victoria is not the only crowned head, or one near to royalty, who sympathizes with Spiritist ideas, and every time we have said that the doctrine had adherents even in the highest degrees of the social ladder, we exaggerated in nothing.

It has often been asked why sovereigns, convinced of the truth and the excellence of this doctrine, did not consider it a duty to support it openly with the authority of their name. It is that sovereigns are perhaps the least free of men; more than mere private individuals, they are subject to the demands of the world and obliged, for reasons of State, to certain precautions. We would not allow ourselves to cite Queen Victoria, with respect to Spiritism, if other newspapers had not taken the initiative; and, because there were for the fact neither denials nor protests, we judged that we could do so without inconvenience. No doubt, a day will come when sovereigns will be able to confess themselves Spiritists, as they confess themselves Protestants, Greek or Roman Catholics. Meanwhile, their sympathy is not as sterile as one might believe, because, in certain countries, if Spiritism is not officially hampered and persecuted, as Christianity was in Rome, it owes this to high influences. Before being officially protected, it must be content to be tolerated, to accept what is given to it and not ask for too much, for fear of obtaining nothing. Before being an oak, it is merely a reed, and if the reed does not break, it is because it bends to the wind.