Springfield Weekly Republican

A WORD FOR LAKE PLEASANT.

The camp-meeting at Lake Pleasant has been rent during this session as before with the irreconcilable dissension of the decent and the dirty factions of so-called spiritualism. It is gratifying, no doubt, that the better element retains the upper hand in the responsible management of the camp-meeting association, and that some of the free-love speakers have been kept still. But there must be more than this done if the spiritualist camp-meeting is to be tolerated in Western Massachusetts. There is no use in mincing matters. There have been avowals and brags and threats enough uttered on the platform to scandalize the public, and obscene and vicious professions have been quite as prominent as their denunciation, if not more prominent. There are even those who regard it as a merely prudential measure that the advocates of clean lives and pure speech have been supported in the contest which took place. Visitors to the camp come away with the impression that its influence is demoralizing in the extreme, and that it is a school of incalculable mischief to the young people of the surrounding towns, who are led by curiosity to make excursions thither. These impressions and reports, joined with the actual public statements and the notorious quarrel, are very serious matters, and the managers of the association, if they are really earnest in desiring to purify spiritualism, must enter upon the undertaking in no such timorous and compromising fashion as they have done. It is not enough to keep the management in the hands of a professedly clean and conscientious majority; they must have no minority in the camp of such a sort that they cannot allow it expression. They confess that these free-love creatures, without shame or sense, are not fit to talk to the public; then they are not fit to be there at all. There is no honest ground for tolerance in the case. The respectable spiritualists must drive the nasty spiritualists out. If this is not done now, it will have to be done when it is harder to do.