Mr. Spender, of the _Westminster Gazette_, recently declared that no man would have repudiated more hotly than Stead the suggestion that journalism was merely a branch of commerce. And in some sense none could more truly say that he regarded his profession as “a vacation abounding in opportunities, but weighted by solemn responsibilities.” He had a real passion for what he thought was the right; he showed fine courage in taking up unpopular causes; he sacrificed much for great ideals, and still more for small eccentricities. But the man was a most singular combination of the business man and the mystic. Those who worked with him had much the same sort of shock we feel in reading the speeches of seventeenth-century Puritan statesmen, who (to quote Macaulay) talked in Committee of Ways and Means about seeking the Lord. He might be led to consider a technical problem through reading the Book of Proverbs, or going to a spiritualistic séance. But to the problem itself he brought the coldest common sense. He could engineer a “stunt,” as the modern slang goes, as well as the most cynical living professor of that art. Such a “stunt” was the cry that sent Gordon to Khartoum. And even when, as in the “Modern Babylon” articles, his heart was fully engaged, his method was only distinguishable from that of a later date by the superiority of his intelligence and his firm sense of the importance of whatever he happened to say. His egotism was wonderful and almost touching in its _naïveté_. Lord Morley visited him during his imprisonment in Holloway, and found him in a “strangely exalted mood.” “As I was taking my exercise this morning in the prison yard,” he said, “I asked myself who was the man of most importance now alive? And I could only find one answer—the prisoner in this cell.” Yet ten minutes later he might easily have been criticising the “make-up” of a paper, or discussing the financial possibilities of an abridged edition of the classics, with Gibbon in twenty pages, _The Republic_ in five, and _Uncle Remus_ in fifty.
The beginning of the Nineties saw Stead, with the publication of the _Review of Reviews_, at the very height of his professional prestige. He had, by his “two keels to one” campaign, established a claim on the regard of political realists. He had, by his efforts to interest European monarchs in schemes for the preservation of peace, won the esteem of those idealists who had perhaps suspected him in his capacity of Imperialist. He enjoyed, on the one hand, the worship of every Nonconformist in England, and, on the other, the friendship of Cecil Rhodes. He exercised, in the sum, an enormous influence on the masses. He could make an author; he could almost unmake a statesman. There seemed to be little limit to the development of one whom Lord Morley has described as “for a season the most powerful journalist in the island.” But just at this period that eccentricity which had always been a large element in his character assumed the proportions of a disease. In 1890 he met a Miss Julia A. Ames, connected with a newspaper in Chicago—“a highly religious woman, a Methodist, very level-headed, and possessing a great amount of common sense.” With Miss Ames Stead was strangely impressed, and after her death in America he essayed communication by “automatic writing” with her spirit. In this, he was convinced, he attained success, and in 1893 he started a paper called _Borderland_, chiefly for the purpose of giving the world the “letters of Julia.” He devoted much time and money henceforth to spiritualism in its various forms, and “Julia’s Bureau” was established “to enable those who had lost their dead, who were sorrowing over friends and relatives, to get into touch with them again.”