The Simple Art of Gulling

Horowhenua Chronicle, 10 November 1915, Page 2

The Simple Art of Gulling

Uue oi the handicaps ol literature arises irom it popular delusion thai gulling people requires ingenuity and addrtws. l/robaltly literature itself is responsible for this. xxomur started tk> trouble by nuking ulyases a man ol brains. Shakespeare, Yielding, (jogol, Thackeray, and numberless otuers, helped it on by endowing their rascals with at least sufficient intelligence to invent a plausioie plot. At length a milled public taste demands that its fictive rogues ue clover, an! will put up with uo other sort. A" story about a man who went down this street selling wallpaper for Oiovernment bonds would not go. Headers would consider it improbable. Yet 'u iact only about one ease ol swindling out of ten that gets into police records or the courts involves higher strategic ability that is requred to take canuy lrom a small child. Some people will believe anything. JJy some curious law which psyschologists have never explained, the more improbable the yarn the firmer the faith. It suffered persecution and u is doubtful if anything weirder or more naively transparent tlian Joseph Smith's story about Eis gold plates, ever came out ot a human head, but many people suffered death i'or their belief in it. Dowie was and less successful. The credulity that even the baldest gold-brick yarn is no doubt a testimonial to human honesty. /3y the strictest tost all men may be liaa's, but comparatively speaking nearly all men are so nearly truthful that to more childlike minds any spoken word has the verity of stamped gold.—Mercantile Gazette.