Some Charlatans

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 46, 14 November 1907, Page 9

Some Charlatans

Some of our neighbors beyond the Tasman Sea have invented a legislative snaffle for the mouths of for-tune-tellers, ' futurists ', ' astro-mathematicians ', and the rest of their tribe. Here is an extract from a Police Offences Act in force- on ' t'other side ' :—: —

1 Any person pretending or professing to tell fortunes, or using any subtle craft, means, or device, by palmistry or otherwise, to defraud or impose on any other person, shall be liable upon conviction to pay a penalty not exceeding twenty-five pounds, and in default of payment to be imprisoned for any time not exceeding six months.'

Fraud and dupe are, according to Carlyle, the upper and nether stones of the same mill. There are, no doubt, great practical difficulties in the way of dealing effectively with this form of fraud on the one hand and of duped superstition on the other. The difficulties are 'akin to those experienced in coping with the ' sly ' or surreptitious traffic in what Artemus Ward calls ' lickwid litenin' '. Yet we have heard of even this brutalising traffic being, if not absolutely suppressed, at least reduced to almost negligeable limits. Periods of decayed religious faith (as the rationalist Lecky observes) are usually periods of marked superstition. Religious faith is normal to the human ,mind ; infidelity abnormal. And the soul which shuffles off religious belief tends to find some fetfch, some ignoble substitute, just as the perverted' -maternal instinct of the social-suicide wife finds a substitute for ' God's little angel .on earth ' in the bull-pup or the Persian cat or the Chinese poodle. Thus it happens that so many in our time dilute their failing faith with superstition, or fill with superstition the place that faith once occupied.. -And so it befalls that our time has become the. golden age of the fraudulent charlatans who

' Make fools believe in their foreseeing Of things before they are in being, To swallow gudgeons ere they're citched, - And count their chickens ere they're hatched. . . But still the best for him that gives The best price fort, or best believes '. The old Puritan English Parliament had its official prophets and almanac-makers. Cardan^ one of the official fortune-tellers of the time, after a lengthy series of predictions that kept ' ganging agley ', foretold that his' own death would take place within a certain period. To ensure this prediction coming true, he starved himself to death, and thus lost his life to sas.ve.his credit. Parliaments nowadays take a saner view of the for-tune-telling impostor. But his suppression is ""' dour wairk '—especially at a time when the passing craze pf materialism and indifierentism tends to set such impostors upon a pedestal.