outside the poor little laws of nature? Arguing
from what was scouted as fabulous even in our
own time, but what is now matter of daily life
(that misdirected prophecy of Dr. Lardner's
about the Atlantic steam ships is one of the most
famous pièces de résistance of the everything-
possibilists), a large section among us rejects
absolutely nothing but common sense, and believes
in everything except the law of gravitation and
the necessities of dynamics. To stick to these
is to be a "a pig" and "a mole," and a dozen
other such amiable little amenities, according
to the morals and manners of our playful friend
the Spiritual Magazine; and the only men
worthy to bear the name of men, and who are
not simply humanised gorillas—that is, having
a serviceable brain and an educated intellect—
are those who believe in gentlemen floating
about a pitch dark room, because they say so—
in the spiritual origination of certain visible and
tangible masses of matter called by courtesy
"luminous hands"—and in the absolute honesty
of certain spiritual juggleries, of which all that
can be said is, that it is vastly like human
jugglery, and condescends to the same means
and conditions.

Yet as a nation we pride ourselves on being
critical even to scepticism; for all that the word
has such an ugly sound;—"only one little letter
between sceptic and septic," as I remember a
tremendously grand college bigwig saying to me
when I was only a callow youngster, with a
whole inch of eggshell still sticking to the top
of my pate: and mightily pleased and edified I
was at this feeble joke so solemnly perpetrated!
—we refuse to believe in foreign miracles, taking
our chemistry to Naples and Saint Januarius,
and our pathology to France and her young
peasant girls visited by holy apparitions in caves
and mountain passes; we will not away with
over-subtle dogmas of any kind; and everywhere
we say of ourselves that we are not credulous,
and that we are critical, and that if we have one
quality more pronounced than another, it is our
common sense, and the almost impossibility of
John Bull's being taken in. Poor old John
Bull! if there is a creature on the face of this
earth more easily gulled than another, it is the
respectable animal who does duty as our national
representative! Show John a bit of scarlet
cloth or a purple stocking, and he goes raving
mad on the spot; tearing about and bellowing,
to the infinite amusement of those who wave the
red flag before his stupid old eyes, just to see
him scamper over the sand, making a fool of
himself at all four corners. Read out to John,
dozing in his comfortable easy-chair, a list of
new religions, and, phew! before you can have
uttered your traditional invocation to Mr. John
Robinson, John has established a hierarchy,
built a church, let off all the pews, and gone
straight up to heaven by the newest description
of spiritual railroad vouchsafed. In any way in
which you can assure him that he has been an
idiot all his life hitherto, and that you have just
discovered a new method for transforming geese
into swans, so surely do you make him your
debtor and your slave, and ready to swallow
flies, ducks, or camels, as it may suit you to
prepare.

Sceptical and critical is John? Well! nations
are not unlike individuals in the way in which
they pride themselves ou having the very
qualities they do not possess; and John's
assumption of cold critical reason is about on a
par with the affected rakishncss of the innocent
country gentleman, whose worst misdemeanours
are that he plays long whist for silver three-
pennies and admires whisky-toddy hot—about
as practical as Liston's desire to play Hamlet,
or poor Power's belief that he was a Romeo
burked and massacred by the brogue and the
shillelagh. Sceptical and critical? while mediums
make large fortunes by a few conjuring tricks
performed on false pretences? while swindlers
can cozen even London lawyers by forged title-
deeds to non-existent estates? while well-dressed
shoplifters can blind London tradesmen, and
lull them into the most confiding security by
the excess of their audacity and gorgeous
apparel? while can be set abroad, and what is
worse largely credited, insane stories of the
monstrous vice and cruelty of well-born English
ladies and gentlemen, if only living under the
shadow of that same scarlet bunting aforesaid?
and while a knot of sane and cultivated people
can gravely attempt to revive the superstitions of
the middle ages, and tax the interference of the
other world by way of accounting for certain
unexplored phenomena in this? So far from
being either sceptical or critical, it seems to me
that we English folk of this present time are
just the most credulous and the least discerning
of any folk extant; and that the mental condition
of two-thirds among us is that of unhesitating
and unquestioning acceptance of whatever they
are told to believe, without the application of
any test and without the check of any
misgiving.

One half of the world lives on the gullibility
of the other half. They trade on it, eat, drink,
sleep, are clothed and lodged through and by it;
and when certain purveyors of public pabulum
speak of what the public demands, they mean
simply the amount of credulity afloat, and how
near to the wind they can steer their supplies.
Nothing wonderful has as yet made shipwreck,
so far as I can remember; and the capacity for
fly swallowing has not been arrested by a fly too
big for the national gullet. To be made beautiful
for ever by a powder and a wash, which the
tradition is no one can by any possibility
analyse or find out, chemists being only dunces
with dirty fingers, and mystic recipes coming
from the far East quite beyond vulgar fractions;
to be cured of every evil known to a dyspeptic
humanity, by a pill and a rather slab and very
insipid kind of gruel; to have one's natural
deficiencies in the matter of hair, teeth, shape, and
limbs, supplied with such artistic skill that, in
point of fact, the artistic skill has the best of it
and beats Nature and all her works out of the
field; to be in possession of some magical
scheme for making thousands, to be liberally
imparted to a believing world for the small charge
of eighteeu-pencc and a stamped envelope—do