<h3 class="chapterhead"><SPAN name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></SPAN>CHAPTER I.</h3>
<p class="hanging">GENERAL VIEW OF THE SUBJECT.—​HUMBUG UNIVERSAL.—​IN RELIGION.—​IN
POLITICS.—​IN BUSINESS.—​IN SCIENCE.—​IN MEDICINE.—​HOW IS IT TO
CEASE.—​THE GREATEST HUMBUG OF ALL.</p>
<p>A little reflection will show that humbug is an astonishingly
wide-spread phenomenon—in fact almost universal. And this is true,
although we exclude crimes and arrant swindles from the definition of
it, according to the somewhat careful explanation which is given in the
beginning of the chapter succeeding this one.</p>
<p>I apprehend that there is no sort of object which men seek to attain,
whether secular, moral or religious, in which humbug is not very often
an instrumentality. Religion is and has ever been a chief chapter of
human life. False religions are the only ones known to two thirds of the
human race, even now, after nineteen centuries of Christianity; and
false religions are perhaps the most monstrous, complicated and
thorough-going specimens of humbug that can be found. And even within
the pale of Christianity, how unbroken has been the succession of
impostors, hypocrites and pre<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_12" id="Page_12"></SPAN></span>tenders, male and female, of every
possible variety of age, sex, doctrine and discipline!</p>
<p>Politics and government are certainly among the most important of
practical human interests. Now it was a diplomatist—that is, a
practical manager of one kind of government matters—who invented that
wonderful phrase—a whole world full of humbug in half-a-dozen
words—that “Language was given to us to conceal our thoughts.” It was
another diplomatist, who said “An ambassador is a gentleman sent to
<i>lie</i> abroad for the good of his country.” But need I explain to my own
beloved countrymen that there is humbug in politics? Does anybody go
into a political campaign without it? are no exaggerations of <i>our</i>
candidate’s merits to be allowed? no depreciations of the <i>other</i>
candidate? Shall we no longer prove that the success of the party
opposed to us will overwhelm the land in ruin? Let me see. Leaving out
the two elections of General Washington, eighteen times that very fact
has been proved by the party that was beaten, and immediately we have
<i>not</i> been ruined, notwithstanding that the dreadful fatal fellows on
the other side got their hands on the offices and their fingers into the
treasury.</p>
<p>Business is the ordinary means of living for nearly all of us. And in
what business is there not humbug? “There’s cheating in all trades but
ours,” is the prompt reply from the boot-maker with his brown paper
soles, the grocer with his floury sugar and chicoried coffee, the
butcher with his mysterious sausages and queer veal, the dry goods man
with his “damaged goods wet at the great fire” and his “selling at a
ruinous loss,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_13" id="Page_13"></SPAN></span>” the stock-broker with his brazen assurance that your
company is bankrupt and your stock not worth a cent (if he wants to buy
it,) the horse jockey with his black arts and spavined brutes, the
milkman with his tin aquaria, the land agent with his nice new maps and
beautiful descriptions of distant scenery, the newspaper man with his
“immense circulation,” the publisher with his “Great American Novel,”
the city auctioneer with his “Pictures by the Old Masters”—all and
every one protest each his own innocence, and warn you against the
deceits of the rest. My inexperienced friend, take it for granted that
they all tell the truth—about each other! and then transact your
business to the best of your ability on your own judgment. Never fear
but that you will get experience enough, and that you will pay well for
it too; and towards the time when you shall no longer need earthly
goods, you will begin to know how to buy.</p>
<p>Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of
humanity. Yet books are thickly peppered with humbug. “Travellers’
stories” have been the scoff of ages, from the “True Story” of witty old
Lucian the Syrian down to the gorillarities—if I may coin a word—of
the Frenchman Du Chaillu. Ireland’s counterfeited Shakspeare plays,
Chatterton’s forged manuscripts, George Psalmanazar’s forged Formosan
language, Jo Smith’s Mormon Bible, (it should be noted that this and the
Koran sounded two strings of humbug together—the literary and the
religious,) the more recent counterfeits of the notorious Greek
Simonides—such literary humbugs as these are equal<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_14" id="Page_14"></SPAN></span> in presumption and
in ingenuity too, to any of a merely business kind, though usually
destitute of that sort of impiety which makes the great religious
humbugs horrible as well as impudent.</p>
<p>Science is another important field of human effort. Science is the
pursuit of pure truth, and the systematizing of it. In such an
employment as that, one might reasonably hope to find all things done in
honesty and sincerity. Not at all, my ardent and inquiring friends,
there is a scientific humbug just as large as any other. We have all
heard of the Moon Hoax. Do none of you remember the Hydrarchos
Sillimannii, that awful Alabama snake? It was only a little while ago
that a grave account appeared in a newspaper of a whole new business of
compressing ice. Perpetual motion has been the dream of scientific
visionaries, and a pretended but cheating realization of it has been
exhibited by scamp after scamp. I understand that one is at this moment
being invented over in Jersey City. I have purchased more than one
“perpetual motion” myself. Many persons will remember Mr. Paine—“The
Great Shot-at” as he was called, from his story that people were
constantly trying to kill him—and his water-gas. There have been other
water gases too, which were each going to show us how to set the North
River on fire, but something or other has always broken down just at the
wrong moment. Nobody seems to reflect, when these water gases come up,
that if water could really be made to burn, the right conditions would
surely have happened at some one of the thousands of city fires, and
that the very stuff with which<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_15" id="Page_15"></SPAN></span> our stout firemen were extinguishing the
flames, would have itself caught and exterminated the whole brave wet
crowd!</p>
<p>Medicine is the means by which we poor feeble creatures try to keep from
dying or aching. In a world so full of pain it would seem as if people
could not be so foolish, or practitioners so knavish, as to sport with
men’s and women’s and children’s lives by their professional humbugs.
Yet there are many grave M. D.’s who, if there is nobody to hear, and if
they speak their minds, will tell you plainly that the whole practice of
medicine is in one sense a humbug. One of its features is certainly a
humbug, though so innocent and even useful that it seems difficult to
think of any objection to it. This is the practice of giving a
<i>placebo</i>; that is, a bread pill or a dose of colored water, to keep the
patient’s mind easy while imagination helps nature to perfect a cure. As
for the quacks, patent medicines and universal remedies, I need only
mention their names. Prince Hohenlohe, Valentine Greatrakes, John St.
John Long, Doctor Graham and his wonderful bed, Mesmer and his tub,
Perkins’ metallic tractors—these are half a dozen. Modern history knows
of hundreds of such.</p>
<p>It would almost seem as if human delusions became more unreasoning and
abject in proportion as their subject is of greater importance. A
machine, a story, an animal skeleton, are not so very important. But the
humbugs which have prevailed about that wondrous machine, the human
body, its ailments and its cures, about the unspeakable mystery of human
life, and still<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_16" id="Page_16"></SPAN></span> more about the far greater and more awful mysteries of
the life beyond the grave, and the endless happiness and misery believed
to exist there, the humbugs about these have been infinitely more
absurd, more shocking, more unreasonable, more inhuman, more
destructive.</p>
<p>I can only allude to whole sciences (falsely so called) which are
unmingled humbugs from beginning to end. Such was Alchemy, such was
Magic, such was and still is Astrology, and above all, Fortune-telling.</p>
<p>But there is a more thorough humbug than any of these enterprises or
systems. The greatest humbug of all is the man who believes—or pretends
to believe—that everything and everybody are humbugs. We sometimes meet
a person who professes that there is no virtue; that every man has his
price, and every woman hers; that any statement from anybody is just as
likely to be false as true, and that the only way to decide which, is to
consider whether truth or a lie was likely to have paid best in that
particular case. Religion he thinks one of the smartest business dodges
extant, a firstrate investment, and by all odds the most respectable
disguise that a lying or swindling business man can wear. Honor he
thinks is a sham. Honesty he considers a plausible word to flourish in
the eyes of the greener portion of our race, as you would hold out a
cabbage leaf to coax a donkey. What people want, he thinks, or says he
thinks, is something good to eat, something good to drink, fine clothes,
luxury, laziness, wealth. If you can imagine a hog’s mind in a man’s
body—sensual, greedy, selfish, cruel, cunning, sly,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_17" id="Page_17"></SPAN></span> coarse, yet
stupid, short-sighted, unreasoning, unable to comprehend anything except
what concerns the flesh, you have your man. He thinks himself
philosophic and practical, a man of the world; he thinks to show
knowledge and wisdom, penetration, deep acquaintance with men and
things. Poor fellow! he has exposed his own nakedness. Instead of
showing that others are rotten inside, he has proved that he is. He
claims that it is not safe to believe others—it is perfectly safe to
disbelieve him. He claims that every man will get the better of you if
possible—let him alone! Selfishness, he says, is the universal
rule—leave nothing to depend on his generosity or honor; trust him just
as far as you can sling an elephant by the tail. A bad world, he sneers,
full of deceit and nastiness—it is his own foul breath that he smells;
only a thoroughly corrupt heart could suggest such vile thoughts. He
sees only what suits him, as a turkey-buzzard spies only carrion, though
amid the loveliest landscape. I pronounce him who thus virtually
slanders his father and dishonors his mother and defiles the sanctities
of home and the glory of patriotism and the merchant’s honor and the
martyr’s grave and the saint’s crown—who does not even know that every
sham shows that there is a reality, and that hypocrisy is the homage
that vice pays to virtue—I pronounce him—no, I do not pronounce him a
humbug, the word does not apply to him. He is a fool.</p>
<p>Looked at on one side, the history of humbug is truly humiliating to
intellectual pride, yet the long silly story is less absurd during the
later ages of history,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_18" id="Page_18"></SPAN></span> and grows less and less so in proportion to the
spread of real Christianity. This religion promotes good sense, actual
knowledge, contentment with what we cannot help, and the exclusive use
of intelligent means for increasing human happiness and decreasing human
sorrow. And whenever the time shall come when men are kind and just and
honest; when they only want what is fair and right, judge only on real
and true evidence, and take nothing for granted, then there will be no
place left for any humbugs, either harmless or hurtful.</p>
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