Rensselaer Union, Volume 10, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 February 1878 — How We Like to be Humbugged. [ARTICLE]

How We Like to be Humbugged.

Verily It is an age of quiet, coldblooded, satisfactory humbug. Deliberate, premeditated, scientific humbug. The air is full of hum buggery. People are humbugged, not I localise the humbnggors are designing and artful and cunning, but because the people rather enjoy being humbugged, in the mass. The native American will pay fifty cents to see the stone man, ana enjoy being swindled, lieeause all his neighbors are swindled with him. He likes that, lie laughs about it. Ko long us his neighbors are swindled, deluded, fooled, humbugged, gulled with him he doesn't mind it. But it makes him most awfnlly mad if he is made the individual victim of the most harmless and mirthful little “sell,” that is attended with no expense whatever. One of the brightest consolations that come to the people who are humhugged, is tiie fact that we of the common herd, the people of the every-day matter-of-fact, business life, we unlettered people, are not so readily, and so easily, and so grandly humbugged, as are our teachers, the savans, tne scholars and the scientists. If, or rather when, a designing rogue manufactures a stone man, and brings it forth to the eyes of the world, to be gazed upon and wondered over, admission twenty-five cents, children under twelve years half price, he does not bring his wonder before the common people at first. Never. The roar of incredulity, the “derisive laughter,” as the Congressional records have it, that greet him and his wonder, is sufficient to inform him that his first victims must be selected from the colleges and the scientific associations. But this does nut dismay- him. —Heknows how easily wise men may and can be and have been humbugged. He knows that from the day the Pickwick Club found the ancient stone at Cobham, bearing the fragmentary inscription “X BILST-UM—PSHI-S. M. ARK,” that learned societies and wise men"" have —been more easily gulled than school boys. And so the stone-man manufacturer gently but firmly takes in the scientific men; they investigate his wonderful discovery, they pronounce the stone man genuine, they enter the proceedings and the result of their profound and scholarly investigations in the archives of their learned societies, and then, when the world has been induced to believe their theories and accept their statements, the man who has duped them “ gives them away,” and the college finds far less consolation in “Pickivick Papers” than the rabble does. In the light of recent events, it really does appear even more than probable, that if a man should saw the figure of a horse out of a pine log, and paste bark over it with ordinary glue, and fasten a flowing mane upon its neck with gimp tacks, he could find some disciples of science to certify that it was undoubtedly a genuine colt of the old wooden horse, and We suppose this love of being humbugged is a natural outgrowth of the earnest, matter-of-fact times in which we live. There is so much that is real in our lives that we enjoy something that is unreal for a change. There is no humbug about a cold in the head, or a soft corn, or a gas-bill(?). There is nothing unreal about the ague; there is no tremendous uncertainty about rent-day; the contribution-box is a stern reality,'and the Tax Collector is an inflexible fact. And when, day after day, we are confronted with these living, inflexible realities, what wonder that we should encourage and enjoy humbugs, so long as we are sold in good, scholarly company?—Burlington Hawk-Eye.