easily as a fly does into the web of a spider. How this is to be accounted for, and what is the proximate cause of human gullibility, we shall presently see.

Not only individuals, but whole communities, are ready to be made victims. During the prevalence of the silly wish for speculation which broke out in the last century, and which was called by the popular name of the "South Sea Bubble,” the blacksmith and the duke, the shopman and minister of state, the parson and the people, were all bitten with the same mad rage. No one knew exactly what the real purport of the Company was; no one could possibly tell, by experience or otherwise, what would be the result of their speculation; but, inflated with the vainest hopes, expecting that fortunes were to be made for really nothing, people rushed to Exchange Alley, and besought the brokers, with tears, to take their money, and to rob and cheat them. Not only the South Sea Company, but all other companies flourished; and it is stated, on good authority, that one rogue of a projector had the impudence to propose a company to carry out some tremendously money-making scheme, the shareholders of which were not to be allowed to know what the scheme was. This implicit faith which he demanded was readily given many deposited their money; and in a few days the projector, either growing timid, or having pocketed enough, ran away.

Many years ago, as we may see by the old numbers of Punch, the English were seized with a madness for railways. Everybody was to travel. Every town and village was to be

cut up by a railway, or was to be united to London, and was thereby to flourish exceedingly. The idea, put forward in a number of flaring advertisements, which lied considerably, took the public mind, and people very nearly ran mad about it. Land-surveyors and map-makers made money with the greatest ease: they had so much work to do in preparing plans that many of them did not change their clothes or get to bed for days and days together. Parliamentary agents were equally busy getting the concurrence of Members of Parliament. A thousand schemes, utterly absurd and impracticable, were put upon paper; and, to our cost and sorrow, many, many lines, which never should have existed, were commenced and carried out. The whole carrying trade of England changed hands at once, and with disastrous effect. Thousands of private speculators were ruined, a few hundred stockbrokers made their fortunes, and England was burdened with a system of railways which is far from being satisfactory, and in which we find two or three long and circuitous routes running to the same place, and encouraging, twenty years after, another and more direct route to be planned, so as to save time.

Whether it be in furniture, in pianos sold second-hand by officers' widows, mock diamonds, bad watches, wooden nutmegs, tea which is formed of old tea-leaves re-dried and coloured, dogs which are painted, sparrows which are dyed, horses which are docked, or books and pictures which are put into a big house and then sold as the effects of a nobleman-in all and each of these, and in a thousand other

instances, we shall find man preying upon his fellow, deceiving him, and putting to proof his simplicity and gullibility. Even the most astute are deceived, and special trades exist for the purpose of deceiving them. For instance, one would believe that pawnbrokers formed an acute, sharp class of men, and they are so; yet a sub-class, called the duffer, exists, which lives by manufacturing goods, tools, and implements, with showy outsides, for the purpose of pawning at much above their value, and thus deceiving the pawnbroker. The articles, as well as the makers, are called duffers; and, to protect himself, the dishonest pawnbroker, when he has been deceived, quietly re-pawns them, or sends out persons with tickets for sale, the pigeon in the last case being persuaded that he is purchasing a watch or a piano which has been pledged far below its value; he then eagerly buys the ticket, and redeems the "duffer" or the "duffing" article.

Now the whole cause of this long round of cheating and being cheated, the motive power of this perverse and noxious system of human industry, is to be found in two springs. The first is that perverse feeling which makes a man love cheating and dishonesty; the second, that cunning selfishness which persuades us that we can buy under the market price, and get wonderful bargains. Almost every man, we need not say every woman too, believes that he or she has a prescriptive right to get things cheaper than any one else. Hence, instead of going to the regular pianoforte-makers, where they can try and buy an instrument which would be exchanged if disliked, they snatch up one from "a widow

lady,” under the idea that they are paying twenty pounds for something worth seventy. The young fellow who is cheated in the street has the prospect of enormous gain held out to him. The countryman who is taken in with the pea-andthimble dodge at a fair is cheated with his eyes open, because he believes that he can pocket a sovereign for almost nothing, and because some one points out to him, as he thinks, where the pea is. The men who lose large estates at the gamblingtable are in the same category—mere bargain-hunters, with an unconscientious low cunning, which leads them to be victimized. Even our friend Moses, in The Vicar of Wakefield, who sold a horse for a gross of green spectacles, was led into that mess by his own cunning. His mother Deborah cries out, "Ay, Moses is a dead hand at a bargain ;" and, trying to be over-cunning and to get too much, he gets too little. In short, human gulls are not so much boobies and fools, as those over-sharp, very cunning fellows, who see through all things with their half-shut eyes,” who pretend to be able to know everything, who are over-wise in their own conceit, and who, whilst they are dreaming of cheating others, generally manage to get thoroughly well cheated themselves.

UPON EVIL WISHES AND CURSES.

ELCHIOR CAMUS, who was no friend to the Jesuits, told Philip II. of Spain that they once carried about them a certain herb which kept

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them entirely free from any contact with sin.

The King was naturally curious to know the name of this herb; and, being pressed, Melchior owned that it was nothing less than the "fear of God;" but he added, "If they had it then, they have quite lost the seed of it now, for it does not grow in their garden." We now find others besides the Jesuits have lost the seed of this little plant. If Louis Napoleon had had it, he would not have laid hands upon Savoy; nor would Victor Emmanuel have abetted him; nor then, it follows, would our acquaintance Pio Nono have made the world ring with a futile curse, all the deeper because it was bottled up in language a little more stately and polite than curses usually are. Both he and Cardinal Antonelli, as also Signori Aloys Serafino, the Apostolical Curser (or cursor), and Phillippus Orsani, the Magister Curser, would have remained silent. There is an eternal satire in events. The very same Times which gave the Pope's curse as the "latest