Henry Blackman Sell

In the palmy days of the sideshow P. T. Barnum let fall a pat little phrase which might be called the Great American Excuse: “the public likes to be humbugged.” The showman referred directly to the amusement-seeking public, and applied his half truth to that rural pageant, the circus; but it was an easy phrase, it suited the purpose of men who were anxious to deceive and to mountebank, and it was snapped up. Today, when a man is caught with a shameful misrepresentation he laughs sheepishly and repeats that the public likes to be humbugged.

But does it?

We are The Public, you are The Public, and none of us likes to be humbugged!

Then how is it that this proverbialism has gained such credence in this country?

We are a new people. Our country is a great international whirlpool of ideas. New music, old music, new theories, old theories, new pictures, old pictures, new standards, old standards meet here and are spun about us with hysteria-like speed.

We do not want to appear ignorant of the newest thought or the oldest convention. We strive for an impossible universalism, and we accept many a mountebank at his face value because we are unable to settle his true worth, immediately, and because we feel that we must give a decision immediately.

Our credulity is stretched almost to the breaking point every hour of every day of the year, for wonders seem never to cease and the quality of the genuine has given rise to the quantity of the false.

We are gullible because we as a nation are alive to the possibility of the impossible.

We have gained a reputation for loving to be cheated because we have the almost national virtue of being able to lose, smile, and again strive, BUT we do not love it. And in the end the only one who really loses is the charlatan who sooner or later awakens to a realization of the bare hollowness of his false and petty philosophy, “the public likes to be humbugged.”