Page:The humbugs of the world - An account of humbugs, delusions, impositions, quackeries, deceits and deceivers generally, in all ages (IA humbugsworld00barnrich).djvu/29

 custodians of the money of their fellow-men, would require a different species of advertising from this; but there are various trades and occupations which need only notoriety to insure success, always provided that when customers are once attracted, they never fail to get their money’s worth. An honest man who thus arrests public attention will be called a “humbug,” but he is not a swindler or an impostor. If, however, after attracting crowds of customers by his unique displays, a man foolishly fails to give them a full equivalent for their money, they never patronize him a second time, but they very properly denounce him as a swindler, a cheat, an impostor; they do not, however, call him a “humbug.” He fails, not because he advertises his wares in an outre manner, but because, after attracting crowds of patrons, he stupidly and wickedly cheats them.

When the great blacking-maker of London dispatched his agent to Egypt to write on the pyramids of Ghiza, in huge letters, “Buy Warren’s Blacking, 30 Strand, London,” he was not “cheating” travelers upon the Nile. His blacking was really a superior article, and well worth the price charged for it, but he was “humbugging” the public by this queer way of arresting attention. It turned out just as he anticipated, that English travelers in that part of Egypt were indignant at this desecration, and they wrote back to the London Times (every Englishman writes or threatens to “write to the Times,” if anything goes wrong,) denouncing the “Goth” who had thus disfigured these ancient pyramids by writing on them in monstrous