and the very difficulties of the claimant's case seemed only to strengthen the blind faith of his adherents.... It may be said that stupidity is a misfortune and not a fault; but there is a sort of cranky, cantankerous, pragmatical stupidity which sets itself up as superior to all plain and obvious considerations, and claims the gift of seeing through stone-walls, and of proving that two and two make four only for common folk, which is really an offense against decency and reason. There are people of this kind, who can bring themselves to believe any thing; and Arthur Orton may take his place by the side of the Cock-Lane ghost, the sea-serpent, and Mrs. Toft's litter of rabbits."
The London Times, referring to the dupes who were made witnesses, remarks:
"If they fell into an open trap, half England showed themselves ready to do the same. We are all now persuaded that the claimant is a low-born, illiterate, vulgar scoundrel, without any trace of education, either of schools or of society, with no lingering suggestion of culture of any kind about him.... It would have been quite impossible for this man Orton to have kept up his enterprise for a fortnight, if his way had not been made easy by a number of dupes of various ranks, which for weeks, and months, and even years, went on increasing.... We may now ask—and that is the point which most concerns us—how came this man, in spite of the most unfavorable appearances, to attract, to confirm, and to organize into a sort of faith, so vast an amount of human credulity? The answer must be that, in the first place, a large part of mankind, and that by no means of the lowest or least educated, wish to believe the improbable and prodigious. They are ready for any thing, because they really desire it. For this purpose, and in order that they may be more free to believe what they choose, they close their eyes to the most important and most material facts of the question, and their reasons to the great laws which should control a decision. They prefer to look about for the smaller particulars, the incidental circumstances, and some trifle or other, which may give them a key to the question. Vanity is satisfied, labor saved, and perplexity avoided, by an intuitive assent, resting upon something which, if not wholly inexplicable to other inquirers, is next to nothing at all in the scale of right reason. When people have no laws of judgment in themselves, little experience, or at least little fruit of it, no tests which they know how to apply, their faith, and with it their adhesion, is as much at the mercy of any one who practises upon it as a salmon is at the mercy of a dexterous angler.... It has been freely said, and will probably be often said again, that the length of time consumed before Arthur Orton has been convicted, as a perjured impostor, is a scandal upon our law. We cannot join in this opinion. Scandal there has been, undoubtedly, but the blame is misplaced when it is attributed to the administration of justice. The real ground of humiliation is the defect of common-sense, and the imperfect education of so large a proportion of the English people. If one thing more than another is and ought to be the object of training in schools, in colleges, and in daily life, it should be to enable a man of full years, and in the possession of ordinary faculties, to know what to believe, and what to disbelieve, to discriminate the value and the weight of evidence, to reject the false and to detect the true."
The British press, it is evident, has not failed to draw the proper lesson from this seven years' experiment upon the state of mind of that country. It is especially noteworthy that the folly which made it possible was not confined to the illiterate classes; the delusion carried away half the English people of all grades, and the result is no doubt correctly attributed to that general deficiency in educational methods which neglects the proper study of evidence.
And from this point of view the Tichborne case is not without interest to us; for we have an education similar to the English in that it does not enforce the critical study of proof, and therefore leaves the people without protection against the tactics of ingenious imposture. That impositions of all kinds should arise under such circumstances is natural. We may not be able to exhibit any such stunning example of audacious imposture as our English friends have just exploited, but we have plenty of the same kind of thing on a smaller scale. Whether deception and fraud are more extensive here than elsewhere, or more extensive now than
