formerly, we do not inquire; but their extent is certainly alarming. It would almost seem that overreaching, and circumventing, and the attainment of ends by false pretenses, are becoming organized in our blood, for "smartness" and "sharpness" have acquired new meanings and are openly commended, and nothing is more common than the remark that a little humbug is indispensable in all successful management. Certain it is that we are duped and cheated continually, and in a thousand ways. At home and on the street, in the cars, at public assemblies, and in all the relations of life, we are beset and imposed upon by designing knaves of every shade. We eat the falsified foods of the grocer, and wear the swindling textures of the dry-goods man. We are "done" by unscrupulous shoemakers, and "sold" by dishonest hatters, while builders construct for us fraudulent houses, and upholsterers fill them with sham furniture. The gasmen and the street-cleaners sell us one thing and furnish another, and, turn where we will, we are plied with plausible deceptions, and made the victims of ingenious rascality. Granting that much of this is inevitable, it is certain that more of it might be avoided, and is due to that credulous state of mind by which, like fools, we believe half that is told us.
If, leaving the sphere of private dealings, we take a wider outlook, the case is far from being mended. Under our republican institutions politics is a universal interest and a semi-occupation of everybody, and who does not know that it is given over to interminable deception and the rankest fraud? An unscrupulous demagogism overshadows the land and shoots down its multitudinous roots into the same stupid public credulity. What else are our political parties but contrivances for massing, organizing, and manipulating, the gullibility of the people? Year after year they are fooled by crafty intriguers, and no braying in the legislative mortar is sufficient to drive their foolishness out. The patriotic perfection of the partisan is measured by his swallow; he must gulp every thing that is administered from his own side, and his steady and stupid faith is the stock-in-trade of political gamesters. A motley crowd of those who have outdone their rivals in the unscrupulous tactics of the canvass get together in some grand edifice, which from corner-stone to liberty-cap is a monument of fraudulent jobbing, and they then call themselves a "government," while the superstitious multitude hails the conclave as the "assembled wisdom." Wise in all the arts by which a credulous people are deluded they certainly are; for how else would their lying promises continue to pass from hand to hand as veritable money?
Now, against all this multifarious imposture, this liability to be misled by calculating knaves of every complexion, what is our defense? How much is accomplished by the 300 colleges, and 800 academies, and altogether some 2,000 high-schools, supplemented by 168,000 common schools, in the way of guarding the people against the delusions and deceptions to which they are perpetually exposed? The common schools bring the mass of them up to the point of reading the newspapers, and thus greatly increase their exposure, but they furnish no mental resources of counteraction. The newspaper has its useful office, but it is the most efficient instrument of a vicious partisanship, and an instrument easily wielded by designing men. The higher institutions turn out the raw material which is quickly worked up into knavish managers on the one hand, and credulous partisan gulls on the other; for, as Mr. Carlyle remarks, "quack and dupe are at bottom the same thing." We find the cause of this wide-spread evil, as the Times remarks, in a faulty, mental training which gives the culti-
