The Humbugs of the World, P. T. Barnum [suggested reading .txt] 📗

these persistent and infatuated spiritualists try what they call the “transfer test,” varying with each experiment the coloring-material used, and every time the bell was rung the medium’s right hand was found out to be stained with what had been put upon the bell-handle. By having a little slack-rope between his wrist and the man’s arm, it was not a difficult matter for the medium, while his “nervousness” was being manifested, to get hold of the bell and ring it, and to make sounds upon the strings of the dulcimer or guitar, with a drumstick that the “manager” had placed at a convenient distance from his (the boy’s) hand.

The Portland Daily Press, in noticing a lecture against Spiritualism, recently delivered by Dr. Von Vleck, in that city, says:⁠—“He (Dr. V. V.) performed the principal feats of the Allen boy, with his hands tied to the arm of the person with whom he was in communication.”

Horace Greeley says that if a man will be a consummate jackass and fool, he is not aware of anything in the Constitution to prevent it. I believe Mr. Greeley is right; and I think no one can reasonably be expected to exercise common sense unless he is known to possess it. It is quite natural, therefore, that many of the spiritualists, lacking common sense, should pretend to have something better.

Part III Trade and Business Impositions XVIII

Adulterations of food⁠—​Adulterations of liquor⁠—​The colonel’s whiskey⁠—​The humbugometer.

It was about eight hundred and fifty years before Christ when the young prophet cried out to his master, Elisha, over the pottage of wild gourds, “There is death in the pot!” It was two thousand six hundred and seventy years afterward, in 1820, that Accum, the chemist cried out over again, “There is death in the pot!” in the title page of a book so named, which gave almost everybody a pain in the stomach, with its horrid stories of the unhealthful humbugs sold for food and drink. This excitement has been stirred up more than once since Mr. Accum’s time, with some success; yet nothing is more certain than that a very large proportion of the food we eat, of the liquid we drink⁠—always excepting good well-filtered water⁠—and the medicines we take, not to say a word about the clothes we wear and the miscellaneous merchandise we use, is more or less adulterated with cheaper materials. Sometimes these are merely harmless; as flour, starch, annatto, lard, etc.; sometimes they are vigorous, destructive poisons⁠—as red lead, arsenic, strychnine, oil of vitriol, potash, etc.

It is not agreeable to find ourselves so thickly beset by humbugs; to find that we are not merely called on to see them, to hear them, to believe them, to invest capital in them, but to eat and drink them. Yet so it is; and, if my short discussion of this kind of humbug shall make people a little more careful, and help them to preserve their health, I shall think myself fortunate.

To begin with bread. Alum is very commonly put into it by the bakers, to make it white. Flour of inferior quality, “runny” flour, and even that from wormy wheat⁠—ground-up worms, bugs, and all⁠—is often mixed in as much as the case will bear. Potato flour has been known to be mixed with wheat; and so, thirty years ago, were plaster-of-Paris, bone-dust, white clay, etc. But these are little used now, if at all; and the worst thing in bread, aside from bad flour, which is bad enough, is usually the alum. It is often put in ready mixed with salt, and it accomplishes two things, viz., to make the bread white, and to suck up a good deal of water, and make the bread weigh well. It has been sometimes found that the alum was put in at the mill instead of the bakery.

Milk is most commonly adulterated with cold water; and many are the jokes on the milkmen about their best cow being choked etc., by a turnip in the pump-spout⁠—their “cow with the wooden tail” (i.e., the pump-handle,) and so on. Awful stories are told about the London milkmen, who are said to manufacture a fearful kind of medicine to be sold as milk, the cream being made of a quantity of calf’s brain beaten to a slime. Stories are told around New York, too, of a mysterious powder sold by druggists, which with water makes milk; but it is milk that must be used quickly, or it turns into a curious mess. But the worst adulteration of milk is to adulterate the old cow herself; as is done in the swill-milk establishments which received such an exposure a few years ago in a city paper. This milk is still furnished; and many a poor little baby is daily suffering convulsions from its effects. So difficult is it to find real milk for babies in the city, that physicians often prescribe the use of what is called “condensed” milk instead; which, though very different from milk not evaporated, is at least made of the genuine article. A series of careful experiments to develop the milk-humbug was made by a competent physician in Boston within a few years, but he found the milk there (aside from swill-milk) adulterated with nothing worse than water, salt, and burnt sugar.

Tea is bejuggled first by John Chinaman, who is a very cunning rascal; and second, by the seller here. Green and black tea are made from the same plant, but by different processes⁠—the green being most expensive. To meet the increased demand for green tea, Master John takes immense quantities of black tea and “paints” it, by stirring into it over a fire a fine powder of plaster Paris and Prussian-blue, at the rate of half a pound to each hundred pounds of tea. John also sometimes takes a very cheap kind, and puts on a nice gloss by stirring it in gum-water, with some stove-polish in it. We may