Although Barnum disliked the conceited manner in which Mangin clapped him familiarly upon the back and assured him that Monsieur Mangin was equal to the Yankee humbugs, he recognized in the Frenchman a true humbug of the ideal type, whom Barnum would have been proud to recognize as one of his disciples. Notoriety at any cost to dignity, even if it had to be sought in the grave, was legitimate, if the pencils were good; whatever the deception he admitted, Barnum pointed with pride to the fact that after all the Museum show was always worth more than twenty-five cents. In _The Humbugs of the World_ Barnum did recognize that dignity was advisable for some professions. He regarded advertising as a necessity for every individual who had goods or services to sell, but he did not advise the banker or insurance broker, who aim to be the custodians of the people’s money, to adopt his methods of hyperbole. Clergymen, lawyers, and physicians, he admitted, needed different tactics, and he often changed his own methods to meet the particular demands of an occasion. His own methods were successful because his taste was varied as well as crude; he never repeated himself. Tom Thumb was followed by Jenny Lind, whose successor was the white whale, for Barnum realized early in his career what many panderers to public taste who merely copied him, failed to realize: that a baby does not play with a rattle for twenty-one years. II A large, and by far the most interesting, section of _The Humbugs of the World_ is devoted to religious humbugs: “The domain of humbug reaches back to the Garden of Eden, where the father of lies practised it upon our poor innocent first grandmother, Eve.” This, said Barnum, was the first and worst humbug on the human race, and next after that in scope and damage were the heathen humbugs. In his opinion all heathen religions--and by a heathen religion he meant any religion besides Christianity and Judaism, whose Bible is used in Christian churches--“always were, and are still, audacious, colossal, yet shallow and foolish humbugs. It is a curious fact that the heathen humbugs were all solemn. This was because they were intended to maintain the existing religions, which, like all false religions, could not endure ridicule.”