In France, the headmaster of a school, following the instructions of the famous psychologist, Alfred Binet, announced to a class of eighty-six boys that he intended to test their memory of the length of lines. A line two inches long, ruled on white cardboard, was shown to each boy, who, after looking at it, had to draw it as accurately as he could on a sheet of paper. The boys were then told that they would be asked to draw another line a little longer than the first, and were accordingly given a second line to copy. In reality it was shorter than the first, being only an inch and three quarters long. Yet out of the entire class only nine resisted the suggestion and believed their eyes and their memories rather than the master’s statement. The other seventy-seven boys—some of whom were fourteen years old—made the second line longer than the first. A variation of the same experiment was made on another class, to whom a series of thirty-six lines was shown, one after the other. Of these lines the first five progressively increased in length, while the remainder were uniformly long. Not one of the forty-two boys who were asked to copy them reached the maximum length at the fifth line, while nine industriously continued making their lines longer up to the last line shown them. The first five lines, that is to say, had acted as a suggestion having sufficient force to induce in them, despite the evidence of their eyes, a belief that the entire series similarly increased in length. Much the same thing, as everyday observation shows, occurs in the case of full-grown men and women. The judicious have long grieved at the gullibility with which people who are by no means illiterate and uneducated accept and act upon the most preposterous suggestions of the fraudulent advertiser, from the patent-medicine man to the swindling promoter. Political mountebanks and charlatans daily ride into power through nothing else than skilfully working on the suggestibility of the voters. So, too, religious cults, no matter how fantastic, gain a foothold and a following. “I am Elijah,” some one announces, and straightway a multitude proclaim him Elijah. “There is no such thing as disease,” says another, and thousands take up the cry, accepting the absurd suggestion with as much unthinking readiness as was shown by the French boys who, although they had concrete evidence to the contrary, accepted their master’s deceptive statements.