Adventure Magazine Cover — page 72: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

S given signal. British is childish, an excuse. They also claim to be working for the Their pretended. rear of the freedom of India. How do they expect to getitin America? Do they expect America to fight England as the North fought the South, India’s freedom the cause? No! They lie. India, in the mass, does not want freedom. Beware of the Indians. Don’t trust them. They are your enemies, the enemies of civilization, and all are skilled hypnotists, waiting the word to begin the Second Fall! SINCLAIR, of Calcutta. 3 THE world read and, laughed. © The comic papers played it up, and caricatures of Sinclair’s Warning delighted the multitude. It became known that Sinclair had once used opium and “Sinclair’s pipe dream’”’ became a trite say- ing. He was compared to those peculiar prophets who every now and then predict the end of the world. His translation of the story in Genesis was called blasphemy by many, and this had perhaps more to do with the disregarding of his warning than any other one thing. The professional psychologists—those sci- entists who contradict’ one another at a trial, from the witness stand—howled that it was impossible to hypnotize the whole world, impossible, even, to hypnotize a hun- dred people at once. They wanted Sin- clair to tell them how it was done. He re- plied that he did not know, but that he be- lieved that extremely sensitive subjects were picked out and these were intensely hypnotized, and that their condition then spread, like a panic in a theater when some fool cries, ‘‘Fire!”’ The psychologists laughed again and asked how these sensitive ones were dis- covered? And when Sinclair attempted to explain that he did not pretend to know, that it had taken ages for the Indian clique to discover the method, the professors crowed loudly from their dunghills of igno- rance and filled the air with the discordancy of their mechanistic platitudes. It never seemed to enter their heads that Sinclair’s life history was in his favor, that he had nothing to gain. N o, they said he had been “hitting the pipe” again. The Hindus in America wrote to the news- papers, claiming that Sinclair’s warning was just a trick of the British, whose agent _ Sinclair was, to rouse public feeling so that the Hindus would be deported. They, hows ever, “trusted in the justice and love of fair play of the American people.” And America believed the Hindus, gave them their sympathy and damned Sinclair. Carlyle’s statement regarding London might have been applied to the world at large: “There are some hundreds of millions of people, and they’re all fools!” But there is little profit in telling how the world received the*warning, for, in spite of the immense sums Sinclair spent in adver- tising, his words soon ceased to interest. The world said that Sinclair was crazy, that if he wanted to throw his money to the news-’ papers, that was his affair, but that he ought to be locked up. Personally I believed every word of the warning—which is.why I am writing this now—and religiously repeated the auto- suggestive words until I felt certain that no Hindu could hypnotize me, even if I hap- pened to be off my guard. I should explain that our psychologists said that no man could be hypnotized against his will. As if the Hindus would first inform a man of their intentions and then perform! As a matter of fact, they had carried hypnotism so far that they could hypnotize any man, even if they had told him what they were going to do, unless he had made himself immune, as I had. And now, by showing you to the best of my ability what happened in Seattle—tak- ing that city as a cross-section of the world— I will try to picture for you, in words, the Second: Fall, which I believe actually paral- leled thefallmeant by theallegory in the Bible. Listening to my friends discuss Sinclair, it was borne upon me forcibly that the world has always stoned those who would save it; and, while they all said in their ignorance that to hypnotize the entire world was im- possible, I never heard one attempt to ex- plain why it was impossible. There had always been a fairly large num- ber of Hindus in the city, but within a few weeks after Sinclair’s warning this number increased. They came into Seattle from the country districts where they had been pretending to look for work. The farmers saw no more of them. The significance of this will shortly appear. They were as popular as ever, for the brainless twisters of the lion’s tail felt a pro- tective interest in them and actually be- lieved they. were eet the British eS . ae = = ei Se ee aphide “ Te oe 4 A at aes =i - a a cs <= 0) DedC tty