A further social habit of this people which we should find very strange
and which I for my part think unaccountable is their habit of judging the
excellence of a literary production, not by the sense or even the sound of
it, but by the ink in which it is printed and the paper upon which it is
impressed. And this applies not only to their letters but also to their
foreign information, and on this account they should (one would imagine)
obtain but a very distorted view of the world. For if a good printer
prints with excellent ink at five shillings a pound, and with beautiful
clear type upon the best linen paper, the statement that the British
Islands are uninhabited, while another in bad ink and upon flimsy paper
and with worn type affirms that they contain over forty million souls, the
first impression and not the second would be conveyed to the Monomotapan,
mind. As a fact, however, they are not misinformed, for this singular
frailty of theirs (as I conceive it to be) is moderated by one very wise
countervailing mental habit of theirs, which is to believe whatever they
hear asserted more than twenty-six times, so that even if the assertion be
conveyed to them in bad print and upon poor paper, they will believe it if
they read it over and over again to the required limits of reiterations.
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