FOR USE IN LECTURES

"A white-haired mental healer, his cadenced words clothed in the richest drapery of metaphor, lulled a fashionable audience into a semi-slumbrous condition yesterday afternoon while he voiced his theories on self-healing." And so a new healer, stealing a rival's thunder, appears in New York, and hypnotizes an audience eighty percent women, by the spell of his voice and the music of a fine orchestra.

Coueism appears doomed before the new emancipator of the sub-conscious, whose teaching is even "more potent" than the reiteration of the Freshman. It is really too bad that the new sun should arise just as Coue himself had planned a long lecture tour, and was expected to arrive early in January, like a belated Christmas gift. The dictates of courtesy would have suggested perhaps that Dr. Gayer keep his discovery to himself until the self-styled father of auto-suggestion had had first say.

Yet a man who had discovered a method of changing his fellows from "canaries to eagles" and persuading them that they were "as fixed as the stars, as unchanging as the sun" could hardly be expected to wait. Think of the results if such as he should succeed; one hundred and ten million people in one country all capable of anything--health, happiness, strength the property of all; complete immunity from accident, from weakness, from sickness. Surely the possessor of such a panacea is only right in telling the world.

There seems to be only one spot on the face of this sun, and that is the effect of auto-suggestion. Of course energetic New Yorkers can be reduced to a semi-comatose state only by a deliberate carefully planned hypnosis; but elsewhere "the semiconscious state with closed eyes" into which Dr. Gayer transports his hearers and which he insists is necessary for success has been reproduced by less strenuous methods. If he too went on a tour say of the colleges he probably could dispense with the orchestra. ("A little auto-suggestion and one can do anything.") At least the receptive state may be recommended for use in lectures.