Pushing to the Front

by Orison Swett Marden

Solicitors often command big salaries because of their wonderful personal magnetism and great powers of persuasion. The time will come when many of these "marvelous persuaders," with long heads cunningly trained, traveling about the country, hypnotizing their subjects and robbing them of their hard-earned money, will be regarded as criminals.

On the other hand, suggestion is used for practical good in business life.

It is now a common practise in many concerns to put in the hands of their employees inspiring books and to republish in pamphlet form special articles from magazines and periodicals which are calculated to stir the employees to new endeavor, to arouse them to greater action and make them more ambitious to do bigger things. Schools of salesmanship are using very extensively the psychology of business and are giving all sorts of illustrations which will spur men to greater efficiency.

The up-to-date merchant shows his knowledge of the power of suggestion for customers by his fascinating show-windows and display of merchandise.

The restaurant keeper knows the power of suggestion of delicious viands upon the appetite, and we often see tempting dishes and articles of food displayed in the window or in the restaurant where the eye will carry the magic suggestion to the brain.

A person who has been reared in luxury and refinement would be so affected by the suggestion of uncleanliness and disorderliness in a cheap Bowery eating-place that he would lose the keenest appetite. If, however, the same food, cooked in the same way, could be transferred to one of the luxurious Broadway restaurants and served upon delicate china and spotless linen with entrancing music, the entire condition would be reversed. The new suggestion would completely reverse the mental and physical conditions.

The suggestion of the ugly suspicions of a whole nation so overpowered Dreyfus during his trial that it completely neutralized his individuality, overbalanced his consciousness of innocence. His whole manner was that of a guilty person, so that many of his friends actually believed him guilty. After the verdict, in the presence of a vast throng which had gathered to see him publicly disgraced, when his buttons and other insignia of office were torn from his uniform, his sword taken from him and broken, and the people were hissing, jeering, and hurling all sorts of anathemas at him, no criminal could have exhibited more evidence of guilt. The radiations of the guilty suggestion from millions of people completely over-powered his own mentality, his individuality, and, although he was absolutely innocent, his appearance and manner gave every evidence of the treason he was accused of.

There is no suggestion so fatal, so insinuating, as that of impurity. Vast multitudes of people have fallen victims to this vicious, subtle, fatal poison.

Who can depict the tragedies which have been caused by immoral, impure suggestion conveyed to minds which were absolutely pure, which have never before felt the taint of contamination? The subtle poisoning infused through the system makes the entrance of the succeeding vicious suggestions easier and easier, until finally the whole moral system becomes saturated with the poison.

There is a wonderful illustration of the power of suggestion in the experience of what are called the Stigmatists. These nuns who for years concentrated all of their efforts in trying to live the life that Christ did, to enter into all of His sufferings, so completely concentrated all of their energies upon the Christ suffering, and so vividly pictured the wounds in their imaginations, that their thought really changed the chemical and physical structure of the tissues and they actually reproduced the nail marks in the hands and feet and the spear wound as in the side of the crucified Christ.