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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: Cagliostro was no isolated phenomenon; that his success--nay, his
having even conceived the possibility of success in the brain that
lay within that "brass-faced, bull-necked, thick-lipped" head--was
made possible by public opinion. Had Cagliostro lived in our time,
public opinion would have pointed out to him other roads to honour--
on which he would doubtless have fared as well. For when the silly
dace try to be caught and hope to be caught, he is a foolish pike
who cannot gorge them. But the method most easy for a pike-nature
like Cagliostro's, was in the eighteenth century, as it may be in
the latter half of the nineteenth, to trade, in a materialist age,
on the unsatisfied spiritual cravings of mankind. For what do all
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