By Max Pemberton

The Times (London), Wednesday, July 17, 1918.

I do not know that there is going to be any greater real romance this 20th Century than the romance of Pelmanism.

The claim is large, but it is not difficult to support it by the facts, and the facts, surely, make a striking appeal to the imagination…

I knew nothing of Pelmanism in my Cambridge days, and yet it seems to me that many of us must have been seeking after it for the best part of our lives. From our earliest youth we have been conscious not only of a dissipation of mental energy, but also of the need of mind training.

The boy at school passes too often from misunderstanding to misunderstanding. Faced at an early age by a task that no one has taught him how to accomplish, he has passed on to other tasks with which he is even less able to deal. In later life, the professional or busy man must often have stood to ask himself if he were making the best use of his mental powers.

• Has he had any mind training at all?
• Is there a day in his life when he has not dissipate brain power upon things that do not matter?
• Above all, is that brain what science could have made of it had science come to his aid five-and-twenty or thirty years ago?

While many thousands have perceived the gigantic flaws in our intellectual fabric, one man, at any rate, began long ago to redesign the building. That man is Mr. W.J. Ennever, the Founder and President of the Pelman Institute. Be it admitted that it was no sudden inspiration which came to him as a dream of the night. He did not wake up one morning to cry "Eureka!"

From the smallest beginnings—initially from a patient investigation of the mysteries of the memory—this wonderful organization arose. Patiently stone by stone the edifice was constructed. Perceiving almost at the outset that man does not live by memory alone, Mr. Ennever, with his scholars and thinkers and writers who came to his aid, set out to develop the system, whose disciples are numbered to-day by hundreds of thousands.

His idea has always been to develop both the intellect and the character of the individual.

It is nothing to teach a man how to use his memory if he have also the will to use it. It is nothing so to equip him that he can more than hold his own in the battle of life if you do not fortify him also with that mental pugnacity which will carry him triumphantly into the fray.

Pelmanism is, as I have said, one of the greatest romance of the century. Reflect for a moment what is happening concerning it. We are fighting the greatest war in the story of the world. Brave men are dying for us; women at home are suffering; the nation has been waiting in the silence of a great faith for the light that must come after. Yet admist it all, alike in the wilderness of the dead and in the homes of the living, the little grey books of the Pelman Institute have given consolidation to thousands…

I do know that thousands, who, are now thanking God for the day they heard of Pelmanism, began by believing that they would never go through with it. Something to learn! They fingered the book and read a few pages of it. There were many opportunities for the soldier in the trenches. He had nothing else to read, it may be, and he read this. Days passed and his interest was not considerable.

Had you asked him at that time, he would have laughed at your suggestion that eleven more books eventually would come to him. But lo and behold, one day the thing had happened. The light had come. Pelmanism had gripped him with both hands.

• He is now devoting every spare moment to it.
• He begins to perceive its enormous possibilities.
• No other literature has interested him like this.
• Every day he is conscious of mental gain.
• He knows that he has become a better man.
• "With this equipment," he says, "I shall be able to successfully fight that other battle which awais me at home."
• Now he perceived why he has not succeeded in life hitherto…

Yes, indeed Pelmanism is a great romance. I think ultimately it will come, as I have said, to be considered the greatest romance of this century. For already it has forged a bond of learning whose links intellectually are of steel. It has founded a great fraternity of the mind, and this fraternity will add thousands to its numbers every week.

And it stands for more than a mere system of education. Rather let us say that it makes for national recognition—for a new spiritual and intellectual birth which must write a memorable page in the story of man’s progress.

The end.