ing the matter with us, we may be cured by our
faith. If we are taking a cure for consumption, the morphine in it may
lull us into thinking we feel better. If we are taking a tonic for
spring fever, the cheap alcohol may excite us into thinking our
vitality has been heightened. Soothing sirup soothes the baby, often
doping its spirit for life, or soothing it into a sleep from which it
never wakes.

In spite of the fact that the "Great American Fraud" has been exposed
repeatedly in newspapers and magazines of wide circulation, the appeal
of the quack still catches men and women of intelligence. The other
night a friend went out to a dinner and conference with a lawyer in the
employ of the national government. Annoyed by a nagging headache, he
made for the nearest drug store and ordered a "headache powder." He
admitted that it was an awful dose, but he had been told that it always
"did the business." He knew the principle was bad, confessed to a
scorn for friends of his whom he knew to be bromo-seltzer fiends, but
he had the headache and the work to do--a sure cure and a quick one
seemed imperative. The headache was due to overwork, indigestion,
constipation. Plain food and quiet sleep was what he needed most. But
the dinner conference plus the headache was the unanswerable argument
for a dose with an immediate result.

Last winter an Irish maid slowly lost her rosy cheeks and grew
hollow-eyed and thin. She was taken to a specialist who discovered a
rapidly advancing case of consumption. He said that owing to the girl's
ignorance, stupidity, and homesickness, her only chance of recovery was
to return to the "auld countrie" at once. The girl agreed to go, but
insisted on a few days "to talk it over with her cousins in New York."
After two weeks had elapsed she was found in a stuffy, overcrowded New
York tenement. She had found a doctor who had given her a little bottle
of medicine for two dollars, which would cure her in the city. It was
futile to protest. Days in the unventilated tenement and nights in a
"dark room" meant that she would never live to finish the bottle.

For a year Miss H. took a patent preparation for chronic catarrh. It
seemed to "set her up"; but it so undermined her strength, through its
artificial nerve spur, that chronic catarrh was followed by
consumption. It later transpired that the cure's chief ingredient was
whisky, and cheap whisky. A good grandmother, herself a vigorous
temperance agitator