[P] The impolitic and monstrously inconsistent patent medicine act, which legalizes and sanctions and promotes the sale of quack poisons, has no doubt annually been the unweeting cause of more murders, than the joint influence of typhus, small-pox, and consumption. The tax or stamp-duty on this odious and destructive trash was, no doubt, at the time of its imposition, intended as a prevention of the evil which it contemplated to suppress. But this is one of the consequences of short-sighted and vicious legislation, and of the entrusting of the concoction of the laws to incompetent persons—in the emphatic phrase of the most eloquent of human tongues, mere ita lex scripta est lawyers—men who make a boast of never having read, or who have had but little or no opportunity of reading any other kind of books than their musty, ill-written, badly digested law-books; such as certain “_learned_ gentlemen,” of prodigiously scholar-like and scientific attainments—men, whom the Times Newspaper has justly characterised by the style and title of “THE MINDLESS;” and who contrive by the arts of “_huggery_” and favouritism to deprive the public of the benefits to be derived from the talents of men of “high classical and literary, and even legal attainments,” and of the most enlarged and enlightened philosophy, but who scorn to court the favour of those in power and “high places” by mean and dirty practices. [Q] This kind of doctrine will, no doubt, be unpalatable in _a certain quarter_, and the productiveness to the exchequer of the DISGRACEFUL REVENUE arising from the pest, will be adduced as an argument for its continuance. But it is to be hoped, as Mr. J. D. Williams said in his meritorious petition to the Commons House of Parliament on that subject, that the health of the public will be held superior to any such consideration. The lottery, no doubt, brought into the state-coffers a considerable revenue; but as it was found to undermine and ruin the morals of the community, it was abolished. And the persons at the head of the government at the time have the thanks and gratitude of every true friend of his country for the act. Surely the HEALTH OF THE PUBLIC is entitled to the same provision.