This is not an overdrawn picture. I believe old and observing professional men will bear me out in it. Statistics of the conditions in the professions are unobtainable, but I feel sure would only corroborate my statement. In a recent medical journal was an article by a St. Louis physician, which said the situation among medical men of that city was "appalling." Of the 1,100 doctors there, dozens of them were living on ten-cent lunches at the saloons, and with shiny clothes and unkempt persons were holding on in despair, waiting for something better, or sinking out of sight of the profession in hopeless defeat. This is a discouraging outlook, but it is time some such pictures were held up before the multitude of young people of both sexes who are entering medical and other schools, aspiring to professional life. And it is time for society to recognize some of the responsibility for graft that rests on it, for setting standards that cause commercialism to dominate the age. CHAPTER III. WHY QUACKS FLOURISH. American Public Generally Intelligent, but Densely Ignorant in Important Particulars--Cotton Mather and Witchcraft--A.B.'s, A.M.'s, M.D.'s and Ph.D.'s Espousing Christian Science, Chiropractics and Osteopathy--Gullibility of the College Bred--The Ignorant Suspicious of New Things--The Educated Man's Creed--Dearth of Therapeutic Knowledge by the Laity--Is the Medical Profession to Blame?--Physicians' Arguments Controvertible--Host of Incompetents Among the Regular Physicians--Report of Committee on Medical Colleges--The "Big Doctors"--Doc Booze--The "Leading Doctor"--Osler's Drug Nihilism--The X-Ray Graft. In spite of the apparent prevalence of graft and the seemingly unprecedented dishonesty of those who serve the public, there are not wanting signs of the coming of better things. The eminent physician who spoke of the turbidity of therapeutics thought it was only that agitation that precedes crystallization and clarification that brings purity, and not greater pollution. May the seeming bad condition not be due in part also to the fact that a larger number of our American people are becoming intelligent enough to know the sham from the genuine, and to know when they are being imposed upon? That our American people are generally intelligent we know; but that a people may be generally intelligent and yet densely ignorant in important particulars has been demonstrated in all ages, and in no age more clearly than in our own. We wonder how the great scholar, Cotton Mather, could have believed in and taught witchcraft. What shall we think, in this enlightened age, of judges pleading for the healing (?) virtues of Christian Science, or of college professors taking treatment from a Chiropractor or magnetic healer; or of the scores of A.B.s, A.M.s, M.D.s, Ph.D.s, who espouse Osteopathy and use the powers of their supposedly superior intellect in its propagation?