There are various kinds and classes of Humbugs; but reduced to the last analysis--stripped of the sugar- coating by which they impose on the public--they are one and all simply professors of falsehood. I am sometimes inclined to the view that humbuggery is a disease, and that some doctor will yet discover a gold- cure for it--will demonstrate that the bad habit is due to microbes that get into a man's mind and make trouble trying to turn around, or to bacilli that bore holes in his moral character and let his honesty leak out; for the medical fraternity has gravely informed us that kleptomania (sneak-thievery by eminently respectable people) and dipsomania (sottishness by the social salt of the earth), are simply diseases that should be treated with pills and powders instead of with penitentiaries and whipping-posts. Now if a man will steal a saw-mill and go back after the site simply because his pericardium is out of plumb or his liver has gone into politics; will nurse a juicy old jag until it develops into a combined museum and menagerie, because his circulation has slipped an eccentric or his stomach got out of its natural orbit, I submit, in all seriousness that he might be physically incapacitated for telling the truth by an insidious attack on his veracity by the dreadful falsehood fungi, and that the best way to restore his moral equilibrium--to remove him from the category of chronic Humbugs--would be to fumigate him. The Lord once attempted to check the Humbug habit by striking liars dead; but soon saw that such a plan would prove more fatal than a second flood--that there wouldn't be even a Noah's Ark picnic of us left--and reluctantly relinquished it. Science has not yet succeeded in mastering the disease; but just give it time and it will save the world yet--will find a medical name for every human frailty; will be able to tell, by looking at a man's tongue, whether he's coming down with the mug-wump malaria or the office-holding hysteria, and do something for him before it's everlastingly too late.