All such festivities are foreign to our nature. We cannot even keep up an interest in "Decoration Day." We revere the memories of our dead; but a ceremonial exhibition of our reverence sits ill upon us. We do not take kindly to public spectacles, and ourselves never appear well in them. As to the sober procession for which the municipal laws in New York compelled the projected masquerade to be changed, it will be, if it is at all, only a means of advertising. That sort of display we take to hugely. It was with difficulty that President Lincoln's obsequies were preserved against the projects of advertisers. We turn the mountains into posters and the hills into sign-posts. If we must do that, let us do it openly and plainly; but a carnival! Fudge! * * * * * --WE cannot successfully imitate Europeans in their graceful follies; but in their soberer and more practical habits we might well follow their example. A step has been just taken in Germany which is more needed here, and which yet there is hardly any hope that we shall profit by. The union of German apothecaries has addressed a petition to the Federal Council demanding that the secret medicines concocted and advertised by quacks shall be officially tested before they are permitted to be sold. A more creditable and needful step was never taken, or one which was more indicative of enlightenment and high civilization. Quack medicines are on the whole a curse to mankind. They are generally imposed upon the ignorant and credulous by men who care not what harm they do so long as they profit by their business. Many of these medicines--so called--are very injurious, and a still greater proportion of them are entirely useless. The very fact that their composition is kept secret is against them. It is a law absolute among all honorable physicians that no remedial agent shall be kept secret. Such physicians, if in their practice they discover a remedy for any disease, at once make it known to the whole profession. To keep such a discovery secret would be to lose caste, if not to be entirely excluded from honorable professional association and recognition. If such an examination as that proposed in Germany is needed there, here it is required by a tenfold greater necessity. America is the great field of operation for the patent medicine vender. Here he thrives. Here he accumulates huge fortunes if he will only advertise persistently and with sufficient disregard of truth. And his chief victims are women and children. He is one of the pests of our society. We cannot exclude him, or extinguish him entirely; that would interfere with the individual liberty of the citizen; not only of the seller, but of the buyer. If people choose to poison themselves gradually, they insist upon their right to do so unhindered by government action. But at least we might do what the German apothecaries ask to have done, and require as a