number of testimonials, not only to Pierce, but to Peruna, Paine's Celery Compound and other brands, out of all proportion to their population? On page 65 {065} is a group of Pierce enthusiasts and a group of Peruna witnesses. Should you, on the face of this exhibit, accept their advice on a matter wholly affecting your physical welfare? This is what the advertiser is asking you to do. Secure as is the present control of the Proprietary Association over the newspapers, there is one point in which I believe almost any journal may be made to feel the force of public opinion, and that is the matter of common decency. Newspapers pride themselves on preserving a respectable moral standard in their news columns, and it would require no great pressure on the part of the reading public (which is surely immediately interested) to extend this standard to the advertising columns. I am referring now not only to the unclean sexual, venereal and abortion advertisements which deface the columns of a majority of papers, but also to the exploitation of several prominent proprietaries. Recently a prominent Chicago physician was dining _en famille_ with a friend who is the publisher of a rather important paper in a Western city. The publisher was boasting that he had so established the editorial and news policy of his paper that every line of it could be read without shame in the presence of any adult gathering. "Never anything gets in," he declared, "that I couldn't read at this table before my wife, son and daughter." The visitor, a militant member of his profession, snuffed battle from afar. "Have the morning's issue brought," he said. Turning to the second page he began on Swift's Sure Specific, which was headed in large black type with the engaging caption, "Vile, Contagious Blood Poison." Before he had gone far the 19-year-old daughter of the family, obedient to a glance from the mother, had gone to answer an opportune ring at the telephone, and the publisher had grown very red in the face. "I didn't mean the advertisements," he said. "I did," said the visitor, curtly, and passed on to one of the extremely intimate, confidential and highly corporeal letters to the ghost of Lydia E. Pinkham, which are a constant ornament of the press. The publisher's son interrupted: "I don't believe that was written for me to hear," he observed. "I'm too young--only 25, you know. Call me when you're through. I'll be out looking at the moon." Relentlessly the physician turned the sheet and began on one of the Chattanooga Medical Company's physiological editorials, entitled "What {070}Men Like in a Girl." For loathsome and gratuitous indecency, for leering appeal to their basest passions, this advertisement and the others of the Wine of Cardui series sound the depths. The hostess lasted through the second paragraph, when she fled, gasping. "Now," said the physician to his host, "what do you think of yourself?"