Our national quality of commercial shrewdness fails us when we go into the open market to purchase relief from suffering. The average American, when he sets out to buy a horse, or a house, or a box of cigars, is a model of caution. Show him testimonials from any number of prominent citizens and he would simply scoff. He will, perhaps, take the word of his life-long friend, or of the pastor of his church, but only after mature thought, fortified by personal investigation. Now observe the same citizen seeking to buy the most precious of all possessions, sound health. Anybody's word is good enough for him here. An admiral whose puerile vanity has betrayed him into a testimonial; an obliging and conscienceless senator; a grateful idiot from some remote hamlet; a renegade doctor or a silly woman who gets a bonus of a dozen photographs for her letter--any of these are sufficient to lure the hopeful patient to the purchase. He wouldn't buy a second-hand bicycle on the affidavit of any of them, but he will give up his dollar and take his chance of poison on a mere newspaper statement which he doesn't even investigate. Every intelligent newspaper publisher knows that the testimonials which he publishes are as deceptive as the advertising claims are false. Yet he salves his conscience with the fallacy that the moral responsibility is on the advertiser and the testimonial-giver. So it is, but the newspaper shares it. When an aroused public sentiment shall make our public men ashamed to lend themselves to this charlatanry, and shall enforce on the profession of journalism those standards of decency in the field of medical advertising which apply to other advertisers, the Proprietary {071}Association of America will face a crisis more perilous than any threatened legislation. For printers' ink is the very life-blood of the noxious trade. Take from the nostrum vendors the means by which they influence the millions, and there will pass to the limbo of pricked bubbles a fraud whose flagrancy and impudence are of minor import compared to the cold-hearted greed with which it grinds out its profits from the sufferings of duped and eternally hopeful ignorance. THE PATENT MEDICINE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. Reprinted from Collier's Weekly, Nov. 4, 1905. {072} "Here shall the Press the People's rights maintain. Unawed by influence and unbribed by gain." --Joseph Story: Motto of the Salem Register.