Each year not far from fifty million dollars are spent in America in exploiting cures for digestion troubles; and no doubt we give the doctors and the druggists a thousand millions or so each year in seeking relief from the consequences of our ignorance and our folly in feeding ourselves. Some of us are too poor to get the right sort of food, even when we know what is the right kind; others are both ignorant and incapable of resisting the clamors of appetite. The problems of mental and physical food are not analogous; they are two parts of a whole. Our ignorance of chemistry and hygiene and our unguarded appetites lead us into gastronomic folly; our ignorance of the simple and easily learned laws of the mind and our vitiated and undiscriminating mental appetites, called passions and prejudices, lead us into educational follies as wild but no wilder than our gastronomic follies. The results of the one show in poor health; the results of the other show in confusion in the conduct of our affairs, private and public. Some of us have no means of getting good mental food, and would not know what to select and what to reject if we had. Others, and these are the overwhelming majority, have no power to discriminate between the true and the false, the rational and the irrational, between that which strengthens the powers of the mind and that which weakens or perverts them. We take in cheap or worthless mental food just as we put cheap or worthless stuff into our stomachs. We take in that which is easy and pleasant to the taste--that is, we patronize the intellectual pastry cooks and confectioners too liberally. Or, we go to the purveyors of the strong waters of passion and prejudice, and under the influence of such whiskies and brandies imagine ourselves beings of extraordinary and fine mentality. There is as much, indeed, there is greater, cause for alarm over the gastronomic than over the mental follies. But neither kind is evidence that we are on the down grade. We are more alert and wiser all the time in matters of physical health, despite our own appetites and foolish inclinations and lazy disinclinations, despite the pretentious ignorance of the medical profession and the shrewd chicanery of the quacks. In the same manner we are more and more alive to the importance of mental health, of the well-fed, well-exercised brain; and this improvement goes steadily forward, despite the harmful effects of alleged literature and drama, despite the pretentious ignorance of our regularly constituted teachers, despite the energetic educational quackeries of false learning, false culture and false taste. Intelligence will spread; Democracy will compel.