p. 8 | NOSTRUMS AND “ISMS.”

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 15, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 42.

NOSTRUMS AND “ISMS.”

There seems to be a pretty general feeling that the existing social and economic system is not what it should be—that men, and the things men have made in the life about us, are not altogether right. Something is wrong; on this point all men are agreed. Reformers multiply, each with his own patent nostrum, his own theory of the thing which alone will mend all the evil of the world. It is socialism, or anarchism, or nationalism, or individualism, or government ownership, or anti-trustism, or free silverism, or populism, or prohibitionism, or new reform partyism, or female suffragism—a magnificent, glittering cornucopia of “isms” poured out upon a patient public. There appears to be a very general belief that there must be some trick of management or organization in our social and political affairs, if once we could find it, which would enable us to make the crooked things straight and the rough places plain. And so we are forever amending our charters and constitutions, and getting up new movements to bring the highest sagacity to bear upon them, as if our very life depended upon our success in this undertaking. The world, we seem to think, is a machine which goes in rather a lame and impotent fashion, and does thus far very imperfect work. There must be a way to take out a wheel here and put in one there; to add a self-acting contrivance at some weak point, so that it will deliver a much more finished product.

Perhaps this might be expected to be the belief of a people which takes as much patent medicine as we manage to consume. May there not be some connection between the two things? We learned the other day that the proprietor of one of these nostrums, which is warranted to cure almost everything from cholera to chilblains, had recently ordered seventy thousand gross of corks from a maker of those useful articles. Presumably each of these corks represents a bottle of the precious liquid; and the science of mathematics therefore assures us that something more than ten million of people are expected to take, in the near future, each one his pint or quart of the healing fluid, or that half this number will pretty surely double that dose. This is only one of a dozen or so of popular remedies whose names are emblazoned on rocks and fences and trees from ocean to ocean. The saffron and pennyroyal and boneset teas and other spring decoctions of our grandmothers sink into entire insignificance beside this huge medicinal flood, which is one curious product of the modern art of advertising. . . .

That all the people who are perpetually curing themselves are really sick enough to resort to medicines passes belief. The work of the world could not go on for a single day if that were the case. The truth is that a great many people imagine themselves to be sick, or on the verge of dreadful illness, when, if they would simply go on about their business, their next birthday would find them much better off, both in pocket and in health, for lack of the stuff they are accustomed to buy and swallow. The regular physicians, and still more the “irregular” ones, reap a bountiful harvest of golden shekels from the pockets of the multitude of people who fool themselves into thinking they are sick. . . .

If the medicine does not act as was expected, try a bottle of something else. Plenty of nostrums are afloat, and and there must be one which will just hit the case. . . .

All properly educated physicians in recent years have tended to place less and less reliance upon the action of drugs. . . . The world is not to be cured by legislation, or by any kind of medicine that is to abolish temptation. Righteousness must come from the inside. The kind that is plastered on by legislation doesn’t stick. The great lack of the world is its lack of good men and women—at least in certain places where their presence would be of much advantage; and personal character is what, above all, we have most need to produce.

Given the character in the man, we shall get like character in the work of his hand and brain and heart. So the root of our industrial troubles is not in condition, but in character. We have threatening social questions, not because the economic system is bad, but because people are bad. The solution is to be reached, not through good machinery, but through good men.—San Francisco Chronicle.