THE PATENT MEDICINE CURSE.
[From "The Stimulant Habit," a booklet by Dr. E. C. Loomis, health officer of Vermillion County, Ind.] THE plea is made by the Prohibition party that the government fosters the alcoholic drink habit. They rail at the army canteen, as a drunkard-maker, and yet patent medicine syndicates make a thousand times as many. Blinded to this fact, temperance people pay but little attention. Worse, these syndicates are actually lauded. We quote: "Peruna has among its friends many of the leading temperance workers in the country, who give it unstinted praise and do not hesitate to indorse it by the use of the most extravagant language. Peruna contains 23.16 per cent. of alcohol by weight. Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, 16.67 per cent.; Green's Nervura, 17.20 per cent.; Hood's Sarsaparilla, 18.80 per cent.; Paine's Celery Compound, 21 per cent.; Ayer's Sarsaparilla, 26.10 per cent.; Warner's Safe Tonic Bitters, 35.70 per cent.; Parker's Tonic, 41.60 per cent.; Hostetter's Stomach Bitters, 44.30 per cent.;" etc. Millions of dollars' worth are sold each year. Beer contains from two to three per cent. of alcohol, and yet these worthy reformers hurl the most scathing denunciations against the brewer and saloon-keeper. By drinking compounds ten times as strong, for some real or fancied ailment, or to revive drooping spirits, prohibitionists are inspired to prodigious labors. The author is glad to admit that thousands of the people who daily use patent bitters would not do so if they knew the nature of the deadly mixture. The Prohibition party would do well to educate the masses along this line. It is no exaggeration to say the amount of alcohol consumed this way by Christians, prohibitionists, reformers, and ordinary people is equal to, if not greater, than that drunk in the saloon. The method of advancing these bitters in the newspapers is apparently as infamous as that of beer and tobacco. Modesty, too, is evidently a lost virtue, else why should a woman having a "trouble" wish to parade herself by a Peruna-Pinkham "testimonial" and a companion picture, the whole being little less than a "state of nature" display held up to the gaze of suffering men. The Terre Haute Brewing Co., freighted one week to the Peruna Company, as sample shipment only, four carloads of high wines, eighty barrels to the car, each barrel containing ninety gallons, making a total of 28,800 gallons to make an authorized temperance drink or medicine.