HOPEFUL. WE WE have recently received two letters from a well educated druggist who has been continually in the business. for more than forty years. These letters were not written for publication, but they contain an earnest and forceful plea for the elimination of the general traffic in intoxicants and narcotics. from the occupation of the pharmacist. Our correspondent writes us as one who feels in his own person the stigma which rests upon the calling which he has honestly and faithfully followed for so long a time, and with a note of apprehension lest true pharmacists fail to appreciate the danger in time to avert universal condemnation, and their occupation becomes debased to the level of the bartender. We appreciate the sincerity of motive in our friend, and sympathize in his ambitious. desire for the honor of his calling. But we are inclined to be more hopeful of the issue than is he. There are "more than seven thousand (pharmacists) who have not bowed the knee to Baal," and while many of these are not active toilers in the field of reform, they stand firmly for all that is wholesome and sound in the conduct of their business. The fact that so much is being spoken and written of the abuses which have crept into the drug business is strong evidence of the reaction which has already begun toward the correction of these. In this age im moralities are endemic rather than epidemic, and no sooner do they appear in distinct form than an effort is immediately made to stamp them out, just as health officials now combat contagious diseases at every point of manifestation. The public pulse is more easily disturbed now than in former periods. Public apprehension is more quickly aroused in dread of physical or moral evil and the demand for the elimination of it in either sphere is irre istable. The man who in the twentieth century is fighting against the moral progress of humanity is waging a hopeless contest in a cause which is even now lost. Like Napoleon at Waterloo he may inflict incalcuable damage upon his opponents, but like Napoleon at Waterloo his doom is fixed, for he is at war with an invisible, an invincible, an unnumbered host which has not known permanent defeat since the foot of man was planted in the earth. There is no rivulet however small that does not flow to the sea. There is not a hidden path in the valley, which, step by step, does not lead up to the heights. The whole creation speaks to him who knows how to lend an ear.- Wagner. THE LISTENER. EVERY man who is working to any profit in this world has his ideals, and the nature of these determines in a large measure the quality of his work. The architect who is content with the study of designs of a low order, without symmetry of proportion or beauty of style, will not merit or receive even a small measure of success in his art. No sculptor will focus his mental vision on an imperfect model, and in proportion as he is imbued with the spirit of perfection in art and is fired with an ambition to produce work that will endure as monuments to his genius, so is he careful to select the subjects upon which he is to gaze until they become such a part of his being that he can no more refrain from reproducing them than the sun can keep from shining. It behooves every man, therefore, who has motive beyond the purely sensual form of existence, to understand the character of the images which he has set up in his brain as the models after which his life work is to be fashioned; and this applies with equal force to occupations of a high or low degree and for every vocation that is for the comfort or the exaltation of man into that condition for which he was created and endowed. Whilst the idealism of to-day is undoubtedly of a higher type than that of the past, there is still a vast amount of wrong thinking among men as to the influence of their daily tasks upon their own characters as well as upon their fellow men. No useful man lives to himself alone, and every being of his own kind whom he touches has an interest in both his thinking and his doing, and the nature of this is the accurate measurement of his real power with other men. The Listener not long since heard one talk who was intoxicated with ambition, in a sense as truly intoxicated as a man may become from the excessive use of wine. Through many years of intelligent labor and untiring energy he had reached that position of material well being where he could look about upon a little world of his own and feel the attainment of that for which he had toiled and sacrificed. But no man ever realizes his ideals. When he has reached the point where they have appeared to stand he finds that he has outgrown them, and his ideals are still far up and beyond. So the Listener's acquaintance in the moment of his supreme satisfaction saw other fields for conquest and in his triumph exclaimed: "I am not dismayed now at the contemplation of any condition that may be thrust upon me." Should he live to advanced years, he will find his scepter rests in another hand and his crown is worn upon another head, then -thrice happy old man will he be if he finds within himself a Kingdom over which he is ruler without a successor! "Possession, why more tasteless than pursuit? of Genesis. When the American warship came to Rome to transport the works of American artists to the United States for exhibition at the World's Fair, Donaghue's great work was unfinished, and later he shipped it by a commercial line to New York but was unable to pay the freight, and the figure was found to be too large to be carried through American railway tunnels. The failure to exhibit this great work so wrought upon the sensitive spirit of the young artist that henceforward he worked only for a frugal existence, and when halffamished for bread he took his latest piece of work to a wealthy woman in New Haven who had given him an order for it. It was rejected in a spirit of arrogance, and unable longer to endure the disappointments of life he went out from the woman's presence with his last piece of work under his arm and took his life. But the bruised spirit of the artist is not dead and somewhere, sometime his unfinished work will be taken up and the "Spirit of a New Creation" will stand forth as the ideal conception of a genius that is immortal. What a pity that he could not have believed that "There is no Chance, no Destiny, no Fate Ethically, can competition be defended? I have been dipping into Herbert Spencer's "Principles of Ethics" recently, and that philosopher is responsible for the question just asked. Dipping into Mr. Spencer's synthetic philosophy is a seductive but risky proceeding. The arguments seem so clearly put, and both sides are so justly dealt with, that the student thinks he has arrived at a definite opinion. If he seeks to formulate that opinion, however, he soon discovers that he has only been led into the mazes of the unknowable. On this question of the ethics of competition Mr. Spencer is particularly unsatisfactory, when you come to reflect on what he has written. He is a sturdy opponent of the socialism which would substitute collective for individual effort. But he sees, too, the "mercilessness" of the battle of life as it presents itself in this competitive age to the weak and incapable. He illustrates this by reference to the methods of a New York department shop keeper who acquired a colossal fortune. "A common practice of his was suddenly to lower prices for a certain class of goods to an unremunerative rate," to the serious injury, if not ruin, of weaker competitors. Mr. Spencer describes this and other methods of trade as commercial murder, and often worse than murder in view of the pain inflicted. But is there any moral distinction between killing rivals, or trying to kill them, by one heavy blow or by a series of lighter ones? Is not all competition a form of commercial maiming and wounding, if not murder, and can it be ethically justified? The philosopher leaves me on this subject, in the happy phrase of the prime minister, with only unconcluded convictions. C -Chemist and Druggist. OMPETITION AS CONDUCTED in the opening years of the 20th century is "commercial maiming and murder" into which the principle of ethics does not enter in the smallest degree. Piracy has been driven from the high seas by the force of national opinion, which demanded that it should pass. Competition in the commercial and industrial worlds is now piracy in the highest form of development. But it will not always be thus. Man was not made to prey upon his fellows like the wild beasts of the jungle, and the time will come when to be the possessor of a million dollars, while the owner's brother suffers the pangs of hunger, will be regarded as a shameful crime. The writer does not believe in an orthodox hell, but if there is any special place for retribution it must be reserved for him whose ambition for greed and whose love of display leads him to crowd his fellow man off the track in the race of life. "Man does not live by bread alone," nor does the possession of things minister to the higher qualities of his being. To think otherwise is to believe in moral chaos, and chaos in the physical or moral domain in a universe whose dominant note is harmony, is absolutely unthinkable. has been accumulating through the years. since the calf path was outlined, in conducting business in harmony with modern methods and ideas. While ridicule seldom accomplishes large results in the way of inducing men to recast their methods of procedure in any given direction, there is much truth in the suggestion of our friend as to the antiquated notions of many druggists who are following the calf path traveled by ten generations, chiefly for lack of the energy, or enthusiasm or faith to build a better road. "For men are prone to go it blind To do what other men have done." But the spirit of the age is touching with the breath of inspiration even the occupation of the retail druggist, and the workings of this all pervasive spirit are quite apparent within recent years. As even casual observers know the worlds of commerce and industry have been revolutionized within ten years through the power of organization and it is this power which has in some degree taken hold of pharmacists and that is aiding them in forsaking the old paths and finding new avenues which are much easier to travel. The day is not so far distant that a prophet's eye may not discern it wherein much of the slavery incident to present and former methods of conducting retail drug stores. will be abolished, and those who follow this occupation will become as free as men in other commercial lines. Once awake to the fact that through close and constant union of effort beneficent results are to be compassed in a large way druggists will speedily discard the sentiment expressed in a couplet of an old hymn "We are traveling home to God In the way our fathers trod." drug clerks were it not reinforced by additional evidence from other sources. There is a great demand throughout Ohio for reliable clerks, and many complaints reach the board of pharmacy of the use of intoxicants and narcotics by men who are otherwise competent for their work. A superintendent of a sanitarium giving special attention to the cure of patients addicted to morphine and cocaine informs the editor of the MIDLAND that a large percentage of the inmates of his infirmary are physicians and druggists, the former predominating, and that they come to the hospital in a most deplorable mental and physical condition. Amid all the warnings and the alarm which are being sounded by associations of physicians and druggists, and the efforts of the best men in both professions to stay the relentless tide, apparently but little impression has been made, nor do we think the extent of the awful curse is at all comprehended. We turn with horror from the bashibazouk who is devastating Bulgaria and Macedonia with scimeter and bayonet and gun, while we are tolerating the regular and extensive distribution of instruments of moral and physical murder the victims of which outnumber the slaughter of the "unindescribable misery and suffering inflicted speakable Turk," to say naught of the which are worse than death. Saliva in the Cure of Disease. Dr. Bergman, in Therapie der Gegenwart, styles the gargle "therapeutic trifling," inefficient for any real purpose. He thinks, on the other hand, that the saliva reaches every part of the throat, and can be made the vehicle for therapeutic applications. To promota the flow of saliva he orders "chewing tablets," and advocates their use in throat affections, in dyspepsia, obesity and edema. He has a special medicated or nonmedicated tablet for each. The alkaline saliva is particularly beneficial in acid dyspepsia. In case of obesity or edema the accumulating saliva is expelled and the large amount of fluid that is thus eliminated has a surprisingly favorable action in reducing the obesity or edema.-Journal A.M.A. If men were stubborn just in proportion as they are right, stubbornness would take her seat among the virtues, but men are generally stubborn just in proportion as they are ignorant and wrong. |