Advertising and testimonials are respectively the aggressive and defensive forces of the Great American Fraud. Without the columns of the newspapers and magazines wherein to exploit themselves, a great majority of the patent medicines would peacefully and blessedly fade out of existence. Nearly all the world of publications is open to the swindler, the exceptions being the high-class magazines and a very few independent spirited newspapers. The strongholds of the fraud are dailies, great and small, the cheap weeklies and the religious press. According to the estimate of a prominent advertising firm, above 90 per cent, of the earning capacity of the prominent nostrums is represented by their advertising. And all this advertising is based on the well-proven theory of the public's pitiable ignorance and gullibility in the vitally important matter of health.

Study the medicine advertising in your morning paper, and you will find yourself in a veritable goblin-realm of fakery, peopled with monstrous myths. Here is an amulet in the form of an electric belt, warranted to restore youth and vigor to the senile; yonder a magic ring or a mysterious inhaler, or a bewitched foot-plaster which will draw the pangs of rheumatism from the tortured body "or your money back"; and again some beneficent wizard in St. Louis promises with a secret philtre to charm away deadly cancer, while in the next column a firm of magi in Denver proposes confidently to exorcise the demon of incurable consumption without ever seeing the patient. Is it credible that a supposedly civilized nation should accept such stuff as gospel? Yet these exploitations cited above, while they are extreme, differ only in degree from nearly all patent-medicine advertising. Ponce de Leon, groping toward that dim fountain whence youth springs eternal, might believe that he had found his goal in the Peruna factory, the Liquozone "laboratory" or the VitÆ-Ore plant; his thousands of descendants in this century of enlightenment painfully drag themselves along poisoned trails, following a will-o'-the-wisp that dances above the open graves.