00 graduates practicing in America. Dear
me, there are not 30 in Europe. Europe is so sunk in superstitions
and prejudices that it is an almost impossible thing to get her to
do anything but scoff at a new thing--unless it come from abroad; as
witness the telegraph, dentistry, &c.

Presently the Osteopath will come over here from America and will soon
make himself a power that must be recognized and reckoned with; and
then, 25 years from now, England will begin to claim the invention and
tell all about its origin, in the Cyclopedia B-----as in the case of
the telegraph, applied anaesthetics and the other benefactions which she
heaped her abuse upon when her inventors first offered them to her.

I cannot help feeling rather inordinately proud of America for the gay
and hearty way in which she takes hold of any new thing that comes along
and gives it a first rate trial. Many an ass in America, is getting
a deal of benefit out of X-Science's new exploitation of an age-old
healing principle--faith, combined with the patient's imagination--let
it boom along! I have no objection. Let them call it by what name
they choose, so long as it does helpful work among the class which is
numerically vastly the largest bulk of the human race, i.e. the fools,
the idiots, the pudd'nheads.

We do not guess, we know that 9 in 10 of the species are pudd'nheads. We
know it by various evidences; and one of them is, that for ages the
race has respected (and almost venerated) the physician's grotesque
system--the emptying of miscellaneous and harmful drugs into a person's
stomach to remove ailments which in many cases the drugs could not reach
at all; in many cases could reach and help, but only at cost of damage
to some other part of the man; and in the remainder of the cases the
drug either retarded the cure, or the disease was cured by nature in
spite of the nostrums. The doctor's insane system has not only been
permitted to continue its follies for ages, but has been protected by
the State and made a close monopoly--an infamous thing, a crime against
a free-man's proper right to choose his own assassin or his own method
of defending his body against disease and death.

And yet at the same time, with curious and senile inconsistency, the
State has allowed the man to choose his own assassin--in one detail--the
patent-medicine detail--making itself the protector of that perilous
business, collecting money out of it, and appointing no committ