to take
this position. It will cost you the high ideal you have always held of
your mother's sex. But a nature, as is the feminine nature, wholly
swayed inwardly by emotion, and outwardly influenced by an insatiate
love for personal adornment, will never stand the analysis you will give
it."

He realized that he was paying a high price for his success. Such
experiences as these--and, unfortunately, they were only two of
several--were doubtless in his mind when, upon his retirement, the
newspapers clamored for his opinions of women. "No, thank you," he said
to one and all, "not a word."

He did not give his reasons.

He never will.

XXX. Cleaning Up the Patent-Medicine and Other Evils

In 1892 The Ladies' Home Journal announced that it would thereafter
accept no advertisements of patent medicines for its pages. It was a
pioneer stroke. During the following two years, seven other newspapers
and periodicals followed suit. The American people were slaves to
self-medication, and the patent-medicine makers had it all their own
way. There was little or no legal regulation as to the ingredients in
their nostrums; the mails were wide open to their circulars, and the
pages of even the most reputable periodicals welcomed their
advertisements. The patent-medicine business in the United States ran
into the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The business is still
large; then it was enormous.

Into this army of deceit and spurious medicines, The Ladies' Home
Journal fired the first gun. Neither the public nor the patent-medicine
people paid much attention to the first attacks. But as they grew, and
the evidence multiplied, the public began to comment and the nostrum
makers began to get uneasy.

The magazine attacked the evil from every angle. It aroused the public
by showing the actual contents of some of their pet medicines, or the
absolute worthlessness of them. The Editor got the Women's Christian
Temperance Union into action against the periodicals for publishing
advertisements of medicines containing as high as forty per cent
alcohol. He showed that the most confidential letters written by women
with private ailments were opened by young clerks of both sexes, laughed
at and gossiped over, and that afterward their names and addresses,
which they had been told were held in the strictest confidence, were
sold to other lines of business for five cents each. He held the
religious press up to the scorn of chur