intensified by one of our national faults--the
tendency to jump at conclusions, to overdo things, to run from one evil to
its opposite, without stopping at the harmless mean. We think we are
brighter and quicker than the Englishman or the German. They think we are
more superficial. Whatever name you give the quality it causes us to
"catch on" sooner, to work a good thing to death more thoroughly and to
drop it more quickly for something else, than any other known people,
ancient or modern. Somebody devises a new form of skate roller that makes
roller-skating a good sport. We find it out before anyone else and in a
few months the land is plastered from Maine to California with huge
skating halls or sheds. Everybody is skating at once and the roar of the
rollers resounds across the oceans. We skate ourselves out in a year or
two, and then the roar ceases, the sheds decay and roller-skating is once
more a normal amusement. Then someone invents the safety bicycle, and in a
trice all America, man, woman and child, is awheel. And we run this good
horse to death, and throw his body aside in our haste to discover
something new. Shortly afterward someone invents a new dance, or imports
it from Spanish America, and there is hardly time to snap one's finger
before we are all dancing, grandparents and children, the cook in the
kitchen and the street-cleaner on the boulevard.

We display as little moderation in our therapeutics. We can not get over
the idea that a remedy of proved value in a particular case may be good
for all others. Our proprietary medicines will cure everything from
tuberculosis to cancer. If massage has relieved rheumatism, why should it
not be good also for typhoid? The Tumtum Springs did my uncle's gout so
much good; why doesn't your cousin try them for her headaches? And even
so, drugs must be all good or bad. Many of us remember the old household
remedies, tonics or laxatives or what not, with which the children were
all dosed at intervals, whether they were ill or not. That was in the days
when all drugs were good: when one "took something" internally for
everything that happened to him. Now the pendulum has swung to the other
side--that is all. If we can ever settle down to the rational way of
regarding these things, we shall discover, what sensible medical men have
always known, and what druggists as well as mere laymen can not afford to
neglect, that there is no such thing as a panacea, and that all ration