PILLS AND POLITICS.
MY attention has been called by several disgusted doctors
to one Jay Jay Lawrence who tacks A.M., M.D. to his
patronymic, evidently as an anchor to hold it to the
earth. Jay Jay and his vestibule-train title are conducting
a sickly concern at St. Louis, sporting the euphonious
cognomen of The Medical Brief, a monthly devoted to
patent medicine and politics, blue ointment and economics,
vermifuge and philosophy. Although Jay Jay finds it necessary
to mix display ads with his reading matter to make
the latter palatable, he declares that his painful monthly
emission has "the largest circulation of any medical magazine
in the world"—thereby indicating that while his
mentality may be atrophied, his imagination is intumescent.
I have long noticed that journals having large
bonafide circulations do little tooting of their own horns
on the house-tops—they don't have to. It is a species of
journalistic quackery which every thorough-bred publisher
regards with contemptuous pity. Brains win, in the
journalistic world as elsewhere, and "blowing" a circulation
were equivalent to employing a brass band to call
attention to the abnormal size of the editorial encephalon.
Still I wouldn't be without Jay Jay's truly remarkable
magazine for ten times the money. I haven't a very high
opinion of it as a medical authority, as it has "Cagliostro"
written on it from cover to cover; but as a humorous
journal it is 'way ahead of anything since the "Wax
Wurx" of Artemus Ward. When I weary of the
professional fun-makers, when I tire of laughing at Brer.
Rockefeller's heroic attempt to suppress the ICONOCLAST
by excluding it from his little gate-system railroad; when
the senatorial candidacy of Chollie-Boy Culberson becomes
a weariness to the spirit, and the Texas Baptist convention,
with its stage accessories of snuffles and snot develops
into
nux vomica, I can turn to Jay Jay's flamboyant
cyclopedia of misinformation and observe with ever increasing
interest the attempts of ye able editor to diagnose the
disease of the body politic and steer it clear of the funeral
director. Jay Jay is evidently not a progressive practitioner,
for he is trying to save the country exactly as Gulliver's
Lagado Galen tried to cure a dog of wind-colic.
I note with unalloyed pleasure that the
Brief has contributors
to its medical department, at Purdon, Cove and Dilworth,
Texas, Jones, Switch and Burnsville, Ala., Nassawadox,
Va., Salt Springs, Mo., Claypool, Ky. and other
great centers of therapeutical information indicating that
it spares no pains to give its patrons the worth of their
money without adding any tea-store chromos or electric
belly-bands by way of rebate. But it is not the startling
discoveries of these doctors, not the sophomoric essays of
new-fledged Hippocrati now struggling manfully with
buck-ague, snake bite and new babies at Nassawadox,
Jones' Switch and elsewhere that constitute the chief
charm of Jay Jay's versatile journal. The feature of
most interest to the lay reader is the political homilies
of the editor himself. Not only are they deeply interesting
to the
hoi polloi, but invaluable from a therapeutical
standpoint, being successfully employed in cases of itch,
smallpox, etc. as a counter irritant. I opine that one of
these read in a loud voice to an Egyptian mummy would
result in its immediate resurrection. If it had the faintest
conception of humor it would wake up long enough to
laugh, and if it hadn't it would come to life for the express
purpose of hitting Jay Jay Lawrence, A.M., M.D., across
the sterno cleidomastoidens with a well-seasoned obelisk.
It is impossible to reproduce the flavor of this intellectual
hippocampus' politico-economic emulsions, they being evidently
compounded with thaumaturgis incantations while
he is surrounded with jars of jalap, pile remedies,
aphrodisiacs and patent liver pills. They should be labelled
allopathic purgatives and kept tightly corked. In the copy
before me Jay Jay assured his readers—who are supposed
to be numerous as the sands of the sea, but are probably
confined to himself and his country contributors—that
there is a Russo-Franco-Germanic alliance against England
and that it is the sacred duty of America to come to
the rescue of her muchly-beloved "mother country," lest
the 'orrid bawbawians make 'way with the old woman,
overturn the civilization of all the centuries and rip human
liberty up by the roots. What my contemporary seems
to need is a mild cathartic that will move his brain—say
about a tablespoonful of Theodorus' Anticyrian hellebore.
The continental powers will not harm England so long as
the old harlot behaves herself, but there's no denying that
they are becoming dead-tired of her predacity and
impudence. If the senescent old British lion attempts any
funny business with the Russian bear it is liable to lose
its umbilicus, and the surgical operation will be performed
without the use of anæsthetics. If John Bull gets his
proboscis ingloriously bumped it will be none of Uncle
Sam's business—unless the gentleman in the Star-spangled
cut-a-way happens to be the party of the first part in the
bumping business. Just why we should expend blood and
treasure fighting the battles of the old buccaneer only an
Anglomaniacal doctor enervated by his own dope could
possibly imagine. Russia has ever been our friend, England
our foe. The sympathies of Russia are with
Republican France, with Republican America—the hand of
England has ever been against the world. She has
ruthlessly despoiled wherever and whenever she possessed the
power, while slavishly obsequious when confronted by
equal force. "Human liberty," your gran-dam! How
long has it been since England repealed the Test Act?—
since she granted political equality to Jews?—to
Catholics? In this respect she even legged behind the Ottoman
Empire. She is the only "Christian" nation on earth
to-day that sanctions human slavery. There are still
fools extant who imagine that all the liberties enjoyed by
Americans were inherited from "dear old England";
while the fact remains that in the matter of liberty
England has been following 50 to 75 years behind the United
States ever since the Flag o' Freedom first adorned the
atmosphere. But it is when Jay Jay ribs himself up with
a powerful nervine and tackles government by injunction
that he really rises into the realm of pure humor—becomes
serious, so to speak. He inadvertently leaks the information
that labor organizations "are animated by anarchistic
impulses, their chief desire is to force property owners
to divide with them or lose their property"; and naïvely
adds: "the injunction is really a guarantee of individual
liberty." Sure! It guarantees to employers the right to
combine to lower wages below the starvation point, while
preventing those who are thus despoiled seeking the
coöperation of their fellows in an attempt to right the
wrong by the simple expedient of taking leave of their
tools. It guarantees to workmen the liberty to be shot
down like dogs for peaceably assembling and walking
unarmed on the public highway—for asking other men to
cease work until there is a better adjustment of wages.
Of course a man who isn't willing to work in a coal mine
for 90 cents a day, who lays down his pick and asks
better pay, is an anarchist who is trying to drive other
people to divide with him their property. Jay Jay is
so much wiser than all the labor organizations in the land,
than the framers of our fundamental law, than a majority
of the American judiciary, a—veritable Daniel come to
judgment. Give him a crown as large as that of King
Midas, which was designed to hide the ears of an ass.
It is, however, when he assails W. J. Bryan
that he becomes intensely interesting. According to
this learned Theban, Bryan is a Populist and
Populists are people who do not pay their doctor bills.
They call the M.D. out of his comfortable bed at 2 g.m.,
and after he has frozen his nose and toes to puke or purge
'em they refuse to even haul him a cord o' slippery-elm
firewood or a load o' pumpkins in payment, but, accuse
him of incompetence! 'Ow 'orrible! Jay Jay must have
obtained his information from those forks of the creek
medicos who constitute the chief contributors to his
columns—and who would probably encounter fewer charges
of incompetence if they expended less time in scribbling
"rot" and more in careful reading. Still I can scare
refrain from weeping over such a tale o' woe. In the terse
vernacular of the "mother country," hit touches me 'eart
—so much so that I hereby authorize anybody to whom
W. J. Bryan owes a doctor bill to draw on me for the
amount. If he doesn't owe anybody a doctor bill it follows,
according to Jay Jay's diagnosis, that he is not a
Populist—may be a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. Classing
Bryan and his followers as Populists, then denouncing all
Populists as chronic dead-beats, must be very soothing to
a majority of the medical men of the West and South, but
it is about what might be expected of a man so infamously
ignorant that he calls England our mother country, so
idiotic that he would have us take up arms for the
international pirate in the name of human liberty. The best
thing Jay Jay Lawrence, A.M., M.D., can do is to apply
a ten-horse power poultice to his head and see if he cannot
draw a few brains into that resounding hollow. In the
meantime he should eschew politics and confine himself to
the publication of essays by village doctors and the
exploitation of patent medicines. When he next feels an
impulse creeping on to invade the realm of economics he
should chloroform it, or hit it with a club.
