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’TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE
45

a score of years only ago an observer had pointed out the nature of the disease and the manifest inadequacy of current theories and prevailing methods of prevention and treatment, do you think others would have had a right to turn upon him and demand that he instantly prescribe a remedy which should be not only complete, but at once recognized as such and so accepted? In the present case, as I have already observed, from the days of Aristotle down through two and twenty centuries, men had been experimenting in all, to them, conceivable ways, on the government of the body politic, exactly as they experimented on the disorders of the physical body. But only yesterday was the source of the yellow fever, for instance, diagnosed and located, and the proper means of prevention applied. The cancer and tuberculosis are to-day unsolved problems. By analogy, they are inviting subjects for an Initiative and a Referendum! Yet would any person who to-day, standing where I stand, expressed a disbelief, at once total and contemptuous, of such a procedure as respects them, be met by a demand for some other panacea of immediate and guaranteed efficiency? And so with the body politic. I here to-day am merely attempting a diagnosis, pointing out the disorders, and exposing as best I can the utter crudeness and insufficiency of the market-place remedies proposed. Have you a right, then, to turn on me, and call for some other prescription, warranted to cure, in place of the nostrums so loudly advertised by the sciolists and the