Quacks and Grafters. Anonymous

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      They live a sort of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” life, and why? Are they not to blame? And are they not to be classed as scoundrels? Yes—and no. These men are diseased. Their contact with the world has inoculated them with the world’s contagion. What is this disease? The diagnosis has been considered simple. So simple that the world has called it commercialism, or money madness, and treated the disease according to this diagnosis without studying it further. May it not be true that, for many cases at least, the diagnosis is wrong? Do men choose the strenuous, money-grabbing life because they really love it, or love the money? I believe thousands of men in professional life to-day, who are known as dollar-chasers, really long for a more simple life, but the disease they have has robbed them of the power to choose “that better part.” And that disease is not money madness, but failurephobia.

      The fear of failing, or of being called a failure, dominates the professional world as no other power could. It claims thousands of poor fellows who were brought up to the active, worth-while life of the farm or of a trade, and chains them to a miserable, sham, death-in-life sort of existence, that they come to loathe, but dare not leave because of their disease, failurephobia.

      Success is the world’s standard. Succeed in your business or profession, by honest means if you can, but succeed! At least, keep up the appearance of succeeding, and you may keep your place in society. It may be known that your business is poor, and that you go to your office and sit in solitude day in and day out, and that you starve and skimp at home, but so long as you keep up the show, you are a “professional man!” What mighty courage it takes to acknowledge what everybody else knows, and quit! A writer in a medical journal told of a young physician in Boston who put an ad. in a daily paper asking for a job in which a strong man could use the strength a manly man ought to be proud of, to earn an honest living. If men only had the courage, I wonder how many such ads. would appear in the columns of our papers!

      An old schoolmate, who is a lawyer in a Western city, told me that of the more than two hundred lawyers of that city, twenty had practically all the law business, and of that twenty a half dozen got the big cases in which there was most money. It is largely so in every city and town. And what applies to the lawyer applies to the physician, though perhaps not to so great an extent. And while the fortunate few get most of the practice, and make most of the money, what are the unfortunate many doing? Holding on, starving, skimping, keeping up appearances, and, while young, hoping against hope for better days. But when hope long deferred has made the soul sick, and hope itself dies, what then? Keep up appearances, you are a professional man. You can’t be a quitter. It would be humorous, were it not so pathetic, to see the old doctor who has dragged along for years, barely eking out a living, put on the silk hat of his more ambitious days and wear it with dignity along with his shiny threadbare trousers and short coat, making a desperate spurt to keep up with the dashing young fellow just out of school.

      Failurephobia! Among professional men what a terrible disease it is! I have known it to drive a young man, who might have been happy and useful as a farmer or mechanic, into a suicide’s grave. Such cases are not uncommon. Who are the M.D.s whose pictures and glaring ads. appear in those 15-cent papers published in Augusta, Me., and in many daily and even religious papers? Are they men who took to graft and disgraced their profession because they loved that kind of life, and the stigma it brings? Not in many cases. Most of them perhaps come from the ranks of ambitious fellows who lost out in the strife for legitimate practice, but who would not acknowledge failure, so launched into quackery, and became notorious if they could not become noted.

      Strange as it may seem, the fact that a professional man is a notorious grafter abroad does not necessarily deprive him of social standing at home. I have in mind a man whose smug face appears in connection with a page of loud and lurid literature in almost every 15-cent Grafters Herald from Maine to California; yet this man at home was pointed to with pride as an eminently successful man. He wore his silk hat to church, and the church of which he was a valued member was proud of the distinction he gave it. A Western city has an industry to which it “points with pride,” and the pictures of the huge plant appear conspicuously placed in illustrated boom editions of the city’s enterprising papers. This octopus reaches out its slimy tentacles to every corner of the United States, feeling for poor wretches smitten by disease, real or fancied. When once it gets hold of them it spews its inky fluids around them until they “cough up” their hard-earned dollars that go to perpetuate this “pride of the West.”

      The most popular themes of the preacher, lecturer and magazine writer to-day are Honesty, Anti-graft, Tainted Money, True Success, etc. You have heard and read them all, and have been thrilled with the stirring words “An honest man is the noblest work of God.” The preacher and the people think they are sincere, and go home congratulating themselves that they are capable of entertaining such sentiment. When we observe their social lives we are led to wonder how much of that noble sentiment is only cant after all.

      The World’s Standard.

       The world will say that goodness is the only thing worth while,

       But the man who’s been successful is the man who gets the smile.

       If the “good” man is a failure, a fellow who is down,

       He’s a fellow “up against it,” and gets nothing but a frown.