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People in general, peaceably minding their own business, do not give much thought to their subtler enemies. A burglar, creeping in through the window, we can see and scream at; but a Public Poisoner, a whole array of Public Poisoners, creeping through the Legislature, we do not notice.
In the interests of the common good we have our National Health League, working by means of the Owen Bill for a National Department of Health which shall safeguard the people from disease and contamination as the Bureau of Agriculture safeguards our cattle.
Against this measure, one of most needed social service, is rising an organized opposition called the "League for Medical Freedom." This association defends the free practice of healing by unorthodox methods, but its opposition to the Owen Bill is wholly ignorant, if not worse. The Owen Bill, in urging a National Department of Health, does not seek to regulate the practice of medicine. Its work will be to maintain pure food, pure drugs, pure streams, and to study human health and maintain it as assiduously as we now study the health of swine and steers.
This sudden opposition, using great sums of money to advertise in the newspapers, seems based on the big interests of the patent medicines and other profitable health destroyers and life takers.
Our women, within their capacity as mothers and guardians of the home, ought to inform themselves as to the work of the National Health League.
Write to the Committee of One Hundred, Drawer 45 New Haven, Conn.
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How many of our readers know that superb magazine, The Englishwoman?*
As far as I have seen them it is by far the finest woman's publication in the world. A big, handsome, dignified monthly; 120 pages in large clear type, a joy to the eye; and paper, a joy to the hand; the magazine is three-quarters of an inch thick to The Century's half inch, and weighs ten ounces to The Century's 18. This is not only because there are no pictures, but because of that specially light weight paper, so much more used in England than with us.