Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/102

96 ghost-swindle were burned as heretics. Protests against the delusions of the drug-swindle were silenced by the bullies of the government quack-ring. For the coalition of shams had developed a union of state and drug-stores as oppressive and jealous as the union of State and Church, though the practise of medicine at last almost deserved the stigma of licensed murder.

says Goethe in the Prologue of "Faust"—"with their hellish nostrums they raged worse than the very pestilence."

After a thousand years' reign of Bruno's "Bestia trionfante," the blatant beast of Imposture—truth, for the first time, had got in a word edgeways; one small standard of fact and naturalism had been raised and successfully defended against the swashbucklers of shams. Can we wonder that all friends of reform rushed to its support and repelled aggression as the refugees of an island, rising above the waves of a universal deluge, would repulse an attack of sea-monsters?

Truth, for once, prevailed. Hydrotherapy contrived to hold its own against all comers, and