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lationship of cause and effect should be traced. Do newspapers supply 
wants? 
Is it reasonable to believe that the average newspaper publisher de- 
liberateiv prefers to publish horrible murder accounts, nauseating and 
lying advertisements of all kinds, which he does not want his children to 
read? The editor himself has very little voice in the matter; he writes 
the high-toned editorials. It is the managing editor who must look for 
financial returns for the owner or rather for the publishing company; he 
gives the people what they want. 
The matter of clean newspapers, clean cities and clean farms goes 
back to the community—there is room for the school teacher. 
Every large city has a number of newspapers; some appeal to a cer- 
tain class of readers only and go to certain sections of the city, some to 
the fine homes, some to the slums; others appeal to all sorts of readers. 
Small communities may have only a single paper. By comparing the 
hewspapers of small cities one can get a comparative idea of city condi- 
tions. Quacks and charlatans and patent me@icine men do not thrive in 
clean communities. 
The patent medicine men in their newspaper advertisements are 
still loud in their praise of our “valuable native medicinal plants.” They 
evidently try to keep up the old-time belief that there is a plant for the 
cure of every disease. 
In strolling about the country with a botany can, one frequently meets 
people whe ask, What are the plants good for? Many have an exaggerated 
idea of the importance of plants, especially of common weeds, in medi- 
cine. Usually one does not attempt to explain. It may be said that as a 
rule plants play a very slight role in medicine today, only a few are used 
and then mainly to modify symptoms, less and less in the light of “curing 
diseases.” Perhaps one can make distinctions between plants and their 
use, in this wise: Plants of least value, used to modify symptoms, are 
those that can be gathered readily, or which grow naturally as weeds, or 
which can be cultivated in gardens. Secondly, plants that must be looked 
for away from the haunts of man. One may say of these that if the indi- 
vidual in ill health will go and seek them out, using them under simple 
life conditions, likely he will regain heath, as shown for instance in a 
little story by O. Henry, where the mere search for the rare plant in the 
mountains brought back health. 
