The Anderson intelligencer. [volume] (Anderson Court House, S.C.) 1860-1914, 1876-10-05
GLOVE POWDERS.o
An imposition that Thriyes Upon the
Sickly Sentimentality of the Women.
Ffou, the Ne,o York Erening Post.

sHH
From the New York Erening Post.
Ours is supposed to be an age of en-
liehtenment, and we are accustomed to
look with something like contemptuous
pity upon the superstitions of.ourforefath-
ers, confident that we never should have
reasoned so illogically as they did; but
there is reason To believe that supersti-
tions of the absurdest sort are RS common
now as they ever were, the difference
between US and our grandfathers, lying
chiefly in our smaller readiness to pro-
claim our belief in charms, and our faith
in portents. Hard-headed men of busl-
ness, who never grow visionary in the
matter of an investment, sometimes carry
buckeyes in their trousers pockets as a
cure for rheumatism, or lucky-bones to
keep off ill-fortune and bankruptcy.
Every ouack in the land does thriving
business, trading upon the insane cred;
ulity of sane men and women, and II
some,charlatan should advertise pactolian
water at a dollar a pint, he would draw
money remittances even from Wall street,
in all probability. The only wonder is
that no shrewd swindler has made the
experiment.
Mr.. Anthony Comstock has'fecently
made some arrests among the quacks
who advertise love powders for sale at
uncommonly high prices, and his discov-
cries are painfully interesting. The
transparent absurdity ofthe pretense up
on which these male and female swim
dlers trade is not sufficient, it appears, to
protect even young women who have
been brought up in intelligent families
and educated in good schools from falling
victims to them. They read advertise
ments in which some man or woman
offers for sale certain drugs, which, it is
alleged, if administered surreptiously,
will make the person to whom they are
given love the person who gives them.
The young women know, of course, that
this must be lie, in the very nature of
the case. They know, or they ought to
know, that the affections are not material
and are not to be acted upon by material
agents. They know that these adver-
tising quacks cannot be better skilled in
the compounding ofdrugs or more learned
in their properties than men of scientific
attainments are; and they know that
quacks are necessarily persons of bad
character, swindlers, cheats; and yet
they believe their transparent and self
evident falsehoods, and send money to
them, and get powder, which, in utter
ignorance of the chemical nature of the
drug they give, they surreptitiously ad-
minister to some young man, refusing to
reflect that if a drug given openly will
not produce certain effect, its secret
administration cannot in the least change
either its nature or its influence.
Two, at least, of the letters which Mr..
Comstock secured were from young wo-
men of this city and Brooklyn who ought
to have known better, and there is here
lesson for parents. It is not difficult to
guess what sort of literature those young
women have been accustomed to read
The symptoms of arsenical poison are
not more certain than are those which
manifest themselves in such cases as
these, of poisoning done to the intellect
by unwholesome literature of the senti-
mental kind. These young women have
been allowed to grow morbid over senti-
mental romances, and their condition is
as truly one of mental disease as is that
of the veriest lunatic at Bloomingdale.
The recklessness with which parents
permit their children thus to poison and
debauch their minds is crying evil of
our time, and its i'll results are not by
any means confined to such slips as those
which the young women have made in
this case Sentimental suicide is not
uncommon, and worse things even than
suicide befall young women sometimes,
as the direct result of morbid sentimen-
tality that comes of long indulgence in
feyerish literature.
Even when no startling revelation of
i'll is made, great harm may be done, and
many a woman's life has been made
wretched by the early stimulation of her
imagination, and her early schooling in
romantic notions of what life and love
and marriage are. On no other subject
whatever is it more important that young
persons of both sexes should have sound,
sensible, wholesome views; on no other
are unsound, senseless and unwholesome
notions more generally prevalent, and
upon no other is there so much sickly
nonsense written and printed. Every
wife learns, if she does not krowit before
marriage, that good, sweet bread is more
potent than aay love powder to retain the
affection of a man, and that tidy house,
a neat person and a cheerful face are
more winning in a woman than any
magical charm can be. The pity is that
these truths are not always impressed
upon the minds of maidens, and that
sickly sentimentality is permitted to
fasten itself there instead.