MB. HOLLOWAY.
THERE is always a profound interest felt by Englishmen in men who accumulate great fortunes, whether they spend them well or ill, or do not spend them at all, but save them for others to spend ; and it is obvious that Mr. Holloway, who had one of those knacks of making money which almost suggest the possibility of a new and very artificial instinct, has excited this interest in England—more, we think, by the fortune that he made, than by the generosity towards the public with which he expended it. We heartily recognise the generosity of those plans for healing curable mental disease, and for giving girls a solid intellectual training, on which Mr. Hollo- way lavished a considerable part of his colossal wealth. But we must say that there seems to us to be too much disposition to make light of the great variety of polyglot fibs by which the original basis of that colossal fortune was laid. From all we have ever heard,—of course, we have no knowledge on the subject our- selves,—Mr. Holloway's ointment has really been found a most useful remedy for sores, especially the sores of horses, by those who have tried it; and Mr. Holloway's pills are probably useful pills of a common-place kind. But there is no manner of doubt that they would never have earned the sums they did earn, if the advertisements had kept within the truth in
speaking of their curative effects ; there is no manner of doubt that their popularity has sprung from that gross ex- aggeration of the excellences of their own wares which tradesmen indulge in all over the world,—and which they no doubt excuse, by saying to themselves that as everybody is disposed to be incredulous of the praises lavished by men on their own goods, you must extremely over-rate the utility of what you offer, if you expect it to be rated by others even at its actual value. We dare say that Mr. Holloway would have argued that the net result of all his advertising eulogies on the virtues of the pills was, that people thought they might just as well try them when they felt unwell, and that that result was not only harmless, but often very useful. But a much greater and much worse result than this is produced by
all such exaggerations of language. We do not mean merely that the ignorant are led to rely on these much-puffed medicines, when they really need the best medical aid that they can get, and that they too often put off till too late the application for that aid, in their credulous reliance on the patent medicine. We mean much more than this, though this, too, is a very mischievous result of advertising fibs. We mean that every fortune made by using language unscrupulously, is a bounty on the. use of unscrupulous language for the future, and that the suc- cessful figments concerning Holloway's Pills or Old Parr's Life Pills, which get so much provisional and tentative credence, lead to the multiplication of other figments of the same class, till English Trade is honeycombed by the false eulogies on common-place articles, and the suspicions which these false eulogies excite. We do not suppose that Mr. Holloway thought it wrong to over-praise his own medicines. He probably thought that " Caveat emptor " was a very good motto, and that the credulous who really accepted all his advertisements literally, were very few indeed ;—nay, that even they accepted them rather as sanguine people catch at straws, when they see nothing better to catch at, than as absolutely relying on what they read. But what we maintain is that it is a great misfortune that colossal wealth can be earned by inspiring deliberately a great deal of false hope ; that the habit of trying to inspire hope which must in a vast number of cases be disappointed, is a demoralising habit ; and that we would far rather have seen Mr. Holloway advertising far and wide his regret that he had overpraised his Pills, and had induced ignorant persons to hope that by their help they might find cures for diseases which the Pills were entirely unfitted even to ameliorate, than have seen him acting the Good Samaritan to the insane, and providing munificently for the education of girls. The fibs of such advertisers may be more or less venial fibs,—we do not for an instant compare them to deliberate attempts to cheat the widows and orphans out of their savings, such as the false prospectuses of so many bubble companies make ; but we do say that they are part of a bad and demoralising Trade system, which tends to bring the great prizes to the least scrupulous of the self-eulogists, and so puts a premium on commercial insincerities which exert the worst possible-influence in the community. If it is right to say to all the world that a pill will cure diseases which it will not affect in the smallest degree, it is equally right to call a poor claret " La Rose," or a miserable tea the finest souchong, or the worst shoddy the best broadcloth ;
and this is precisely what English tradesmen do—not always with the same worldly wisdom, for patent medicines are not tried by quite the same standards as food and clothing, and are much seldomer bought by those who have already tried their virtues by any reasonable and sufficient tests. We deliberately think that if the late Mr. Holloway had honestly retracted the exaggerated descriptions of the virtues of his Pills, in all the papers in which he had published these descriptions, he would have done more good to England, than by founding a dozen excellent and splendid lunatic asylums, and a dozen excellent and splendid colleges for young women. The example of a successful tradesman regretting his too-successful puffs of his own wares, would have been a better example for Englishmen, than the. example of genuine and splendid generosity which Mr. Holloway undoubtedly set.
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