I can, if I choose, snap my fingers in his face,
and make Miss Rosa happy (or unhappy, as the
case may be) without his sanction; but so can
the African savage kick his fetish if he has pluck
enough; only he dares not, because of that
something, that vague power, that unspoken
dread, which he himself has conferred upon his
rag and rubbish heap.

Two fetishes guard the gates of life; in other
words, they are hung over the doors of the
Royal Colleges of Physicians and of Surgeons.
One fetish goes by the name of Professional
Orthodoxy; the other is the Formula of the
Prescription. Now, it would seem to the
uneducated in such matters, that the mission of
medicine is to heal, and not to follow the mere
manner of our forefathers; and that, whosoever
can bring the art of healing to greater perfection
and more certainty, he is the great man of
the medical generation, be he of the royal
colleges or an outsider—orthodox, or of the free
school. But the fetish chalks on the black
board a cabalistic sign that looks like M.D., and
says "No, we will have only medicine men duly
qualified by ourselves, and we will not recognise
the degrees conferred by nature,
knowledge, or experience; these are uncertificated
and uncovenanted services, and we despise their
successful methods, and laugh at their beards.
The mission of medicine is to heal, if you
can, by prescribed means, and to uphold the
authority of the royal colleges; but chiefly
to uphold this authority, and to repudiate
any method of healing outside the prescribed
means."

Well! that is one fetish swinging grimly
over the gates of life, and a formidable and
most tyrannical fetish he is, as many a desolate
home and rank graveyard can testify; the
other is not quite so harmful, being of the
nature of a spell or charm expressed by the
symbols R §, j for i, very badly written Latin
words instead of intelligible English ones, and
a vile mish-mash of directions at the end, which
the chemist is supposed to decipher and write in
plain mother tongue on the label of the bottle.
Why sane people with their ordinary allowance
of brains, of the ordinary number and depth of
convolutions, could not put this fetish behind
the fire, I cannot understand. Would it be
such a very terrible revolution in the medical
world if a patient, or rather a patient's friends,
were told that he was going to take glycerine
and iron, or rhubarb and magnesia, or blue pill
and black draught, in the language in which we
have been taught to say our prayers and blow up
our servants, instead of in a queer old monkish
rigmarole that would have sent Cicero into fits,
and put an end to the days of Quintilian before
his time? No one can defend the practice; it
is just a fetish and nothing more; a gree-gree,
as absurd, unsubstantial, irrational, and destructive
to truth and freedom as any mass of rags
and rubbish and muttered charms, hung up
against the trees and temples of an African
village.

And is not our respect to mere rank—rank
per se, and not because it is associated with
greater nobleness, or retrospective of a mighty
time and a glorious name, but merely because it
is rank, and a title to roll pleasantly between the
lips—is not that a fetish too, of a like kindred
to the African's? Why should My lord set
our hearts in a glow when he condescends to
the social equality of an hour? And why should
My lady's soft eyes and genial smile be so very,
very much more beautiful than the little
confectioner girl's at the corner, whom yet, I
think, young Maulstick, our artist friend, would
pronounce the more beautiful creature of the
two?

Why? Because My lord and My lady wear
fetishes stuck all over them, and we fall down
and worship the work of our own hands. Very
patent and declared are some of the fetishes
with which we endow each other. Ribbons, and
stars, and garters, and crosses, and orders, and
so many stripes on the sleeve, and such and
such a pattern of gold on the shoulder, the shape
of a hat, the colour of a bunch of feathers, the
cut of a coat, and whether the trousers come
down to the ankles or are snipped off short at
the knee, the skins of beasts—specially the skin
of a certain kind of polecat—the colour of a bit
of coarse bunting and whether it is red, white,
or blue, the pattern of a certain metal head-
dress, and what kind of crosses and leaves and
balls make up the ornaments; the shapes cut
into bits of stone, and painted on carriages,
on hall chairs, on windows, hammercloths,
screens, as well as engraved on silver spoons
and pap-boats—all these, and more than these,
are fetishes pure and simple, hanging like mill-
stones round the neck of freedom, and bending
that and the knee-joints whether you like it
or no. A fetish the hereditary system, too.
Oh! a grand-sounding, high-headed fetish that!
sometimes making more conspicuous the true
king—the real leader of men—and sometimes
consecrating to limitless mischief the miserable
mistake who, but for this, would have been
quietly laid hold of by the heels, and set to drill
in the wholesome army of disciplined workers.
Protected by his fetish men kneel at his feet
instead, and so erect into a scourge for their
own backs what else they might have employed
in weeding potatoes or thrashing corn. Men
are very silly about their fetishes at all times,
but the fetish of hereditary rule, when the
hereditary ruler is a fiend or a fool, is the most
amazing silliness of all.

Turn now to the "pomp of ceremonial," as
people call it, and say, if you please, where we
in England are superior to the savage who
smears his body with red paint, and tattooes
his face into a high-dress pattern; who wears
eagle's feathers and shark's teeth and glass beads
and scarlet cloth; and who thinks himself ever
so much a grander fellow than he was, if he
has a fathom, or two of brass wire, or an extra
roll of "American domestics." Take our lord
mayor's show as one example; we will come
to others by-and-by. Gilt coaches, running
footmen with long staves in their hands