The cold drink habit is like all other habits--it grows on what it feeds. The soft drink factories run full blast in every state in the Union. There are thousands of these factories turning out drinks that are little less deadly than alcoholic drinks.

These "soft drinks" all contain mineral-free sugar, coal tar dyes, mineral acids and artificial flavors in addition to the "regular" poisons that are put into many of them. Billions of bottles of injurious imitations of fruit juices and still more billions of glasses of the same, or worse "belly-washes" made possible by coal tar products, are sold every year, to the drink mad public. The stuff can be made very cheap and sold at a big profit.

"Ginger Ale," made largely of an infusion of capsicum; "Grapeade," that contains no substance from the grape; "Orangeade," without an atom of orange juice in it; "Strawberry drink" without the strawberry; "Cherry-- " that was never a cherry, and other "artificially colored and flavored drinks" are sold in floodlike proportions, because, to use Mr. Harter's words, "we are a bunch of silly children to whom red circus lemonade has a lure against which mother's lemon squeezer cannot compete." "Selling booze is unlawful and selling water is unprofitable, and we are awfully thirsty and awfully easy and selling soft drinks is a soft snap and we are a lot of soft-brained sap-headed suckers."

There are no health drinks among these soft drinks. These drinks are all frauds and cheats. The chemical imitations of fruit juices contain none of the virtues of the real fruit juices. They have no food value and do not really taste like the real juice. There is nothing for the intelligent person to do except to avoid the whole lot of them and stick to water and real fruit juices. Few know that the coloring and flavoring substances used in "soft-drinks" are coal tar products and are enemies of health. If this knowledge were more general, there would be less of these substances consumed.

Other soft-drinks, which make no pretense of being fruit drinks, contain such drugs as caffeine, bromid and acentanilid. In a drink of Bromo-seltzer, one gets about twenty-four grains of bromid, ten grains of acetanilid and three grains of caffeine. An ordinary glass or bottle of coca-cola, the "drink that refreshes," contains about the same amount of caffeine as a cup of strong coffee. Its so-called refreshing effect is irritation--vital resistance. There are a number of caffeine containing cold-drinks.