Dr. Andre Surtaine is a wealthy manufacturer of a patent medicine cure-all. He idolizes his son Hal, who knows little of his father's business and does not realize that their wealth has been built upon a fraud and on the pitiable weakness of sufferers throughout the nation. Hal falls in love with Esme, the daughter of Dr. Mark Elliott. Years before, Dr. Surtaine, while at the beginning of his career as a peddler of his nostrum, had been attacked by a man whose wife contracted the morphine habit through taking Surtaine's fake medicine. In his father's factory, Hal meets Milly Beal, who is ignorant of the tact that she is the daughter of this old-time enemy of Dr. Surtaine. "The Clarion" is a newspaper published in the city where Surtaine's medicine is manufactured. Through the influence of a minister "The Clarion" attacks editorially Dr. Surtaine and his business.