struction, serves the world "for what there is in it" for the commercialist, forming combines and syndicates and misusing and perverting the tariffs for the financial betterment of themselves and the worsting of their fellows, our motto is the welfare of mankind and incidentally our maintenance along with the good of our fellows. Our mission is to upbuild and strengthen for the happiness and good of the world.

It is a great profession, is it not, with which to cast one's lot in life? It has given the world certain safety from many once devouring diseases. Its beneficence begins with man's life before he goes into the cradle and follows him to the grave. It has secured his safety from smallpox. It has driven the yellow fever almost completely from the land and it is now pointing the way of safety from that great white plague, consumption, and from the Eastern bubonic plague, and from our own scourge, malaria. It has sequestered, and in some instances, cured the leper and found its fatal bacillus. It has taken the fangs out of those serpent diseases, in this audience, unnamable. It has rescued, and is rescuing thousands of victims from death by timely operations upon and within the head and abdomen, nerves and arteries. By antisepsis and anaesthesia it has saved thousands upon thousands. It has mitigated the terrors of typhus, typhoid and phthisis, by showing their causes and avoidance. It has mastered many diseases and caused milder morbid conditions to take the place of others.

It stands guard at Castle Garden and other seaports and turns back the diseases of European crime, pauperism, neglect and degeneracy and guards our shores against other pestilences of the old world. It has in a thousand ways made modern life an enduring possibility under the otherwise adverse influence of our too strenuous conditions of existence and other exhausting influences of a too intense, exclusive and morbid commercialism, that have made the mighty dollar the chief aim of living.

It has founded or been the inspiration in founding hos pitals, sanitaria schools and homes for the foundling, the infirm, the aged, the sick, the insane and the feeble

minded, and devised gymnasia and rest cure resorts for the well that they may not become sick. It has rescued the lunatic from bonds and freed him from his chains and treated him as a sick man and saved him. It has likewise shown inebriety to be a disease and now cures its victims. It has diffused and scattered its blessings so unostentatiously, gently and so lavishly among the people and its benefits have been bestowed in so many ways in dispensaries and charities and hospitals innumerable, wherever the maimed in the battle of life are to be found, that its great beneficence has not been appreciated as it ought, and its power for the welfare of the people not understood and felt as it should.

If this is not so why has not a place been made by a grateful people for a medical man in the cabinet of the President of the United States and why has not the statue and face of Benjamin Rush, Surgeon General of the Army of the American Revolution been placed in Helen Gould's Pantheon of great men? Why was not Rush given a place in Washington's cabinet? Washington honored. Rush, though Rush did not agree with him politically. Why has not the Surgeon General of the Army and Navy been given a place in the cabinet as well as the Secretary of War, etc.?

It has discovered how alcohol, through beverages that contain it, damages the nutrition and integrity of the brain's arteries, distends them by vaso-motor paralysis, thus changing the blood supply and damaging the brains, neurones and membranes, as well as harming the liver and stomach, kidneys, etc., and from your teaching and example the people may learn lessons of caution and temperwith regard to the drink that destroys heads and hearts and households and bankrupts lives and minds and shatters commercial and professional credit and destroys manhood and personal honor.

It stands, I repeat, between the people and the pestilences that destroy them and through its patient, painstaking, courageous endeavors, these plagues are stayed. It walks and works in the wake of devastating armies and

helps to repair, by enlightened medical and surgical resource, the ravages of war and to avert them. It watches over camps, where death with its microbic millions revels in human destruction and destroys the messengers of the grim monster, unseen by human eyes, without the lens. It makes the warrior strong on the battlefield and gives him hope in the consciousness that the help of a great and resourceful profession will come to his aid should he fall in battle or by microbic sting, deadlier than the enemy's missive. Wherever danger of disease is, there is the doctor to help and sustain and lift up mankind.

I do not subscribe to Ella Wheeler Wilcox's vicious poem:

"Laugh and the world laughs with you;

Weep and you weep alone." etc.

This poem is a sarcastic and cynical description of a class. It does not correctly portray our kindly humanity as a whole. Our noble profession in its daily round of clinical duty and in its work of mercy refute it; this institution with its hospital attachment, its worthy faculty and nurses refute it; all the great world's charity and philanthropy, clerical and secular, refute the coldblooded sentiment, too. The graves of the volunteers in yonder cemetery who came to help succor the victims of the yellow plague and fell, themselves a prey, refute it, though some of their graves are yet unentombed. A sentiment too coldblooded and cynical to rightly come from the lips of woman, save in cynical sarcasm of a despicable minority in the heartless class only, of the world's many people. Were I to sing an answer, I would say:

Smile and the world smiles with you;

Weep and you weep not alone.

For this heart hurt world has other hearts
That beat in feeling with your own.

Cultivate the amenities of life. Be good and true to yourselves and to each other. Practice the habit of showing kindness; it will react reflexly upon your nature and enlarge it and help you to help those who fall in your way

for your skillful ministrations. Kindliness and cheerfulness and honest hopefulness, based on study and knowledge, will add to your skill and success at the bedside, in office, and with the world in general. Be true in all the exalted relations of your profession to patients and people and you will find this a really pleasant world to live in, despite the intercurring illnesses and misfortunes of life and its people, kind and good and true as a rule, if you are kind and good and true to them.

You will find them out reflexly. For, heart to heart is a wondrous reflex of smiles and tears, of hopes, woes and joys, of sorrows and tears. Get close to them and treat them well and they will, as a rule, return your charity, your generosity in kind. Not always, for there are ingrates and sore-heads and sour-tempered kickers and misanthropes, misconceived and mismated abortions and squint-eyed brains and strabismic hearts, owned by people who live wrong side up and wrong side out and wrong end foremost and inside out and outside in, in this motly show of life. But get close even to them, with a warm heart and kindly conduct, and even they are not always so bad as they look. They are prettier than they are painted sometimes, but it takes more of the paint of charity to gloss them over into presentable appearance than you can sometimes afford to waste on the job. But be kind to them, if you can, anyway, and charitable, for some of them are built that way by a bad heredity and can't help being cross-grained, ill-natured and sour, sordid, sore, suspicious, hoggish and cynical and cussed, so easily as some who have come into the world better endowed and lived in a more sunshiny atmosphere of environment.

In this country, whose government derives its powers from the consent of the governed, with occasional exceptions caused by the corrupt boodler, grafter or that other political Judas, the "legislative agent," who generally calls himself a lawyer, the state is a composite political picture of the people and it is the duty of the medical profession to aid the people in the development of sound brains in sound bodies, to eradicate the degenerate and the

decadent who are unfit for citizenship. "Mens sana in corpore sano" should be the shibboleth for the franchise and it should extend to the immigrants at Gastle Garden and the voters our courts make of foreign citizens, and to the native born, without distinction. As physicians, we should demand physiological qualification for the franchise. The decadent in organism, as of mind and morals, should be dropped from the voting list.

The greatest duty before the medical profession of our time is to seek to learn and then to advise the people and the state how to sustain the over-strenuous life of our day among so many of the aspiring and ambitious, so that they may not, so often and so many, fall prematurely broken in endurance and wounded unto early death because of ceaseless overstrained activities and striving for success and sometimes for existence, even among their fellows.

Action, always action and the motto of Napoleon's dazzling success and premature ruin to himself and people. Audacity! always audacity! is putting our Nation and our people on such a strain, especially among the Napol eons of finance and the admirals and generals of gigantic business and commercial strategy, that the strain of organism that brings premature exhaustion, brain-break and vital ruin to this and other nerve centers of our men of action, so often long before their natural time of failure, must be met and mastered by research, resource and hygienic admonition and remedy.

Our masters and past grand masters in the business world should hear from us incessantly as they live in action, the doctrine of rest and regulation of their anatomies, and be warned by us of the dangers of over-action and over-stimulation, especially alcoholic stimulation and overtime night-strain.

There never was a time when great and capable medical men were so much needed as now. Mediocrity and grasping avarice rule in our legislative halls and statesmen are few. There are not too many physicians of the right sort. There are not enough and there never will be enough physicians among us, if the strenuous life