As for the post-graduate teacher—good or bad—he is already defeating his own ends—he is exciting ambitions in the breasts of his pupils. Here and there among them is an embryo McDowell, a Sims, or a Battey. The backwoods country produces good, rich blood and virile brains. And the Sims, and McDowells, and Batteys of the future will be found in relatively small places, doing good work, and then—good-bye to the tin god and his horn, “for whosoever bloweth not his own horn, the same shall not be blown.” And in that day the parrot shall evolve into an eagle, and the hawk had better have an eye to windward. Meanwhile, hurrah for the post-graduate school and its pupils, and more power to the tin gods. This business handicap is so self-evident that it is hardly necessary to touch on it. We raise the standard of medical education year by year, yet the mushroom colleges do not go—they are here to stay. If one-half the colleges were wiped out of existence there would still be more than enough to supply the demand for physicians. We have done the best we could to breed competition by manufacturing doctors, and we are doing all we can to make that competition first class—a queer business proposition in force of the oversupply of doctors. We are unjust, too, to the men we educate, by offering them inducements to enter an already overcrowded profession—but so long as human nature is as it is I see no way out of the dilemma. 26There was once a time when it appeared a goodly thing for the chosen few to get together like the “three tailors of Tooley street,” and, after establishing to their own satisfaction the fact that they were indeed “the people,” formulated rules for the guidance of the many. These rules were called “ethics.” And the profession has been wrestling with its ethics ever since, trying to determine what it was all about anyhow. The ethical garment of half a century ago no longer fits—it is frayed and fringed, and baggy at the knees; full many a patch has been sewed on it, in individual attempts to make it fit from year to year, until it is now, like the Irishman’s hat, respectable by age and sentimental association only. And the public, the ever practical and heartless public, has also wondered what ’twas all about, and exhibits little sympathy for a profession which, while driveling of ethics, has “strained at gnats and swallowed camels.”