The recent action taken in the matter by the authorities at Apothecaries’ Hall is exactly of the kind to outrage an Englishman’s sense of fairness, and therefore is sure before long to bring its own redress. As the facts may not be thoroughly understood in the non-medical world, I will briefly recapitulate them. When Miss Garrett first began to study medicine in 1860, she tried to obtain admittance to one School and University after another, and finally found that Apothecaries’ Hall was the only body which, from its charter, had no power to refuse to examine any candidate complying with its conditions. She accordingly went through the required five years’ apprenticeship, and obtained her diploma in 1865, having gone to very great additional expense in obtaining privately the required lectures by recognised Professors,--sometimes paying fifty guineas for a course when the usual fee, in the classes from which she was debarred, was but three or four. Not content, however, with indirectly imposing this enormous pecuniary tax on women, the authorities now bethought them to pass a rule forbidding students to receive any part of their medical education privately,--this course being publicly advised by one of the leading medical journals as a safe way of evading the obligations of the charter, and yet effectually shutting out the one chance left to the women![56] Of course the efficacy of this measure ceases the moment that any regular medical school fairly opens its doors to women; but till that day comes, it presents a formidable, if not insuperable, difficulty. Commenting on this proceeding, the _Daily News_ remarks:--“We recommend these facts to the good people who think that coercion, restriction, and the tyranny of combination, are peculiar to any one class of society. It will be a great day in England when the right of every individual to make the most of the ability which God has given him, free from interested interference, is recognised, and to that goal we are surely advancing; but our progress is slow, and it is very clear that it is not only in the lower ranks of the community that the obstructive trades-union spirit is energetically operating.”