the acme of degradation is reached when strength of any kind is used for the injury or annoyance of the weaker or less protected; and, this being so, I acquiesce very heartily in the decision that, at present, wherever professors and students think it necessary, women shall be taught medicine only in separate classes, though I hope, even in my life-time, to see the day when such regulations are no longer required, because students and teachers alike have risen to a higher moral level.[117] In the meantime, let us but be granted permission to acquire our knowledge in separate classes, at whatever cost, and the authorities may be very sure that we shall not trouble them with requests again to be subjected to the unsavoury companionship of which we had such full experience in 1870–71.[118] And, lastly, with regard to future legislation respecting medical practice, I would say but one word. It is clearly right that, for the protection of the helpless and ignorant, the State should take means to distinguish between competent and incompetent practitioners of medicine, and I hope that women as well as men will always be required very thoroughly to prove their fitness for practice before they are allowed to undertake it, at least under national sanction. But it is not in the least for the good of the nation that any monopoly should be encouraged, whether in matters of teaching, examination, or practice. Is it not simply shameful that all that I have now been relating should be _possible_ in this country, and possible because of a law which appoints but one door to the medical profession,--that of Registration,--limits Registration to those who have passed through certain definite Schools, and satisfied certain definite Boards, and yet allows those Schools and Boards absolute power to shut their doors on one-half of the human race, and that even in the case of Universities largely subsidised from public funds, and at a time when the public are positively clamouring for women doctors for women? We can see plainly enough why it is (in the lowest sense) the interest of medical men to exclude women from their profession,--though, thank God, there are hundreds of medical men who would scorn to put their interests in one scale when justice weighed down the other,--but it is _not_ the interest of the public or of the nation to sanction any such monopoly;[119]--it is their interest to throw open the gates of competition as widely as possible, insisting only on a uniform standard of attainment for all, of either sex, who would enter them; for, by thus increasing the supply of really competent doctors, they give themselves the best possible opportunities of selection; and, as I have pointed out elsewhere, they double the chances of growth and advance in the fields of medical science.