The medical men of the Bay State have been treated several times during the past decade to the mournful story of the meagre financial results from a life-long practice of medicine in that commonwealth. The detailed cases, narrated by Dr. Cotting, were pitiful enough, for they were proof that a faithful, conscientious and skillful medical career could find little laid aside for the “rainy day” of personal illness or the vacation for the tired brain and body, or the reposeful life of a physician’s family when death had closed in on his labors. In the same strain Dr. Jeffries, in his late annual address before the Massachusetts Medical Society, proclaims that “no man has made a fortune as a physician, I mean no one ever paid his expenses and laid by at interest enough to live on through the practice of medicine.” This breathes in the atmosphere of complaint as if the profession of medicine were exceptional in life’s vocations; as if it, alone of all the lines of work, did not lead to financial results where “enough to live on was laid by at interest.” It is very pertinent to ask, in what pursuit in life inheres that tendency to make the laborers therein independent of labor? It is equally pertinent to ask, where is there an instance, in the history of labor, where a man, following the duty common to his fellow workers and relying on his own unaided hands and brain, ever acquired the competency to live, in his accustomed sphere, independent of labor? Dr. Cotting’s instances of the poverty of medical men are pitiful, but they are duplicated in the ranks of the promoters of literature, art, science and philanthropic work through historic time and will be multiplied to the end. Great wealth is the possession of but very few and, on the lines of legitimate industry, is always the result of combination and the use made of the labor of others. In the early part of the century, Mr. Astor founded a fortune by buying up pelts from the trappers of the Northwest. Had he depended on what his own hands could have done, his old age would have found him drying his skins and frying his bacon with his own hands in his forest cabin. Mr. Carnegie to-day, utilizing the labor of miners in iron and coal and giving direction to the skill and toil of a multitude of mechanics, is still adding to his fifty millions. Had he depended on the limitations of his own brawn, he might still each evening be washing the grime from his horny hands under the faucet in the hallway of his tenement house lodgings. These great possibilities of combination are in the genius of commercial enterprise, though they are realized by few. They are foreign to the genius of labor where combination is impossible, and where the labor is of such a character that there is no monopoly of skill and many can accomplish it equally well. A medical man’s labor is limited by what he can himself do, personally and unaided. He can neither delegate nor superintend.