Your plumbing must be done by none, however skilled, but a registered plumber, and the law is positive. Arguments before your law courts can be conducted by no one, no matter how able, unless he be a registered lawyer, and the law is definite. No one dares to practice medicine who is unregistered, and the law is explicit, but where do the rights of the pharmacist begin and where do they end? The unrestrained and indiscriminate sale of medicines by department stores, the corner grocery, patent medicine shops and what not, whose proprietors are not only unregistered, but whose only knowledge is to handle it like the rest of the merchandise they sell, without any restriction, makes us feel like we wasted time in becoming registered at all. Is antikamnia more potent when dispensed as a prescription than antikamnia sold in 25-cent boxes by department stores? Does paregoric sold on a doctor’s prescription require greater technical skill in handling than that sold in 5-cent and 10-cent bottles at the corner grocery? Does the strength, purity or therapeutic value of tablets of asperin, calomel or pills of quinine dispensed by the druggist on prescription vary from those peddled by the dry goods stores in 100 lots? Does the registration of pharmacists mean simply a guarantee of competency to fill prescriptions? Should drugs of a questionable degree of potency be given indiscriminately to the public, without someone who understands them to either recommend or advise against their use? Is not the competition waged in the traffic of medicines to an irresponsible public by houses without registered proprietors in fact considered in an entirely different line of business, as much a hardship to the big druggist as to the little man, simply a question of proportion, and if continued must mean but one thing, “the survival of the fittest?” Suppose we turn from drugs and chemicals to other forms of medication. What protection have any of you? Only very recently one of the large general merchants advertised vaccine virus, and actually vaccinated his customers. But the druggist lies supinely by, with scarcely a murmur of protest, while National, State and Municipal laws are made for him. Laws that are definite, made to prosecute, to handle him criminally and contemptuously; that afford no protection, allow not the slightest leeway, are as fragile as glass apparently for others, but for him as unyielding and inflexible as steel, and as positive as the Decalogue; made by men who have no practical knowledge of the business, know little, and inform themselves less on the matter they are legislating. Why does the druggist submit? Has he become callous through long exposure to this condition? Does he hope to win his immortal crown through his great humility and patience, or does he accept as a fact that he is following a well-defined precedent, for as far back as Shakespeare’s time we find Romeo saying to the apothecary: