Bah! I'm sick of the whole business, and I well know how all my colleagues at the Medical School, who go only by the label, will view me and my efforts. But if Zola and Col. Picquart can face the whole French army, can't I face their disapproval?--Much more easily than that of my own conscience! You, I fancy, are not one of the fully disciplined demanders of more legislation. So I write to you, as on the whole my dearest friend hereabouts, to explain just what my state of mind is. Ever yours, W. J. James was not indulging in empty rhetoric when he said that his conscience drove him to face the disapproval of his medical colleagues. Some of them never forgave him, and to this day references to his "appearance" at the State House in Boston are marked by partisanship rather than understanding. What happened cannot be understood without recalling that thirty-odd years ago the licensing of medical practitioners was just being inaugurated in the United States. Today it is evident that everyone must be qualified and licensed before he can be permitted to write prescriptions, to sign statements upon which public records, inquests, and health statistics are to be based, and to go about the community calling himself a doctor. On the other hand, experience has proved that those people who do not pretend to be physicians, who do not use drugs or the knife, and who attempt to heal only by mental or spiritual influence, cannot be regulated by the clumsy machinery of the criminal law. But either because the whole question of medical registration was new, or because professional men are seldom masters of the science of lawmaking, the sponsors of the bills proposed to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1894 and 1898 ignored these distinctions. James did not name them, although his argument implied them and rested upon them. The bills included clauses which attempted to abolish the faith-curers by requiring them to become Doctors of Medicine. The "Spiritualists" and Christian Scientists were a numerous element in the population and claimed a religious sanction for their beliefs. The gentlemen who mixed an anti-spiritualist program in their effort to have doctors examined and licensed by a State Board were either innocent of political discretion or blind to the facts. For it was idle to argue that faith-curers would be able to continue in their own ways as soon as they had passed the medical examinations of the State Board, and that accordingly the proposed law could not be said to involve their suppression. Obviously, medical examinations were barriers which the faith-curers could not climb over. This was the feature of the proposed law which roused James to opposition, and led him to take sides for the moment with all the spokesmen of all the-isms and-opathies.