pleasant one to me, but I paint it in the hope that some one in the future years, when these conditions shall be changed, may be able to paint what I would now like to see.

I think it is best to face this problem boldly. I think the time has come for us to substitute kindness for harshness from one end of this country to the other. It may seem oldfashioned to you when I ask you to substitute the Golden Rule as the ethics which should govern our profession from one end of the country to the other. At least, let us try kindness before we try another method.

An old friend at a boarding house in town passed his cup up the second time. "Mr. Jones," the landlady asked, “what will you have, tea or coffee?" He looked very grave and replied, "That depends on what the last was that I had. If it was tea I want coffee, and if it was coffee I want tea; I want something I have not tried." (Laughter.) We have tried turning men out of our local societies for these deflections from our line of conduct without waiting to see whether such a measure was really justified, and whether we had not ourselves permitted and encouraged transgressions along the same line of conduct to which we had objected.

I know these are grave charges; it is the indictment of a great profession, and it is a sad thing to contemplate that such charges can be laid at the door of a profession like ours, whose individual members are among the chiefest citizens of this country, who will stand comparison with members of any other profession. I believe the physicians of Minnesota, the physicians of this broad land, do more Christian charity every day, every month, every year, than all the churches and preachers and Christian Endeavors and Epworth Leagues put together, without any disparagement of the great work these organizations are doing. Our profession all over this great land is putting into practice what they are preaching and singing about. We are actually doing the work. I doubt whether all the taxes collected in this country would represent sufficient compensation for the charity done by this great profession of ours. It is astonishing that charges like these can be truthfully laid at the door of men who have accomplished

such a great work, but I am satisfied that no one is going to stand up in this audience and controvert these propositions I make, because he knows they are absolutely true. If they are not true in your community or in mine, they are true of other sections which have come under my observation. These evils which have grown to such an alarming proportion have crippled us in legislation, and I know in the early history of your legislation you were very successful, but I have learned. that you have had reverses. I am not astonished, because with only one-third of the profession represented in an organized body it is not strange that in a legislative body you can not obtain your request. It is pleasant in the light of reverses that have come to other states in the matter of legislation to note what has been accomplished by some states under certain methods which they have adopted, among which I might mention the method that Alabama pursues to-day. In Alabama their methods of organization have been so completed in forty-five years that out of 1,700 physicians in the state 1,500 are members of an organization, either county or state, and in all the history of the state there has not been a measure passed antagonistic to health legislation, but nothing has ever been proposed of that kind. No medical legislation has ever been proposed in the general assembly of that great state that did not originate in the state medical society. The decisions of the Supreme Court in relation to osteopathic instruction have been along the medical practice act as drafted by the state association. It is said that courts are not in the least influenced by public opinion, but it happened that in states adjoining Alabama the courts gave an entirely different construction of the same question, while in that state the decisions have been uniformly in line with what we believe to be correct and conscientious medical principles.

To correct these evils the American Medical Association has formulated and placed before the medical profession of this country a great plan of organization, which is designed to reach every reputable practitioner in every county of every state in the Union. It is a plan entirely practical; there is nothing Utopian about it. It is a plan that requires great self

sacrificing labor on the part of those who will undertake to do the work. Many members of the profession who were prominent in the state aind national organizations had serious doubts as to the wisdom of this plan, but it has spread over this country like a conflagration, and every single state on the Ohio and the Mississippi and on the Great Lakes has accepted the uniform plan of organization except Minnesota. Every state in the South except Georgia and South Carolina has reported favorably, and the plan will be accepted by those states as soon as they hold their meetings. I understand that at your last meeting, in the wisdom of the leading members of your association, it was thought best to lead up gradually to this work, and perhaps it was best that it should be done, and it was a question with the House of Delegates whether efficient county societies could be formed in those sparsely settled regions where the difficulties were so great that perhaps they could not be overcome. I believe those difficulties in your state would have disappeared if you had accepted the complete plan last year. We have found that to be true in all the states which did accept it. There is no question about that; but perhaps the plan adopted by you was the wisest one. You have now sixty counties out of eighty-three organized, so that you are ready to give to your people the full benefit of the complete plan now, and to show you how it has worked I will take my own state as an example, which was the second state to adopt it, and the ink was scarcely dry on the constitution and by-laws as formulated by the national organization when our own state adopted the plan without question. At that time we had 390 members in actual affiliation. We had an average attendance at our meetings of 100 to 150 members. At once the state was divided into councilor districts and the work of reorganization actively taken up, and in a year's time, at our meeting in Louisville, we had on our roll an actual paid up membership of over 1,600, and we had an actual attendance of over 500, so that the actual attendance we had at our annual meeting exceeded the total previous membership, including those members in arrears for dues. The interest in the work has increased in a very much

greater ratio than the increase in numbers. We have about 3,800 physicians in our state, and they have taken up the work this year with increased zeal, and the purpose and intention is to bring into the organization every reputable physician in every county in the state. We had a good many counties where there was but one physician. Some had two or three, some three or four, and you could not expect much of an organization where one physician was away out by himself, but you may hold out the life line even to him. He is in the fix of the man who wanted to be ferried across the river. When they were almost on the other side he said to the ferryman: "I have not a cent of money to pay you for taking me across." The ferryman at once turned his boat around and started for the shore they had just left. "Where are you going to take me?" asked the man. "I am going to take you back,” said the ferryman, "because a man without a cent of money to his name is just as well off on one side of the river as on the other." (Laughter.) The physician who is away out on the frontier can not be here. The question is asked, what are you going to do with the physician away out there by himself? That is a debatable question. This plan is flexible, and it is not the plan of a few men, but it has been submitted to hundreds of our best men, and it is the consensus of opinion of the best men of this country, and some of the leading men of your state have endorsed it and helped to formulate it, that the plan is in every way desirable, and we have found that it works as well in actual practice as it does on paper. I want to say this, that we usually have the impression that it takes a whole lot of doctors to make a good society, but I think the greatest society in this country is the New York Obstetrical Society, which has been in existence for a quarter of a century, and by its constitution its membership is limited to fifteen. The best working organization in the state of Kentucky is in a county in which there are but four physicians. I would like to take up your time for a moment (I do not want to be tedious) to tell you how that organization was effected. I went up there because they had an epidemic of smallpox. I found they were divided into four factions and had four

different names for the disease. I got them together and asked them to meet at the court house. I did not ask them to meet at any physician's office. (I see by the expression of your faces that you know something about such cases in Minnesota.) I had these four men meet me in the county court room and had them discuss the matter frankly. I tried to impress on them the fact that no physician in this country had ever profited to the extent of one dollar by misrepresentation of his neighbor. I have always observed that the men who have succeeded in practice in this country are the noble, generous, broad-minded men whose hearts go out to their fellowmen. I explained these underlying principles and explained these evils to those four men, and they decided then and there to organize a county society. They had only four members and the nearest physician was twenty-five miles distant. It was an important community, containing large coal and lumber interests. They formed a county society and I went back there a few months afterward and explained the desirability and advantage of combining in their work. One was an excellent surgeon, and I advised him to go to Chicago and take a post-graduate course; which he did. Within a year three of those young men went away to take a post-graduate course, one to New York, one to Philadelphia and one to Chicago. They took their surgery together, which was impossible before, because the man who was capable of doing the work and giving the other the needed assistance was so afraid of misrepresentation and so afraid of malpractice that he kept aloof from the others, but after their organization the necessity of engaging together in life-saving work came to them naturally. They employed a common collector to do their collecting, every man of the four paid his share and the expense to each was very small. They did not have a blacklist, they did not need a blacklist, but they found in a little while that one-third of the people in that community, who were amply able to support the profession, were systematically employing one of them without expense, and when they had obtained all the service they could get they would go to the neighboring practitioner and do the same