REVERSIONS IN MODERN INDUSTRIAL LIFE. 789 



tempt hardly less profound and humiliating than that visited upon 

 the honest toil of feudal times ; it includes the noble role of phi- 

 lanthropist and benefactor. " The principal object of this bill," 

 says the note appended to a measure to regulate the practice of 

 optometry in the State of New York, but really to restrict the 

 sale of spectacles to opticians, " is to protect the public against 

 incompetent and designing persons who may in the future at- 

 tempt to traffic upon postulate skill in adapting glasses to the 

 sight 1 " * " To the end that public health and our loved ones " 

 may " be more adequately protected," and " to the elevation of 

 our profession" and the suppression of "the impostors in our 

 business," the undertakers of Indiana, with more tenderness than 

 the opticians, due perhaps to the nature of their calling, ask for 

 the enactment of a bill to create a " State Board of Funeral Direct- 

 ors," and to prescribe certain requirements to the trade. When 

 the barbers of the State of New York met in Syracuse last No- 

 vember to frame a similar measure, they, too, felt moved to pro- 

 claim the purity of their motives. " We have been hampered and 

 humiliated for years," they said, " by incompetent people working 

 at our profession." Among these obnoxious persons are "the 

 drunken barbers," the workmen graduated from so-called barber 

 colleges "in the remarkably short time of eight weeks," and, 

 finally, the laborers and mechanics engaged in other occupations 

 during the day that shave and cut hair in the evening, using 

 " one towel on six persons," and charging the demoralizing price 

 of five and ten cents for their dangerous services. " Innumerable 

 people," they add, referring to this alarming peril, " have been 

 inoculated with vile skin diseases, which, in many cases, have 

 baffled the skill of physicians ; and we claim," they assert, with 

 the firmness of true philanthropists, animated by a noble princi- 

 ple, "that the public should be protected from these impostors." f 

 But the most edifying exhibition of disinterested benevolence 

 is to be found in the pleas and apologies of the master plumbers 

 the strongest of these modern corporations and the happy pos- 

 sessors of the largest rights and privileges under the law.J It 



* The Optical Journal, vol. ii, No. 10, p. 393. 



f The National Barber, December 31, 1896. 



X As proof of this statement the following extract from the report of the Sanitary Com- 

 mittee at Philadelphia, 1895, may be given: " We have recited the utter lack of sanitary 

 laws as we found at the time of our organization. Now note the change. The necessary 

 preliminaries performed, immediately throughout the entire country the master plumbers' 

 association, by various honorable, just, and enlightened efforts, exerted, too, under the most 

 trying conditions of ridicule, sarcasm, ignorance, and narrow-mindedness, formulated and 

 caused to be adopted regulating laws, now generally termed ' plumbing laws,' or ' rules and 

 regulations of plumbing and drainage.' To such an extent did our labors ramify that, at 

 this writing, there is no city or town, and hardly a hamlet, which is not in a greater or less 

 degree controlled and benefited by our labors." Proceedings, p. 42. 



