A NATIONAL VETERINARY INSTITUTE. 411 



thing but a paying basis. Unless a thing pays its expenses, it is an 

 utterly unpractical venture in this land of eminent practicality. 



But medical schools and business enterprises can not be looked 

 upon from the same stand-point. A business enterprise is a private 

 affair, undertaken to make money ; if it " won't pay," it goes under. 

 A medical school is an educational affair ; whether it " pays " in 

 money or not is a matter of no importance whatever. It is a public 

 servant, just the same as the public schools. The only dividend the 

 public can expect to receive is that the graduates of the school are 

 thoroughly educated in both the scientific and practical parts of their 

 profession. Naturally, it remains for you, as the founders of this 

 movement, to endeavor to find some means by which you can make 

 such an institution pay its way. 



To do this you have adopted the London plan of " subscrip- 

 tions," by which, for a minimum sum of money per year, you prom- 

 ise to render services to each subscriber which no private practitioner 

 could afford to guarantee to do for three times the amount. In 

 adopting this subscription plan you have yet to learn that you can 

 not, as overseers of a great public institution, afford to do what a 

 private speculative affair like the London School has done, though 

 not without the greatest opposition from its own graduates. 



Gentlemen, you have yet to know that it " won't pay " for you 

 to draw down upon your most worthy and necessary undertaking 

 the opposition and ill will, not only of the few educated members 

 of the veterinary profession of the present day, but of all time, in- 

 cluding every man that graduates from your school. 



The time will surely come when other members of the profession 

 will openly oppose the plan upon which you are conducting this 

 venture. Gentlemen, your advisers were bad. They knew no more 

 about the establishment of a veterinary school than an iron-foundry, 

 perhaps not half as much. 



They had but one purpose in view, and that was self, not Har- 

 vard College or the State. I look upon this " subscription plan," 

 as carried out by you, as disgraceful to Harvard College, and as 

 bound to exert a most baneful influence, by its example, on the 

 future of American veterinary medicine. 



I have said your advisers were not the men they should be, and 

 I now tell you that it " won't pay" to let them conduct the school 

 in the manner they are now doing. 



What are you trying to give us, gentlemen — a medical school for 

 the best possible education of veterinarians, or an institution for the 

 development of English " flunkeyism " on American soil ? One 



