AND THE CHARTER. 
653 
a matter of course, their petitions were addressed — seems, if we 
may judge from certain transactions that have come to our know- 
ledge, at the first to have lent a deaf ear to their complaints : a re- 
petition of “ prayer,” however, influentially backed, has at length 
sounded the tocsin of alarm in the Home Office ; and the result has 
been, a letter from Sir James Graham to our worthy President, 
stating that petitions had reached him, bearing complaints of the 
Charter recently granted us, with suggestions for certain alterations 
in it, and requesting to be informed if the Council had any altera- 
tions of their own to submit, and, if so, what they were. To this an 
answer was returned, to the purport, that the Council felt satisfied 
with the present Charter, so far as it went : at the same time 
giving the worthy Baronet to understand, that they had no objec- 
tion to holding a conference with the parties who had expressed 
themselves otherwise. 
We will not pretend even to hint at the nature or number of the 
“ alterations” suggested, though it is more than probable we might 
guess some of them : we have reason to believe, however, that, so 
far as the schools are concerned, the London and Edinburgh Vete- 
rinary Colleges are far from being agreed on what the spirit or pro- 
visions of a Charter really ought to be ; and we have had proofs enow 
that the views entertained thereupon by the Council are not such 
as are approved by either of those institutions. This is a condition 
of our professional affairs much to be deplored. If it have not ori- 
ginated in disunion of the professional body, it cannot fail to be 
productive of it ; and, the seeds of dissension once sown, will be 
sure, in an inflammatory soil like this, to yield too abundant a 
harvest of fruits of every kind that is pernicious to our common 
professional weal. Better for us to have had no Charter at all 
than one pregnant with such mischievous effects as these. Should 6 
the very unlikely event come to pass of the schools procuring 
Charters for themselves, apart from the body of the profession, it 
requires no prophet to tell us that such Charters can command no 
respect save from the parties for whom they were made ; or, should 
the — we trust — equally unlikely event fall out, of the present 
Charter undergoing the suggested alterations, in its altered form it 
is impossible it can be respected by those who at present think 
well of it. The motto of the incorporated body — vis unita fortior ■ — 
