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BRITISH PHARMACEUTICAL CONFERENCE. 
But while I have been talldug about ethics, I have felt deeply all along how 
feeble and unsatisfactory was the argument. For what at present is English 
pharmacy ? A name—a label that may be stuck with equal legality on a man 
like your late President, or on some stray discontented grocer. 
And our own Society is a grand amateur effort, highly benevolent in its 
intentions, but impotent in carrying them into any tangible result,—a sort of 
kind father who educates his children, and then has to turn them out unprotected 
on the world. 
I have talked about the misery of a section of our brother druggists, and here 
comes out in terrible relief the weakness of our corporate position ; this misery 
is complicated and aggravated tenfold by the absolute facility by which our 
ranks may be recruited. Listen for a moment to a communication from Mr. 
H. Sugden Evans:— 
“ The absolute freedom of the drug trade is its curse; no skilled labour is more 
unprotected; even the bricklayers, stonemasons, carpenters, coopers, and shoe¬ 
makers are more jealous of their rights. This absolute freedom attracts needy 
men without knowledge of the trade, who, wholly dependent for their supply 
upon the wholesale dealers, do not and probably could not make or teach their 
apprentices how to make the simplest extract, infusion, or tincture, and by luck 
rather than cunning avoid serious or fatal blunders in dispensing. These needy 
men are glad to get apprentice fees, to make a drudge of him, and turn him 
upon the world in innocent bliss of his own ignorance. He seeks a situation as 
journeyman, and can give no satisfaction ; he rolls from place to place ; then, 
finding all disappointment, if he chance to command slight means, or a little 
credit, he opens for himself as master, and thus perpetuates this demoralized 
state of things. But if he feels his inability to fill a dispensing situation, he 
seeks to occupy a subordinate post, anything with a prospect of advancing, in 
the wholesale, where his practical deficiencies may remain unobserved.” 
What can stop this ? Is there never to be a barrier thrown between the man 
and misery, between the business and degradation ? I have spoken of a great 
deliverance. I believe our sole hope is in a stringent Act of Pharmacy, on the 
one basis of compulsory examination. 
The following is the calm and lucid statement of. Mr. Orridge:— 
“ In reply to your note I can only suggest, as bearing on your inquiry, that 
beyond all doubt the passing of the Apothecaries Act of 1815 removed apothe¬ 
caries from a low position to a high one, and by making education compulsory 
reconciled the public to paying good fees (charged in one line) instead of the 
miserable little details of an old doctor’s bill. The ethics of the medical pro¬ 
fession in fact were improved by taking away the temptation to charge exorbi¬ 
tantly for physic, and substituting a just demand for skilled labour. 
“ Precisely the same result, I believe, would follow, if the examination of 
chemists were made compulsory prior to their undertaking to compound pre¬ 
scriptions. The public would pay a good price for skilled labour, and every 
pharmaceutist of legitimate position would be better remunerated. In short, 
the temptation to quackery would be lessened, and the inducements and in¬ 
centives to gain a scientific reputation increased.” 
Not that any legal measure will at one stroke, like the wand of an enchanter, 
transmute the incompetent and nondescript pharmaceutist into an intelligent 
and higher being. Every Government measure must respect existing rights, 
and assign a date from which its operations must commence. The first visible 
effect of the passing of such an Act will be to flood England with little drug¬ 
gists’ shops and materially to swell the ranks of mediocrity. Time, the great 
restorer, will set matters right, and in due course we shall have men of superior 
culture and known ability. Then, and not till then, may we truly talk of ethics, 
not as polite observances but as a code. 
