556 
AUSTIN PETERS. 
personal and pecuniary interests will sometimes overwhelm 
the most worthy professional and best-intentioned individual. 
Not until our leading veterinary institutions have ample 
endowment funds, either as private bequests or public appro¬ 
priations, will they be enabled to in any degree approach 
perfection. 
Another means of elevating the profession that deserves 
our consideration is by means of ethics. I would call your 
attention to a paper read upon this subject by Dr. A. Liautard, 
before the Massachusetts Veterinary Association, last May, 
and published in the American Veterinary Review for June, in 
which the writer treats the question in a very able and 
insti uctive manner, and which 1 would call to the notice of 
all who may be interested in the subject. I will, therefore, 
dismiss this matter in as few words as possible. 
It is not to the ethical behavior of our recent graduates 
that we would call attention, but to the professional morals of 
the older members of our calling, more particularly that of 
instructors in veterinary colleges, to whom the youthful 
practitioner or student is looking for example, and in whose 
footsteps he is likely to follow. 
It is our teachers who are largely responsible for the 
ethical feeling of the recent members of the profession, and it 
is their influence and training which have much to do in 
deciding the professional morals of the young man, whether 
he looks upon his calling as one of the “ learned professions,’’ I 
and feels the proper esprit de corps in its well being when 
launching upon it as his life work ; on the other hand solicits • 
patronage, seeks contract work at low rates, and even goes 
so far as to claim that the calling of a veterinarian is a busi¬ 
ness, and not a profession, and that a man to succeed in it in 
the race for dollars must resort to sharp business tactics in 
order to get ahead. In speaking of the ethical example set 
by the instructors in our veterinary schools, I do not refer to 
veterinarians alone, but would include members of what we 
sometimes style our “sister profession,” who are upon the 
teaching force of all these institutions, and in some of them, 
at least, if not more, take an interest in and encourage 
