EDITORIAL. 
167 
the meeting, and are scrupulously excluded from any active part in the pro¬ 
gramme, so we have the spectacle of a national society congregating on an excur¬ 
sion train, whose doors are locked when the Alleghany Mountains are reached, 
and the Society journeys one thousand miles from home to hold a meeting, with 
apparently no other purpose in view but the charitable act of allowing western 
veterinarians, who are not beggars, to get a glimpse of the “wise men of 
the east.” 
Your utterances have already broken up a plan for concerted action on the 
part of the presidents of veterinary societies and professors of veterinary science 
in agricultural colleges in several of the western States, intended to awaken an 
interest in your society. And every plan and effort on our part is so thoroughly 
clogged that no other course is left open to us but to renounce all responsibility 
for the success of the meeting, and allow it to rest where it properly belongs— 
with your committee—or, as a prominent professor of veterinary science puts it, 
“let them run their own show T .” 
We asked you to hold a national veterinary meeting in Chicago, and should 
you have arranged to do so there was every prospect that it would prove the 
largest and most influential veterinary gathering ever convened in America; 
but if your present attitude is to be maintained, you will do well to unlock the 
doors of your excursion train when you reach Cincinnati, and permit the entrance 
into it of fresh recollections of the meeting of 1884, and prepare yourselves for 
a similar failure at Chicago. 
If you can bring all the necessary elements of success for a national veter¬ 
inary meeting on an excursion train from New York, you are surely prepared, 
otherwise we would suggest that your position on several important questions be 
promptly and publicly announced : 
1st. Do you recognize as professional brethren those of us in the west who 
have graduated from the same veterinary colleges from which the most of you 
have emanated, or in which you teach ? 
2d. Is the Chicago meeting to be national? 
3d. If national, why has your national committee frittered away nine-tenths 
of its time and all energy in arranging for, and devoting nearly all your public 
utterances to, a purely local excursion train, and leaving wholly neglected one- 
half (numerically considered) of the veterinary profession of the United States? 
4th. Will western veterinarians receive a cordial welcome to the Chicago 
meeting, and will those of us who fully meet the requirements of your constitu¬ 
tion and by-laws be unanimously and heartily recommended for immediate elec¬ 
tion to membership, so that our intercourse with you may be fraternal and pleas¬ 
ant, or will the consideration of our applications be delayed for one year, contrary 
to your written laws ? 
6th. Will your Society be kind enough to abstain from making “ great con¬ 
cessions” to us, and bestow respect, not charity, upon us? 
Very respectfully, 
W. L. Williams. 
American Veterinary College Building Fund.— 
The history of American veterinary education yet to be writ¬ 
ten will contain some very interesting and possibly surprising 
