ADDRESS. 
579 
Our colleges of the money-making class are rapidly 
crowding our professional ranks with incompetent men dis¬ 
tinctly in excess of the demand, and are bringing us to the 
same point eventually attained by everything in Nature—a 
question of the survival of the fittest. In most parts of our 
country the overcrowding is resulting seriously to our 
professional welfare, causing extreme hardships to our 
members from want of support, driving some of them out 
of the profession, and, still worse, pushing others into 
disreputable practices in order to gain a livelihood. 
This is a time of peril to our profession and Association, 
and it behooves every man to stand firmly for these, striving 
incessantly for higher education, professional integrity and 
ethics. 
We have nothing to do with veterinary education as it 
may be conducted by a given school, but we can and must 
dictate what education shall be required for admission to our 
Association, and we should constantly encourage as a body 
higher and better education, and constantly assure colleges 
standing for this advancement to-day, that they will be the 
schools which the profession will support in the future. 
Our experience during the past three years of expansion 
of our Association in membership and territory, demonstrates 
quite clearly that our laws are of such character as to 
seriously interfere with the working of our organization. 
The provision of our Constitution requiring semi-annual 
meetings of your comitia minora was not a hardship while 
all members resided within a radius of from three hundred 
to four hundred miles, but now we find them scattered 
almost across the continent, and this semi-annual meeting 
demands of a portion of these a very considerable outlay of 
% money, and a loss of five or six days with the incident hard¬ 
ship of travel, for the purpose of meeting with this committee 
for a few hours. This semi-annual meeting should be abol¬ 
ished, and other means found for transacting the Association’s 
business; or, if the present system must prevail, provision 
should be made for at least paying from the Association funds 
the necessary traveling expenses of attending members. 
