136 
THE PHARMACEUTICAL CONVENTION. 
Grave and difficult questions which experience has proved are of 
the highest importance, must be met perhaps at their very first meet- 
ing. What shall be the qualifications for membership ? Shall the 
number of members, necessarily small, be diminished by exclusive 
regulations, or, on the other hand, shall the enlightened and con- 
scientious apothecary join hands with the ignorant empyric ? Shall 
ill-gotten wealth and undeserved influence in the community 
weigh against the true qualifications of an educated, honorable and 
high-minded apothecary? 
These and numerous other questions of equal import, especially 
pertaining to a society which is designed to form an integral part 
of a national organization to " be governed by a code of ethics cal- 
culated to elevate the standard and improve the practice" of Phar- 
macy, must be met and settled a priori. 
Then will come the jealousies that are almost inseparable from 
trade, and which it is one of the chief objects of the proposed or- 
ganization to break up. At the very commencement of any 
pharmaceutical association, some ground of intercourse must be 
agreed upon among the members, which, while it shall allow free 
scope to an honorable and manly competition, shall destroy every 
germ of this pestiferous plant. 
Under such circumstances, will it not occur to every Pharma- 
ceutist that great caution should be observed in the preliminary 
steps, looking to permanent local organizations, and that they 
should not be consummated till after the proposed Convention. 
The delegates to such Convention will probably return home 
with a knowledge of the mode in which the oldest and most suc- 
cessful existing organizations are founded — with a just appre- 
ciation of the ethical relations which the members bear to each 
other, and to the medical profession — of the received opinions in 
regard to quackery, open and disguised — of the duties and responsi- 
bilities of druggists and apothecaries in regard to the education of 
candidates for the profession placed under their care — of the dif- 
ficulties in the way of giving them such an education, and the 
best means of overcoming them, and with such enlightened 
views of the duty and destiny of the profession at large as would 
enable them to organize, on a sure foundation, auxiliary associa- 
tions which would be permanently useful in promoting the great 
objects of Pharmaceutical reform. 
