tempt hardly less profound and humiliating than that visited upon the honest toil of feudal times; it includes the noble role of philanthropist and benefactor. "The principal object of this bill," says the note appended to a measure to regulate the practice of optometry in the State of New York, but really to restrict the sale of spectacles to opticians, "is to protect the public against incompetent and designing persons who may in the future attempt to traffic upon postulate skill in adapting glasses to the sight"[1] "To the end that public health and our loved ones" may "be more adequately protected," and "to the elevation of our profession" and the suppression of "the impostors in our business," the undertakers of Indiana, with more tenderness than the opticians, due perhaps to the nature of their calling, ask for the enactment of a bill to create a "State Board of Funeral Directors," and to prescribe certain requirements to the trade. When the barbers of the State of New York met in Syracuse last November to frame a similar measure, they, too, felt moved to proclaim the purity of their motives. "We have been hampered and humiliated for years," they said, "by incompetent people working at our profession." Among these obnoxious persons are "the drunken barbers," the workmen graduated from so-called barber colleges "in the remarkably short time of eight weeks," and, finally, the laborers and mechanics engaged in other occupations during the day that shave and cut hair in the evening, using "one towel on six persons," and charging the demoralizing price of five and ten cents for their dangerous services. "Innumerable people," they add, referring to this alarming peril, "have been inoculated with vile skin diseases, which, in many cases, have baffled the skill of physicians; and we claim," they assert, with the firmness of true philanthropists, animated by a noble principle, "that the public should be protected from these impostors."[2]
But the most edifying exhibition of disinterested benevolence is to be found in the pleas and apologies of the master plumbers—the strongest of these modern corporations and the happy possessors of the largest rights and privileges under the law.[3] It
- ↑ The Optical Journal, vol. ii, No. 10, p. 393.
- ↑ The National Barber, December 31, 1896.
- ↑ As proof of this statement the following extract from the report of the Sanitary Committee at Philadelphia, 1895, may be given: "We have recited the utter lack of sanitary laws as we found at the time of our organization. Now note the change. The necessary preliminaries performed, immediately throughout the entire country the master plumbers' association, by various honorable, just, and enlightened efforts, exerted, too, under the most trying conditions of ridicule, sarcasm, ignorance, and narrow-mindedness, formulated and caused to be adopted regulating laws, now generally termed 'plumbing laws,' or 'rules and regulations of plumbing and drainage.' To such an extent did our labors ramify that, at this writing, there is no city or town, and hardly a hamlet, which is not in a greater or less degree controlled and benefited by our labors."—Proceedings, p. 42.
