If the Legislature had taken the usual precaution, and had added
a clause _compelling_ those boards to examine worthy applicants, the act
would have been a sound public measure; but for want of that
foresight--and without foresight a lawgiver is an impostor and a public
pest--the State robbed women of their old common-law rights with one
hand, and with the other enabled a respectable trades-union to thrust
them out of their new statutory rights. Unfortunately, the respectable
union, to whom the Legislature delegated an unconstitutional power they
did not claim themselves, of excluding qualified persons from
examination, and so robbing them of their license and their bread, had an
overpowering interest to exclude qualified women from medicine. They had
the same interest as the watchmakers' union, the printers', the painters'
on china, the calico-engravers', and others have to exclude qualified
women from those branches, though peculiarly fitted for them; but not
more so than they are for the practice of medicine, God having made
_them,_ and not _men,_ the medical, and unmusical, sex.
"Wherever there's a trades-union, the weakest go to the wall.
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