[14] A Commencement address to the graduating class of the School
of Pharmacy, St. Louis, May 19, 1915.

The graduation of a class of technically trained persons is an event of special moment.  When we send forth graduates from our schools and colleges devoted to general education, while the thought of failure may be disquieting or embarrassing, we know that no special danger can result, except to the man who has failed.  The college graduate who has neglected his opportunities has thrown away a chance, but he is no menace to his fellows.  Affairs take on a different complexion in the technical or professional school.  The poorly trained engineer, physician or lawyer, is an injury to the community.  Failure to train an engineer may involve the future failure of a structure, with the loss of many lives.  Failure to train a doctor means that we turn loose on the public one who will kill oftener than he will cure.  Failure to train a lawyer means wills that can be broken, contracts that will not hold, needless litigation.

Congressman Kent, of California, has coined a satisfactory word for this sort of thing—­he calls it “mal-employment.”  Unemployment is a bad thing.  We have seen plenty of it here during the past winter.  But Kent says, and he is right, that malemployment is a worse thing.  All these poor engineers and doctors and lawyers are busily engaged, and every thing on the surface seems to be going on well.  But as a matter of fact, the world would be better off if each one of them should stop working and never do another stroke.  It would pay the community to support them in idleness.

I have always considered pharmacy to be one of the occupations in which malemployment is particularly objectionable.  If you read Homer badly it affects no one but yourself.  If you think Vera Cruz is in Italy and that the Amazon River runs into the Arctic Ocean, your neighbor is as well off as before; but if you are under the impression that strychnine is aspirin, you have failed in a way that is more than personal.

I am dwelling on these unpleasant possibilities partly for the reason that the Egyptians displayed a skeleton at their banquets—­because warnings are a tonic to the soul—­but also because, if we are to credit much that we see in general literature, including especially the daily paper and the popular magazine, all druggists are malemployed.  And if it would really be better for the community that you should not enter upon the profession for which you have been trained, now, of course, is the time for you to know it.

There seems to be a widespread impression—­an assumption—­that the day of the drug is over—­that the therapeutic of the future are to be concerned along with hygiene and sanitation, with physical exercise, diet, and mechanical operations.  The very word “drug” has come to have an objectionable connection that did not belong to it fifty years ago.  Even some of the druggists themselves,