that
its only criterion is the financial return which it offers to its
shareholders. The essence of the latter, is that, though men enter it
for the sake of livelihood, the measure of their success is the service
which they perform, not the gains which they amass. They may, as in
the case of a successful doctor, grow rich; but the meaning of their
profession, both for themselves and for the public, is not that they
make money but that they make health, or safety, or knowledge, or good
government or good law. They depend on it for their income, but they
do not consider that any conduct which increases their income is on
that account good. And while a boot-manufacturer who retires with half
a million is counted to have achieved success, whether the boots which
he made were of leather or brown paper, a civil servant who did the
same would be impeached.

So, if they are doctors, they recognize that there are certain kinds of
conduct which cannot be practised, however large the fee offered for
them, because they are unprofessional; if scholars and teachers, that
it is wrong to make money by deliberately deceiving the public, as is
done by makers of patent medicines, however much the public may clamor
to be deceived; if judges or public servants, that they must not
increase their incomes by selling justice for money; if soldiers, that
the service comes first, and their private inclinations, {95} even the
reasonable preference of life to death, second. Every country has its
traitors, every army its deserters, and every profession its blacklegs.
To idealize the professional spirit would be very absurd; it has its
sordid side, and, if it is to be fostered in industry, safeguards will
be needed to check its excesses. But there is all the difference
between maintaining a standard which is occasionally abandoned, and
affirming as the central truth of existence that there is no standard
to maintain. The meaning of a profession is that it makes the traitors
the exception, not as they are in industry, the rule. It makes them
the exception by upholding as the criterion of success the end for
which the profession, whatever it may be, is carried on, and
subordinating the inclination, appetites and ambitions of individuals
to the rules of an organization which has as its object to promote the
performance of function.

There is no sharp line between the professions and the industries. A
hundred years ago the trade of teaching,