which to-day is on the whole
an honorable public service, was rather a vulgar speculation upon
public credulity; if Mr. Squeers was a caricature, the Oxford of Gibbon
and Adam Smith was a solid port-fed reality; no local authority could
have performed one-tenth of the duties which are carried out by a
modern municipal corporation every day, because there was no body of
public servants to perform them, and such as there were took bribes.
It is conceivable, at least, that some branches of medicine might have
developed on the lines of industrial capitalism, with hospitals as
factories, {96} doctors hired at competitive wages as their "hands,"
large dividends paid to shareholders by catering for the rich, and the
poor, who do not offer a profitable market, supplied with an inferior
service or with no service at all.

The idea that there is some mysterious difference between making
munitions of war and firing them, between building schools and teaching
in them when built, between providing food and providing health, which
makes it at once inevitable and laudable that the former should be
carried on with a single eye to pecuniary gain, while the latter are
conducted by professional men who expect to be paid for service but who
neither watch for windfalls nor raise their fees merely because there
are more sick to be cured, more children to be taught, or more enemies
to be resisted, is an illusion only less astonishing than that the
leaders of industry should welcome the insult as an honor and wear
their humiliation as a kind of halo. The work of making boots or
building a house is in itself no more degrading than that of curing the
sick or teaching the ignorant. It is as necessary and therefore as
honorable. It should be at least equally bound by rules which have as
their object to maintain the standards of professional service. It
should be at least equally free from the vulgar subordination of moral
standards to financial interests.

If industry is to be organized as a profession, two changes are
requisite, one negative and one positive. The first, is that it should
cease to be conducted by the agents of property-owners for the
advantage of property-owners, {97} and should be carried on, instead,
for the service of the public. The second, is that, subject to
rigorous public supervision, the responsibility for the maintenance of
the service should rest upon the shoulders of those, from organizer and
scientist to labo