or of professional gain. As Bacon truly wrote, "Every man owes a duty to his profession," and in no profession is this obligation more clear than in that of the modern physician. Perhaps in no other of the great professions does one find greater discrepancies between the ideals of those who represent it. No members of the social order are more self-sacrificing than the true physicians and surgeons, and of this fine group none deserve so much of society as those who have taken upon their shoulders the burden of medical education. On the other hand, the profession has been diluted by the presence of a great number of men who have come from weak schools with low ideals both of education and of professional honor. If the medical education of our country is in the immediate future to go upon a plane of efficiency and of credit, those who represent the higher ideals of the medical profession must make a stand for that form of medical education which is calculated to advance the true interests of the whole people and to better the ideals of medicine itself.
There is raised in the discussion of this question a far-reaching economic problem to which society has as yet given little attention; that is to say, What safeguards may society and the law throw about admission to a profession like that of law or of medicine in order that a sufficient number of men may be induced to enter it and yet the unfit and the undesirable may be excluded?
It is evident that in a society constituted as are our modern states, the interests of the social order will be served best when the number of men entering a given profession reaches and does not exceed a certain ratio. For example, in law and medicine one sees best in a small village the situation created by the over-production of inadequately trained men. in a town of two thousand people one will find in most of our states from five to eight physicians where two well trained men could do the work efficiently and make a competent livelihood. When, however, six or eight ill trained physicians undertake to gain a living in a town which can support only two, the whole plane of professional conduct is lowered in the struggle which ensues, each man becomes intent upon his own practice, public health and sanitation are neglected, and the ideals and standards of the profession tend to demoralization.
A similar state of affairs comes from the presence of too large a number of ill trained lawyers in a community. When six or eight men seek to gain their living from the practice of the law in a community in which, at the most, two good lawyers could do all the work, the demoralization to society becomes acute. Not only is the process of the law unduly lengthened, but the temptation is great to create business. No small proportion of the American lack of respect for the law grows out of the presence of this large number of ill trained men seeking to gain a livelihood from the business which ought in the nature of the case to support only a much smaller number. It seems clear that as nations advance in civilization, they will be driven to throw around the admission to these great professions such safeguards as will limit the number of those who enter them to some reasonable estimate of the number who are actually needed. It goes without saying that no system of stan-
