TRANSFORMATION OF THE PROFESSIONS
“I charge you by the law,
Whereof you are a well-deserving pillar.”
_Merchant of Venice._
Sixty years ago there were three professions and two services. The two
services were the Army and the Navy; the three professions were the
Church, Law, and Medicine.
The Church was the natural home of the scholars: a few scholars drafted
off into the Law; there were also a few in the House, where they made
apt quotations from Horace, and delighted the members by giving a
Virgilian turn to a debate. Nowadays--alas!--were a scholar to venture
on a Latin quotation, the House would not understand.
It is pleasant to look back upon the quiet, uneventful, peaceful life
of the early Victorian scholar. He began at a public school, where
he needed no stimulus in the way of stripes; he devoured books; he
acquired scholarship by a kind of intuition; he wrote Latin verses,
in which every hexameter had a Virgilian phrase and every pentameter
reminded one of Ovid; he wrote Greek Iambics more easily than the
most rapid English poet ever composed blank verse; he thought in
Latin; he made jokes in Greek. This boy gained, of course, a School
scholarship and entered one of the Colleges of Oxford or Cambridge.
Here he obtained one of the College scholarships; one of the University
scholarships; all the prizes that there were for Latin and Greek
compositions; and at last took the highest degree possible in Classical
Honours. This done, a Fellowship was the next step. This place was
worth about £300 a year, with rooms, commons, and dinner free. There
were no duties attached: if he chose to take Orders and to remain
unmarried he might keep his Fellowship for life. He did take Orders: he
was appointed College Lecturer in Classics; he remained Lecturer for
ten years, when the Tutor took a College Living; he then succeeded to
the Tutorship, which was worth three or four thousand a year. He then
had two courses open to him: he might remain Tutor long enough to amass
a considerable fortune, and then take a College Living and retire into
the country; or he might wait on, presently retire, and either finish
his days as a Fellow, or be perhaps elected to the Mastership, a post
both dignified and well endowed. By this time he had passed the period
when men most desire to marry: he was settled in most excellent rooms;
he had a free library; his habits were fixed; the College Port was
renowned; he was too comfortable to run the risk of change. Therefore
he stayed where he was, within the walls of the old College, and
younger men took the College Livings. He never wrote anything to prove
his own learning or to advance the learning of others; he produced
nothing except a few Greek epigrams. And when at last he died there was
for a brief period a memory of one who had been among them--a great
scholar--and then oblivion closed over him and he was gone. Such was
the life of the Don. Sometimes he retired from the College and took the
Head Mastership of a school, but not often.
[Illustration:
_Painting by Count D’Orsay_
THE ONLY EQUESTRIAN PORTRAIT OF HER MAJESTY]
All the clergy were not College Dons and great scholars. Yet there
was always, at that period, a flavour of scholarship about them: the
beneficed clergy of the country were generally younger sons of the
country gentry, because almost every family had a church living in its
gifts, and these livings were too valuable to be bestowed out of the
family. A young man who took a curacy in the country without family
influence probably found himself stranded for life on eighty pounds a
year. Those of the benefices which did not belong to private patrons
were either in the gift of the Lord Chancellor, with whom interest
was required; or of the Bishop, who had his own relations to provide
for: of the sons, nephews, and cousins, for instance, of Dr. Sparke,
sometime Bishop of Norwich, it was said “as the Sparkes fly upwards;”
or of some college at Oxford or Cambridge which wanted them for its
Fellows. The only chance for such a man was to attract attention as a
preacher in some town. But this chance came to few; therefore for half
the clergy at least their profession was a starveling. Yet those who
had no interest entered it, in hopes and under the pressure of a call
which they believed to be real, and not to be disobeyed under penalties
too awful to be contemplated. Meantime it is now nearly fifty years
since Charles Kingsley, who could never shake off the prejudice of
small middle-class gentility, uttered the sneer that the modern way
of making your son a gentleman was to send him to Oxford first and
to put him in Holy Orders next. He here expressed, however, a common
feeling about the clergy, which was that they should be scholars first,
gentlemen next, and Divines last. And there is no doubt that the social
position of the Church, and, therefore, the adhesion of all the better
classes to the Church, has proved of the greatest value, in times of
religious decay, towards maintaining the Church in her position of
ascendency.
The administration of the parish was still that of the eighteenth
century. That is to say, the Church was there, before all people, with
open doors, offering its services, its sermons, its offices, freely to
all who chose to accept them. It was not considered the business of
the clergy to run after those who refused their offices. As for the
piety and the reputation of the clergy, their lives were pure; there
was commonly no scandal: they were supposed, however, to be addicted
to wine, and in the City there were some who were known as “three
bottle men.” In opinions the majority were of the Evangelical type,
with Calvinistic leanings: they preached sermons wholly on points of
doctrine. The general belief was that mere membership in the Church
was of no importance at all, and that the salvation of the soul was an
independent and separate transaction carried on between the individual
and his Creator. This kind of preaching has not yet wholly ceased, but
it is rare: such preachers are no longer heeded.
[Illustration: COUNCIL CHAMBER, OSBORNE HOUSE]
[Illustration: BILLIARD-ROOM, OSBORNE HOUSE]
Let us compare the Church of the present day. It is no longer a
Church of scholars: there are still some learned members in it, but
the old presumption that a clergyman must be a scholar, is quite
lost and forgotten; rather the presumption is the other way, that a
clergyman is not a scholar. The young scholars of the day do not, as
a rule, take upon them Holy Orders: there are too many openings for
their intellectual activities. Moreover, the prizes are not what they
were. Agricultural depression has ruined the fellowships, cut down by
one half the country livings, destroyed the value of Deaneries and
Canonries. The Bishoprics still, however, keep their value, and a
profession cannot be thought very poor which numbers so many prizes
as the Church of England, with her Archbishops and her Bishops.
Preaching, which was formerly so important a part of Church work,
has decayed deplorably. The reason is the development of the parish
work, which now occupies the whole time of the clergy, leaving them
no time for meditation and study. For, since the people will not come
to the clergy, the clergy condescend to stoop to the people. At the
present moment the Church is the centre of numberless institutions and
associations which aim at civilising the people rather than making
them religious. The clergy preside over clubs for the lads, clubs
for the girls, temperance associations, mothers’ meetings, sales of
clothing, lectures, concerts, care of the poor and of the sick, benefit
societies, visiting organisations, Sunday schools, country holiday
funds, convalescent homes, and a thousand other things. Now the working
people, and especially the very lowest class, regard this activity
with a kind of admiring wonder; they see these young fellows--many
of whom are not clergy, but live among them--working morning, noon,
and night for no reward: they are touched by this devotion; their
lads would follow them to the death. I do not say that this example
makes them religious, but it fills them with that new feeling towards
religion which has been already considered. The doctrines held by the
present clergy are in most cases High Church, with which, personally,
I have no kind of sympathy. At the same time, one must admit that the
modern views have destroyed the dreadful terrors about Election and
Predestination: in the Anglican, as in the Roman Church, once more the
Fold protects.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF THE QUEEN IN ROYAL ROBES]
In Law and Medicine, fewer changes have been made. In the former, a
barrister was not allowed to make a friend of an attorney, or to take
his hand, or to visit at his house. The low class attorney-at-law,
of whom there were a great many, practised with impunity all kinds
of iniquities and conspiracies; he was, indeed, an enemy to the
human race; he was usurer; he was the concoctor of civil actions,
which he dragged on interminably;--it was he who filled the prisons
with unfortunate prisoners; he robbed the widow and defrauded the
fatherless; he took advantage of difficulties which he aggravated--he
charged what he pleased. The power of the attorney--now called
solicitor--for mischief is very greatly curtailed;--a taxing master
looks after his bills; he can no longer clap a debtor into prison; he
is liable to be struck off the rolls for misconduct.
In Medicine the physician never claimed so great a superiority over
the surgeon. If he did, that superiority has vanished. Great are the
recent triumphs of surgery: not so great, perhaps, those of medicine.
In those days the surgeon operated in the presence of the physician; he
did not aspire to the medical degree; he could not be called “Doctor.”
There were no anæsthetics in those days; operations of all kinds were
limited by the patient’s power of endurance: a long operation killed,
because there is a limit to the endurance of pain. The discoveries of
the laboratory have placed the treatment of all disease on a new and
more scientific footing. Fortunately, I am not called upon in this
place to do more than indicate changes that only a medical student
could properly explain. We can, however, all understand the ward, clean
and neat, with regulated temperature; the patients under the care of
bright and cheerful nurses; the hospitals “walked” not by the young
ruffians of the “Bob Sawyer” type, but keen and eager students, with
whom science is more than a mere profession, and the causes of diseases
more than their cure.
[Illustration: OSBORNE HOUSE, ISLE OF WIGHT]
Sixty years ago, I said, there were only three professions. How many
are there now, recognised as on an equal footing of dignity and
importance with these three?
Formerly, Architecture was not considered a profession. I remember
long ago, in the Sixties, listening to a group of men who were
discussing whether architecture had any claims at all to be a
profession--certainly the local architect was also the house-agent--and
whether a gentleman could belong to it. I believe they agreed that it
was only a trade.
[Illustration: THE ROYAL YACHT “VICTORIA AND ALBERT”]
Formerly, there was no profession of science at all. At Cambridge
there were chairs of Mathematics, of Chemistry, and of other branches.
But there was no profession of any branch of science. No man set up a
laboratory and said “I am a chemist by profession”; there were none of
the great Schools for Physical Science, such as now exist at Cambridge,
at South Kensington, at Newcastle, and at other places; no young men
began by “going in” for science, as they do at present. That profession
which offers the noblest prizes of fame and name, together with a
sufficiency of income, has been created in all its numerous branches
within the last sixty years. The British Association made the world
familiar with the claims and the work of the new science. Such men as
Humphry Davy, Faraday, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and so many others, who
will be accounted the chief luminaries of this age, planted firmly the
claims of science in the minds of the people, and raised the position
of science to the same level as that of Latin and Greek scholarship.
All these physicists, electricians, zoologists, biologists, chemists,
and the rest have come into existence during the Queen’s reign. The
teaching of science at our Universities and Schools, the multiplication
of new Colleges in all the Colonies, as well as at home, have created
places for these students and a demand for their teaching: they have
also created a demand for new books, which only these teachers were
able to supply.
Formerly, again, the position of teacher in a school, except when one
was Headmaster of Eton, Harrow, or Winchester, was one of curious
contempt. The reason for this contempt was simple: it was the
connection between a schoolmaster and his floggings. That connection
has now ceased. At a few schools, the Head exercises the old business
with the birch: it is regarded as a custom or a usage rendered
venerable by antiquity. “I was swished,” said a young fellow the other
day, “nineteen times when I was at school. I have always regretted that
I didn’t make it twenty.” But the assistant masters have no power of
inflicting personal chastisement.
This old contempt has vanished: the profession is now regarded
with great respect, and carries with it a proper amount of social
consideration. No young man, formerly, who could by any possibility get
into any other line of life, would take a place as assistant master
even in a public school. If he did, it was in hopes of obtaining
a boarding-house and making a rapid fortune. The position is now
literally run after by young University men of the greatest distinction
and the best credentials as to scholarship. The present Headmaster
of Harrow, writing to the papers some time ago, made this suggestive
observation. I quote from memory--“I believe that I have at Harrow, at
this moment, the best collection of assistants that were ever gathered
together at any public school. Yet I am certain that if they were all
to resign, I could replace them very shortly by another collection
equally good.” So ready, so eager, are the young scholars of the day to
become masters in the public schools. Sixty years ago they would have
stayed on at Oxford or Cambridge, and led the life already described of
the Scholar, the Fellow, and the College Tutor.
Another new profession, though to the younger men it seems an old
profession, is that of engineering. There are many branches of
engineering: one constructs piers, jetties, railways, bridges, great
works like the Forth Bridge, or smaller bridges, tunnels, roads,
embankments, and the like. Another devises and constructs machinery
of all kinds, another controls electricity: there must be an engineer
in every factory as in every little steamer. Great prizes in money
and fortune belong to this profession. It is eminently a learned
profession: to attain unto any degree of eminence in it one must be a
good mathematician.
Other new professions are those of the actuary and the accountant. And
there are “followings” once not allowed to be professional, such as
that of the painter and the sculptor, the work of literature, music,
acting, etc. A young man may enter any one of these branches of mental
achievement: he may choose his own department; he will occupy as
good a social position as the young barrister; he will belong to the
professional class. As for the prizes in some of them, if they are not
equal to those of the Bar or the Church, they are considerable; in some
kinds of literature, such as educational books, fiction, and the drama,
successful writers command incomes which would be considered incredible
by Douglas Jerrold and the wits of the early Victorian era.
To recapitulate. Where there were three professions sixty years ago
there are now dozens: given a young man of ability and activity, it is
difficult not to find for him an opening where he will get a chance
of gaining a splendid prize of success. For the man of exceptional
ability, the Church leads him to a Bishopric with a life peerage and
£10,000 a year; the Bar leads him to an income of £10,000 a year,
and, if he pleases, a peerage; Medicine may give him £15,000 a year,
also with a peerage, or a baronetcy, if he wishes one; all the other
professions have their splendid prizes and their magnificent chances
which are open to a young man of ability. Compared with the condition
of 1837, we are like the occupants of a broad expanse of country which
has been suddenly widened in all directions by the removal of walls and
fences and the abolition of prohibitions.
One thing remains with the new as with the old professions: they all
demand an apprenticeship and a training. No one can enter the Law, or
Medicine, or any other, without being able to pay, over a period of
five years, at least a thousand pounds, probably two thousand when
all is done. Until this condition is removed, which is not likely to
happen, it is not true to say, or to think, that every career in this
country is open to every boy.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]