ABSTRACT
Professions are esteemed higher than business, simply because, in theory at least, while business is conducted avowedly for gain, the profession aims directly at service. We have to admit that the theory often breaks down, and professional men are as covetous and self-regarding as others, and seem worse, because they falsify the conception that is formed of them. Corruptio optimi pessima. Indeed, by a sad irony, some of the professions become proverbial for their dishonesty, unfairly no doubt, but yet with such persistency that it is hard to maintain the distinction which has just been drawn between professions and business. “ I don’t want,” said Dr. Johnson, “ to say anything disrespectful of the gentleman who has just left the room, but I believe he is an attorney !” When the doctor was buried in the parish churchyard among his former patients, it was proposed to put upon his tombstone : Si monumentum quœris circumspice. When a clergyman asked Garrick why he drew the people in crowds, while the church was half empty, the great actor said : “ I present fiction as if it were truth, and you present truth as if it were fiction.” And so on with other professions ; they quickly, owing to the faults of professional men, become stigmatised as even worse than business, because, while in business people are avowedly serving their own interestsand seeking gain, in the professions people are seeking gain just as much under the pretence of disinterested service.
