In the course of a few weeks, the family council assembled, for the doctor was really much beloved by all his connections; and his wife had so couched her request for advice that it was quite irresistible. On a keen March day, uncles, cousins, and friends met; and after dining at the doctor’s hospitable table, they began to consider what career would be most likely to assure Tom of a happy and prosperous future. The reverend cousin presided, at the general request; and he opened the subject as follows:
‘When I got the letter which has brought me here to-day, I felt its appeal so strongly, that I made immediate arrangements to be present. Tom has always been an exemplary boy in conduct, though I must say his progress in the classics is deplorably slow. When I was his age, I read Homer for the pleasure it gave me; and I had Horace by heart. Now, a scholar Tom never will be; of that I have satisfied myself before dinner in a private talk with him. Well, the ground is so far cleared. Tom cannot be a scholar, ergo, he cannot be a clergyman; for of all things inappropriate, in my opinion, the extreme is an ignorant divine. In my profession, one ought to be steeped in Greek, permeated with Latin, and saturated with Hebrew. But even if Tom were a born student and of a serious order of mind, I could not advise his parents to devote him to the Church.’
Something like a blank fell on Tom’s mother at the emphatic closure of the reverend cousin’s speech. She had hoped that Tom might have gone to Oxford, as other grammar-school boys had done, and thence to some pretty rectory as a rural parson. While she sat in silent depression, the rest of the company talked in little knots, until the reverend president stopped them by saying: ‘Now, Uncle John, I call upon you. No one is better able to say if the law promises fame and fortune for the rising generation, as it has done for the past generations since Cicero’s time. Shall we make Tom an attorney or a barrister?’
‘I am flattered by the manner you esteem my humble abilities,’ answered Uncle John. ‘It is a strange coincidence of thought. I have also come down from town expressly to deprecate the putting of our young hopeful to my profession. I believed I could lay my reasons before my brother and his good wife better by a few spoken words, than by any extent of correspondence; so I took an early train. Tom must not be a lawyer. Why, I proceed as briefly as I can to explain. First, the profession is more crowded than the market-place. Second, the crowd is daily increasing, because almost every family of the middle classes that has thriven during the past twenty or thirty years is sending a boy into a solicitor’s office. The business is supposed to be very lucrative, and it is esteemed highly respectable, which allures the parvenu mind. As to the fiction of the law being a lucrative pursuit, I cannot understand how it originated, still less how it is maintained. A few solicitors, with quite exceptional luck and good connections, may attain to opulence. But the rank and file of the profession merely earn a decent livelihood. If you want to know what fortune does for lawyers in England, read the reports of wills and bequests in the newspapers. While these are telling us of manufacturing, banking, and trading millionaires dying in all parts of the country, they rarely record the demise of a lawyer worth twenty thousand pounds. No, no; the law is not a money-making trade. But it will be still less so, and that is why I warn Tom’s parents against it.
‘Let me elaborate a little. Since I was put on the rolls, Law Reform, as it is pleasantly called by certain politicians, has been hacking away at our fees continually, until now, certain branches of the profession are no longer remunerative at all. County courts, for instance, have deprived me of hundreds a year. The Judicature Act has damaged my practice still more seriously. However, I am not here to dwell upon my own misfortunes, but to prevent my nephew Tom from having worse, by following in my footsteps. Past law reforms are trifles to what are coming! In a few years, the most respectable and valuable department of my profession will be simply worthless. I refer to conveyancing. Even now, it is sadly shorn of its former profitableness. Soon it will be non est. Registration of titles is bound to come; with it goes the old system of mortgage deeds and all the costly methods of land transfer. As in America and the colonies, the transfer of real estate will be merely the business of government officials, and the vendor and purchaser; lawyers will be eliminated from such transactions altogether. Then, as regards commercial cases—Chambers of Commerce will go on with their simple methods of arbitration and conciliation, until at last the courts will hear no more of traders’ contentions than if such did not exist.
‘Last and worst of all, there is growing a steady abhorrence of legal conflicts in all ranks and classes. When I was apprenticed, even the poorest fellow would rush into law against a neighbour or relative with the greatest confidence; ay, and be ruined with a sort of grim satisfaction. In those days, everybody delighted in law. Now, if I am not vastly wide of the mark, men will submit to the rankest frauds and personal assaults as meekly as the most abject Asiatics. Yes, really, the English race, once litigious to a degree, is positively afraid of entering upon the most trumpery suit in the inferior courts. Finally, the lowest of our business, that of the criminal courts, is dwindling into insignificance. Judges are holiday-making in maiden assizes all over the country; police stipendiaries are becoming sinecurists; and as soon as the teetotalers have made another million or two of converts, the income of legal men from criminals will be nil. What with popular education, milder manners, law reforms, land reforms, and the rest, no man would think of putting a youngster into the fast decaying legal profession.’
Uncle John spoke with such evident and crushing sincerity that Tom’s father and mother uttered a simultaneous groan as he finished; and for a few minutes something like consternation kept all silent.
But the reverend president did not forget his duty, and afterwards resumed in these terms: ‘My dear friends, I am sure we are all greatly indebted to Uncle John for his luminous remarks upon the actual and coming condition of the profession, of which he is so distinguished a member. Of course, our dear Tom cannot be a lawyer. Let us therefore proceed with our deliberations into another professional avenue; after the Law, Medicine comes, according to established usage. Tell us, therefore, my dear doctor, why you do not think of devoting Tom to your own pursuit. Of that, you must have far clearer and more accurate knowledge than any other person here present. Knowing how hopeless the Church and the Law are, do you not think it best to train Tom to succeed to your own practice?’
‘I certainly am greatly surprised at what I have just heard of the degenerate state of two noble professions,’ said Tom’s father; ‘indeed, I may express myself as stunned by the revelations. Yet, I do not think that the future of the Church and the Law is so discouraging as that of Medicine. If I saw the ghost of a prospect for my boy as a doctor, I would not have put you to the trouble you have so kindly taken to come here and advise me. It is my solemn conviction that in a few years general practitioners in medicine—and that means ninety-nine out of every hundred doctors in this country—will not gain salt. A few men of supreme ability in medicine will have that department of the profession to themselves; a few more will have the surgical. For the good old family doctor, there will be no place in the new house that John Bull is going to build.—You smile, dear friends, at my simile; but the prospect is not amusing to me. Uncle John tells us that his profession is crowded, and that “the cry is still they come.” Yes, but they are men that come to the Law; whereas, women are swarming into our profession. Think of that, good folks! Realise what it means for the men-doctors of the next generation. All our practice among children and women will go to the doctoresses, as a matter of course. Women are naturally fitted for attending upon their own sex, and are, if truly feminine, born medicos. Now that they have proved themselves equal to all the tests of the continental dissecting-rooms and to brazen out the lectures, and now that they are taking such brilliant degrees, I, for one, throw up the game, and say, place aux dames!
‘Just think! there are nearly a million more women than men in these happy islands, and they are all bound to live. And accentuate the thought by my assurance that there is no one so ambitious and remorseless in professional competition as a clever woman! While our male medical students are dissipating, idling, fooling, as they have always done since Hippocrates’ days, their lady rivals are preparing to puzzle a John Hunter, a Claude Bernard, a Bichat, or any savant living or dead. I prophesy that, before the end of this century, women will sit in most of the high places of the medical profession. They have keener wits than men; they are more moral, more industrious, and more sympathetic. But I leave this part of the subject for another and more discouraging still—people are beginning to be their own doctors! When I was a young man, few persons were bold enough to quack themselves. Now; there are millions swallowing homeopathic pills and tinctures, and diagnosing their own ailments themselves! Add to them the other millions who feed themselves on patent medicines, and, I tell you, the field of operation is alarmingly diminishing for doctors of either sex. Nor have I yet unfolded more than a fraction of my sorrowful tale. Other multitudes, who, by all that is fair in social life, instead of following the good old plan of sending for the doctor when they have eaten, drunk, and worked, or pleasured too freely, now bolt away to some hydropathic palace, and positively turn a fit of sickness into a spell of luxury! Talk about the Sybarites of old! Go rather and look at our own, “packed,” shampooed, handled, dandled, and fondled in the vast number of our hydropathic “Halls of Idleness” and sensuous convalescing sanatoria! Do not stay to deplore these lapses from the stern old British methods of phlebotomy, leeching, purging, and partaking of all that was nauseous, but receive my most startling confidence—the public don’t believe in us as of old!