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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.