THE ' RATION OF MONOPOLIES. 603 



much attached, by habit, to corporations of every kind, who really 

 believe, that were these institutions destroyed, darkness would in- 

 stantly succeed chaos would come again. Amongst these we are 

 sorry to find some who, at one time, held an honourable place in their 

 profession. Sir A. Carlisle says, <e I do not believe that any subversive 

 change in our English colleges would amend the profession, or benefit 

 the public." Strange, that the ancients, with -ill their wisdom, could 

 not devise such measures for instructing youf# ! f:nd yet we do not 

 find that they were wanting in any of the learning of their day which 

 could render them good and useful citizens. Athens had no colleges, 

 corporate or chartered bodies she rose to pre-eminence by her free 

 institutions alone. There was nobody to compel the attendance of 

 students. Solon's law, which released the child from the obligation 

 of supporting its parent, if it was not brought up to some profession, 

 obliged all to be educated : further than this the state never interfered. 

 Salaries were first granted to professors in the reign of Antoninus : 

 Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, received none. The medical schools of Italy 

 and Sicily were without charters ; Egypt was a stranger to them ; 

 but look at their effects on Sparta, where the government regulated 

 the education learning never flourished. The history of the world 

 affords no instance of the prosperity of literary institutions under the 

 withering influence of corporate charters. 



The learned Adam Smith has brought the influence of his great 

 mind to bear happily upon this subject. " Have public endowments," 

 he says, " contributed to approve the abilities, and encourage the 

 diligence, of the teacher ? Have they directed the course of education 

 to objects more useful, both to the individual and the public, than 

 those to which it would have gone of its own accord?" The answer 

 to this is not difficult ; but he proceeds : " In every profession, the 

 exertions of those who exercise it is always in proportion to the ne- 

 cessity they are under of making it." The endowments of colleges 

 have denominated this necessity, more or less, in the attention of the 

 teachers ; and why ? " Their subsistence, so far as it arises from 

 their salaries, is evidently derived from a fund altogether inde- 

 pendent of their success and reputation in their several professions." 

 Again, he says, " Whatever forces a set of students, of any college, 

 independent of the merit of their teacher, tends to diminish the neces- 

 sity of that merit." 



The abuse of medical monopolies in this city is a most monstrous 

 and crying evil. We shall begin with the College of Physicians, and 

 in so doing we enter not upon it as a question involving merely the 

 rights of fellows and licentiates, but, more correctly speaking, one 

 between the public and a medical monopoly, and which is of the 

 deepest interest to all. 



In the reign of Henry the Eighth, a chapter was granted to this 

 college, securing to it the medical practice of London and seven miles 

 around. The charter was granted with the laudable view of check- 

 ing mountebank practice, without intending to interfere with the re- 

 gularly-educated physician, or limiting the number of physicians in 

 the metropolis and its suburbs to the small number of six, which at 

 one time was all that this chartered body would admit to practise 



