Page:Introductory Address on the General Medical Council, its Powers and its Work.djvu/24

 suppose that the members elected by direct representation will be less eminent than those nominated either by the Crown or the [proposed] Divisional Boards" [of the three parts of the Kingdom]. The Commission accordingly recommended that four members should be directly elected, two for England and one each for Scotland and Ireland. The Act, when it came, was framed on a somewhat different basis, and gave three members to England instead of two.

Please observe the main reason alleged for the introduction of the directly elected members: it was "highly important that the Profession should have full and complete confidence in the Council." Exactly the same reason may be assigned for the arrangement, also sanctioned in 1886, by which each one of the Licensing Bodies was granted a separate voice in the counsels of the principal authority. For in their case also it was important that they should have such "full and complete confidence in the Council" as would make them ready to co-operate with it in matters of medical education. The new Act conferred no new coercive powers on the Council. Its numbers were increased, the extent of the qualifying examinations was enlarged and better defined, the scope and method of the inspection to which they were subject were more fully expressed. But the Council as before could only in the last resort report to the Privy Council any deficiencies it discovered. The law in fact contemplated that reasonable uniformity and stringency in the existing tests were to be brought about not by autocratic compulsion but by common action for a common end. To use the language of a recent Bill, "peaceable persuasion in a reasonable manner" was to be the main motive force entrusted to the Council, so far as Medical Education was concerned. Ardent reformers cried then, and have often cried since, for speedier and more drastic powers. But after all is not the method adopted by Parliament characteristically British? "Government with the consent of the governed"; "freedom limited only by necessary checks on the abuses which would destroy the freedom and efficiency of others." These