Page:Introductory Address on the General Medical Council, its Powers and its Work.djvu/30

 oblige. You gave the Council the highest sanction in your power by sending a member to represent you; you would expect the minority to respect its decisions had you been in the majority: you can do no less yourself even if you for once are in the minority.

From the point of view of the Council as a corporate entity, it is also of inestimable advantage that each of its constituent bodies is represented upon it. Its members, in one aspect of their functions, are so many envoys from the Universities and Corporations. Each is in immediate touch with his Governing Body: he is by hypothesis in good standing and influence there, or he would not have been chosen. While he is an envoy of the body, he becomes in turn an envoy of the Council to the body. From his own knowledge of the course of the discussion, the arguments used, the examples proposed for imitation, he is in a position to explain and commend the Council's decision to his colleagues at home. He can make clear the scope and bearing of resolutions that are not always, I regret to say, self-explanatory.

It is, I am convinced, largely owing to the representation of the bodies upon the Council, and to the potent motives which, with our British temperament, we deduce from that representation, that the influence of the Council with the bodies so far outmeasures its actual powers. The only compulsion to which the bodies have been subject is the internal compulsion of a high self-respect, which makes them unwilling to do less than their compeers for the common good. In a multitude of instances, even this compulsion has been eased of all constraint by the fuller sympathy with the Council's motives and objects which the loyal mediation of its members has induced.

Whatever may have been assigned as the reason for it in past times, the fact is worthy of mention here that during its forty-eight years of existence the Council has only once had to express its final verdict of "insufficiency" with respect to any one of the licensing boards, and to report that verdict to the Privy Council with a view to