Page:Introductory Address on the General Medical Council, its Powers and its Work.djvu/36

 Time fails me to tell you in detail by what curious stages, through what disputes and controversies, along what educational bye-paths, the present arrangement has been reached. It is still transitional, there are still difficulties in the way, it is not yet perfect. But on the whole it is making for progress, for the uplifting of the educational status, and thereby of the social status of the profession. And its improvement is fortunately the concern not of the Council only, but of medical men themselves. It is entirely to their credit that so many of them should be eager for a more rapid advance than the Council finds to be practicable. The Council has to carry a large number of bodies with it; the pace of the march has to take account of the slower as well as of the faster of these; and, as you know, it has no real power to drive—it can only lead.

Let me make a last confession in closing. The Medical Council as an instrument of professional government is not ideally perfect. Perhaps no human organization, with the possible exception of the University of Manchester, is perfect. But it may be said for it that it did not start de novo, full-armed and potent like Minerva from the brow of Jove. Like every British institution it was built on old foundations of tradition and vested right and sacred privilege. It was not a creation but an adaptation. That it had within it, however, the seed of life, the germ of growth and expansion, my informal sketch of some phases in its half -century of history has, I hope, convinced you. Whether its future be one of continued evolution, or of sudden and complete revolution, it has not wholly failed in the task committed to it. The work it has succeeded in accomplishing has not been measured by the scanty powers it originally received.