Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/280

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how little! Contrast with it the much that doctors, lawyers, professors, men of science, give of their less as regards actual income! When men like Zola and Léon Daudet sneer at surgeons and fashionable doctors, I ask myself if, for a moment, they realise all that these surgeons and doctors do for the needy for nothing. You give a subscription for some charitable object duly recorded in the newspapers. You have the benefit of your charitable reputation, and your self-advertisement; you have earned both without any actual sacrifice.

How many doctors and surgeons have their hours set aside regularly for free consultations, and add to these gifts of money for medicine and wine! If I were to try to enumerate all the kindnesses and liberal charities done by big doctors and surgeons, and by small doctors, and never a word of it recorded, I should have to embark in several volumes. I know no class of men so disinterested and generous, except perhaps, barristers and professors. In France we need seek no more splendid examples in this class of men than the present French Prime Minister, M. Waldeck-Rousseau, who gave up a lucrative profession, being the most brilliant and best paid advocate of France, to become an ill-paid Minister, sacrificing in the hour of a great national crisis something like fifteen thousand a year; and Maître Labori, who, in order to defend an