may suffer loss from a wholehearted devotion to the spirit of truth as they conceive it. The artist, the play- wright, the author, may have to choose between the ideals of their art and the more lucrative devices of popularity. Finally, the technical and the cultural interest may work apart. Routine methods and processes may dominate the professional mind to the obscura- tion of the ends which they should serve. A notable statement of this opposition is given in the valuable investigation into professional organi- zation in England which was published in two supplements of the New States- man (April 21 and 28, 1917). The investigation points to "the undis- guised contempt in which both solici- tors and barristers, notably those who have attained success in their profession and control its organization, hold, and have always held, not only all scholar- ship or academic learning of a profes- sional kind, but also any theoretic or philosophical or scientific treatment of law."
Here, therefore, in the structure of the general professional interest we find a rich mine of ethical problems, still for the most part unworked but into which the growing ethical codes of the professions are commencing to delve. A still greater wealth of the material for ethical reflection is re- vealed when we turn next to analyze the relation of the professional interest as a whole to that of the community.
Relation of Professional Interest to General Welfare
Every organized profession avows itself to be an association existing primarily to fulfil a definite service within the community. Some codes distinguish elaborately between the various types of obligation incumbent on the members of the profession. The lawyer, for example, is declared to have
specific duties to his client, to the public, to the court or to the law, to his professional brethren and to himself. It would occupy too much space to consider the interactions, harmonies, and potential conflicts of such various duties. Perhaps the least satisfactory reconciliation is that relating the in- terest of the client to the interest of the public, not merely in the consideration of the particular cases as they arise but still more in the adaptation of the serv- ice to the needs of the public as a whole as distinct from those of the individual clients. Thus the medical profession has incurred to many minds a serious liability, in spite of the devo- tion of its service to actual patients, by its failure for so long to apply the pre- ventive side of medicine, in particular to suggest ways and means for the prevention of the needless loss of life and health and happiness caused by the general medical ignorance and help- lessness of the poor.
In addition it must suffice to show that the conception of communal serv- ice is liable to be obscured alike by the general and by the specific bias of the profession. It is to the general bias that we should attribute such attempts to maintain a vested interest as may be found in the undue restric- tion of entrants to the profession — undue when determined by such pro- fessionally irrelevant considerations as high fees and expensive licenses; in the resistance to specialization, whether of tasks or of men, the former correspond- ing to the resistance to "dilution" in the trade union field; in the insistence on a too narrow orthodoxy, which would debar from professional practice men trained in a different school; in the unnecessary multiplication of tasks, of which a flagrant example is the English severance of barrister and solicitor. Another aspect of the general bias is found in the shuffling of
