e
atmosphere was terribly raw, his wife left the house in search
of food. The nearest grocer declined to supply provisions
without being paid his price; a second imposed the same
condition, and the woman then went to the police station. As
that is not a soup-kitchen, they could not help her, and she
tried other grocers and bread-shops. In all the poor woman
called on eight, and the only one who did not decline to
supply food without payment was for some reason bankrupt and
out of stock. Eventually a local overseer was persuaded to see
the man, and he ordered his removal to the workhouse, where,
after considerable hardship, he was partly appeased with
skilly."

I, myself, have known an overworked, financially worried doctor at his
bedroom window call out, "Have you brought the fee?" and have pitied
and understood his ugly alternatives. "Once I began that sort of
thing," he explained to me a little apologetically, "they'd none of
them pay--none."

The Socialist's remedy for this squalid state of affairs is plain and
simple. Medicine is a public service, an honourable devotion; it
should no more be a matter of profit-making than the food-supply
service or the house-supply service--or salvation. It should be a part
of the organization of a civilized State to have a Public Health
service of well-paid, highly-educated men distributed over the country
and closely correlated with public research departments and a reserve
of specialists, who would be as ready and eager to face dangers and to
sacrifice themselves for honour and social necessity as soldiers or
sailors. I believe every honourable man in the medical profession
under forty now would rather it were so. It is, indeed, a transition
from private enterprise to public organization that is already
beginning. We have the first intimation of the change in the
appearance of the medical officer of health, underpaid, overworked and
powerless though he is at the present time. It cannot be long before
the manifest absurdity of our present conditions begins a process of
socialization of the medical profession entirely analogous to that
which has changed three-fourths of the teachers in Great Britain from
private adventurers to public servants in the last forty years.

And that is the aim of Socialism all along the line; to convert one
public service after another from a chaotic profit-scramble of
proprietors amidst a mass of swea