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The professions, conceived as a select body of superior occupations, have existed from time immemorial, although their identity has often been in dispute. The ancients wrote and argued about them, while Herbert Spencer traced their origin among primitive peoples. The earliest view to which we need here pay attention was that occupations should be judged and valued according to their compatibility with the good life. They were to be tested by their effect on the giver of the service rather than on the recipient. The professions were, in English parlance, the occupations suitable for a gentleman. This idea naturally flourished in societies which distinguished sharply between life lived as an end in itself, and life passed in pursuit of the means which enable others to live as free civilized men should. The professions in such a society were those means to living which were most innocuous, in that they did not dull the brain, like manual labour, nor corrupt the soul, like commerce. They even contained within themselves qualities and virtues which might well find a place among the ends of the good life itself. Leisure, based on the ownership of land or of slaves, was the chief mark of aristocracy, and here too the professions were but slightly inferior. For leisure does not mean idleness. It means the freedom to choose your activities according to your own preferences and your own standards of what is best. The professions, it was said, enjoyed this kind of freedom, not so much because they were free from the control of an employer—that was assumed—but rather because, for them, choice was not restricted and confined by economic pressure. The professional man, it has been said, does not work in order to be paid: he is paid in order that he may work. Every decision he takes in the course of his career is based on his sense of what is right, not on his estimate of what is profitable. That, at least, is the impression he would like to create when defending his claim to superior status.

The story of the relation between political philosophy and economics records many curious twists and turns, anachronistic survivals, and striking anticipations. But nothing is more astonishing than the contrast between the current preoccupations of economists and their tacit methodological beliefs. During the last war and today economic enquiry has inevitably been harnessed to problems of government. But even during the two decades of armistice the bulk of the work of economists has been intimately related to policy. Not only has activity in the empirical and applied fields increased greatly, but purely theoretical analysis, too, has had a strong practical bias. Probably the three outstanding topics in theoretical discussion during the last few years have related to the problems of crises, monopoly, and planning. All three, even when debated in the most abstract terms, have an obvious "tendency to use," in the sense that they envisage the application of measures of control by government or other social agencies.Thus, judged by their choice of topics, economists seem to have given up any implicit unquestioning belief in the virtues of laissez-faire, and, to some extent, even in the capitalist system. Yet there seems still to be lurking in their minds an inherited regard, if not for the Smithian "hidden land," at least for the so-called economic case for laissez-faire as expounded by such members of the first generation of modern economics as William Stanley Jevons, Philip Wicksteed, and J. B. Clark. There are left, it is true, only a few citadels which would put up a full-bodied defence of this case. But a great many of the less intransigent economists still appear to subscribe to it when they are asked explicitly to discuss it.

A full history of the English cabinet would be one of the seminal works on the technique of representative government; for, as Bagehot was the first to point out, the cabinet has been the primary source of decision in the modern English institutional system. Few books, it must be added, would be so difficult to write. Until 1917, the cabinet was without a secretary or authentic records; and there are even today purists who regret these obvious innovations. What account we have of its working is thus necessarily spasmodic and partial in character. A statesman who took a note of some meeting where his department was affected, a debate in the House of Commons after some dispute which has entailed resignation, a chance entry in a diary, the occasional revelation of autobiography–it is upon materials such as these that we are largely dependent for our knowledge. Even semi-official accounts, like those of Lord Morley and Mr. Gladstone, hardly give us more than the formal outline of the cabinet as it functions.Yet one clue to its character has been curiously neglected; and it illustrates, as it happens, the nature of the social system in England in a quite special way. We know the men who occupied cabinet office; and by a careful study of who they were we can at least draw some inferences of interest and even importance. These inferences, let it be said at once, will not explain in any way the technique of the cabinet system. But at least they will serve to measure the way in which the changes in the structure of English social life are reflected in the choice of those responsible for the nation's effective governance.