[To TER EDITOR Or " BeRCTIITORn
SIR,—The progressive socialisation of our institutions must, ever more and more, bring in the authority of the doctor. It was, for instance, inevitable that sooner or later admission to, or continued attendance at, the schools of the State must be made contingent upon medical inspection, as it has by recent legislation been rendered. But it is not at the entrance to the school alone that the doctor stands armed with the flaming sword of possible rejection. His permissive word is the pass- port to every one of the public services—civil, military, and naval—and sets the standard of minimum employable bodily capacity. I doubt whether many of our Socialistic friends have quite realised to what an extent State-organised employ- ment would need to be dependent upon trained medical advice unless the so-called workshops of the State were to become mere sanatoria for physical and moral weaklings and malingerers. The decree of seclusion, as belonging to the class of the unfit, which the self-contained State must in its own defence be prepared to pronounce upon some of its con- stituent units, must be determined in almost every conceivable case by expert medical testimony. There is no occasion to entertain any doubt as to the benevolence of the despotism of a staff of medical assessors; but they must, from the nature of the case, be inexorable in their verdict, which no merely lay administrative department could with impunity venture to
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