In all these branches there were great—­in some, very great—­prizes to be obtained; prizes not always of money, but of honour:  in some of them the prizes included what was considered the greatest of all rewards—­a Peerage.  The country, indeed, was already beginning to insist that the national distinctions should be bestowed upon all those—­and only upon those—­who rendered real services to the State.  One poet had been made a Peer.  One man of science had been made a Privy Councillor, and another a Peer; two painters had been made baronets; and the humble distinction of Knight Bachelor, which had been tossed contemptuously to city sheriffs, provincial mayors, and undistinguished persons who used back-stairs influence to get the title, was now brought into better consideration by being shared by a few musicians, engineers, physicians, and others.  Nothing could more clearly show the real contempt in which literature and science were held in an aristocratic country than that, although there were a dozen degrees of peerage and half a dozen orders of knighthood, there was not one order reserved for men of science, literature, and art.  Feeble protests from time to time were made against this absurdity, but in the end it proved useful, because the chief argument against the continuance of titles of honour in the great debate on the subject, in the year 1920, was the fact that all through the nineteenth century the men who most deserved the thanks and recognition of the State were (with the exception of soldiers and lawyers) absolutely neglected by the Court and the House of Lords.

Let us consider by what usages, rather than by what rules, the Professions were barred to the people.  In the Church a young man could not be ordained under the age of twenty-three.  Nor would the Bishop ordain him, as a rule, unless he was a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge.  This meant that he was to stay at school, and that a good school, till the age of nineteen; that he was then to devote four years more to carrying on his studies in a very expensive manner; in other words, that he must be able to spend at least a thousand pounds before he could obtain Orders, and that he would then receive pay at a much lower rate than a good carpenter or engine-driver.

At the Bar it was the custom for a man to enter his name after leaving the University:  he would then be called at five or six-and-twenty.  A young man must be able to keep himself until that age, and even longer, because a lawyer’s practice begins slowly.  There were also very heavy dues on entrance and on being called.  In plain terms, no young man could enter at the Bar who did not possess or command, at least, a thousand pounds.

In the lower branch of the law a young man might, it is true, be admitted at twenty-one.  But he had to pay a heavy premium for his articles, and large fees both at entrance and on passing the examination which admitted him.  Not much less, therefore, including his maintenance, than a thousand pounds would be required of him before he began to make anything for himself.  A medical man, even one who only desired to become a general practitioner, had to work through a five years’ course, with hospital fees.  Like the solicitor, he might qualify for about a thousand pounds.