Poor people do not differ from rich people in this natural characteristic, that they both like to have individual medical attention and realise that the best way to obtain this is to pay a reasonable fee to the doctor of their choice. Nevertheless one meets many people of all classes who make, sometimes grudgingly, the admission that they think a State Medical Service would be a good thing.

There are several causes of this discrepancy. In the first place, it is by no means confined to medical matters. More than ever since the Second War, some commodities are badly distributed and many of us have got into the way of thinking that nationalisation, or control by the State, offers a satisfactory solution. This is a trend of the times, and statistical statements have got us into the habit of supposing a ‘trend’ to be something inevitable. Eor instance, this was the defeatist talk some years ago of many doctors who were by temperament, by training and by reasoned conviction opposed to State Medicine as a bad thing for the people: they summed up wearily by saying that it was all a trend of the times and there was no resisting it. Another attitude, less easy to dispose of, was, and is, to point to the many defects in our present medical services and to suggest that State control at least offers a remedy, no other being available.