must be manufactured:—
PROMOTION
IN ABSENTIÂ.—Qualified surgeons, chemists, dentists, oculists, chiropodists, and professors of music or arts aspiring to a doctor’s degree, may communicate by letter to Professor ——.
Qualified, forsooth! why, any one who liked to pay could obtain the most honourable degree for the biggest idiot in Earlswood Asylum. One of the chief difficulties to be encountered over such a bad business as this is that the good and the sham degree holders very often get irretrievably mixed up in certain phases of society. Physicians, surgeons, and gentlemen in similar position are protected, and so little dealing is done in medical, surgical, or chemical degrees; but bachelors and masters of arts and doctors of laws are made by the score, the recipients of honours being in a majority of cases men whose ignorance must be probed before it is appreciated, but whose depth requires no delving whatever. Now, when a man of this kind elects to call himself doctor, or puts B.A. or M.A. after his name, even those who know what little right he has to the degree are hardly quixotic enough to decline giving him the title he covets; so in a year or so, Dr Brown or Dr Jones has as firm a hold upon his title as if he had obtained it by a personal examination under the most rigorous system; and strangers who are unable to discover for themselves the unworthiness of the pretender, give him all the honours which belong to the learned. Sometimes the applicant swindles the professor, and we not long back heard of an aspiring youth who paid for the degrees of M.A. and LL.D. with a cheque and a bill, each being for £20, and both being dishonoured. It is a pity that these two scamps cannot be treated to three months in the House of Correction, just to encourage all