It has been the history of new professions—and every profession has been at some time a new profession—that they are accepted by the public and become firmly established only after two significant handicaps are overcome. The first of these, oddly enough, lies in public opinion itself; it consists of the public’s reluctance to acknowledge a dependence, however slight, upon the ministrations of any one group of persons. Medicine, even to-day, is still fighting this reluctance. The law is fighting it. Yet these are established professions.
The second handicap is that any new profession must become established, not through the efforts and activities of others, who might be considered impartial, but through its own energy.
These handicaps are particularly potent in a profession of advocacy, because it is engaged in the partisan representation of one point of view. The legal profession is perhaps the most familiar example of this fact, and in this light at least a trenchant comparison may be drawn between the bar and the new profession of the public relations counsel.
Both these professions offer to the public substantially the same services—expert training, a highly sensitized understanding of the background from which results must be obtained, a keenly developed capacity for the analysis of problems into their constituent elements. Both professions