In boroughs, monopoly had made work bad and dear; in universities, it had led to quackery, imposture, and exorbitant fees. One remedy for the inconveniences of town corporations had been found in the outgrowth of manufacturing villages; and, in a similar way, the private interest of some poor professors of physic had done something to check the exorbitance of rich universities, which made a course of eleven or even sixteen years necessary before a student could become a Doctor of Law, Physic, or Divinity. The poor universities could not stipulate for residence, and sold their degrees to any one who would buy them, often without even a decent examination. “The less trouble they gave, the more money they got, and I certainly do not pretend to vindicate so dirty a practice.” Nevertheless these cheap degrees, though extremely disagreeable to graduates whose degrees had cost much time and expense, were of advantage to the public in that they multiplied doctors, and so sunk fees. “Had the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge been able to maintain themselves in the exclusive privilege of graduating all the doctors who could practise in England, the price of feeling a pulse might by this time have risen from two and three guineas, the price which it has now happily arrived at, to double or triple that sum; and English physicians might, and probably would, have been at the same time the most ignorant and quackish in the world.”[28] This trenchant reasoning seems to have prevailed. At any rate, the idea of obtaining governmental interference was dropped. Some time afterwards, however, Dr. Cullen took an opportunity of pointing out that there is a good deal more to be said for the corporate regulation of medicine than for ordinary trade guilds. Adam Smith probably pushed his argument for free trade in medical degrees to this extreme mainly from anxiety to prevent the interference of an unwise Government in his favourite universities, though partly no doubt because he thought fraudulent competition better than none, partly again for love of maintaining a paradox. A more spacious handling of this theme is found in the _Wealth of Nations_, more especially in the famous tenth chapter of the first book, with its account of “Inequalities occasioned by the Policy of Europe,” and in a later criticism of universities.