Corruption in professional life may be held to involve virtually all of our social leadership outside of business and politics. Apart from the specific services rendered by the various professions their principal practitioners are instinctively looked up to by the community for guidance. In a broad sense all professional men are teachers. Corruption in the professions is thus equivalent to the defilement of the sources of public instruction. Yet precisely on this ground very sweeping and bitter accusations are made. Law, journalism, and the higher education are more frequently attacked, but medicine, philanthropy, and theology also come in for criticism. To cite specific instances:—editors are accused of wholesale misrepresentation and suppression of news in behalf of sinister interests; college professors, assumed to be subtly bribed by munificent endowments, are reproached as the crafty inventors of philosophic excuses for menacing public evils; lawyers are denounced as servile hirelings who “justify the wicked for reward” and who accept crooked corporation or political work without demur; ministers, philanthropic workers, and other leaders of thought are said to be purchased by large contributions, gifts of parks, playgrounds, hospitals, and so on.[41] There are many modern Micahs who go about saying of our people that “the heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money.” Corruption of the sources of public instruction is manifestly replete with the potency of evil. If a nation’s “men of light and leading” fail in their function the case is hopeless indeed. Moreover the regulation of the various sources of public instruction is a task the complexity of which far excels that of any problem presented by the other forms of corruption. No insuperable technical difficulty is involved, for example, in prescribing the standard of pure milk, the proper safety devices for theatres, the best method of fencing dangerous machinery in mills, the adequate safeguarding of the interests of policy holders in life insurance companies. But who will tell us with authority exactly what is news and what isn’t; who will define explicitly the standard of orthodoxy for university instruction in economics and political science; who will provide ministers of the gospel with a social creed drawn up with the precision and free from the dogmatic differences of their theological creeds? It is not strange, therefore, that although there has been much vague talk of “tainted money,” proposals for the legal definition and regulation of its alleged pernicious consequences have been wanting. We already have extended and complicated legal systems of inspection and regulation of many of the material goods of life, while but little has been done or even concretely outlined in the direction of state supervision of ideal goods and services.