The great scheme of State Insurance was certainly an important step towards the socialisation of medicine. It came short, indeed, of the complete Nationalisation of Health as an affair of State. But that could not possibly be introduced at one move. Apart even from the difficulty of complete reorganisation, the two great vested interests of private medical practice on the one hand and Friendly Societies on the other would stand in the way. A complicated transitional period is necessary, during which those two interests are conciliated and gradually absorbed. It is this transitional period which State Insurance has inaugurated. To compare small things to great--as we may, for the same laws run all through Nature and Society--this scheme corresponds to the ancient Ptolomaean system of astronomy, with its painfully elaborate epicycles, which preceded and led on to the sublime simplicity of the Copernican system. We need not anticipate that the transitional stage of national insurance will endure as long as the ancient astronomy. Professor Moore estimated that it would lead to a completely national medical service in twenty-five years, and since the introduction of that method he has, too optimistically, reduced the period to ten years. We cannot reach simplicity at a bound; we must first attempt to systematise the recognised and established activities and adjust them harmoniously. The organised refusal of the medical profession at the outset to carry on, under the conditions offered, the part assigned to it in the great National Insurance scheme opened out prospects not clearly realised by the organisers. No doubt its immediate aspects were unfortunate. It not only threatened to impede the working of a very complex machine, but it dismayed many who were not prepared to see doctors apparently taking up the position of the syndicalists, and arguing that a profession which is essential to the national welfare need not be carried out on national lines, but can be run exclusively by itself in its own interests. Such an attitude, however, usefully served to make clear how necessary it is becoming that the extension of medicine and hygiene in the national life should be accompanied by a corresponding extension in the national government. If we had had a Council of National Health, as well as of National Defence, or a Board of Health as well as a Board of Trade, a Minister of Health with a seat in the Cabinet, any scheme of Insurance would have been framed from the outset in close consultation with the profession which would have the duty of carrying it out. No subsequent friction would have been possible.