THERE are “nefarious professions”; and every one is so familiar with their names that it is needless to list them here. Years ago, in mediaeval towns, those who practised them were confined to particular districts and compelled to wear insignia prescribed by law to distinguish them from other citizens. Nowadays, the insignia have been discontinued, but the professions are still tolerated, and even, as happened in bygone days, stimulated and encouraged.

But not enough attention has been given to the nature of the professions designated by this particular phrase, that is to say by a substantive, with an adjective modifying the substantive. The word “professions” suggests, on the one hand, trades that may be practised, and not anti-social activities like brigandage or other associations for delinquency. On the other Hand, the word “nefarious” condemns them, and not in terms of aesthetic disgust, but in terms of moral repugnance. The phrase in other words contains a manifest contradictio in adiecto: it says “yes” and “no” at the same time—the noun conceding a social need or a social good, and the adjective denying that need or that good.

The inconsistency cannot be explained.away by interpreting the phrase as a ne quid nimis which concedes and limits all in one; for by such a formula condemnation is morally precluded. And in that case? In that case the contradiction cannot be reduced; and in fact it is not reduced unless we see that what is approved in the phrase is the “business” and not the “stock in trade,” and what is condemned is the “stock in trade” and not its form—the “business.” There are evils which it is not at present possible to destroy, and to combat which would be a task more desperate than any of the emprises of Don Quixote. Indeed certain programmes of repression are so absurd that those who attempt to put them into practice are at once buried in public ridicule. All that society can do in the meantime is to regulate the evils in question, choosing to give battle to them on some other ground in the hope of eliminating or attenuating them in a future more or less remote. A thing which cannot be destroyed must necessarily live; and it lives better, that is to say, it is less pernicious and therefore more useful, when it lives as a “business” or a “profession.” For this reason rulers of States have always pampered the “nefarious professions”—among others, prostitution, usury, and gambling. There is no inconsistency in this, for the “yes” and the “no” do not touch the same thing, the same point or aspect of the fact in question.

As “professions,” the activities here mentioned have a necessary relation to other professional activities, notably to the economic aspects of society, and bonds of mutual dependence between these professions and the others come into being. How could this be avoided? Only by taking away the form which these activities have assumed, the form of a “business”: and then we should be destroying not the evil, the “stock in trade,” but only the incidental benefits which accompany, restrain, and attenuate that evil.

But the interdependence which thus necessarily arises provokes the criticism that when we thus legitimise social evils all society is contaminated by contact with them and all professions rendered “nefarious” by the economic relations they necessarily come to have with the truly “nefarious professions.” The criticism is more ingenious than profound, and it comes from minds distinguished for artistic impressionability rather than for logical thought. The honest financier, when he cashes the profits of his bank, does not know and does not care whether the money deposited with him may not be in greater or lesser part and more or less directly or indirectly derived from speculations on vice and poverty. Non olet is Bernard Shaw’s sarcastic comment on such cases. And money, in fact, has no smell. The Roman Emperor who first used that phrase spoke the purest truth. It is wholly absurd to accuse honest men of hypocrisy and exploitation of evil under these conditions. They might as well be held responsible for the creation of the world and for all the sins (if sins they be) that have sprang from that. Many beneficent endowments have been created by legacies from usurers who were afraid of Hell. What of it? What they bequeathed was not a concentrated extract, a refined by-product, of wrongdoing—only a fantastic mind could think it was; but a concentration of economic power, innocent as such and in the case in point moreover devoted to a worthy purpose. For such endowments lead through education to the ultimate attenuation or destruction of the vice that was once the stock in trade of the profession. And it was the profession and not its underlying vice that produced the accumulation of economic power.