Six of these ten lectures have already been printed, the first in 1951, the last in 1957. At intervals during these years I was reminded by some of my friends responsible for the teaching of social administration that students of the subject had difficulty in obtaining the relevant journals and reports. It is true that these lectures reached the sometimes unwelcome finality of print in a variety of published forms, and that certain journals are not easily available to students, particularly those less fortunately placed than students at a university. In publishing them now in book form I must, however, make one or two personal comments.

All these lectures except one were written with two kinds of audience in mind; those who come to listen and those who prefer to read. In revising them in the interests of the latter I have tried to remove some of the more obvious adornments that go to the making of a public lecture. Nothing of any consequence can have been lost in the process. I have added footnotes and references here and there, and corrected the most noticeable lapses in visual style.

What I have not been able to do much about without injury to the flow of the essays is a certain repetitiveness of content and ideas; a tendency, in several of them, for the same point to be taken up, treated in one more lightly, in another in more detail, yet never worked out as satisfactorily as if one were writing a book. For these faults I apologize.

In reprinting these six lectures I have taken the opportunity to include four that have not been published. One is a Fawcett Memorial Lecture on ‘The Position of Women’, given at Bedford College, London, in 1952. Here I have included some new material and added more up-to-date references.

The remaining three lectures, all on the National Health Service, were given under the auspices of the Sherrill Foundation in the Law Faculty at Yale University in the United States in April 1957. Though addressed to an American audience they contain material which may be of interest to students of the subject in Britain and other countries. They were subsequently submitted, with other evidence, to the Royal Commission on Doctors’ and Dentists’ Remuneration.