of the present conflict, and tolerate vague platitudes about war and peace in the large, then, when peace comes to be settled, we shall have difficulty in escaping from the chains of the very militarism which, instinctively, millions of our people have sprung to arms to destroy.

CHEMISTRY AND NATIONAL

PROSPERITY1

I HAVE been asked by the Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce to say a few words on the importance of chemistry in the affairs of the nation, and the part that skilled chemists can play in furthering the general prosperity of the community.

The war has been already the means of removing some misconceptions and of the making of some discoveries. It has, for example, discovered the science of chemistry to a vast number of people, not excluding Cabinet ministers, who hitherto have associated it vaguely with the gilded mortar and pestle and mysterious flagons of brightly coloured fluids of the apothecary. Long ago a French savant described us as a country where the apothecaries call themselves chemists. Another discovery that is destined to be made is the difference between money and wealth.

The wealth of a country is in its matter and energy,-matter, the passive resister, that in the raw state will not do anything you want it to do; and energy, both animate and inanimate, which is for ever trying to do what you do not want it to do, and needs to be controlled. So man found the world, and so, largely, till the beginning of last

1 Address to the Annual Meeting of the Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce, 8th February 1916.

century he left it, moralising and philosophising eternally about himself, and leaving a vast legacy of these elegant accumulations for the "education" of his children. Ignorant of the most elementary facts outside himself, and of the simplest principles which control absolutely his life from the cradle to the grave, he was worse than that. He attempted, with considerable initial success, by means of a cunningly devised "educational" system to entail the conclusions of these preposterous self-examinations in perpetuity upon his children. We have first to

break this entail, or so much of it, if any, as still survives after the conclusion of this disastrous war. I read in the columns of Nature the other day that the only officers in the British Army who receive a scientific training are those belonging to the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers who are attached to the regular army; that for cavalry and infantry officers practically no facilities exist; that the teaching of science at Sandhurst was abandoned many years ago, and has not yet been resumed; that at the present time boys who receive commissions immediately on leaving school are devoting their time to the dead languages, and enter the army without a scrap of scientific knowledge.

However, what I want here mainly to emphasise is that after the war, whatever be its outcome, science and its application can retrieve every disaster and make good even the present seemingly irreparable destruction. Science is neither the upbuilder nor the destroyer. It is the docile slave of its human masters. It will appear as the one or the other, according as the moral outlook of the latter is derived from a progressive and deepening sense of responsibility, awakened by the realisation of the true position which man occupies with regard to the external realities of nature, or an

THE CONTROL OF WEALTH

45

impossible compromise between this and the old mixed mythologies.

Let us glance at the change that has come over the world with regard to the relations of man to energy and matter. Instead of being between these two as between a steam-hammer and an anvil, he has climbed to the controlling gear and has his hand upon the valve. And the hand on this valve is the hand of the chemist and physicist and their executive officer, the engineer.

Power, before running to waste and making at best but an idle show, at the bidding of these three now works, battering raw materials into life-giving commodities; and so it is throughout the length and breadth of the busy world to-day. Science has its hand on the lever controlling the major physical factors of our existence.

Just as you see that a properly authenticated banker has the control of your money, see to the hand that has control of your wealth. If it be in the hands of an honest, well-trained and capable chemist, you will be surprised what unimagined wealth is slipping past your very doors to waste itself, as waterfalls used to do, though rarely so inoffensively and picturesquely. But science-the knowledge of things outside of and independent of our own poor selves and our imaginings-though it has made the world wealthy, is no soulless materialism. Those who think so can know nothing of science, little indeed of wealth, less still of the want of it, and of all that the want of wealth has meant for humanity in its upward progress towards control. They have but fed on the roses and lain on the lilies of life."

There is just this much sardonic justification for the sedulously fostered confusion between creative science and sordid materialism. In the old days the genius of the pure thinker and lover of wisdom for its

H

own sake did not directly contribute to the immediate material prosperity of the community. In these days of experimental science it is this type which governs it. Starving, in the time-honoured manner, a great pioneer of religion, reason or art was cheap. But starve the same type of mind in science now and the community starves with him. It cannot possibly compete, either in war or peace, with any modern. nation that treasures as its most fertile asset the original mind of the discoverer and inventor and the bold exploring spirit of the scientific investigator.

It is true that society may, like an old-established firm, carry on in dignified rottenness in the ways of a bygone generation and live for a while upon its established reputation, if its rivals and competitors are obliging enough to do the same. It is true that ruin may apparently be staved off by the growing power of money and the law to enslave the creators of wealth in the community. Huge individual fortunes may so be built up, but at an ultimate cost to the country altogether disproportionate to the private gain. No quicker road to general impoverishment could well be chosen than the treatment habitually accorded in this country to the poor discoverer and inventor, preyed upon by rascals of every description who flourish under the protective majesty of the law, and in the grip of a commercialism that deems it the highest wisdom not to pay for anything it can get by other means. A country that so mistakes the making of money for the creation of wealth is going to pay in its pocket as well as in its prestige. So is the whirligig of time fast bringing its revenges!

In conclusion, I would like to say a few words. about chemists and the training of chemists. The chemist, if he is a genuine pioneer, is not usually a very worldly-wise person, and he suffers grievously in any sort of beggar-my-neighbour competition.