Amongst various important matters now brought to a sharper focus in the public eye, few, if any, require more careful attention than that which is concerned with science, its value, its position, its teachings, and how it should be taught. No one who has followed the domestic difficulties due to our neglect of the warnings of scientific men can fail to see how we have had to suffer because of the lax conduct of those responsible for these things in the past.

Within the first few weeks after the war broke out—to take one example—every medical man was the recipient of a document telling him of the expected shortage in a number of important drugs and suggesting the substitutes which he might employ. It was a timely warning; but it need never have been issued if we had not allowed the manufacture of drugs, and especially those of the so-called "synthetic" group, to drift almost entirely into the hands of the Badische Aniline Fabrik, and kindred firms in Germany. This difficulty, now partly overcome, is one which never would have arisen but for the deaf ear turned to the warnings of the scientific chemists. British pharmaceutical chemists, with one or two exceptions, had been relying upon foreign sources not only for synthetic drugs but actually for the raw materials of many of their preparations—such, for example, as aconite, belladonna, henbane, all of which can be freely grown—which even grow wild—in these islands; even, incredible as it may seem, for foxglove leaves. These things with many others were imported from Germany and Austria. Here again leeway has had to be made up; but it ought never to have been necessary, and now that the war is over steps should be taken to see that it never need be necessary again. The encouragement of British herb-gardens and of scientific experiment therein on the best method of culture for the raw material of our organic medicines must certainly be matters early taken in hand.

The classical example of the mortal injury done to British manufacture by the British manufacturer's former contempt for the scientific man is that of the aniline dyes, which are so closely associated with the synthetic drugs as to form one subject of discussion. Quite early in the war dye-stuffs ran short, and there was no means of replenishing the stock in Britain, nor even in America, these products having formed the staple of a colossal manufacture, with an enormous financial turnover, in Germany.

Let us look at the history of these dyes. The first aniline dye was discovered quite by accident, in 1856, by the late Professor W. H. Perkin. He called it "mauve," from the French word for the mallow, the colour of whose flower it somewhat resembled. In 1862 there was an International Exhibition in London; and those who remembered it and its predecessor of 1851 have declared that the case of aniline dye-stuffs—for by that time quite a number of new pigments had been discovered—excited at the later the same attention as that given to the Koh-i-noor at the earlier. The invention, out of which grew the enormous German business already alluded to, and with which has been associated the discovery and manufacture of the synthetic drugs, was entirely British in its inception and in its early stages. Moreover the raw materials on which it depended, namely, gas-tar products, were to be had in greater abundance in England than anywhere else. Yet, at the time when the war broke out, this industry had been allowed almost entirely to drift into German hands.

How was this? Let an expert reply. It was due, he tells us, to the neglect of "the repeated warnings which have been issued since that time" (viz. 1880, by which date the Germans had succeeded in capturing the trade in question) "in no uncertain voice by Meldola, Green, the Perkins (father and son), and many other English chemists." Further, he continues, two causes have invariably been indicated for the transfer of this industry to Germany—"first the neglect of organic chemistry in the Universities and colleges of this country" (a neglect which has long ceased), "and then the disregard by manufacturers of scientific methods and assistance and total indifference to the practice of research in connection with their processes and products." I remember talking some twenty-five years ago to a highly educated young student of Birmingham who was of German parentage though of English birth. He had just taken the degree of Doctor of Science in London University, and was on the eve of abandoning the adopted country of his parents for a position in the research laboratories of the Badische company, where he would be one among a number of chemists, running into hundreds, all engaged in research on gas-tar products. At that moment the great Birmingham gas-company was employing the services of one trained chemist.

Such was and is the neglect of science by business men. Could it have been otherwise, considering their bringing up? Let me again be reminiscent. I suppose the public school in England (not a Catholic school, for I was then a Protestant) at which I pursued what were described as studies did not in any very marked degree differ from its sister schools throughout the country. How was science encouraged there? One hour per week, exactly one-fifth of the time devoted weekly, not to Greek and Latin (that would have been almost sacrilegious), but to the writing of Greek and Latin prose and alleged Greek and Latin verse—that was the amount of time which was devoted to what was called science. I suppose I had an ingrained vocation for science, for it was the only subject, except English composition, in which I ever felt interest at school. If the vocation had not been there, any interest in the subject must necessarily have been slain once for all in me, as I am sure it was in scores of others, by the way it was taught; for the instruction was confided to the ordinary form-master, who doled out his questions from a text-book perfunctorily used and probably heartily despised by a man brought up on strict classical or mathematical lines. Our manufacturer is brought up in a school of this kind, and it would be a miracle if he emerged from it with any respect for science. Things have changed now, and for the better, as they have at most of the Universities; but we are dealing with the generation of manufacturers of my age who were largely responsible for the neglects now in question. Well, the boy left his school and went to Oxford or Cambridge, neither of which then greatly encouraged science. Its followers were, I believe, known as "Stinks Men." At any rate it is only comparatively recently that we have seen the splendid developments of to-day in those ancient institutions. One relic of the ancient days gives us an illuminating idea of how things used to be, just as a fossil shows us the environment of its day.[30] Trinity College, Dublin, has fine provision for scientific teaching, and a highly competent staff to teach. But in its constitution it shows the attitude towards science which till lately informed the older Universities.

Trinity College has in its Fellowship system one of the most important series of pecuniary rewards perhaps in Europe, of an educational character. A man has only once to pass an examination, admittedly one of great severity and competitive in character, and thenceforward to go on living respectably and doing such duties as are committed to him, to be ensured an excellent and increasing income for life. How great the rewards are will be gathered from the fact that a distinguished occupant of one of these positions some years ago endeavoured—with complete success—to enforce on me the importance of the Fellowship examination by telling me that he had already received over £50,000 in emoluments as a result of his success. He has received a good deal more since, and I hope will continue to be the recipient of this shower of gold for many years to come.[31] No doubt much might be urged for this system, which was for a long time popular in China for the selection of Mandarins, and I am not criticising it here. What I want to emphasise is that the examination for these valuable positions is either classical or mathematical, and there it ends. The greatest biologist in the world would have as much chance of a Fellowship as the ragged urchin in the street unless he could "settle Hoti's business" or elucidate [Greek: P] or do other things of that kind. It is a luminous example of what was—must we say is?—thought of science in certain academic circles. Of course it may be urged—I have actually heard it urged—that nothing is science save that which is treatable by mathematical methods. It was a kind of inverted M. Jourdain who used this argument, a gentleman who imagined himself to have been teaching science during a long life without ever having effected what he supposed to be his object. Then, again, our manufacturer, whose object in life is to make money, is naturally, perhaps even necessarily, affected by the kind of salaries which highly trained and highly eminent men of science receive by way of reward for their work. Few, if any, receive anything like the emoluments attaching to the position of County Court Judge, and I know of only one case in which a Professor's income, to the delight and envy of all the teaching profession, actually, for a few years, soared somewhat near the empyrean of a Puisne Judge's reward.

Perhaps this is not to be wondered at; for Parliament always contains many lawyers, and at the moment, I think, not a single scientific expert, at least among the Commons. This is not really a sordid argument, though it may appear so. The labourer, after all, is worthy of his hire; but in the scientific world it very, very seldom happens that the hire is worthy of the labourer. Even to this day there is plenty of truth in the description of the attitude of Mr. Meagles towards Mr. Doyce as detailed by the author of Little Dorrit. Perhaps that is partly because it is generally the man of business, and not the unhappy man of science, who gains the money produced by scientific discoveries. These are often, if not usually, made by accident, and by a man on the track of something else, on the elucidation of which he is probably so intent that he cannot spare time for side-issues, very likely never even thinks of them. Sir James Dewar discovered the principle of the "Thermos flask" whilst he was working at the exceedingly difficult subject of the liquefaction of air. I hope Sir James had the prescience to patent his discovery, and reap the reward which was due to him; but, if he did, he is one amongst a thousand who never took this trouble and of whom Sic vos non vobis might well be said. When Sabatier had shown the importance of combinations of hydrogen effected by what is known as a catalyst, numerous patents were taken out—by other people, of course—on which were founded very flourishing businesses. Sabatier profited by none of these—so I understand. He received a Nobel prize for his discoveries; but another hath his heritage.

Though science has not received any great encouragement, yet in spite of that—the cynic might say because of that—it has made amazing progress during the past half-century. Mr. Chesterton somewhere notes that "a time may easily come when we shall see the great outburst of science in the Nineteenth Century as something quite as splendid, brief, unique, and ultimately abandoned as the outburst of art at the Renaissance." That, of course, may be so, but as to the outburst there can be no question, nor of its persistence to the present day. That also is surely a curious phenomenon; for, as regards most other things, we seem to be in the trough of the wave, and not merely in these islands but all over the civilised world. In Art, in Music, in Literature, in the Drama, it would be difficult to argue in favour of a pre-eminence, or even of an equality of the present age, comparing it with its predecessors.

Take the politicians of the world; it is perhaps difficult, even foolish, for us who are living with them to prophesy with any approximation of accuracy what the historian of a future day may say about them. He may sum them up as respectable, honest mediocrities trying to do their best under exceptionally difficult circumstances; he may put them lower; he may put them higher; he may differentiate between those of different nations; but there is little doubt that, with the exception of the American President, he will not be able to point to any one of the calibre of Pitt or of Bismarck or of the less severely tried Disraeli or Gladstone.

But just the reverse is the case in science, which has men of the very first rank living, working, and discovering to-day. There are indeed signs that even our Government is cognizant of this. The creation of a Department of Industrial Scientific Research, the provision of a substantial income for the same, the increase of research-grants to learned societies, these and other things show that some attempt will be made to recognise the value of science to the State. Further, the lesson seems to have gone home to some few at least that there is no difference between what have been absurdly called Pure and Applied Science, since so very many "Applied" discoveries—such as the "Thermos"—arose in the course of what certainly would have been described as "Pure" researches.

It is to the public advantage that every educated person should know something about science; nor is this by any means as big or difficult an achievement as some may imagine. It is not necessary to teach any very large number of persons very much about any particular science or group of sciences. What is really important is that people should imbibe some knowledge of scientific methods—of the meaning of science. This can be done from the study of quite a few fundamental propositions of any one science under a good teacher—a first essential. Any person thus educated will, for the remainder of his life, be able at least to understand what is meant by science and the scientific method of approaching a problem. He will not, like an educational troglodyte at a recent Conference, refuse to describe anything as science which is not capable of mathematical treatment, nor allude compendiously to physiological study as "the cutting up of frogs." In a word, he will be an educated man, which can no more be said of one ignorant of science than it can be of one whose mind has never experienced the softening influence of letters.

So far, everybody whose opinion counts seems to be agreed; but in any plea for an extended and improved teaching of science, certain points ought not to be left out of count. In the first place, science is not the key to all locks; there are many important things—some of the most important things in life—with which it has nothing whatever to do. It will be well to recall Mr. Balfour's words at the opening of the National Physical Laboratory: "Science depends on measurement, and things not measurable are therefore excluded, or tend to be excluded, from its attention. But Life and Beauty and Happiness are not measurable. If there could be a unit of happiness, politics might begin to be scientific." It follows that there are a number of subjects on which the scientific man is just as fit, or as unfit, to express an opinion as any other man. The intense preoccupation which serious scientific studies demand, may render the man who is engaged therein even less competent to express an opinion on alien subjects than one whose attention, less concentrated, has time to range over diverse fields of study. Readers of Darwin's Life will remember his confession that he had lost all taste for music, art, and literature; that he "could not endure to read a line of poetry" and found Shakespeare "so intolerably dull that it nauseated" him; and finally, that his mind seemed "to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts."

Despite this warning as to the limits of science, we have no lack of instances of scientific men posing as authorities on subjects on which they had no real right to be heard, and, what is worse, being accepted as such by the uninstructed crowd. Thus Professor Huxley, who, as some one once said, "made science respectable," was wont to utter pontifical pronouncements on the subject of Home Rule for Ireland. His knowledge of that country was quite rudimentary, and his visits to it had been as few and as brief as if he had been its Sovereign; but that did not prevent him from delivering judgment, nor unfortunately deter many from following that judgment as if it had been inspired. I am not now arguing as to the rights and wrongs of Huxley's view on the matter in question: I have my own opinion on that. What I am urging is that his position, whether as a zoologist or, incidentally, as a great master of the English language, in no way entitled him to express an opinion or rendered him a better authority on such a question than any casual fellow-traveller in a railway carriage might easily be.

This is bad enough; but what is far worse is when scientific experts on the strength of their study of Nature assume the right of uttering judicial pronouncements on moral and sociological questions, judgments some at least of which are subversive of both decency and liberty. Thus we have lately been told that it is "wanton cruelty" to keep a weak or sickly child alive; and the medical man, under a reformed system of medical ethics, is to have leave and licence to put an end to its life in a painless manner. To what enormities and dastardly agreements this might lead need hardly be suggested; and I am quite confident that the members of the honourable profession of physic, to which I am proud to belong, have no desire whatever for such a reform of the law or of their ethics. Then we are told in the same address (Bateson, British Association Addresses in Australia, 1914) that on the whole a decline in the birth-rate is rather a good thing, and that families averaging four children are quite enough to keep the world going comfortably. The date of this address will be noted; and the fact that the war, which was then just beginning, has probably caused its author and has caused everybody else to see the utter futility of such assertions.

However, if we are to rear only four children per marriage, and if we are to give the medical man liberty to weed out the weaklings, it behoves us to see that the children whom we produce are of the best quality. Let us, therefore, hie to the stud-farm, observe its methods and proceed to apply them to the human race. We must definitely prevent feeble-minded persons from propagating their species. Within limits, that is a proposition with which all instructed persons would agree, though few, we imagine, would put their opinions so uncharitably as the lecturer did: "The union of such social vermin we should no more permit than we would allow parasites to breed on our own bodies." But we must go farther than this, and introduce all sorts of restrictions on matrimony, until finally it comes to be a matter to be arranged under rigid laws by a jury of elderly persons—all, we may feel perfectly sure, "cranks" of the first water.

In what milieu are their findings to take effect? It is very important to consider that. The author from whom I have been quoting tells us what we want to know. Man, he tells us, is "a rather long-lived animal, with great powers of enjoyment, if he does not deliberately forgo them." In the past, we are told, "superstitious and mythical ideas of sin have predominantly controlled these powers." We have changed all that now; as the parent in Punch says to the crying child by the seashore, "You've come out to enjoy yourself, and enjoy yourself you shall!" So we are to plunge into the whirlpool of eugenic delights without any fear of that "bugbear of a hell" which another writer congratulates us on getting rid of. We can, it appears, enter upon our eugenic experiment without a single moral scruple to restrain us or a single religious restriction to interfere with us. In this soil is the plant to be grown, and the first weed to be eradicated is that of the right of personal choice of a partner for life, or for such other term as the law under the new rÉgime may require. Jack is to be torn from weeping Jill, and handed over to reluctant Joan, to whom he is personally displeasing and for whom he has not the slightest desire, and handed over because the Breeding Committee think it is likely to prove advantageous for the Coming Race. All that may be possible—or may not—but what then? When you are carrying out Mendelian experiments on peas, you can enclose your flowers in muslin bags and prevent anything interfering with your observations. And in the stud-farm you can keep the occupants shut up.

But what are you going to do with Jack? and with Jill? And still more with Joan? They cannot be permanently isolated, neither are they restrained by any "mythical ideas of sin." They have been educated to the idea that their highest duty is to enjoy themselves. Why should they not do what they like? And consequently, as any reasoning person can see, "The Inevitable" must happen; and where is your experiment and where the Coming Race? It is perfectly useless for doctrinaires to argue, as doctrinaires will, about ethical restraints. Nature has no ethical restraints; and any ethical restraints which man has come from that higher nature of his which he does not share with the lower creation. What those whom the late Mr. Devas so aptly called "after-Christians" always forget is that the humane, the Christian side of life, which they as well as others exhibit, is due to the influence, lingering if you like, of Christianity. They ignore or forget the pit out of which they were digged.

By another Eugenist we are told that willy-nilly every sound, healthy person of either sex must get married or at least betake him or herself to the business of propagating the race. That at least is the essence of his singularly offensive dictum that since the celibacy of the Catholic clergy and of members of Religious Orders deprives the State of a number of presumably excellent parents, "if monastic orders and institutions are to continue, they should be open only to the eugenically unfit."[32] If the religious call is not to be permitted to dispense a man or woman from entering the estate of matrimony, it may be assumed that nothing else, except an unfavourable report from the committee of selection, will do so. And, further, as the one object of all this is to bring super-children into the world, we must also assume that those who fail in this duty will find themselves in peril of the law.

Surely what has been set down shows that whatever scientific reputation the writers in question possess, and it is undeniably great, it has not equipped them, one will not merely say with moral or religious ideas, but with an ordinary knowledge of human nature. It has not equipped them with any conception apparently of political possibilities; and it has left them without any of that saving salt, a sense of humour. Like Huxley, they have started out to give opinions without first having made themselves familiar with the subject on which they were to deliver judgment.

It is perhaps little to be wondered at that the intense preoccupation which the study of science entails should tend to induce those whose attention is constantly fixed on Nature to imagine that from Nature can be drawn not only lessons of physical life but lessons also of conduct. Of course this is quite wrong; for Nature has no moral lesson to teach us. We are told to go to the ant—at least the sluggard is—but for what? To amend his sluggardliness. No one has ever suggested that we should go to Nature to learn to be humble, kindly, unselfish, tolerant, and Christian, in our dealings with others; and for this excellent reason, that none of these things can be learnt from Nature. Science is neither moral nor immoral, but non-moral; and, as we have seen a thousand times in this present war, its kindest gifts to man can be used, and are used, for his cruel destruction. In this war, pre-eminently amongst all wars, we have the application of pure natural principles unameliorated by the influences of Christianity, or of chivalry, Christianity's offspring. As Sir Robert Borden has summed it up, German kultur is an attempt "to impose upon us the law of the jungle."

Natural Selection, some would have us believe, is the dominant law of living nature, and all would agree that it is an important law. Let us then, if we are to follow Nature, put it into practice. But Natural Selection means the Survival of the Fittest in the Struggle for Life. It consequently means the Extermination of the Less Fit, a little fact often left out of count. It means in three words "Might is Right," and was not that exactly the proposition by which we were confronted in this war? If Natural Selection be our only guide, let us sink hospital ships, destroy innocent villages and towns, exterminate our weaker opponents in any way that seems best to us. It was all summed up centuries ago by the author of the Book of Wisdom: "Let us oppress the poor just man, and not spare the widow, nor honour the ancient grey hairs of the aged. But let your strength be the law of justice: for that which is feeble is found to be nothing worth." That is Natural Selection in operation in human life when human beings have been stripped of all "mythical ideas of Sin:" not a pretty picture nor a condition of affairs under which we should like long to exist. Some of the other resemblances are less dreadful, but none the less instructive. Let us take the matter of Mimicry. There is a form of protective mimicry whereby the living thing is like unto its surroundings, and thus escapes its enemy. We find it in warfare in the use of khaki dress, in white overalls in snow-time, in other such expedients. But there is also a form of Aggressive Mimicry in which a deadly thing makes itself look like something innocent, as the wolf tried to look in "Little Red Riding Hood." "The Germans were beginning their attack on Haumont. Their front-line skirmishers, to throw us into confusion, had donned caps which were a faint imitation of our own, and also provided themselves with Red Cross brassards" (The Battle of Verdun. H. Dugard). Not to be tedious on this point, which really does not require to be laboured, let me finish with one quotation from a vivid series of war-pictures. Boyd Cable is writing of men in the trenches: "Civilised Man, in his latest art of war, has gone back to be taught one more simple lesson by the beast of the field and the birds of the air; the armed hosts are hushed and stilled by the passing air-machine, exactly as the finches and field-mice of hedgerow and ditch and field are frozen to stillness by the shadow of a hovering hawk, the beat of its passing wing."

No; an existence passed under conditions of this kind and as the normal state of affairs is not an existence to be contemplated with equanimity. We are anxious that science and scientific teaching should be assisted in every possible way. But let us be quite clear that while science has much to teach us and we much to learn from her, there are things as to which she has no message to the world. The Minor Prophets of science are never tired of advising theologians to keep their hands off science. The Major Prophets are too busy to occupy themselves with such polemics. But the theologian is abundantly in his right in saying to the scientific writer "Hands off morals!" for with morality science has nothing to do. Let us at any rate avoid that form of kultur which consists in bending Natural History to the teaching of conduct, uncorrected by any Christian injunctions to soften its barbarities.

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