THE rROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



411 



THE PEOGRESS OF SCIENCE 



WAR AND SOCIAL PEOGBESS 



The present issue of The Popular 

 Science Monthly contains a series of 

 papers presented at the recent Phila- 

 delphia meeting of the social and eco- 

 nomic section of the American Associa- 

 tion for the Advancement of Science, 

 treating more or less directly problems 

 relating to the war. We welcome the 

 opportunity to print these articles, the 

 responsibility for which belongs to our 

 great national scientific association, 

 for it is difficult to know what should 

 be the attitude of a scientific journal 

 toward the war. The appalling mag- 

 nitude of the disaster crushes every- 

 thing into insignificance. It seems 

 strange that it is possible for people 

 to talk, read or think about anything 

 else, that they can eat and sleep as 

 usual. But the Greeks knew that both 

 pleasure and pain consume themselves. 

 Hobbes told us that it is the same al- 

 ways to perceive the same thing as to 

 perceive nothing at all. Modern psy- 

 cho-physical research has established a 

 law that to produce a perceptible 

 change of sensation the increase of the 

 stimulus must be made continually 

 larger as the stimulus becomes greater, 

 until we finally reach a point where no 

 increase in the stimulus will increase 

 the sensation. 



It is probably the ease that prevent- 

 able disease, preventable vice and pre- 

 ventable poverty cause each of them 

 every year as much human misery, loss 

 of life and waste of wealth as the war 

 is causing this year. The sacrifice in 

 the war of a million lives and of wealth 

 amounting to twenty billion dollars, is 

 an inconceivable catastrophe. But it 

 is also true that a million children die 

 needlessly in Russia every year, that 

 the annual loss in lives and wealth 

 through the use of alcohol in the sev- 



eral countries is about equal to that 

 due to the war. 



We do not expect to see headlines in 

 the daily papers to the effect that five 

 thousand children died yesterday in 

 Russia, three thousand of them through 

 easily preventable causes, or that there 

 was spent in the United States last 

 week four times as much on alcoholic 

 drink as on the whole educational sys- 

 tem of the country. It is consequently 

 not surprising that other and even 

 trivial events take their places on the 

 front pages of the daily press beside 

 the war news. But the fact that we be- 

 come callous with time to the most 

 dreadful conditions or that this war is 

 only one of the evils of the world does 

 not decrease its horror. On the con- 

 trary, these circumstances make it more 

 appalling, for after we become used to 

 murder, robbery, debauchery, starva- 

 tion and disease under the auspices of 

 government, they may be viewed with 

 greater complaisance when due to in- 

 dividuals, and the lives and wealth 

 squandered in the war will for a long 

 time make it difficult or impossible for 

 the nations concerned to reorganize 

 their energies for the advancement of 

 civilization. 



On us in the United States there is 

 placed serious responsibility and great 

 opportunity. Clearly we should do 

 what we can to alleviate the misery 

 caused by the war and try to bring it 

 to an end when there is the slightest 

 chance of success, and in a way that 

 will make new wars less likely. We 

 should prepare ourselves for defense, 

 not through military drill or increased 

 armaments, but by education, scien- 

 tific research and the improvement of 

 social and economic conditions; by the 

 payment of all public debts and the 

 accumulation of surplus wealth under 



