SCIENCE AND THE STATE 207 



is an obvious duty, and indeed should be a point of honour, for 

 the State to pay compensation. Apart from this ethical con- 

 sideration, the State should see that its interest lies in doing so, 

 if only to encourage such individual work in the future. Of 

 course it may be doubted whether men who have been directly 

 paid for their researches possess any claim for such remunera- 

 tion ; but even in such cases, where a Government obtains 

 immense pecuniary advantage from any researches made by 

 private individuals, it seems to us that a certain moral claim 

 lies for some pecuniary recognition in return. But the case is 

 very much more clear where researches have been totally 

 unremunerative to the worker, or, indeed, have occasioned him 

 direct pecuniary loss. Indeed, Parliament fully recognised this 

 obligation when it gave Edward Jenner the sum of £30,000 in 

 1802 and 1805 as a result of his petition. That precedent still 

 holds to-day, and the moral obligation will never be abrogated. 

 These cases are therefore provided for directly in items 5 and 6 

 of the programme. 



Many of those who have written on this subject complain 

 that the defects in our present organisation for science are due 

 to the general attitude of the public, which appears to take little 

 interest in science and scientific work. Others maintain that 

 this attitude is due largely to our faulty methods of education, 

 which instil into children, not the laborious pursuits of science, 

 but rather grammatical, dialectical, historical, political, and 

 literary ambitions. There is much truth in this, but a con- 

 sideration of the details would be out of place here. Suffice it 

 to say that the eyes of British education seem to be too 

 constantly fixed upon the past rather than upon the future, 

 and that this tends to give the whole intellectual attitude of 

 the nation a backward aspect. A knowledge of the facts of 

 nature, ascertained by centuries of effort, forms the best ground- 

 work for advance. At present there is some truth in the epigram 

 that the one ideal of the British schoolmaster seems to be to 

 develop in his scholars only the arts of literary criticism and 

 party politics. There are loftier fields of work, but we can reach 

 them only through the hard-won and difficult passes of true 

 science. 



To the solid ground 

 Of nature trusts the mind which builds for aye. 



That there is something wrong with the whole state of 



