THE RELATION OF SCIENCE TO INDUSTRY 459 



children as sacrifices to his God, or in Attica in making war 

 on his fellow Greeks because the Delphic Oracle, or the 

 flight of birds, or the appearance of an animal's entrails 

 bids him do so, or in medieval Europe in preparing for the 

 millennium to the neglect of all his normal duties as he did to 

 the extent of bringing on a world disaster in the year looo, 

 or in burning heretics in Flanders or drowning witches in 

 Salem, or in making perpetual motion machines in Phila- 

 delphia, or magnetic belts in Los Angeles, or soothing syrups in 

 New England. 



The invention of the airplane and the radio are looked 

 upon by everyone as wonderful and pre-eminently useful 

 achievements, and so they are, perhaps one-tenth as useful 

 as some of the discoveries in pure science that I shall pres- 

 ently discuss and hence worthy of a moment or two of 

 consideration. 



As I listened in Pasadena to the Presidential candidates 

 presenting in their own easily recognizable voices from the 

 platform in Madison Square Garden to the people of the 

 United States the issues of the election, or at least its shib- 

 boleths, I found myself aglow with enthusiasm for the future 

 of representative government. The few thousand citizens of 

 Athens gathered about the Acropolis to hear the problems 

 of the city discussed and then to cast their ballots. The 

 120 million citizens of the United States in this recent 

 election had precisely the same opportunity and in my judg- 

 ment they used it judiciously. These public discussions 

 addressed to the ears of the nation represent, I think, a 

 stupendous advance. No such step forward in public edu- 

 cation has been taken since the invention of printing. 



But this new achievement of the race, this new capacity 

 for education was after all only an inevitable incident in the 

 forward sweep of pure science, which means simply knowl- 

 edge, knowledge of the nature and capacities of the physical 

 world, the ethereal world (to which the radio belongs j, the 

 biological world and the intellectual world; for this knowl- 

 edge, as man acquires it, necessarily carries applied science 

 in its wake. 



Look for a moment at the historic background out of 

 which these modern marvels, as you call them, the airplane 



