53^ Remarks on Research [April-July 



repeating his pathetic pleadings with the French government to give 

 him more suitable quarters than a damp, poorly lighted basement, 

 in which he was compelled to carry on his research; and this was, 

 then, the condition of affairs of no less a place than Paris, the 

 same Paris that was spending, just at that time, endless milHons for 

 the building of her new Opera-Palace. Such facts should not be 

 overlooked by those who might think that America has been too 

 slow in fostering chemical research. 



However imposing may appear the institutions founded by the 

 Nobels, the Solvays, the Monds, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers and 

 others, each of them is only a puny effort (compared) to what is 

 bound to come when governments will do their füll share. Fancy 

 that if, for instance, the Rockefeiler Institute is spending to good 

 advantage about half a million dollars per annum for medical re- 

 search, the chewing-gum bill of the United States alone would 

 easily support half a dozen Rockefeiler Institutes; and what a mere 

 insignificant little trickle all these research funds amount to, if we 

 have the courage to compare them to that powerful gushing stream 

 of money which yearly drains the war budgets of all nations. 



But most governments of the world have been run for so long 

 almost exclusively by lawyer-politicians, that we have come to con- 

 sider this as an unavoidable evil, until sometimes a large experiment 

 of government by engineers, like the Panama Canal, opens our 

 eyes to the fact that, after all, successful government is — first and 

 last — a matter of efficiency, according to the principles of applied 

 science. Was it not one of our very earliest American chemists, 

 Benjamin Thompson, of Massachusetts, later knighted in Europe 

 as Count Rumford, who put in shape the rather entangled adminis- 

 tration of Bavaria, by introducing scientific methods of govern- 

 ment? 



Pasteur was right when one day exasperated by the politicians 

 who were running his beloved France to ruin, he exclaimed : In our 

 Century, science is the soul of the prosperity of nations and the 

 living source of all progress. Undoubtedly, the tiring daily dis- 

 cussions of politics seem to be our guide. Empty appearances! 

 What really leads iis forward are a few scientific discoveries and 

 their applications. (Baekeland: Science, 1914, xl, pp. 179-198.) 



