BRAIN-POWER AND HISTORY. 85 



ing staff of that class of university should be granted without demur. 



It is the case of battleships over again, and money need not be 

 sjjent more freely in one case than in the other. 



Let me at once say that this sum is not to be regarded as practically 

 gone when spent, as in the case of a short-lived ironclad. It is a loan 

 which will bear a high rate of interest. This is not my opinion merely; 

 it is the opinion of those concerned in great industrial enterprises and 

 fully alive to the origin and effects of the present condition of things. 



I have been careful to point out that the statement that our indus- 

 tries are suffering from our relative neglect of science does not rest 

 on my authority. But if this be true, then if our annual production is 

 less by only two millions than it might have been, having two millions 

 less to divide would be equivalent to our having forty or fifty millions 

 less capital than we should have had if we had been more scientific. 



Sir John Brunner, in a speech connected with the Liverpool School 

 of Tropical Medicine, stated recently that if we as a nation were now 

 to borrow ten millions of money in order to help science by putting 

 up buildings and endowing professors, we should get the money back 

 in the course of a generation a hundredfold. He added that there was 

 no better investment for a business man than the encouragement of 

 science, and that every penny he possessed had come from the appli- 

 cation of science to commerce. 



According to Sir Eol^ert Giffen, the United Kingdom as a going 

 concern was in 1901 worth 16,000,000,000L 



Were we to put aside 24,000,000Z. for gradually organizing, building 

 and endowing new universities, and making the existing ones more 

 efficient, we should still be worth 15,976,000,000/., a property well worth 

 defending by all the means, and chief among these brain-power, we can 

 command. If it be held that this, or anything like it, is too great a 

 price to pay for correcting past carelessness or stupidity, the reply is 

 that the 120,000,000L recently spent on the navy, a sum five times 

 greater, has been spent to correct a sleepy blunder, not one whit more 

 inimical to the future welfare of our country than that which has 

 brought about our present educational position. We had not sufficiently 

 recognized what other nations had done in the way of ship building, just 

 as until now we have not recognized what they have been doing in uni- 

 versity building. 



Further, I am told that the sum of 24,000,000/. is less than half 

 the amount by which Germany is yearly enriched by having improved 

 upon our chemical industries, owing to our lack of scientific training. 

 Many other industries have been attacketd in the same way since, but 

 taking this one instance alone, if we had spent this money fifty years 

 ago, when the Prince Consort first called attention to our backwardness. 



