REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT, 1919. 19 



healthy exchange between a progressive estabhshment and its 

 contemporaries. 



Detailed reports concerning the war activities of the Institu- 

 tion, and particularly concerning the work done by the depart- 

 ments of research, are on file in the office of administration; so 

 that if it should become necessary to publish an account of these 

 activities the essential data are at hand. The time for publi- 

 cation of such an account does not appear to have arrived, since 

 the Government is entitled to initiative and priority in all these 

 matters.* Hence only the briefest references to them are made 

 in this and other parts of the current Year Book. 



It should go without saying that the disturbed conditions, 

 social, industrial, economic, and governmental, under which the 

 world is now laboring are not without untoward effects on the 

 Institution. Being a part of and not apart from contemporary 

 life, it must share to a greater or less extent in the consequences 

 which follow from an unparalleled attempt at national suprem- 

 acy based on the desperate doctrine of ' 'dominance or downfall." 

 But obvious as these consequences are in the abstract, there 

 appear to be many outside and some within the Institution who 

 think that it may continue to expand regardless of the Umits 

 of its income and regardless of the fact that the purchasing 

 capacity of this income has diminished by one-half during the 

 past decade. In line with these vagaries there is a recrudescence 

 also of the juvenile notion so commonly held of the Institution 

 in its earHer years, that it may play the role of paternaHsm for 

 other estabhshment s and for individuals, and that it may act 

 generally as a salvager in the wreckage of the world. Similarly, 

 just as in political affairs it is often assumed that the prevailing 

 scarcity of necessities and the burdens of taxation may be re- 

 lieved by other means than by productive labor, so it is assumed 

 that the Institution may meet the increasing costs of its opera- 

 tions, not by appropriate restrictions and economies, but by 

 increasing appropriations drawn from mythical sources. Thus 

 the distribution of necessary disappointment, which has been so 

 large a part of the unproductive business of the administrative 



* A concise history of the production of optical glass is given by Dr. Fred E. Wright (major 

 Engineer Corps, U. S. A.)i of the staff of the Geophysical Laboratory, in "America's Muni- 

 tions," published by the War Department in 1919, 



