26 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
rise into service by virtue of their application. So it is quite plain 
that service and business are as intimately correlated in human affairs 
as mind and body are in the individual man. This may seem an 
absurdly trite and obvious point to argue in a preface; little more than 
a formal way of saying that it takes all sorts to make a world. But 
the point is worth some elaboration, since devotion to any kind of ser- 
vice, and especially to the intellectual life, is thought a poor “business 
proposition” in a generation so materialized as to think one sort alone 
—and that a purely commercial sort—will make any world worth hav- 
ing. Our people are apt to forget what they owe to “The River of 
Canada,’ what this River owes to the sword and the cross, and what 
it may still owe to the pen and the brush. And they are equally apt 
to be heedless of the fact, and resent it when brought to their notice, 
that the service of genius is the only thing that ever has or ever can 
make any people great. Everything that makes our life worth living 
comes from the original and creative minds of men of genius. These 
men are so few that all of them, in all ages put together, would not 
nearly equal the population of one small town. Yet without them 
man could not be man. They are the units of life, other men are the 
ciphers. All the ciphers in the world are no better than a single 
cipher. And all the countless ordinary men would never have made 
any advance without the leadership of the few extra-ordinary men. 
But these few would never have moved mankind unless some bond of 
sympathy had turned units and ciphers together into a concrete num- 
ber. Take a simple illustration. Shakespeare, in and by himself, is 
merely 1. As none of his readers could have written his plays, all of 
his readers are simply so many ciphers, in that particular respect. 
But put unit and ciphers together, and all the otherwise futile ciphers 
become parts of an effective whole, which is 10, or 100, or 1,000, or 
1,000,000, or more, according to the number of ciphers under the in- 
fluence of the unit. Thus each is needful to the other, because a unit 
alone would be purely selfish, and therefore could do no service, while 
the ciphers alone could never do anything at all, even for themselves. 
Our greatest New-World disability is our blindness to this very 
aspect of interdependent need. Most of our people think a whole 
nation can live on business alone and that it can buy service like any 
other ‘‘goods.’’ But every people forms a body corporate of all the 
human faculties; and the health of this body depends on the due 
exercise of all its vital organs. There is evolution by atrophy down- 
wards as well as upwards. And disuse of our higher organs will as- 
suredly bring the nemesis of reversion to a lower type. Business is the 
food and stomach, service the head and heart. We cannot exist 
without the one, nor live without the other. And this dual unity 
