DEMOCRACY AND GENIUS 59 



As regards the most important and fundamental 

 things of life such as, to mention only as illustra- 

 tions, the number of people that can be supported in 

 a given country in a given standard of comfort and 

 affluence, the amount of food the country can grow 

 or buy, whether it can outpour from its super- 

 abundance into the less fertile and more necessitous 

 countries of the earth, or whether it remains a 

 malaria-haunted or fever-stricken jungle, ruled by 

 the mosquito the 999,999 out of the million have 

 no direct say whatever. It little matters whether 

 they are an absolute monarchy like Russia, a 

 republic like France or the United States, or, to 

 come to this country, whether they are ruled by an 

 aristocracy of blood, an aristocracy of wealth, or the 

 loudest of cheap presses. These questions are settled 

 otherwise in the laboratory by men, sometimes, as 

 in the case of malaria and yellow fever, with the 

 special problem to be solved before them, more often 

 impelled by a divine curiosity and the desire to know 

 and understand Nature for her own sake and the 

 sake of truth, and without any care whether or not 

 all the -labour and thought they expend in the search 

 will or will not be repaid in increased good to the 

 community. 



Now, willing enough as I am to subscribe to the 

 doctrine that every one born into the world may 

 be a potential Faraday, a potential Newton, or a 

 potential Pasteur, I am absolutely certain that the 

 999,999 out of the million are in fact nothing of the 

 kind and never could be, even if they had the 

 laboratory resources of the whole world put at their 

 disposal, and Faraday, Newton and Pasteur reincar- 

 nated to serve as their professors. 



What applies in science applies everywhere. The 

 creative element is not the only element, but it is 

 the pace-maker of progress and civilisation. For 



