7o8 



NATURE 



[August 4, 192 1 



much tedious lecturing," as Mr. Wells has it. 

 It created, among Cambridge mathematicians, a 

 school of thought that was probably advantageous 

 to their subject as well as to themselves. 



But Mr. Wells's scheme of world-wide educa- 

 tion, like the national system of education fore- 

 shadowed for England in Mr. Fisher's great Act 

 of 1918, depends for its realisation upon the 

 money being available. Mr. Wells has no doubt 

 where the money is to come from ; and, in truth, 

 there can be little doubt about the matter. Ac- 

 cording to a recent American book, the United 

 States spent last year no less than 93 per cent, 

 of the national revenues upon wars old and new : 

 that is, on war loan charges, on war pensions, 

 and on maintaining military and naval forces. 

 Great Britain, not being made up of forty-eight 

 States with separate incomes, naturally spent a 

 smaller proportion of her national income on war 

 charges ; but last year, and again in the Esti- 

 mates for this year, the proportion of the national 

 revenues that this country is spending on wars 

 old and new is no less than 64 per cent. — more 

 than twelve shillings in every pound of taxes. 

 When we remember that a simple agreement 

 between a few great naval Powers is all that is 

 needed to abolish battleships, and that a battle- 

 ship costs, in capital, some 8,ooo,ooo^ sterling, 

 or, in income (for interest, depreciation, and re- 

 pairs, but not including personnel), i,ooo,oooZ. a 

 year — more than ten times the British contribu- 

 tion to the League of Nations — we wonder that 

 this money is not diverted to remunerative ex- 

 penditure. The whole contribution of the British 

 Government to university education is only 

 2,ooo,oooL (of which half a million pounds is a 

 special grant for superannuation purposes) this 

 year, and used to be much less. It is thus equal 

 to the cost of maintaining the structure and equip- 

 ment of two battleships. Mr. Wells says that we 

 need to press "for a ruthless subordination of 

 naval, military, and Court expenditure to educa- 

 tional needs." At all events, we need to come to 

 an agreement with the other nations of the world, 

 most of whose incomes are at present in- 

 sufficient to meet their expenditure, for a general 

 limitation of armaments, that would enormously 

 reduce the burdens of taxation and set free far 

 more than sufficient money to expand and improve 

 our educational organisations as rapidly as is 

 humanly possible. 



Mr. Wells's book is marred by minor defects, 

 which are only minor because of the greatness of 

 the whole. Thus he would apparently have his 

 readers believe that the world commonwealth, 

 which he regards as the ultimate goal, should be 

 NO. 2701, VOL. 107] 



attained by the immediate absorption of the exist- 

 ing seventy or eighty independent sovereign 

 States of the world into a single super-State. 

 Such a first step would certainly be a false step,, 

 even if it were in any way practicable. How 

 would it, for example, be possible to persuade 

 Japan to place the control of her destinies in the 

 hands of a Parliament, Congress, or Assembly 

 most of the members of which would be of Euro- 

 pean race? The first step towards increasing the 

 political unity of the nations is surely their co- 

 operation in multifarious works for the benefit of 

 mankind, and especially in the abolition of world- 

 war. This is what is being done by the " quite 

 inadequate League of Nations at Geneva," which 

 consists, after all, of forty-eight sovereign States 

 representing three-quarters of the population of 

 the earth. 



Moreover, Mr. Wells is surely mistalcen in sup- 

 posing that we must get rid of patriotism if we 

 are to have an adequate sense of world citizen- 

 ship. Loyalty to a smaller group is not neces- 

 sarily inconsistent with higher loyalty to a larger 

 group that includes the smaller. An undergraduate 

 who is asked to play for his university and for 

 his college on the same day will play for his uni- 

 versity, and not for his college; but he is not on 

 that account less loyal to his college. The York- 

 shireman or the Cornishman who loves his county 

 is not on that account an inferior Englishman ; 

 nor is one who loves England likely to be a less 

 loyal member of the British Commonwealth of 

 nations than one who has no feeling for his own 

 people ; nor, again, has it ever been suggested 

 that loyal members of the British Commonwealth 

 are on that account feebler supporters of the 

 League of Nations. J. C. M. G. 



Practical Chemistry. 



(i) Introduction to Qualitative Chemical Analysis, 

 By Th. W. Fresenius. Seventeenth edition. 

 Translated by C. Ainsworth Mitchell. 

 Pp. XX 4- 954. (London: J. and A. Churchill,. 

 192 1.) 365. net. 



(2) A Text-hook of Practical Chemistry. By 

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 Pp. xii + 527. (London: J. and A. Churchill, 

 1921.) 215. net. 



(3) Public Health Chemical Analysis. By R. C. 

 Frederick and Dr. A. Forster. Pp. viii + 305. 

 (London : Constable and Co., Ltd., 1920.) 

 2 IS. net. 



(i) 'nr^HE treatises on chemical analvsis — 



T 



qualitative and quantitative — planned 

 so far back as 1840 by C. Remigius Fresenius^ 



