REPORT OF THE SECRETARY GENERAIv. 95 



satisfaction and joy; and it has seemed to me that the language of 

 science, the language of impersonal thought, the language of those who 

 think, not along the lines of individual interest but along what are 

 intended to be the direct and searching lines of truth itself, was a very 

 fortunate language in which to express this community of interest 

 and of sympathy. Science affords an international language just as 

 commerce also affords a universal language, because in each instance 

 there is a universal purpose, a universal general plan of action, and it is a 

 pleasing thought to those who have had something to do with scholarship 

 that scholars have had a great deal to do with sowing the seeds of friend- 

 ship between nation and nation. Truth recognizes no national bound- 

 aries; truth penjiits no racial prejudices; and when men come to know 

 each other and to recognize equal intellectual strength and equal intel- 

 lectual sincerity and a common intellectual purpose some of the best 

 foundations of friendship are already laid. 



But, ladies and gentlemen, our thought can not pause at the artificial 

 boundaries of the fields of science and of commerce. All boundaries 

 that divide life into sections and interests are artificial, because life is 

 all of a piece. You can not treat part of it without by implication and 

 indirection treating all of it, and the field of science is not to be distin- 

 guished from the field of life any more than the field of commerce is to 

 be distinguished from the general field of life. No one who reflects 

 upon the progress of science or the spread of the arts of peace or the 

 extension and perfection of any of the practical arts of life can fail to 

 see that there is only one atmosphere that these things can breathe, 

 and that is an atmosphere of mutual confidence and of peace and of 

 ordered political life among the nations. Amidst war and revolution 

 even the voice of science must for the most part be silent, and revolu- 

 tion tears up the very roots of everything that makes life go steadily 

 forward and the light grow from generation to generation. For noth- 

 ing stirs passion like political disturbance, and passion is the enemy of 

 truth. 



These things were realized with peculiar vividness and said with 

 unusual eloquence in a recent conference held in this city for the purpose 

 of considering the financial relations between the two continents of 

 America, because it was perceived that financiers can do nothing without 

 the cooperation of Governments, and that if merchants would deal with 

 one another, laws must agree with one another — that you can not make 

 laws vary without making them contradict, and that amidst contra- 

 dictory laws the easy flow of commercial intercourse is impossible, and 

 that therefore a financial congress naturally led to all the inferences 

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