THE MODERN DUEL 109 



and dumbly as a decree of Providence. Enormous 

 tracts of the British Empire are uninhabitable by 

 white men by reason of malaria and yellow fever. It 

 is the will of Allah. A solitary duellist l against the 

 unknown and not understood confronted Nature. 

 A single intelligence in the teeth of official apathy 

 and neglect sought the "million murdering cause," 

 and found it. In India alone more than a million 

 people died yearly from malaria before its cause and 

 remedy were ascertained. The Panama Canal owes 

 its successful construction to the work of this solitary 

 individual in Bangalore, diligently followed up by 

 others. Praise be to Allah! 



The future of the British Empire is at the moment 

 in the hands of five million stalwart men, with an 

 organised nation of workers and vast accumulations 

 of wealth and resources and every possible scientific 

 discovery and invention behind to back them up. If 

 the nation thinks, when peace returns, that the 

 struggle against Nature, which after all is of more 

 abiding and permanent interest to its destiny, large 

 as the present contest looms to-day, can be best 

 carried on in the old way by a handful of isolated 

 individuals as a sort of hobby in their spare time, out 

 of their own means, and in the intervals of more 

 urgent professional duties, the nation is mad. 



[The war being now over, it is not out of place 

 to add that an even greater danger than neglect 

 awaits the scientific investigator, the danger that 

 he along with every other creative element in the 

 community will be remorselessly shackled and ex- 

 ploited to bolster up the present discredited social 

 system. There is abundant evidence since the war 

 that science rules the world, and he who would aspire 

 to rule it must first rule science. The prospect of 

 creative science under the heel of government depart- 



1 Sir Ronald Ross. 



