THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 73 



has been prevented. But I never could see how any one can extol 

 the sacrifice of a million lives for political progress who condemns 

 the sacrifice of a dozen lives for scientific progress. For the ad- 

 vance of science is but the advance of truth, and "The truth shall 

 make you free." 



As this book is going through the press I have received a letter 

 from one of the- scientific staff of our expedition who saw several 

 of his companions die in the North, and then went home to serve 

 four years on the western front to see men die by the thousand. 

 Meantime some of us, his former colleagues, were carrying on the 

 northern work. He is writing about a recent visit to him of one 

 of our other men who remained in the North two years longer 

 before going home to serve the last two years of the war. He says: 

 "It was indeed a pleasure to learn at first hand of the work the 

 expedition accomplished . . . and no less to hear of the men with 

 whom I had had the honor to associate. My only regret has been, 

 and always will be, that I was denied the honor of a more active 

 association in these results. My enthusiasm for the study of polar 

 problems has increased rather than diminished, and I should have 

 been delighted to join Wilkins in his Antarctic venture * . . . but 

 unfortunately the war has left me a legacy in the shape of a weak 

 leg as the result of wounds, which incapacitates me for arctic field 

 work." ** 



Thus men will always differ in their estimates, partly because of 

 their nearness to or remoteness from the objective they judge; the 

 soldier does not always agree with the editor. The battle for the 

 advancement of knowledge is being nobly fought where doctors 

 submit to malignant inoculations to test the efficacy of a serum, 

 where experimenters breathe poisonous fumes through thousands 

 of tests to perfect a process in economic chemistry, where astron- 

 omers spend sleepless nights photographing the spectra of the re- 

 mote stars. And the astronomer is not necessarily the least of 

 these because it is least obvious just how his discoveries are to be 

 applied to the problems of food and raiment. 



Nor are the principles established by the arctic explorer neces- 

 sarily worthless because no one may see their commercial applica- 

 tion, nor the lands he discovers valueless because corn will not 

 thrive there and water frontages cannot be subdivided into city 

 lots with prospect of immediate sale. Their time will come. "The 



*The Cope Antarctic Expedition of which our Wilkins became second- 

 in-command after the ena of the war. Thej^ sailed south in 1920. 



** Letter to the author from William Laird McKinlay, dated May 27, 1920. 



