44 CHEMISTRY AND NATIONAL PROSPERITY 



century he left it, moralising and philosophising 

 eternally about himself, and leaving: a vast legacy of 

 these elegant accumulations for the "education" of 

 his children. Ignorant of the most elementary facts 

 outside himself, and of the simplest principles which 

 control absolutely his life from the cradle to the 

 grave, he was worse than that. He attempted, with 

 considerable initial success, by means of a cunningly 

 devised "educational" system to entail the con- 

 clusions of these preposterous self-examinations in 

 perpetuity upon his children. We have first to 

 break this entail, or so much of it, if any, as still 

 survives after the conclusion of this disastrous war. 

 I read in the columns of Nature the other day that 

 the only officers in the British Army who receive a 

 scientific training are those belonging to the Royal 

 Artillery and the Royal Engineers who are attached 

 to the regular army ; that for cavalry and infantry 

 officers practically no facilities exist ; that the teach- 

 ing of science at Sandhurst was abandoned many 

 years ago, and has not yet been resumed ; that at 

 the present time boys who receive commissions 

 immediately on leaving school are devoting their 

 time to the dead languages, and enter the army 

 without a scrap of scientific knowledge. 



However, what I want here mainly to emphasise 

 is that after the war, whatever be its outcome, 

 science and its application can retrieve every dis- 

 aster and make good even the present seemingly 

 irreparable destruction. Science is neither the up- 

 builder nor the destroyer. It is the docile slave of 

 its human masters. It will appear as the one or 

 the other, according as the moral outlook of the 

 latter is derived from a progressive and deepening 

 sense of responsibility, awakened by the realisa- 

 tion of the true position which man occupies with 

 regard to the external realities of nature, or an 



