4 REPORT — 1903. 



politicians will have in the future to pay more regard to education and 

 science as empiro-builders and empire-guarders than they have paid in 

 the past. 



The nineteenth century will ever be known as the one in which the 

 influences of science were first fully realised in civilised communities ; 

 the scientific progress was so gigantic that it seems rash to predict that 

 any of its successors can be more important in the life of any nation. 



Disraeli, in 1873, referring to the progress up to that year, spoke as 

 follows : ' How much has happened in these fifty years — a period more 

 remarkable than any, I will venture to say, in the annals of mankind. 

 I am not thinking of the rise and fall of Empires, the change of dynasties, 

 the establishment of Governments. I am thinking of those revolutions 

 of science which have had much more effect than any political causes, 

 which have changed the position and prospects of mankind more than all 

 the conquests and all the codes and all the legislators that ever lived.' ^ 



The progress of science, indeed, brings in many considerations M'hich 

 are momentous in relation to the life of any limited community — any one 

 nation. One of these considerations to which attention is now being 

 greatly drawn is that a relative decline in national wealth derived from 

 industries must follow a relative neglect of scientific education. 



It was the late Prince Consort who first emphasised this when he 

 came here fresh from the University of Bonn. Hence the ' Prince 

 Consort's Committee,' which led to the foundation of the College of 

 Chemistry, and afterwards of the Science and Art Department. From 

 that time to this the warnings of our men of science have become louder 

 and more ui'gent in each succeeding year. But this is not all ; the com- 

 mercial output of one country in one century as compared with another is 

 not alone in question ; the acquirement of the scientific spirit and 

 a knowledge and utilisation of the forces of Nature are very much furtlier 

 reaching in their effects on the progress and decline of nations than is 

 generally imagined. 



Britain in the middle of the last century was certainly the country 

 which gained most by the advent of science, for she was then in full 

 possession of those material gifts of Nature, coal and iron, the combined 

 winning and utilisation of which, in the production of machinery and in 

 other ways, soon made her the richest country in the world, the seat and 

 throne of invention and manufacture, as Mr. Carnegie has called her. 

 Bein"- the great producers and exporters of all kinds of manufactured 

 goods, we became eventually, with our iron ships, the great carriers, and 

 hence the supremacy of our mercantile marine and our present command 



of the sea. 



The most fundamental change wrought by the early applications of 

 science was in relation to producing and carrying power. With the 

 vanning of mineral wealth and the production of machinery in other 



' I\'ature, November 27, 1873, vol. ix. p. 71. 



