ADDRESS. 5 



Countries, and cheap and rapid transit between nations, our superiority 

 as depending upon our first use of vast material resources was reduced. 

 Science, which is above all things cosmopolitan — planetary, not national 

 — internationalises such resources at once. In every market of the 



world 



'things of beauty, things of use, 

 Which one fair planet can jsroduce, 

 Brought from under every star,' 



were soon to be found. 



Hence the first great effect of the general progress of science was 

 relatively to diminish the initial supremacy of Britain due to the first use 

 of material resources, which indeed was the real source of our national 

 wealth and place among the nations. 



The unfortunate thing was that, while the foundations of our 

 superiority depending upon our material resources were being thus 

 sapped by a cause tvhich was beyond our control, our statesmen and our 

 Universities were blind leaders of the blind, and our other asset, our 

 mental resources, which was within our control, was culpably neglected. 



So little did the bulk of our statesmen know of the part science was 

 playing in the modern world and of the real basis of the nation's activities 

 that they imagined political and fiscal problems to be the only matters 

 of importance. Nor, indeed, are we very much better off to-day. In 

 the important discussions recently raised by Mr. Chamberlain next to 

 nothing has been said of the efiect of the progress of science on prices. 

 The whole course of the modern world is attributed to the presence or 

 absence of taxes on certain commodities in certain countries. The fact 

 that the great fall in the price of food-stuffs in England did not come 

 till some thirty or forty years after the removal of the corn duty between 

 1847 and 1849 gives them no pause ; for them new inventions, railways, 

 and steamships are negligible quantities ; the vast increase in tlie world's 

 wealth, in Free Trade and Protected countries alike, comes merely, 

 according to them, in response to some political shibboleth. 



We now know, from what has occurred in other States, that if our 

 Ministers had been more wise and our Universities more numerous and 

 efficient our mental resources would have been developed by improvements 

 in educational method, by the introduction of science into schools, and, 

 more important than all the rest, by the teaching of science by experiment, 

 observation, and research, and not from books. It is because this was not 

 done that we have fallen behind other nations in properly applying 

 science to industry, so that our applications of science to industry are 

 relatively less important than they were. But this is by no means all ; we 

 have lacked the strengthening of the national life produced by fostering 

 the scientific spirit among all classes and along all lines of the nation's 

 activity ; many of the responsible authorities know little and care less 

 about science ; we have not learned that it is the duty of a State to 

 organise its forces as carefully for peace as for war ; that Universities and 



