294 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. L. No. 1291 



which for thousands of years has been the 

 chief concern of religion, and it is perhaps 

 the most fundamental and most important 

 of all. Its needs and its opportunities are 

 eternal, and no thinking man leaves it out 

 of account. But it is not this field to 

 which I am directing attention to-day. 



The second type of effort has to do, in 

 one form or another, with possible and 

 projected changes in the distribution of 

 wealth. In this category are found all ef- 

 forts toward social rearrangements, and 

 educational reform, brought about either 

 by legal enactment, or by the development 

 of an enlightened public opinion. No man 

 in his senses would belittle this type of 

 effort. The needs are tremendous and 

 every right thinking man bids every 

 worker of this sort godspeed. This is, 

 however, the field in which most of the 

 m.oot questions exist and in which most of 

 the big mistakes are made. Moreover, this 

 is the field which is always before the pub- 

 lic eye, and which absorbs nine tenths of 

 the nations' capacity for discussion in 

 print or on the platform. 



But it may after all be questioned 

 whether effort in this field has as good a 

 chance — I had almost said one tenth as 

 good a chance — of effectiveness in contrib- 

 uting to human well-being as has effort in 

 the third field, namely, the field which has 

 to do broadly with the creation of wealth 

 rather than with its distribution. This 

 last is the field of scientific and engineex'- 

 ing endeavor; for the scientist is, in the 

 broad sense, a creator of wealth as truly as 

 is the man whose attention is focused on 

 the application of science. Indeed, the 

 scientist is merely the scout, the explorer, 

 who is sent on ahead to discover and open 

 up new leads to nature's gold. His motive 

 may be merely to find out how nature 

 works, but once that knowledge has been 

 gained, man almost always finds a way to 



apply it to his own ends, so that in a very 

 real sense all scientific effort is directed 

 toward the improvement of human well- 

 being through the creation of more wealth. 

 Now it goes without saying that it is im- 

 possible to distribute more than is created, 

 and where the wealth is once created there 

 is no little evidence that natural processes 

 in the long run do a good deal, at least in 

 democratic countries, toward producing 

 a more or less reasonable distribution. 

 The inequalities and injustices which strike 

 the eye are of much less general signifi- 

 cance than the superficial observer realizes. 

 A progressive economist told me the other 

 day that I was probably making an over- 

 estimate when I stated that a complete 

 levelling of all incomes in the United 

 States might possibly increase the income 

 of the average worker by 10 per cent. I 

 am informed by one who is in position to 

 know the facts that such a complete level- 

 ling in the telephone industry, for ex- 

 ample, could not increase the average in- 

 come of the wage earner by more than 2 

 or 3 per cent., and I have been given, from 

 what I consider fairly reliable sources, 

 about the same figures for the steel indus- 

 try. It is probable that the total possibili- 

 ties of improvement of conditions through 

 changes in distribution are very limited, 

 while possibilities of improvement through 

 increase in production are incalculable. 

 But whether rough figures and estimates 

 like the foregoing have any value or not, 

 this much may be set down as certain. 

 The present distress in Europe is not due 

 to bad distribution but simply to lack of 

 production. Equally certain it is that no 

 one who visited- Europe frequently before 

 the war and came back to this country, as 

 I have often done, with the observation 

 that here one finds in comparison with 

 Europe large comfort, large intelligence, 

 large well-being in the case of the average 



