September 26, 1919] 



SCIENCE 



295 



man, will claim that the prosperity and 

 comfort of the average American citizen 

 as compared with his European brother is 

 due to a better mode of wealth distribu- 

 tion which is in use in this country. Our 

 critics claim that we have the worst system 

 of distribution in the world, since it is here 

 that the great fortunes are piled up. 

 There can he no question that the ietter 

 wage and the greater prosperity of the 

 American workman is due primarily if not 

 wholly to the fact that the American work- 

 man in every line of industry actually 

 produces from two to five times as much 

 per man-hour as does his European 

 irother. The reasons for this fact need 

 not concern us here. They lie partly no 

 doubt in our national resources, partly in 

 a spirit of accomplishment which has been 

 created here, and partly, though not 

 wholly, in our use of labor-saving ma- 

 chinery. But it is the fact and the obvious 

 consequence of it in the increased oppor- 

 tunity and well-being of the average man 

 to which I would here call attention. How 

 unimaginable then the stupidity and how 

 pathetic the blundering of that large class 

 of labor leaders who are endeavoring to 

 improve the conditions of labor by limiting 

 production. Such efforts can only bring 

 disaster. If successful they merely result 

 in robbing one class at the expense of 

 another, and the robbed class is, in gen- 

 eral, the one which is already least favor- 

 ably situated. 



However important, then, the problems 

 of distribution may be there can be no un- 

 certainty about the even greater impor- 

 tance of the problems of production. One 

 little new advance like the discovery of 

 ductile tungsten, which makes electric light 

 one third as expensive as it was before, is 

 a larger contribution to human well-being 

 than all kinds of changes in the social 

 order. The man who finds a way to so 



harvest his hay as to make a given plot of 

 ground feed twice as many cattle as it did 

 before has contributed immeasurably to 

 human welfare. So has the biologist who 

 shows mankind how to defeat the law of 

 Malthus and to propagate rationally in- 

 stead of in accordance with the law of the 

 jungle. Or again the pure scientists who 

 for ten years worked out the properties of 

 discharges of negative electricity through 

 highly exhausted bulbs and so made pos- 

 sible the use of pure electron discharges in 

 multiplying enormously the possibilities 

 of telephonic and telegraphic communica- 

 tion — the cornerstone of international good 

 will— have made their lives count for hu- 

 manity as very few political or social re- 

 formers have ever been able to do. These 

 are the sort of opportunities which lie be- 

 fore the young man who is now choosing 

 his life work in science, and incomparable 

 opportunities they are. 



Imagine a country which is made up of 

 hills and valleys and in which the valleys 

 often become flooded so as to drown out 

 the valley-dwellers. A part of the people 

 of this country set to work to level down 

 the hills and fill in the valleys so that all 

 the inhabitants may live in safety. These 

 are the political and social reformers. 

 And another part, without attempting to 

 interfere with the topography, set them- 

 selves the task of raising the whole level 

 of the land or lowering the level of the 

 water so that the danger of floods is alto- 

 gether gone. These are the creators of 

 new wealth, the scientists and engineers. 

 Both groups are needful to progress, but 

 I suspect that the second group is less 

 likely to make costly mistakes and more 

 likely to accomplish useful results than is 

 the first group. Neither group, however, 

 should slacken its effort. 



Fifth, there is a new opportunity in sci- 

 ence for the man who wishes to invest his 



