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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XL VI. No. 1188 



ciety who have worked their way to posi- 

 tions and incomes on a par with those of 

 successful lawyers and physicians — ^but 

 manufacturers should heed well that almost 

 invariably these are men who withdrew 

 from their original direct employment by 

 corporations and have developed their own 

 independent establishments, either as con- 

 sulting chemists or as independent, com- 

 peting manufacturers! How much wiser 

 it would have been for the manufacturers 

 — I am not saying, for the chemists — if 

 these brilliant, forceful men had been kept 

 in their establishments, as they would have 

 been abroad, by fair treatment as partners 

 in success as well as in effort. 



I have dwelt long on this plea because 

 I consider this message to our manufactur- 

 ers from an outside observer, a university 

 man without any industrial affiliations, to 

 be perhaps the most important service I 

 can try to render our country in this privi- 

 leged address. Let me summarize my point 

 with the aid of an analogy which I owe to 

 my friend Dr. Eisenschiml's remarks after 

 a presentation of this subject to our local 

 section in Chicago : Just as Napoleon let 

 every soldier feel that he carried a mar- 

 shal's baton in his knapsack and thus se- 

 cured the enthusiastic and self-sacrificing 

 support of his hundreds of thousands, so 

 our manufacturers should let their chem- 

 ists feel that each one carries in his brains a 

 contract of partnership — and all that is in- 

 volved therein! If this is done, we will 

 witness through the tremendous power 

 of the combination of psychological mo- 

 mentum and trained, scientific minds, the 

 dawn of an era of power and prosperity in 

 our industries, in which no one need fear 

 the after-the-war competition for which all 

 Europe is now preparing. Enlightened 

 self-interest is slowly revolutionizing and 

 improving our whole social fabric by a 

 fairer, more honest conception of the rela- 



tion of capital to workers — with harm to 

 no one, least of all, and to their own sur- 

 prise, to those who have blindly been op- 

 posing the movement. And my plea for 

 fairer treatment of productive chemists is 

 the point at which the great world move- 

 ment touches our scientific body. 



Another vitally important factor in the 

 outlook for chemistry in the United States 

 is the adoption by our legislative bodies 

 of a definite national policy looking toward 

 the establishment of that independence of 

 our country in the matter of chemical sup- 

 plies to which reference was made before. 

 Action in this direction has been happily 

 inaugurated in the fundamental matter of 

 the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen for the 

 manufacture of explosives in war times, of 

 fertilizers in peace and war. The fixation 

 of nitrogen plants in Germany have un- 

 questionably saved her thus far both from 

 a military collapse and from starvation. 

 As has been indicated before, it is impor- 

 tant too that we become independent in as 

 large a measure as possible also in regard 

 to all manufactured chemicals and particu- 

 larly also the finer organic chemicals, in- 

 eluding the dyes and the synthetic drugs. 

 The most important measure necessary to 

 this end is protection by duties such as a 

 non-partisan commission of experts may 

 find necessary. American textile manu- 

 facturers, who have opposed this action in 

 the past as far as dyes are concerned, have, 

 I trust, learned their lesson, and will not, 

 I hope, need a second more sharply pointed 

 one. And other manufacturers, having 

 found their supplies of needed chemicals 

 cut off or enormously increased in cost, will 

 also, I imagine, favor the establishment of 

 conditions making home production pos- 

 sible. It is a source of gratification to 

 me to state that the United States Tariff 

 Commission, which is making a scientific 

 study of the vexed tariff problem, most 



