Mat 12, 1916] 



SCIENCE 



663 



best expression in publicity whose principal 

 object is to impress the Appropriation Com- 

 mittee. Such advertising may have its 

 foundation in truth and yet may possess 

 a superstructure so large and top-heavy as 

 to violate all engineering formulas. 



Unrestrained competition in the public 

 service, then, presents some dangers no less 

 real than those incident to unregulated 

 competition in private business. The ques- 

 tion must come home to every bureau chief 

 and to his intimate advisers: To what ex- 

 tent is a competitive struggle for new terri- 

 tory warranted, even when only fair meth- 

 ods are used in this endeavor for bureau- 

 cratic expansion? I am aware that we 

 may invoke "the public demand" and put 

 forward other equally plausible reasons, 

 but even if we sometimes fool Congress and 

 on rare occasions fool each other, we never 

 fool ourselves. Of course the individual 

 investigator, self-centered with enthusiasm 

 in his discovery of a new line of research, 

 may be wholly ignorant of the fact that 

 among the two thousand or so fellow 

 scientists here in Washington, some one in 

 another department has already preempted 

 that subject and possibly carried the work 

 well on to completion ; but however uncon- 

 scious the scientific worker in one bureau 

 may be of the obvious relation of that prob- 

 lem to the work of some other bureau, only 

 rarely indeed can his own bureau chief 

 plead any such ignorance or innocence. 

 May I express my individual conviction 

 that the bureau chief who makes strategic 

 moves in this contest for enlargement of 

 field of work is just as conscious whether 

 he is playing the game fairly as the "cap- 

 tain of industry" that we have thought 

 ought to be investigated by the Depart- 

 ment of Justice. 



Even at its best, however, this competi- 

 tive system is wasteful. The public has 

 too often found that competition as the 



safety-valve of business costs too much in 

 steam. If in the branch of public business 

 in which we are engaged the ideal is to 

 render the best service at the lowest cost, 

 must there not be regulation, and regulation 

 which recognizes that there are what we 

 may term natural monopolies in the gov- 

 ernment scientific service? The monop- 

 olistic idea must here yield the same real 

 savings to society that have come with the 

 recent growth of public-utility monopolies. 

 The product of our scientific bureaus is not 

 a staple commodity, but a special service to 

 the public, and under governmental aus- 

 pices this service is offered without price, 

 yet that does not mean that we are any less 

 vitally interested in costs. If monopoly 

 will enable these scientific bureaus to ren- 

 der the best service at the lowest cost, the 

 competitive system in scientific work should 

 go to the scrap heap as out of date. 



The adoption of the monopoly system, 

 however, involves here, as in the field of 

 public utilities, the correlative idea of ade- 

 quate regulation in the public interest. 

 And here is where we may be in danger of 

 losing our way, for the question of course 

 obtrudes itself: "Who is the guide; who is 

 to define the field of work to be monop- 

 olized by this or that bureau? My own be- 

 lief is that Congress can not be expected to 

 enforce even its own wishes in the matter. 

 Some years ago the chairman of a Con- 

 gressional committee that had made a most 

 thorough investigation of one of the depart- 

 ments, himself a trial lawyer of large ex- 

 perience, admitted to me that the investi- 

 gation had been largely in vain ; in his own 

 words, "I know the department is full of 

 duplication, but it would take a trained 

 scientist to put his finger on it all." Nor 

 can the cabinet officer be expected in a few 

 years to discover all the overlaps in his own 

 department, much less to learn the logical 

 and proper coordination of the scientific 



