306 THE OCEAN RIVER 



of the two components of Empedocles' world, friendship, 

 union, attraction; and strife, dispersion and repulsion." 



Just how can modern man face reduced available resources, 

 the disappearance of available free frontiers and overpopu- 

 lation? Today, assuredly, we have all the knowledge and 

 ''know-how" necessary to defeat the disease, poverty, and 

 hatreds due to an unequable use and distribution of the 

 world's available wealth. But so far we have not found satis- 

 factory uses for this knowledge. It lies neither in the some- 

 times advocated extreme of laissez-faire industrial exploitation 

 nor the rigid police state of dictatorship. The scientists tell 

 us of the unexplored resources of the Ocean River itself. 

 Nature and man have through the ages reduced much of the 

 concentrated mineral wealth of the land to the dilute rever- 

 voir of the sea by erosion, floods, and even the wasteful proc- 

 esses of our modern industrial world. If science can develop 

 the techniques of handling the dilute but prevalent solutions 

 of food and minerals everywhere present in the salt sea, a 

 new frontier of common wealth is available to mankind, a 

 technological frontier. But obviously this cannot occur unless 

 the other problems, both social and political, are likewise 

 met in a scientific and co-operative spirit. This demands of 

 the Atlantic peoples a willingness, first to look with open 

 eyes on the new problems they face, and then to "submerge 

 their differences and face as free peoples the task of common 

 survival; to organize without economic slavery to protect indi- 

 vidual freedom under democracy without the killing touch 

 of mediocrity. 



This can be done by free communication among the peoples 

 of the Atlantic communities. A sharing of ideas and scientific 

 techniques has in the past given us weapons for survival. 

 Physics provided the thermometer, engineering the vessels, 

 and mathematics the understanding of the Coriolis force, all 

 of which have helped build oceanography as a scientific team- 



