THE WORLD'S DEBT TO FRANCE 



501 



French, few great tragedies, and those 

 imperfect and in a faulty kind, little prose 

 like Milton's or like Jeremy Taylor's, 

 little verse (though more than is gener- 

 ally thought) like Shelley's or like Spen- 

 ser's. But there are the most delightful 

 short tales, both in prose and in Averse, 

 that the world has ever seen, the most 

 polished jewelry of reflection that has 

 ever been wrought, songs of incompara- 

 ble grace, comedies that must make men 

 laugh as long as they are laughing ani- 

 mals, and above all such a body of narra- 

 tive fiction, old and new, prose and verse, 

 as no other nation can show for art and 

 for originality, for grace of workman- 

 ship in him who fashions, and for cer- 

 tainty of delight to him who reads." 



OUR DEBT TO PASTEUR 



Xor has France given more direction 

 to the literary aspirations of mankind 

 than she has to the scientific endeavors 

 of humanity. Go back to the beginnings 

 of science and you will see her astron- 

 omers pointing the way that astronomy 

 has pursued. It was her Pasteur who 

 established the germ theory of disease 

 and through whom the wonderful mira- 

 cles of saving human life that have char- 

 acterized the past third of a century have 

 been wrought. The normal death rate of 

 civilized countries before the days of 

 Pasteur was about 30 per thousand of 

 population. Today it is about 15 per 

 thousand in the more progressive nations. 



Think what the saving of 15 lives a 

 year for every thousand of population 

 means when applied to half the earth ! 

 It means the averting of 12,000,000 un- 

 timely deaths annually. It means more 

 than 25,000,000 cases of illness avoided. 

 It means health and happiness in 20,000,- 

 000 homes rather than disease and dis- 

 tress. Who can estimate the benefits to 

 humanity of the wonderful discovery of 

 Pasteur ? When one tries to comprehend 

 the far-reaching results already attained 

 and to estimate those that may yet flow 

 out of that basic discovery, one's mind 

 is simply unable to grasp it all. 



Certain it is that the life-saving pro- 

 cesses reared on the great foundation 

 built by Pasteur are saving more people 



from beds of sickness and untimely 

 graves than the great war in Europe, 

 with all its terrors, is able to send there. 



THE SCIENCE OF RADIO-ACTIVITY 



And then we must not forget that 

 radium comes to the world through the 

 French laboratory, and with it the bud- 

 ding science of radio-activity. Who can 

 say what the world's debt to France 

 therefor is going to be? Those who 

 know most about it tell us that we stand 

 with reference to extracting power from 

 the rocks exactly where our forefathers 

 long ages ago stood when they saw the 

 lightning flash set fire to the dead pine 

 tree, but stood ignorant and helpless to 

 reproduce the fire. We know that there 

 are thousands of times as much power 

 wrapped up in radio-active material as 

 there is in coal, thanks to the work of the 

 French laboratories ; and when we learn 

 how to harness that power as we have 

 harnessed the power of wood and coal, 

 by promoting the processes of decay, as 

 it seems that we are destined to do, who 

 can adequately portray the possibilities 

 that would follow? 



And while we think of this wonderful 

 new science, whose book France has 

 opened to the world, we must not forget 

 its elder sister, the science of electricity, 

 which, while harnessed to man's purposes 

 mainly by American inventors, had the 

 foundations upon which they built laid 

 largely in France. 



And so it has been in all things. 

 France has dared to break new ground, 

 to invade new fields of research, to risk 

 a thousand defeats in the hope of ulti- 

 mate victory. She has been enough of a 

 conservative to hold fast to all that was 

 good from the past and yet progressive 

 enough to let go of all that is not worth 

 while and to reach out for whatever 

 promises to add even a jot or a tittle to 

 human progress. She has not permitted 

 herself to be handicapped by a too-deep 

 reverence for the past nor yet by a re- 

 straining fear of the future. She lets 

 nothing stand before her duty to her 

 ideals ; and her ideals are bound up in 

 the good of all time — past, present, and 

 future. 



