horsepower driving generators in thousands of stations from which electric energy is distributed to our homes and factories and transportation lines to perform innumerable services. Imagine, if you can, the stunning impact of the impressions that would crowd the day of his return. With what amazement would he converse over a wire from Philadelphia to San Francisco or hear a voice transmitted through the ether from a point halfway around the world. So commonplace a thing as a street car would leave him openmouthed with wonder, which might well increase at sight of an electric locomotive, hauling its hundreds of tons of freight.

In great industrial plants he would find electricity driving machines of an intricacy, precision, and productive power beyond the imagination of his generation, or at work in decomposing cells, and in the heart of glowing furnaces fashioning new products. In university and corporation laboratories would be revealed to him the marvels of the X-rays, photography, the fascinating world of the microscope, balances weighing 1/100,000th of a milligramme, the spectroscope, and all those instruments of precision and research which are the tools of the Fifth Estate. Elements unknown to him would be placed in his hand; fascinating experiments performed to demonstrate properties and relationships beyond his dream. The air, which he studied with reference to winds, combustion, and ventilation, would be reduced before him to a liquid as obvious as water, though boiling on a cake of ice.

Where once the postboy and the post chaise were familiar he would find our roads crowded with automotive vehicles and the country gridironed by the railways. Did he wish to send a letter across the continent, he would have only to commit it to the air mail

to ensure its arrival in thirty-six hours. Were he called upon to revisit England, there would be no ten weeks' voyage in a sailing packet, but the speed and luxury of a 50,000-ton liner, oil-fired and turbine-driven. At Portsmouth, where he calmed the waves with oil, he would find, instead of wooden frigates and smooth-bore cannon, submarines and armored superdreadnoughts, single gun of which could sink the entire British Navy as he knew it. Did he wish to proceed to Paris? He would have only to take passage in an airplane.

a

The gardeners Franklin knew grew peas for pleasure or profit. Mendel grew them and established the laws of heredity. Farming, which was a wholly empirical occupation, is now the special concern of a great governmental department devoted to the development of scientific agriculture. Here Franklin would learn of soil analysis and seed selection, of hardier and more prolific varieties of plants, of better breeds of animals, of methods of control of such virulent diseases virulent diseases as splenic fever, anthrax, hog cholera, and bovine tuberculosis. He would find his own experiments with gypsum extended to cover the whole field of chemical fertilizers, the air itself converted into an inexhaustible reservoir of plant food, and the efficiency of farm labor multiplied many times by ingenious agricultural machines.

He would find household economics revolutionized: the town pump replaced by running water; electricity a servant in the house; the food supply broadened and stabilized; domestic drudgery assumed by laundry, bakery, and factory; tasteful clothing within the reach of all; transportation and amusement for the multitude, and the history of yesterday sold for a penny; innumerable new industries, based on the findings of the laboratory, now

offering means of decent livelihood to millions, opening careers to thousands.

In great hospitals, permeated with the scientific spirit and equipped with many new and strange devices for the alleviation of human suffering, he would hear of the incalculable benefits which medical and surgical science have conferred upon mankind. He would see the portraits and listen to the story of Pasteur and Lister and Loeb and Ehrlich. We know to-day with what joy and relief the world would welcome a veritable cure for cancer, but we can little realize the emotion with which one like Franklin would learn in a single afternoon of the germ theory of disease, of preventive serums, of antisepsis, of chemotherapy, of the marvelous complexity of the blood stream and the extraordinary influence and potency of the secretions of the ductless glands. What appraisal would he make of the service to humanity which, in little more than a generation, has mitigated the horrors of surgery by the blessings of anesthesia and antisepsis, which has controlled rabies, yellow fever, typhoid fever, tetanus, which is stamping out tuberculosis, curing leprosy, and providing specifics for other scourges of the race? What values would he put on insulin, thyroxin, adrenalin? The physician is no longer compelled to rely on herbs and simples and drastic mineral compounds of doubtful value and uncertain action. Compounds of extraordinary potency, isolated or synthesized by the chemist, are now available to allay pain, correct disorders, prolong life, and even to restore mentality and character.

With contributions to their credit which have so enriched and stimulated the intellectual life; which have brought the peoples of the earth together into closer touch than English shires once were; which have revolutionized industry, enlarged the opportunity of the

average man, and added so greatly to his comfort and well-being, we may reasonably inquire, 'What are the recompenses of the Fifth Estate?'

On the material side they have almost invariably been curiously inadequate and meagre. It is incomparably more profitable to draw the Gumps for a comic supplement than to write the Origin of Species. There is more money in chewing-gum than in relativity. Lobsters and limousines are acquired far more rapidly by the skillful thrower of custard pies in a moving-picture studio than by the no less skillful demonstrator of the projection of electrons. The gate receipts of an international prize-fight would support a university faculty for a year.

One may recall that Lavoisier was guillotined by a republic that 'had no need of chemists'; that Priestley was driven from his sacked and devastated home; that Leblanc, after giving the world cheap alkali, died in a French poorhouse; that Langley was crushed by ridicule and chagrin in his last days. A month before the war who could have believed that within a few years the Fifth Estate in Russia would be utterly destroyed and in Germany and Austria existing at the very edge of starvation? What has happened there may happen again elsewhere if the intelligence of the world does not assume and hold its proper place in the direction of national and world affairs.

In the preface to his recent Lehrbuch der Photochemie Professor Plotnikow has written: 'Home and property were pillaged by bands of idle Russians who used my library for cigarette papers. Hunger, misery, want, and personal insecurity, often approaching fear for my life, were the constant accompaniment of my labors.'

One is reminded that Carlyle, on the authority of Richter, says: "In the island of Sumatra there is a kind of

"Light-chafers," large fireflies, which people stick upon spits, and illuminate the ways with at night. Persons of condition can thus travel with a pleasant radiance, which they much admire. Great honor to the fireflies, But - !'

It is not becoming that the world expect the light to shine indefinitely when carrying a lantern is often less remunerative than carrying a hod. The money and the years of study required for special training are not recognized as invested capital, and the return from a decade of research is often taxed as the income of a year. Professorial salaries move forward as slowly as a glacier, but they seldom leave a terminal moraine. Yet teaching is our most important business; for a failure to pass on for a single generation the painfully accumulated knowledge of the race would return the world to barbarism.

Though material wealth is rarely acquired by the Fifth Estate, they have the riches of the royal man, defined by Emerson as 'he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments.' Their wealth is in the Kingdom of the Mind. It is inalienable and tax-exempt. It may be shared and yet retained.

A recent survey by a national magazine would seem to indicate that the majority of men have drifted into their vocations with little effort of selection and that a very large proportion ultimately regret their choice. This is seldom true of members of the Fifth Estate. Theirs is a true vocation, a calling and election. It brings intellectual satisfactions more precious than fine gold. They live in a world where common things assume a beauty and a meaning veiled from other eyes; a world where revelation follows skillful

questioning and where wonder grows with knowledge. Together they share the interests, the communion of spirit, the labors and the triumphs of the fraternity of Science. The Law of Diminishing Returns exerts a control from which there is no escape in agriculture, industry, and business. Research alone is beyond the twelvemile limit of its inhibitions.

If the heavens declare the glory of God that glory is surely made more manifest by telescope and spectroscope. If the whirling nebula and the stars in their courses reveal Omnipotence, so do the electrons in their orbits reveal His presence in universes brought into being by the striking of a match. The laboratory may be a temple as truly as the church. The laws of Nature are the Will of God, their discovery is a revelation as valid as that of Sinai, and by their observance only can man hope to come into harmony with the universe and with himself.

There has been a general and ready acceptance by the world of the material benefits of science, while its contributions to sociology and ethics are as generally ignored as guides to human conduct. Yet science proclaims new commandments as inflexible as those engraved on stone, and furnishes what Wiggam has reverently termed 'the true technology of the Will of God.'

Science has so drawn the world together and so rapidly remoulded civilization that the social structure is now strained at many points. Statecraft and politics, law and custom, lack the plasticity of science and are now in imperfect contact with the contours of their new environment. The result, as events have shown, is friction and confusion. Though our civilization is based on science, the scientific method has little place in the making of our laws. Office does not seek the man in the laboratory, and candidates are not

pictured as engaged in any activity that might suggest a superior intelligence. They are shown milking cows, pitching hay in new blue overalls, or helping with the family washing. Recently, in the senate of a New England state, there was presented the edifying spectacle of the presiding officer, being shaved by a barber, called to the rostrum, while senators were reading the encyclopædia into the record. To expedite further the public business sundry members of the chamber were presently gassed with bromine. Does not this suggest that a few chemists might with advantage be distributed among our legislative bodies?

It is claimed that fifty per cent of the members of state legislatures in America have never been through high school and that only one in seven has been through college. We see in the ranks of science knowledge without power and in politics power without knowledge. An electorate, which regards itself as free, listens to the broadcast noise of manufactured demonstrations and is blind to the obvious mechanics of synthetic bedlam. The result is too often government by gullibility, propaganda, catchwords, and slogans, instead of government by law based on facts, principles, intelligence, and good will.

As President Stanley Hall once said, 'Man has not yet demonstrated that he can remain permanently civilized.' Many thoughtful people have been led to question the ultimate effect of science upon civilization. We all recognize the utility of matches, but we keep them away from children. Meanwhile, science puts dynamite and TNT, poison gas, airplanes, and motor cars at the disposal of criminals and leaders of the mob. Bertrand Russell, in Icarus, sees in science the ultimate destroyer. Haldane, in Dædalus,

visualizes it as the stern and vigorous chastener and corrector which will ultimately save the race and usher in the new day of light and reason.

'Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers,' and democracy levels down as well as up. Even in Boston cigars have replaced books on a corner famous for a century of literary associations. The world is wrong because few men can think. It will not be made right until those who cannot think trust those who can. When its foundations are so obviously out of joint humanity still clings tenaciously to fossilized precepts and opinions and is as resentful of suggested change as in the days of Galileo. Despite the pressure of new ideas, education must still, to be acceptable, follow old conventional lines.

IV

Let us not deceive ourselves. Human life is still a hard and fearsome thing. Mankind is required to maintain existence in a world in which, as Kipling has said, 'any horror is credible.' More than a hundred years ago De Quincey wrote, 'We can die, but which of us, knowing, as some of us do, what is human life, could, were he consciously called upon to do it, face, without shuddering, the hour of birth?' But little more than yesterday Henry Adams closed his Education with the expression of the hope that perhaps some day, for the first time since man began his education among the carnivores, he would find a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder.

Everywhere there is upheaval and unrest. "The machine,' to quote Dr. Elton Mayo, 'runs to an accompaniment of human reverie, human pessimism, and sense of defeat.'

We are everywhere overburdened by unnecessary illness, crushing taxation,

extravagant and inefficient governments, huge expenditures for trivialities, and the appalling waste of effort, material, and resources. We are hampered by class suspicion and misunderstanding, racial antagonisms, the inhibitions of organized labor, and the lack of imagination in high places. Life in general is on a low cultural plane and bound by custom and tradition.

One hundred years of science have failed to satisfy the cravings of humanity. Chesterton finds science 'a thing on the outskirts of human life it has nothing to do with the centre of human life at all.' We do not, of course, agree with him, but we must still meet the challenge of John Jay Chapman, who declares: 'Science, which filled the air with so large a bray, is really a branch of domestic convenience, a department for the study of traction, cookery, and wiring. The prophet-scientists have lived up to none of their prospectuses.' The fault, however, as Wiggam points out, is not with science, nor with the scientists. It is with those who 'have mainly used the immense spiritual enterprise of science to secure five-cent fares, high wages, and low freight rates,' when it should have 'ushered in a new humanism.'

Thus we still encourage race deterioration, still carry the burden of the unfit, still cultivate national antipathies, still are breeding from poor stock, and witnessing with equanimity the suppression of the best.

The history of aristocracies, feudalism, the Church, the guilds, and the soviets has amply demonstrated that no one class possesses the qualities required for the government of all classes, and we cannot claim them for the Fifth Estate. We can, however, claim with full assurance that the Fifth Estate possesses many qualities, now practically ignored, which could be utilized in government to the incal

culable advantage of us all. Its knowledge of material facts, of natural and economic laws, of the factors governing race development and human relations; its imagination, vision, and its open mind, should be brought to bear effectively in the formulation of national policies and the solution of governmental problems. There is an alternative before us, which has recently been defined with somewhat surprising frankness by Warren S. Stone, President of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, perhaps the most conservative of the labor unions. Mr. Stone says:

'But until labor, in the inclusive sense in which I am using it, secures control of legislative and executive branches of the national and state governments, and through control of the executive branch secures control of the judiciary, labor is in continuous peril of seeing its gains wiped out and its progress retarded by hostile legislation or unfriendly court decisions.'

Our countrymen may well consider whether they prefer participation in government by the Fifth Estate to the benefit of all or control of government by labor unions in the interest of labor.

Since most of the troubles that beset mankind have their origin in human nature it would seem worth the while of those who make our laws to study and apply the findings of the biologists and psychologists as to what human nature really is and the springs of its motivation.

Plato called democracy 'the best form of bad government.' It will be the best form of good government only as it develops the capacity to breed leaders and the faith to trust them. The quality of our children will determine the quality of our democracy. If our laws and mores and economic structure continue to discourage breeding from our best strains, if there is to be no adequate recompense for service