SCIENCE AND WORLD UNITY

Two events, different externally but similar in ultimate meaning, have just occurred in England: the World Power Conference that opened in London late in June, and the reading, by Senator Marconi, of a paper describing his researches during the past eight years, before the Royal Society of Arts a few days later. The World Power Conference emphasized in a significant way the growing industrial unity of the world. Mr. Marconi's paper foreshadowed a development of communication that promises to promote unity of world thought and opinion.

The Power Conference, following closely upon the heels of the International Shipping Conference, illustrated the new attitude of conscious world-coöperation in production and exchange. The World War has made most countries poorer. A century ago, when Europe faced a similar situation after the unsettlement of the French Revolution and the waste of the Napoleonic Wars, her recovery was immensely facilitated by the discovery and use of steam power, which mul

tiplied her productive capacity. To day the prompt return of prosperity is conditioned in no small measure by a similar expansion of power applied to industry. No nation realizes this more keenly than the British, whose coal, used by already antiquated methods, is a rapidly wasting and increasingly costly resource. Her water power if fully developed would not move more than one fifth of her existing machinery. Clinging as she does to traditional methods of power-generation, she is obtaining, according to expert figures, less than four per cent of the energy theoretically available from the coal, water, and oil she consumes, while Switzerland, without coal and forced to resort to up-to-date economies, is utilizing profitably more than thirtysix per cent of her power. This striking contrast shows the immediate possibilities of progress not only in Great Britain but in other countries, including our own.

Will this progress tend to bind nations closer together or to separate them? To come close to home, Canada has already developed approximately 3,250,000 horse power-representing

an investment of nearly $700,000,000 from her water courses. Projects now under construction will raise this to 4,000,000 horse power, no small fraction of which will be consumed in the United States. Great Britain's other Dominions, notably Australia and New Zealand, are pushing ahead in the same direction with almost equal energy.

Evidently the coal-using countries must be alert or they will soon lose their present industrial hegemony. "The harnessed power of the Victoria Falls or of the upper waters of the Nile, the rush of the mighty rivers of South America, or the mountain torrents of Norway and Sweden may swing the great centres of production to wholly new places on the map.'

This gives the statesman as well as the engineer food for thought. As a contributor in the Empire Review says: "There is need at the present moment of international coöperation in many things, in science, and engineering, and research, even as much as in finance, in politics, and in power development.'

Major-General Sir Philip Nash, Chairman of the MetropolitanVickers Electrical Company, writing in the Conservative and ultra-Nationalist English Review, notes the desire for international coöperation that exists among men immeditely and consciously responsible for industrial welfare in every country.

While nearly every nation, in Europe especially, has been building up tariff walls and creating a single national language where formerly several were tolerated, desirous of fomenting national industries above all and of closing out foreign competition, the deeper movement towards greater knowledge, scientific and educational as well as economic, has persisted, with interesting results. The industrial institution and the State institution have

shown a greater readiness to coöperate in research, experimental and theoretic, and supply informed opinion regarding State policy in any matter touching on their province; those institutions spread their points of contact farther and farther from the centre, come into touch with similar institutions abroad, and thus eventually pool their knowledge with that possessed by the latter. The idea of an international clearing-house or pool for scientific, educational, and economic knowledge has grown in strength during the last few years, and the first result of such a movement will be the destruction of exactly those barriers which a jealously national spirit has tended to erect in many countries. Coöperation in research, in science, in economic policy, must be the motto of the future.

Hereafter, according to this author, the tendency of industrial development in the newer parts of the world will be 'to make a country capable of absorbing an ever-increasing amount of excess labor from the main countries and so relieve them of some part of the burden of population, to industrialize it- but industrialize on a genuinely progressive scale!'

Senator Marconi's paper described a new development in wireless communication by which radio-telephone messages spoken at the Poldhu Station in Cornwall have been heard with perfect clearness by an official of the Australia Marconi Company in a private house at Sydney, Australia, so plainly that the words 'might have been spoken from the next street.' The same messages were heard in Montreal, and Senator Marconi informed a representative of the London Daily Telegraph that 'any fairly and reasonably efficient receiver would have received the message.'

This achievement was not due to directional radio-phoning, to so-called 'beam' communication, but to the employment of shorter wave-lengths. The development of wireless communi

cation during the past few years has been toward the use of constantly longer wave lengths, long distance transmission using waves of twenty thousand metres and requiring the power of one thousand kilowatts to send them. The new method is to employ a very short wave length, of no more than one hundred metres, — by which it is possible to communicate for very long distances with a power of I about thirty kilowatts. During April, May, and June last year, Senator Marconi's yatch Elettra received messages at a distance ranging from eight hundred and twenty to over two thousand miles with short wave lengths, where no more then twelve kilowatts were used. Senator Marconi says: 'By means of this system, economical and efficient low-power stations can be established which will maintain direct, I high-speed services with the most distant parts of the globe during a considerable number of fixed hours per day.'

Among the advantages of the short waves are not only distinct transmission with low-power stations over distances hitherto considered impossible, but ability to transmit messages with greater speed, and in definite directions; for the short waves respond to reflector devices better than long

waves.

It should be noted, however, that the messages from England to Australia, a distance of twelve thousand two hundred and nineteen nautical miles, which were transmitted successfully on the first trial, were sent without the use of any reflector at either end.

GREAT BRITAIN AND MEXICO

THE diplomatic incident between Great Britain and Mexico last June, when Mr. Cummins, the British Agent, remained for a time a voluntary prisoner

in the Legation at Mexico City, where he was kept practically under aquae et ignis interdictionem by President Obregon, is still echoing gon, is still echoing- though not very loudly— through the British and Continental press. We need not repeat the details of the episode, which have already been given fully in the dispatches. Premier MacDonald has explained that the Mexican Government objected to the tone of Mr. Cummins's letters to its Foreign Office. Mr. Cummins was endeavoring to protect the rights of Mrs. Evans, a British subject residing in that country. But Dr. Dillon, a veteran British correspondent of high authority, who has written a laudatory book upon President Obregon's administration, has taken up the cudgels for the Mexican Government. He says that the real trouble with Mr. Cummins was not that he performed his duty in protecting British subjects, but that he intrigued - apparently in company with an American attaché who was detected and recalled - to secure the election of Robles Dominquez, a Conservative politician, to the presidency, and when he failed in this, that he worked in favor of the De la Huerta rebellion last spring.

Rodolfo Reyes, the Mexican Minister at Madrid, admits frankly in a letter to El Sol, that the nationals of other countries have suffered much in Mexico during the last few years; but protests that the methods adopted by Foreign Powers to right these wrongs are not likely to attain their object. 'Mexico may have sinned much, but in attempting to punish her they will only make her errors a rallying cry for the whole nation, for a people will endure anything rather than a direct threat to its sovereignty.'

César Falcon, the London staff-correspondent of El Sol, regrets that this episode has tended to increase the dependence of Mexico upon the United