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THE FIFTH ESTATE

BY ARTHUR D. LITTLE

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was not perhaps in all respects a paragon, but he was unquestionably a polygon-a plain figure with many sides and angles. There were not enough buttons on his black coat to tell off the multifarious aspects in which his complex personality was presented to the world. He was craftsman and tradesman; philosopher and publicist; diplomat, statesman, and patriot. And he was, withal, a very human being. What concerns us particularly on this occasion is the fact that he was at once philosopher and man of affairs. His remarkable career should refute forever the fallacy which, unfortunately, still is current, that the man of science is temperamentally unfitted for the practical business of life.

At the time when Franklin was in England the British Parliament was assumed to be composed of representatives of three estates: the lords spiritual, the lords temporal, and the commons; but Edmund Burke, pointing to the Reporters' Gallery, said, "There sits a Fourth Estate, more important far than they all.' No one at all familiar with the ubiquitous influence and all-pervading power of the press would to-day question the validity of Burke's appraisal. Even then, however, there was present in England, in the person of Benjamin Franklin, a prototype and exemplar of the membership of a Fifth Estate, an estate destined to play an even greater

I

part than its predecessors in the remaking of the world.

This Fifth Estate is composed of those having the simplicity to wonder, the ability to question, the power to generalize, the capacity to apply. It is, in short, the company of thinkers, workers, expounders, and practitioners upon which the world is absolutely dependent for the preservation and advancement of that organized knowledge which we call Science. It is their seeing eye that discloses, as Carlyle said, 'the inner harmony of things; what Nature meant.' It is they who bring the power and the fruits of knowledge to the multitude who are content to go through life without thinking and without questioning, who accept fire and the hatching of an egg, the attraction of a feather by a bit of amber, and the stars in their courses, as a fish accepts the ocean.

The curious deterioration to which words are subject has left us with no term in good repute and common usage by which the members of the Fifth Estate may properly be characterized. Sophists are no longer distinguished for wisdom, they are now fallacious reasoners. Philosophers, who once claimed all knowledge for their province, are now content with speculative metaphysics. Scholars have become pupils. The absent-minded and myopic professor is a standardized property of the stage and screen. The expert, if not under a cloud, is at least standing

in the shade. In Boston one hesitates to call a professional man a scientist - he may be a Presbyterian; and a 'sage,' as an anonymous writer has pointed out, 'calls up in the average mind the picture of something gray and pedantic, if not green and aromatic.' Let us, therefore, for a time at least, escape these derogations and identify ourselves as members of the Fifth Estate. Although the brotherhood of the Estate is open to all the world, its effective membership nowhere comprises more than an insignificant proportion of the population. Two hundred and fifty constitute the membership of the National Academy of Sciences. The latest edition of American Men of Science includes only about 9500 names. The number is expanded to 12,000 on the roll of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Although gathered from all countries, and though chemistry is one of the most active and inclusive sciences, the chemical papers, books, and patents reviewed in Chemical Abstracts in 1923 were the product of about 22,000 workers. One may hazard the estimate that there are not in all the world 100,000 persons whose creative effort is responsible for the advancement of science.

The studies of Cattell indicate that in America, at least, the great majority of men of science come from the socalled middle and upper classes, or precisely those sections of society which, in Russia, have been practically exterminated in the name of the new Social Justice. In about two thirds of Cattell's reported cases both parents were American-born, while the fathers of nearly one half were professional men. Seventy-five per cent depend upon the universities for support; from which we may assume that the burden of the higher surtaxes does not bear heavily upon the Fifth Estate.

In proportion to population the cities have produced twice as many scientific men as the country, but how many hearts 'once pregnant with celestial fire' repose in country churchyards because of lack of opportunity and absence of the stimulus of contact cannot, of course, be known, nor can we tell how many brains, competent and well equipped to penetrate the mysteries of nature, the war has cost the world.

Initiative is one of the rarest mental qualities, yet without it progress is impossible. Its combination with the scientific imagination and command of fact is still rarer and more precious. Since comparatively few of those who study science develop the capacity to extend its borders, the cost of a man competent to advance science has been estimated at $500,000 and his value to the community set at a far greater figure. Full membership in the Fifth Estate thus seems to involve the highest initiation-fee on record. It is a figure disconcerting to the candidate, but as Wiggam has finely said: 'Only genius can create science, but the humblest man can be taught its spirit. He can learn to face truth.'

That the Fifth Estate is not better appreciated or always understood by the world at large is not surprising. In their endeavors to secure accuracy of definition and expression its members have evolved a preposterous and terrifying language of their own. It is not ideally adapted to the interchange of confidences in ordinary human intercourse. It does not lend itself to poetry. 'Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home' becomes impossible when one is forced to address the prettily spotted beetle as Coccinella dipunctata. A primrose by the river's brim is much more than a yellow primrose to the botanist: it is a specimen of Primula vulgaris. The organic

chemist produces a new synthetic product in a mass of pilular dimensions and bestows upon it a name that would slow up Arcturus. Nothing but static interference can account for the terms of radiotelephony.

If knowledge is to be humanized it must first be translated.

Dewar has said that the chief object of the training of a chemist is to produce an attitude of mind. It should be the object of all education to produce the scientific attitude toward truth. We may even agree with Robinson that 'of all human ambitions an open mind, eagerly expectant of new discoveries and ready to remould conviction in the light of added knowledge and dispelled ignorances and misapprehensions, is the noblest, the rarest, and the most difficult to achieve.'

Carlyle says, 'The degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the man.' And President Coolidge has been quoted as saying in a recent interview:

'Everything flows from the application of trained intelligence, and invested capital is the result of brains.

The man of trained intelligence is a public asset. . . . We go forward only through the trained intelligence of individuals, but we, not the individuals, are the beneficiaries of that trained intelligence. In the very nature of things we cannot all have the training, but we can all have the benefits.'

Now vision, a trained intelligence, and an open mind are the qualities which characterize all those who are worthy of membership in the Fifth Estate. They are qualities which the many-sided Franklin possessed in exceptionally high degree.

II

Among all the activities with which his busy life was crowded Franklin un

doubtedly found his greatest pleasure in the pursuit of science, and in that pursuit he followed the eclectic method. At a time when nearly everything awaited explanation his focused attention ranged like a searchlight over many fields. He observed the movement of winds and developed a theory of storms. He considered ventilation and the causes of smoky chimneys and proceeded to invent new stoves. He introduced the Gulf Stream to Falmouth skippers and demonstrated the calming effect of oil on turbulent seas to officers of the British Navy at Portsmouth. From earthquakes he turned to the heat-absorption of colored cloths and the fertilizing properties of gypsum. He wrote on sun spots and meteors; waterspouts, tides, and sound. The kite, which for centuries had been the toy of boys, became in Franklin's hands a scientific instrument, the means to a great discovery. That its significance is, even now, not universally appreciated is shown by the recent answer of a schoolboy, 'Lightning differs from electricity because you don't have to pay for lightning.' To Franklin, as the child of every man knows, we owe our initial conceptions of positive and negative electricity, and he was the first to suggest that the aurora is an electrical phenomenon.

The gregariousness, which is a prominent characteristic of the Fifth Estate, found early expression in Franklin. He formed the Junta, a club for the discussion of morals, politics, and natural philosophy, and in 1743 drew up a proposal for the organization of the American Philosophical Society, of which later he became president. He established a wide acquaintance and cemented many firm friendships among the foremost scientific men of France and England, by whom he was received on equal terms. In 1753 he was awarded the

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The professional spirit which animates the Fifth Estate is essentially one of service. Its compelling urge in the search for truth springs from the conviction that the truth shall make men free. That spirit finds complete expression in Franklin's statement, ‘I have no private interest in the reception of my inventions by the world, having never made, nor proposed to make, the least profit by any of them.' This impersonal relation to the children of his brain was indeed carried by him to an extent which ordinary human nature would find hard to emulate. 'I have,' he writes, 'never entered into any controversy in support of my philosophical opinions; I leave them to take their chance in the world. If they are right, truth and experience will support them; if wrong, they ought to be refuted and rejected.'

There is, nevertheless, a place for militancy in science. The world needs a Huxley for every Bryan.

Franklin was a man of science, but his career proclaims that it is possible to be a man of science and much more besides. Science was made for life, and life is more than science. Art in its fullest expression may touch deeper springs, human relations and affections may bring richer rewards, and public affairs may make a more imperious claim. With Franklin as their prototype the members of the Fifth Estate may well strive to emulate his devotion to the public service and his constructive interest in human affairs.

Error and misconception have a feline tenacity of hold upon life, and the Fifth Estate, though richly endowed with latent executive capacity, is still, in popular opinion, regarded as equipped for thought rather than for action. The practical man, busily engaged in repeating the errors of his forefathers, has little time and less consideration for the distracting theories and disconcerting facts of the man of science. Yet who, among the men of action, is more intensely and truly practical than Carty, Baekeland, Reese, or Whitaker? Where shall one find a firmer grasp on the details of business than that possessed by E. W. Rice, Jr., Gerard Swope, or Dr. Nichols? What quality caused the young director of a research laboratory to find himself responsible for the production of gas masks to protect four million fighting men? In a time of dire emergency it was a professor of chemistry who organized the great Edgewood Arsenal and developed the means and methods and the trained personnel required to supply munitions for a new type of warfare. It was not to a statesman or a business man or a great manufacturer that the Allies entrusted the supreme command. It was to a teacher in a French military school. The range and value of their public service obscures the fact that Charles W. Eliot was a professor of chemistry and that Hoover is an engineer. The League of Nations is the child of a schoolmaster.

Numerically the Fifth Estate has always been feeble and insignificant. Its total membership at any time could be housed comfortably in a third-rate city. No politician makes a promise or invents a phrase to attract its scattered and ineffective vote. Rarely do its members sit in Congress; when they do they sit in the gallery.

With less political influence than the sparse population of Nevada, the Fifth

Estate has recast civilization through its study and application of 'the great and fundamental facts of Nature and the laws of her operation.' It has opened out the heavens to depths beyond imagination, weighed remote suns, and analyzed them by light which left them before the dawn of history. It has moved the earth from the centre of the universe to its proper place within the cosmos. It has extended the horizon of the mind until its sweep includes the 30,000 suns within the wisp of smoke in the constellation Hercules and the electrons in their orbits within the atom. It has read the sermons in the rocks, revealed man's place in nature, disclosed the stupendous complexity of simple things, and hinted at the underlying unity of all.

Because of this new breadth of vision, this lifting of the corner of the veil, this new insight into the hidden meaning of the things about him, the mind of man, cramped for ages by taboos and bound by superstition, is emerging into freedom: into a new world, rich in promise, and of surpassing interest and wonder.

Man brought nothing into the world and through long and painful ages he added little to that nothing: a club, an axe of stone, a pebble in a sling, some skins of beasts, a rubbing of sticks for a fire. He might labor, but to what avail? Even to-day the South American Indian works incessantly, yet his labor produces little more than heaps of stones. To those who would have us believe that all wealth is produced by labor the Fifth Estate replies, 'Wealth is the product of brains, and labor is productive only as it is guided by intelligence.'

Science is the great emancipator of Labor. Bagehot has somewhere said, perhaps in Physics and Politics, that during the early stages of civilization

slavery was essential to progress because only through the enforced labor of the many could the few have leisure to think. To-day, in the United States, the supply of available energy is equivalent to sixty manpower for every man, woman, and child. There is now leisure for all to think, but the millions prefer the movies.

It is not Labor, but the trained intelligence of the Fifth Estate which has endowed man with his present control of stupendous forces. It has solved problems that for ages have hindered and beset mankind. It has revealed great stores of raw materials, synthesized scores of thousands of new compounds, furnished the fundamental data which find embodiment in machines and processes and in those agencies of transportation and communication that have made of the world a neighborhood. It has enabled man effectively to combat disease, added years to the average life, and made it better worth the living.

III

Benjamin Franklin died in 1790one hundred and thirty-four years ago. could he return to make appraisal, what wonders would confront his astonished vision, what triumphs of the Fifth Estate compel his admiration!

Electricity, which to his contemporaries was little more than an obscure force, the curious manifestations of which might supply an evening's entertainment, has become the structural basis of the universe. The atom of Democritus is now a microcosm, vibrant with energy that glows in the white light of the electric lamps, which have replaced the tallow dip. In place of the electrophorus and the charges of the Leyden jar he would find in our own country alone twenty-seven million

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