All this refers to our industries. We are not suffering because trade no longer follows the flag as in the old days, but because trade follows the brains, and our manufacturers are too apt to be careless in securing them. In one chemical establishment in Germany, 400 doctors of science, the best the universities there can turn out, have been employed at different times in late years. In the United States the most successful students in the higher teaching centers are snapped up the moment they have finished their course of training, and put into charge of large concerns, so that the idea has got abroad that youth is the password of success in American industry. It has been forgotten that the latest product of the highest scientific education must necessarily be young, and that it is the training and not the age which determines his employment. In Britain, on the other hand, apprentices who can pay high premiums are too often preferred to those who are well educated, and the old rule-of-thumb processes are preferred to new developments—a conservatism too often depending upon the master 's own want of knowledge.
I should not be doing my duty if I did not point out that the defeat of our industries one after another, concerning which both Lord Rosebery and Mr. Chamberlain express their anxiety, is by no means the only thing we have to consider. The matter is not one which concerns our industrial classes only, for knowledge must be pursued for its own sake, and since the full life of a nation with a constantly increasing complexity, not only of industrial, but of high national aims, depends upon the universal presence of the scientific spirit—in other words, brain power—our whole national life is involved.
The present awakening in relation to the nation's real needs is largely due to the warnings of men of science. But Mr. Balfour's terrible Manchester picture of our present educational condition[1] shows that the warning which has been going on now for more than fifty years has not been forcible enough; but if my contention that other reorganizations besides that of our education are needed is well founded, and if men of science are to act the part of good citizens in taking their share in endeavoring to bring about a better state of things, the question arises, has the neglect of their warnings so far been due to the way in which these have been given?
- ↑ "The existing educational system of this country is chaotic, is ineffectual, is utterly behind the age, makes us the laughing-stock of every advanced nation in Europe and America, puts us behind, not only our American cousins, but the German and the Frenchman and the Italian."—Times, October 15, 1902.
