Sir Norman Lockyer, in his presidential address to the members of the British Association, at Southport, on 9th September, 1903, said:—
"We are suffering because trade no longer follows the Hag 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 in different times in late years. In the United States the most successful students in the higher teaching centres 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 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 prescience of the scientific spirit-in other words, brain power-our who national life is evolved."
