Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/315

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THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE
311
Copyright by International Press Exchange, New York.

The so-called "Liquid Fire" used by the Germans in repulsing Attacks.

time when war will be no part of this morality and will no longer exist.

Those who can not understand or do not accept the argument that science will ultimately control human conduct must be convinced by the brute argument of accomplished fact that science is essential to national efficiency. Germany, against superior numbers, advances its lines in Poland and Russia and holds them in Flanders and France, it adjusts the nation to be self supporting and self-sufficient, because it has a better organization of science than the other nations. Germany did not spend so much per capita on its army and navy as Great Britain or France, but it spent more on science and regarded science more highly. It has been stated that the British government at present employs 17 chemists, the German government about 1,000. We hear it said that Germany has developed an efficient military machine by subordinating the individual to discipline from above. It is not less true that the German university has been one cf the most anarchic of institutions—both students and professors having had freedom greater than they have in American universities—and at the present moment Germany owes more to its universities as they have been conducted in the past than to its army as it is now organized.

A complicated machine is not useful in order to meet an emergency, but rather the scientific attitude and the scientific training which can react to the new situation. A superdreadnaught