IN a recent conversation between two friends the complaint was made that there existed no clear and systematic national plan or policy for the development of the Empire after the war. This complaint was discussed, and both friends concluded at last that it was unfounded, that there did exist—though too often expressed in a fragmentary way and much obscured by personal and party questions— a clear and simple course before the country. The two friends attempted a plain statement of this course, and came to a very complete agreement upon it. Their attempt seemed so to clear up their own ideas that they think the results may appeal to a wider circle. They have ventured to compress them into some three or four letters (in which it may be noted two hands are engaged), believing that what they will have to say will outline a complete and consistent liberal and progressive policy in British affairs. They find they can approach the whole matter most conveniently by coming into it in reference to the recent discussion of the national neglect of science.
For the last quarter of a century one of these writers has been interested in the movement for the development of science teaching and scientific research in this country. He has been equally impressed by the excellence and by the futility of the criticisms levelled at our higher educational organization, from the days of Matthew Arnold to the recent gathering in the rooms of the Linnean Society, when, under appropriately asphyxiating conditions, witness after witness testified to the suffocation of science in British affairs, to waste, disastrous ignorance, and murderous indifference to knowledge in our administration, and to our planless future. The figure of Sir Ray Lankester still haunts his memory. Sir Ray, with a corrugated brow and troubled eyes, asking in a kind of perplexed whisper what it was held us back, why, with so overwhelming a case against neglect, with such instances and proofs, in these days of tragic and bitter demonstration, we still even now were not getting on to any real expansion either of scientific education or of the organization of research.
SCIENCE AND THE PUBLIC SERVICES
Sir Ray Lankester’s answer to his own question was to attack the Civil Service Commissioners. They have a bias in favour of the old classical education, and they load the scales against science by overmarking Greek and Latin subjects and undermarking science. In practice this closes the big public services to the science student. Clever and ambitious boys are drawn over to the classical side; they acquire an ‘anti-modern side’ habit of mind and a certain contempt for the modern side residuum. The science of the country suffers doubly—first, because the abler and administrative men are unscientific and ignorant of science; and, secondly, because science does not get the pick of our young men. The case of the
