Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/544

540 schools are endeavoring to promote our science. Excellent representatives of scientific chemistry are employed as teachers. Scientific research is carried on more and more. But, notwithstanding all that, I think that we Germans need not be alarmed in the near future. The time for the development of the organic chemical industries on a large scale has not yet arrived. As I have shown before, the Germans are masters in manufacture where numberless products are employed in a series of reactions which finally lead to the finished product, and require manual labor, which can not possibly be replaced by machinery, while Americans may claim to be masters where manufactures on a large scale are concerned, which can be done by machinery. Yet we must not leave out of consideration the very important facts that in America wages are extraordinarily high, that the conditions of life are here much more elaborate, and last, but not least, that the employees, and more particularly the workmen, manifest a spirit of independence, which has become especially noticeable during the last few years. By their labor unions the workmen attempt not only to raise wages to a height which will make manufacturing difficult and less profitable, but they are also endeavoring to take the control of the works out of the hands of the educated managers and put it into the hands of irresponsible labor leaders. This movement, as I have above shown, is especially fatal for the chemical industry in which our glorious science should be supreme. But nobody can deny that times will change in all these respects. Then you will be obliged to husband more economically your natural treasures, and you will experience changes which with us, in the course of historical development, are already things of the past. But this accomplished, the organic chemical industry of this country will commence to flourish. It will be found that the only way that leads to success in chemical manufactures is a combination of science and technics, the two branches of which eminent representatives are to-day assembled here, men who in their spheres have done so much already for the advancement of industries. It will be found that technical progress in this industry can only be secured on the basis of purely scientific research, and to the man who first recognized this fact and taught it to the world, to our great fellow countryman, Justus von Liebig, not only the German, but also the great American, nation, nay the whole world, owes eternal gratitude.