Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/459

Rh wherever state maintenance has been provided for work which before had been carried on independently of the government, suggests that the wisest course would be to proceed tentatively. It is almost certain that any general scheme formed at the present time would hereafter have to be greatly modified, if not altogether abandoned. The time, indeed, has not yet arrived when the nation would look with satisfaction on any wide scheme of scientific endowment even if Parliament could be persuaded to make adequate grants for such a scheme, or to authorize the employment for that purpose of funds available at the two universities. As to the action of our legislators, it may be remarked that possibly a favorable vote might be secured, if the more earnest supporters of endowment (who have shown considerable strategic skill in pushing their schemes) should choose a convenient season and convenient hours for bringing the matter before Parliament. But it is to be hoped that science will not be degraded by a line of action implying that the endowment of science requires to be urged as cautiously in Parliament as an act relating to contagious diseases. The most liberal grant would be dearly purchased by the disgrace which such a proceeding would bring upon science.

The nation is probably willing to see experiments made on the effect of endowment for special scientific purposes. If such experiments were made, we should gradually perceive whether wider schemes were likely to be advantageous to science, or whether dangers may not lurk in all such schemes. It might be found that endowment would tend greatly to increase the number of those entering on scientific pursuits, while widening also the range of scientific culture. It might be found, as some assert, that endowment would give the younger men a better chance of making good progress than they at present possess. Or, on the other hand, it might be found that the national endowment of science would tend only to advance scientific Micawberism, and that the real workers in science would be discouraged by seeing all the best rewards given for pretentious novelties, clever adaptations perhaps of their own discoveries. That, too, which Herbert Spencer has described as "the rule of all services, civil, military, naval, or other," might be found to operate with the scientific service also—the rule, namely, of "putting young officials under old," with its necessary "effect of placing the advanced ideas and wider knowledge of a new generation under control of the ignorance and bigotry of a generation to which change has become repugnant." This, "which is a seemingly ineradicable vice of public organizations, is a vice to which private organizations are far less liable; since, in the life-and-death struggle of competition, merit, even if young, takes the place of demerit, even if old."

It appears to me that those who really desire the advancement of science cannot too carefully or cautiously weigh the schemes now rife