Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/495

Rh set your leg if you broke it, or bridge the Mississippi if you wanted to cross it. It would be an extremely difficult question to decide, but you would have to do it somehow if you wanted to solve this problem numerically. Then if you confined your attention to professional schools you would need to estimate the relative value to the community of a doctor, lawyer, clergyman or engineer, and so on. In doing this you would necessarily take into account local needs and local peculiarities. You would have to consider, as a single sample of what I mean, whether there was a real demand in the community for an increased number of doctors, and so with the other professions.

Here to-day we are celebrating the foundation of buildings which are to be devoted to science and its applications, and so it would seem natural to consider that kind of educational effort somewhat more minutely. You would have to begin with deciding on the usefulness to the community of an education such as is being given in this institution, and in particular in this school of engineering where men are trained in the sciences for the service of the state. Now, it is such a commonplace to-day that science has revolutionized the world that I shall not weary you with attempting to demonstrate that fact. At the same time I should like to say in passing that, like many another commonplace, it is too often neglected in actual practise. It seems that individuals and states in making provisions for education constantly fail to recognize how enormously important to the welfare of the state it is that men should be trained in science, and in its application to every branch of practical life. We live in an age preeminently scientific, and if we are not able to cope with a problem scientifically we can not cope with it at all. But not only is a scientific training essential anywhere to any country to-day, it is, I think, peculiarly important in this country at this particular time. It seems to me that one of the great dangers of our democracy is the prevalence of the idea that one man is as good as another. It is an idea founded on an erroneous theory of democracy and one that appears utterly false from a scientific point of view. It too often gives support to the doctrine that any man will do for any position that he is clever enough to get. Nothing has surprised me more in moving about this country than to see countless instances of men who have had no adequate scientific training employed in the service of cities and of states, to do work that really needs a very considerable scientific equipment. They are amateurs doing the work of professionals. We have suffered too much at the hands of these amateurs, and we must remove them—root and branch. We must educate our communities in such a way that it will shock their moral sense to see a man, let us say, administering a department of public health who knows little or nothing of biology and bacteriology or any of the other fundamental sciences that enter into the very heart of his