Page:Scott Nearing - The Germs of War (1916).djvu/5



Be it so!

Take the argument on its merits. The United States is opposed to war. She is preparing in order that she may play her part in maintaining peace. By what means may war be prevented and peace established? Or, put the question more generally, and ask, "How do you avert an impending danger?"

Your city is threatened with typhoid fever. Do you import doctors, hire nurses, and rush through appropriations for new hospitals? or do you boil the water and inspect the milk?

You are an intelligent human being, living in a scientific age. Across the path of progress, you find an obstacle before which you must stop. This obstacle may be a plague, a crime-wave or a war. What do you do?

There is only one answer to that question, the whole world over. Any thinking people living under any form of government and speaking any language, will follow exactly the same course. They will face the obstacle squarely and ask:

Question 1. What is it?

Question 2. Why is it?

Question 3. How can it be overcome?

These are the three questions that science always puts to every new obstacle that it encounters.

Primitive men cowered in fear, or prayed to their gods, or ran away. The honest, fearless seeker after truth first asks the questions of science, and then labors until she finds the answers.

There are many fields in which the three questions of science have been asked and successfully answered. The people of Havana for centuries had been plagued with yellow fever. Year after year the terrible disease