On Monday the Secretary of State for War opened the
new electrical laboratory at Teddington,—a department of the National Physical Laboratory. Mr. Haldane's speech was a sermon on his favourite text,—the necessity of Geist in our national life. Germany gained her prosperity through science: we did not think about science until our prosperity had been attained. And yet science was the most potent of all instru- ments in the struggle for success. Once scholarship was a bond of brotherhood between men of different nationalities, but now science was becoming the great common heritage. The work of the scientist was not imperishable, like the work of the artist, but was superseded and rethought by succeeding generations. Therein it resembled statesmanship, though it worked on broader and more permanent foundations. He did not ask that Plato's dream should be insisted upon and philosophers made rulers, but he asked that no severance should be made between thought and action. Statesmanship was one half the management of men, and the other was taking thought for the. morrow ; and if the first was an art, the second demanded the scientific temper.
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