Fifteen summers of this pursuit, free from self-seeking or sordidness or jealousy, free from fame’s flatteries, and the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole became famous wherever the human intellect is respected. Its Knights of Science have not reached their goal—their Holy Grail. But under the inspiration of the triple vow of Science for her Knights—poverty, self-immolation and obedience to truth—they have had adventures and have made discoveries so strange, so passing strange, so wonderful, that all Americans are intensely proud of this American institution, at once so small and so majestically great.
Then came the proposal to endow this little laboratory with part of the Carnegie millions and to erect it into a rich and aristocratic palace of science. At first glance the proposal seemed as admirable as the purpose that prompted it. And yet——
This is a day when the numerous newcomers among our multi-millionaires are so pouring out the millions that it looks as if presently the necessity for struggle, the incentive to struggle, in the development of brain power, would be almost wholly removed. In the progress of the race, wealth in possession has played a very small part—has more often interfered to blight than to bless. Wealth possessed means ease and power without effort, and a sense that the goal has been reached. It means the mind at rest, tending to sloth and slumber, with life’s greatest fears and greatest incentives removed. Above all, it means an atmosphere of self-complacency and satiety and languor that insensibly relaxes the strongest fibre.
Carnegie millions may help to keep a-burning the light in that plain little temple of science at Woods Hole—may, if judiciously used. But not if they stifle the splendid, self-sacrificing, self-unconscious enthusiasm which set that light a-blazing. The lesson is wider than the instance—far wider. It was wealth and patronage that rotted the splendid intellect of Greece; wealth again, and patronage, that brought the Renaissance to an abrupt, inglorious end. And how much the English intellect in its long period of most brilliant achievement owed to the contempt of the English dominant classes—that of birth and that of commerce—for scientists, writers and “those kinds of cattle!”
CHAPTER VII
THE MADE-OVER WHITE HOUSE
We find plutocracy’s follies in full swing not alone in the great cities, East and West, where the money-caste must have outward signs of superiority to bolster up its pretensions, but in our national capital as well—in what ought to be the high-set citadel of democratic dignity.
Few Americans have any adequate idea of the system of etiquette which has grown up there. The other day a newly appointed high officer of the Government said:
“My daughter went to lunch with the daughter of Secretary —— yesterday. She did not come home until long after she was expected, and her mother asked her what was the matter.
“‘Oh,’ she explained, ‘Secretary ——’s daughter was there, and none of us could go until she left, and we thought she never would go.’ And I find that precedent is carried out in the strictest possible way all through Washington society in all its sets, down to the very children.”