Science in Short Chapters

by W. Mattieu Williams

These, and a multitude of other analogous facts, abundantly refute the idea that the native minerals, the natural fertility, the navigable rivers, or the convenient seaports, determine the industrial and commercial supremacy of nations. The moral forces exerted by the individual human molecules are the true components which determine the resulting force and direction of national progress. It is the industry and skill of our workmen, the self-denial, the enterprise, and organizing ability of our capitalists, that has brought our coal so precociously to the surface and redirected for human advantage the buried energies of ancient sunbeams, while the fossil fuel of other lands has remained inert.

The foreigner who would see a sample of the source of British prosperity must not seek for it in a geological museum or among our subterranean rocks; let him rather stand on the Surrey side of London Bridge from 8 to 10 A.M. and contemplate the march of one of the battalions of our metropolitan industrial army, as it pours forth in an unceasing stream from the railway stations towards the City. An analysis of the moral forces which produce the earnest faces and rapid steps of these rank and file and officers of commerce will reveal the true elements of British greatness, rather than any laboratory dissection of our coal or ironstone.

Fuel and steam-power have been urgently required by all mankind. Englishmen supplied these wants. Their urgency was primary and they were first supplied, even though the bowels of the earth had to be penetrated in order to obtain them. In the present exceptional and precocious degree of exhaustion of our coal treasures, we have the effect not the cause of British industrial success.

If in a ruder age our greater industrial energy enabled us to take the lead in supplying the ruder demands of our fellow-creatures, why should not a higher culture of those same abundant energies qualify us to maintain our position and enable us to minister to the more refined and elaborate wants of a higher civilization? There are other necessary occupations quite as desirable as coal-digging, furnace-feeding, and cotton-spinning.

The approaching exhaustion of our coal supplies should therefore serve us as a warning for preparation. Britain will be forced to retire from the coal trade, and should accordingly prepare her sons for higher branches of business,—for those in which scientific knowledge and artistic training will replace mere muscular strength and mechanical skill. We have attained our present material prosperity mainly by our excellence in the use of steam-power; let us now struggle for supremacy in the practical application of brain-power.

We have time and opportunity for this. The exhaustion of our coal supplies will go on at a continually retarding pace—we shall always be approaching the end, but shall never absolutely reach it, as every step of approximation will diminish the rate of approach; like the everlasting process of reaching a given point by continually halving our distance from it.

First of all we shall cease to export coal; then we shall throw up the most voracious of our coal-consuming industries, such as the reduction of iron-ore in the blast-furnace; then copper-smelting and the manufacture of malleable iron and steel from the pig, and so on progressively. If we keep in view the natural course and order of such progress, and intelligently prepare for it, the loss of our coal need not in the smallest degree retard the progress of our national prosperity.

If, however, we act upon the belief that the advancement of a nation depends upon the mere accident of physical advantages, if we fold our arms and wait for Providence to supply us with a physical substitute for coal, we shall become Chinamen, minus the unworked coal of China.

If our educational efforts are conducted after the Chinese model; if we stultify the vigor and freshness of young brains by the weary, dull, and useless cramming of words and phrases; if we poison and pervert the growing intellect of British youth by feeding it upon the decayed carcases of dead languages, and on effete and musty literature, our progress will be proportionately Chinaward; but if we shake off that monkish inheritance which leads so many of us blindly to believe that the business of education is to produce scholars rather than men, and direct our educational efforts towards the requirements of the future rather than by the traditions of the past, we need have no fear that Great Britain will decline with the exhaustion of her coal-fields.

The teaching and training in schools and colleges must be directly and designedly preparatory to those of the workshop, the warehouse, and the office; for if our progress is to be worthy of our beginning, the moral and intellectual dignity of industry must be formally acknowledged and systematically sustained and advanced. Hitherto, we have been the first and the foremost in utilizing the fossil forces which the miner has unearthed; hereafter we must in like manner avail ourselves of the living forces the philosopher has revealed. Science must become as familiar among all classes of Englishmen as their household fuel. The youth of England must be trained to observe, generalize, and investigate the phenomena and forces of the world outside themselves; and also those moral forces within themselves, upon the right or wrong government of which the success or failure, the happiness or misery of their lives will depend.