Labour and Science in Industry

Abstract

THE article by “F. S. M.” under this heading in NATURE of March 24, p. 385, emboldens me to inquire whether the time has not come for a really searching scientific re-examination of the natural fundamental basis of the economic system under which we perish. That it is necessary to ask such a question as that in this article, whether, after a century's unparalleled progress in the domination of the forces of Nature and the fertile labours of inventors and producers, the average lot of the people is really better than it was in consequence, suggests a certain lack of scientific imagination. The question which many thoughtful people are now asking themselves, and which a few scientific men at least should have asked before the War, is not whether the material lot of the people is up to what it was before the use of science, but why is it not vastly improved. What kind of a civilisation ought to be the result, if science were directed in accordance with natural laws to the constructive purposes of life, rather than only so for the purposes of mutual destruction? Civilisation can scarcely revert in peace-time to economic law, in which the tokens of wealth usurp the place of reality, without raising the very general aspiration that the advantages of war and peace might be combined by proceeding according to natural laws in peace-time.