Notes

Abstract

IN the Henry Sidgwick memorial lecture at Newnham College, Cambridge, on January 25, Mr. Balfour spoke on decadence, and remarked that progress is with the West and with the communities of the European type. “If our energy of development,” he is reported to have said, “were some day exhausted, who can believe that there remains any external source from which it can be renewed? Where are the untried races competent to construct out of the ruined fragments of our civilisation a new and better habitation for the spirit of man?” He answered his own questions with the assertion that such nations do not exist. But Japan has been steadily assimilating what is most important in European civilisation for some years now, and her system of education is. every year approach ing in efficiency anything the West has to show. In the contingency of which Mr. Balfour spoke, it is easily conceivable that a people with a genius for development, such as Japan has shown, may take naturally the place of superiority and develop a system which is a distinct advance on any civilisation the world has yet known. Men -of science will be pleased with Mr. Balfour's tribute, in the latter part of his lecture, to the achievements effected by science and to the extent science has assisted human development, but they will at the same time remember that the Government of which Mr. Balfour was the leader assisted scientific work no more than other Governments. Statesmen are eloquent¹ in praising scientific work and methods, but few of them have sufficient courage of their expressed convictions to mjjke adequate provision for the extension of natural knowledge which is the life-blood of the modern State.