Abstract
THE practical absence of leading representatives of scientific knowledge and research in the new Parliament is the subject of an article in the Times of January 21. Among the 707 members there are only two Fellows of the Royal Society, Mr. Balfour and Sir Joseph Larmor, neither of whom can be considered specifically to represent science. The work of Parliament is more and more coming to be a sordid scrimmage of hereditary, vested, class, and sectional interests. Out of the base-metal of the various self-seeking coteries represented—agrarian, commercial, financial, professional, proletarian, and so on—by some obscure alchemy too absurd for belief, Westminster is supposed to effect a synthesis of the pure gold of wisdom, and in its odd moments from this conjuring entertainment to administer the affairs of an Empire on which the sun never sets. The helpless public, as in America at its worst, is on the point of abandoning its government to a peculiar people with aptitudes and codes of conduct which in their private life they abhor and despise, and with an intellectual outlook and unteachableness similar to that of the traditional type of public-school legislator whom they have succeeded, but without their reputation for integrity, altruism, and incorruptibility. The practical problem is, How are the learned men—of whose learning and research the twentieth century is, and from whose brains and laboratories arises the necessity for the metamorphosis now blindly and vehemently convulsing it—to pull with something more nearly approximating their true weight dans cette galére?
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Science in Parliament . Nature 102, 421–422 (1919). https://doi.org/10.1038/102421a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/102421a0