Notes

Abstract

A RESOLUTION for the establishment of a League of Nations was passed by the Inter-Allied Conference at Paris on Saturday. It was moved by President Wilson in an eloquent speech, in the course of which he said:—“Is it not a startling circumstance, for one thing, that the great discoveries of science, that the quiet studies of men in laboratories, that the thoughtful developments which have taken place in quiet lecture-rooms, have now been turned to the destruction of civilisation? The powers of destruction have not so much multiplied as gained facility. The enemy whom we have just overcome had at his seats of learning some of the principal centres of scientific study and discovery, and he used them in order to make destruction sudden and complete; and only the watchful, continuous co-operation of men can see to it that science as well as armed men are kept within the harness of civilisation.”We have on many occasions pointed out that responsibility for the use of scientific discoveries in destructive devices depends upon statesmen and democracy rather than upon the men who labour to increase natural knowledge. It is for those men to promote the higher national and international feeling of fellowship which will repudiate the doctrine of force as the main factor in the evolution of civilisation, and to encourage the development of science as the chief means of securing human progress. The invention of gunpowder and the use of it in scientific appliances freed the people from the power, of the barons in the Middle Ages and altered the political organisation of Europe. Thanks to the existence of scientific workers in the Allied countries, free peoples have been able to establish their cause of righteous dealing against the arrogant military aristocracy of Germany. Political power is now in the hands of democracy, which has yet to prove that it will make noble use of the forces provided by progressive scientific knowledge.