Jasper County Democrat, Volume 22, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 April 1919 — GREATEST OF ALL ASSETS [ARTICLE]

GREATEST OF ALL ASSETS

World’* Vast Store of Gathered Knowl- , edge Has Not Been Destroyed » by the War. At the one hundred and sixty-fifth session of the Royal Society of Arts the chairman of the council, Mr. Alan A. Campbell Swinton, F. R. 8., in an address on “Science and the Future,” said that undoubtedly the war had been responsible for an enormous amount of destruction of capital, but when those losses were estimated it was not usually borne in mind that capital did not merely consist of gold and silver, bricks and mortar, furniture and fitments, or even of railways, steamships and machinery, but that the main capital of the modern world consisted of scientific knowledge. The reconstruction of the material things now temporarily destroyed would take only a very small fraction of the labor and time expended when men learned how to bring those things about. When we compiled estimates of losses due tb the war we must not forget that our greatest asset, the vast store of knowledge that had been gathered together, was still Intact. In

the future, if the Industries of this country were to flourish in the face of the world’s competition, It was above all things necessary that research should play a greater part in them than it had in the past. The modern world had no room for antiquated and unscientific methods.