IT is a trite remark to say that the War from which we are just emerging is unexampled in History. It has involved by far the greater part of the civilized world. It has been waged not only on land and sea but in the air and under the water. All the fighting forces of the nations engaged in it have been put into the field until the man-power remaining has been hardly sufficient to do the work necessary to support the actual combatants. Women have been dragged into the work almost as universally as men. The demands for materials have in many cases far exceeded the resources of the nations involved, if not of the whole world itself. It has cost the lives of millions and condemned millions more to face the struggle of life, sick and maimed. It has left the nations burdened with debts reckoned in thousands of millions of pounds. So overwhelming has been the strain of it that, now that it is over, the very reaction shakes and threatens to disintegrate the foundations of civilization.
I am reminding you of these things not as bearing upon the choice that as a nation we made in entering into the conflict. Not all these disastrous consequences can make us regret that choice. Gigantic as must evidently be the cost it was not for us to count it. From the first it was clear that the future of the whole world was at stake, that the conflict was between World Dominion and Liberty and the memory of our past and the hopes of our future combined to make our path clear. But my object is not to dwell on these matters but to impress upon you that, the choice once made, the issue became one of such surpassing importance that it inevitably called into action all the powers, known or latent, of those engaged in the struggle.
If, with regard to such a War, we ask ourselves—What does it owe to Science? one is tempted to reply that in the first place it owes its very possibility to it. But for the stupendous advances that Science has made in times within the memory of many here present no catastrophe at once so wide-spreading and so deep-reaching could have happened. In scale and in intensity alike, this War represents the results of the totality of scientific progress—it is the realization of all that which the accumulated powers with which Science has endowed mankind can effect when used for destruction. We must be on our guard against treating the word Science in such a connection as though it included only the more recent advances that Science has made. Her Old and her New gifts have alike been put under contribution. The development of the human race has been the result of its increase in knowledge of the world around us, of the properties of the substances that it contains and the laws that govern them. Each such increase of knowledge has brought with it an increase of power. Man has learned more fully the resources of the world in which he lives and what assistance he can procure for himself therefrom when he seeks to effect something which is beyond his unaided powers. Thus, step by step, he has increased his capacities to an almost limitless extent. Gifted with only mediocre vision the telescope enables him to see the almost immeasurably distant and the microscope to see the almost immeasurably small. In spite of his little strength he can shatter in pieces the hardest rocks and lift the most stupendous weights. If we would learn to what he can attain in speed we must look to his skates, his cycles, his motors and his aeroplanes. The whole world is not too big for his powers of communicating instantaneously with his fellow man either by sign or speech. In short, although there is little ground for thinking that a man comes into the world endowed in any wise differently from his ancestors of many thousand years ago, the accumulated gifts of Science have opened out to the adult civilized mind of to-day the possibility of a life which covers a realm and which is endowed with powers wholly transcending those for which Nature framed him as an individual.
It is to men thus endowed that this War has come with all its overpowering motives and wild stimulus and to its service they have devoted all these acquired powers. To understand, therefore, what part Science has played in the War we must not only look at the new discoveries that have been made in direct connection with it but we must have regard also to the advances which had already begun to play their part in Peace, and which under the stress of War have been pressed into its service. Indeed we shall find that these have played at least an equal part among the great formative influences which made this War what it has been. That which has rendered the burden of the War so crushing has been the huge scale on which it has been waged and this has been the direct consequence of the extent to which the machinery of Peace has been utilized in it. Man mastered Transport, Aviation, Telegraphy and the like in order to add to the conveniences of Peace. It was a result though not a motive that he thereby revolutionized War.