Moreover, the domain of the science of the transformation of matter includes even life itself as its loftiest phase:  from our birth to our return to dust the laws of chemistry are the controlling laws of life, health, disease and death, and the ever clearer recognition of this relation is the strongest force that is raising medicine from the uncertain realm of an art to the safer sphere of an exact science.  To many scientific minds it has even become evident that those most wonderful facts of life, heredity and character, must find their final explanation in the chemical composition of the components of life producing, germinal protoplasm:  mere form and shape are no longer supreme but are relegated to their proper place as the housing only of the living matter which functions chemically.

It must be quite obvious now why thoughtful men are insisting that the public should be awakened to a broad realization of the significance of the science of chemistry for its national life.

It is a difficult science in its details, because it has found that it can best interpret the visible phenomena of the material world on the basis of the conception of invisible minute material atoms and molecules, each a world in itself, whose properties may be nevertheless accurately deduced by a rigorous logic controlling the highest type of scientific imagination.  But a layman is interested in the wonders of great bridges and of monumental buildings without feeling the need of inquiring into the painfully minute and extended calculations of the engineer and architect of the strains and stresses to which every pin and every bar of the great bridge and every bit of stone, every foot of arch in a monumental edifice, will be exposed.  So the public may understand and appreciate with the keenest interest the results of chemical effort without the need of instruction in the intricacies of our logic, of our dealings with our minute, invisible particles.

The whole nation’s welfare demands, indeed, that our public be enlightened in the matter of the relation of chemistry to our national life.  Thus, if our commerce and our industries are to survive the terrific competition that must follow the reestablishment of peace, our public must insist that its representatives in Congress preserve that independence in chemical manufacturing which the war has forced upon us in the matter of dyes, of numberless invaluable remedies to cure and relieve suffering; in the matter, too, of hundreds of chemicals, which our industries need for their successful existence.

Unless we are independent in these fields, how easily might an unscrupulous competing nation do us untold harm by the mere device, for instance, of delaying supplies, or by sending inferior materials to this country or by underselling our chemical manufacturers and, after the destruction of our chemical independence, handicapping our industries as they were in the first year or two of the great war!  This is not a mere