as warfare alone. Our country, in a word, needed not only
to have some men with the requisite training, but men enough to meet
simultaneously many needs in many fields, and these men were drawn in
large measure from our academic faculties. While one must not press the
identity between the scholar and the professor too hard--for a number of
reasons--the fact remains that the teaching profession provided the main
reservoir from which the country drew. One of my friends in the Chemical
Warfare Service has summarized the relation between the academic scholar
and that branch of the army activity. Both chiefs of the Chemical
Service Station were college professors, one of them a member of this
Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Of the fourteen heads of the Research
Division, eight were college professors. It was the college professors
who made fundamental improvements in gas masks on the one hand, and who
devised new gases to test the German masks on the other.

* * * * *

As a nation, we did not realize at the outset, as Germany did, the
importance of the man who knows, and of knowing who he is and where he
is; and here, perhaps, lay our most fundamental unpreparedness. What
this cost us may be judged from a single instance. A code message from
Germany directing the dismantling of the German ships lying in our ports
was intercepted. If we had known that there was a professor of English
in the University of Chicago who, in the pursuit of his medieval
researches, had developed the power of reading ciphers almost at sight,
that cable from Germany could have been promptly deciphered, we could
have forestalled the sabotage, and something like six months in the use
of these ships for the transport of our troops and munitions could have
been gained.

The job of getting the man who knew into the right niche was not an easy
one. The scholars could not all be spared; for, after all, education and
research are essential industries, and, fortunately for our institutions
of learning, for our reviews and scientific agencies, and fortunately
for the country as a whole, all of our scholars did not rush immediately
into government work. The less thrilling task of keeping the lamps
burning in our lighthouses was never more important than during the
stormy days which we have just gone through. Furthermore, the scholar is
a modest person, though he has his human vanities, as we all know who
have seen our colleagues in u