cter, 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 m