The need for the scholar was not only qualitative, but quantitative. But for the general distribution of chemical knowledge in France and England, and the presence of men capable of promptly applying that knowledge to combat the gas attacks launched by the Germans, the war would have been lost before we could possibly have rendered the slightest assistance; and on our side of the Atlantic when the armistice was signed, there were two thousand trained chemists engaged in the problems of gas 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.