When the wild beast of Plato's dream becomes a waking reality, and a herd-emotion of hate sweeps a nation off its feet, the desolation that follows is wider than that in France and Belgium, wider even than the desolation of grief, and something worse--the hardened heart, the lie in the soul--so graphically described in Book II of the "Republic"--that forces us to do accursed things, and even to defend them! I refer to it because, as professors, we have been accused of sinning against the light. Of course we have. Over us, too, the wave swept, but I protest against the selection of us for special blame. The other day, in an address on "The Comradeship of Letters" at Turin, President Wilson is reported to have said: "It is one of the great griefs of this war that the universities of the Central Empires used the thoughts of science to destroy mankind; it is the duty of the universities of these states to redeem science from this disgrace and to show that the pulse of humanity beats in the classroom, and that there are sought out not the secrets of death but the secrets of life." A pious and worthy wish! But once in war a nation mobilizes every energy, and to say that science has been prostituted in discovering means of butchery is to misunderstand the situation. Slaughter, wholesale and unrestricted, is what is sought, and to accomplish this the discoveries of the sainted Faraday and of the gentle Dalton are utilized to the full, and to their several nations scientific men render this service freely, if not gladly. That the mental attitude engendered by science is apt to lead to a gross materialism is a vulgar error. Scientific men, in mufti or in uniform, are not more brutal than their fellows, and the utilization of their discoveries in warfare should not be a greater reproach to them than is our joyous acceptance of their success.