It must not be forgotten that our scholar in war worked under two powerful stimuli, neither of them operative under ordinary conditions. Although he was out of his accustomed setting, working with strange people and at strange tasks, nevertheless the realization of the national need and the joy of feeling an identification with the forces facing the adversary tended to produce that fine frenzy which enables a man to do better than he knows how. Then, for the first time in history, the scholar had unlimited funds. It is an interesting subject for speculation as to how he can ever go back to the limits of academic appropriations. It is to be feared that in many cases he will not, but will turn to industrial enterprises instead. If, however, there was an unlimited supply of funds, there was a corresponding deficiency in time, and the scholar who could not speed up to meet the new conditions had little chance to make his mark. The men who failed in war because they could not grasp the significance of the time factor may, however, still be eminently useful in peace. On the other hand, the training which some of our scholars received in meeting another war-time condition is likely to have an important influence upon the relation of scholarship to industry. Many a scholar found for the first time that to meet a given condition a beautiful laboratory solution may be no solution at all, that the answer, to be effective, must meet the peculiar condition of quantity production.
The merit of the Liberty engine, of which I have already spoken, lies not alone in the excellence of its design, admirable as that is, but in the fact that it is so constructed that we could produce fifteen hundred of them in a single week. Or, to take another example, in 1914 we made all together eighteen hundred field glasses in this country. Last winter, thanks to the coöperation of the scholars in the chemistry of glass and in the field of optics on the one hand, and of the experts in quantity production on the other, we were making thirty-five hundred pairs of field glasses each week. There are many other adaptations of scholarship to industry that are awaiting similar practical solutions. One of our most distinguished scholars in physics has said publicly that the day is past when one can defend any distinction between pure and applied science. One might as well try to distinguish between pure and applied virtue.