grave question. For it must be remembered that the child of a working man or of a small tradesman, whose abilities and application have enabled him to rise to the level of the highest education, does not as a rule return to the employments and surroundings of his parents. And the consequence of this must be, that the various industries at the lower end of the social scale,--those, too, I may add, which are directly concerned with the production of material wealth,—will be continually starved of their best minds, and be thereby impaired in their efficiency and productive power; and the classes which are engaged in them will be less able to raise themselves in the social scale, as classes.

If this be true, the further question remains, Can the social advantage of raising the best minds of every class of the community to the top, be regarded as in any way economically a set-off to the detriment accruing to the particular industries from which they are withdrawn? Would not the working classes be able to do much more for the economic progress of the community, even than they do at present, if they could keep their best men amongst them, instead of being helped by public money to surrender them into the ranks of classes who do not share their feelings, and to whom they are at present in temporary opposition?

IV

THE ENDOWMENT OF RESEARCH A PRODUCTIVE FORM OF EXPENDITURE.1

BY CHARLES EDWARD APPLETON, D.C.L., Fellow of St. John's
College, Oxford.

THE relations of scientific research to the production and distribution of wealth, form the subject of a chapter in Political Economy which has yet to be written. All that can be done in the present paper is to mark out some of the lines of enquiry which the consideration of this important topic suggests, and to draw those more obvious conclusions which seem to be derived from the application to it of well-known and established principles.

In the first place, then, the investigation of truth, considered as a vocation, is an instance of that class of industry whose economical condition seems to be one of inherent and permanent incapability to maintain itself. The reason of this is, that knowledge, which is its product, has no marketable value apart from its applications to the useful arts or to education. When a man

I Reprinted, with additions, from the Fortnightly Review, October 1874. See p. 67.

has made a discovery in science he has the choice of keeping it to himself or of publishing it. The former case we need not now consider; but if he publishes it, what may have cost him years of labour can be bought for a few shillings. It is true, that by publishing, he multiplies his product; and if he could find a demand in the whole or a large portion of the population, he might make his publication profitable; but not at all to an extent that would remunerate him for the time and expense which he had devoted to making his discovery. In any existing community the only demand for new knowledge, in its raw state so to speak, is to be found in the small body of students like himself, who labour under precisely the same difficulty that he does, viz., that they are devoted to an unremunerative occupation. Nay, more, it is not even to the whole body of the scientific men of the country that he can look for his demand; for, as study becomes more specialised, it is only a very small fraction even of these whose interest it is to buy his discovery. Under these circumstances, the publication of researches becomes not only not a source of remuneration but a loss. The investigator is not only not paid for his observations, but may actually himself have to pay in the first instance for making them known. Compare this case with that of an artist, who spends several years in painting a picture. When it is done, he can sell it for a price, which is more than sufficient to keep him during the same number of years in comparative affluence. But it is scarcely con

ceivable that any alteration, however radical, could be made in the arrangements of society, which could render the labour of scientific discovery of any appreciable pecuniary value to the man engaged in it.

Nor can he hope for any remuneration arising from its application to material arts or to education. In the first place, the application may not be made till after his death; and in the second, if it be applied during his life, a fortune may be made by the patentee and a comfortable income by the educator, but not one fraction of this can by the most ingenious contrivance be made to flow back into the lap of the original discoverer:

Sic vos non vobis, mellificatis apes!

As a consequence of this inherent inability to maintain itself commercially, the pursuit of knowledge has, since the appropriation of its endowments at the Universities by the higher education, supported itself by connexion with some other occupation. This is the reason, for instance, why almost all the learning in this country has been for the most part, since the Reformation, in the hands of the clergy of the Established Church; i.e. of persons who received a public salary and maintenance, to which duties of an indeterminate character were attached. If a benefice was not actually enjoyed, it might well be with certainty looked forward to by any clergyman of moderate literary distinction; and there is no doubt that the decay of zeal in the ministry, which has characterised certain periods in the history

of the Church of England, however much to be deplored in itself, has not unfrequently provided the opportunity for learned and fruitful leisure. Some thirty years ago a book was written by an anonymous author called the Fruit of Endowments; being a list of upwards of two thousand authors who have, from the Reformation to the present time enjoyed prebendal or other non-cure endowments of the Church of England.' (London: McDowall, 1840.) No doubt the names of many of the books put down to the credit of the Church may now raise a smile; and many more would seem to indicate not so much learning or research as the love which theologians proverbially bear to one another. Still, making every allowance for the character and aims of some of the erudition displayed, we find here evidence of real study and of the diligent use of leisure. It is from a survey like this, embracing not only the fellowships at the universities but also the benefices of the Church, that we can best estimate the working of sinecure endowment. If we take the fellowships alone, the evidence seems to tell against such endowments; because, as it can be shown statistically, the universities were starved of their best minds by the superior attractiveness of Church preferment. But if we take the two classes together, bearing in mind the operation of this tendency, we shall, I think, come to the conclusion that the Church afforded a real support to learning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.