The Daily News. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22. IN HALF A CENTURY.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 191, 22 November 1910, Page 4

The Daily News. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22. IN HALF A CENTURY.

It must occur daily to the man who cares to think that general progress has its basis less in application of the minds of communities than in the application of master minds and individual thought. Nature is chary in her great gifts of mind, and so every community or nation accepts the guidance of units without troubling very much to study the reasons for advancement. No period of the world's history has been so full of the achievements of science, so notable for individual effort, so wonderful in its general progress, as the past half century. The necessitties of to-day were then considered to be figments of the imaginations of cranks. To have told your grandfather that lie might hear your voice while he was in Auckland and you in Wellington would have decided him that you were a very special kind of lunatic, but to-day the wonder of the common telephone has passed away. We take it for granted. The advancement of a I people did not effect the wonder. Individual research and achievement made it possible for the people to advance. We do not worry to any large extent to think of the great discoveries of which Darwin's theory of evolution was the germ. We accept the beneficent, changes science and study have supplied to us, and insensibly take national credit for the work of individuals. When our present middle-aged citizens were children the reason and nature of bodily ills was hardly suspected. Pasteur, the great French physician, was therefore the world's teacher. Every physician, whether eminent or in the ruck, owes some of his skill to Pasteur. Diagnosis of diseases and the saving of life could not be effected in innumerable cases but for Pasteur's genius. We are able to talk with wisdom about the antiseptic treatment of wounds, knowing that septic contamination is due to germs. We should have known nothing about it except for Lister. Lister, therefore, and not the community of medical men, has saved tens of thousands of lives, has made surgical operations infinitely less dangerous and painful.. Lister's discovery applied in one war—the Russo-Jap—-saved twenty thousand good strong lives. The surgeons were the servant of Lister's idea. Had that war occurred less than fifty years ago thousands of men would have died because Lister's theory was then unknown. Individual scientists ever watchful were inspired with the notion that insects were the germ carriers for the tropical diseases which made the tropics uninhabitable to the white man. The community did not understand. Individuals did the thinking. Their intellect commanded communities to fight insect pests, and in the past decade or two immense tracts of tropical countries are safe for the white man and safer for the black. When the citizen of sixty years was a boy at school there was no cable service between Britain and America. Engineering has done more to cohere two great nations than any other means. Daily we touch small buttons and set our machinery in motion, we release a switch and light our houses, our factories, and our offices. Most of us have no conception as to the "why" of electricity. We just accept it, as we accept other benefits giving little thought to the individuals whose ideas revolutionised the world. We have ceased to wonder at the horse-less car taken along the highways by the power in a small electric cable. Half a century ago the "cranks" had hardly begun to form ideas on the subject. The transmission of power developed bv moving water is a modern marvel. Again, most of us know nothing of the why and wherefore of it. We are unthinking beneficiaries in the capital of great ideas, not our own. By study of the infinite forms of life science has increased the productivity of the earth, even extracting from the air the nitrogenous elements necessary for fertilisation. It is profoundly wonderful that remote tillers of the soil understanding nothing of the marvels of nature can be helped by great individuals from the laboratory. The outstanding thought is that the mass is led by the individual, not knowing it is led. The superlative form of conceit is "We lead, others follow." In nearly every walk of life, in all national developments of science, politics, social advancement and achievement, the truth is, "He leads, we follow." The guidance of the individual is over all the earth. No nation, however great, advanced the theory of the electrical constitution of matter, no community gave to the world X-rays, or propounded the truths of radio-acthiity. All these individual achievements are of recent origin, and demonstrate the truth tliat nature selects individuals whose attributes force the advance of nations. Unthinkably great industries have been born during the last half century because Perkin discovered analine dyes. Our immediate forefathers laboriously excavated with blasting powder until individual ideas conceived high explosives. Tt is inconceivable to the man whose ideas are bounded by the size of his bankbalance that the master minds of all 'great research have no cash goal. Tdeas that may transform the world are as likely to germinate in a garret as in a palace. Neither poverty nor riches, nor the bleatings of politicians nor the passage of legislation can destroy or enhance ideas. Ideas are the soil on which achievements flourish. Every professional man. every artisan, every clerk, everv skilled worker, owes most of all to the initial ideas of some remote-in-dividual. The time and the necessity always produce the man or the woman, and no time and no necessity produce rritlerl communities. It is the individual who .presents gifts to the people at large. ITow hopelessly the mass depends on the individual can only be understood by an examination of the great feats of isolated loaders in art and scienoe, politics and commerce.