Not that no loss has been incurred, nor that no material degree of derangement is to be looked for, but in comparison with what the experience of the war is bringing to the Europeans, the case of the Americans should still be the best there is to be looked for and the best is always good enough, perforce. So it becomes a question, what the Americans will do with the best opportunity which the circumstances offer. And on their conduct of their affairs in this bearing turns not only their own fortune in respect of the interests of science and scholarship, but in great measure the fortunes of their overseas friends and co-partners in the republic of learning as well.
The fortunes of war promise to leave the American men of learning in a strategic position, in the position of a strategic reserve, of a force to be held in readiness, equipped and organized to meet the emergency that so arises, and to retrieve so much as may be of those assets of scholarly equipment and personnel that make the substantial code of Western civilization.
And so it becomes a question of what the Americans are minded to do about it. It is their opportunity, and at the same time it carries the gravest responsibility that has yet fallen on the nation; for the spiritual fortunes of Christendom are bound up with the line of policy which this surviving contingent of American men of learning shall see fit to pursue. They are not all that is to be left over when the powers of decay shall begin to retire, nor are they, perhaps, to be the best and most valuable contingent among these prospective survivors; but they occupy a strategic position, in that they are today justly to be credited with disinterested motives, beyond the rest, at the same time that they command those material resources without which the quest of knowledge can hope to achieve little along the modern lines of inquiry. By force of circumstances they are thrown into the position of keepers of the ways and means whereby the republic of learning is to retrieve its fortunes. By force of circumstances they are in a position, if they so choose, to shelter many of those masters of free inquiry whom the one-eyed forces of reaction and partisanship overseas will seek to suppress and undo; and they are also in a position, if they so choose, to install something in the way of an international clearing house and provisional headquarters for the academic community throughout that range of civilized peoples whose goodwill they now enjoy -- a place of refuge and a place of meeting, confluence and dissemination for those views and ideas that live and move and have their being in the higher learning.
There is, therefore, a work of reconstruction to be taken care of in the realm of learning, no less than in the working scheme of economic and civil institutions. And as in this other work of reconstruction, so here; if it is to be done without undue confusion and blundering it is due to be set afoot before the final emergency is at hand. But there is the difference that, whereas the framework of civil institutions may still, with passable success, be drawn on national lines and confined within the national frontiers; and while the economic organization can also, without fatal loss, be confined in a similar fashion, in response to short-sighted patriotic preconceptions; the interests of science, and therefore of the academic community, do not run on national lines and can not similarly be confined within geographical or political boundaries. In the nature of the case these interests are of an international character and can not be taken care of except by unrestricted collusion and collaboration among the learned men of all those peoples whom it may concern.
Yet there is no mistaking the fact that the spirit of invidious patriotism has invaded these premises, too, and promises to bungle the outcome; which makes the needed work of reconstruction all the more difficult and all the more imperative. Unhappily, the state of sentiment on both sides of the line of cleavage will presumably not admit a cordial understanding and co-operation between the German contingent and the rest of the civilized nations, for some time to come. But the others are in a frame of mind that should lend itself generously to a larger measure of co-operation in this respect now than ever before.
So it may not seem out of place to offer a suggestion, tentatively and under correction, looking to this end. Abeginning may well be made by a joint enterprise among American scholars and universities for the installation of a freely endowed central establishment where teachers and students of all nationalities, including Americans with the rest, may pursue their chosen work as guests of the American academic community at large, or as guests of the American people in the character of a democracy of culture. There should also be nothing to hinder the installation of more than one of these academic houses of refuge and entertainment; nor should there be anything to hinder the enterprise being conducted on such terms of amity, impartiality and community interest as will make recourse to it an easy matter of course for any scholars whom its opportunities may attract.
The same central would at the same time, and for the time being, take care of those channels of communication throughout the academic world that have been falling into enforced neglect under the strain of the war. So also should provision be made, perhaps best under the same auspices, for the (transient) taking-over of the many essential lines of publicity and publication on which the men engaged in scholarly and scientific inquiry have learned to depend, and which have also been falling into something of a decline during the war.
