Part 20

The Government was anxious to encourage thrift, but the development of the Friendly Societies was impeded for a time by legislation aimed at political conspiracy. The Corresponding Societies Act of 1799 prevented the Friendly Societies from forming a central organization with branches, and the Dorchester Labourers of 1834 discovered the peril into which the ritual of oaths might lead innocent men.

These deterrents were removed by enabling legislation. In 1829 a central authority, the Registrar of Friendly Societies, was appointed to supervise Friendly Societies, and between 1829 and 1875 further privileges and safeguards were conferred. But the Friendly Society Movement throughout the nineteenth century was wholly voluntary. In 1911 the situation was suddenly reversed by the passing of the National Insurance Act.

The Co-operative Societies were more suspect. They crept into legal recognition as the children of the Friendly Society, under the 'frugal investments' clause of the Act of 1846, being compelled by the legal prejudice against association in restraint of trade to adopt this unnatural mother. Their real nature was recognized in 1852, when they were brought under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act, and in 1862, when they were granted the boon of limited liability. But the accident of their legal origin still survives; for they are regulated to-day by the Industrial and Provident Societies Act of 1893. The Co-operative Movement is now drawing closer to politics, following the lead of most of the continental countries, notably Belgium and Germany. Though we cannot say that there is any indication of the State taking over the movement, we may note that the growth of municipal trading in the 'nineties was, in principle, an application of the consumers' association to monopolies of distribution such as tramways, water, electricity, and gas.

The State was altogether hostile to the growth of the Trade Union. The Charter of Emancipation, won by the guile of Francis Place in 1824, was severely curtailed in 1825. Huskisson depicted in lurid terms the tyranny of a military trades unionism, 'representing a systematic union of the workers of many different trades'. It was a 'kind of federal republic', whose mischievous operations, if not checked, would keep the commercial classes 'in constant anxiety and fear about their interests and property'. Arnold, of Rugby, a decade later wrote of them in the same strain: 'you have heard, I doubt not, of the trades unions; a fearful engine of mischief, ready to riot or assassinate; and I see no counteracting power.'

The counteracting power was their own weakness. The early militancy burnt itself out, and was succeeded at the turn of the century by a 'New Spirit and a New Model'. The new spirit was anti-militant, and the new model was a trade union representing the élite of the skilled trades. The Amalgamated Society of Engineers was founded in 1850 and served as a model to the Carpenters, Tailors, Compositors, Iron-founders, Brick-layers, and others. The Trades Unions were now respectable, and in 1867 the State recognized the fact.

The period of collectivism is denoted by the growth of the Labour Party in Parliament, and the increasing part played by the State in industrial disputes and the regulation of wages. The nationalization of railways and the nationalization of mines are burning questions.

4. In all the movements we have described, the spiritual stimulus, the initial drive, and the solid successes have been provided by voluntary association. The State has not been the pioneer of social reform. Such a notion is the mirage of politicians. It has merely registered the insistent demands of organized voluntary effort or given legal recognition to accomplished facts. This is the distinctive note of English social development in the nineteenth century.

FOR REFERENCE

Dicey, Law and Opinion.

Robinson, The Spirit of Association.

Hovell, The Chartist Movement.

Sombart (tr. Epstein), Socialism and the Socialist Movement.

FOOTNOTES:

VIII

ATOMIC THEORIES

PROFESSOR W.H. BRAGG, C.B.E., D.SC., F.R.S.

When a lecture on the progress of Science is given before a conference concerned largely with historical subjects, it is not inappropriate to point out that Science has a history of its own and that its progress makes a connected story. The discovery of new facts is not made in an isolated fashion, nor is it a matter of pure chance, unaffected by what has gone before. On the contrary, scientific progress is made step by step, each new point that is reached forming a basis for further advances. Even the direction of discovery is not entirely in the explorer's control; there is always a next step to be taken and a limited number of possible steps forward from which a choice can be made. The scientific discoverer has to go in the direction in which his discoveries lead him. When discoveries have been made it is possible to think of uses to which they may be put, but in the first instance all discoveries are made without any knowledge whatever of what use may afterwards be made of them.

Consequently scientific progress is a quite orderly advance, not a spasmodic collection of facts, and in the truest sense of the word it has a history. In order that opportunities for this steady progress may be provided it is very important that this point should be fully appreciated. Every one, for example, is vaguely conscious that science played a great part in the War. As a consequence the number of students of science has greatly increased; manufacturing firms are awakening to the fact that they must pay more attention to scientific development and are founding research laboratories. It is very important that this awakened attention should be well informed, and for that reason it cannot be pointed out too often that the scientific work which has been the basis of all material progress can only be turned to definite material ends in the last stages of its development. Fundamentally everything rests on the pure attempt to gain knowledge without any idea of the use to which it may subsequently be put. Without pure science there is no applied science at all. It is quite right in my opinion that the researcher in pure science should have with him the hope that what he does may one day be of direct benefit to others. But it is probable that he does not in his own mind confine the idea of possible uses to such material matters as I have mentioned above and as are so prominent at present. He believes that his work has a less material side whose value need not be explained to the present audience.

In the general line of progress it is natural to find that there are certain broad roads along which the main advance has been directed. Students of physics and chemistry and the subjects which are allied to them find that they are in general considering either matter, or electricity, or energy. I make this classification, not from any philosophical point of view, but simply for present convenience. The first important principle to which I would like to draw your attention is that each of these things can be measured quantitatively. If we accept the weight of a substance as an indirect measure of the amount of matter present, then we all know we can express the amount of matter in any given body in terms of a fundamental unit, like a pound or a gramme; and the idea has been put to immemorial use. In later years we have learnt that electricity itself is also a quantity and that the amount of electricity which stands on an electrified body, or flows past a given point in an electric conductor, as for example the wire connected to an electric light, can be expressed arithmetically in terms of some unit. Instruments are made for the purpose of measuring quantities of electricity in terms of the legal standard. It is one of the functions of a Government Institution, like the National Physical Laboratory, to test such instruments and report on their accuracy. International conferences have been held for the purpose of reducing these units to as small a number as possible so that people may be able to trade less wastefully and more conveniently, so that also the barriers between peoples may be broken down and the interchange of ideas as well as of materials may be made more easily. Without an arrangement of this kind it would be impossible to carry on industrial life in which use is made of electricity. It would be as difficult as to hold a market without the use of weights and scales, more difficult, in fact, since anyone can estimate the size of a piece of cloth or the amount of corn in a sack, but no one has a natural sense by which he can estimate an amount of electricity.

In just the same way energy can be measured as a quantity in terms of a fundamental unit. The discovery that this was so was made by Joule and others towards the middle of the nineteenth century, and lit the road for further advance as a dark street is lit by the sudden turning-up of the lamps. All modern industry rests on this principle. We are now so accustomed to the idea that energy is a quantity that we can hardly realize a time when it was merely a vague term. If we want an illustration of how thoroughly we have grasped this idea let us remember that when we pay our electric-light bill we pay so much money for so many units of energy supplied; for so much energy, let us note, not for so much electricity, since we take into account not only the actual amount of electricity driven through our house wires, but also the magnitude of the force which is there to drive it. Energy exists in many forms: energy of motion, heat, gravitational energy, chemical energy, radiation, and so on. In the transformations of energy which are continually occurring in all natural processes, there is never any change in the total amount of energy. This is the famous principle of the Conservation of Energy. Sometimes it is stated in the form 'Perpetual motion is impossible'.

One of the most important forms of energy is radiation. The constant outpouring by the sun of energy in this form is vital to us. The fact was obvious long ago and that is one of the reasons why light and heat have interested students of science in all ages.

There exist then three main subjects of study--matter, electricity, and energy. These themselves and their mutual relations have been, and are, the principal objects of interest to the scientific student, and from our strivings to understand them we have learnt most of what we know. All three are quantities and all are expressible in terms of units.

Now there is one point which I have thought would especially interest you. A very remarkable tendency of modern discovery shows more and more clearly that not only are these things quantities which we can express in units of our own choosing, but that Nature herself has already chosen units for them. The natural unit does not, of course, bear any exact connexion with our own. This being so, it must be of the utmost importance that we should know what these natural units are and so be able to understand what Nature is ready to tell us. Nature has chosen to speak in a certain language; we must get to know that language.

In the first place we know surely that there are natural units of matter. This was the great discovery made by Dalton in the beginning of the nineteenth century. When he found that each of the known elements, such as copper or oxygen or carbon, consisted ultimately of atoms, all the atoms of any one element being alike, he laid the foundation on which the huge structure of modern chemistry has been raised. The chemist takes one or more atoms of one element, one or more of another, and may be of a third or fourth, and he puts them together into a compound which we call a molecule. The molecule for example of ordinary salt contains always one atom of chlorine and one of sodium. Chlorine and sodium are elements, salt is a compound. Six atoms of carbon and six of hydrogen put together in a certain way make benzene. In the same way every substance that we meet is capable of analysis, showing ultimately the molecules as made up, according to a definite plan, of so many atoms of the various elements. In analytical chemistry molecules are dissected in order to discover the mode of their building; in synthetic chemistry the atoms are put together to make a molecule which is already known to have, or even may be anticipated to have, certain properties. This is the work of the chemist. Sometimes enormous forces are concerned in this pulling apart and putting together, witness the terrific power of modern explosives. But the same kind of handling by the chemist may be devoted to the delicate construction of a molecule which gives a certain colour to the dyer's vat and so pleases the eye that the great cloth industries feel the consequence, and nations themselves are affected by the flow of trade. After all, since the processes of the physical world operate ultimately through the power and properties of molecules, it is not surprising that the chemist's work in these and numberless other ways has such tremendous influence in the world.

Here then by the recognition of the units of matter which Nature has chosen for herself it has been possible to do great things.

It should be observed that the atom, in spite of its name, is not something which is incapable of all further division; it is only incapable of retaining its properties on division. When an atom of radium breaks down in the unique operation during which its singular properties are manifested, it dies as radium and becomes two atoms, one of helium, the other of a different and rare substance. It will interest you to know that the airships of the future are expected to be filled with this non-inflammable helium.

The discovery of the atomic nature of electricity came later. Faraday established the fact that in certain processes there was more than a hint that electricity was always present in multiples of a definite unit. In the process called electrolysis the electric current is driven across a cell full of liquid containing molecules of some substance. When the electricity passes there is a loosening of the bonds that bind together the atoms of the molecule, and a separation; atoms of one kind travel with the electricity across the cell and are deposited where the current leaves the cell; the other kind travel the opposite way. In this way for example we deposit silver on metal objects in electro-plating processes, or separate out the purest copper for certain electrical purposes. The striking thing which Faraday discovered was that the number of atoms deposited always bore a very simple relation to the quantity of electricity that passes. The same current passing in succession through cells containing different kinds of molecules broke up the same number of molecules in each cell. It was as if in each electrolytic cell atoms of matter and atoms of electricity travelled together. The movement of an atom meant the simultaneous movement of a definite quantity of electricity. Electricity was, so to speak, done up in little equal parcels, and an atom of matter on the move, which was termed an ion, or wanderer, carried, not a vaguely defined amount of electricity, but one of these definite parcels.

It was not, however, until the later years of the nineteenth century that the natural unit of electricity was manifested by itself and without a carrier. At a famous address to the British Association at York in 1881 Sir William Crookes described the first marvellous experiments in which this feat had been accomplished, though there was still to come a long controversy before the interpretation was clearly accepted. It is now definitely established that there is a fundamental atom of electricity which we now call the electron. As we all know electrification is of two kinds--a positive and a negative. The electron is of the negative kind. There does not appear to be a corresponding positive atom of electricity, or at least not one that is so singular in its properties as the electron. Electrons go to the making of all atoms, just as atoms go to the making of molecules. The atom which is neutral, that is, shows neither positive nor negative electrification, must contain positive electricity in some form to balance the electrons which we know it contains. When we strip an atom, as we know how to do, of one or more of these electrons, the remainder is positively charged. The positive ion is any sort of an atom or molecule which has become positively electrified in this way. An atom which has become positive by the loss of one or more of its electrons exercises a force on any spare electrons in its neighbourhood or on any atom carrying a spare electron. When there are large numbers of atoms seeking in this way to become neutral once more, as occurs often in Nature, the forces generated may be tremendous. They are shown, for example, in the lightning-stroke. But indeed it would seem that all the chemical forces of which we have already spoken depend ultimately upon the electric state of the atom concerned.