The New Decalogue of Science
An Open Letter from the Biologist to the Statesman
By Albert Edward Wiggam
Sir: As you know, biology is the science of life. Statesmanship is the art, and may some day become the science of the control of life. Now, you control life on a vaster scale than any other human being. What you say or think or do about life is, therefore, the most important thing in the whole world. You are in a very real sense the arbiter of the destiny of the race. I regret to say, however, that there are five or six thousand volumes and special investigations dealing with this subject of life of which, it seems, you have never heard; or if you have heard of them, they have had a singularly slight influence upon your policy and action.
You are familiar with some ten commandments which God wrote on tables of stone and gave to one of your predecessors as a true chart of statesmanship. He later added two supplements known as the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount. You have failed conspicuously to put these ancient principle into practice, and it may surprise your Excellency to learn that God is still revealing to mankind now and revolutionary aspects of these principles of statesmanship and life. However, instead of using table of stone, prophecies, visions, and dreams, He has in this day given men the microscope, the telescope, the spectroscope, and the chemist's test tube to enable them to make their own revelations. And these new instruments have not only added an enormous range of new commandments, an entirely new decalogue to man's moral code, but they have supplied a technic for putting the old ones into effect. Men have never been really righteous because they did not know how. They
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