whom the Congress could draw if it would. Some Congressmen already use the valuable reports issued by this service.

Just two major reforms are needed; a scientific organization of the committees and a scientific use by those committees of up-to-date expert creative knowledge.

To govern any country there has to be an informed and organized initiative somewhere. If legislatures do not provide it, executive branches must-and should. The conclusion is clear. The only way to combat the dictatorial tendency in the world is to modernize the democratic legislative process.

Fellow citizens, the candidates for the Congress will tell you many things about how they are going to make all things better at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, at the end where the executive agencies are. You tell them, in return, just one thing. You tell them:

We want to hear how you are going to make a better Capitol Hill.

[From American Journal of Pharmacy, October 1944]

THE MARRIAGE OF SCIENCE TO GOVERNMENT

(By T. SWANN HARDING)

The American public, in the integument of Congress assembled, is considering a bill. This provides for making the salaries of Federal Government employees subject to garnishment just as are the salaries of people employed outside Government. The proposition is certainly sound in principle so Congress decides to vote favorably. Surely no one would hold that the employees of Federal Government should have special privilege in the matter of evading debts.

But, in the agreement on soundness of principle, there has been a tendency to overlook the huge volume of red tape and the involved bureaucratic procedure passage of the legislation would promote. There would have to be a special unit in each Government agency merely to handle this one matter, to receive and record processes, to conduct a great volume of correspondence, and to keep an account of all attachments and garnishments.

Persons would have to be employed also to check each name on each pay roll each pay day to be absolutely certain that no outstanding attachment or garnishment existed for the name of the employee. Since more employees are scattered in the field than work in Washington, this would mean that experts must gain familiarity with the garnishment law of each of the States. The difficulties of administration would be enormous.

Few Members of Congress are administrative experts. Few, if any, congressional committees have expert advisers on anything. In time some of the very persons who voted for such a bill would grow to hate the expense involved in its enforcement and would stand to denounce the encroaching bureaucracy it created.

Certainly those who follow the present legislators in the quick turnover at the Capitol can scarcely be expected necessarily to favor the results of this or any other bill and will almost certainly demand cuts

in expenditures and units predicated on their own idea of how things should be. But Congress has a job on its hands trying to understand technical matters.

The other day the writer of these lines, who was for a considerable period of time a research chemist, visited a chemical laboratory which formed one small unit in a single huge department. His object was to talk to the scientists and find out what was going on and to report these findings. But he was persistently cascaded with technical nomenclature and found it extremely difficult to work his way through this fog to simple factual statements.

However, quite suddenly, he ran upon a technical man in a difficult and complicated field who was an interpreter, who realized that the writer had forgotten more chemistry than he ever knew, and who replied to his lay questions with enlightening lay answers. It developed that this man also could interpret his own science to other scientists in terms they could comprehend and that he could interpret one scientist in terms another could grasp.

He was, therefore, a very valuable man. For the day of the specialist has not only dawned; it is at bright noontide. Not only is it quite impossible for a botanist speaking his own language to be understood by a physicist who speaks his, and vice versa—it is also impossible for a chemist in one specialized field to understand a chemist in a related but different specialized field, so long as both speak their own technical language.

In the same manner it is futile to imagine that a lawyer, which is what a legislator generally is, can fully comprehend difficult problems in science, administration, and finance presented to him in the technical languages of these specialties. Yet Congress, essentially without technical advisers, attempts to understand complicated problems in widely separated but highly specialized fields.

For it is up to congressional committees and then to the Congress as a whole to grasp and decide upon the justice of appropriations for such projects as:

The use of endocrines to increase egg production; the role of Johne's disease, coccidiosis, and worm parasites in cattle production; the production of riboflavin from milk byproducts; spot treatment with soil fumigants for the control of root-knot nematode on melons; the use of mass releases of Macrocentrus ancylivorus to control oriental fruit moth injury; and the conversion of lactose into methyl acrylate to be polymerized with butadiene for the production of synthetic rubber. How would you like to decide upon the wisdom of these projects and the expenditures involved? Members of Congress are often accused of asking silly and irrelevant questions when the continuance of such projects is proposed. How can they ask any other kind of questions than those which represent desperate attempts to piece together their largely nonspecialized knowledge and the highly technical and intensely specialized scientific knowledge of those who explain the projects to them often in the most esoteric language?

In its efforts Congress is pushed around by what are called lobbies. These lobbies represent capital, labor, industry, agriculture, and other special interests. The lobby of the public is conspicuous by its absence. No one represents the ordinary run of citizens except a few harried, frustrated individuals whose half-hysterical desperation gets

them cataloged as cranks. Scientists, who have vast knowledge, speak a language legislators do not understand—and scientists often do not, either!

The great need for what has been called an institute of science pears here. This agency would be an over-all organization, a sort of strategically located general staff of scientists. It would be a clearing house for all Government scientific projects and knowledge. It would in no sense be dictatorial or represent an effort at regimentation. But it would seek to channelize and regularize all the farflung scientific work that must be carried on by modern government. It would evaluate this work and interpret it in terms understood by legislators and other laymen who need to have it made plain to them in ordinary language. It would supply special technical staffs of scientific specialists to advise any branch of government-executive, legislative or judicial-that needed such services. It would supervise and plan types of social and economic experimentation that we now tend to undertake at haphazard if at all.

When we citizens dislike something Congress has done we usually indulge in denunciations of Congress, or else of the expenditures and bureaucratic institutions that have had to be created in response to actions taken by Congress. Through pressure groups we slowly insist, for example, that Congress create all the far-flung establishments of a great institution like the Department of Agriculture which, under wartime conditions, rather naturally takes over in the food field.

Then if the institution does not operate exactly to suit us we, and often Congress as well, denounce this, our own creation, without any very clear ideas about its replacement. We have no clear ideas largely because we lack the experimental approach when it comes to such matters, hence verifiable knowledge about them does not exist. The only effective way in which we can make our wishes felt by Congress is almost too complicated and hopeless for us to undertake.

It would require us to quit talking about our rights as citizens for a while and to cease aimless criticism, while assuming our duties. and responsibilities. We should have to acquire understanding of what goes on. We should have to organize, vote in the primaries, see that the right Congressmen are elected, and then have our own powerful lobby in Washington to prevent our representatives from forgetting us when subjected to the pressure of other powerful lobbies.

The fatal defect here is, however, that we have little or no scientific knowledge about how, for instance, banks should be run, how the monetary system should be set up, how government should serve industry or agriculture or public health. The institutions we have usually do valuable and often extremely effective work, but they have largely been improvised.

Look into the history of agriculture again. The Department of Agriculture came into existence in Lincoln's administration almost by inadvertence. A few Commissioners of Patents had been much interested in agriculture and they had been hammering away for a quarter of a century to the effect that the Federal Government should set up an agency to serve agriculture. Most of them were gentlemen farmers; and gentlemen farmers in general, the fellows who belonged to the agricultural societies, attended the agricultural museums and fairs, and subscribed to the existing agricultural journals, backed them up.

In other words there was a lobby. Indeed, it crystallized into a sort of United States agricultural society which became a spearhead and finally induced the Secretary of the Interior to include a plea for an agricultural bureau in his annual report. Lincoln, who was in no sense a farmer or even an agrarian philosopher, reproduced the plea almost verbatim in his message to Congress. Congress passed the act required because the southern delegation had vanished and there was, where the opposition concentrated.

But no one sat down and thought out a plan for this new Department. Its status was anomalous, after futile debate decided its head should not have Cabinet status but should be a mere commissioner. No New Deal was proposed and no far-sighted preparations for the future were made. As a result the Department just shambled along its own way for years, often headed by political appointees of quite other interests. Only gradually and by accretion of congressional statutes did the Department become what it is today.

One reason such planning could not be undertaken was, and still is, that we are lax in social experimentation. It should be possible to run small-scale experiments in social science and economics to see how things work, just as research laboratories run first laboratory and then pilot-plant-scale experiments.

For instance, take the sort of thing that happened when the subsistence homesteads were set up. The idea sprouted in the mind of M. L. Wilson, not Rexford Tugwell to whom it is so often erroneously attributed. A lot of the homesteads failed miserably. The entire project was expensive if you want to look at it in a profit-and-loss waywhich would be very foolish. For this was scientific experimentation, like a great many other things carried on by Federal Government in recent years, and the value of experiments arises from what is found out, not from the success of a particular experiment per se.

If you want to know what was found out in this instance get A Place On Earth, by Russell Lord and Paul H. Johnstone, from the United States Department of Agriculture. It is a critical appraisal of subsistence homesteads. It tells in simple, highly readable language what was found out. By reading it anyone who wanted to set up subsistence homesteads in the future could discover many things that should not be done and many that must be done. The thing would not be so expensive next time.

In the same way through the Institute of Science (if we had one) experiments could be run on the best method of devising income-tax blanks and of collecting income taxes, of running banks and post offices, and of providing aid to specialized groups of citizens who need protection or assistance in any of a wide variety of ways. Government housing projects, food-distribution problems, industrial and commercial standards, and a thousand and one things concerned with our daily lives could be subjected to serious planned experimentation.

To be sure, a Greenbelt housing project may have lost 10 million dollars or 20 million. What of it, if thereby you have found out how not to plan a Greenbelt in the future? What of it, if you have discovered how it should be planned, what kind of people should live in it, what income level they should have for homes of particular prices, what social or community organization should be undertaken and, above all, what should not?

We can experiment in group medicine plans, in crop insurance—an experiment right now being permitted to lapse-in matters concerned with matrimony, divorce, and the care of the hopeless children who spring from certain weird, feckless, and ghastly marriages. We could experiment with individual schools and entire systems of education, with the provision of specific monetary or other aids to farmers, with the control of frauds or public utilities or business enterprise. We could even experiment with forms of enterprise, deciding thereby which should be governmental and which in private hands.

Our Institute of Science would gradually decode and reinterpret the findings in terms that our legislators and we ourselves could understand. It would maintain codified bodies of information on all topics of importance. Then we as citizens could assume our responsibilities in full knowledge and our legislative bodies would have expert advice and reservoirs of scientific knowledge for their guidance. The place of the expert in government would be regularized with full preservation of democratic process and institutions.

To expect Congress with haphazard advice to act wisely on rural rehabilitation, lend-lease, farm bankruptcy, cotton production, reclamation, the price of hogs, price control in general, the management of property, subsidies, taxation, synthetic fuels, petroleum reserves, the dairy industry's problems, the tariff, property requisition, personnel economy, and so on-is just too much. Some means must be devised for putting the insight and knowledge of the expert to work on such matters without necessarily giving scientists ultimate political power.

Such a method is outlined here. We shall have eventually to evolve some such system or our democracy will simply fall to pieces under the impacts of special interests and scientific specialization. Now is the time to plan something better before postwar crises catch us unprepared. Thus we shall restrict the field of opinion and authority, and expand that in which verifiable scientific knowledge guides and directs

our actions.

[From National Planning Association Planning Pamphlet No. 39, January 1945] STRENGTHENING THE CONGRESS 1

(By ROBERT HELLER, Business Management Engineer)

FIVE FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS

1. Because national economic and social problems are growing more complex and because our international role will be more important, the effective functioning of the Federal Government will progressively become more necessary.

2. This increasingly important Federal Government must by all means be a democracy, and in addition it should make it possible for the people to achieve the good things of life through their own initiative.

3. Strengthening Congress is indispensable to the existence of an effective democracy in the United States.

1 Selected excerpts.