100 YEARS AGO

Some fifty years ago Japan was a hermit nation more than five centuries behind the times, to-day she constitutes a new and important factor in the problem of the distribution of the world's commerce. The story of the foreign commerce of Japan since the restoration of imperial authority in 1868 is told by Mr. Yukimasa Hattori... Two remarks towards the end of his paper will show the conclusions to which Mr. Hattori has come. “Japan must rely on industrial development rather than on agriculture, and must try to excel in the quality of goods produced rather than in quantity.” “Japan possesses all the advantages necessary to make her a great manufacturing country. Her people possess exceptional skill, and labour is relatively cheap: coal is abundant, and the raw material is easily obtainable either at home or in the neighbouring countries.” Those readers who have followed the steps in Japan's development since 1868 will be prepared to agree with Mr. Hattori that his country is but “at the very beginning of beginnings” of what will yet be seen.

From Nature 17 November 1904.

50 YEARS AGO

Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent by Prof. Henry Steele Commager. Like Prof. A. Macbeath's plea for heretics at the British Association meeting in Belfast, the five essays collected in this volume develop the pragmatic argument that the right to dissent, even to be wrong, is an imperative necessity for a society in which science or any other creative activity is to flourish... Prof. H. S. Commager's essays are addressed to an American audience, but quite apart from the evidence they afford that there are those in the United States itself who have a national audience and are not afraid to attack McCarthyism, his refreshing defence of intellectual freedom will appeal to all scientists who welcomed Prof. Macbeath's forthright words. In the accents of Mill rather than of Burke, he argues for the encouragement of the experimental attitude in science, because “if we create a climate of opinion in which scientists fear to be bold and original or if we require that they work only on projects that appear to be of immediate importance to us, we shall end up with scientists and scientific knowledge inadequate to the tasks that we impose upon them”.

From Nature 20 November 1954.