The whole nation's welfare demands, indeed, that our public be
enlightened in the matter of the relation of chemistry to our national
life. Thus, if our commerce and our industries are to survive the
terrific competition that must follow the reestablishment of peace, our
public must insist that its representatives in Congress preserve that
independence in chemical manufacturing which the war has forced upon us
in the matter of dyes, of numberless invaluable remedies to cure and
relieve suffering; in the matter, too, of hundreds of chemicals, which
our industries need for their successful existence.
Unless we are independent in these fields, how easily might an
unscrupulous competing nation do us untold harm by the mere device, for
instance, of delaying supplies, or by sending inferior materials to this
country or by underselling our chemical manufacturers and, after the
destruction of our chemical independence, handicapping our industries as
they were in the first year or two of the great war! This is not a mere
possibility created by the imagination, for our economic history
contains instance after instance of the purposeful undermining and
destruction of our industries in finer chemicals, dyes and drugs by
foreign interests bent on preserving their monopoly.
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