Endowment of Industrial Research

Abstract

IN an article contributed to the Nineteenth Century for November, Mr. H. W. J. Stone reviews the present position of the research associations in Great Britain at the exhaustion of the Million Fund, while industrial conditions are still difficult. Although in the current year the vote of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research has been increased by £70,000 to enable it to facilitate the work of these associations, the existence of most of them remains precarious. Mr. Stone uses the recent vicissitudes of the Research Association of British Rubber Manufacturers as an example of the evils attending our present haphazard methods of financing such industrial research. He urges that true economy and efficiency in industrial research require a settled programme subject to long-range review, together with a stabilised system of finance, based on levies, block grants or similar expedients for a terrn of years, so as to place the industrial research associations in the position of institutions existing on fixed endowments, the programmes and endowments being reviewed periodically by Parliament at intervals of not less than five or more than ten years. In place of a compulsory levy, he suggests the allocation of £2,000,000 from the new tariff revenue, estimated at £24,500,000 in the current financial year, for the endowment of industrial research. By the allocation from this new revenue of that sum for ten years to create a capital fund of 20 millions, invested to produce a steady and regular income, industrial research would at once be stabilised and at the end of ten years endowed for all time. Mr. Stone ably pleads the value of research in periods of depression, its place in national recovery and the need of ensuring that tariffs do not foster industrial sloth and inefficiency.