850 JOURNAL OF I'ORKSTRV 



gan ; his superintendent on our job had work at CorneU and regrets 

 that he did not stay for a degree, and the man whom our httle city 

 hires to inspect or watch, day by day. over the work, as to its progress 

 and quahty, is a graduate engineer. But the two husky, hard-fisted 

 men who really do the difficult and painstaking work in the laying of 

 ])ipes and valves, making the proper joints, etc., are not school-bred 

 men, but workmen with skill, experience, and much ability and judg- 

 ment, and as I stand by, now and then, it seems as if a twinkle comes 

 into the eyes of these men when they ask the young engineer, "Is it 

 all right, boss ?" At their homes and in conversation among themselves 

 they do not always hold the young engineer very high, and many a 

 newspaper man has gathered material for his nonsense talk on the self- 

 made man by listening to these men. These unschooled men — or. 

 l)etter, these men whose schooling was in the doing — have not always 

 Ijeen properly appreciated, but they are gradually (now rather rapidly) 

 coming into their own. The engineer of experience respects them ver}- 

 highly, and the respect is mutual. This is as it should be, and let us 

 hope it may be so in forestry. When the school-bred architects and 

 engineers have made designs for our large building, then the contractor 

 comes, and his superintendent and foreman set to work with their 

 men — the few engineers in their office made work for many on the 

 ground and in the building. 



Some iron-worker, or plumber, or foreman, or even the cement 

 mixer, may feel big and think "What would they do without me?" 

 but the fact remains that they are all needed, each in his place, and it 

 seems far sillier for the hod-carrier to consider himself indispensable 

 than the engineer, even though both are needed. 



That the good foreman, the skillful plumber, etc., should feel a little 

 envy toward the school-bred engineer is quite natural ; to him the 

 engineer's pay looks big (and his own has been out of proportion, small 

 in the past) and his life easy; in comfortable quarters, in a good suit 

 of clothes, the goal of most men. 



Now and then some industry or some establishment feels that the 

 school-bred engineer, chemist, etc., is not needed, or may be dispensed 

 with ; the methods which built up the concern are "good enough" and 

 are followed. But sooner or later trouble comes. Our paper-makers 

 today are just beginning to see that the workman-foreman-superintend- 

 ent never gets beyond the methods of the past. Coal gas was made in 

 the "good old way" of wastefulness, all over the world, until the school- 

 bred man showed them the ways whereby the by-products pay both for 

 the coal and work and leave gas as pure profit. The story of the last 



