CHAPTER I 



THE AGE OF THE ENGINEER 



THE world has come to the Age of the Engineer — 

 when engineering is statesmanship and states- 

 manship is engineering. The demand is for 

 facts, for exact information, and then for the appli- 

 cation of the facts by genuinely scientific methods. 

 The end sought is efficiency not merely, but something 

 infinitely more important — the extension of man's 

 promised dominion over the earth, with an unimagined 

 increase in the security, the prosperity and the happi- 

 ness of mankind. 



Men can live — have lived for ages — by the crude, 

 primitive, even wasteful use of Nature's resources ; but 

 infinitely more of them can live, and live infinitely better 

 than men ever lived before, when they shall have learned 

 to make the most of their opportunities and environ- 

 ment. This is the key to the future, which is to be 

 better than the past. Only the high spirit of the 

 trained engineer, dwelling in the upper air of disinter- 

 ested service, is equal to the obligations of leadership 

 in a day when this fundamental truth is realized. 



These are facts which the world is just beginning 

 to see; but they developed very early in the course of 

 the inquiry set on foot by Secretary Lane in the interest 

 of rural reconstruction. It was perfectly plain that 

 all the great mistakes that had attended the develop- 



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