G.— ENGINEERING 139 



rulers. A man becomes a town councillor or a member of parliament 

 without any proper test of his ability to put two and two together or to 

 arrive at a logical conclusion from a given set of premises. No test is 

 imposed for the purpose of seeing whether or not he has the ability to 

 tackle very difficult problems. The kind of mental training required to 

 find the right solution of a difficult economic problem is exactly the same 

 as the kind of training required to tackle engineering problems. How 

 many members of parliament could solve a simultaneous equation with 

 three unknowns ? And yet they are paid ;(^400 per annum to solve 

 problems involving many more unknowns. How many of them have the 

 most elementary knowledge of the laws they are amending ? When 

 they voted for the Law of Property Act, 1925, how many of them under- 

 stood it ? How many of them have the most elementary knowledge of 

 the scientific facts upon which the manufacture of wealth is based or have 

 the organising ability that is necessary to carry through a great project ? 

 There are, of course, exceptions, but as a class, apart from lack of educa- 

 tion, they have the wrong mentality. 



An example will make my meaning clear. A certain factory receives 

 an order to equip an electric railway in Australia. The carrying out of 

 the order involves the manufacture of many hundreds of different kinds 

 of machines, instruments and apparatus. Each machine and instrument 

 consists of many parts made of special materials and manufactured by 

 processes requiring expert knowledge. A good deal of abstruse mathe- 

 matical calculation is involved in the design. The directions to the shops 

 are contained in hundreds of documents and drawings, each compiled 

 after intense attention to detail. Thousands of workmen are engaged, 

 each directed by these minute instructions, and in a few months the various 

 parts take shape. They move along pre-arranged channels until they are 

 assembled and the machines and instruments are tested. These are 

 shipped to Australia, taken up country, each to its appointed place, to 

 power house, sub-station, or locomotive. On a certain day the equipment 

 starts up. Thousands of passengers are carried successfully and we have 

 this wonderful addition to our civilisation. Now I assert that if the men 

 who form an average committee of our House of Commons were in charge 

 of that factory, whatever might have been their previous training and 

 whatever facilities they might have had to gain experience, they would 

 make a dismal failure of the whole thing. The reason would be that they 

 are not engineer ingly minded, and that is the reason why they make a 

 failure of state management. They can talk but they cannot do things 

 successfully. They do not know their job. They have not the minds 

 that can think out intricate problems. They have not faith in the obtain- 

 ing of good by logical procedure to that end. They are not as a class 

 eudemonistic. 



The very parliamentary procedure which they permit to hinder them 

 condemns them. Every session for years past there have been desirable 

 measures which no one has expected to get through, because, as it was 

 said, there was not time. A large business house in its annual conference 

 with salesmen assembled from all parts of a continent can get through 

 more work and come to more useful decisions in two weeks than are 



