The Engineer is going to have somewhat the quieting effect upon institutions and upon the spirit of unrest in the people, when he is known to be in control of the great employers and has made them dependent on him, that the matter of fact and rather conclusive taxi meter in a cab has on the man inside, who wants to quarrel with his cabman.
A business world largely in control of men who have the spirit and the technique of engineers will make unrest more awkward, will make the red flag look stranger, feel stranger and lonelier every day.
§ 4. The American Business Sport.
If any man ever again in this world finds like Methuselah, the secret of eternal youth, the secret will be found to consist in being, I suspect, what the best American business man already is—what I would call a fine all-round religious sport.
Sport has certain well-known disadvantages. So has religion. The man who once grasps the secret of modern life as practiced by a really big engineering genius, insists upon having his business allowed all the advantages of sport and religion both.
To have something on which one spends ten hours a day, which has all the advantages without the disadvantages of being a sport, and all the advantages without the disadvantages of being a religion, is a find.
The typical engineer, like any other thorough-going man treats what he does as a sport. That is, he puts his religion for the fun of it into his business. His business becomes the continual lark of making his religion work. He dramatizes in it his belief in human nature and in God, his belief that human nature is not crazy and that God has not been outwitted in allowing so much of it to exist.
It has looked especially reckless during the last four years for God to let human nature try to keep on being human nature any longer. Now is the time of all others, and Germany is now the country of all others, to show with a whole world looking on how essentially sound human nature really is, and how being human (especially being human in a thing which everybody cares about and which everybody notices, like business) really works.
There has never been such a chance dreamed of for a nation before in history, the chance America has now of dramatizing to Germans, and dramatizing through the Germans to everybody, an idea of business efficiency that shall be in itself not only in its spirit but in its very substance, peace come into the world.