I have been greatly honored as your unanimous choice for President of this Institute with which I have been associated during my entire professional life. It is customary for your new President, on these occasions, to make some observation on matters of general interest from the engineer's standpoint.
The profession of engineering in the United States comprises not alone scientific advisers on industry, but is in great majority composed of men in administrative positions. In such positions they stand midway between capital and labor. The character of your training and experience leads you to exact and quantitative thought. This basis of training in a great group of Americans furnished a wonderful recruiting ground for service in these last years
of tribulation. Many thousands of engineers were called into the army, the navy, and civilian service for the Government. Thousands of high offices were discharged by them with credit to the profession and the nation.
We have in this country probably one hundred thousand professional engineers. The events of the past few years have greatly stirred their interest in national problems. This has taken practical form in the maintenance of joint committees for discussion of these problems and support to a free advisory bureau in Washington. The engineers want nothing for themselves from Congress. They want efficiency in government, and you contribute to the maintenance of this bureau out of sheer idealism. This organization for consideration of national problems has had many subjects before it and I propose to touch on some of them this evening.
Even more than ever before is there necessity for your continued interest in this vast complex of problems that must be met by our Government. We are faced with a new orientation of our country to world problems. We face a Europe still at war; still amid social revolutions; some of its peoples still slacking on production; millions starving; and therefore the safety of its civilization is still hanging
by a slender thread. Every wind that blows carries to our shores an infection of social diseases from this great ferment; every convulsion there has an economic reaction upon our own people. If we needed further proof of the interdependence of the world, we have it today in the practical blockade of our export market. The world is asking us to ratify long delayed peace in the hope that such confidence will be restored as will enable her to reconstruct her economic life. We are today contemplating maintenance of an enlarged army and navy in preparedness for further upheavals in the world, and failing to provide even some insurance against war by a league to promote peace.
Out of the strain of war, weaknesses have become ever more evident in our administrative organization, in our legislative machinery. Our federal government is still overcentralized, for we have upon the hands of our government enormous industrial activities which have yet to be demobilized. We are swamped with debt and burdened with taxation. Credit is woefully inflated; speculation and waste are rampant. Our own productivity is decreasing. Our industrial population is crying for remedies for the increasing cost of living and aspiring to better conditions of life and labor.
But beyond all this, great hopes and aspirations are abroad; great moral and social forces have been stimulated by the war and will not be quieted by the ratification of peace. These are but some of the problems with which we must deal. I have no fear that our people will not find solutions. But progress is sometimes like the old-fashioned rail fence—some rails are perhaps misshapen and all look to point the wrong way; but in the end, the fence progresses.
Your committees, jointly with those of other engineering societies, have had before them and expressed their views on many matters concerning the handling of the railways, shipping, the reorganization of the government engineering work, the national budget, and other practical items.
The war nationalization of railways and shipping are our two greatest problems in governmental control awaiting demobilization. There are many fundamental objections to continuation of these experiments in socialism necessitated by the war. They lie chiefly in their destruction of initiative in our people and the dangers of political domination that can grow from governmental operation. Beyond this, the engineers will hold that the successful conduct of great industries is to a transcendant degree dependent upon the personal abilities and