HIS INAUGURATION AS PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN
INSTITUTE OF MINING ENGINEERS (NEW YORK CITY, FEBRUARY 17, 1920)

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 wo