to legislation, to administration, to
public opinion, and the like. It is timely writing. The engineer is
about due for active participation in civic affairs other than a yearly
visit to the polls to register his vote. He has not done much more than
this since his inception. His work alone has sufficed, for him, at
least, though the time is past when he can bury himself in his
professional work and, in the vernacular, get away with it. Men of the
stamp of Herbert Hoover have demonstrated the very great need for men of
scientific training in public affairs. Such places heretofore have been
filled with business men and lawyers. These men served and served well.
But since administration of public affairs to-day is largely a matter of
formulation and execution of engineering projects, it is assuredly the
duty of engineers to take an active part in these public affairs.

Exact knowledge, which in a manner of speaking is synonymous with the
engineer, is needed in high places in our nation. Men of technical
education and training have demonstrated their fitness as servants of
the people in the few instances where such men have taken over the reins
of administration in certain specified branches of our government.
Trained to think in terms of figures and the relation of these figures
to life, engineers readily perceive the true and the untrue in matters
of legislation and administration, though as a body they have never
exerted themselves to an expression of their opinions on matters coming
properly under the head of public opinion. Engineers have felt that they
have not had the time. Or, having the time, that the public at large,
chiefly owing to the engineer's self-imposed isolation, would not
understand a voice from this direction, and so engineers have kept
silent. The day has arrived, however, when this silence on the part of
engineers must be broken.

The World War has been an awakening in this as in other directions.
Lawyers and politicians have successfully dominated our government from
its beginning, with a single beautiful exception in George Washington at
one end and another admirable exception in Woodrow Wilson at the other.
Washington was a civil engineer, and Wilson, while trained as a lawyer,
was an educator. In between these two men there may have fallen a
scattering of others who were not lawyers or politicians; the writer is
not sure. Of one thing he is sure, however, and that is that engineers
in the future