m these shores with schemes
and plans for the rapid upbuilding of devastated Europe. These men, for
the most part, are engineers embracing all branches of the profession,
and each is a man especially well qualified to serve in his branch. In a
way he is a specialist. He may represent a giant structural
organization, or a machine-tool manufacturer, or an electric-lighting
and power concern--any one of the many fields of industrial enterprises
whose product is needed to place demoralized France and Belgium back
upon a productive basis. For when the construction period is over with
there will be need for machine-tools and equipment for operating these
tools, such as engines and boilers and motors, all of which come
properly under the head of engineering productive enterprises.

Engineers--especially American engineers--will be in great demand, as
they are already. Nor will the close of the reconstruction period
witness an abatement of this demand. Having once entered the foreign
field on a large scale, they will of necessity continue to be in demand
not only for the furtherance of industrial projects, but for purposes of
maintaining that which has been installed at their hands. Machinery has
a way of needing periodical overhauling--even the best of machinery--and
this will entail the services of many engineers for long after the
machinery itself has been set up. The services of erecting engines,
operating engineers, supervising engineers--known more properly as
industrial engineers--following, as the need will, close upon the heels
of the constructing and selling men--will keep the many branches alive
and in foreign trade for much more than a decade--or so it seems to the
writer. Other nations may, of course, whip into the field and in time
crowd out the more distant--meaning American--engineers and engineering
products. But I don't think so, because of the acknowledged supremacy of
American engineers in many directions. The war itself taught the world
that we possessed such a supremacy, and the world will be slow to
forget--especially the purchasing side of nations themselves so crippled
of man-power as to be for a generation well-nigh helpless.

So the immediate future of the engineer is richly promising. It is so
rich with promise that a young man could hardly do better than to enter
upon engineering as a life-work, provided he has no particular choice of
careers, and would enter upon an attractive and scopeful one. His