neering is a distinctive and important
profession. To some even it is the topmost of all professions. However
true that may or may not be to-day, certain it is that some day it will
be true, for the reason that engineers serve humanity at every practical
turn. Engineers make life easier to live--easier in the living; their
work is strictly constructive, sharply exact; the results positive. Not
a profession outside of the engineering profession but that has its
moments of wabbling and indecision--of faltering on the part of
practitioners between the true and the untrue. Engineering knows no such
weakness. Two and two make four. Engineers know that. Knowing it, and
knowing also the unnumbered possible manifoldings of this fundamental
truism, engineers can, and do, approach a problem with a certainty of
conviction and a confidence in the powers of their working-tools nowhere
permitted men outside the profession.

II

ENGINEERING OPPORTUNITIES

The writer can best illustrate the opportunities for young men which
exist in engineering by a little story. The story is true in every
particular. Nor is the case itself exceptional. Men occupying high
places everywhere in engineering, did they but tell their story, would
repeat in substance what is set forth below. More than any other
profession to-day, engineering holds out opportunities for young men
possessing the requisite "will to success" and the physical stamina
necessary to carry them forward to the goal. Opportunities in any walk
of life are not all dead--not all in the past. A young man to-day can go
as far as he wills. He can go farther on less capital invested in
engineering than in any other profession--that's all.

The young man's name was Smith. He was one of seven children--not the
seventh son, either--in a poor family. At the age of sixteen he went to
work in overalls on a section of railroad as a helper--outdoor, rough
work. At seventeen he was transferred to the roundhouse; at nineteen he
apprenticed himself to the machinist trade. Engineering? He did not know
what it was, really. Merely he saw his way clear to earning a livelihood
and went after it. He was miserably educated. His knowledge of
mathematics embraced arithmetic up to fractions, at which point it faded
off into blissful "nothingness"--as our New-Thoughtists say. But he had
an inquiring mind and a proper will to succeed. While serving his three
years in the shop he bought a course in a cor