Page:George Soule - The Intellectual and the Labor Movement.djvu/31

 more equitable lines can be assisted only by the skillful and able presentation of the unions’ side of the controversies which constantly arise. That is the job of the lawyer who would be of service to the labor movement.

The engineer is the man who applies the physical sciences to the production of wealth. He has been responsible for the development of steel mills, railroads, radio and water power. Science is his handmaiden. To him the earth gives up her oil and her coal, and the trees their rubber. No profession appeals more strongly to the imagination. No profession is nearer, apparently, to the center of modern civilization.

And yet the engineer finds himself a less and less dominating force in industry. He no longer controls his own time, nor determines the direction of his own efforts. Like a blind Samson he turns the mill for others, often far less strong than he.

The engineer has remained too completely an engineer. While he has been working with machines and materials, others have mastered the human machine in which he is no more than a cog.

With the rise of the corporation there has evolved the new business of "ownership." The engineer finds his time and his opportunities "owned" by others—not human employers with whom he can talk—but boards of directors to whose single purpose, the making of profits, all his activities must contribute. These new "owners" are wise in their generation and they pay him well for his services.

But he is not blind. He is aware of the increasingly subordinate position to which he is being relegated, and he is beginning to study the human machine with the same analytical mind with which he has solved so many mechanical problems. There are already some notable examples of engineers who have mastered the operation of the human machine, and it may be that out of the minds of men trained to produce rather than to exploit, a new social consciousness will be born.

The average church contains a mixture of economic groups in varying proportions, each group thinking economically in its own terms. The minister or priest can interpret those two groups to each other, stressing the dominant human note that is back of labor's aspirations. Much excellent work along that line has been done through newspapers in small cities where a minister conducts a column into which he can put matter that ordinarily gets into the news columns.

In choosing a particular congregation to work in the minister can pick one which is preponderantly labor in its make-up (for there are such in every denomination) and give himself fully to forwarding the spiritual interests of the group. In