Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/141

Rh lest they rise in their might and take what they can get and lead the way to common ruin. I do not profess to be an idealist in the common sense of the term, which to me implies an absence of sense of the practical. Nevertheless I am not scornful of idealism in the broadest conception. The greatest idealists and progressives whereof I know are the engineers and the managers of business, who dream such dreams as no one else, but who do so in practical ways and work until they make them come true. There are many engineers whose minds do not rise above mere thoughts of measurements and materials, their strength and properties; but the great engineer has visions and is not so far removed from the poet as many might carelessly think. If it were not so, you would have no steam engine and none of the other things that in the space of a century and a half have raised the civilization of Europe and America so far above that of the interior of Africa, and by the very enrichment of the people, have led them to dissatisfaction, such being human nature.

So, as a professed materialist (who may nevertheless have ideals and visions) I say to the professed idealists, let us give to the dissatisfied everything in the ways of liberty and opportunity that they want. I am thinking only of America. An idealist told me recently however there is sufficient liberty and opportunity here, but that the aspiration is for more leisure and more things, in other words, that it is quite materialistic. This brings us right up against economic limitations, just as sometimes we are unfortunately constrained by the limits of our company balance sheets or family budgets. If the national income does not permit the satisfaction of idealistically materialistic aspirations what then can