Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/176



The advances of civilized people in their ability to contend successfully against the adversities of nature, and in the ability of an increasing population to enjoy a steadily improving scale of living up to the advent of the war, have been due to the work of scientists in discovering and interpreting the laws of nature; and to the engineers for putting their knowledge into practical effect. It has been such things as the invention of the steam engine, the electrical transmission of power, the development of the methods of mining and metallurgy and the arrangement of industrial organization that have conferred upon the world the comforts of the present age. Those have not been reserved by and for the class that has opened the way to them but have spread to everybody.

Capital and labor are equally useless and helpless without brains. This is, of course, incomprehensible to the moronic intellect and even to the illiterate. In the early days of the Russian bolshevik revolution the horny handed sons of toil appeared in the offices of mines and works telling the managers and engineers that it had come their turn to go out into the works and down into the mines to labor and sweat while the old hands would henceforth sit in comfort in the offices, sharpening lead pencils and smoking cigarettes, that being their idea of the work of the engineers. Even