ABSTRACT
The material welfare of the community is unreservedly bound up with the due working of this industrial system and with its unreserved control by the engineers, who alone are competent to manage it. While the statesmen are at work to divert and obstruct the working forces of the industrial system and the captains of finance are working, at cross purposes and in collusion at any cost to the rest. Politics and investment are allowed to decide matters of industrial policy which should plainly be left to the discretion of the general staff of production engineers driven by no commercial bias. The ordinary duties of the consulting engineers have been to advise the investment bankers as to the industrial and commercial soundness, past and prospective, of any enterprise that is to be underwritten. By comparison with the population at large, including the financial powers and the kept classes, the technological specialists which come in question here are a very inconsiderable number.
