reads as follows: "All members of the Society shall subscribe to the following Code of Ethics, etc."

This is a new and interesting step as the Code of Ethics for the first time has been made a part of the Constitution of the Society. The new constitution and the new Code of Ethics which will supersede the Society's code of 1914, have been sent out by letter ballot for a vote by the membership. While the results of this ballot have not been announced at this time, there is every indication that both will be accepted by an almost unanimous vote.

The Directors of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers voted not to take any action on the proposal at this time. The American Society of Civil Engineers have arrived at a similar decision. The Code is understood to be still under consideration by the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers. Progress towards its general acceptance has been more favorable than anticipated, for engineers have not yet become accustomed to act as a unit. Several of the smaller Societies are proposing to adopt the Code. This is a most encouraging sign. Many of the leading engineering colleges now require their men to affirm it before graduation. This declaration has also suggested international action for common ethics for all English speaking engineers and tentative steps have been taken to accomplish this object. Objections to a common code can only be of a temporary nature for business and trade associations are forming ethical standards and engineers as a body will soon be forced to state their ideals in positive language such as is suggested in this Code of Ethics.

XI

Two Kinds of Education for

Engineers

1

By John Butler Johnson 1

EDUCATION may be defined as a means of gradual emancipation from the thraldom of incompetence. Since incompetence leads of necessity to failure, and since competence alone leads to certain success, in any line of human endeavor, and since the natural or uneducated man is but incompetence personified, it is of supreme importance that this thraldom, or this enslaved condition in which we are all born, should be removed in some way. While unaided individual effort has worked, and will continue to work marvels, in rare instances in our so-called self-made men, these recognized exceptions acknowledge the rule that mankind in general must be aided in acquiring this complete mastery over the latent powers of head, heart, and

1 This essay is reprinted from Waddell and Harrington's Addresses to Engineering Students with the kind permission of the Editors. John Butler Johnson, 1850-1902, was a graduate of the Engineering Department of the University of Michigan in 1878 and became first a practising engineer and then a teacher of engineering. He was Professor of Civil Engineering at Washington University, St. Louis, from 1883 to 1899, and Dean of the College of Mechanics and Engineering of the University of Wisconsin from 1899 until his death in 1902. He was a member of several engineering societies, President of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education in 1898, and the author of many engineering papers and treatises.- EDITOR.

hand. These formal aids in this process of emancipation are found in the grades of schools and colleges with which the children of this country are now blessed beyond those of almost any other country or time. The boys or girls who fail to embrace these emancipating opportunities to the fullest extent practicable, are thereby consenting to degrees of incompetence and their corresponding and resulting failures in life, which they have had it in their power to prevent. This they will ultimately discover to their chagrin and even grief, when it is too late to regain the lost opportunities.

There are, however, two general classes of competency which I wish to discuss to-day, and which are generated in the schools. These are, Competency to Serve, and Competency to Appreciate and Enjoy.

By competency to serve is meant that ability to perform one's due proportion of the world's work which brings to society a common benefit, which makes of this world a continually better home for the race; and which tends to fit the race for that immortal life in which it puts its trust.

By competency to appreciate and enjoy is meant that ability to understand, to appropriate, and to assimilate those great personal achievements of the past and present in the fields of the true, the beautiful, and the good, which brings into our lives a kind of peace, and joy, and gratitude which can be found in no other way.

It is true that all kinds of elementary education contribute alike to both of these ends, but in the so-called higher education it is too common to choose between them rather than to include them both. Since it is only service which the world is willing to pay for, it

is only those competent and willing to serve a public or private utility who are compensated in a financial way. It is the education which brings a competency to serve, therefore, which is often called the utilitarian, and sometimes spoken of contemptuously as the breadand-butter education. On the other hand the education which gives a competency to appreciate and to enjoy is commonly spoken of as a cultured education. As to As to which kind of education is the higher and nobler, if they must be contrasted, it all depends on the point of view. If personal pleasure and happiness are the chief end and aim in life, then for that class of persons who have no disposition to serve, the cultural education is the more worthy of admiration and selection (conditioned of course on the bodily comforts being so far provided for as to make all financial compensations of no object to the individual). If, however, service to others is the most worthy purpose in life, and if in addition such service brings the greatest happiness, then that education which develops the ability to serve, in some capacity, should be regarded as the higher and more worthy. This kind of education has the further advantage that the money consideration it brings makes its possessor a self-supporting member of society instead of a drone or parasite, which those people must be who can not serve. I never could see the force of the statement that "they also serve who only stand and wait." It is possible they may serve their own pleasures, but if this is all, the statement should be so qualified.

The higher education which leads to a life of service has been known as a professional education, as law, medicine, the ministry, teaching, and the like. These

have long been known as the learned professions. A learned profession may be defined as a vocation in which scholarly accomplishments are used in the service of society or of other individuals, for a valuable consideration. Under such a definition every new vocation in which a very considerable amount of scholarship is required for its successful prosecution, and which is placed in the service of others, must be held as a learned profession. And as engineering now demands fully as great an amount of learning, or scholarship, as any other, it has already taken a high rank among these professions, although as a learned profession it is scarcely half a century old. Engineering differs from all other learned professions, however, in this, that its learning has to do only with the inanimate world, the world of dead matter and force. The materials, the laws, and the forces of nature, and scarcely to any extent its life, are the peculiar field of the engineer. Not only is the engineer pretty thoroughly divorced from life in general, but even with that society of which he is a part his professional life has little in common. His profession is so new it practically has no past, either of history or of literature, which merits his consideration, much less his laborious study. Neither do the ordinary social or political problems enter in any way into his sphere of operations. Natural law, dead matter, and lifeless force make up his working world, and in these he lives and moves and has his professional being. Professionally regarded, what to him is the history of his own or of other races? What have the languages and the literatures of the world of value to him? What interest has he in domestic or foreign politics, or in the various social