'iprTto'.y<T, "as" 
 
 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 GEORGE S. MORISON
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 MAY TREAT MORRISON 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 
 ALEXANDER F MORRISON
 
 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 AS DEVELOPED BY THE 
 
 MANUFACTURE OF 
 
 POWER
 
 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 AS DEVELOPED 
 
 BY THE MANUFACTURE 
 
 OF POWER 
 
 BY GEORGE S. MORISON 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 1903
 
 COPYRIGHT 1903 BY ROBERT S. MORISON 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Pitblished November igoj
 
 
 
 NOTE 
 
 The preface of this volume gives the rea- 
 sons for its preparation in its present form 
 and the date at which it was prepared. Al- 
 though it was ready for the press in April, 
 
 5? 
 
 j;. 1898, it was not then published. There 
 
 5 were several causes for this, one of which 
 
 was a natural modesty that made the author 
 
 z hesitate to offer to the public a work which 
 o 
 
 was outside the field of his usual profes- 
 sional writings. Mr. Morison died July i, 
 "-' 1903. The manuscript is now published as 
 he left it. The reader should occasionally 
 
 CO ■' 
 
 5 bear m mind that it was completed before 
 
 iJL 
 
 o the war with Spain occurred and before the 
 = nineteenth century had closed. 
 
 Sept. 23, 1903. 
 
 432939
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The general idea which runs through this 
 little book was first suggested to the writer 
 while reading his classmate John Fiske's 
 work entitled " The Discovery of America,'^ 
 in which the series of ethnical periods among 
 prehistoric men is elaborated. The fact that 
 the world is now entering on a new epoch 
 of the same nature is the fundamental idea 
 of the writer. This idea was subsequently- 
 developed in an address, delivered in June, 
 
 1895, as President of the American Society 
 of Civil Engineers, which he called " The 
 New Epoch and the Civil Engineer;" it 
 was further elaborated in an oration deliv- 
 ered before the society of the Phi Beta 
 Kappa at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 
 
 1896, to which he gave the title of "The 
 New Epoch and the University ; " the same
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 subject was in a measure completed by an 
 address delivered at the annual commence- 
 ment of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Insti- 
 tute at Troy, New York, in June, 1897, 
 which was entitled "The Civil Engineer 
 and the University." Meanwhile the idea 
 had been used in an article entitled " The 
 New Epoch and the Currency," which was 
 prepared as a campaign document but was 
 too late to be used for that purpose, and 
 was subsequently published in the " North 
 American Review." Various friends have 
 requested that these several papers be put 
 in more permanent form, and this volume 
 ,is the result of such requests. 
 
 It seemed necessary to recast the subject, 
 but in doing this little change has been 
 made in the language, which may account 
 for some declamatory expressions which are 
 more appropriate in an address than in a 
 book. Chapter I. was practically common 
 to all three addresses. Chapter II. is taken 
 principally from the article in the " North
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 American Review." Chapters III., IV., and 
 VIII, are substantially new. Chapter V. is 
 principally from the presidential address, 
 Chapter VI. from the Phi Beta Kappa ora- 
 tion, and Chapter VII. from the Rensselaer 
 Polytechnic Institute address. 
 
 G. S. M. 
 Chicago, April i6, 1898.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. General Conditions . . . i 
 
 II. Business 13 
 
 III. Capital 31 
 
 IV. Government 47 
 
 V. Civil Engineering .... 61 
 
 VI. The University .... ']^ 
 
 VII. Education loi 
 
 VIII. Conclusion 128
 
 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 AS DEVELOPED BY THE MANUFAC- 
 TURE OF POWER 
 
 GENERAL CONDITIONS 
 
 Students of primitive society have divided 
 the early development of the human race 
 into ethnical epochs, representing various 
 conditions of savagery and barbarism, and 
 finally culminating in civilization ; they rec- 
 ognize three periods of savagery, followed 
 by three periods of barbarism. In the lowest 
 epoch men were little superior to the ani- 
 mals by which they were surrounded. With 
 the use of fire the second period began. 
 With the invention of the bow and arrow, 
 the most primitive form of projectile, man 
 entered the third period. With pottery, and 
 all that it implies, he passed from savagery
 
 2 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 to barbarism. The next advance came with 
 the domestication of animals, which gave 
 man another power besides his own physical 
 strength. With the manufacture of iron the 
 last of the barbarous periods was entered. 
 By the invention of the written alphabet the 
 primitive race was promoted from barbarism 
 to civilization. 
 
 The use of fire first placed man in a con- 
 dition very different from that of other ani- 
 mals, giving him a power the uses of which 
 are even yet not fully developed. The do- 
 mestication of animals was hardly less im- 
 .portant, and although where animals suit- 
 able for domestication did not exist tribes 
 were able to pass this period without them, 
 their weakness was apparent when they 
 came in contact with other races whose con- 
 ditions were not so limited. Finally the in- 
 vention of a written language made the 
 work of one generation available for its suc- 
 cessors and produced historical civilization. 
 
 The changes which mark the advances 
 from period to period are all material im-
 
 GENERAL CONDITIONS 3 
 
 provements ; in every instance they are char- 
 acterized by some distinctive physical de- 
 vice which has enabled man either to utilize 
 his own strength better than before, or to 
 increase his power by adding other animate 
 or inanimate force. The race that passed 
 from one period to another acquired re- 
 sources which it had not before ; in the con- 
 tests which characterized the life of the prim- 
 itive man, the men of a lower period fell be- 
 fore those who had risen higher. But though 
 the devices were of a purely material char- 
 acter, they gave opportunities for mental and 
 moral improvement which alone made fur- 
 ther advance possible, till finally the writ- 
 ten alphabet resulted in that preservation 
 of knowledge which has made the intellect- 
 ual efforts of thirty centuries available for 
 ourselves. With the dawn of civilization 
 the ethnical periods have been considered 
 closed ; subsequent growth has been the 
 natural advance of civilization marked by 
 the events which make written history. 
 But there is no reason why the epoch
 
 4 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 which began with writing should be the last. 
 It only needed a new capacity, radically un- 
 like those which have gone before, to make 
 an epoch in civilization as distinct as those in 
 primitive society. Such new capacity has now 
 been found ; another epoch has begun. Fire, 
 animal strength, and written language have 
 in turn advanced men and nations ; some- 
 thing like a new capacity was developed with 
 the discovery of explosives and again in the 
 invention of printing ; but the capacity of 
 man has always been limited to his own 
 individual strength and that of the men and 
 animals which he could control. His capa- 
 city is no longer so limited ; man has now 
 learned to manufacture power, and with 
 the manufacture of power a new epoch 
 began. These words are used advisedly; 
 creation, whether of substance or force, is 
 not given to man ; manufacture is not crea- 
 tion, but to change inert matter from one 
 form to another in such way as to generate 
 power is to manufacture power, and this we 
 can do.
 
 GENERAL CONDITIONS 5 
 
 Furthermore, not only does the manu- 
 facture of power mark a new epoch in de- 
 velopment, but the change is greater than 
 any which preceded it ; greater in its influ- 
 ence on the world ; greater in the results 
 which are to come. 
 
 The manufacture of power means that- 
 wherever needed we can now produce prac- 
 tically unlimited power ; whatever the mea- 
 sure of a single machine, that machine can 
 be used to make a greater one ; we are no 
 longer limited by animal units, confined by 
 locations of waterfalls, nor angered by the 
 uncertain power of wind. Power can be had 
 where it is needed and when it is needed. 
 The power generated in a modern steam- 
 ship in a single voyage across the Atlantic 
 is more than enough to raise from the Nile 
 and set in place every stone of the great 
 Egyptian pyramid. 
 
 The new epoch differs from all preceding 
 epochs, in that while they represented suc- 
 cessive periods of progress, different races 
 have existed simultaneously in every period
 
 6 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 of advancement, whereas the new epoch 
 must from its very nature soon become uni- 
 versal. The manufacture of power has given 
 /us the means of traversing the entire globe 
 with a regularity and speed which brings all 
 races together, and which must in time re- 
 move all differences in capacity. It brings 
 people of all races into contact, and, by ex- 
 tending knowledge, ends the superstitions 
 and mysteries which have had such influ- 
 ence in the past. It enables man while 
 working in unhealthy districts to spend a 
 portion of his time in places favorable to 
 physical health and bodily vigor, and so may 
 end the climatic degeneration of race, which 
 has done so much in history. It is gradually 
 breaking down national divisions, substitut- 
 ing the natural boundaries of convenient 
 government for boundaries based on race 
 and ignorance. It will finally make the 
 human race a single great whole, working 
 intelligently in ways and for ends which we 
 cannot yet understand. 
 
 It is not too much to predict that when
 
 GENERAL CONDITIONS 7 
 
 the full effects of the manufacture of power 
 are realized and the world has passed 
 through the development which the next 
 ten centuries will see, that the time when 
 man began to manufacture power will be 
 recognized as the division between the an- 
 cient and the modern, between ignorance 
 and intelligence, between the national strife 
 which may then be classed as barbarism and 
 the new civilization, whatever that may then 
 be called. 
 
 The new. epoch has barely begun. No 
 exact dates can be fixed. Epoch making is 
 not a matter of a single invention ; it is the 
 general result which follows. It was not the 
 manufacture of the first earthen pot, but the 
 general introduction of pottery which car- 
 ried a prehistoric race from savagery to 
 barbarism. It was not the invention of a few 
 letters, but the general use of a written 
 language which took the barbarian into 
 civilization. It was not the invention of the 
 first steam engine, but the general control 
 of the manufacture of power which is now
 
 8 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 taking mankind into the new civilization. 
 James Watt developed his first steam engine 
 in 1769. The steam engine began to come 
 into general use about the beginning of this 
 century. The nineteenth century has seen 
 the development of the manufacture of 
 power by steam. The steam engine is still 
 almost the sole representative of manufac- 
 tured power, but there is no reason why this 
 should continue. Electricity as a conveyer 
 of power has been developed to an extent 
 which may almost be classed with manufac- 
 tured power. New forms of manufactured 
 power may come at any time, but the intro- 
 duction of new forms is a comparatively un- 
 important thing. The great advance came 
 with the ability to manufacture power at all ; 
 the method is a secondary thing. 
 
 It is easy to understand that when the 
 new epoch is fully developed all physical 
 work may be dependent on inanimate power. 
 It is easy to see that this means the con- 
 centration of enormous masses of power 
 where power never could be had before ;
 
 GENERAL CONDITIONS 9 
 
 that it means the subdivision of power into 
 units of a minuteness hard to conceive ; that 
 it means the unraveling of mysteries which 
 have never been solved ; that it means 
 the construction of works of a magnitude 
 before which the greatest monuments of 
 antiquity become insignificant. The fight- 
 ing ship of to-day is a floating machine-shop, 
 though its crew of mechanics are confined 
 as completely as the chained rowers of a 
 Roman galley. The battles of the future 
 will not be fought by men or by horses ; the 
 camels of the desert will never again con- 
 front the elephants of the jungle ; fortifica- 
 tions will be factories filled with power. It 
 is easy to recognize that the discoveries 
 already made may be slight in comparison 
 with those which are to come. All this is 
 a matter of physical possibility ; it is inter- 
 esting to speculate upon ; it is foolish to 
 prophesy about ; these achievements are too 
 close at hand for us to waste time in guess- 
 ing what they will be. 
 
 The substitution of inanimate manufac-
 
 lo THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 tured power for the animal power on which 
 our race was formerly dependent means a 
 separation of the force which does the work 
 from the intellect which directs it. The 
 power which we make and use is absolutely 
 without sense ; all this must come from the 
 human mind. The man who drives a horse 
 has little to do ; the horse finds the way and 
 does the work. But the driver of a motor 
 carriage has a senseless machine, and all 
 direction must come from him. Manufac- 
 tured power demands intelligence to supply 
 the sense which the power lacks. The ex- 
 treme logical development would be a con- 
 dition where every kind of physical work is 
 performed by machines, while human effort 
 is reduced to design and care. Such a re- 
 sult will never be reached. So long as men 
 have bodies, the forces placed in those 
 bodies must be used, but the substitution of 
 manufactured power for human labor is a 
 promotion for man, whose value becomes 
 measured by skill in directing power and not 
 by muscular strength.
 
 GENERAL CONDITIONS ii 
 
 No changes have ever equaled those 
 through which the world is passing now. 
 The manufacture of power has an intel- 
 lectual as well as a physical effect ; it has 
 separated power from the mind which must 
 manage it ; it calls for intelligent design and 
 direction of the multitude of works which it 
 has rendered possible ; it has equipped our 
 generation with tools for study and investi- 
 gation as well as for mechanical work. The 
 new epoch will alter the relations between 
 the professions, business, and trades ; it will 
 readjust the duties of government and the 
 relations of one government to another ; it 
 will change our system of education. These 
 changes will be considered in relation to 
 business, to national interests, and to edu- 
 cation. The larger subject of government 
 and international relations can only be 
 touched upon briefly, but the effect of the 
 new epoch is very important, and its influ- 
 ence in shaping the duties of government 
 must not be overlooked. The group of new 
 professions which are now coming into life
 
 12 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 will be reviewed and their proper influence 
 on work outside of professional lines ex- 
 plored. The general demands of education 
 in the new epoch will be considered, and 
 some suggestions will be made as to the 
 best methods of meeting these demands.
 
 II 
 
 BUSINESS 
 
 The manufacture of power has entirely 
 changed all methods of communication. The 
 railroad has replaced the stage coach ; the 
 steamship has supplanted the graceful sail- 
 ing vessel; and the telegraph has supple- 
 mented the laggardly mail. AH this hns been 
 the work oLihe^ engineer. 
 
 In the early part of the century, to travel 
 at the rate of one hundred miles a day was 
 so difficult a thing that few people were 
 willing to undertake it ; now eight hundred 
 miles can be accomplished with little fatigue 
 in twenty-four hours, and even this speed 
 has been materially exceeded. The first 
 President of the republic spent weeks go- 
 ing from his home in Virginia to take the 
 oath of office in New York ; to-day there is 
 no part of our country, except Alaska, from
 
 14 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 which a citizen cannot reach the national 
 capital in less than six days. If we consider 
 simply the time taken to travel personally, 
 neglecting the other methods of communi- 
 cation, in which much greater speed has 
 been attained, every part of the country has 
 now become nearer the most distant section 
 than Boston was to Richmond one hundred 
 years ago ; this is what the railroad has 
 done. 
 
 Only sixty years ago the entire business 
 on the ocean was done by sailing vessels. 
 They had improved in size, speed, and model 
 since Columbus crossed in his caravels, but 
 the only power to propel them was still the 
 uncertain action of the wind. A good east- 
 ward voyage across the Atlantic consumed 
 twenty days, while the return voyage usually 
 took at least twice that time. This was the 
 quickest method of communication between 
 America and all the rest of the world. It 
 was only under very exceptional conditions 
 that any one could leave an American port 
 and reach some of the nearer ports in
 
 BUSINESS 15 
 
 Europe and return in as short a time as 
 two months, and this was true not only of 
 men and women, but of mails and every 
 kind of communication. To-day it is pos- 
 sible to cross the Atlantic and return in less 
 than two weeks. The usual time occupied 
 by passenger steamers in a round voyage, 
 including the time which they wait in port 
 on both sides the Atlantic, and including 
 voyages to as distant ports as Bremen and 
 Hamburg, is now four weeks, while the 
 steamers of one of the leading steamship 
 lines are making a round voyage every three 
 weeks. The entire circuit of the globe can 
 be accomplished in less time than was com- 
 monly necessary in the early years of the 
 century for a hurried trip to a near Euro- 
 pean port and return. 
 
 The mails follow the same course as pas- 
 sengers ; they are taken on the fastest ships 
 and the fastest railroad trains, but they 
 have the advantage that they are transferred 
 from train to train and from train to ship 
 at the quickest speed, and are free from the
 
 i6 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 delays of inspection and sometimes of quar- 
 antine which annoy passengers. The cost 
 of sending a letter to the most distant part 
 of the globe is only one fifth as much as 
 the cost of sending it from one state to 
 another in the early days of the republic. 
 
 Great as these changes are, from a busi- 
 ness point of view the effect of the tele- 
 graph is still greater. It has been able to 
 annihilate time in communication between 
 different towns, states, and countries ; there 
 is no important business centre in any part 
 of the globe to which a message cannot be 
 sent and a reply received within twenty- 
 four hours, the delays generally being due 
 not to the time occupied in transmission or 
 delivery, but to the fact that the rotation 
 of the earth and the different times of light 
 and darkness make the business day in our 
 continent simultaneous with the silent, 
 dark hours of sleep in populous Asia. 
 
 The result of this quick communication 
 has been an absolute change in all methods 
 of doing business. Formerly each commu-
 
 BUSINESS 17 
 
 nity was a unit by itself ; it handled its own 
 business ; its people seldom went outside 
 of its own limit ; and such luxuries as were 
 obtained from a distance were brought at 
 long intervals either by their owners or 
 by people specially charged with handling 
 them. The food, dress, and all the habits 
 of each community were dependent on its 
 immediate surroundings. If the soil and 
 climate were adapted to wheat, the white 
 bread of the present day was a common 
 food, but in other regions where corn and 
 rye grew better, wheat bread was seldom 
 seen. Homespun garments were the usual 
 wear ; the luxuries of imported fruits were 
 unknown. The merchant in a seaport sent 
 his ship to sea in charge of a supercargo 
 whom he recognized as a capable business 
 man, loaded with a cargo which that officer 
 was to sell, and with the proceeds of which 
 he was to make purchases for the return 
 voyage. The chances were that from the 
 time the ship left till it returned nothing 
 would be heard of it. The capital invested
 
 i8 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 in the cargo was absolutely locked up, and 
 the merchant knew little or nothing of the 
 success of his venture until the ship, return- 
 ing from a voyage of perhaps a year, was 
 sighted off the harbor. It was in those days 
 that people talked of what they would do 
 when their ship came in. To-day any such 
 voyage is absolutely impossible. A com- 
 merce, of a tonnage before which that of 
 the old supercargo days becomes insignifi- 
 cant, is done by regular lines of steamers 
 sailing to almost every part of the world, on 
 regular schedules, from which they seldom 
 vary more than one or two days, and whose 
 arrival at every port is known at every 
 other port at which they touch, within 
 twenty-four hours of the time they reach 
 there. The sailing fleet of to-day no longer 
 goes out with ventures under the charge of 
 supercargoes, but the ship takes a load of 
 goods for which freight is paid, and which 
 is consigned to some merchant in the port 
 to which it sails, where the ship again loads 
 for another port ; the captain sails the ship.
 
 BUSINESS 19 
 
 which is simply a means of transportation ; 
 the business is handled by merchants in the 
 several ports, and every one of these mer- 
 chants has the means of knowing what 
 goods are in demand, and what prices they 
 will bring in every other port in the world. 
 Commercially the whole earth has already 
 become a single unit, in every part of which 
 business can be directed from every other 
 part. 
 
 This is what the manufacture of power 
 has accomplished by its improvement in 
 methods of transportation and communica- 
 tion alone. No nation can live by itself ; it 
 is a part of the whole commercial world ; it 
 can be politically independent of other 
 countries, but it cannot be independent of 
 the general laws which govern trade and 
 commerce. Even if it desired to do so, it 
 would not be allowed to keep clear of the 
 developments of the nineteenth century. 
 The very system of commercial credits 
 which played so important a part in all 
 international commerce thirty years ago is
 
 20 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 now passing away ; regular steamship lines 
 and telegraph cables have changed the prac- 
 tice ; the commercial standing of every firm 
 can be known everywhere, and the aid of 
 the few great houses is no longer needed ; 
 an event which would impair the standing 
 of any important business house in an in- 
 land American city may be felt in eastern 
 Asia. 
 
 The manufacture of power has effected at 
 least an equal change in all varieties of manu- 
 factures. Homespun garments have disap- 
 peared, complicated machinery directed by 
 few hands produces nearly every manufac- 
 tured product which is essential to man. The 
 spinning wheels, which were a necessary part 
 of our great-grandmother's households, are 
 now kept only as curiosities in bric-a-brac 
 decorations, while the housewife who could 
 weave even her own supply of linen would 
 be very hard to find. 
 
 It is not necessary to go into the details 
 of this change. The result has been accom- 
 plished by substituting for the muscle of
 
 BUSINESS 21 
 
 arm and leg the power which the steam 
 engine or the turbine wheel provides, power 
 which is fed on coal at five cents a bushel 
 instead of power fed on wheat at eighty 
 cents, or which is furnished free in the slopes 
 of rivers. 
 
 This is not merely the case with cloths 
 and fabrics ; it is true of every kind of manu- 
 facture and every kind of work. Power has 
 so reduced the price of all the little articles 
 which enter into our daily life that no one 
 can afford to make them himself. In the 
 older parts of the country there are old 
 barns the frames of which were so made 
 that the boards could be fastened in without 
 nails ; when they were built the price of nails 
 was more than ten times what it is now, 
 while the value of a workman's time was 
 only about one third its present value. 
 
 The development of iron manufacture 
 shows what has been done. Only twenty 
 years ago nothing typified the strain of hu- 
 man labor more than the row of furnaces in 
 which the puddlers, by muscular effort and in
 
 22 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 glaring heat, slowly drew together the par- 
 ticles of soft metal into the spongy puddle- 
 ball from which wrought iron was forged and 
 rolled. To-day the Bessemer converter and 
 the open-hearth furnace have spoken the 
 doom of wrought iron, which is disappearing 
 before the less costly steel, and there is 
 nothing more striking about a great steel 
 plant than the absence of men. Ingots, 
 blooms, billets, and finished product seem to 
 make themselves, while the few men who 
 stand around appear to police the machinery 
 rather than to labor. 
 
 It was common in country districts in the 
 early part of the century to find families who 
 bought almost nothing ; their food was all 
 raised on their farms, while the clothing and 
 all the household linen was of wool or flax 
 raised at home, spun and woven by the 
 mothers and daughters of the family. To- 
 day it is still possible to find places where 
 people live well and where all the food is 
 raised at home, but in the whole United 
 States it is doubtful whether a hundred
 
 BUSINESS 23 
 
 families can be found who do not buy their 
 clothing and most of their household goods. 
 
 The results may be very briefly stated. 
 Cheap manufactured power does the work ; 
 a few intelligent hands direct the machinery; 
 a day's labor expended in other ways will buy 
 ten times as much cloth or any other manu- 
 factured article as the good hands of our 
 capable grandparents could make in a day. 
 
 Perhaps the manufacture of power has had 
 less influence in agriculture than in anything 
 else, but even here the effect, has been 
 enormous. In the first place, it has filled the 
 world with a great variety of agricultural 
 machinery, which has reduced the labors of 
 the farmer to a small fraction of what they 
 formerly were, till the same man can accom- 
 plish with these tools four or five times as 
 much as he could do without them. But 
 there is another remarkable change. The 
 crops of every part of the world have become 
 available for the rest of the world ; a failure 
 of crops in one country is known immediately 
 ten thousand miles away ; a surfeit of crops
 
 24 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 in one country is known with equal prompt- 
 ness ; prices are regulated not by immedi- 
 ate home demand, but by the supplies and 
 demands of the world, modified by cost of 
 transportation and a few other complica- 
 tions well understood everywhere by deal- 
 ers. The farmer of the present day feels all 
 this. He has ceased to be able to live from 
 his farm alone. To maintain his family with 
 the luxuries and habits which people now 
 think necessary he must draw upon all parts 
 of the world, and it is only by selling his 
 crops that he can pay for what he so pur- 
 chases. In the older farming districts this 
 may apply to little more than clothing and 
 a few unnecessary luxuries, but in the newer 
 districts it is otherwise. On the prairies 
 west of the Missouri the farmer raises little 
 but grain and stock ; everything else, even 
 the fuel to keep him warm in winter bliz- 
 zards, must be bought. 
 
 The general effects already accomplished 
 by the manufacture of power may be briefly 
 stated. Every part of the civilized world
 
 BUSINESS 25 
 
 now draws its supplies from every other part 
 of the world. Even the savage or barbarous 
 regions, which get- nothing from outside 
 their own country, are forced to render their 
 contributions to civilized lands. Prices are 
 fixed by the whole world, not by any one 
 community, the cost of transportation and 
 tariff charges being simply additions to the 
 cost of the article somewhere else. Further- 
 more, every civilized family must buy a large 
 portion of what it consumes, and practically 
 all but farmers must buy everything they 
 consume. If the price of wheat rises in 
 Liverpool, it rises on every farm in the 
 United States ; if a great surplus is pro- 
 duced in India or Argentina, the price falls 
 in European markets and on every farm in 
 the United States. 
 
 It is the glory of the new epoch that it has 
 reduced the cost of almost every article of 
 important use in modern life ; it is the crown- 
 ing merit of the nineteenth century that it 
 has made cheap so many things which 
 in our fathers' times were dear. The older
 
 26 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 inhabitants remember the pinched, under- 
 fed look of a large portion of our people, in 
 the early days of the century, when their 
 wages would not provide them with either 
 adequate food or suitable clothing. Such 
 people may still be seen, but there are few of 
 them among the plump, well-clad people of 
 to-day. It is a rarer thing to see children 
 barefoot now than it was to see them with 
 shoes on fifty years ago. Let no one find 
 fault with the lowering of prices of those 
 articles which are necessary for the common 
 support of all, of food, of fuel, or of ordinary 
 clothing. 
 
 The manufacture of power has cheapened 
 all the necessities of life ; it has done so 
 by substituting inanimate force for human 
 muscle and strength ; and it has done so by 
 rendering the products of every part of the 
 world available in every other. Great as this 
 work is, it is not the whole ; the change is 
 elevating mankind, and putting the individ- 
 ual in a better position than he was in be- 
 fore. A man's wages are determined, not
 
 BUSINESS 27 
 
 by what he can do himself, but by what he 
 can have done. The character of his work 
 has risen ; his average pay is better. 
 
 One other thing must be observed ; the 
 gain is accruing to civilized nations. Sav- 
 age and barbarous nations are made to con- 
 tribute their share towards the comforts of 
 the civilized without receiving much return. 
 This cannot continue. Savage and barba- 
 rous people disappear before the stronger 
 arms of the more civilized. A few people 
 are elevated, more of them are crushed. It is 
 a constant struggle for supremacy in which 
 the nation which has the greatest resources, 
 the greatest strength, and understands best 
 how to manufacture and use power, always 
 comes out ahead. To do this it must know 
 what every other land is doing ; it must use 
 the tools which every country has provided ; 
 it must avail itself of the work of all. There 
 was a time when nations could shut them- 
 selves up within their own limits and do very 
 well. It amounted to little more than ex- 
 cluding some foreign trade, which at best
 
 28 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 was small ; the whole world was nearly sta- 
 tionary ; the improvements made in foreign 
 countries amounted to so little that the work 
 done at home was all that was needed. 
 Japan lived in this way for centuries, with 
 laws, practices, and currency entirely unlike 
 anything now in the world. Gold and silver 
 were kept in circulation together at a valu- 
 ation in which gold was only four times as 
 high as silver. The manufacture of power 
 has rendered everything like this absolutely 
 impossible. There is no race or people so 
 great that it could afford to shut itself out 
 for ten years from what is going on else- 
 where. The simple result would be that 
 after a decade of stagnation it would find 
 itself remanded to a secondary position 
 among the nations of the world, and become 
 a servant where it should have been a master. 
 The lessons of history must be studied 
 as showing the mistakes of the past, not as 
 giving precedents to be followed now. The 
 works and doings of the past are not those 
 of the present. History gives us a record of
 
 BUSINESS 29 
 
 what has been done, but no more. It would 
 be as wise to cite the habits of savage life 
 as the ways which civilized nations should 
 follow, as to make the practice of the begin- 
 ning of this century, before the effect of 
 the manufacture of power had been felt, the 
 standard of the present day. 
 
 In the race which we are now in the midst 
 of, which the manufacture of power is open- 
 ing, new influences, new appliances, new 
 powers, and new forms of education appear 
 every day ; only by constant effort, constant 
 intercourse, continual study, and vigorous 
 achievements can any country use the tal- 
 ents which are now before it. If the Amer- 
 icans are to make the best use of their 
 America, they must call to their aid the 
 work which the brains of Europe, and be- 
 fore long those of Asia, will contribute to 
 the general benefit of mankind. 
 
 There are other laws than those which 
 are enacted by legislative bodies, whether 
 those laws be expressed in congressional 
 enactments, in judicial decisions, or in that
 
 30 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 organic law which has come to be called 
 constitutional. In history the laws of re- 
 ligion have perhaps played a greater part 
 than the civil laws of states. Many of these 
 religious laws have been the work of design- 
 ing priests or wild impostors, but the preach- 
 ing of Peter the Hermit carried the young 
 men of Europe to Syria, and the trumpet of 
 the Prophet spread Islam ism over the early 
 home of Christianity. There are the laws of 
 logic and mathematics, which are absolute 
 and fixed; it is beyond any power, either 
 human or supernatural, to set them aside ; 
 not even the Deity can change the sum of 
 two numbers. The laws of trade are at least 
 as important as legislative enactments ; they 
 involve the arguments of logic, the truths of 
 mathematics, and a knowledge of the vari- 
 ous natural conditions which have made the 
 trade of the world possible. From their very 
 nature these laws must be international, ex- 
 cept in some country which would set itself 
 up alone and sell its nineteenth-century birth- 
 right.
 
 Ill 
 
 CAPITAL 
 
 The human mind has been defined as dif- 
 fering from that of animals in being the only- 
 mind which can make thought an object of 
 thought. This is the metaphysician's method 
 of looking at it. From the point of view on 
 which our argument has been developed, the 
 difference between man and the lower ani- 
 mals may be said to be that man alone has 
 the capacity to use tools. Fire, the bow and 
 arrow, and pottery were among man's earliest 
 tools. The use of powerful tools is charac- 
 teristic of the development of the new epoch. 
 Every variety of tool is substituted for the 
 muscles and animate forces which were used 
 before. The whole history of the develop- 
 ment of man from his primitive weakness has 
 been the history of the development of his 
 tools. Furthermore, the new epoch differs
 
 32 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 from all preceding epochs in that it uses 
 tools of great size and cost. Several hundred 
 thousand dollars have been spent for a single 
 steam hammer, a single hydraulic press, or a 
 single train of tools, in a modern steel plant, 
 and each of these is but a single machine 
 among a multitude of others necessary to 
 equip the whole mill. More than two million 
 dollars has been paid for a single passenger 
 ship. The aggregation of many freight steam- 
 ers makes the fleets which have so greatly 
 reduced the cost of water transportation. 
 The great railroad systems are simply tools 
 for land transportation. It is only by the 
 use of these great tools and by great com- 
 binations of smaller tools that the element 
 of human labor has been so largely elimi- 
 nated from the cost of production and the 
 extraordinary accomplishments of the new 
 epoch made possible. Though the manufac- 
 ture of power gives practically unlimited 
 power where and when we need it, the cost 
 of the machines to manufacture and use 
 that power must be in some measure pro-
 
 CAPITAL 33 
 
 portionate to its amount ; but the larger the 
 tool or the greater the combination of smaller 
 tools, the less the amount of human labor re- 
 quired to direct these tools in proportion to 
 the power which they develop or use. This 
 is the great secret of modern manufactures ; 
 it is this which has enabled the fairly paid 
 labor of northern Europe to fill the markets 
 of Asia with manufactured goods, although 
 the workman in Asia may earn only a tenth 
 as much as the European ; it is this which 
 now makes it possible for the United States, 
 paying the highest wages in the world, to 
 compete with European manufacturers in the 
 most important products, and has made the 
 price of steel about one-fifth less in Pitts- 
 burg than in Glasgow. 
 
 It is not many years since a furnace 
 which would produce a hundred tons of pig 
 iron in twenty-four hours was considered 
 large. The new plant of the Carnegie Steel 
 Company at Duquesne, near Pittsburg, con- 
 sists of four furnaces, each of which pro- 
 duces a little more than five hundred tons of
 
 34 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 pig iron in twenty-four hours, the whole out- 
 put being over two thousand tons, with the 
 result that the bill for labor at the furnace 
 has been reduced to about six per cent, of 
 the value of the metal ; but the cost of this 
 plant, with all its machinery and labor- 
 saving devices, was measured by millions. 
 The same may be said of nearly every op- 
 eration by which the full advantages of the 
 new epoch are realized. Great results in 
 economy and production are only obtained 
 by a thorough equipment to produce them 
 and by a correspondingly large investment. 
 Large aggregations of capital have be- 
 come a necessary feature of the new epoch. 
 In no other way can the tools and appli- 
 ances necessary to develop its capacity be 
 obtained. This aggregation of capital means 
 one of two things, — either the concentra- 
 tion of great wealth in the hands of indi- 
 viduals, or the collection of the wealth of 
 many in corporate ownership. The two are 
 gradually becoming combined ; individual 
 manufacturers are generally availing them-
 
 CAPITAL 35 
 
 selves of legal provisions to place their 
 affairs under the protection of corporate 
 ownership ; there is nothing to prevent the 
 concentration of the greater part of the 
 stock of a corporation in the hands of a 
 few men or even a single individual. This 
 tendency, however, results in a concentra- 
 tion of control and management rather 
 than in a real concentration of ownership. 
 However great the wealth of individuals 
 and the amount of property concentrated 
 in a few hands, the wealth of these indi- 
 viduals may be much less in the aggregate 
 than the savings and small capital of people 
 of small or moderate means ; and when 
 these people are working for wages, as 
 nearly all of them are, they have no use for 
 their savings or small capital. This small 
 capital, though the owner may not under- 
 stand what really becomes of it, is used by 
 the corporations and by the wealthy men 
 who are carrying on the great manufactur- 
 ing, transportation, and other active works 
 of the country. The capital of the nominal
 
 36 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 owners and the nominal capital of cor- 
 porations is generally very much less than 
 is required to conduct the business. The 
 other money is borrowed ; borrowed from 
 small investors, from savings banks, and 
 other financial institutions ; borrowed at 
 rates of interest which are low in propor- 
 tion as the security is large. All of this 
 borrowed money has a claim on the capital 
 of the corporation and on the wealth of the 
 individual manufacturer before any profits 
 can be distributed. The apparent owners 
 may take the larger profits, but they assume 
 the risks ; the ultimate ownership may be 
 said to be with the owners of the borrowed 
 money, who must always be protected, even 
 at the entire loss of every other interest. 
 
 Theoretically it would seem that the 
 ideal method of concentrating capital would 
 be by cooperation, so that the small capi- 
 talists and the operatives might be the 
 actual and responsible owners, entitled to 
 divide among themselves the profits of the 
 enterprise. It is possible that some method
 
 CAPITAL 37 
 
 of accomplishing this result will ultimately 
 be worked out ; if it has been done suc- 
 cessfully heretofore, it has only been on 
 such rare occasions that they have little in- 
 fluence on the general conduct of affairs. 
 But though apparent cooperative owner- 
 ship may not exist, real cooperation does. 
 It exists through the agencies of savings 
 banks and other similar organizations, which 
 receive as deposits the savings of the work- 
 ers and lend them out to swell the capi- 
 tals of the producing organizations ; it exists 
 in the systems of preferred securities, as in 
 the case of railroad and other corporate 
 bonds, which are entitled to their interest as 
 an absolute charge, or in the case of pre- 
 ferred stocks, which are entitled to their 
 dividends before any profits can go to the 
 common stockholders. The results are very 
 far from perfect, and have by no means 
 reached their full development, but the real 
 ownership is much more widely distributed 
 than the workers generally know. 
 
 The management of these corporations is 
 
 432939
 
 38 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 one of the principal duties of the new epoch, 
 and the duties of such management are en- 
 tirely changing the conditions of business 
 success. The work of the manager is to 
 handle tools ; it is to manufacture rather than 
 to trade. While the products must be sold, 
 the greatest skill must be shown in getting 
 the largest results of which the tools are 
 capable. In old times fortunes were gener- 
 ally made by people who had some special 
 advantage over others in the information 
 which they possessed. Such was the case 
 with merchants trading with distant coun- 
 tries. They bought at low prices in the East 
 goods which they sold at high prices at 
 home ; they kept to themselves the differ- 
 ence in these prices ; the distant people from 
 whom they bought knew nothing of what 
 they did with the goods; the people at home 
 to whom they sold them had no idea of what 
 the goods cost. It was the general charac- 
 teristic of the merchant, from the earliest 
 times, to keep his knowledge secret, and to 
 make the best bargain he could. This method
 
 CAPITAL 39 
 
 of conducting trade is virtually at an end ; 
 the conditions of the new epoch render it 
 impossible. There will soon be no secrets of 
 trade by which these profits can be made ; 
 knowledge of what is going on anywhere in 
 the world will be open to all, and any one 
 who desires to do so can learn any specific 
 thing. The profits of the new epoch must 
 be made, not by buying cheap and selling 
 dear, but by reducing the cost of produc- 
 tion. The most successful man will not be 
 the one who has the shrewdest salesman to 
 dispose of his goods, but the one who can 
 manufacture his wares more cheaply than 
 any one else engaged in the same work. 
 The most successful transportation line will 
 not be the one whose agents are most active 
 in securing business, but the one which is 
 the most closely handled, which can carry its 
 freight at a less cost to itself than any com- 
 peting line. Permanent success will depend 
 not on commercial drummers, but on the 
 civil engineer ; not on the shrewd guesses 
 of the so-called business man, but on the
 
 40 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 accurate knowledge of the manager who 
 knows what his tools are, who knows what 
 it costs to produce, who knows the defects 
 of his plant and the features in which it may 
 be improved, who in fact is applying all the 
 intelligence of an educated mind, not to get- 
 ting the better of some other man who may 
 know a little less, but to getting the best 
 work possible for himself and his employers 
 out of what he has to work with. 
 
 The management of the corporations 
 which will own the great tools of the next 
 century seems likely to be the great duty of 
 the active man, of the man who is to make 
 the records of the future. As these tools be- 
 come larger and the demands upon them 
 greater, the responsibility and the honor 
 which belongs to the successful manage- 
 ment of such interests will become more 
 fully recognized. The sharp mercantile 
 spirit must gradually go down ; it is already 
 doing so. Careful skilled management is the 
 only thing which can produce permanent re- 
 sults. The business of the new epoch will
 
 CAPITAL 41 
 
 be manufacturing and banking rather than 
 trading. Good and bad times must be ex- 
 pected, but they will be less common as 
 business trickery decreases and as the world 
 attaches less weight to commercial guesses. 
 But a proper management of corporations 
 must recognize the existence of such periods 
 of prosperity and depression ; it must recog- 
 nize that while its own work is permanent 
 and not temporary, the demand for its pro- 
 ducts is in a measure variable ; it must re- 
 member that the owners who always insist 
 on complete division of immediate profits 
 must ultimately fall behind, and that the 
 extra profits of the good times must be used 
 to maintain the plant and put it in a condi- 
 tion to tide over bad times. Every manufac- 
 turing plant, every steamship, and every rail- 
 road is simply a tool. It has no value except 
 in its capacity to produce ; improvements 
 are constantly being made, and as these im- 
 provements are made, the parts which are 
 superseded must be discarded. 
 
 The relations between the ownership and
 
 42 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 the management of corporations have not 
 yet been settled. The new epoch opens as an 
 era of corporations, and these relations are 
 gradually being fixed. The old rule of equity, 
 that any one handling the property of another 
 was a trustee and had no right to use that 
 property for his own benefit, is fundamen- 
 tal, and must always govern the management 
 of corporations, f, In a corporation there are 
 three elements at work, — ownership, man- 
 agement, employees, — the ownership in- 
 cluding not only the nominal owners but all 
 the ultimate ownership, which often extends 
 to the employees. Ownership is very^ much 
 more scattered than commonly appears. 
 The employees are the mechanics and la- 
 borers who handle the machines and do the 
 comparatively small amount of manual labor 
 which machinery has not yet mastered. The 
 managerJsJlie--trustgeJor both parties ; he 
 must understand the tools that he uses and 
 get the best work out of them that he can 
 for the owners ; he must also understand the 
 relations between those tools and the men
 
 CAPITAL 43 
 
 that work them, and see that the workmen 
 are competent and cared for. The rights of 
 ownership are the rights of property, which 
 seem to be the foundation of all civil gov- 
 ernment. The manager is the trustee for this 
 ownership. The rights of the employees are 
 the rights of men and women who are pro- 
 fiting, and must be allowed to profit, by the 
 developments which the manufacture of 
 power has rendered possible, and to whom 
 must ultimately accrue the increased leisure 
 and comfort which the substitution of me- 
 chanical power for muscles renders pos- 
 sible. The owners and the workers both 
 have rights ; the managers have principally 
 responsibilities. 
 
 There is another feature which must not 
 be overlooked. The necessary aggregations 
 of capital and the necessary extensions of 
 corporate ownership and management will 
 have an important effect which many may de- 
 plore, but which seems to be inevitable. It 
 is one of the changes which necessarily 
 occur in the passage of races from one stage
 
 44 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 of civilization to another, in which some of 
 the best features of the older life pass away, 
 leaving a deplorable void, while the new 
 conditions, with their new virtues, are being 
 developed. The new epoch must reduce the 
 number of people who work by themselves ; 
 it must reduce the number of people who 
 seem to be entirely their own masters, and 
 who pursue their lives on independent lines, 
 and it must increase the number of salaried 
 employees, the number of men who are work- 
 ing for fixed wages, and who are apparently 
 dependent on others. Its development will 
 wipe out the small manufacturers ; they can- 
 not compete against the great concerns. It 
 must wipe out many of the small traders 
 and dealers whose business has always been 
 that of middle-men. In fact, these changes 
 make men members of communities, mem- 
 bers of working organizations, members of 
 what has been called an army of workers, 
 but necessarily deprive them of many of the 
 conditions which have hitherto done most 
 to produce strong individual characters.
 
 CAPITAL 45 
 
 Were this all it would certainly be an evil. 
 The loss of independence is a great loss ; it 
 is always regarded with regret. Whatever 
 his vices and wickedness, and they have 
 been enormous, there is a noble element 
 about the life of the savage man which will 
 live in literature and song long after his 
 sins are forgotten. The strong features of 
 New England country life, with its combi- 
 nation of manual labor and high intelligence, 
 which bred the men who started the Revo- 
 lution, call for the highest admiration and 
 praise, in spite of the physical pain and suf- 
 fering which wore out so many of these 
 people before they had passed middle life. 
 But no one would voluntarily go back to the 
 conditions under which our grandparents 
 were born ; still less would he adopt the life 
 of the noble savage. It is premature to say 
 where the compensation for the loss of 
 individualism and personal independence 
 will be found, but we may be sure that such 
 compensation will come. It may be in the 
 greater amount of leisure which all men
 
 46 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 will have when human labor is reduced as 
 that of machines increases. It may be that 
 it will be found in the higher degree of skill 
 and education which must characterize in 
 these days of machinery all classes of labor. 
 It may be that it will come from the gen- 
 eral benefit which attends the immolation of 
 the individual in the whole and enables him 
 to recognize that he has a share in what 
 every one else is doing. Whatever form 
 this compensation may take we may be sure 
 that it will come. It may be only after a 
 severe struggle, but the laws which control 
 the development of the new civilization are 
 inevitable and cannot be resisted. The fu- 
 ture good of our race lies in utilizing them 
 to the utmost possible extent, and not in 
 trying to retain the good features of condi- 
 tions which are passing away.
 
 IV 
 
 GOVERNMENT 
 
 In the new epoch there must be a great 
 increase in the variety of the duties of 
 governments. There will be a great exten- 
 sion of the geographical limits over which a 
 single government can exercise immediate 
 and direct control. 
 
 In early times the functions of govern- 
 ment were really but two : the protection 
 of the people against foreign enemies, which 
 meant the conduct of war, and the protec- 
 tion of the people from domestic enemies, 
 which meant police and the whole system 
 of both criminal and civil law. This is not 
 the place to amplify these duties nor to 
 consider the different forms of government 
 which have performed these duties. It may, 
 however, be noted that the foreign and 
 domestic functions, even of despotic gov-
 
 48 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 ernments, have usually been so distinctly 
 marked, that when a government has failed 
 entirely in protecting itself and its people 
 and passed out of existence before a victo- 
 rious enemy, the domestic provisions have 
 been recognized by the conqueror and car- 
 ried on with little change. The right to 
 carry on war and the duty of protecting 
 and governing the people carry with them 
 the right to provide the means of doing so. 
 This right includes in war the right of the 
 victor to levy an indemnity on the con- 
 quered, a right which was formerly held to 
 include absolute confiscation, reduction to 
 slavery, and even extermination. This right 
 in domestic affairs covers taxation in its 
 various forms and with its various substi- 
 tutes ; in its broad application it includes 
 the right to collect revenue and the right of 
 conscription. The right of conscription in 
 modern civilized nations is confined to mili- 
 tary service, but it is a power which has 
 been extended to forced labor on all vari- 
 eties of public works. Incidental to this.
 
 GOVERNMENT 49 
 
 though it marks a more advanced condition, 
 is the right to coin and issue money. 
 
 These were practically all the earlier func- 
 tions of government, though other rights 
 and powers have often been assumed, es- 
 pecially by the more despotic forms. Fur- 
 thermore, governments have usually been 
 more or less linked with religions, a rela- 
 tion which has been one of the most potent 
 influences in history, the influence of the 
 priests on the rulers having often exceeded 
 the power of the rulers over the priests, and 
 the duties of education and religion being 
 often confounded. 
 
 A departure from old limits of govern- 
 ment and recognition of a really new func- 
 tion is the post office, whose introduction 
 preceded the dawn of the new epoch by two 
 or three centuries, but whose general ex- 
 tension to communication with all parts of 
 the world for the benefit of every member 
 of the community is of a very recent date. 
 It seems hard to recognize that there were 
 no mails in the Roman Empire, and that even
 
 so THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 to this day there is no general government 
 mail service in the Empire of China. Two 
 thousand years ago the young wife who 
 followed her husband to a distant colony, 
 whether one of the Greek colonies on the 
 Mediterranean or at a later date the out- 
 posts which Rome scattered much farther, 
 bade farewell for life to all her friends and 
 relations, from whom she might never hear 
 again. The change of old friends and sur- 
 roundings for new ones was absolute and 
 complete. To-day a European emigrant who 
 settles in America, in Australia, or in south- 
 ern Africa, is in constant communication 
 with the home from which he came ; and this 
 constant communication, at once keeping 
 up the friendships of the old and gradually 
 bringing them into contact with the friend- 
 ships of the new dwelling-place, must have 
 great influence in unifying and consoli- 
 dating relations which are of much more 
 than a personal character. 
 
 Another duty of governments, not wholly 
 new but yet distinctive of the new epoch, is
 
 GOVERNMENT 51 
 
 that of sanitation. Something of this kind 
 has been done in cities for an indefinite 
 period. It was especially marked in the days 
 of Rome, where the sewer built in the time 
 of the Tarquins still carries the drainage of 
 the Eternal City to the Tiber, and where 
 aqueducts built in the days of the emperors 
 still supply far better water than is often to 
 be had in Europe. But with the increased 
 knowledge and capacity of the new epoch, 
 the duties of the government in caring for 
 the health of the people have become very 
 greatly increased. Water supply is not con- 
 fined to the more important cities, but is ex- 
 tending even to small towns. Water supply 
 must always be followed by a sewerage 
 system, and the modern sewerage system 
 must not only take away the sewage, but 
 dispose of it and utilize it. Other duties fol- 
 low. They are being assumed perhaps too 
 rapidly. Lighting public ways is a duty of 
 cities, and it may be that the supply of light 
 and heat for private consumers may yet be 
 considered a government duty. In fact, the
 
 52 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 extensions of the duties of government in 
 the new epoch are too general and too great 
 to be definitely predicted. 
 
 Another duty which governments are as- 
 suming is that of education. In old times 
 this duty was only recognized in the form 
 of a state religion ; and though the priests 
 were the custodians of literature, science, 
 and art, as they were then understood, it 
 was not their policy to disseminate education 
 widely. The importance of general educa- 
 tion, especially in those countries which had 
 free governments, was appreciated before 
 the dawn of the new epoch. It may have 
 had much to do with the invention which 
 led to the manufacture of power ; but be 
 that as it may, the substitution of mechan- 
 ical for human power calls for general educa- 
 tion. It leaves more time for the average 
 man to study, and it demands a higher order 
 of intelligence in the man. The provision 
 of an education has been assumed to be a 
 proper function of government. It began 
 with the free public-school system, which is
 
 GOVERNMENT 53 
 
 now universal in our country and is extend- 
 ing around the world. Its next development 
 was the library ; and it will not be long be- 
 fore every town considers it as much its 
 duty to provide a free public library as to 
 provide free schools. A further development 
 is in progress, and boards of public educa- 
 tion are beginning to provide free lectures 
 to supplement the school system. 
 
 The promotion of trade has been assumed 
 by governments, and this involves the care 
 of harbors, improvements of navigation, 
 and many other engineering works, which, 
 though perhaps originally justified on mili- 
 tary grounds, have gradually been extended 
 until their development for peaceful trade 
 is much greater than for ships of war. 
 
 The tools of the new epoch are already 
 being used in the conduct of foreign affairs, 
 and the relations of one nation to another 
 are being handled at home, the foreign repre- 
 sentatives being little more than the agents 
 through whom telegraphic and other dis- 
 patches are sent. The possibility of geo-
 
 54 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 graphical extensions of governments in the 
 new epoch is even greater than the addition 
 of new functions. It is absolutely essential 
 to a satisfactory government that no long 
 interval should elapse between the need of 
 action and action itself ; between the issu- 
 ance of instructions and the execution of 
 such instructions. Various methods have 
 been adopted to overcome this difficulty. 
 The delegation of power to viceroys and 
 others was the method in use in the em- 
 pires of old and in Asia to-day ; the method 
 of representation came later, and was the 
 only method by which a single popular gov- 
 ernment could be extended over any con- 
 siderable area of country. The Constitution 
 of the United States preceded the opening 
 of the new epoch, and its fundamental fea- 
 ture is that it leaves the execution of all 
 local government, which demands quick ac- 
 tion, in the several States, which thus far 
 are considered independent nations, while 
 it provides for a representation of every 
 community at the centre of the general
 
 GOVERNMENT 55 
 
 government. It is the most perfect device 
 ever made for the extension of a govern- 
 ment by the people over a great area of coun- 
 try. The manufacture of power, however, 
 has virtually annihilated distance. With the 
 present condition of steam navigation it may 
 be said that there is no seaport in the world 
 which cannot be reached from any other 
 seaport in a period not much exceeding 
 thirty days. It is true this could not be done 
 by any regular line of transportation, but 
 it could be done in an emergency by the 
 use of special ships. The railroad system 
 has now brought every place in the United 
 States, excepting Alaska, within less than 
 one week of every other place. The com- 
 bination of the steamship and railroad ser- 
 vice may within another century make it 
 possible to go from every place to any other 
 place on the planet in about three weeks. 
 The telegraph goes beyond this, and it is 
 now not only possible but the actual prac- 
 tice to know in every civilized city on the 
 earth what has taken place on the preceding
 
 56 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 day in every other city. These changes have 
 removed the conditions which formerly lim- 
 ited governments. If a single government 
 could be organized to handle the affairs 
 of the entire earth and give equal rights 
 and like laws to all races and conditions of 
 men, the physical difficulties in enforcing the 
 acts of such government would be much less 
 than those of handling the thirteen States 
 at the time of the adoption of our Constitu- 
 tion. 
 
 Whether such universal government will 
 ever exist is a question with which we have 
 nothing to do. So far as physical condi- 
 tions are concerned, the manufacture of 
 power makes it possible that the world in 
 the new epoch may be governed in this 
 way ; whether it ever will be, and whether 
 it would be desirable for it to be, are differ- 
 ent things. It seems more probable that 
 the increased respect which different na- 
 tions will have for each other as they come 
 to know each other better, as each one 
 learns to adopt the better features of others
 
 GOVERNMENT 57 
 
 and to discard its own worst features, may 
 lead to the existence of a few great nations 
 which will manage their own affairs sepa- 
 rately, but which will bear to each other re- 
 lations like those which exist in a peace- 
 ful family. At present the obstacles to the 
 unification of the human race are great ; 
 they are an inheritance from the past which 
 the new epoch will gradually obliterate. 
 The first of these is that of race. Civilized 
 races differ from each other. The civilization 
 of Asia is the oldest in the world, but the 
 two most populous districts of Asia, China 
 and India, are separated by a mountain bar- 
 rier more impassable than a-ny ocean, and 
 their civilizations were on independent lines 
 and entirely unlike. The civilization of Eu- 
 rope came later, but it developed with no 
 knowledge of what had been done in Asia, 
 Each of these civilizations represents a 
 development from savage life, but they 
 are on different lines. The races have civi- 
 lized apart, and each of them differs from 
 the others more than either does from the
 
 58 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 absolute savage. All the differences, great 
 as they are, may disappear when the races 
 come to know each other thoroughly. An- 
 other obstacle in the way of unification is 
 language. This also will in time disappear. 
 A third great difference is religion, the 
 power of which has been enormous in all 
 ages of the world ; and while fetichism and 
 all merely idolatrous religions seem to dis- 
 appear at once before their spiritual con- 
 querors, the great religions which have real 
 life and spirit in themselves, and which ap- 
 peal to the better qualities of the mind and 
 soul, do not yield to each other, and the 
 lines of distinction are to this day as plainly 
 marked as ever. Whether this division is 
 to continue with the knowledge which the 
 new epoch is opening, remains to be seen. 
 If it does continue it must be accompanied 
 by that tolerance of each other which should 
 ever mark the relationship between intelli- 
 gent educated people. 
 
 These mental and intellectual obstacles 
 will be much more difficult to surmount
 
 GOVERNMENT 59 
 
 than the purely physical obstacles, but if 
 they ever are surmounted the conquest will 
 be complete, while the mountains and 
 oceans will continue, lines of past demarca- 
 tion overcome by the work of the engineer, 
 but still remaining to help men to under- 
 stand the history of the ages which are just 
 entering their final period. 
 
 It is unwise to predict too much, but we 
 may be sure that the effect of the new epoch 
 will be to reduce greatly the number of na- 
 tions in the world ; that these nations will 
 ultimately be large but compact, perhaps 
 not more than a dozen in all ; that another 
 effect will be to increase the duties and 
 responsibilities of government ; that there 
 will be great changes in the forms of gov- 
 ernment, though what these will be we can- 
 not tell ; that the needs of the people who 
 are to live in the new epoch, wherever they 
 may be and whatever their form of govern- 
 ment, will be discipline and education, — the 
 discipline which, whether in the individual, 
 the family, or the nation, preserves that
 
 6o THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 control under which alone the best results 
 can be obtained, and the education which 
 alone fits man to direct the great powers 
 of the new epoch for the best good of his 
 race. 
 
 1
 
 V 
 
 CIVIL ENGINEERING 
 
 The new epoch has opened an entirely 
 new set of professions. The old professions 
 were primarily divided into two classes, the 
 military and the civil, and of the latter only 
 three were recognized, — divinity, law, and 
 medicine. These three were called liberal 
 professions, and their members were sup- 
 posed to be, and generally were, better edu- 
 cated, though not always more thoroughly 
 trained, than the men who followed other 
 callings. The demands of the new epoch 
 are such that educated men are required 
 everywhere. They are needed to design the 
 tools by which power is manufactured and 
 is utilized ; they are needed to manage the 
 affairs of the corporations whose capital is 
 invested in the great variety of tools, and 
 which have been referred to ; they are
 
 62 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 needed to perform the increased duties 
 which governments are now assuming. 
 
 Seventy years ago civil engineering was 
 defined as the art of directing the great 
 sources of power in nature for the use and 
 convenience of man. ^ This definition was 
 embodied in the charter of the institution 
 which has done more than any other to 
 unite the profession and to give it the stand- 
 ing it is now attaining. It was made in the 
 very infancy of the new epoch, within sixty 
 years of the time when Watt developed his 
 first steam engine. Had the profession re- 
 mained unnamed till the end of the century, 
 it is possible that its various departments 
 might have been classed separately, and 
 that what is now called by a single name 
 would have been divided into several profes- 
 sions. The definition was followed by a list 
 of objects and applications, but it was ex- 
 pressly stated that its real extent was limited 
 only by the progress of science, and that its 
 
 1 Thomas Tredgold, 1828 ; subsequently embodied in 
 charter of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
 
 CIVIL ENGINEERING 63 
 
 scope and utility would be increased with 
 every discovery, and its resources with every 
 invention, since its bounds were unlimited, 
 as must also be the researches of its pro- 
 fessors. This definition is broad enough to 
 embrace every department of work which 
 undertakes the development and use of any 
 of those physical powers through which the 
 new epoch is now subjecting all varieties 
 of matter to the dominion of mind. 
 
 The constitution of the American Society 
 of Civil Engineers fixes as a requirement 
 for full membership " the ability to design 
 as well as direct engineering works." The 
 English definition and the American re- 
 quirement taken together explain what con- 
 stitutes a civil engineer. His business is to 
 design the works by which the great sources 
 of power in nature are directed. His works 
 are not built for themselves nor as com- 
 memorative monuments ; they are made to 
 direct the powers of nature for the use of 
 man. Every engineering work is built for a 
 special ulterior end ; it is a tool to accom-
 
 64 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 plish some specific purpose. Engine is but 
 another name for tool. The business of an 
 engineer relates to tools. A civil engineer 
 must be capable of designing as well as 
 handling tools. The highest development 
 of a tool is an engine which manufactures 
 power. All the great possibilities of this 
 profession come from the existence of such 
 tools. 
 
 It is a common error to think of civil 
 engineering as a coordinate branch of a gen- 
 eral profession with many other branches ; 
 to class it with mechanical engineering, 
 with hydraulic engineering, with sanitary 
 engineering, with mining engineering, with 
 electrical engineering, or with any other 
 specific branch. The name of every special 
 branch of engineering has a distinctive 
 meaning ; the mechanical engineer deals 
 with machines ; the hydraulic engineer, with 
 water ; the mining engineer, with mines ; 
 the sanitary engineer, with drainage ; and the 
 railroad engineer, with railroads. The word 
 " civil " has no such distinctive meaning ; it
 
 CIVIL ENGINEERING 65 
 
 shows only that civil engineering is the work 
 of the citizen and not the work of the sol- 
 dier. Civil engineering, in its true meaning, 
 embraces every special branch of engineer- 
 ing. The professional limitation which 
 should be applied to the civil engineer is 
 that he must be a man who in his own de- 
 partment can design as well as direct. He 
 must have that control over his work which 
 nothing but intelligent knowledge of the 
 subject gives. He may be a railroad builder, 
 he may be a skillful surveyor, he may be a 
 mechanical engineer, or he may follow any 
 other specialty ; but whatever he does he 
 must do it not as a skillful workman but 
 as one qualified to design. Any man who is 
 thoroughly capable of understanding and 
 handling a machine may be called a mechan- 
 ical engineer, but only he who knows the 
 principles behind that machine so thoroughly 
 that he would be able to design it or to adapt 
 it to a new purpose, whatever that purpose 
 may be, can be classed as a civil engineer. 
 Any skillful sewer-builder and pipe-fitter
 
 66 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 may claim to be a sanitary engineer, but 
 only the man who approaches his work with 
 the intelligent knowledge of the conditions 
 which sanitation involves can be classed as 
 a civil engineer. Any man who knows how 
 to work a mine may be a mining engineer, 
 but only he who understands why he works 
 his mine as he does can be called a civil 
 engineer. Any well-practiced electrician 
 may be classed as an electrical engineer, but 
 only one whose practical knowledge is based 
 on the intelligent study of electricity can be 
 called a civil engineer. The business of 
 every engineer is to handle tools ; the busi- 
 ness of the civil engineer, whatever depart- 
 ment or specialty he may follow, is to de- 
 sign and build those tools rather than to use 
 them. The word " tool " is used in its largest 
 sense ; it may be called engine if preferred. 
 Any constructed thing whose principal ob- 
 ject is to produce something outside of itself 
 is a tool, whether that tool be a brad-awl, a 
 steamship, or a railroad. Civil engineering 
 embraces all branches of engineering, but
 
 CIVIL ENGINEERING 67 
 
 the civil engineer differs from other engi- 
 neers in that he makes tools rather than 
 uses them. The relation of civil engineer- 
 ing to all other branches is of the broadest 
 kind ; no branch of engineering is excluded ; 
 the only exclusion is based on the individual 
 qualifications of the men. 
 
 The civil engineer is briefly a man who, 
 with knowledge of the forces and materials 
 around him, uses that knowledge in the de- 
 sign and construction of engineering works. 
 His business is to design the tools by which 
 the sources of power in nature are directed 
 for the use of man. A body of civil engi- 
 neers should include the choicest minds in 
 every branch of the engineering profession. 
 
 Any civil, military, naval, mining, me- 
 chanical, electrical, or other professional 
 engineer, architect, or marine architect, 
 who, with knowledge of the great sources 
 of power in nature, uses that knowledge 
 in the design and direction of engineering 
 works, is qualified to be considered a civil 
 engineer. Civil engineering includes all
 
 68 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 branches of engineering, but not all en- 
 gineers. It should include every engineer 
 who applies a knowledge of the powers 
 of nature to the design and construction of 
 engineering works. It should include the 
 architect who uses this knowledge in his 
 designs and constructions ; but the archi- 
 tect who treats his profession as a fine art to 
 decorate a construction which he cannot de- 
 sign, belongs elsewhere. Intelligent know- 
 ledge of the great powers in nature is the 
 fundamental requirement for a civil engi- 
 neer. On this substructure a superstructure 
 of actual design and construction must be 
 built to make the complete professional man. 
 The civil engineer of the new epoch, the 
 epoch which he is bringing into existence 
 by the manufacture of power, must be an edu- 
 cated man. In no profession will this be more 
 necessary. The physical laws of power and 
 strength are mathematically exact and ad- 
 mit of no trifling. As the epoch progresses 
 the requirements for each individual will 
 become more complicated. The theologian
 
 CIVIL ENGINEERING 69 
 
 and the metaphysician may claim that an 
 education based on the laws of matter 
 leaves out the highest part of existence ; 
 the biologist and the physician may claim 
 that matter endowed with life is a higher 
 organism than the inanimate matter with 
 which the engineer has to deal. But how- 
 ever true these claims, their laws have not 
 the mathematical rigidity, the clear defini- 
 tion, and the thorough discipline which mark 
 the laws with which our profession works. 
 The engineer cannot shield himself under 
 doctrines or theories which he accepts but 
 cannot understand. Dealing with accurate, 
 definite laws and guided by the corrective 
 touch of physical nature, the education of 
 the engineer will become more necessary, 
 more thorough, and more exact than that 
 of any other professional man. This is the 
 training which the civil engineer of the new 
 epoch must have. This knowledge he must 
 have, or he must be classed as a workman 
 rather than a professional man. 
 
 The civil engineer of the new epoch
 
 70 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 must sink the individual in the profession. 
 The engineering work of the future must 
 be better work than has ever yet been done. 
 The best work is never done by separate 
 men. It is only accomplished when pro- 
 fessional knowledge so permeates all mem- 
 bers of a profession that the work of one is 
 virtually the work of all. The first steps 
 are made by individuals, but the best results 
 come later. In the Middle Ages Gothic 
 cathedrals were built throughout northern 
 Europe. They are exquisite works ; no mod- 
 ern architect can approach their beauty. 
 The reason is that the men who built the 
 Gothic cathedrals worked together as mem- 
 bers of a guild which was thoroughly imbued 
 with the spirit of building these churches. 
 In no period of the world's history has 
 marine construction had any significance 
 compared with what it has to-day, and it is 
 because the great shipbuilders are work- 
 ing together, each having the practical bene- 
 fit of what they all are doing. They are 
 working together as members of a profes-
 
 CIVIL ENGINEERING 71 
 
 sion rather than as individuals, and their 
 work is becoming more uniform and more 
 perfect. 
 
 The civil engineer of the new epoch must 
 be a specialist. No man can learn to design 
 all the tools by which the powers in nature 
 are to be directed. The work is too great 
 for one man to master. The best results 
 will only be obtained by concentrating ef- 
 fort in a single line. But though the civil 
 engineer must be a specialist, his specialty 
 must not be of a narrow kind ; he must have 
 that general knowledge and training which 
 makes the liberally educated man. In every 
 occupation a natural selection of men takes 
 place ; some follow the close lines of the 
 work for which they are trained, while to 
 others this training is but an incident in the 
 early part of their careers, and does little 
 more than point the general direction of 
 their lives. The ability to deal with men 
 and to direct the minds of men is a mat- 
 ter of natural gift more than of education. 
 It is so important that when possessed in a
 
 72 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 high degree, all other accomplishments yield 
 to it ; and its possessor, realizing that the 
 ability to use several minds gives him the 
 same advantage among his fellows that the 
 control of additional power has given among 
 races, will use his ' capacity. But the posi- 
 tive training of an education has its value 
 for men whose paths of life may lie far 
 from the special work for which they were 
 trained ; it will at least teach them the im- 
 portance of accurate knowledge. Too many 
 men are contented to guess rather than to 
 know, relying on personal tact to relieve 
 themselves from difficulties when their 
 guesses are wrong. 
 
 ''^he civil engineer of the new epoch must 
 fill many positions which are now held 
 by men of different training. The know- 
 ledge of the tools, both large and small, 
 which men are using, must be the strongest 
 qualifications for their use. Accurate engi- 
 neering knowledge must succeed commer- 
 cial guesses. Corporations, both public and 
 private, must be handled as if they were
 
 CIVIL ENGINEERING 73 
 
 machines, and the men who will so handle 
 them will find their best training in the 
 education which will make the best civil 
 engineers. These managers may not be 
 called civil engineers, but civil engineering 
 should not find fault with titles ; the man , 
 whose training has fitted him to do the work 
 of a civil engineer will not cease to be one 
 if he is promoted to a high position of man- 
 agement. 
 
 When ability to rule meant ability to 
 defend against invasion, to maintain war 
 against foreign enemies, government was in 
 the hands of soldiers. As society became 
 more complicated, and a permanent admin- 
 istration of civil matters more necessary, 
 domestic affairs being more important than 
 foreign, the administration passed largely 
 into the hands of lawyers. The legal profes- 
 sion was long the only educated profession 
 whose members were available for public 
 work. The functions of government are 
 changing. The demands of the new epoch 
 are not like those of the past. Safety from
 
 74 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 foreign invasion is needed less than safety 
 from dangers which lurk within, — from the 
 poisons, both moral and physical, which en- 
 danger concentrated population ; from bad 
 air, bad water, and bad construction ; from 
 corrupt administration, and from bacteria. 
 The rulers and governors, who at first were 
 soldiers, who subsequently were selected 
 from men trained as lawyers, must in the 
 future be taken, at least in part, from those 
 who are educated in the utilization of the 
 powers in nature, — from civil engineers and 
 the men who are equipped with the new 
 education for the benefit of their country. 
 The duties of municipal government, or the 
 government which is most closely concerned 
 with local affairs, must become very much 
 like the management of corporations. In 
 fact, a municipality is a public corporation 
 rather than a government, and its duties 
 should be performed in the same way as 
 those of a corporation. The same class of 
 men will do the best work for a city that 
 will make the best managers of manufac-
 
 CIVIL ENGINEERING 75 
 
 turing corporations. In cities and in many 
 communities the duties of the government 
 rest more on good engineering than on legal 
 skill. The whole life of the community de- 
 pends on appliances and conveniences which 
 the manufacture of power alone has made 
 possible. For all this work the government 
 needs neither soldiers nor lawyers, but men 
 educated in the various departments which 
 come within the broad definition of the work 
 of the civil engineer. 
 
 The tools which civil engineers have to 
 build are generally large. The physical 
 man is often a tiny thing beside the work 
 which he has to construct. Nothing better 
 illustrates the power of mind over matter 
 than the work of this profession. Though 
 it deals with matter and its work is of a 
 material kind, it is the mind which has 
 made this matter give forth power ; it is the 
 mind which is opening the new epoch, and 
 it is by the training of this mind that the 
 civil engineer must prevail. He is the priest 
 of material development, of the work which
 
 76 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 enables other men to enjoy the fruits of the 
 great sources of power in nature, and of 
 the power of mind over matter. He is the 
 priest of the new epoch, a priest without 
 superstitions. But if this profession is to do 
 the good work of which it is capable, the 
 true spirit of individual immolation which 
 has characterized the devoted priest of all 
 ages must be found among its members. 
 The profession can only do its future work 
 by trained minds working together.
 
 VI 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 Great as is the effect which the develop- 
 ments of the new epoch are having on the 
 engineering profession, their influence on 
 education is equally important. The duties 
 of universities are being entirely changed. 
 Great changes impose new duties on the 
 institutions which are charged with the in- 
 tellectual development of the community. 
 No changes have ever equaled those 
 through which the world is passing now. 
 No institution has greater responsibilities 
 at this time of change than those which rest 
 on a university. The manufacture of power 
 has an intellectual as well as a physical 
 effect ; it has separated power from the 
 mind which must manage it ; it calls for 
 intelligent design and direction of the mul- 
 titude of works which it has rendered pos-
 
 78 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 sible ; it has equipped our generation with 
 tools for study and investigation as well as 
 for mechanical work. 
 
 A university is more than a school ; it is 
 not merely a college ; still less should it be 
 an eleemosynary institution for the benefit 
 of young men to whom it can give an edu- 
 cation. A university owes its duty to the 
 community as a whole, not to individuals 
 who live in that community. The endow- 
 ment which a university may receive, 
 whether it come from public appropriation 
 or from private gift, must come to it as to 
 a public benefactor, endowed and sustained 
 in order that the whole community may 
 have the benefit of its intellectual guid- 
 ance. It must not train young men because 
 those young men wish to be scholars, but 
 because trained scholars are necessary for 
 the good of the community. The individual 
 must be sunk in the nation or state of which 
 he is a part ; the young men whom the uni- 
 versity educates should know that they are 
 educated to be useful members of a com-
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 79 
 
 munity, and not for their own ends. The 
 real duties of a university are universal ; it 
 is the head of the educational system of 
 the land, charged with the high responsi- 
 bilities which this position implies ; it must 
 be the depository of the lore which former 
 generations have accumulated and the pilot 
 of the community in every kind of intellec- 
 tual life; it must preserve the records of 
 the past, and it must train the men who are 
 to make the records of the future ; it must 
 combine the work of a museum with that 
 of a school. 
 
 A collection of physical objects, though 
 those objects be most rare and curious, does 
 not make a museum. A collection classified 
 and arranged in the most systematic man- 
 ner that has ever been devised would still 
 be incomplete. It must be a collection of 
 the records of the past, including that which 
 can be stored only in the mind. A classi- 
 fied museum, though it include a library 
 containing every book that has ever been 
 written, would be of no value without the
 
 8o THE iSTEW EPOCH 
 
 minds to use it. The museum which forms 
 so important a part of a university must 
 include among its collections a collection of 
 educated men. 
 
 The school which is to train the men 
 who are to make the records of the future 
 must build its special courses on the foun- 
 dation of an education which teaches how 
 to use the mind. This is the real measure 
 of a liberal education; without this, the 
 men it educates will be of little value in the 
 community. 
 
 The new epoch which the manufacture 
 of power is bringing forth makes new de- 
 mands upon a university — new demands 
 upon it as a museum in the large sense 
 which has been stated ; new demands upon 
 it as a school to train the young men whom 
 the community needs, and who will make 
 the records of the new epoch. 
 
 The new epoch has an inheritance from 
 older times. It increases the work of a uni- 
 versity in its capacity of museum. In the 
 mere collection and preservation of records.
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 8i 
 
 the work is greater in a period of change 
 than at any other time. Generally, in pass- 
 ing from one ethnical period to another, the 
 records of the past have been lost. The 
 students of the earliest life of man have to 
 grope among prehistoric remains, decipher- 
 ing marks which seem almost as inani- 
 mate as geological strata, and tracing their 
 uncertain way by analogies drawn from 
 races living to-day. 
 
 The new epoch must destroy as well as 
 build ; the new civilization will wipe out the 
 conditions which precede it. The sav- 
 age and barbarous tribes which now live 
 simultaneously in different parts of the 
 world must disappear. If their habits, cus- 
 toms, and mental conditions are to be re- 
 corded, the work must be done soon ; in 
 one or two centuries it will be too late. 
 The structures which represent the achieve- 
 ments of many generations cannot be pre- 
 served. A few may be kept as beautiful 
 relics, specimens in a universal museum. 
 But the manufacture of power has made
 
 82 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 the demands of the new epoch so differ- 
 ent from those of the old that nearly 
 everything which has to be used must be 
 built anew. The old and the new cannot 
 exist together. It is hard to realize how 
 rapidly the appearance of the whole earth 
 may change. Greater care of life is a 
 feature of the new epoch. An increase of 
 population at the rate of one per cent, an- 
 nually, which is less than that in European 
 Russia, would cover the entire land surface 
 of the globe, including deserts, mountains, 
 and snow-capped plains, with a population 
 as dense as that of Belgium, in about three 
 centuries. In the change through which 
 we are now passing, a change which will 
 leave no isolated tribes for the future, it is 
 one of the duties of the university to see 
 that the museums of the future are stored 
 with the full history of the past. 
 
 The new epoch is characterized by great 
 material changes. In such a time there is 
 danger that natural science and physical 
 study will overpower all other thought.
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 83 
 
 The treasures of philosophy, of music in 
 the broad Greek meaning, and of rehgion in 
 the noblest sense, must be a special charge 
 of the university. 
 
 Around the museum, of which they will 
 form a part, must be gathered the men 
 who will collect, study and care for what 
 it contains. The university must train and 
 educate these men to be the curators and 
 scholars who will see that record precedes 
 destruction ; who will take care that, when 
 physical existence ends, the facts which 
 scholars need are preserved, — and who will 
 themselves be the scholars who are to use 
 these records. The education of these men 
 must include the intelligent study of the 
 delicate accomplishments and refinements 
 of the past ; the new epoch may not have 
 the grace and taste which have marked 
 some inferior conditions ; in the creation of 
 beauty, Europe and America are to-day far 
 below the nations which dwelt around the 
 Mediterranean two thousand years ago, or 
 the older races which still inhabit Asia. The
 
 84 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 Study of history belongs to this department. 
 The training for those professions which are 
 based on history and precedent will find a 
 place here. But few of the young men so 
 educated will remain to form the body of 
 educated men which is an essential part 
 of the university museum ; the majority will 
 seek other lives and callings. The general 
 body of educated men, as education was 
 once understood, the men who are students 
 rather than workers, readers rather than 
 originators, who are guided by what others 
 have done rather than by what they them- 
 selves would do, will be educated in this 
 museum. 
 
 This work is much like what the uni- 
 versity has always been doing. In this de- 
 partment the effect of the new epoch is to 
 develop rather than to change; it makes 
 the old work greater and more important 
 than before ; greater because there will be 
 more workers, more to do, and more tools to 
 work with ; more important because much 
 which cannot be done soon may be lost for-
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 85 
 
 ever, and because the life of a community 
 busied with material development needs a 
 double leaven from the educated past. 
 
 But the community has needs for the fu- 
 ture as well as for the past. The records of 
 the past must be preserved and studied by 
 that body of educated men who make the 
 society of a university town the most refined 
 and intelligent that is anywhere found, and 
 who give to the precincts of a university a 
 peculiar attraction which exists in no other 
 place. The records of the future must be 
 made by men of different types and different 
 habits, who are educated to fit them for 
 active work, who will exchange the plea- 
 sures and quiet of the university for the roar 
 of the rolling-mill, the buzz of the machine- 
 shop, the obscurity of the mine, the bustle 
 of the railroad, and the harsh surroundings 
 of many other duties. These men must be 
 prepared to sacrifice the pleasures of edu- 
 cation as such, and the delights of study for 
 mental development, and spend their lives 
 where their work calls them.
 
 86 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 The definition of civil engineering which 
 is incorporated in the charter of the Insti- 
 tution of Civil Engineers has already been 
 quoted, "the art of directing the great 
 sources of power in Nature for the use and 
 convenience of man." The same definition 
 may be accepted as measuring the duties of 
 the new education which is to train young 
 men for active work in the new epoch ; this 
 education must qualify them to handle all 
 the great sources of power in nature, 
 whether those sources be animate or in- 
 animate, whether the direction be mechani- 
 cal or physiological, whether the work be 
 investigation, construction, management, or 
 invention ; it must be prepared to deal with 
 every kind of matter of which the world is 
 composed, with the power associated with 
 such matter, and with the laws, simple and 
 complicated, which govern it ; the object 
 must be to direct such matter and power for 
 the improvement of mankind ; this must be 
 the work of the new education. The civil 
 engineer claims that all this work belongs to
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 87 
 
 his profession, which should include every 
 educated man who, with a clear knowledge 
 of the laws which govern his work, is han- 
 dling the powers of nature, be that work in 
 a harbor, a machine-shop, a railroad, a mine, 
 an edifice, or a laboratory ; the fundamental 
 condition being that the work shall be that 
 of an educated man, who knows how to 
 design and to direct, in accordance with 
 nature's laws of construction, strength, and 
 power. 
 
 There is one profession whose age and 
 history have given it a rank by itself. Med- 
 icine had an old and honored name when 
 civil engineering was still unrecognized. But 
 it belongs with the new profession rather 
 than with the older ones ; its work deals with 
 the powers in nature for the use of man. 
 It differs from engineering in that it deals 
 with organic life, and not with inanimate 
 power. Its recent developments have been 
 rendered possible by the same conditions 
 which have developed engineering. Its place 
 in a university is with the other branches of
 
 88 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 physical science in the new education, rather 
 than in the historical museum. 
 
 The time is not far behind us when none 
 of the occupations which strove to direct 
 and use the sources of power in inanimate na- 
 ture required any high degree of education. 
 Practice and experience seemed to be enough. 
 Good sense, guided by precedents, accom- 
 plished what was necessary. While in some 
 ways a man specially educated had an ad- 
 vantage, it was not enough to give his work 
 the marked position which belongs to an 
 educated profession. This is no longer so. 
 Within the last half century the whole con- 
 ditions have changed. 
 
 It is not the educated character of the 
 man, but the educational needs of the work 
 which makes an educated profession. The 
 work must be such that it can only be 
 done by those whose education has spe- 
 cially qualified them for it. Natural ability 
 combined with education will always be 
 greater than either of the two alone ; but no 
 occupation can become an educated profes-
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 89 
 
 sion until education gives the men who fol- 
 low it a distinct advantage over those who 
 have not received such education ; and no 
 profession will ever be composed entirely 
 of educated men until the advantages of 
 education outweigh those of mere natural 
 ability. 
 
 The manufacture and use of power, though 
 in its crude beginning easily understood and 
 handled, has already reached a point where 
 accurate knowledge and thorough training 
 are needed for the best results. There is 
 not a single department in the manufacture 
 or use of power in which the advantage of 
 a thorough education is not felt. 
 
 The study of the strength of materials, 
 and the mathematical laws involved, is re- 
 quired in all structural work. The older 
 structures were the gradual development of 
 experience, each builder inheriting the work 
 of his predecessors. So long as dimensions 
 were small and the material generally exces- 
 sive, this worked well, but modern engineer- 
 ing asks for the least material which can be
 
 90 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 used to produce safe results ; the strains in 
 every part of the structure must be calcu- 
 lated, and unnecessary material removed ; 
 the rule that nothing is stronger than its 
 weakest part must be applied by eliminating 
 the material which gives useless strength. 
 
 Metallurgy has become in all its details a 
 matter of refined investigation. A minute 
 variation in the amount of phosphorus it 
 contains will make the difference between 
 a bar of steel which is perfectly safe for 
 structural purposes and one which is treach- 
 erous and may break without warning. A 
 large portion of the steel product of the 
 world is now made in furnaces with basic 
 linings which absorb the excess of phos- 
 phorus, and which were introduced, not by 
 a practical iron-master, but by a chemist, 
 who made dephosphorization his special 
 study, and sacrificed his life to the ardor of 
 his researches.^ 
 
 The ordinary high-pressure slide-valve 
 steam engine, such as is used for a sawmill 
 
 1 Sidney Gilchrist Thomas.
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 91 
 
 in the woods, or for a straw-burning harvest 
 outfit on a Dakota prairie, is a simple thing 
 which anybody can understand, but its use 
 is only justified because temporary conven- 
 ience is more important than economy. 
 The marine engine, where power is limited 
 by capacity to carry fuel, is very different ; 
 scientific study and design have reduced the 
 coal consumption of the best marine engines 
 to less than a pound and a half per indicated 
 horse-power ; this has rendered possible the 
 speed of the modern Atlantic liner and the 
 extremely cheap carriage of the tramp 
 freight steamer. • 
 
 Electrical engineering, and the other pro- 
 fessional branches which are multiplying 
 rapidly, require a like scientific training. 
 
 This education is not a simple. one. A 
 smattering of knowledge may enable a man 
 to understand what is going on, but to 
 design and perfect the structures and ma- 
 chines which will give the best results re- 
 quires a thorough knowledge of laws whose 
 complications increase as their applications
 
 92 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 are extended. The strength of materials, 
 the chemical composition of substances, the 
 laws of heat and of dynamic energy, with 
 other equally important principles, enter 
 into almost every operation of modern life. 
 Every design must be worked out in accord- 
 ance with the laws which govern it. There 
 was a time when Yankee ingenuity was 
 thought to be equal to anything, and the 
 memory of that time still exerts its baneful 
 influence ; works which required educated 
 engineers have been intrusted to ignorant 
 men, and terrible disasters have followed 
 this perversion of trust. The laws which 
 govern the problems of mechanical and ma- 
 terial devices are complete, and require 
 trained minds for their solution ; they are 
 exact ; they can be demonstrated absolutely, 
 and a mistake may be followed at once by 
 a disaster. There is no place among them 
 for the strange theories which, when with- 
 out the corrective influence of physical facts, 
 seem to prove intellectual depravity; the 
 man engaged either in the manufacture of
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 93 
 
 power or the utilization of its sources in 
 nature, can find no refuge behind unproved 
 theories or questionable practices. 
 
 This work is the creation of an epoch 
 differing from the past to such a degree that 
 it may itself be considered new ; the edu- 
 cation which will fit men to perform this 
 work must also differ from the old education. 
 The old education teaches facts ; it is based 
 on a knowledge of what has been done. 
 The new education cares little what has 
 been done, provided no one ever wants to 
 do it again. The men who are to adapt the 
 great powers of nature to the use of man, 
 who are to make the records of the future, 
 must understand the laws by which they 
 are to do this, must know how to investigate, 
 and how to work themselves, rather than 
 know what work other people have done. 
 No work is good unless made on correct 
 principles, and education must equip the 
 worker with these principles. The educa- 
 tion of the engineer is intended to fit him 
 to construct and use tools which serve
 
 94 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 some specific purpose ; they must be adapted 
 to their purpose and nothing else ; he must 
 be prepared to see them thrown away when 
 their work is done. The machine must be 
 properly proportioned ; the heavy, clumsy 
 tool which requires unnecessary power must 
 be avoided as much as the weak tool which 
 fails under its work. Furthermore, this ed- 
 ucation must be applied to every class of 
 work ; to all that great variety of tools by 
 which the engineer utilizes the powers of 
 nature ; to those more permanent construc- 
 tions by which the architect would build 
 monuments for future ages. 
 
 As this education becomes more general, 
 it will be realized that the basis of all true 
 beauty is adaptation to its purpose ; that 
 the decorations of the so-called fine arts 
 must be made subservient to correct and 
 simple lines of construction, which they 
 would- emphasize rather than conceal. The 
 false motto Ars celare artem, which really 
 means it is good to lie, must give place to the 
 dorious Veritas. The incongruous absurd-
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 95 
 
 ities of the present day must disappear. 
 The engine frames of the first Cunard 
 steamers were decorated with Gothic arches ; 
 beside the engines of a modern steamer 
 these old machines have a strange fantastic 
 look. Architecture, which as a fine art 
 would consign itself to the museum, and 
 sometimes, following the rapid changes of 
 fashion, seems to differ from millinery 
 chiefly in the want of a beautiful object on 
 which to place its novelties, will find its 
 highest development in correct construc- 
 tion. 
 
 The engineering of the new epoch must 
 be thoroughly good. This means the de- 
 velopment of the true professional idea, and 
 demands professional education. The best 
 work has never been done by separate men ; 
 it is only accomplished when professional 
 knowledge so permeates the whole body of 
 workers that each member has the benefit of 
 what all are doing. The first steps in inven- 
 tion and in new developments are taken by 
 individuals ; the best work is done later when
 
 96 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 the path into which the bold inventor ven- 
 tured alone is trodden by the crowd who 
 find it their usual course. The name of 
 Watt was immortalized by his successful 
 introduction of the steam engine, but there 
 are thousands of men to-day who can build 
 better engines than James Watt could. Ma- 
 rine construction owes its present high con- 
 dition to the fact that ship-building has 
 become a profession in which each builder 
 has the real benefit of what all are doing. 
 There lived in one of our great cities an 
 engineer of marvelous inventive skill and 
 world-wide reputation, who in a variety of 
 ways has left his mark on the developments 
 of the century ; his history was a mixture 
 of great accomplishments and strange dis- 
 appointments ; but the saddest part of the 
 whole was the work of the last years of his 
 long life, when, alone, having little inter- 
 course with other men, he set himself the 
 task of devising means by which future gen- 
 erations might manufacture their power 
 when the supplies of fuel now in use should
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 97 
 
 be exhausted.^ Perhaps no engineer who 
 has ever lived was as well qualified to solve 
 this problem as he was ; but no man, how- 
 ever great, can do good work alone and 
 before its time. When the problem on 
 which he toiled for years becomes a real 
 issue, there will be many men, of far less 
 ability than he, who, sharing the profes- 
 sional experience which will come mean- 
 while, will have little difficulty in providing 
 the needed power. 
 
 But the best professional spirit demands 
 more than this. To training and instruction 
 must be added the spirit which alone makes 
 men worthy of the power education gives 
 them. They must not only know how to 
 work, but they must do it in the spirit which 
 the best good of the community demands. 
 The advance of mankind through the savage 
 and barbarous periods was not continuous. 
 Increased powers are susceptible of abuse 
 as well as use, and the evil of the abuse has 
 sometimes exceeded the good of the use. 
 
 1 John Ericsson.
 
 98 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 Thfe new epoch will be no exception ; its 
 universality has only substituted other dan- 
 gers for the barbarian invasions which de- 
 stroyed older civilizations. The men who 
 would sacrifice their friends and their coun- 
 try for their own selfish selves still live ; the 
 1 ■ greater their capacities the greater the dan- 
 ger. Never before have the opportunities 
 for selfishness been so great, whether that 
 selfishness be devoted to acquisition of use- 
 less wealth, to indulgence in degrading lux- 
 uries, or to the general disregard of the 
 rights of others, which may characterize poor 
 and rich alike. In communities where every- 
 thing is organized on the selfish basis of 
 commercial life, these influences may trans- 
 form the great forces of the new epoch into 
 powers of destruction from which the world 
 will never recover. 
 
 There is a capacity in the mind which can 
 be developed to meet these dangers. The 
 antidote for these evils which selfishness be- 
 gets is that power which, working in many 
 ways and for many objects, takes a man out
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 99 
 
 of himself and is called love, whether that 
 love be for human beings, for animal life, for 
 inanimate objects, or for laws and principles, 
 which are at least as real as anything else. 
 The education of the men who are to do the 
 work of the new epoch must not only train 
 them and teach them, but must fill them 
 with that interest and enthusiasm which en- 
 genders love. ' This can be done ; the more 
 complicated the work and the higher the 
 education, the more interest the worker 
 finds to make him love his work. Every man 
 who has entered earnestly into the study 
 of the powers of nature, into the design of 
 works which are to utilize those powers, or 
 the execution of the plans which the world 
 is profiting by, knows that this is true. The 
 ordinary workman who works for wages 
 only, does not feel this love ; the professional 
 man whose profession is simply a source 
 of income, is little better ; but education 
 can be so directed that no man can really 
 enter into the spirit of the work, for which 
 this education has trained him, without
 
 100 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 caring more for the work than for the profit, 
 without an interest which is really love. 
 The men who are to save the new civili- 
 zation from business trickery, commercial 
 cruelty, and selfish indulgence must feel this 
 interest in the work they do ; they must 
 seek the best results because they love the 
 best ; they must do their work because they 
 love it, not perhaps with all their heart and 
 soul, but with the full strength of their intel- 
 lectual capacity. This love for their work 
 has characterized the best students and 
 investigators in all ages. With the change 
 which the manufacture of power has intro- 
 duced, it should exist in every branch of 
 work which deals with the utilization of the 
 great sources of power in nature. The uni- 
 versity will fail in its duty to the community 
 if it does not inspire young men with a love 
 for their work.
 
 VII 
 
 EDUCATION 
 
 The educational system of our country is 
 properly divided into four grades. It begins 
 with the common-school system where chil- 
 dren first begin to learn, and where they get 
 the education which every man and woman 
 ought to have ; this much is required by 
 law ; without it a child grows up in igno- 
 rance. Then follows the secondary school, 
 with a higher education which no one is 
 compelled to take, but an education which 
 is generally sought for by all who have any 
 taste for study, and who do not have to 
 work for wages as soon as they leave the 
 common school. Next comes the college, 
 whose duty is to round out the general 
 education, and to equip the youth with that 
 general knowledge and accomplishment 
 which places him in the rank of educated
 
 ro2 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 men. The last is the professional school, 
 with its special training for the vocation the 
 student is to follow. The number who will 
 enter each successive grade must always be 
 less than those who take the grade below. 
 The college course is omitted by many who 
 go directly from secondary to professional 
 schools. 
 
 Of the common school little need be said 
 It has become so thoroughly embodied in 
 American institutions that the younger gen- 
 eration finds it hard to realize that there is 
 any place where it does not exist. The sec- 
 ondary school is another thing, although it 
 has often been accepted as a proper public 
 charge. It includes both high and prepara- 
 tory schools ; the scholars in both are of the 
 same age, and the studies on parallel lines, 
 though the high school is intended to give 
 an education from which boys will enter 
 business life, and the preparatory school 
 trains for something which is to follow. 
 The secondary school has one advantage 
 over any other : its scholars are at the age
 
 EDUCATION 103 
 
 in which the mind is most easily and most 
 thoroughly trained ; the rudimentary educa- 
 tion of the common school has given them 
 some tools to work with ; they are not so 
 old that mental habits are hard to form ; it 
 takes the boy when he begins to know the 
 difference between what he is taught and 
 what he thinks ; while there may be no 
 period in his school life the studies of which 
 he will remember less, there is certainly no 
 period in which the work has so much effect. 
 The possible influence of a teacher in a sec- 
 ondary school is enormous ; the great prin- 
 cipal who for fifty years was at the head of 
 one of these schools in New England ^ ex- 
 erted an indirect power over his whole coun- 
 try which few men ever had. Many a man 
 whose name is now synonymous with great- 
 ness traced the awakening of his mind to 
 this teacher. 
 
 The function of the college is different 
 The boy who has begun to think for him- 
 self, whose tastes and habits are partly 
 
 1 Benjamin Abbot, LL. D.
 
 I04 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 formed, must here get the general training 
 which places him among educated men ; a 
 training which, going outside of particular 
 callings, provides that general equipment 
 of varied knowledge which fits him to as- 
 sociate with men of other occupations, and 
 at least to appreciate lines of work and study 
 which he does not follow himself. 
 
 What the college should avoid the pro- 
 fessional school is bound to do ; the young 
 man comes here with his plan of life formed, 
 he asks for the special training which will 
 fit him to carry out his plan. The time for 
 general education has gone by, and the 
 duties of the professional school are specific. 
 
 In earlier times there was but a single 
 course of education from beginning to end, 
 and this was taken by comparatively few. 
 The working classes received no education ; 
 the ruling classes, who were generally sol- 
 diers, received but little ; women were given 
 none. Between the ruling and the working 
 classes was the clerical body, the only edu- 
 cated set, who formed the clerks and writers
 
 EDUCATION 105 
 
 for their more ignorant masters ; the Egyp- 
 tian officer of to-day need not know how to 
 \ read and write when he has secretaries to 
 do it for him. But the demands of education 
 have changed ; every profession and occu- 
 pation calls for educated men, and the edu- 
 cation of to-day must fit them for this work, 
 with all its variety. No single curriculum 
 can meet the requirements of the new 
 epoch ; the universal scholar can no longer 
 exist ; the man who tries to know every 
 thing must spend his life in study alone, 
 with no time left to make use of his accom- 
 plishments ; he may be admired for his 
 great learning, but his education will be like 
 some tariffs, continued long after its useful- 
 ness has gone. Every man who would con- 
 tribute what he owes to the world of which 
 he is a part, must accept his true position 
 in his own department of study and of sub- 
 sequent work ; he cannot know all, but he 
 can console himself with the thought that 
 he does not live alone, that he is one of a 
 community, and that as a member of such
 
 io6 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 community he has an interest and a part in 
 what all the others are doing. 
 
 It is not long since few of the occupations 
 which are included in civil engineering re- 
 quired any high order of preparation. The 
 fact that some of the ablest engineers in 
 the middle of the century had barely a com- 
 mon-school education is sometimes used as 
 an argument against professional training. 
 These old engineers did much ; some of 
 them were great men ; they are entitled to 
 honor and respect ; they were the pioneers 
 of the profession ; but there is a great dif- 
 ference between the work of a pioneer and 
 the work which follows. The pioneer must 
 tread on unknown ground, he cannot be 
 educated in those things which he must 
 himself discover; judgment, sound sense, 
 and daring distinguish the work of the pio- 
 neer ; but the work of his followers, who are 
 able to study what he could only explore, is 
 better than his own. In the romantic town 
 of Cuernavaca the Spanish conqueror built 
 a church whose massive roughly buttressed
 
 EDUCATION 107 
 
 walls still resist the thrust of the clumsy 
 arched stone roof. On the plaza of the city 
 of Mexico stands a great cathedral, built 
 nearly two centuries later, which shows in 
 every line of its groins and domes, its col- 
 umns and its walls, the intelligence of its 
 designer ; structurally honest, it has little in 
 common with the fashionable work by which 
 our cities are scarred, but it has a high rank 
 among the noble buildings of the world. The 
 two churches typify the work of the pio- 
 neer and the work which should follow. An 
 established profession has no longer pio- 
 neers. The men who to-day are to direct 
 the great powers of nature to the use of 
 man, who are to make the records of the 
 future, must understand the laws by which 
 they arc to do this. The greatest engineer 
 is not the man who knows the most, but the 
 man who, when confronted with a new prob- 
 lem, can best grasp the novel subject, and 
 whose judgment will most correctly approve 
 or condemn his solution of it. This is the 
 proper qualification for individual engineers.
 
 io8 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 but even this is not enough for the profes- 
 sion. 
 
 LiberaUty means much the same in edu- 
 cation and in professions as in anything 
 else. It means freedom from the narrow 
 boundaries of prejudice, and it recognizes 
 that there is something beyond the con- 
 tracted Hmits which bound the education or 
 the profession of any one man. The real 
 difference between a liberal education and 
 a special education is that the first teaches 
 the student to use his mind, and the second 
 supplies him with information ; the man 
 who has only a special education may be 
 no better than the uneducated man among 
 surroundings for which he is not educated. 
 The distinctive mark of a liberal profession 
 is that its members shall know enough of 
 matters outside their own professional work, 
 to respect, to appreciate, and in a general 
 way to understand the work of other men, 
 whether those men belong to other active 
 professions or to the various educated call- 
 ings which are not given professional names.
 
 EDUCATION 109 
 
 The education which will keep civil engi- 
 neering where it should be — in its rank 
 among the liberal professions — must be 
 broad enough for its disciples to understand 
 and respect other lines of life ; it must make 
 it a profession whose members will hold 
 their own among other educated men, a pro- 
 fession which will have its proper share of 
 writers and original thinkers, a profession 
 through which men may rise to do the most 
 influential work, and to take the highest 
 places of trust and honor in the land. 
 
 There is a great difference between the 
 work of the museum and that of a school, 
 between the old and the new education, be- 
 tween the study of the past and the training 
 for the future ; the education of different in- 
 dividuals must first divide into these two 
 general directions. But there are several, 
 professions and a multitude of occupations 
 based on the history of the past, and 
 grounded on the old education of the mu- 
 seum ; and there are many vocations which 
 are gradually being grouped into separate
 
 no THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 professions, and which are grounded on the 
 scientific courses of the new education. 
 There must be a division first between the 
 museum and the school, between the new 
 and the old education ; and there must be 
 another division when each of these two 
 great educations separates into many courses 
 leading in different professional lines. The 
 great educational question of the day is how 
 to provide for these divisions of work ; it is 
 a problem with which our universities are 
 wrestling ; it is a problem which is now 
 thrown back on the preparatory schools, 
 whose work is largely determined by the 
 colleges to which they send their pupils ; it 
 finds its full development in the courses of 
 the professional schools, which must train 
 for separate professions and specialties. 
 
 The separation must begin in the second- 
 ary schools, but this is a beginning rather 
 than more. Under the training of these 
 schools, boys begin to show their natural 
 aptitudes, and some of their studies first take 
 a direction which may lead to the classic
 
 EDUCATION III 
 
 shades of the museum or the more active 
 work of modern life. During the college 
 years the first separation must be completed ; 
 the work of the museum and of the school 
 must diverge. A college course should be 
 framed with reference to the .mental apti- 
 tude of the student and the general order 
 of life which he is likely to follow ; while 
 there might be courses which would com- 
 bine equal selections from the two, it must 
 generally be a course distinctly belonging 
 either to the old education or to the new ; 
 but each should include enough of the other 
 to give the student that general knowledge 
 which every liberally educated man- must 
 have, and to develop that respect for other 
 work which is the highest characteristic of 
 the cultivated man. 
 
 Changes have taken place in college 
 courses ; fifty years ago they were much the 
 same in all American colleges, and for every 
 student at each college ; but even then they 
 covered a variety of subjects not found 
 in any other educational institution. The
 
 112 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 Studies were of the past rather than for the 
 future; they were classical and historical, 
 rather than scientific ; the old education was 
 generally the only one. A great variety of 
 new studies have now been introduced, 
 while the methods of conducting the old ones 
 have changed, A paper warfare has gone on 
 between science and the classics, and much 
 is heard of classical and scientific courses ; 
 if not carried too far this is all right. The 
 subjects which now find their place in a 
 college course are too many for any one to 
 take them all, but a selection should include 
 studies of very different kinds. The studies 
 which are generally supposed to form a 
 classical course, though no college course 
 now consists exclusively of classical studies, 
 are the ones best fitted to train the young 
 man whose life is to be devoted to the work 
 of the museum, and to those professions 
 which are based on a history of the past ; they 
 are still the bulwarks of the old education. 
 A scientific course, which ought in no col- 
 lege to consist entirely of science, is the
 
 EDUCATION 113 
 
 true beginning of the new education, and 
 the one which, in the order of other depart- 
 ments, would precede the professional work 
 of the engineering school. 
 
 Different methods have been adopted to 
 meet the increased variety of college studies. 
 But few of the studies which are now taught 
 at colleges can be taken by any one man. 
 The simplest method has been to provide 
 instruction in a large number of studies and 
 let each student select what he would take 
 himself, simply requiring that a sufficient 
 aggregate amount of work ■ be done ; while 
 this method may sometimes result well it 
 assumes a capacity of choice which few 
 young men have ; few college students know, 
 except in a general way, what studies they 
 wish to pursue ; scarcely any college student 
 is capable of making that judicious selection 
 by which he will get a general training in 
 the direction in which his mind leads him, 
 with a sufficient admixture of other studies 
 to meet the general requirements of a truly 
 liberal education ; the desultory selection
 
 114 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 which some boys have made has produced 
 college graduates the Latin of whose de- 
 grees is a strange travesty on the ignorance 
 of their minds. Another method, which re- 
 quires special skill in the college govern- 
 ment, but from which good results may 
 come, is to group studies in courses and re- 
 quire each student to select a course which, 
 arranged by older men than himself, may be 
 at least expected to have the proper admix- 
 ture for good results. With colleges of mod- 
 erate size this may be the best method. 
 When a college becomes very large there is 
 a method, which has been little tried, but 
 which is probably the best of all ; it is not 
 merely to divide the work into separate 
 courses, each being a wisely selected group 
 of studies, but to divide the college itself 
 into a number of smaller colleges, each ha\dng 
 but a single course, the number of colleges 
 corresponding to the number of courses ; this 
 scheme will involve duplicate instruction if 
 each college does all its own work, but it 
 has the great advantage of grouping to-
 
 EDUCATION IIS 
 
 gather in one college the young men who 
 pursue each course of studies and who have 
 a single purpose ; it calls upon every student 
 to measure himself with his fellows in a 
 spirit of friendly rivalry, and it generates 
 that mutual esteem which comes when 
 young men of very different home training, 
 but who are now working for a common end, 
 are brought together in the intimate rela- 
 tions of daily life. 
 
 With the professional school the separa- 
 tion of each class of education into its final 
 subdivision is complete. The first division 
 comes gradually ; it takes years from its 
 first beginning in the secondary school to 
 the end of the college course ; the subdi- 
 vision which follows comes all at once when 
 the young man is ready to devote all his 
 energies to the single pursuit of his profes- 
 sion. 
 
 The three older professions, which were 
 formerly the only ones recognized as lib- 
 eral, are law, medicine, and divinity. Spe- 
 cial professional schools exist for each of
 
 ii6 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 these. The first and third belong to the 
 old education, but medicine deals with the 
 powers in nature for the use of man ; it 
 differs from civil engineering principally in 
 that it deals with organic life and not with 
 inanimate power ; its recent developments 
 have been rendered possible by the same 
 conditions that have developed the engi- 
 neering profession ; its place is with the 
 other branches of physical science in the 
 new education. The courses of these three 
 sets of professional schools are generally 
 based on the existence of a previous college 
 course, which it is at least hoped that stu- 
 dents entering them will have taken. One 
 leading American university, which has been 
 at great pains to raise the standard of these 
 three departments, now limits admission to 
 its Law School to graduates of colleges, or 
 to persons qualified to enter the senior 
 class of its own college ; it requires an 
 examination for admission to its Medical 
 School, but accepts a college degree as a 
 substitute for such examination ; a candi-
 
 EDUCATION 117 
 
 date for a degree in its Divinity School 
 must cither be a college graduate or he 
 must give evidence that he has received an 
 education at least equal to what a college 
 would give. These are now recognized as 
 the requirements which should precede the 
 special work of the professions which were 
 formerly known as the only liberal profes- 
 sions. The requirements are right ; spe- 
 cialists can be trained without these earlier 
 studies ; liberal professions need them. 
 While it would neither be just nor wise 
 to close the bar, the pulpit, or the hospital 
 to men without college educations, it is 
 well that at least one university should 
 declare that it will give no professional de- 
 grees to men who are not qualified to make 
 their professions liberal. 
 
 Similar requirements are seldom made as 
 conditions for admission to schools of engi- 
 neering. The same university which now 
 insists on such rigid requirements for ad- 
 mission to its older professional schools, is 
 satisfied with lower requirements for its
 
 Ii8 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 Scientific School than it asks for its under- 
 graduate department ; while it has raised 
 the other professional schools to a strictly 
 postgraduate rank, it has given its Scientific 
 School a rank inferior to that of its clas- 
 sical college, though this Scientific School 
 is its only provision for educating engineers. 
 The demands of the engineering profes- 
 sion are now at least equal to those of any 
 other. The time required to master the 
 special studies of the profession is certainly 
 no less than the time needed for law or 
 medicine or theology. The broad defini- 
 tion of civil engineering embraces all the 
 branches of the engineering profession, 
 and an institution which would train for 
 civil engineering in its broadest sense must 
 really comprise several professional schools. 
 The requirements now demanded by any 
 engineering specialty are enough to oc- 
 cupy the full time of the student during 
 the years ordinarily allotted to professional 
 schools. If the professional school of engi- 
 neering can dispense with the previous
 
 EDUCATION 119 
 
 training of the college, it means that the 
 engineer needs less general education than 
 members of other professions do ; it would 
 almost seem to mean that civil engineering 
 is not a liberal profession. Undoubtedly 
 the work of the engineer is less dependent 
 on a knowledge of the past than is that of 
 the lawyer or the priest. An engineer can 
 separate himself entirely from all work and 
 study outside of close professional lines 
 without impairing his strictly professional 
 ability. The most skillful specialist may be 
 entirely ignorant of everything but his own 
 work. The man who knows nothing but 
 his own profession may be the most useful 
 man to his employer, even though he be 
 employed in a position of great importance 
 and liberal pay. From this point of view, 
 the additional years which would be spent 
 in a college may be considered wasted, and 
 the boy who enters a technical school would 
 be wise in saving the time which would be 
 unnecessarily spent in a more varied educa- 
 tion.
 
 120 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 The real question, however, is not the 
 value of the college course to any individual 
 engineer, but the value of this preliminary 
 education to the profession as a whole. Ed- 
 ucation must not be organized on the selfish 
 basis of business or for personal ends. The 
 true education for a profession is the educa- 
 tion which will make that profession accom- 
 phsh the most for the world. Every pro- 
 fessional man must have the education of the 
 common school, and of the secondary school 
 Every professional man, be he engineer, 
 lawyer, or physician, may, if he wishes, omit 
 the college, though the omission closes 
 some avenues of later professional studies ; 
 the omission may not impair his profes- 
 sional efficiency, it may only deprive him of 
 the general education which will help him 
 to give his own profession a standing among 
 the other liberal professions. The omission 
 of the college course, thereby bringing the 
 professional schools of engineering immedi- 
 ately after the secondary schools, is right, 
 if all engineers are to confine themselves to
 
 EDUCATION 121 
 
 the strict limits of their work, if all engi- 
 neers will be satisfied to be employed rather 
 than to be employers, if engineers are to 
 live by themselves, and measure the value of 
 life by what they alone do. But the civil 
 engineer ought to fill many positions which 
 are now held by men of different training ; 
 a thorough education in the laws which 
 govern the construction and the working of 
 the tools which men are using must be the 
 best qualification for the control and use of 
 such tools. Among the most successful 
 railroad managers of to-day are those who 
 have been first trained as engineers, and 
 have been disciplined by the painstaking 
 care of physical management. The best, 
 the most important, and the most honorable 
 work is that which must be performed by 
 comparatively few, by men who, passing 
 beyond the strict lines of professional work, 
 occupy those exceptional positions in which 
 they control others, in which they direct 
 the progress of their race. 
 
 Amid the plains and hills of India may
 
 122 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 be seen great cities which were built or 
 which were abandoned by the orders and at 
 the pleasure of absolute rulers. We cannot 
 build cities in this way here ; their location, 
 their growth, and their prosperity must de- 
 pend on commercial developments, and on 
 laws which no one man can control. An 
 absolute monarch might create a university 
 at the location which he preferred and 
 with the full organization which he thought 
 best ; we cannot do this here. The develop- 
 ment of our educational institutions must, 
 like everything else we do, be gradual, and 
 be determined chiefly by circumstances 
 which we cannot ourselves control. The 
 most that we can do is to give some slight 
 guidance to the unseen powers which are 
 at work, and, so far as our own lives and 
 influence can reach, direct these powers in 
 the right way. 
 
 A great university, which would be com- 
 plete in all departments, would be divided 
 on two planes, — on the planes of time and of 
 subjects. As the head of an educational sys-
 
 EDUCATION 123 
 
 tem, it would not be improper for it to exer- 
 cise supervision and direction over the com- 
 mon and the secondary schools, but the act- 
 ual maintenance of inferior departments is 
 hardly a proper part of its work. There 
 would be but one division in time, — into 
 the colleges or undergraduate schools and 
 the professional or postgraduate schools. 
 The division among subjects would be more 
 varied ; there would be, first, the great di- 
 vision based on the studies of the museum 
 and the studies for active life, and then there 
 would be various subdivisions to meet spe- 
 cific aptitudes and duties. In the undergrad- 
 uate schools the line between the old and 
 the new education would not be absolutely 
 drawn. There would be a number of col- 
 lege courses, or better a number of colleges, 
 whose work would vary all the way from that 
 which is almost entirely classical to that 
 which is almost entirely scientific, from 
 that which thoroughly represents the old 
 education to that which thoroughly repre- 
 sents the new. In the postgraduate schools.
 
 124 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 the division among subjects would be ab- 
 solute ; these schools must belong to one 
 education or the other; there would be a 
 distinct division between, on the one hand, 
 the graduate schools of the museum, includ- 
 ing those for the older professions, which 
 are based on study of the past, and, on the 
 other hand, the schools which instruct young 
 men to utilize the powers of nature for the 
 good of men, whether in the various lines 
 of engineering, or in the courses which, deal- 
 ing with organic life, will train the physi- 
 cians and biologists of the future. 
 
 Such a complete university does not now 
 exist. The name university is generally ac- 
 corded to any group of schools and colleges 
 which forms a considerable part of the great 
 whole. A group of undergraduate colleges 
 may be termed a university. A group of 
 colleges and graduate schools, whose work 
 is generally that of the old education, may 
 be termed a university ; some of the older 
 and more prominent universities of America 
 are of this kind. A group of colleges and
 
 EDUCATION 125 
 
 graduate schools belonging entirely to the 
 new education may be called a university ; 
 some of the newer universities of America 
 are based on these lines. 
 
 There would seem to be great advantage 
 in grouping together in one university the 
 several undergraduate colleges whose courses 
 vary from the extreme of the old to the ex- 
 treme of the new education, in uniting them 
 where there may be some acquaintance 
 and some communication between the stu- 
 dents of even those colleges whose courses 
 differ most widely, where equal rank and 
 merit may lead each to respect the other. 
 Liberal professions, professions whose mem- 
 bers would appreciate what they cannot per- 
 form, and admire what they can only par- 
 tially understand, demand not only that there 
 should be some admixture of science with 
 the classics, and of the classics with science, 
 but also that the young men who choose 
 one should not be kept too far away from 
 those who choose the other. 
 
 On the other hand little may be gained
 
 126 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 by placing the schools for different profes- 
 sions under the wing of a common univer- 
 sity management. Professional training is 
 too distinctive a matter, its lines are too 
 closely drawn, and the students are gener- 
 ally too old, to have much to do with those 
 who are following other pursuits. There 
 might be satisfaction and some advantage 
 in having schools for all professions grouped 
 in a single university ; but while the studies 
 of the college course can be pursued in the 
 quiet of a university town, away from the 
 active work of the present day, perhaps 
 better than anywhere else, professional 
 education should not be separated too far 
 from the lines of work and the sympathies 
 of the profession itself ; there would be few 
 locations equally favorable for schools of 
 every profession. The associations of a col- 
 lege undergraduate should be with others 
 of the same age and educational rank ; the 
 associations of professional students should 
 be with older men of their own profession, 
 rather than with students of other profes-
 
 EDUCATION 127 
 
 sional schools. While the best college work 
 can probably be done in those colleges 
 which, with widely different courses, are 
 grouped into a single university, the best 
 professional instruction may be given by 
 professional schools located where the stu- 
 dents can have some intercourse with the 
 older men of the professions they are to 
 follow, and can at least see something of 
 actual work of the kind they hope later 
 to do themselves. There must be opportu- 
 nities for interchange of ideas between pro- 
 fessors and workers, between students and 
 their future employers, between the young 
 men and the old men whose places they 
 expect to take.
 
 VIII 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 We are all familiar with the story of the 
 prophet who, after trials and tribulations of 
 strange and terrible character, went to a 
 city and preached that its destruction was 
 close at hand. This volume is not prepared 
 in the spirit of prophecy, nor are the condi- 
 tions of the new epoch like those which 
 attended this tremendous preaching. Still 
 in many ways the new epoch must open as 
 an era of destruction. It must from its 
 very nature destroy many of the conditions 
 which give most interest to the history of 
 the past, and many of the traditions which 
 people hold most dear. It will put an end, 
 once for all, to savage and barbarous races, 
 who must either be elevated to the life of 
 their more civilized contemporaries or must 
 vanish from existence. It must destroy
 
 CONCLUSION 129 
 
 ignorance, as the entire world will be edu- 
 cated, and one of the greatest dangers 
 must come from this very source, when the 
 number of half-educated people is greatest, 
 when the world is full of people who do 
 not know enough to recognize their limita- 
 tions, but know too much to follow loyally 
 the direction of better qualified leaders. 
 With the disappearance of ignorance will 
 come the destruction of superstitions which 
 have exercised such a momentous influence 
 in the past, perhaps generally for evil, but 
 in many instances for good. There must 
 be a great destruction, both in the physical 
 and in the intellectual world, of old build- 
 ings, old boundaries, and old monuments, 
 and furthermore of customs and ideas, sys- 
 tems of thought and methods of education. 
 There must be changes in governments, 
 which means destruction of old constitu- 
 tions, destruction of races as they merge 
 into one another, destruction of languages, 
 in the gradual disappearance of all but a 
 few of Ihe most important, while even these 
 
 X
 
 130 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 may in time give place to one that is uni- 
 versal. It is not worth while to consider 
 how this destruction will occur, nor how 
 much time it will require for its completion. 
 The important fact is that destruction will 
 come, not because the things which are de- 
 stroyed are in themselves bad, but because 
 however good and useful they may have 
 been in the past, they are not adapted to 
 fulfill the requirements of the new epoch. 
 
 Our principal thought must not be of the 
 destruction but of the new development 
 which makes that destruction necessary. 
 The destruction is not something to be 
 feared or avoided, it is inevitable. But de- 
 struction is always attended with danger ; 
 some time may elapse after the old has gone 
 before the new is established in its place. 
 If any warning is to be given, this is where 
 it should come. Education must adapt it- 
 self to the new demands ; professional work 
 must be extended, — the work of the men 
 who receive salaries and fees for what they 
 know and can do, rather than those who, on
 
 CONCLUSION 131 
 
 the one hand, take the chances of profits on 
 their own ventures and speculations, and, 
 those who, on the other hand, receive wages 
 for physical rather than mental labor. There 
 will be many other changes, the general na- 
 ture of a few of which has already been out- 
 lined. The danger is that the destructive 
 changes will come too fast, and the develop- 
 ments which are to take their place not fast 
 enough. The trouble will lie in the possible 
 gap between the two. The next two or three 
 centuries may have periods of war, insurrec- 
 tion, and other trials, which it would be well 
 if the world could avoid. 
 
 When the period of change is over it 
 would seem as if the final conditions of 
 human civilization would have been reached. 
 It is proper to say that it seems, for no one 
 can tell what new capacity may at some 
 future time change the conditions of life 
 again. But when the development of the 
 new epoch has become universal over the 
 whole globe, so that all have the same tools 
 to work with, and if necessary to defend
 
 132 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 and fight with, so that each land has the 
 advantage of what all the others know ; 
 when the possibilities of adventure are re- 
 moved ; when the opportunities for specu- 
 lation no longer exist ; it would seem as if 
 mankind must settle down to a long period 
 of rest. In many parts of our country, towns 
 may be found which, after a few years of 
 rapid, energetic development, seem to have 
 attained their growth, and improvement 
 seems to stop ; but in reality they simply 
 cease to increase rapidly in population ; 
 better houses are built, the people are sur- 
 rounded with more comforts, and though 
 the adventurous pioneers may be gone, the 
 people who remain have settled down to 
 the quiet satisfaction of a comfortable life. 
 Similar changes have come in national life 
 where nations became so consolidated or so 
 enlarged that there was no further occa- 
 sion for war, and their communication with 
 other nations virtually ceased. Such was 
 the history of Japan ; such seems to have 
 been the history of China. They have
 
 CONCLUSION 133 
 
 prospered and continued in a morbid, self- 
 satisfied existence, until the manufacture of 
 power opened the new epoch in the western 
 world and they suddenly became aware that 
 other and stronger nations than themselves 
 existed. A like condition will occur when 
 the new epoch is fully developed, but with 
 one important difference ; it will not be the 
 condition of a town nor of a nation but of 
 the whole earth, with nothing to change it 
 unless communication should be opened 
 with another planet, a possibility perhaps, 
 but one on which we need waste no thought. 
 It seems likely that material develop- 
 ments will come to a gradual pause, that 
 the stimulus will be removed, and that the 
 densely populated earth may continue for 
 centuries with comparatively little change ; 
 that then an immense population will live 
 comfortably and happily, and the qualities 
 which make the good citizen and the con- 
 tented man will be more in demand than 
 those which make leaders in such periods 
 as we are familiar with. It may be a time
 
 134 THE NEW EPOCH 
 
 when every one will understand the com- 
 fort and peace of mind which attend the 
 adaptation of personal feeling to the gen- 
 eral conditions which surround him. How- 
 ever satisfactory this condition may be, 
 whatever its delights, and whatever the ex- 
 cellence and happiness which may be in 
 store for the inhabitants of the thirtieth 
 century, they are not for us. We have, 
 however, one privilege which will not be- 
 long to them. In all history and in all 
 periods of the world, the honors are held to 
 belong, not to those who enjoy the results, 
 but to those who have made these results 
 possible. Our generation has the privilege 
 of doing its full share in bringing forth the 
 great changes which are ushering in the 
 new epoch.
 
 Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton &' Co. 
 Cambridge, Mass., U.S. A.
 
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