Abstract :
Arthur Twining Hadley A building like this is the best monument of what the twentieth century has accomplished. The really important part of the history of a nation is the development of its ideals and standards. The specific things that it does are important not so much for their own sake, but for the sake of the evidence they give as to the trend of a nation´s thought. It is not the magnitude of the individual battles which makes a war worth reading about. It is the ideas under which the war is conducted and the constitutional principles for which it is fought. It is not the census figures which decide whether a nation is great or small. It is the industrial methods and educational ideas which these census figures indicate. And in like manner it is not the buildings and machines and railroads and mines which constitute the important part of the history of the engineering profession. A book might give a good description of a thousand of these great engineering works, and yet fail of being in any sense a true history of engineering progress. The thought of the successive builders and the influence of that thought upon the conduct and ideals of other men are the things that we really care about. The story of the concrete achievements that have dazzled the eye of the world is but the unimportant and superficial part of the history. The real thing for which we care, the thing that helps us to understand the past and inspires us with hope for the future, is the story of the men who did the things — their struggles and their discoveries, their trials and their successes.
