Twenty-five Dollars for Nothing at All

TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS for nothing at all except a sheepskin. That to me is the effect of the New York State law for registration of engineers and the same may be said of any of the state licensing laws. Of course, if one has to practice in more than one state, he must pay a more or less equal amount for every state he works in; and yet there has been little effective protest against these laws. It would seem that the spirit which animated the Boston Tea Party is non-existent amongst engineers. Undoubtedly a good many consider, through their failure to understand the law, that the matter does not affect them. In New York State it is provided that "any person practicing or offering to practice profes-sional engineering or land surveying . . . shall be licensed as hereinafter provided." To quote further from the law: "A person practices professional engi-neering . . . who holds himself out as able to do, or who does, the work that an engineer does . . . " The cunning of the wording of this article can only be appreciated by considering that anyone calling himself an engineer falls within the definition; its liberal inter-pretation (I have not quoted the whole of it) would embrace many who do not consider themselves engi-neers. The state authorities may not construe it to include such individuals; indeed, they may possibly consider it inexpedient to extend it to include engineers of subordinate grade, but the possibility is always there and, even though an engineer be of the grade of assis-tant, he may at any time be called upon to substitute for his principal in responsible charge of the work. It is therefore clear that anyone calling himself engineer and practicing engineering must, for his own protection, apply for registration or run the risk of violating the law. Now, what is the sense of all this? We have done very well without such restrictions on the means of gaining our livelihood. If one only stops to think, there is hardly a minute of his modern existence when he is not dependent for his safety on the engineering by engineers of yesterday or today. How often is one in jeopardy through failure of engineering works, work done under the supervision of those same engineers? If all of us had to wait for our ends by such means, our average life would probably be some thousands of years. Where, then, is the point to the object declared in all these laws that the need for licensing is "to safeguard life, health and property?" Bosh!