Since the lot of the common man had traditionally been one of unrelenting hardship, engineers looked upon their works as man's redeemer from despairing drudgery and burdensome labor. Once the common man was released from drudgery, the engineers reasoned, he would inevitably become educated, cultured and ennobled.... Next, elevation of the common man would tend to make all men more nearly equal, thus making the engineer an agent in the realization of the democratic dream, an apostle of democracy, as one engineer orator put it in 1905.... We are the priests of a new epoch, an engineering leader told his colleagues in 1895, without superstitions.

pp. 6-7 - The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (1976)