When organized under the laws of the State and under by-laws designed to secure steady employment, rather than any artificial condition of things in regard to pay hours, and continuance of labor, the true interests of the workman will be advanced. It may be that some one of you will develop a talent in the direction of organization and be the means of aiding in the solution of this great problem. Please think of the matter seriously, watch the law of evolution while you are advancing your professional knowledge, and if the opportunity offers, do all you can to aid in a cause so important and beneficent. One writer has criticised the technical schools because they do not teach mechanical intuition. The schools have enough to do in the time available if they teach principles and sufficient practice to enable the principles to be understood. The aptitude to design, which must be what is meant by mechanical intuition, requires very considerable practical experience, which you will readily learn if you do not keep yourself above it. If you have used your leisure hours to study why a certain piece of mechanism was made in a certain way rather than in another; if you have wondered why one part is thick in one place rather than in another, apparently in defiance of all rules of the strength of material; if you have endeavored to ascertain why a particular device is used rather than another more evident one; if you have thought and studied why a boss is thrown in here and there in designs to receive bolts or to lengthen a journal, and if you have in your mind, by repeated observation, a fair idea of how work is designed by other people, the so-called _mechanical intuition_ will be learned and found to be the _combination of common sense and good practice_. You will observe that some details have been copied for years and years, although thoughtful men would say they are not the best, simply because they are adapted to a large amount of work already done. This is particularly true of the rolling stock on railroads. The cost of a change in starting in a new country might be warranted, but it practically cannot be done when the parts must interchange with so much work done in other parts of the country. You will find in other cases that the direct strain to which a piece of mechanism is subjected is only one of the strains which occur in practice. A piece of metal may have been thickened where it customarily broke, and you may possibly surmise that certain jars took place that caused such breakages, or that particular point was where the abuse of the attendant was customarily applied.