Page:Literary Digest 1928-01-07 Henry Ford Interview 4.jpg

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"Perhaps to a five-day week pretty soon," I ventured.

"You're getting ahead pretty fast," said Mr. Ford.

The possibilities of such a Utopia did not seem to fascinate him particularly. He could see the logic of it, but he did not care. It is not up to him to bring Utopia to earth. It is up to him to do his job in the Ford Motor Company. If others copy his tactics until the bulk of the world's work is done by scientific modern methods, and we can all work in relays of a few weeks a year, spending the rest of the time in pursuit of culture, Henry Ford will probably have no objections. But that is not his goal. He is concerned rather that the Ford Motor Company shall do with all its might the things which it finds to do. He has no notion that he has reached that goal yet. He can tell only by experience.

That the experience of one generation is passed over to the next does not figure much in Mr. Ford's philosophy. He is not even that much of a socialist. What passes over from one generation to another, as he sees it, is the individual human soul—the soul which has occupied a body, perhaps, in some now-forgotten civilization being assigned by the Great Executive to be born again into present-day America to learn the lessons which work in America may give him. Ford is the world's champion individualist. But, perhaps, its greatest social force.