things, among our friends, in an atmosphere of kindliness and helpfulness, we had been cheerfully unconcerned about the foundations of our economic and industrial life.
In the winter there are thousands of unemployed men—we try to give each one a bowl of soup, a place to sleep. Our street corners are unpleasantly infested with beggars—we pass an ordinance, arrest them for vagrancy, feed them a few days and order them to leave town. The city is full of criminals—what are the police doing? we inquire testily. We build another prison, erect another gallows.
We are like an architect who, seeing threatening cracks in the walls of the building, would hurriedly fill them with putty and add another story.
Henry Ford read the news from Europe. He saw there a purposeless, useless and waste of everything valuable. He saw a machine, wrongly built for centuries so that each part would work against all the other parts, suddenly set in motion and wrecking itself.
It was a repetition, on a larger scale, of a catastrophe with which he had been familiar in the business world. How many companies in his own field had been organized in the early days of the industry, had gone into business with the one purpose of getting all they could from every one, workers, stockholders, buyers—and had gone down in ruin! Only those companies which had been built on some basis of fair service had suc-
