Capital that is not constantly creating more and better jobs is more useless than sand. Capital that is not constantly making conditions of daily labour better and the reward of daily labour more just, is not fulfilling its highest function. The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more service for the betterment of life. Unless we in our industries are helping to solve the social problem, we are not doing our principal work. We are not fully serving.



CHAPTER XIV

THE TRACTOR AND POWER FARMING

It is not generally known that our tractor, which we call the "Fordson," was put into production about a year before we had intended, because of the Allies' war-time food emergency, and that all of our early production (aside, of course, from the trial and experimental machines) went directly to England. We sent in all five thousand tractors across the sea in the critical 1917-18 period when the submarines were busiest. Every one of them arrived safely, and officers of the British Government have been good enough to say that without their aid England could scarcely have met its food crisis.

It was these tractors, run mostly by women, that ploughed up the old estates and golf courses and let all England be planted and cultivated without taking away from the fighting man power or crippling the forces in the munitions factories.

It came about in this way: The English food administration, about the time that we entered the war in 1917, saw that, with the German submarines torpedoing a freighter almost every day, the already low supply of shipping was going to be totally inadequate to carry the American troops across the seas, to carry the essential munitions for these troops and the Allies, to carry the food for the fighting forces, and at the same time carry enough food for the home population of England. It was then that they began shipping out of England the wives and families of the colonials and made plans for the growing of crops at home. The situation was a grave one. There were not enough draft animals in all England to plough and cultivate land to raise crops in sufficient volume to make even a dent in the food imports. Power farming was scarcely known, for the English farms were not, before the war, big enough to warrant the purchase of heavy, expensive farm machinery, and especially with agricultural labour so cheap and plentiful. Various concerns in England made tractors, but they were heavy affairs and mostly run by steam. There were not enough of them to go around. More could not easily be made, for all the factories were working on munitions, and even if they had been made they were too big and clumsy for the average field and in addition required the management of engineers. We had put together several tractors at our Manchester plant for demonstration purposes. They had been made in the United States and merely assembled in England. The Board of Agriculture requested the Royal Agricultural Society to make a test of these tractors and report. This is what they reported:

At the request of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, we have examined two Ford tractors, rated at 25 h. p., at work ploughing:

First, cross-ploughing a fallow of strong land in a dirty condition, and subsequently in a field of lighter land which had seeded itself down into rough grass, and which afforded every opportunity of testing the motor on the level and on a steep hill.

In the first trial, a 2-furrow Oliver plough was used, ploughing on an average 5 inches deep with a 16-inch wide furrow; a 3-furrow Cockshutt plough was also used at the same depth with the breast pitched 10 inches.

In the second trial, the 3-furrow plough was used, ploughing an average of 6 inches deep.

In both cases the motor did its work with ease, and on a measured acre the time occupied was I hour 30 minutes, with a consumption of 2 gallons of paraffin per acre.

These results we consider very satisfactory.

The ploughs were not quite suitable to the land, and the tractors, consequently, were working at some disadvantage.

The total weight of the tractor fully loaded with fuel and water, as weighed by us, was 23 1/4 cwts.

The tractor is light for its power, and, consequently, light on the land, is easily handled, turns in a small circle, and leaves a very narrow headland.

The motor is quickly started up from cold on a small supply of petrol.

After these trials we proceeded to Messrs. Ford's works at Trafford Park, Manchester, where one of the motors had been sent to be dismantled and inspected in detail.

We find the design of ample strength, and the work of first-rate quality. We consider the driving-wheels rather light, and we understand that a new and stronger pattern is to be supplied in future.

The tractor is designed purely for working on the land, and the wheels, which are fitted with spuds, should be provided with some protection to enable them to travel on the road when moving from farm to farm.

Bearing the above points in mind, we recommend, under existing circumstances, that steps be taken to construct immediately as many of these tractors as possible.

The report was signed by Prof. W. E. Dalby and F. S. Courtney, engineering; R. N. Greaves, engineering and agriculture; Robert W. Hobbs and Henry Overman, agriculture; Gilbert Greenall, honorary directors, and John E. Cross, steward.

Almost immediately after the filing of that report we received the following wire:

Have not received anything definite concerning shipment necessary steel and plant for Cork factory. Under best circumstances however Cork factory production could not be available before next spring. The need for food production in England is imperative and large quantity of tractors must be available at earliest possible date for purpose breaking up existing grass land and ploughing for Fall wheat. Am requested by high authorities to appeal to Mr. Ford for help. Would you be willing to send Sorensen and others with drawings of everything necessary, loaning them to British Government so that parts can be manufactured over here and assembled in Government factories under Sorensen's guidance? Can assure you positively this suggestion is made in national interest and if carried out will be done by the Government for the people with no manufacturing or capitalist interest invested and no profit being made by any interests whatever. The matter is very urgent. Impossible to ship anything adequate from America because many thousand tractors must be provided. Ford Tractor considered best and only suitable design. Consequently national necessity entirely dependent Mr. Ford's design. My work prevents me coming America to present the proposal personally. Urge favorable consideration and immediate decision because every day is of vital importance. You may rely on manufacturing facility for production here under strictest impartial Government control. Would welcome Sorensen and any and every other assistance and guidance you can furnish from America. Cable reply, Perry, Care of Harding "Prodome," London.

PRODOME.

I understand that its sending was directed by the British Cabinet. We at once cabled our entire willingness to lend the drawings, the benefit of what experience we had to date, and whatever men might be necessary to get production under way, and on the next ship sent Charles E. Sorensen with full drawings. Mr. Sorensen had opened the Manchester plant and was familiar with English conditions. He was in charge of the manufacture of tractors in this country.

Mr. Sorensen started at work with the British officials to the end of having the parts made and assembled in England. Many of the materials which we used were special and could not be obtained in England. All of their factories equipped for doing casting and machine work were filled with munition orders. It proved to be exceedingly difficult for the Ministry to get tenders of any kind. Then came June and a series of destructive air raids on London. There was a crisis. Something had to be done, and finally, after passing to and fro among half the factories of England, our men succeeded in getting the tenders lodged with the Ministry.

Lord Milner exhibited these tenders to Mr. Sorensen. Taking the best of them the price per tractor came to about $1,500 without any guarantee of delivery.

"That price is out of all reason," said Mr. Sorensen,

"These should not cost more than $700 apiece."

"Can you make five thousand at that price?" asked Lord Milner.

"Yes," answered Mr. Sorensen.

"How long will it take you to deliver them?"

"We will start shipping within sixty days."

They signed a contract on the spot, which, among other things, provided for an advance payment of 25 per cent. of the total sum. Mr. Sorensen cabled us what he had done and took the next boat home. The 25 five per cent. payment was, by the way, not touched by us until after the entire contract was completed: we deposited it in a kind of trust fund.

The tractor works was not ready to go into production. The Highland Park plant might have been adapted, but every machine in it was going day and night on essential war work. There was only one thing to do. We ran up an emergency extension to our plant at Dearborn, equipped it with machinery that was ordered by telegraph and mostly came by express, and in less than sixty days the first tractors were on the docks in New York in the hands of the British authorities. They delayed in getting cargo space, but on December 6, 1917, we received this cable:

London, December 5, 1917.

SORENSEN,

Fordson, F. R. Dearborn.

First tractors arrived, when will Smith and others leave? Cable.

PERRY.

The entire shipment of five thousand tractors went through within three months and that is why the tractors were being used in England long before they were really known in the United States.

The planning of the tractor really antedated that of the motor car. Out on the farm my first experiments were with tractors, and it will be remembered that I was employed for some time by a manufacturer of steam tractors—the big heavy road and thresher engines. But I did not see any future for the large tractors. They were too expensive for the small farm, required too much skill to operate, and were much too heavy as compared with the pull they exerted. And anyway, the public was more interested in being carried than in being pulled; the horseless carriage made a greater appeal to the imagination. And so it was that I practically dropped work upon a tractor until the automobile was in production. With the automobile on the farms, the tractor became a necessity. For then the farmers had been introduced to power.

The farmer does not stand so much in need of new tools as of power to run the tools that he has. I have followed many a weary mile behind a plough and I know all the drudgery of it. What a waste it is for a human being to spend hours and days behind a slowly moving team of horses when in the same time a tractor could do six times as much work! It is no wonder that, doing everything slowly and by hand, the average farmer has not been able to earn more than a bare living while farm products are never as plentiful and cheap as they ought to be.

As in the automobile, we wanted power—not weight. The weight idea was firmly fixed in the minds of tractor makers. It was thought that excess weight meant excess pulling power—that the machine could not grip unless it were heavy. And this in spite of the fact that a cat has not much weight and is a pretty good climber. I have already set out my ideas on weight. The only kind of tractor that I thought worth working on was one that would be light, strong, and so simple that any one could run it. Also it had to be so cheap that any one could buy it. With these ends in view, we worked for nearly fifteen years on a design and spent some millions of dollars in experiments. We followed exactly the same course as with the automobile. Each part had to be as strong as it was possible to make it, the parts had to be few in number, and the whole had to admit of quantity production. We had some thought that perhaps the automobile engine might be used and we conducted a few experiments with it. But finally we became convinced that the kind of tractor we wanted and the automobile had practically nothing in common. It was the intention from the beginning that the tractor should be made as a separate undertaking from the automobile and in a distinct plant. No plant is big enough to make two articles.

The automobile is designed to carry; the tractor is designed to pull—to climb. And that difference in function made all the difference in the world in construction. The hard problem was to get bearings that would stand up against the heavy pull. We finally got them and a construction which seems to give the best average performance under all conditions. We fixed upon a four-cylinder engine that is started by gasoline but runs thereafter on kerosene. The lightest weight that we could attain with strength was 2,425 pounds. The grip is in the lugs on the driving wheels—as in the claws of the cat.

In addition to its strictly pulling functions, the tractor, to be of the greatest service, had also to be designed for work as a stationary engine so that when it was not out on the road or in the fields it might be hitched up with a belt to run machinery. In short, it had to be a compact, versatile power plant. And that it has been. It has not only ploughed, harrowed, cultivated, and reaped, but it has also threshed, run grist mills, saw mills, and various other sorts of mills, pulled stumps, ploughed snow, and done about everything that a plant of moderate power could do from sheep-shearing to printing a newspaper. It has been fitted with heavy tires to haul on roads, with sledge runners for the woods and ice, and with rimmed wheels to run on rails. When the shops in Detroit were shut down by coal shortage, we got out the Dearborn Independent by sending a tractor to the electro-typing factory—stationing the tractor in the alley, sending up a belt four stories, and making the plates by tractor power. Its use in ninety-five distinct lines of service has been called to our attention, and probably we know only a fraction of the uses.

The mechanism of the tractor is even more simple than that of the automobile and it is manufactured in exactly the same fashion. Until the present year, the production has been held back by the lack of a suitable factory. The first tractors had been made in the plant at Dearborn which is now used as an experimental station. That was not large enough to affect the economies of large-scale production and it could not well be enlarged because the design was to make the tractors at the River Rouge plant, and that, until this year, was not in full operation.

Now that plant is completed for the making of tractors. The work flows exactly as with the automobiles. Each part is a separate departmental undertaking and each part as it is finished joins the conveyor system which leads it to its proper initial assembly and eventually into the final assembly. Everything moves and there is no skilled work. The capacity of the present plant is one million tractors a year. That is the number we expect to make—for the world needs inexpensive, general-utility power plants more now than ever before—and also it now knows enough about machinery to want such plants.

The first tractors, as I have said, went to England. They were first offered in the United States in 1918 at $750. In the next year, with the higher costs, the price had to be made $885; in the middle of the year it was possible again to make the introductory price of $750. In 1920 we charged $790; in the next year we were sufficiently familiar with the production to begin cutting. The price came down to $625 and then in 1922 with the River Rouge plant functioning we were able to cut to $395. All of which shows what getting into scientific production will do to a price. Just as I have no idea how cheaply the Ford automobile can eventually be made, I have no idea how cheaply the tractor can eventually be made.

It is important that it shall be cheap. Otherwise power will not go to all the farms. And they must all of them have power. Within a few years a farm depending solely on horse and hand power will be as much of a curiosity as a factory run by a treadmill. The farmer must either take up power or go out of business. The cost figures make this inevitable. During the war the Government made a test of a Fordson tractor to see how its costs compared with doing the work with horses. The figures on the tractor were taken at the high price plus freight. The depreciation and repair items are not so great as the report sets them forth, and even if they were, the prices are cut in halves which would therefore cut the depreciation and repair charge in halves. These are the figures:

COST, FORDSON, $880. WEARING LIFE, 4,800 HOURS AT 4/5 ACRES PER HOUR, 3,840 ACRES

3,840 acres at $880; depreciation per acre .221

Repairs for 3,840 acres, $100; per acre .026

Fuel cost, kerosene at 19 cents; 2 gal. per acre .38

1 gal. oil per 8 acres; per acre .075

Driver, $2 per day, 8 acres; per acre .25 —- Cost of ploughing with Fordson; per acre. .95

8 HORSES COST, $1,200. WORKING LIFE, 5,000 HOURS AT 4/5 ACRE PER HOUR, 4,000 ACRES

4,000 acres at $1,200, depreciation of horses, per acre. . . . 30 Feed per horse, 40 cents (100 working days) per acre . . . . . 40 Feed per horse, 10 cents a day (265 idle days) per acre. . . 2.65 Two drivers, two gang ploughs, at $2 each per day, per acre. . 50 —— Cost of ploughing with horses; per acre. . . . . . . . . . . 1.46

At present costs, an acre would run about 40 cents only two cents representing depreciation and repairs. But this does not take account of the time element. The ploughing is done in about one fourth the time, with only the physical energy used to steer the tractor. Ploughing has become a matter of motoring across a field.

Farming in the old style is rapidly fading into a picturesque memory. This does not mean that work is going to remove from the farm. Work cannot be removed from any life that is productive. But power-farming does mean this—drudgery is going to be removed from the farm. Power-farming is simply taking the burden from flesh and blood and putting it on steel. We are in the opening years of power-farming. The motor car wrought a revolution in modern farm life, not because it was a vehicle, but because it had power. Farming ought to be something more than a rural occupation. It ought to be the business of raising food. And when it does become a business the actual work of farming the average sort of farm can be done in twenty-four days a year. The other days can be given over to other kinds of business. Farming is too seasonal an occupation to engage all of a man's time.

As a food business, farming will justify itself as a business if it raises food in sufficient quantity and distributes it under such conditions as will enable every family to have enough food for its reasonable needs. There could not be a food trust if we were to raise such overwhelming quantities of all kinds of food as to make manipulation and exploitation impossible. The farmer who limits his planting plays into the hands of the speculators.

And then, perhaps, we shall witness a revival of the small flour-milling business. It was an evil day when the village flour mill disappeared. Cooperative farming will become so developed that we shall see associations of farmers with their own packing houses in which their own hogs will be turned into ham and bacon, and with their own flour mills in which their grain will be turned into commercial foodstuffs.

Why a steer raised in Texas should be brought to Chicago and then served in Boston is a question that cannot be answered as long as all the steers the city needs could be raised near Boston. The centralization of food manufacturing industries, entailing enormous costs for transportation and organization, is too wasteful long to continue in a developed community.

We shall have as great a development in farming during the next twenty years as we have had in manufacturing during the last twenty.



CHAPTER XV

WHY CHARITY?

Why should there by any necessity for almsgiving in a civilized community? It is not the charitable mind to which I object. Heaven forbid that we should ever grow cold toward a fellow creature in need. Human sympathy is too fine for the cool, calculating attitude to take its place. One can name very few great advances that did not have human sympathy behind them. It is in order to help people that every notable service is undertaken.

The trouble is that we have been using this great, fine motive force for ends too small. If human sympathy prompts us to feed the hungry, why should it not give the larger desire—to make hunger in our midst impossible? If we have sympathy enough for people to help them out of their troubles, surely we ought to have sympathy enough to keep them out.

It is easy to give; it is harder to make giving unnecessary. To make the giving unnecessary we must look beyond the individual to the cause of his misery—not hesitating, of course, to relieve him in the meantime, but not stopping with mere temporary relief. The difficulty seems to be in getting to look beyond to the causes. More people can be moved to help a poor family than can be moved to give their minds toward the removal of poverty altogether.

I have no patience with professional charity, or with any sort of commercialized humanitarianism. The moment human helpfulness is systematized, organized, commercialized, and professionalized, the heart of it is extinguished, and it becomes a cold and clammy thing.

Real human helpfulness is never card-catalogued or advertised. There are more orphan children being cared for in the private homes of people who love them than in the institutions. There are more old people being sheltered by friends than you can find in the old people's homes. There is more aid by loans from family to family than by the loan societies. That is, human society on a humane basis looks out for itself. It is a grave question how far we ought to countenance the commercialization of the natural instinct of charity.

Professional charity is not only cold but it hurts more than it helps. It degrades the recipients and drugs their self-respect. Akin to it is sentimental idealism. The idea went abroad not so many years ago that "service" was something that we should expect to have done for us. Untold numbers of people became the recipients of well-meant "social service." Whole sections of our population were coddled into a state of expectant, child-like helplessness. There grew up a regular profession of doing things for people, which gave an outlet for a laudable desire for service, but which contributed nothing whatever to the self-reliance of the people nor to the correction of the conditions out of which the supposed need for such service grew.

Worse than this encouragement of childish wistfulness, instead of training for self-reliance and self-sufficiency, was the creation of a feeling of resentment which nearly always overtakes the objects of charity. People often complain of the "ingratitude" of those whom they help. Nothing is more natural. In the first place, precious little of our so-called charity is ever real charity, offered out of a heart full of interest and sympathy. In the second place, no person ever relishes being in a position where he is forced to take favors.

Such "social work" creates a strained relation—the recipient of bounty feels that he has been belittled in the taking, and it is a question whether the giver should not also feel that he has been belittled in the giving. Charity never led to a settled state of affairs. The charitable system that does not aim to make itself unnecessary is not performing service. It is simply making a job for itself and is an added item to the record of non-production.

Charity becomes unnecessary as those who seem to be unable to earn livings are taken out of the non-productive class and put into the productive. In a previous chapter I have set out how experiments in our shops have demonstrated that in sufficiently subdivided industry there are places which can be filled by the maimed, the halt, and the blind. Scientific industry need not be a monster devouring all who come near it. When it is, then it is not fulfilling its place in life. In and out of industry there must be jobs that take the full strength of a powerful man; there are other jobs, and plenty of them, that require more skill than the artisans of the Middle Ages ever had. The minute subdivision of industry permits a strong man or a skilled man always to use his strength or skill. In the old hand industry, a skilled man spent a good part of his time at unskilled work. That was a waste. But since in those days every task required both skilled and unskilled labour to be performed by the one man, there was little room for either the man who was too stupid ever to be skilled or the man who did not have the opportunity to learn a trade.

No mechanic working with only his hands can earn more than a bare sustenance. He cannot have a surplus. It has been taken for granted that, coming into old age, a mechanic must be supported by his children or, if he has no children, that he will be a public charge. All of that is quite unnecessary. The subdivision of industry opens places that can be filled by practically any one. There are more places in subdivision industry that can be filled by blind men than there are blind men. There are more places that can be filled by cripples than there are cripples. And in each of these places the man who short-sightedly might be considered as an object of charity can earn just as adequate a living as the keenest and most able-bodied. It is waste to put an able-bodied man in a job that might be just as well cared for by a cripple. It is a frightful waste to put the blind at weaving baskets. It is waste to have convicts breaking stone or picking hemp or doing any sort of petty, useless task.

A well-conducted jail should not only be self-supporting, but a man in jail ought to be able to support his family or, if he has no family, he should be able to accumulate a sum of money sufficient to put him on his feet when he gets out of jail. I am not advocating convict labour or the farming out of men practically as slaves. Such a plan is too detestable for words. We have greatly overdone the prison business, anyway; we begin at the wrong end. But as long as we have prisons they can be fitted into, the general scheme of production so neatly that a prison may become a productive unit working for the relief of the public and the benefit of the prisoners. I know that there are laws—foolish laws passed by unthinking men—that restrict the industrial activities of prisons. Those laws were passed mostly at the behest of what is called Labour. They are not for the benefit of the workingman. Increasing the charges upon a community does not benefit any one in the community. If the idea of service be kept in mind, then there is always in every community more work to do than there are men who can do it.

Industry organized for service removes the need for philanthropy. Philanthropy, no matter how noble its motive, does not make for self-reliance. We must have self-reliance. A community is the better for being discontented, for being dissatisfied with what it has. I do not mean the petty, daily, nagging, gnawing sort of discontent, but a broad, courageous sort of discontent which believes that everything which is done can and ought to be eventually done better. Industry organized for service—and the workingman as well as the leader must serve—can pay wages sufficiently large to permit every family to be both self-reliant and self-supporting. A philanthropy that spends its time and money in helping the world to do more for itself is far better than the sort which merely gives and thus encourages idleness. Philanthropy, like everything else, ought to be productive, and I believe that it can be. I have personally been experimenting with a trade school and a hospital to discover if such institutions, which are commonly regarded as benevolent, cannot be made to stand on their own feet. I have found that they can be.

I am not in sympathy with the trade school as it is commonly organized—the boys get only a smattering of knowledge and they do not learn how to use that knowledge. The trade school should not be a cross between a technical college and a school; it should be a means of teaching boys to be productive. If they are put at useless tasks—at making articles and then throwing them away—they cannot have the interest or acquire the knowledge which is their right. And during the period of schooling the boy is not productive; the schools—unless by charity—make no provision for the support of the boy. Many boys need support; they must work at the first thing which comes to hand. They have no chance to pick and choose.

When the boy thus enters life untrained, he but adds to the already great scarcity of competent labour. Modern industry requires a degree of ability and skill which neither early quitting of school nor long continuance at school provides. It is true that, in order to retain the interest of the boy and train him in handicraft, manual training departments have been introduced in the more progressive school systems, but even these are confessedly makeshifts because they only cater to, without satisfying, the normal boy's creative instincts.

To meet this condition—to fulfill the boy's educational possibilities and at the same time begin his industrial training along constructive lines—the Henry Ford Trade School was incorporated in 1916. We do not use the word philanthropy in connection with this effort. It grew out of a desire to aid the boy whose circumstances compelled him to leave school early. This desire to aid fitted in conveniently with the necessity of providing trained tool-makers in the shops. From the beginning we have held to three cardinal principles: first, that the boy was to be kept a boy and not changed into a premature working-man; second, that the academic training was to go hand in hand with the industrial instruction; third, that the boy was to be given a sense of pride and responsibility in his work by being trained on articles which were to be used. He works on objects of recognized industrial worth. The school is incorporated as a private school and is open to boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen. It is organized on the basis of scholarships and each boy is awarded an annual cash scholarship of four hundred dollars at his entrance. This is gradually increased to a maximum of six hundred dollars if his record is satisfactory.

A record of the class and shop work is kept and also of the industry the boy displays in each. It is the marks in industry which are used in making subsequent adjustments of his scholarship. In addition to his scholarship each boy is given a small amount each month which must be deposited in his savings account. This thrift fund must be left in the bank as long as the boy remains in the school unless he is given permission by the authorities to use it for an emergency.

One by one the problems of managing the school are being solved and better ways of accomplishing its objects are being discovered. At the beginning it was the custom to give the boy one third of the day in class work and two thirds in shop work. This daily adjustment was found to be a hindrance to progress, and now the boy takes his training in blocks of weeks—one week in the class and two weeks in the shop. Classes are continuous, the various groups taking their weeks in turn.

The best instructors obtainable are on the staff, and the text-book is the Ford plant. It offers more resources for practical education than most universities. The arithmetic lessons come in concrete shop problems. No longer is the boy's mind tortured with the mysterious A who can row four miles while B is rowing two. The actual processes and actual conditions are exhibited to him—he is taught to observe. Cities are no longer black specks on maps and continents are not just pages of a book. The shop shipments to Singapore, the shop receipts of material from Africa and South America are shown to him, and the world becomes an inhabited planet instead of a coloured globe on the teacher's desk. In physics and chemistry the industrial plant provides a laboratory in which theory becomes practice and the lesson becomes actual experience. Suppose the action of a pump is being taught. The teacher explains the parts and their functions, answers questions, and then they all troop away to the engine rooms to see a great pump. The school has a regular factory workshop with the finest equipment. The boys work up from one machine to the next. They work solely on parts or articles needed by the company, but our needs are so vast that this list comprehends nearly everything. The inspected work is purchased by the Ford Motor Company, and, of course, the work that does not pass inspection is a loss to the school.

The boys who have progressed furthest do fine micrometer work, and they do every operation with a clear understanding of the purposes and principles involved. They repair their own machines; they learn how to take care of themselves around machinery; they study pattern-making and in clean, well-lighted rooms with their instructors they lay the foundation for successful careers.

When they graduate, places are always open for them in the shops at good wages. The social and moral well-being of the boys is given an unobtrusive care. The supervision is not of authority but of friendly interest. The home conditions of every boy are pretty well known, and his tendencies are observed. And no attempt is made to coddle him. No attempt is made to render him namby-pamby. One day when two boys came to the point of a fight, they were not lectured on the wickedness of fighting. They were counseled to make up their differences in a better way, but when, boy-like, they preferred the more primitive mode of settlement, they were given gloves and made to fight it out in a corner of the shop. The only prohibition laid upon them was that they were to finish it there, and not to be caught fighting outside the shop. The result was a short encounter and—friendship.

They are handled as boys; their better boyish instincts are encouraged; and when one sees them in the shops and classes one cannot easily miss the light of dawning mastery in their eyes. They have a sense of "belonging." They feel they are doing something worth while. They learn readily and eagerly because they are learning the things which every active boy wants to learn and about which he is constantly asking questions that none of his home-folks can answer.

Beginning with six boys the school now has two hundred and is possessed of so practical a system that it may expand to seven hundred. It began with a deficit, but as it is one of my basic ideas that anything worth while in itself can be made self-sustaining, it has so developed its processes that it is now paying its way.

We have been able to let the boy have his boyhood. These boys learn to be workmen but they do not forget how to be boys. That is of the first importance. They earn from 19 to 35 cents an hour—which is more than they could earn as boys in the sort of job open to a youngster. They can better help support their families by staying in school than by going out to work. When they are through, they have a good general education, the beginning of a technical education, and they are so skilled as workmen that they can earn wages which will give them the liberty to continue their education if they like. If they do not want more education, they have at least the skill to command high wages anywhere. They do not have to go into our factories; most of them do because they do not know where better jobs are to be had—we want all our jobs to be good for the men who take them. But there is no string tied to the boys. They have earned their own way and are under obligations to no one. There is no charity. The place pays for itself.

The Ford Hospital is being worked out on somewhat similar lines, but because of the interruption of the war—when it was given to the Government and became General Hospital No. 36, housing some fifteen hundred patients—the work has not yet advanced to the point of absolutely definite results. I did not deliberately set out to build this hospital. It began in 1914 as the Detroit General Hospital and was designed to be erected by popular subscription. With others, I made a subscription, and the building began. Long before the first buildings were done, the funds became exhausted and I was asked to make another subscription. I refused because I thought that the managers should have known how much the building was going to cost before they started. And that sort of a beginning did not give great confidence as to how the place would be managed after it was finished. However, I did offer to take the whole hospital, paying back all the subscriptions that had been made. This was accomplished, and we were going forward with the work when, on August 1, 1918, the whole institution was turned over to the Government. It was returned to us in October, 1919, and on the tenth day of November of the same year the first private patient was admitted.

The hospital is on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit and the plot embraces twenty acres, so that there will be ample room for expansion. It is our thought to extend the facilities as they justify themselves. The original design of the hospital has been quite abandoned and we have endeavoured to work out a new kind of hospital, both in design and management. There are plenty of hospitals for the rich. There are plenty of hospitals for the poor. There are no hospitals for those who can afford to pay only a moderate amount and yet desire to pay without a feeling that they are recipients of charity. It has been taken for granted that a hospital cannot both serve and be self-supporting—that it has to be either an institution kept going by private contributions or pass into the class of private sanitariums managed for profit. This hospital is designed to be self-supporting—to give a maximum of service at a minimum of cost and without the slightest colouring of charity.

In the new buildings that we have erected there are no wards. All of the rooms are private and each one is provided with a bath. The rooms—which are in groups of twenty-four—are all identical in size, in fittings, and in furnishings. There is no choice of rooms. It is planned that there shall be no choice of anything within the hospital. Every patient is on an equal footing with every other patient.

It is not at all certain whether hospitals as they are now managed exist for patients or for doctors. I am not unmindful of the large amount of time which a capable physician or surgeon gives to charity, but also I am not convinced that the fees of surgeons should be regulated according to the wealth of the patient, and I am entirely convinced that what is known as "professional etiquette" is a curse to mankind and to the development of medicine. Diagnosis is not very much developed. I should not care to be among the proprietors of a hospital in which every step had not been taken to insure that the patients were being treated for what actually was the matter with them, instead of for something that one doctor had decided they had. Professional etiquette makes it very difficult for a wrong diagnosis to be corrected. The consulting physician, unless he be a man of great tact, will not change a diagnosis or a treatment unless the physician who has called him in is in thorough agreement, and then if a change be made, it is usually without the knowledge of the patient. There seems to be a notion that a patient, and especially when in a hospital, becomes the property of the doctor. A conscientious practitioner does not exploit the patient. A less conscientious one does. Many physicians seem to regard the sustaining of their own diagnoses as of as great moment as the recovery of the patient.

It has been an aim of our hospital to cut away from all of these practices and to put the interest of the patient first. Therefore, it is what is known as a "closed" hospital. All of the physicians and all of the nurses are employed by the year and they can have no practice outside of the hospital. Including the interns, twenty-one physicians and surgeons are on the staff. These men have been selected with great care and they are paid salaries that amount to at least as much as they would ordinarily earn in successful private practice. They have, none of them, any financial interest whatsoever in any patient, and a patient may not be treated by a doctor from the outside. We gladly acknowledge the place and the use of the family physician. We do not seek to supplant him. We take the case where he leaves off, and return the patient as quickly as possible. Our system makes it undesirable for us to keep patients longer than necessary—we do not need that kind of business. And we will share with the family physician our knowledge of the case, but while the patient is in the hospital we assume full responsibility. It is "closed" to outside physicians' practice, though it is not closed to our cooperation with any family physician who desires it.

The admission of a patient is interesting. The incoming patient is first examined by the senior physician and then is routed for examination through three, four, or whatever number of doctors seems necessary. This routing takes place regardless of what the patient came to the hospital for, because, as we are gradually learning, it is the complete health rather than a single ailment which is important. Each of the doctors makes a complete examination, and each sends in his written findings to the head physician without any opportunity whatsoever to consult with any of the other examining physicians. At least three, and sometimes six or seven, absolutely complete and absolutely independent diagnoses are thus in the hands of the head of the hospital. They constitute a complete record of the case. These precautions are taken in order to insure, within the limits of present-day knowledge, a correct diagnosis.

At the present time, there are about six hundred beds available. Every patient pays according to a fixed schedule that includes the hospital room, board, medical and surgical attendance, and nursing. There are no extras. There are no private nurses. If a case requires more attention than the nurses assigned to the wing can give, then another nurse is put on, but without any additional expense to the patient. This, however, is rarely necessary because the patients are grouped according to the amount of nursing that they will need. There may be one nurse for two patients, or one nurse for five patients, as the type of cases may require. No one nurse ever has more than seven patients to care for, and because of the arrangements it is easily possible for a nurse to care for seven patients who are not desperately ill. In the ordinary hospital the nurses must make many useless steps. More of their time is spent in walking than in caring for the patient. This hospital is designed to save steps. Each floor is complete in itself, and just as in the factories we have tried to eliminate the necessity for waste motion, so have we also tried to eliminate waste motion in the hospital. The charge to patients for a room, nursing, and medical attendance is $4.50 a day. This will be lowered as the size of the hospital increases. The charge for a major operation is $125. The charge for minor operations is according to a fixed scale. All of the charges are tentative. The hospital has a cost system just like a factory. The charges will be regulated to make ends just meet.

There seems to be no good reason why the experiment should not be successful. Its success is purely a matter of management and mathematics. The same kind of management which permits a factory to give the fullest service will permit a hospital to give the fullest service, and at a price so low as to be within the reach of everyone. The only difference between hospital and factory accounting is that I do not expect the hospital to return a profit; we do expect it to cover depreciation. The investment in this hospital to date is about $9,000,000.

If we can get away from charity, the funds that now go into charitable enterprises can be turned to furthering production—to making goods cheaply and in great plenty. And then we shall not only be removing the burden of taxes from the community and freeing men but also we can be adding to the general wealth. We leave for private interest too many things we ought to do for ourselves as a collective interest. We need more constructive thinking in public service. We need a kind of "universal training" in economic facts. The over-reaching ambitions of speculative capital, as well as the unreasonable demands of irresponsible labour, are due to ignorance of the economic basis of life. Nobody can get more out of life than life can produce—yet nearly everybody thinks he can. Speculative capital wants more; labour wants more; the source of raw material wants more; and the purchasing public wants more. A family knows that it cannot live beyond its income; even the children know that. But the public never seems to learn that it cannot live beyond its income—have more than it produces.

In clearing out the need for charity we must keep in mind not only the economic facts of existence, but also that lack of knowledge of these facts encourages fear. Banish fear and we can have self-reliance. Charity is not present where self-reliance dwells.

Fear is the offspring of a reliance placed on something outside—on a foreman's good-will, perhaps, on a shop's prosperity, on a market's steadiness. That is just another way of saying that fear is the portion of the man who acknowledges his career to be in the keeping of earthly circumstances. Fear is the result of the body assuming ascendancy over the soul.

The habit of failure is purely mental and is the mother of fear. This habit gets itself fixed on men because they lack vision. They start out to do something that reaches from A to Z. At A they fail, at B they stumble, and at C they meet with what seems to be an insuperable difficulty. They then cry "Beaten" and throw the whole task down. They have not even given themselves a chance really to fail; they have not given their vision a chance to be proved or disproved. They have simply let themselves be beaten by the natural difficulties that attend every kind of effort.

More men are beaten than fail. It is not wisdom they need or money, or brilliance, or "pull," but just plain gristle and bone. This rude, simple, primitive power which we call "stick-to-it-iveness" is the uncrowned king of the world of endeavour. People are utterly wrong in their slant upon things. They see the successes that men have made and somehow they appear to be easy. But that is a world away from the facts. It is failure that is easy. Success is always hard. A man can fail in ease; he can succeed only by paying out all that he has and is. It is this which makes success so pitiable a thing if it be in lines that are not useful and uplifting.

If a man is in constant fear of the industrial situation he ought to change his life so as not to be dependent upon it. There is always the land, and fewer people are on the land now than ever before. If a man lives in fear of an employer's favor changing toward him, he ought to extricate himself from dependence on any employer. He can become his own boss. It may be that he will be a poorer boss than the one he leaves, and that his returns will be much less, but at least he will have rid himself of the shadow of his pet fear, and that is worth a great deal in money and position. Better still is for the man to come through himself and exceed himself by getting rid of his fears in the midst of the circumstances where his daily lot is cast. Become a freeman in the place where you first surrendered your freedom. Win your battle where you lost it. And you will come to see that, although there was much outside of you that was not right, there was more inside of you that was not right. Thus you will learn that the wrong inside of you spoils even the right that is outside of you.

A man is still the superior being of the earth. Whatever happens, he is still a man. Business may slacken tomorrow—he is still a man. He goes through the changes of circumstances, as he goes through the variations of temperature—still a man. If he can only get this thought reborn in him, it opens new wells and mines in his own being. There is no security outside of himself. There is no wealth outside of himself. The elimination of fear is the bringing in of security and supply.

Let every American become steeled against coddling. Americans ought to resent coddling. It is a drug. Stand up and stand out; let weaklings take charity.



CHAPTER XVI

THE RAILROADS

Nothing in this country furnishes a better example of how a business may be turned from its function of service than do the railroads. We have a railroad problem, and much learned thought and discussion have been devoted to the solution of that problem. Everyone is dissatisfied with the railways. The public is dissatisfied because both the passenger and freight rates are too high. The railroad employees are dissatisfied because they say their wages are too low and their hours too long. The owners of the railways are dissatisfied because it is claimed that no adequate return is realized upon the money invested. All of the contacts of a properly managed undertaking ought to be satisfactory. If the public, the employees, and the owners do not find themselves better off because of the undertaking, then there must be something very wrong indeed with the manner in which the undertaking is carried through.

I am entirely without any disposition to pose as a railroad authority. There may be railroad authorities, but if the service as rendered by the American railroad to-day is the result of accumulated railway knowledge, then I cannot say that my respect for the usefulness of that knowledge is at all profound. I have not the slightest doubt in the world that the active managers of the railways, the men who really do the work, are entirely capable of conducting the railways of the country to the satisfaction of every one, and I have equally no doubt that these active managers have, by force of a chain of circumstances, all but ceased to manage. And right there is the source of most of the trouble. The men who know railroading have not been allowed to manage railroads.

In a previous chapter on finance were set forth the dangers attendant upon the indiscriminate borrowing of money. It is inevitable that any one who can borrow freely to cover errors of management will borrow rather than correct the errors. Our railway managers have been practically forced to borrow, for since the very inception of the railways they have not been free agents. The guiding hand of the railway has been, not the railroad man, but the banker. When railroad credit was high, more money was to be made out of floating bond issues and speculating in the securities than out of service to the public. A very small fraction of the money earned by the railways has gone back into the rehabilitation of the properties. When by skilled management the net revenue became large enough to pay a considerable dividend upon the stock, then that dividend was used first by the speculators on the inside and controlling the railroad fiscal policy to boom the stock and unload their holdings, and then to float a bond issue on the strength of the credit gained through the earnings. When the earnings dropped or were artificially depressed, then the speculators bought back the stock and in the course of time staged another advance and unloading. There is scarcely a railroad in the United States that has not been through one or more receiverships, due to the fact that the financial interests piled on load after load of securities until the structures grew topheavy and fell over. Then they got in on the receiverships, made money at the expense of gullible security holders, and started the same old pyramiding game all over again.

The natural ally of the banker is the lawyer. Such games as have been played on the railroads have needed expert legal advice. Lawyers, like bankers, know absolutely nothing about business. They imagine that a business is properly conducted if it keeps within the law or if the law can be altered or interpreted to suit the purpose in hand. They live on rules. The bankers took finance out of the hands of the managers. They put in lawyers to see that the railroads violated the law only in legal fashion, and thus grew up immense legal departments. Instead of operating under the rules of common sense and according to circumstances, every railroad had to operate on the advice of counsel. Rules spread through every part of the organization. Then came the avalanche of state and federal regulations, until to-day we find the railways hog-tied in a mass of rules and regulations. With the lawyers and the financiers on the inside and various state commissions on the outside, the railway manager has little chance. That is the trouble with the railways. Business cannot be conducted by law.

We have had the opportunity of demonstrating to ourselves what a freedom from the banker-legal mortmain means, in our experience with the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton Railway. We bought the railway because its right of way interfered with some of our improvements on the River Rouge. We did not buy it as an investment, or as an adjunct to our industries, or because of its strategic position. The extraordinarily good situation of the railway seems to have become universally apparent only since we bought it. That, however, is beside the point. We bought the railway because it interfered with our plans. Then we had to do something with it. The only thing to do was to run it as a productive enterprise, applying to it exactly the same principles as are applied in every department of our industries. We have as yet made no special efforts of any kind and the railway has not been set up as a demonstration of how every railway should be run. It is true that applying the rule of maximum service at minimum cost has caused the income of the road to exceed the outgo—which, for that road, represents a most unusual condition. It has been represented that the changes we have made—and remember they have been made simply as part of the day's work—are peculiarly revolutionary and quite without application to railway management in general. Personally, it would seem to me that our little line does not differ much from the big lines. In our own work we have always found that, if our principles were right, the area over which they were applied did not matter. The principles that we use in the big Highland Park plant seem to work equally well in every plant that we establish. It has never made any difference with us whether we multiplied what we were doing by five or five hundred. Size is only a matter of the multiplication table, anyway.

The Detroit, Toledo & Ironton Railway was organized some twenty-odd years ago and has been reorganized every few years since then. The last reorganization was in 1914. The war and the federal control of the railways interrupted the cycle of reorganization. The road owns 343 miles of track, has 52 miles of branches, and 45 miles of trackage rights over other roads. It goes from Detroit almost due south to Ironton on the Ohio River, thus tapping the West Virginia coal deposits. It crosses most of the large trunk lines and it is a road which, from a general business standpoint, ought to pay. It has paid. It seems to have paid the bankers. In 1913 the net capitalization per mile of road was $105,000. In the next receivership this was cut down to $47,000 per mile. I do not know how much money in all has been raised on the strength of the road. I do know that in the reorganization of 1914 the bondholders were assessed and forced to turn into the treasury nearly five million dollars—which is the amount that we paid for the entire road. We paid sixty cents on the dollar for the outstanding mortgage bonds, although the ruling price just before the time of purchase was between thirty and forty cents on the dollar. We paid a dollar a share for the common stock and five dollars a share for the preferred stock—which seemed to be a fair price considering that no interest had ever been paid upon the bonds and a dividend on the stock was a most remote possibility. The rolling stock of the road consisted of about seventy locomotives, twenty-seven passenger cars, and around twenty-eight hundred freight cars. All of the rolling stock was in extremely bad condition and a good part of it would not run at all. All of the buildings were dirty, unpainted, and generally run down. The roadbed was something more than a streak of rust and something less than a railway. The repair shops were over-manned and under-machined. Practically everything connected with operation was conducted with a maximum of waste. There was, however, an exceedingly ample executive and administration department, and of course a legal department. The legal department alone cost in one month nearly $18,000.

We took over the road in March, 1921. We began to apply industrial principles. There had been an executive office in Detroit. We closed that up and put the administration into the charge of one man and gave him half of the flat-topped desk out in the freight office. The legal department went with the executive offices. There is no reason for so much litigation in connection with railroading. Our people quickly settled all the mass of outstanding claims, some of which had been hanging on for years. As new claims arise, they are settled at once and on the facts, so that the legal expense seldom exceeds $200 a month. All of the unnecessary accounting and red tape were thrown out and the payroll of the road was reduced from 2,700 to 1,650 men. Following our general policy, all titles and offices other than those required by law were abolished. The ordinary railway organization is rigid; a message has to go up through a certain line of authority and no man is expected to do anything without explicit orders from his superior. One morning I went out to the road very early and found a wrecking train with steam up, a crew aboard and all ready to start. It had been "awaiting orders" for half an hour. We went down and cleared the wreck before the orders came through; that was before the idea of personal responsibility had soaked in. It was a little hard to break the "orders" habit; the men at first were afraid to take responsibility. But as we went on, they seemed to like the plan more and more and now no man limits his duties. A man is paid for a day's work of eight hours and he is expected to work during those eight hours. If he is an engineer and finishes a run in four hours then he works at whatever else may be in demand for the next four hours. If a man works more than eight hours he is not paid for overtime—he deducts his overtime from the next working day or saves it up and gets a whole day off with pay. Our eight-hour day is a day of eight hours and not a basis for computing pay.

The minimum wage is six dollars a day. There are no extra men. We have cut down in the offices, in the shops, and on the roads. In one shop 20 men are now doing more work than 59 did before. Not long ago one of our track gangs, consisting of a foreman and 15 men, was working beside a parallel road on which was a gang of 40 men doing exactly the same sort of track repairing and ballasting. In five days our gang did two telegraph poles more than the competing gang!

The road is being rehabilitated; nearly the whole track has been reballasted and many miles of new rails have been laid. The locomotives and rolling stock are being overhauled in our own shops and at a very slight expense. We found that the supplies bought previously were of poor quality or unfitted for the use; we are saving money on supplies by buying better qualities and seeing that nothing is wasted. The men seem entirely willing to cooperate in saving. They do not discard that which might be used. We ask a man, "What can you get out of an engine?" and he answers with an economy record. And we are not pouring in great amounts of money. Everything is being done out of earnings. That is our policy. The trains must go through and on time. The time of freight movements has been cut down about two thirds. A car on a siding is not just a car on a siding. It is a great big question mark. Someone has to know why it is there. It used to take 8 or 9 days to get freight through to Philadelphia or New York; now it takes three and a half days. The organization is serving.

All sorts of explanations are put forward, of why a deficit was turned into a surplus. I am told that it is all due to diverting the freight of the Ford industries. If we had diverted all of our business to this road, that would not explain why we manage at so much lower an operating cost than before. We are routing as much as we can of our own business over the road, but only because we there get the best service. For years past we had been trying to send freight over this road because it was conveniently located, but we had never been able to use it to any extent because of the delayed deliveries. We could not count on a shipment to within five or six weeks; that tied up too much money and also broke into our production schedule. There was no reason why the road should not have had a schedule; but it did not. The delays became legal matters to be taken up in due legal course; that is not the way of business. We think that a delay is a criticism of our work and is something at once to be investigated. That is business.

The railroads in general have broken down, and if the former conduct of the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton is any criterion of management in general there is no reason in the world why they should not have broken down. Too many railroads are run, not from the offices of practical men, but from banking offices, and the principles of procedure, the whole outlook, are financial—not transportational, but financial. There has been a breakdown simply because more attention has been paid to railroads as factors in the stock market than as servants of the people. Outworn ideas have been retained, development has been practically stopped, and railroad men with vision have not been set free to grow.

Will a billion dollars solve that sort of trouble? No, a billion dollars will only make the difficulty one billion dollars worse. The purpose of the billion is simply to continue the present methods of railroad management, and it is because of the present methods that we have any railroad difficulties at all.

The mistaken and foolish things we did years ago are just overtaking us. At the beginning of railway transportation in the United States, the people had to be taught its use, just as they had to be taught the use of the telephone. Also, the new railroads had to make business in order to keep themselves solvent. And because railway financing began in one of the rottenest periods of our business history, a number of practices were established as precedents which have influenced railway work ever since. One of the first things the railways did was to throttle all other methods of transportation. There was the beginning of a splendid canal system in this country and a great movement for canalization was at its height. The railroad companies bought out the canal companies and let the canals fill up and choke with weeds and refuse. All over the Eastern and in parts of the Middle Western states are the remains of this network of internal waterways. They are being restored now as rapidly as possible; they are being linked together; various commissions, public and private, have seen the vision of a complete system of waterways serving all parts of the country, and thanks to their efforts, persistence, and faith, progress is being made.

But there was another. This was the system of making the haul as long as possible. Any one who is familiar with the exposures which resulted in the formation of the Interstate Commerce Commission knows what is meant by this. There was a period when rail transport was not regarded as the servant of the traveling, manufacturing, and commercial publics. Business was treated as if it existed for the benefit of the railways. During this period of folly, it was not good railroading to get goods from their shipping point to their destination by the most direct line possible, but to keep them on the road as long as possible, send them around the longest way, give as many connecting lines as possible a piece of the profit, and let the public stand the resulting loss of time and money. That was once counted good railroading. It has not entirely passed out of practice to-day.

One of the great changes in our economic life to which this railroad policy contributed was the centralization of certain activities, not because centralization was necessary, nor because it contributed to the well-being of the people, but because, among other things, it made double business for the railroads. Take two staples—meat and grain. If you look at the maps which the packing houses put out, and see where the cattle are drawn from; and then if you consider that the cattle, when converted into food, are hauled again by the same railways right back to the place where they came from, you will get some sidelight on the transportation problem and the price of meat. Take also grain. Every reader of advertisements knows where the great flour mills of the country are located. And they probably know also that these great mills are not located in the sections where the grain of the United States is raised. There are staggering quantities of grain, thousands of trainloads, hauled uselessly long distances, and then in the form of flour hauled back again long distances to the states and sections where the grain was raised—a burdening of the railroads which is of no benefit to the communities where the grain originated, nor to any one else except the monopolistic mills and the railroads. The railroads can always do a big business without helping the business of the country at all; they can always be engaged in just such useless hauling. On meat and grain and perhaps on cotton, too, the transportation burden could be reduced by more than half, by the preparation of the product for use before it is shipped. If a coal community mined coal in Pennsylvania, and then sent it by railway to Michigan or Wisconsin to be screened, and then hauled it back again to Pennsylvania for use, it would not be much sillier than the hauling of Texas beef alive to Chicago, there to be killed, and then shipped back dead to Texas; or the hauling of Kansas grain to Minnesota, there to be ground in the mills and hauled back again as flour. It is good business for the railroads, but it is bad business for business. One angle of the transportation problem to which too few men are paying attention is this useless hauling of material. If the problem were tackled from the point of ridding the railroads of their useless hauls, we might discover that we are in better shape than we think to take care of the legitimate transportation business of the country. In commodities like coal it is necessary that they be hauled from where they are to where they are needed. The same is true of the raw materials of industry—they must be hauled from the place where nature has stored them to the place where there are people ready to work them. And as these raw materials are not often found assembled in one section, a considerable amount of transportation to a central assembling place is necessary. The coal comes from one section, the copper from another, the iron from another, the wood from another—they must all be brought together.

But wherever it is possible a policy of decentralization ought to be adopted. We need, instead of mammoth flour mills, a multitude of smaller mills distributed through all the sections where grain is grown. Wherever it is possible, the section that produces the raw material ought to produce also the finished product. Grain should be ground to flour where it is grown. A hog-growing country should not export hogs, but pork, hams, and bacon. The cotton mills ought to be near the cotton fields. This is not a revolutionary idea. In a sense it is a reactionary one. It does not suggest anything new; it suggests something that is very old. This is the way the country did things before we fell into the habit of carting everything around a few thousand miles and adding the cartage to the consumer's bill. Our communities ought to be more complete in themselves. They ought not to be unnecessarily dependent on railway transportation. Out of what they produce they should supply their own needs and ship the surplus. And how can they do this unless they have the means of taking their raw materials, like grain and cattle, and changing them into finished products? If private enterprise does not yield these means, the cooperation of farmers can. The chief injustice sustained by the farmer to-day is that, being the greatest producer, he is prevented from being also the greatest merchandiser, because he is compelled to sell to those who put his products into merchantable form. If he could change his grain into flour, his cattle into beef, and his hogs into hams and bacon, not only would he receive the fuller profit of his product, but he would render his near-by communities more independent of railway exigencies, and thereby improve the transportation system by relieving it of the burden of his unfinished product. The thing is not only reasonable and practicable, but it is becoming absolutely necessary. More than that, it is being done in many places. But it will not register its full effect on the transportation situation and upon the cost of living until it is done more widely and in more kinds of materials.

It is one of nature's compensations to withdraw prosperity from the business which does not serve.

We have found that on the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton we could, following our universal policy, reduce our rates and get more business. We made some cuts, but the Interstate Commerce Commission refused to allow them! Under such conditions why discuss the railroads as a business? Or as a service?



CHAPTER XVII

THINGS IN GENERAL

No man exceeds Thomas A. Edison in broad vision and understanding. I met him first many years ago when I was with the Detroit Edison Company—probably about 1887 or thereabouts. The electrical men held a convention at Atlantic City, and Edison, as the leader in electrical science, made an address. I was then working on my gasoline engine, and most people, including all of my associates in the electrical company, had taken pains to tell me that time spent on a gasoline engine was time wasted—that the power of the future was to be electricity. These criticisms had not made any impression on me. I was working ahead with all my might. But being in the same room with Edison suggested to me that it would be a good idea to find out if the master of electricity thought it was going to be the only power in the future. So, after Mr. Edison had finished his address, I managed to catch him alone for a moment. I told him what I was working on.

At once he was interested. He is interested in every search for new knowledge. And then I asked him if he thought that there was a future for the internal combustion engine. He answered something in this fashion:

Yes, there is a big future for any light-weight engine that can develop a high horsepower and be self-contained. No one kind of motive power is ever going to do all the work of the country. We do not know what electricity can do, but I take for granted that it cannot do everything.

Keep on with your engine. If you can get what you are after, I can see a great future.

That is characteristic of Edison. He was the central figure in the electrical industry, which was then young and enthusiastic. The rank and file of the electrical men could see nothing ahead but electricity, but their leader could see with crystal clearness that no one power could do all the work of the country. I suppose that is why he was the leader.

Such was my first meeting with Edison. I did not see him again until many years after—until our motor had been developed and was in production. He remembered perfectly our first meeting. Since then we have seen each other often. He is one of my closest friends, and we together have swapped many an idea.

His knowledge is almost universal. He is interested in every conceivable subject and he recognizes no limitations. He believes that all things are possible. At the same time he keeps his feet on the ground. He goes forward step by step. He regards "impossible" as a description for that which we have not at the moment the knowledge to achieve. He knows that as we amass knowledge we build the power to overcome the impossible. That is the rational way of doing the "impossible." The irrational way is to make the attempt without the toil of accumulating knowledge. Mr. Edison is only approaching the height of his power. He is the man who is going to show us what chemistry really can do. For he is a real scientist who regards the knowledge for which he is always searching as a tool to shape the progress of the world. He is not the type of scientist who merely stores up knowledge and turns his head into a museum. Edison is easily the world's greatest scientist. I am not sure that he is not also the world's worst business man. He knows almost nothing of business.

John Burroughs was another of those who honoured me with their friendship. I, too, like birds. I like the outdoors. I like to walk across country and jump fences. We have five hundred bird houses on the farm. We call them our bird hotels, and one of them, the Hotel Pontchartrain—a martin house—has seventy-six apartments. All winter long we have wire baskets of food hanging about on the trees and then there is a big basin in which the water is kept from freezing by an electric heater. Summer and winter, food, drink, and shelter are on hand for the birds. We have hatched pheasants and quail in incubators and then turned them over to electric brooders. We have all kinds of bird houses and nests. The sparrows, who are great abusers of hospitality, insist that their nests be immovable—that they do not sway in the wind; the wrens like swaying nests. So we mounted a number of wren boxes on strips of spring steel so that they would sway in the wind. The wrens liked the idea and the sparrows did not, so we have been able to have the wrens nest in peace. In summer we leave cherries on the trees and strawberries open in the beds, and I think that we have not only more but also more different kinds of bird callers than anywhere else in the northern states. John Burroughs said he thought we had, and one day when he was staying at our place he came across a bird that he had never seen before.

About ten years ago we imported a great number of birds from abroad—yellow-hammers, chaffinches, green finches, red pales, twites, bullfinches, jays, linnets, larks—some five hundred of them. They stayed around a while, but where they are now I do not know. I shall not import any more. Birds are entitled to live where they want to live.

Birds are the best of companions. We need them for their beauty and their companionship, and also we need them for the strictly economic reason that they destroy harmful insects. The only time I ever used the Ford organization to influence legislation was on behalf of the birds, and I think the end justified the means. The Weeks-McLean Bird Bill, providing for bird sanctuaries for our migratory birds, had been hanging in Congress with every likelihood of dying a natural death. Its immediate sponsors could not arouse much interest among the Congressmen. Birds do not vote. We got behind that bill and we asked each of our six thousand dealers to wire to his representative in Congress. It began to become apparent that birds might have votes; the bill went through. Our organization has never been used for any political purpose and never will be. We assume that our people have a right to their own preferences.

To get back to John Burroughs. Of course I knew who he was and I had read nearly everything he had written, but I had never thought of meeting him until some years ago when he developed a grudge against modern progress. He detested money and especially he detested the power which money gives to vulgar people to despoil the lovely countryside. He grew to dislike the industry out of which money is made. He disliked the noise of factories and railways. He criticized industrial progress, and he declared that the automobile was going to kill the appreciation of nature. I fundamentally disagreed with him. I thought that his emotions had taken him on the wrong tack and so I sent him an automobile with the request that he try it out and discover for himself whether it would not help him to know nature better. That automobile—and it took him some time to learn how to manage it himself—completely changed his point of view. He found that it helped him to see more, and from the time of getting it, he made nearly all of his bird-hunting expeditions behind the steering wheel. He learned that instead of having to confine himself to a few miles around Slabsides, the whole countryside was open to him.

Out of that automobile grew our friendship, and it was a fine one. No man could help being the better for knowing John Burroughs. He was not a professional naturalist, nor did he make sentiment do for hard research. It is easy to grow sentimental out of doors; it is hard to pursue the truth about a bird as one would pursue a mechanical principle. But John Burroughs did that, and as a result the observations he set down were very largely accurate. He was impatient with men who were not accurate in their observations of natural life. John Burroughs first loved nature for its own sake; it was not merely his stock of material as a professional writer. He loved it before he wrote about it.

Late in life he turned philosopher. His philosophy was not so much a philosophy of nature as it was a natural philosophy—the long, serene thoughts of a man who had lived in the tranquil spirit of the trees. He was not pagan; he was not pantheist; but he did not much divide between nature and human nature, nor between human nature and divine. John Burroughs lived a wholesome life. He was fortunate to have as his home the farm on which he was born. Through long years his surroundings were those which made for quietness of mind. He loved the woods and he made dusty-minded city people love them, too—he helped them see what he saw. He did not make much beyond a living. He could have done so, perhaps, but that was not his aim. Like another American naturalist, his occupation could have been described as inspector of birds' nests and hillside paths. Of course, that does not pay in dollars and cents.

When he had passed the three score and ten he changed his views on industry. Perhaps I had something to do with that. He came to see that the whole world could not live by hunting birds' nests. At one time in his life, he had a grudge against all modern progress, especially where it was associated with the burning of coal and the noise of traffic. Perhaps that was as near to literary affectation as he ever came. Wordsworth disliked railways too, and Thoreau said that he could see more of the country by walking. Perhaps it was influences such as these which bent John Burroughs for a time against industrial progress. But only for a time. He came to see that it was fortunate for him that others' tastes ran in other channels, just as it was fortunate for the world that his taste ran in its own channel. There has been no observable development in the method of making birds' nests since the beginning of recorded observation, but that was hardly a reason why human beings should not prefer modern sanitary homes to cave dwellings. This was a part of John Burroughs's sanity—he was not afraid to change his views. He was a lover of Nature, not her dupe. In the course of time he came to value and approve modern devices, and though this by itself is an interesting fact, it is not so interesting as the fact that he made this change after he was seventy years old. John Burroughs was never too old to change. He kept growing to the last. The man who is too set to change is dead already. The funeral is a mere detail.

If he talked more of one person than another, it was Emerson. Not only did he know Emerson by heart as an author, but he knew him by heart as a spirit. He taught me to know Emerson. He had so saturated himself with Emerson that at one time he thought as he did and even fell into his mode of expression. But afterward he found his own way—which for him was better.

There was no sadness in John Burroughs's death. When the grain lies brown and ripe under the harvest sun, and the harvesters are busy binding it into sheaves, there is no sadness for the grain. It has ripened and has fulfilled its term, and so had John Burroughs. With him it was full ripeness and harvest, not decay. He worked almost to the end. His plans ran beyond the end. They buried him amid the scenes he loved, and it was his eighty-fourth birthday. Those scenes will be preserved as he loved them.

John Burroughs, Edison, and I with Harvey S. Firestone made several vagabond trips together. We went in motor caravans and slept under canvas. Once we gypsied through the Adirondacks and again through the Alleghenies, heading southward. The trips were good fun—except that they began to attract too much attention.

* * * * *

To-day I am more opposed to war than ever I was, and I think the people of the world know—even if the politicians do not—that war never settles anything. It was war that made the orderly and profitable processes of the world what they are to-day—a loose, disjointed mass. Of course, some men get rich out of war; others get poor. But the men who get rich are not those who fought or who really helped behind the lines. No patriot makes money out of war. No man with true patriotism could make money out of war—out of the sacrifice of other men's lives. Until the soldier makes money by fighting, until mothers make money by giving their sons to death—not until then should any citizen make money out of providing his country with the means to preserve its life.

If wars are to continue, it will be harder and harder for the upright business man to regard war as a legitimate means of high and speedy profits. War fortunes are losing caste every day. Even greed will some day hesitate before the overwhelming unpopularity and opposition which will meet the war profiteer. Business should be on the side of peace, because peace is business's best asset.

And, by the way, was inventive genius ever so sterile as it was during the war?

An impartial investigation of the last war, of what preceded it and what has come out of it, would show beyond a doubt that there is in the world a group of men with vast powers of control, that prefers to remain unknown, that does not seek office or any of the tokens of power, that belongs to no nation whatever but is international—a force that uses every government, every widespread business organization, every agency of publicity, every resource of national psychology, to throw the world into a panic for the sake of getting still more power over the world. An old gambling trick used to be for the gambler to cry "Police!" when a lot of money was on the table, and, in the panic that followed, to seize the money and run off with it. There is a power within the world which cries "War!" and in the confusion of the nations, the unrestrained sacrifice which people make for safety and peace runs off with the spoils of the panic.

The point to keep in mind is that, though we won the military contest, the world has not yet quite succeeded in winning a complete victory over the promoters of war. We ought not to forget that wars are a purely manufactured evil and are made according to a definite technique. A campaign for war is made upon as definite lines as a campaign for any other purpose. First, the people are worked upon. By clever tales the people's suspicions are aroused toward the nation against whom war is desired. Make the nation suspicious; make the other nation suspicious. All you need for this is a few agents with some cleverness and no conscience and a press whose interest is locked up with the interests that will be benefited by war. Then the "overt act" will soon appear. It is no trick at all to get an "overt act" once you work the hatred of two nations up to the proper pitch.

There were men in every country who were glad to see the World War begin and sorry to see it stop. Hundreds of American fortunes date from the Civil War; thousands of new fortunes date from the World War. Nobody can deny that war is a profitable business for those who like that kind of money. War is an orgy of money, just as it is an orgy of blood.

And we should not so easily be led into war if we considered what it is that makes a nation really great. It is not the amount of trade that makes a nation great. The creation of private fortunes, like the creation of an autocracy, does not make any country great. Nor does the mere change of an agricultural population into a factory population. A country becomes great when, by the wise development of its resources and the skill of its people, property is widely and fairly distributed.

Foreign trade is full of delusions. We ought to wish for every nation as large a degree of self-support as possible. Instead of wishing to keep them dependent on us for what we manufacture, we should wish them to learn to manufacture themselves and build up a solidly founded civilization. When every nation learns to produce the things which it can produce, we shall be able to get down to a basis of serving each other along those special lines in which there can be no competition. The North Temperate Zone will never be able to compete with the tropics in the special products of the tropics. Our country will never be a competitor with the Orient in the production of tea, nor with the South in the production of rubber.

A large proportion of our foreign trade is based on the backwardness of our foreign customers. Selfishness is a motive that would preserve that backwardness. Humanity is a motive that would help the backward nations to a self-supporting basis. Take Mexico, for example. We have heard a great deal about the "development" of Mexico. Exploitation is the word that ought instead to be used. When its rich natural resources are exploited for the increase of the private fortunes of foreign capitalists, that is not development, it is ravishment. You can never develop Mexico until you develop the Mexican. And yet how much of the "development" of Mexico by foreign exploiters ever took account of the development of its people? The Mexican peon has been regarded as mere fuel for the foreign money-makers. Foreign trade has been his degradation.

Short-sighted people are afraid of such counsel. They say: "What would become of our foreign trade?"

When the natives of Africa begin raising their own cotton and the natives of Russia begin making their own farming implements and the natives of China begin supplying their own wants, it will make a difference, to be sure, but does any thoughtful man imagine that the world can long continue on the present basis of a few nations supplying the needs of the world? We must think in terms of what the world will be when civilization becomes general, when all the peoples have learned to help themselves.

When a country goes mad about foreign trade it usually depends on other countries for its raw material, turns its population into factory fodder, creates a private rich class, and lets its own immediate interest lie neglected. Here in the United States we have enough work to do developing our own country to relieve us of the necessity of looking for foreign trade for a long time. We have agriculture enough to feed us while we are doing it, and money enough to carry the job through. Is there anything more stupid than the United States standing idle because Japan or France or any other country has not sent us an order when there is a hundred-year job awaiting us in developing our own country?

Commerce began in service. Men carried off their surplus to people who had none. The country that raised corn carried it to the country that could raise no corn. The lumber country brought wood to the treeless plain. The vine country brought fruit to cold northern climes. The pasture country brought meat to the grassless region. It was all service. When all the peoples of the world become developed in the art of self-support, commerce will get back to that basis. Business will once more become service. There will be no competition, because the basis of competition will have vanished. The varied peoples will develop skills which will be in the nature of monopolies and not competitive. From the beginning, the races have exhibited distinct strains of genius: this one for government; another for colonization; another for the sea; another for art and music; another for agriculture; another for business, and so on. Lincoln said that this nation could not survive half-slave and half-free. The human race cannot forever exist half-exploiter and half-exploited. Until we become buyers and sellers alike, producers and consumers alike, keeping the balance not for profit but for service, we are going to have topsy-turvy conditions.

France has something to give the world of which no competition can cheat her. So has Italy. So has Russia. So have the countries of South America. So has Japan. So has Britain. So has the United States. The sooner we get back to a basis of natural specialties and drop this free-for-all system of grab, the sooner we shall be sure of international self-respect—and international peace. Trying to take the trade of the world can promote war. It cannot promote prosperity. Some day even the international bankers will learn this.

I have never been able to discover any honourable reasons for the beginning of the World War. It seems to have grown out of a very complicated situation created largely by those who thought they could profit by war. I believed, on the information that was given to me in 1916, that some of the nations were anxious for peace and would welcome a demonstration for peace. It was in the hope that this was true that I financed the expedition to Stockholm in what has since been called the "Peace Ship." I do not regret the attempt. The mere fact that it failed is not, to me, conclusive proof that it was not worth trying. We learn more from our failures than from our successes. What I learned on that trip was worth the time and the money expended. I do not now know whether the information as conveyed to me was true or false. I do not care. But I think everyone will agree that if it had been possible to end the war in 1916 the world would be better off than it is to-day.

For the victors wasted themselves in winning, and the vanquished in resisting. Nobody got an advantage, honourable or dishonourable, out of that war. I had hoped, finally, when the United States entered the war, that it might be a war to end wars, but now I know that wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with the fire hazard. When our country entered the war, it became the duty of every citizen to do his utmost toward seeing through to the end that which we had undertaken. I believe that it is the duty of the man who opposes war to oppose going to war up until the time of its actual declaration. My opposition to war is not based upon pacifist or non-resistant principles. It may be that the present state of civilization is such that certain international questions cannot be discussed; it may be that they have to be fought out. But the fighting never settles the question. It only gets the participants around to a frame of mind where they will agree to discuss what they were fighting about.

Once we were in the war, every facility of the Ford industries was put at the disposal of the Government. We had, up to the time of the declaration of war, absolutely refused to take war orders from the foreign belligerents. It is entirely out of keeping with the principles of our business to disturb the routine of our production unless in an emergency. It is at variance with our human principles to aid either side in a war in which our country was not involved. These principles had no application, once the United States entered the war. From April, 1917, until November, 1918, our factory worked practically exclusively for the Government. Of course we made cars and parts and special delivery trucks and ambulances as a part of our general production, but we also made many other articles that were more or less new to us. We made 2 1/2-ton and 6-ton trucks. We made Liberty motors in great quantities, aero cylinders, 1.55 Mm. and 4.7 Mm. caissons. We made listening devices, steel helmets (both at Highland Park and Philadelphia), and Eagle Boats, and we did a large amount of experimental work on armour plate, compensators, and body armour. For the Eagle Boats we put up a special plant on the River Rouge site. These boats were designed to combat the submarines. They were 204 feet long, made of steel, and one of the conditions precedent to their building was that their construction should not interfere with any other line of war production and also that they be delivered quickly. The design was worked out by the Navy Department. On December 22, 1917, I offered to build the boats for the Navy. The discussion terminated on January 15, 1918, when the Navy Department awarded the contract to the Ford Company. On July 11th, the first completed boat was launched. We made both the hulls and the engines, and not a forging or a rolled beam entered into the construction of other than the engine. We stamped the hulls entirely out of sheet steel. They were built indoors. In four months we ran up a building at the River Rouge a third of a mile long, 350 feet wide, and 100 feet high, covering more than thirteen acres. These boats were not built by marine engineers. They were built simply by applying our production principles to a new product.