Capital that a business makes for itself, that is employed to expand the workman's opportunity and increase his comfort and prosperity, and that is used to give more and more men work, at the same time reducing the cost of service to the public—that sort of capital, even though it be under single control, is not a menace to humanity. It is a working surplus held in trust and daily use for the benefit of all. The holder of such capital can scarcely regard it as a personal reward. No man can view such a surplus as his own, for he did not create it alone. It is the joint product of his whole organization. The owner's idea may have released all the energy and direction, but certainly it did not supply all the energy and direction. Every workman was a partner in the creation. No business can possibly be considered only with reference to to-day and to the individuals engaged in it. It must have the means to carry on. The best wages ought to be paid. A proper living ought to be assured every participant in the business—no matter what his part. But, for the sake of that business's ability to support those who work in it, a surplus has to be held somewhere. The truly honest manufacturer holds his surplus profits in that trust. Ultimately it does not matter where this surplus be held nor who controls it; it is its use that matters.
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.