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.
With the Armistice, we at once dropped the war and went back to peace.
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An able man is a man who can do things, and his ability to do things is dependent on what he has in him. What he has in him depends on what he started with and what he has done to increase and discipline it.
An educated man is not one whose memory is trained to carry a few dates in history—he is one who can accomplish things. A man who cannot think is not an educated man however many college degrees he may have acquired. Thinking is the hardest work any one can do—which is probably the reason why we have so few thinkers. There are two extremes to be avoided: one is the attitude of contempt toward education, the other is the tragic snobbery of assuming that marching through an educational system is a sure cure for ignorance and mediocrity. You cannot learn in any school what the world is going to do next year, but you can learn some of the things which the world has tried to do in former years, and where it failed and where it succeeded. If education consisted in warning the young student away from some of the false theories on which men have tried to build, so that he may be saved the loss of the time in finding out by bitter experience, its good would be unquestioned. An education which consists of signposts indicating the failure and the fallacies of the past doubtless would be very useful. It is not education just to possess the theories of a lot of professors. Speculation is very interesting, and sometimes profitable, but it is not education. To be learned in science to-day is merely to be aware of a hundred theories that have not been proved. And not to know what those theories are is to be "uneducated," "ignorant," and so forth. If knowledge of guesses is learning, then one may become learned by the simple expedient of making his own guesses. And by the same token he can dub the rest of the world "ignorant" because it does not know what his guesses are. But the best that education can do for a man is to put him in possession of his powers, give him control of the tools with which destiny has endowed him, and teach him how to think. The college renders its best service as an intellectual gymnasium, in which mental muscle is developed and the student strengthened to do what he can. To say, however, that mental gymnastics can be had only in college is not true, as every educator knows. A man's real education begins after he has left school. True education is gained through the discipline of life.
There are many kinds of knowledge, and it depends on what crowd you happen to be in, or how the fashions of the day happen to run, which kind of knowledge, is most respected at the moment. There are fashions in knowledge, just as there are in everything else. When some of us were lads, knowledge used to be limited to the Bible. There were certain men in the neighbourhood who knew the Book thoroughly, and they were looked up to and respected. Biblical knowledge was highly valued then. But nowadays it is doubtful whether deep acquaintance with the Bible would be sufficient to win a man a name for learning.
Knowledge, to my mind, is something that in the past somebody knew and left in a form which enables all who will to obtain it. If a man is born with normal human faculties, if he is equipped with enough ability to use the tools which we call "letters" in reading or writing, there is no knowledge within the possession of the race that he cannot have—if he wants it! The only reason why every man does not know everything that the human mind has ever learned is that no one has ever yet found it worth while to know that much. Men satisfy their minds more by finding out things for themselves than by heaping together the things which somebody else has found out. You can go out and gather knowledge all your life, and with all your gathering you will not catch up even with your own times. You may fill your head with all the "facts" of all the ages, and your head may be just an overloaded fact-box when you get through. The point is this: Great piles of knowledge in the head are not the same as mental activity. A man may be very learned and very useless. And then again, a man may be unlearned and very useful.
The object of education is not to fill a man's mind with facts; it is to teach him how to use his mind in thinking. And it often happens that a man can think better if he is not hampered by the knowledge of the past.