That the earth produces, or is capable of producing, enough to give decent sustenance to everyone—not of food alone, but of everything else we need. For everything is produced from the earth.
That it is possible for labour, production, distribution, and reward to be so organized as to make certain that those who contribute shall receive shares determined by an exact justice.
That regardless of the frailties of human nature, our economic system can be so adjusted that selfishness, although perhaps not abolished, can be robbed of power to work serious economic injustice.
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The business of life is easy or hard according to the skill or the lack of skill displayed in production and distribution. It has been thought that business existed for profit. That is wrong. Business exists for service. It is a profession, and must have recognized professional ethics, to violate which declasses a man. Business needs more of the professional spirit. The professional spirit seeks professional integrity, from pride, not from compulsion. The professional spirit detects its own violations and penalizes them. Business will some day become clean. A machine that stops every little while is an imperfect machine, and its imperfection is within itself. A body that falls sick every little while is a diseased body, and its disease is within itself. So with business. Its faults, many of them purely the faults of the moral constitution of business, clog its progress and make it sick every little while. Some day the ethics of business will be universally recognized, and in that day business will be seen to be the oldest and most useful of all the professions.
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All that the Ford industries have done—all that I have done—is to endeavour to evidence by works that service comes before profit and that the sort of business which makes the world better for its presence is a noble profession. Often it has come to me that what is regarded as the somewhat remarkable progression of our enterprises—I will not say "success," for that word is an epitaph, and we are just starting—is due to some accident; and that the methods which we have used, while well enough in their way, fit only the making of our particular products and would not do at all in any other line of business or indeed for any products or personalities other than our own.
It used to be taken for granted that our theories and our methods were fundamentally unsound. That is because they were not understood. Events have killed that kind of comment, but there remains a wholly sincere belief that what we have done could not be done by any other company—that we have been touched by a wand, that neither we nor any one else could make shoes, or hats, or sewing machines, or watches, or typewriters, or any other necessity after the manner in which we make automobiles and tractors. And that if only we ventured into other fields we should right quickly discover our errors. I do not agree with any of this. Nothing has come out of the air. The foregoing pages should prove that. We have nothing that others might not have. We have had no good fortune except that which always attends any one who puts his best into his work. There was nothing that could be called "favorable" about our beginning. We began with almost nothing. What we have, we earned, and we earned it by unremitting labour and faith in a principle. We took what was a luxury and turned it into a necessity and without trick or subterfuge. When we began to make our present motor car the country had few good roads, gasoline was scarce, and the idea was firmly implanted in the public mind that an automobile was at the best a rich man's toy. Our only advantage was lack of precedent.
We began to manufacture according to a creed—a creed which was at that time unknown in business. The new is always thought odd, and some of us are so constituted that we can never get over thinking that anything which is new must be odd and probably queer. The mechanical working out of our creed is constantly changing. We are continually finding new and better ways of putting it into practice, but we have not found it necessary to alter the principles, and I cannot imagine how it might ever be necessary to alter them, because I hold that they are absolutely universal and must lead to a better and wider life for all.
If I did not think so I would not keep working—for the money that I make is inconsequent. Money is useful only as it serves to forward by practical example the principle that business is justified only as it serves, that it must always give more to the community than it takes away, and that unless everybody benefits by the existence of a business then that business should not exist. I have proved this with automobiles and tractors. I intend to prove it with railways and public-service corporations—not for my personal satisfaction and not for the money that may be earned. (It is perfectly impossible, applying these principles, to avoid making a much larger profit than if profit were the main object.) I want to prove it so that all of us may have more, and that all of us may live better by increasing the service rendered by all businesses. Poverty cannot be abolished by formula; it can be abolished only by hard and intelligent work. We are, in effect, an experimental station to prove a principle. That we do make money is only further proof that we are right. For that is a species of argument that establishes itself without words.