“There’s trouble between labor and capital. Well, the solution is not through one side getting the other by the neck and squeezing. No, sir; that isn’t a solution; that is ruin for both. It means that later the other side is going to recover and try to get on top again, and there’ll be constant fighting and jarring where there ought to be harmony and adjustment.
“The only solution is to GET TOGETHER. It can’t come only by the demands of labor. It can’t come only by the advantages of capital. It’s got to come by both recognizing their interest and getting together.
“That’s the solution of all the problems in the world, as I see it. Let people realize that they’re all bound together, all parts of one machine, and that nothing that hurts one group of people will fail in the end to come back and hurt all the people.”
So, at the end of thirty-seven years of work, Henry Ford sat in his office on his fifty-second birthday and looked out on a community of nearly 20,000 persons, working efficiently and happily together, working for him and for themselves, well paid, contented. He thought of the world, covered with the network of his agencies, crossed and recrossed with the tracks of his cars.
He had run counter to every prompting of “practical business judgment” all his life—he had left the farm, built his engine, left the moneyed men who would not let him build a cheap car, started his own plant on insufficient capital, built up his business, established his profit-sharing scheme—all against every dictate of established practice.
He had acted from the first on that one fundamental principle, “Do the thing that means the most good to the most people.” His car, his factory, his workmen, his sixty millions of dollars, answered conclusively the objection, “I know it’s the right thing, theoretically—but it isn’t practical.”
Thinking of these things on that bright summer day in 1914, Ford decided that there remained only one more thing he could do.
CHAPTER XXVIII
A GREAT EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION
It happened that on Ford’s fifty-second birthday a commission from the French Chamber of Commerce arrived in Detroit, having crossed the Atlantic to inspect the Ford factories.
They viewed 276 acres of manufacturing activity; the largest power plant in the world, developing 45,000 horse-power from gas-steam engines designed by Ford engineers; the enormous forty-ton cranes; 6,000 machines in operation in one great room, using fifty miles of leather belting; nine mono-rail cars, each with two-ton hoists, which carry materials—in short, the innumerable details of that mammoth plant.