Ford returned to Detroit with a working model for a cheap farm-tractor which he intends to put on the market soon. He worked out the designs and dropped them into the roaring cogs of his organization which presently produced some dozens of the tractors. These were sent down to the farm and put to work. In due course, caught up again by the Ford organization, the tractors will begin to pour out in an endless stream and Ford will have done for farm work what he did for passenger traffic.
But he realized that those occupations did not absorb his whole energy. Unconsciously he was seeking something bigger even than his factories, than his business operations, to which he could devote his mind—something to which he could apply his ruling idea, something for which he could fight.
The terrible 4th of August, 1914, which brought misery, ruin, desolation to Europe and panic to the whole world, gave him his opportunity.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE EUROPEAN WAR
War! The news caught at the heart of the world, and stopped it.
For a time the whole business structure of every nation on earth trembled, threatened to crumble into ruin, under this weight, to which it had been building from the beginning.
Greed, grasping selfishness, a policy of “each man for himself, against other men,” these are the foundations on which nations have built up their commercial, social, industrial success. These are the things which always have led, and always will lead, to war, to the destruction of those structures they have built.
Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Russia, England, Japan, Turkey, Italy—one by one they crashed down into the general wreck. Everything good that the centuries had made was buried in the debris. The world rocked under the shock.
Here in America we read the reports in dazed incredulity. It could not be possible, it could not be possible, we said to each other with white lips—in this age, now, to-day—
For, living as most of us do, on the surface of things, among our friends, in an atmosphere of kindliness and helpfulness, we had been cheerfully unconcerned about the foundations of our economic and industrial life.