Page:Henry Ford's Own Story.djvu/47

 BACK TO THE FARM

letter from home must have come like a dash of cold watherwater [sic] on Henry's enthusiastic plans. He had been thinking in the future, planning, rearranging, adjusting the years just ahead. It has always been his instinct to do just that.

"You can't run anything on precedents if you want to make a success," he says to-day. "We should be guiding our future by the present, instead of being guided in the present by the past."

Suddenly the past had come into his calculations. Henry spent a dark day or two over that letter the universal struggle between the claims of the older generation and the desires of the younger one.

There was never any real question as to the outcome. The machine-idea has been the controlling factor in his life, but it has never been stronger than his human sympathies. It is in adjusting them to each other, in making human sympathies a working business policy, that he has made his real success.

Of course at that time he did not see such a possibility. It was a clear-cut struggle between two opposing forces; on one side the splendid