Page:How Henry Ford is regarded in Brazil (1926).djvu/12

 Good sense is implanted in the bosom of all human beings and that is why we call it Common Sense. But this treasure that we all possess is, like bottles of old wine, covered with a thick crust of fixed ideas – successive coats of dust as it were – and traditional errors perpetuated by routine as well as fantasies arising from the seduction that the sirens of Utopian ideology have always exercised over us. This crust overlays our innate good sense, dulls it, chokes it, leaves it like a brilliant embedded in a coating of clay. If, however, a shock breaks the clay crust, the brilliant glistens, good sense peeps out serene and fit.

Henry Ford is a kind of shatterer of the crusts that form over our inborn good sense. Whoever reads Ford feels the deposit of error that hinders a correct view of things crack within him, crumble and vanish – and that is why when we read him we find ourselves punctuating the whole series of his conclusions with “That’s perfectly true! He’s right!”

And so far have we wandered off the track as a rule that at our first contact with Henry Ford we feel inclined to classify him among the “contradictory cusses”, running, as he does, so contrary to the prevailing ideas not only in purely industrial matters but also in matters of social organization. The next thing is we have retracted and admitted that he is quite right because can there be a clearer proof of 10