Page:How Henry Ford is regarded in Brazil (1926).djvu/13

 the inherent vice in almost all our accepted ideas than the horrible mess to be seen in a world governed thereby? Had they been correct, had they been just, we should not now be struggling in the sea of problems conventionally termed the “social question”. If a man has fever, if he is delirious, it is a sure sign that he is seriously ill internally. To stamp out these bodily symptoms of fever is as foolish a procedure as stamping out social fever (revolutions, strikes, etc.) by drastic measures. The thing to do is to discover and remove the cause of the fever, the cause of the convulsion.

What is a revolution? A revolution is nothing more than the upsetting of a state of balance too uncomfortable to be maintained any longer. Maddened by despair, the people let go and flounder in a sea of blood, struggling wildly to find a new standing-ground more tenable than the previous one.

Because the collar-button won’t go into the hole of the collar, says Ford, they tear the shirt and collar to pieces: the only correct solution, WIDEN THE HOLE, never occurs to them.

Ford is not a reformer and still less a reactionary; he is an ADJUSTER. He accepts the world as it is and man as he finds him. He merely corrects faults of adjustment, the evident cause of all ills. In his own field of action he demonstrates this to be so – demonstrates that modern industry, on a salary basis, without the reform or destruction of a single 11