Page:How Henry Ford is regarded in Brazil (1926).djvu/14

 thing, can be made into an ideal system for obtaining maximum production with maximum benefits for the three partners – owner, workman and consumer – if organized in accordance with the dictates of common sense. He showed what prodigious results schools can yield if run on similar lines. He a demonstrated the same thing in regard to poorhouses and hospitals.

Ford impresses us as a new Pasteur, a sage of a modern type who does not commit himself to any idea, however simple, before the most rigorous tests have sanctioned it. Instead, however, of operating on a small scale, on inanimate things or “in anima vili”, Ford operates on a grand scale in the great laboratory Society with the abundant material Man. Only after experimenting does he draw conclusions and make assertions. His immense factory may well be called an Experimental Station. For the first time in the history of the world experiments are being made in respect of wages, selling prices, cost prices and the real meaning of the words “money”, “industry”, “profits”, etc. with that scientific rectitude and meticulousness with which an analyst studies in a laboratory the biology of an insect, the structure of organic tissue, the catalytic action of a metalloid in the presence of another. And, inasmuch as in laboratories the message of microscope, scales, chemical reactions, electrolysis, etc., seldom confirms the fixed ideas that routine 12