Page:How Henry Ford is regarded in Brazil (1926).djvu/20

 Henry Ford would have his business an epitome of society in general. He wants a cross-section through the mass of his employees to reveal the same composition as would a cross-section through the mass of society. If in the latter we see the blind, the lame, the consumptive and all sorts of defectives ranged with the sound, the personnel of a properly organized industry should present a similar structure. And the day that it comes to pass, that day will society “ipso facto” be freed from its burden of dead weight and the problem of want will be solved by the suppression of unproductiveness.

The practical demonstration of this was so overwhelming that the idea is making headway and will conquer the world some day.

Complete victory over misery, however, will not depend on this alone but on other readjustments between industry and the general welfare of the community, the which Ford ably expounds in his book and which he has shown to be possible by carrying them out in his gigantic plant.

Pity it is that we in Brazil live stuck in a mire of last-century ideas, rancid and mouldy ideas translated from the French. In spite of the amazing advance of the United States, an advance that has placed them in the forefront of the modern world as the fashioners of Humanity’s to-morrow, we here continue marking time, continue in our inveterate chewing of the cud. Camel-like, we ruminate 18