That business has been built only because fundamentally it was for "the greatest good to the greatest number," but in the long fight they have lost sight of that fact. Let a new project arise which is for the general good and "it will hurt business!" they cry in alarm.
Ford kept his viewpoint. Partly because of his years on the farm, where he worked shoulder to shoulder with other men and learned essential democracy; partly because most of his work had been in mechanics rather than in business, but most of all because he is a simple, straight-thinking man, the tremendous Ford organization did not absorb him.
He had applied his machine idea first to an engine, then to a factory; in time he was to apply it to society as a whole.
"That Christmas present of ours is paying better dividends than any money we ever spent," he said to Couzens with a grin. "First thing we know, the men'll be paying us back more than we gave them. Look here." He spread on Couzens' desk a double handful of letters from the men.
"They like it," he said soberly. "Some of them say they were worrying about Christmas bills, and so on. Those checks took a load off their minds, and they're pitching in and working hard to show they appreciate it. I guess in the long run anything that is good for the men is good for the company."
In the months that followed he continued to turn over in his mind various ideas which occurred to him, based on that principle.
The Ford employees and agents now numbered tens of thousands. They were scattered all over the earth, from Bombay to Nova Scotia, Switzerland, Peru, Bermuda, Africa, Alaska, India--everywhere were workers, helping Ford. Black men in turbans, yellow men in embroidered robes, men of all races and languages, speaking, thinking, living in ways incomprehensible to that quiet man who sat in his office in Detroit, were part of the vast machine out of which his millions poured.
He thought it over--that great machine. He knew machines. He knew that the smallest part of one was as necessary as the largest, that every nut and screw was indispensable to the success of the whole. And while he brooded over the mighty machine his genius had created, the thought slowly formed itself in his mind that those multiplying millions of his were the weak spot in the organization. Those millions represented energy, and through him they were draining out of the machine, accumulating in a useless, idle store. Some way they must be put back.
