them just as naturally as they drink water.
But your process of making the article will require
your constant care. Machinery wears out and needs
to be restored. Men grow uppish or lazy or careless,
and that is a situation that must be remedied, too.
A business is men and machines united in the produc-
tion of a commodity, and both the men and the ma-
chines need repairs and replacements. It is a fact
which every business man should realize that sometimes
it is the men "higher up" who need this treatment most
and get it least.
When a business becomes congested with bad
methods ; when a business becomes ill through lack of
attention to one or more of its functions; when exec-
utives sit comfortably back in their chairs as if the
plans they have inaugurated are going to keep them
WHEN NOT TO BORROW MONEY
going forever ; when business becomes a mere planta-
tion on which to live, and not a big work which one
has to do then look out for trouble.
You will wake up some fine morning and find your-
self doing more business than you have ever done
before and getting less out of it. Keep on, and you
will begin to feel the pinch. It is then that you show
what is in you ; it is the last examination to determine
whether you are entitled to the degree of Business Man.
In such a situation you can borrow money. And
you can do it, oh, so easily. People will crowd it on
you. It is the most subtle temptation the young busi-
ness man has.
Or in such a situation you can take off your coat,
plunge into the business and see what ails its internal
workings. Go through it. like a surgeon. Remove dan-
gerous growths, cut off wastes, purge away accumu-
lated customs which hinder, put your business on the
operating table and give it a chance for its life.
If you borrow money, you are simply borrowing
stimulus to whatever it may be that is wrong. You
are feeding the disease. Is a man more wise with
borrowed money than he is with his own? Not as a
usual thing. To borrow under such conditions is to
mortgage a declining property.
The time for a business man to borrow money, if
ever, is when he docs not need it. That is, when he
does not need it as a substitute for some things he
ought himself to do. If a man's business is in excellent
condition and in need of expansion which the business
can take care of, that is another matter. But if a
business is in need of money through mismanagement
or a disorder of the internal functions, then the thing
to do is to get after the business and correct the trouble
from the inside, not poultice it by loans from the out-
side.
Money is only another tool in business, anyway.
It is just a part of the machinery. You might as well
borrow 100,000 lathes as $100,000, if tlir trouble is
inside your business. More lathes won't cure it ; nei-
ther will more monev. <")nl\- heavier doses ot brains
and thought, and wise courage can do it. A business
that misuses what it lias, will continue to mi>usc what
391
FORD IDEALS
it can get; the point is, cure the misuse. Then, when
that is done, the business will begin to make its own
money, as a repaired human body begins to make suffi-
cient pure blood.
Borrowing may easily become an excuse for boring
into the cause of the trouble.
Borrowing may easily become a sop for laziness
and pride. Some business men are too lazy to get
into overalls and go down to see what is the matter.
Or they are too proud to permit the thought that any-
thing they have originated could go wrong. But the
laws of business are like the laws of gravity, and
the man who opposes them feels their power.
Borrowing for expansion is one thing ; borrowing
to make up for waste and mismanagement is quite
another. You don't want money for the latter, for
the primary reason that money cannot do the job.
Waste is corrected by economy ; mismanagement is
corrected by brains and application ; and neither of
these correctives can be confused with money. Indeed,
money under certain circumstances is the worst enemy
of these desirable qualities. And many a business man
thanks his stars for the pinch which showed him that
his best capital was in his own brains and not in bank
loans.
Borrowing under certain circumstances is just like
the drunkard taking another drink to cure the effect
of the last one. It doesn't do what it is expected to do.
It simply increases the difficulty. It is the capstan
of the young business man's education when he sees
that the tightening up of the loose places in his busi-
ness is much more profitable than any amount of cap-
ital at ? per cent.
Tariff- Taxes- Transportation
GOVERNMENT never will be efficient through
and through because that is not what Government
exists for. But in its tasks, in the various things it
undertakes to do as specific services for the people,
it should be a model of efficiency. After all is said
and done, Government is a business organization, and
something more. In so far as it is the culmination
of national purpose and aspiration, it is as foolish to
require efficiency of a Government as of a poem. That
is not the sphere of governmental efficiency. But if
it is a matter of digging a canal, of surveying a roacl r
of delivering a letter if it is anything like the things
men undertake in individual or lesser corporate ca-
pacity, then we ha^e a right to expect of the Govern-
ment a perfect performance.
These services, however, are but a part of the
work of Government. They lie on the factory side
of Government, so to speak, and should be organized
under efficient superintendents who are held responsible
for results. But there is a great region of policy and
progress where efficiency, by the very nature of the
case, cannot be maintained, but where wisdom is in-
dispensable. Efficiency consists in doing in the best
possible way anything which we already know how to
do. But in the field of government there are some
things which we have yet to learn how to do. We
are still in the experimental stage.
Tariff is one of these experimental matters. Think
of the many minds that have devoted themselves to
tin's problem, of the party battles that have been waged
over it. of the artificial prosperities and the needless
distresses that have cursed whole populations as the
tariff pendulum swung this way or that.
It would be must uncharitable to say that none ot
this effort to reach the basic principle ot taritt has
been honest : doubtless must of it has been: and doubt-
less the tariff idea rests largely on the confidence that
393
FORD IDEALS
a tariff is justified because it is serviceable to the peo-
ple.
Perhaps there never will be a perfect tariff adjust-
ment until the world itself is perfected, and then there
will be no need of tariffs. It is because of the inequal-
ities of the nations and the imperfection of the earthly
federation that these walls are wanted. Formerly they
walled each city apart from the rest ; now they only
wall each country.
It is all imperfect, of course, and tariffs are but
a part, of the general imperfection. We can perhaps
tolerate them better for knowing that they are an effect
more than a cause. Certainly the tendency of the times
is toward less tariff restriction rather than more.
There was once a hope held by a party that the
tariff problem could be solved on the principle of
"tariff for revenue only," but if that rule were liter-
ally applied now, we probably should have the highest
tariff wall in our history.
Tariff has always been relied on as a tax producer,
and as a side line it served the industrial party the
greedy and short-sighted financial party as a monop-
oly-maker. It is right to protect American industries
when this does not mean protecting and coddling the
greedy inefficiency of individual Americans. This
country does not protect the individual that way ; why
should it protect a group of individuals formed into
a corporation? If it is an American industry, it can
meet the world. If it cannot meet the world, it should
not be artificially sustained to represent. American in-
dustry.
Taxation is another problem still in the experimen-
tal room of government. There never was an ideal tax
because there never has been an ideal expenditure of
taxes. There has never been a perfect basis of taxa-
tion because we have no basis of value. Many plans
have been suggested to meet this lack. The single- '
taxer would make land the basis ; others would take
a certain percentage of the income. We try both after
a fashion, and instead of people feeling that the tax
is their contribution to the cost of the benefits they
enjoy under their Government, they oftener feel that
394
TARIFF TAXES TRANSPORTATION
it is a burden. The very word has come to have an
ugly sound.
The present administration must raise taxes, and
of recent months most of the tax-producing sources
have dried up. What happens then? What does the
Government do then ? Maybe the Government will go
into production to earn its own money. We have
100,000,000 people here who never stop eating, who
continue to wear clothes it is a pretty good market
and ought always to keep business pretty brisk, if
there were not some kink in the money machinery
which the Government says it controls.
It is easy to say, "Lower taxes." But to stop
taxes altogether might mean to lower our Flag. How
would you like a 50 per cent reduction in all your
taxes? Well, that could easily happen, and still give
the Government 40 per cent more than it is now re-
ceiving for the purposes of government, if we were
not so dumbly tied up with a system that takes oceans
of gold every year for the upkeep of our man-killing
machinery.
If the tax system were even 50 per cent perfect;
if people had a view of the course of their tax monies
which should be half as clear as their view of the in-
fluence of -their ballots that is, if the people knew
their government, or if the facts of government were
such as would make the government desirous of hav-
ing the people know them, then the payment of taxes
would become a pleasant ceremonial, like unfurling the
Flag or firing off firecrackers on the Fourth of July.
Taxes provide the method by which people enter most
closely into the work of Government, yet nobody knows
it. Fundamentally there is a wrong, wrong principle.
Then there is Transportation that also is still an
experiment. Nothing is more arresting than the serv-
ice breakdown of the railways five years ago under
increasing business, and their fiscal breakdown now
under increasing income. When more business breaks
a business, and more income renders it poorer, there's
something deeper than mere mismanagement, there is
something fundamentally wrong.
Of course, fiscally, our railroads are paying for
multitudes of dead horses. Gamblers first controlled
FORD IDEALS
our railroads, robbed them till there was no more gam-
ble in them, and left it to honest, management to pay
the lOU's. Railroads developed artificially because
their gambling controllers strangled the railroad's side
partner, the canal the canal, which, had it been left
alone to perform its functions, would have assisted the
railroad to grow on a more natural basis. But, no,
the gamblers filled the canals with rubbish, and today
the railroads are breaking down for lack of waterways
to help them.
Our railroads are striking illustrations of the retri-
bution which overtakes even a national and interna-
tional business which is victimized by speculation. By
being regarded as mere financial devices, railroads were
cheated of the mechanical development which today
would have enabled them to meet the changed condi-
tions. Worse than being inefficient, worse than being
near bankruptcy, our railroads are not admirable even
in the railroad sense. They are equipped wrongly' and
operated wrongly and they never will be efficient and
they never will be profitable again until they have been
changed from the bottom. You can't run railroads
from a speculator's office.
There, then, are three problems, all of them touch-
ing our times pretty vitally Tariff, Taxes, Transpor-
tation. Each of them a field for dreams that come
true.
396
Illusions Are Not Faith
MANY a man thinks he has lost faith when he
has lost only his illusions. It is one of the pen-
alties \ve pay for not making proper distinctions be-
tween values. The power of illusion is so great, that
when the illusion vanishes we think that the bottom
has fallen out of reality; the truth is that only the
mists have been dispelled. The mists sometimes give
illusions of flowery meadows beyond; when they lift
we see a hard road.
Illusions can be lost, but faith cannot. A good
deal of credulity can be turned into skepticism, but
faith cannot. A man may lose many things, but he
cannot lose anything that he once possessed as part
of his very self ; and faith is such a part.
It is perhaps impossible correctly to see illusions
until they have vanished, because they till so large a
part of the foreground of our minds while we have
them. They are like the dreams of youth which are
very real while they last, and even after they pass
leave fragrant vestiges behind, but which in the clearer
light of reality we see to have been wrongly placed.
They were beautiful, but they were not true: at least
they were not yet true. They may have been fore-
gleams, as when a sunnv day foretells the Spring but
is succeeded by weeks of raw and changeable weather.
Illusions are numerous and take their color trom
the man himself. Perhaps the most common of them
all relate to ourselves and society. There is a com-
fortable feeling which most of us possess at some time
in our lives and which is based on the supposition that
all men are good and unselfish. This feeling seems
to be confirmed during youth, lor as a rule the world
does not show its hard side to young people. A great
defect in ordinary education i> the teaching that every-
one is all right, when later experience, it' it be normal,
cannot but show that everyone is not all right. There
is a sort of education which tends to make us sott
FORD IDEALS
and overdeveloped on the conciliatory side, so pathet-
ically anxious for harmony that we are afraid to stand
up for the truth which comes like a divisive sword and
cuts men into parties.
Society is suffering a reaction from that attitude
now, because of the weakness in ordinary thinking
which leads the ordinary mortal, for a time at least, to
say to himself, "Everybody is for himself alone; I
will therefore be for myself alone, and the devil take
the rest."
There are people who in their reaction turn to a
deeper dye of the thing which they thought was not
there and have found to be there ; their reaction is not
toward the actual condition as a real condition but
incomplete, and then goes still further toward the con-
dition that ought to exist. That is, men disappointed
in their illusions as to human society often turn de-
fensive and predatory, instead of constructive.
That is the cause of what is called "class conscious-
ness" today a predatory attitude toward a class to
which one conceives he does not belong. It is seen
at its most fateful development in Russia, and its ex-
istence is a warning to all men.
There is enough good in society to preserve it for
all social purposes, but it. is not of the ice cream party
or missionary kind. It doesn't go out in large and
generous waves, but it is there, waiting to greet its
own kind when it comes along. But some men's bit-
terness upon the loss of their illusions is so strong
that they miss the very thing for which their natures
are searching. In the great social upheaval in Russia,
there is a terrible lack of idealism. As one who has
been through it says, the idealists become rapacious
hypocrites as soon as they come into power. No po-
litical or social philosophy can be blamed for this ; it
is simply human nature.
Illusions are fine things to keep us afloat until we
find our feet, and the best thing that can be said of
them is that they trend mostly in the right direction.
If they were not mainly tinged with the right color,
they would not last long as illusions. Uncomfortable
illusions depart sooner than any other, for truth drives
308
ILLUSIONS ARE NOT FAITH
them out; if truth is kindlier to our comfortable il-
lusions, it may be because these are more akin to truth
itself. However, illusion is at best a mirage, while
faith has something solid about it it is perhaps the
solidest thing in the world. All faith at last is one
faith, though the expressions of it may vary.
People do not commonly think of faith as solid and
substantial; they regard if as an airy fairy nothing,
colored balloons which one sends up for one's own
amusement. This is because they have confused faith
with something else.
Faith is know-so more than hope-so. Faith may
begin as a conscious preference; it ends as an ironclad
proof. The man who has faith knows. There may
be still much work to be done on the drawing board
or in the experimental room to make his faith articu-
late, but nevertheless he knows just as assuredly as
if the thing were the commonplace of everyday agree-
ment.
Faith is a higher grade of intelligence and is ac-
cessible even to those whose brains do not move easily
in routine methods, who do not manufacture their
thoughts according to the rujes made and established
by the professionals.
The rule ought to be, the less illusion the more
faith, because illusion may be balmy, but faith is dyna-
mic. Illusions are sedative, faith is stimulative. A
man rests on his illusions, he climbs on his faith. Il-
lusions grow less and less as life goes on; faith grows
more and more. Illusions are many, faith is one.
Faith is the material out of which all the things
that are yet to be are made. It is an invisible and
plastic substance capable of taking upon itself the
reality of visible form. Not. only is it substance, but
it is force as well. It probably does not create any-
thing that already does not exist, but it ha-> power to
bring the invisible things into the visibK' plane where
all men may use them. Faith is the matter out ot
which new pattern things arc made, and after they
appear, then commonplace men may make the same
things out of wood or laws or systems, or whatever
it may be.
We talk about having faith in ourselves. Well,
FORD IDEALS
if we know what that means, it is true; but too often
it means only a stimulated self-confidence, the assump-
tion and presumption of a "front." But plainly and
simply, faith must be in ourselves, because there we
make the only contact with reality that we can make.
It is faith in ourselves as having become at last a use-
ful part of the whole, that the term really signifies.
We sometimes talk about faith and sight as if they
were opposed ; they are the same thing. The only
man who walks by sight is the man who walks by faith,
for he is the only man who can see. Nobody sees
anything until faith has brought it within the sphere of
vision.
Faith is the sixth sense that completes all the others
and it shows itself chiefly in loyalty to Duty, for Duty
sums up all the creative work we do. Our career is
our duty, and our duty is our contribution to life.
Creative work is not a fine and pleasant frenzy ; it is
often doing what we would not choose to do, for we
are chosen oftener than we choose. A man plodding
along at what he knows to be his duty is an agent of
the universe, in his right place. Not only is he doing
something, but something is being done for him. Faith
works changes both in the agent and the objective. It
is the creative medium, without any limit that has been
found.
400
What Makes Immigration
a "Problem?"
THE immigration question has come to the front
again and gives another illustration of the diffi-
culty of deciding national policies with rigid mathe-
matical precision. The fact that this question occurs
is proof that something is wrong : the fact that no
offered solution can be considered as final is proof
that we have not yet found the principle that should
govern us.
Two points are fixed, of which it will be very hard
to dispose. One is our national tradition as a place
of refuge for all people. It will be impossible to cause
the people of the United States to turn their faces like
flint against the populations of the Old \Yorld who
wish to come to us. YYe have stood before the world
as the open door for all who would begin their lives
again in a condition of libertv ; we have never refused
sanctuary to the person fleeing from persecution.
The other point has already been made: our na-
tional attitude is the first : the plight of the alien is
the second; thev merge together. To close our doors
is not a national act alone, it react- upon human beings
elsewhere. And that we shall ever be loath to do.
That is to say, perhaps, that we are incurable sen-
timentalists on this question. \Ye may admit this, even
while we keep a shrewd eve on those who diligently
play upon our sentimentality for their own purposes.
\Ye may admit most of what the -poke-men tell n-.
too the spokesmen who are more interested in other
races than they are in America. \Ye may admit, tor
instance, that this countrv wa- made by immigrant-.
So it was. The pioneers were immigrant-. Ibex-
came to a wilderne - and made it blo-som. I hey came
to a bleak and stormy coast and tilled it with commerce.
It is impossible to honor them too much.
\Ye ought to be frank enough, however, to -ec that
'x .im
FORD IDEALS
not all modern immigrants are of pioneer quality. It
is one thing to come to a country to help make it, and
quite another thing to come to a country as to a ripe
tree to pick it. There ivas no immigration problem in
the United States so long as immigrants came to help
make the country. The country knew its friends, felt
the impulse of new life with every shipload of those
who came seeking a place to bestow their best. But
as soon as the type of immigration changed to include
people who came to pluck the country of its good
things, immediately the body of the nation felt its
vitality decreasing, as with some slow insidious disease,
and presently we knew that we had an immigration
problem.
The pioneers came on their own initiative. A very
large proportion of those who come now, are brought ;
they are transported as literally as an army is ; they
do not form that surging forward of the free and in-
dependent portions of other peoples which character-
ized our former immigration tidal waves. No country
can have too much of the pioneer spirit., too much of
that loyalty which contributes to the upbuilding of its
institutions.
But what have we been getting in this country,
particularly of late? What have we been importing
besides immigrants? The immigration of destructive
ideas has been enormous, too. It is easier to deal
with immigrants, in whatever condition of physical,
mental or financial decrepitude they may come to us,
than with the false ideas which so many of them bring.
That is one of the conditions that make the immigra-
tion question : we are importing something else besides
people and the danger of disease; we are importing
dangerous and false ideas dangerous because false.
Now America is on the right road, or she is on the
wrong road. The United States stands for personal
liberty within the limits prescribed by the public good,
and for equality before the law, or it does not. Our
Constitution is the charter of a proper kind of national
life, or it is not. We must take one side or the other
on these matters, and we must classify men according
to the side they choose. If they are of the opinion that
WHAT MAKES IMMIGRATION A "PROBLEM"?
the United States ought to be changed into something
else, let them be so classified. They, however, cannot
be considered as citizens contributing to the upbuilding
of this country. Jf there is a class of people who come
to us saying, "We; are the apostles of a new era; your
way of doing things is wrong ; your whole system must
be changed," we are entitled to say in reply, "That
many of our ways are imperfect, we have long known ;
we are trying to perfect them ; tell us how it is that a
light has shone on you with reference to American
problems that has never shone on us ; show us what
you have behind you in achievement and then we shall
consider your fitness to become our rulers."
And, for the most part, we find that these people
have no constructive record at all, and have nothing