"Say," he said, shifting from one foot to the other, and running his fingers around the brim of the hat in his hands, "I wonder if you'd tell me how to get into a bank and leave this? And what bank? I'm wise how to get in and take it out, but I ain't up to putting it in without some advice." To-day that man is living in his own home which he is paying for on the installment plan, and he is one of the best workers in Detroit, a good, steady man. His chance appearance resulted in Ford's policy of employing convicts wherever his investigators come across them. Nearly a hundred ex-criminals, many of them on parole, are working in his shops to-day, and he considers them among his best men. "No policy is any good if it cannot go into a community and take every one in it, young, old, good, bad, sick, well, and make them all happier, more useful and more prosperous," he says. "Every human being that lives is part of the big machine, and you can't draw any lines between parts of a machine. They're all important. You can't make a good machine by making only one part of it good." This belief led to his establishing a unique labor clearing-house in his administration building--a department that makes it next to impossible for any man employed in the organization to lose his job. CHAPTER XXVII THE IMPORTANCE OF A JOB That surging mob of men outside this factory during the week following the announcement of his profit-sharing plan had impressed indelibly on Ford's mind the tremendous importance of a job. "A workingman's job is his life," he says. "No one man should have the right ever to send another man home to his family out of work. Think what it means to that man, sitting there at the supper table, looking at his wife and children, and not knowing whether or not he will be able to keep them fed and clothed. "A normal, healthy man wants to work. He has to work to live right. Nobody should be able to take his work away from him. In my factory every man shall keep his job as long as he wants it." Impractical? The idea seems fantastic in its impracticality. What, keep every man--lazy, stupid, impudent, dishonest, as he may be--every man in a force of 18,000 workmen, on the payroll as long as he wants to stay? Surely, if there is any point at which ideals of human brotherhood end and coldblooded business methods begin, this should be that point. But Ford, obstinate in his determination to care for the interests of every one, declared that this policy should stand. As a part of his new plan, he installed the labor clearing house as part of his employment department. Now when a foreman discharges a man, that man is not sent out of the factory. He goes with a written slip from the foreman to the labor clearing house. There he is questioned. What is wrong? Is he ill? Does he dislike his work? What are his real interests?