Ford, Overland, Reo—you will recognize this trinity as the leaders in sales, and by the same token they have been the leaders in profits. When it is stated that Henry Ford made $200,000,000 in thirteen years, and was then offered a like amount for only a small part of his enterprise, we may well believe that he credits his own statement that “anything for only a few people is no good. It’s got to be good for everybody or it won’t survive.” Other Ford investors profited on the basis of $5,000,000 for each $10,000 invested. After the parent Ford company had established a record of a million dollars a week in profits in the United States alone, Ford stepped across the river into Canada and organized a company there which is earning fifty per cent a year on its capital of $10,000,000. Profits of $52,000,000 in capital stock alone which has been built up almost entirely of dividends earned, is the record of the Willys-Overland Company. John North Willys founded the success of this great money-making business on his personal check of $500, cashed at great trouble during the panic of 1907, when the Overland company was ready to go into bankruptcy. Besides the dividends applied to increasing the capital, an immense amount in profits has been disbursed by this enterprise. The dividends in 1916 were $11,000,000, over 20 per cent of the capital. This year they will likely be nearly double that amount. The Reo Motor Car Company has paid over $50,000 on an investment of $1,000. These three are not by any means all the automobile companies which have contributed to make the automobile industry a signal example of the earning power of money, but they represent the leaders of the popular or quantity-production-through-low-price type. There are about 150 passenger automobile companies that are profitable in varying degrees, proportioned to their price, not to say anything of trucks and tractors, in the marketing of which fortunes are also being made. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY—AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRIAL FIGURES ARE AMAZING. BY EDWARD G. WESTLAKE, _Automobile Editor, The Chicago Evening Post_. During the year 1916 the automobile industry in the United States entered the “billion dollar class,” and manufacturers who have membership in the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce which holds the industry, as it were, in the hollow of its great hand, made no more ado over this significant, almost amazing development than to meet in the annual banquet and reiterate their statements that the critic did not live who could predict, with certainty, the gain that might be made in 1917.