For thirteen years thereafter, until 1911, gasoline automobile manufacture in the United States was under tribute to a royalty of from four-fifths of one per cent to 1-1/4 per cent of the retail price of all cars sold. The beneficiary of this license fee was the Electric Vehicle Company, which “split” the fees with Selden, and the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers itself. The fees amounted to very large sums, and the licensees wriggled and squirmed; but the United States District Court having upheld the Selden patent, there was no way out, unless a deliverer appeared. And such a deliverer did appear. It was none other than Henry Ford. For a pacifist, Henry Ford is about the greatest fighter the American industrial ranks have ever produced. His history has been a succession of fights—fights to make a motor that would go inside a hat box, fights to get anybody to believe in him and invest money with him, fights to convince people that nearly everybody would buy an automobile if the price was low enough, and finally the fiercest and most prolonged fight of all—the fight to break the Selden patent monopoly and free the industry from serfdom, give it free rein and relieve it of the incubus of tribute. Ford had refused to join the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers and had gone on making his engine and adapting it to a car which he put out, as has before been said, in 1903. The Electric Vehicle Company, which held the reins and was driving all the gasoline car makers except Ford, cracked its whip in Henry’s direction and brought him up standing, and bristling as well. In the suit for infringement against Ford the Electric Vehicle Company won in the lower United States court, but it reckoned without its Ford. That product of a strain of Irish-English fighting blood didn’t consider he was whipped because one court decided against him, as all the other manufacturers, who submitted their necks meekly to the Selden patent yoke, had done. He promptly appealed and fought the case like a wildcat up to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, and through that tribunal, and with such success that, in 1911 this court reversed the finding of the lower court and gave the decision to Henry Ford. The original suit in the lower court was begun against Ford in 1903, so that his fight against the first and only automobile “trust” was an eight year war. But during it all, he never faltered in his activities in perfecting his car and making his elaborate preparations to build and market it. His confidence in his final victory was not affected in the slightest degree. He went on, pursuing his object with unruffled mien.