This, then, was Henry Ford at 52. A slender, slightly stooped man, with hollow cheeks, thin, firm, humorous lips, gray hair; a man with sixty odd millions of dollars; used to hard work all his life, and liking it. A man who on a single idea had built up a tremendous organization, so systematized that it ran by itself, requiring little supervision. In some way he must use his driving energy, in some way he must spend his millions, and his nature demanded that he do it along the line of that idea which had dominated his whole life--the machine idea of humanity, the idea of the greatest good to the greatest number. That summer, for the first time, he found himself with leisure. He was not imperatively needed at the plant. He and Mrs. Ford spent some time in Greenfield, where he enlarged the old farm by purchasing nearly four thousand acres of land adjoining it. He himself spent some time on the problems of organizing the work on those acres. He and his wife lived in the house where they had begun their married life, and where, with their old furniture and their old friends, they reconstructed the life of thirty years before. Ford returned to Detroit with a working model for a cheap farm-tractor which he intends to put on the market soon. He worked out the designs and dropped them into the roaring cogs of his organization which presently produced some dozens of the tractors. These were sent down to the farm and put to work. In due course, caught up again by the Ford organization, the tractors will begin to pour out in an endless stream and Ford will have done for farm work what he did for passenger traffic. But he realized that those occupations did not absorb his whole energy. Unconsciously he was seeking something bigger even than his factories, than his business operations, to which he could devote his mind--something to which he could apply his ruling idea, something for which he could fight. The terrible 4th of August, 1914, which brought misery, ruin, desolation to Europe and panic to the whole world, gave him his opportunity. CHAPTER XXIX THE EUROPEAN WAR War! The news caught at the heart of the world, and stopped it. For a time the whole business structure of every nation on earth trembled, threatened to crumble into ruin, under this weight, to which it had been building from the beginning. Greed, grasping selfishness, a policy of "each man for himself, against other men," these are the foundations on which nations have built up their commercial, social, industrial success. These are the things which always have led, and always will lead, to war, to the destruction of those structures they have built. Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Russia, England, Japan, Turkey, Italy--one by one they crashed down into the general wreck. Everything good that the centuries had made was buried in the debris. The world rocked under the shock.