Here in America we read the reports in dazed incredulity. It could not be possible, it could not be possible, we said to each other with white lips--in this age, now, to-day-- For, living as most of us do, on the surface of things, among our friends, in an atmosphere of kindliness and helpfulness, we had been cheerfully unconcerned about the foundations of our economic and industrial life. In the winter there are thousands of unemployed men--we try to give each one a bowl of soup, a place to sleep. Our street corners are unpleasantly infested with beggars--we pass an ordinance, arrest them for vagrancy, feed them a few days and order them to leave town. The city is full of criminals--what are the police doing? we inquire testily. We build another prison, erect another gallows. We are like an architect who, seeing threatening cracks in the walls of the building, would hurriedly fill them with putty and add another story. Henry Ford read the news from Europe. He saw there a purposeless, useless and waste of everything valuable. He saw a machine, wrongly built for centuries so that each part would work against all the other parts, suddenly set in motion and wrecking itself. It was a repetition, on a larger scale, of a catastrophe with which he had been familiar in the business world. How many companies in his own field had been organized in the early days of the industry, had gone into business with the one purpose of getting all they could from every one, workers, stockholders, buyers--and had gone down in ruin! Only those companies which had been built on some basis of fair service had succeeded, and these had done so in proportion to their real value to others. Whether or not this principle is recognized by those who profit from it, it is the fundamental principle on which business success is built. "The trouble is that people do not see that," said Ford. "A man goes into business from purely selfish motives; he works for himself, and against every one else, as far as he can. But only so far as his grasping selfishness really works out in benefit to other people he succeeds. If he knew that, if he went to work deliberately to help other people, he would do more good, and at the same time he would make a bigger success for himself. "But instead of that, he gets more and more selfish. When he has got a lot of money, and becomes a real power, he uses his power selfishly. He thinks it is his grasping policy that has made him successful. Why, everything I ever did selfishly in my life has come back like a boomerang and hurt me more than it hurt any one else, and the same way with everything I have done to help others. It helps me in the end every time. It is bound to. As long as a machine runs, anything that is really good for one part is good for the whole machine.