ent, far nobler and far more rational. It is seen to be not alone a question of succouring misery but of suppressing it. Ford’s idea is to make charity useless for lack of objects.
How many readers will smile at this! How many will take this to be only one more of the countless Utopian visions that people the human brain!
That is because they don’t know how Ford forms his ideas – they don’t know that his idealistic faculty is a practical working organ. Ford’s ideas are based on experiment – they represent what the possibilities have held out to him.
Absurd as this proposition may seem of suppressing charity by suppressing want, Ford demonstrated it in Detroit in the same way that Columbus solved the problem of the egg. And there is no reason why an experiment on a small scale should have different results when we make it on a larger scale. What he did can be done the wide world over; the Detroit solution is universally applicable.
But what did he do?
He studied the primary causes of misery. He saw that these primary causes are incapacity for work and dislike for work. For the misery that supervenes because a man does not want to work there is a very simple remedy: let him starve. Whatever kind of beneficence seeks to take care of this class of idlers is criminally guilty because it justifies and rewards sloth. But there are those who cannot
