work: the disabled and the sick. If they cannot work, how are they to live except on charity or beneficence?
It is here that Henry Ford makes the world a Great Revelation.
The legions of the unfit are not incapacitated for work; for the work, as we have organized it, is unadaptable to them. Intelligent organization of industry, as effected by Ford in his own business, solves the problem perfectly.
Ford had a study made of all the tasks carried out in his factory and what each required of the artisan. He found that so many needed a normal man in good health, so many one arm only, so many no legs, so many not even eyesight, and so on. Then he rounded up the halt and lame of Detroit who were being supported by public charity and offered each one work suited to his physical condition. He did not do this out of charity, thereby burdening production. He did it to prove that a man of impaired physical capacity, given suitable work, can produce as much as a sound man, deserving therefore full pay. In this way he provided work in his factory for thousands of non-productive human beings who were a burden on the productive, levelling them up to normal efficiency, relieving society of so much dead weight and sparing the former the mortification of knowing themselves to be encumbrances.
