luxury, it appealed to our longing to have something just a little better than our neighbors could afford. At the same time its obvious usefulness was an argument which overcame economy. The comic supplements, those faithful reflectors of American life in terms of the ridiculous, played with every variation of the theme, "He mortgaged the home to buy an automobile.
Amid this mounting excitement, in spite of millions to be made by building a car bigger, finer, more beautiful and luxurious than those of his competitors, Henry Ford still clung firmly to his Idea. He seems to have been, at that time, the only automobile manufacturer who realized that the automobile supplied a real need of the average man, and that the average man is a hard working, frugal individual, used to living with out those things he must mortgage his home to get.
"The automobile of those days was like a steam yacht," Ford says. "It was built for only a few people. Now anything that is good for only a few people is really no good. It's got to be good for everybody or in the end it will not survive."
Radical philosophy, that. You might hear it from a street corner orator, one of that dissatisfied multitude which will insist, in spite of all the good things we have in this country, that merely because those things are not good for them they are not good. There is something of Marx in
