on the floor. Wives were ill, uncared for; babies were dressed in rags. Another 5,000 men in his employ were living in conditions which could only be called "fair." Only 364 out of 18,000 owned their own homes.
Yet the employees in the Ford shops were above the average of factory workingmen. They were paid the regular scale of wages, not overworked, and their surroundings at the plant were sanitary and pleasant.
In those terrible figures Ford was seeing merely the ordinary, accustomed result of the wasted energy represented in those idle millions of dollars.
He went over them thoroughly, noting that the scale of living grew steadily better as the salaries increased, observing that the most wretched class was mainly composed of foreign workmen, ignorant, unskilled labor, most of them unable to speak English. He figured, thought, drew his own conclusions.
He had been studying relief plans, methods of factory management in Germany, welfare work of all kinds. When he had finished his consideration of those reports he threw overboard all the plans other people had made and announced his own.
"Every man who works for me is going to get enough for a comfortable living," he said. "If an able-bodied man can't earn that, he's either lazy or ignorant. If he's lazy, he's sick. We'll have a hospital. If he's ignorant, he wants to
