Henry Ford sat in his office on his fifty-second birthday and looked out of a community of nearly 20,000 persons, working efficiently and happily together, working for him and for themselves, well paid, contented. He thought of the world, covered with the network of his agencies, crossed and recrossed with the tracks of his cars.
He had run counter to every prompting of "practical business judgment" all his life—he had left the farm, built his engine, left the moneyed men who would not let him build a cheap car, started his own plant on insufficient capital, built up his business, established his profit-sharing scheme—all against every dictate of established practice.
He had acted from the first on that one fundamental principle, "Do the thing that means the most good to the most people." His car, his factory, his workmen, his sixty millions of dollars, answered conclusively the objection, "I know it's the right thing, theoretically but it isn't practical."
Thinking of these things on that bright summer day in 1914, Ford decided that there remained only one more thing he could do.
