A WORD TO MR. FORD.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1481, 4 December 1915, Page 2

A WORD TO MR. FORD.

Titk following sagacious remarks are made by New York Life concerning the Henry Ford pacifist campaign : —“Henry Ford says he has 10,000,000 dollars to spend if necessary to persuade this country that peace is always the best plan. . . . He thinks people have a false idea of war that ought to be educated out of them. He imagines that they are fooled by the glory and glamour of it. . , He wants the people to be persuaded that preparedness for war creates war. Henry does not seem to realise that several times 10,000,000 dollars is being spent every day, and has been spent every day tor 14 months, to persuade mankind that peace is the best plan, and that excess in preparation for war is about as dangerous as no preparation at all. Onr newspapers and movie shows are telling the (tilth about war nowadays in so far as they can get it. They represent it as a terrible job. The glory and glamour of it go for nothing. It Is all tragedy, the purge of the passions ; tragedy, destruction and waste. Henry's ten millions would be merely a scratch on the slate compared with the daily picture of war that we have been getting this last year. Have patience, Henry. This is a war against war. Folks who survive it are going to be gun shy for some time. You have done a great deal to make life attractive. That is your great service to peace, because the pleasanter life is the less people want to die. But war, Henry, brings a much greater lesson than that — the lesson of self-sacrifice. Nobody is much good who has not in him some idea, some ideal, than he cares for more than he does for life, even though it is life alleviated by the Ford motor. You help to make life pleasant, but war, Henry, helps to make it noble, and if it is not noble it does not matter a damn, Henry, whether it is pleasant or not. That is the old lesson of Calvary repeated at Mons and Ypres and Liege and Namur. Whether there are more people in the world or less, whether they are fat or lean, whether they are Fords or oxen, makes no vital difference ; but whether men shall be willing to die for what they believe in makes all the difference between a pigsty and a Paradise. Not by bread alone, Henry, shall men live. As for military preparedness, enough is good and salutary ; too much is militarism, and that is bad, bad, bad, as the Germans are teaching us. They are the great teachers of peace, and, be sure, Henry, they shall learn that lesson themselves down to the last line. Leave peace propaganda to them ; but you, if you have ten millions to spare, put it into Ford ambulances for France.”