HENRY FORD, PROPHET

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21208, 3 September 1940, Page 2

HENRY FORD, PROPHET

WAR TO END SOON FUTURE AMERICAN PROSPERITY “I was never more confident,” Henry Ford told the Christian Science Monitor in an interview on his 77th anniversary, “than I am today that the future will bring happiness, contentment, and prosperity to our people.” The noted industrialist whose philosophy of life centres largely upon the idea that “there never has been produced too much of any useful commodity” had no formal celebration of his birthday. “When you get to be 77 years old,” Ford said, “you’re more or less used to birthdays; the years themselves don't count anyway; it’s what you have done with them that adds up to success or failure.” Ford repeated his conviction that the United States would not be drawn into the war, “despite tremendous pressure on the part of certain selfish interests that would like to see all our enormous resources devoted to the production of the machinery of destruction.” “Depends on Youth”

The extent of the prosperity he sees ahead. Ford said, “depends of course upon our youth and what we teach them. We must teach them to work and to be self-reliant. The sooner we all learn that ‘life is earnest and real,’ and that there is no short cut to economic or social security, the sooner will we achieve the purpose for which we were put on this Earth.”

Ford, who pioneered in mass production and the mechanisation of industry and agriculture, believes that “once the two are definitely tied together, both are safe.” His chief aim in developing the so-called “Machine Age,” has been to make normal labour easier, and he is positive in his belief that the machine does not replace the individual wage earner. “The machine age, so-called,” he said, “has made the normal life span longer.” The present war in Europe, Ford said, could not have developed “if the peoples of all the nations involved had gone earnestly back to work after the World War. Instead, too many of them were content to ‘coast along’ taking things as they came and, knowingly or otherwise, developing a philosophy of carelessness and indifference.”

Ford, who has held a life-long hatred for war, said he was convinced the present conflict would not be of long duration.