FORD'S WAR WORK.

" MYSTERY" SHIPS, TRACTORS, AIR ENGINES

A REMARKABLE PACIFIST

Special Cable

. By W. BEACH THOMAS

New York City, Feb. 20. . . . diseases desperate grown By desperate appliance are reliev'd, Or not at all.—Hamlet, Act IV., Scene 3.

I have just returned from Detroit, oue i>f thy most dashing of American cities and hubs of war activity. I saw thy. c xkree wonderful engines of w;/r in process ot manufacture —the Fordfcbn tractor, an aeroplane engine, and the "mystery" ships which'are just being laid down in tile Ford works. i believe 1 was the first t-o be allowed to examine the process of manufacture of these ships, of which one of the wonders is that they are built by a firm which has never touched marine architecture before.

The Ford system of architecture is applied iv an enhanced degree. Every part is standardised. Every plate and bolt is brought automatically to the workman in his place <jv. whatever stage or storey he stands —the keel, where work begins, or at the deck plates, where it finishes. It is a curious detail that no plate ever touches the ground. Each is swung and carried to its place and suspended there very much as you would carry a coat to the wardrobe. The process by which the ship grows before your eyes is recorded automatically by moving photography, which takes a picture once every minute. In a vast corridor or aisle —for it had an almost cathedral 100k —I saw the iirst of these U-boat destroyers begin to assume shape, and felt the mystery to be greater, not less, ior the intimacy of my acquaintance with it. Nevertheless, in spite of the attraction of these mechanical marvels, I found myself even more interested in their creator than in the thing created, and there is no news of the war moro worth imparting than some account of Henry Ford himself. Since the morning I spo'nt with him 1 feel rather like the amiable idiot in "David. Copperfield" whose best efforts wore always interrupted by King Charles's head.

Mr. Ford received us in a little glass-

;w»lled office-, sixteen feet square, stolon from a corner of his new factory for tho agricultural tractor. This marvellous machine was Mr. Ford's dream years before the production ;:f the " Flivvers," of Ford cars, interrupted his vision. ' The room, and, indeed, the factory, reminded one of us of a visit to Krupp's works at Essen, but all thought oi such likeness was swallowed up in the personality of the men there, busy not at the sword but at the ploughshare. Spirits less German could not be imagined.

"1 care nothing for your war," whs about the first thing Mr. Ford said ; to me, and his contemptuous emphasis made me i'or the moment fear a pacifist outbreak.

"War is destruction, and all I care for is the productivity of the soil, and, not least, of the English soil."

And from this text he talked long and earnestly on the present state of the world..

"1 believe this war to be necessary," said Mr. Ford, "because desperate diseases require desperate remedies, an-1 there are some abscesses you can only cut out with tho knife."

At this point 1 had a great desire to ask Mr. Ford if he was intentionally paraphrasing the King in "Hamlet,1- or whetfter it was mere accident that this genius in mechanics was stepping in umo with the super-genius of our race in letters. But the discussion was too earnest for verbal interruption. " And peace will come," continued Mr Ford, "just as soon as we get rid of wluit is rotten in the state of each nation.'; This, I take it, is the cardinal article in Mr. Fords's view of the war. We have to win it. The war is to be a purge of evil; first, of tile master evil, the cruel love of war that dominate the German Empire, but also of tro crooked view of life that flourishes wherever financiers or autocrats are gathered together. The face and guise of the speaker added I know noc what momentum to his arguments. Enthusiasm, energy, sincerity are written for .all to read on every lineament of that eager face.

When we first cam© in Mr .Ford sat and talked ou his office table in an attitude that reminded me of the description by a charming French authoress of her first meeting with an English officer on the eve of the Battle of the Marne. What struck her most. s o far as 1 can remember, was "the natural, friendly way you English people have of sitting ova table and danglnig your legs." Mr. Ford's attitude was ill that —natural and simple, I found his parallel not among the multi-million-aires—and the superpluralist.s in their tribe—but rather among the professors, in a man like Metchnikoff, whoso zeal for humanity left him quite content with a salary of £400 a year. There were other suprising contrasts. This arch-democrat's face has the fine lines of the born aristocrat, and this wizard of material creation lives and linn his being in a world of ideas in which his own genius for mechanics is no more than an incidental attribute.

Mr Henry Ford, the pacifist, is one of t.ie wat workers most to be dreaded by the enemy. His view of tlie way to mobilise national industry for war purposes is that every man who has a plant or ideas should tell the Government exactly what he and his organisation can b<>st <10, and that if individual enterprise and capacity are thus employed and correlated all the evils of superfluous officialdom and all the delay of erecting national workshops may he best avoided. This he himself has done, with the result that h'm vast organisation of industry at Detroit and a portion of this 40,000 workmen and workwomen are at work en all branches of the war. They are

helping with parts of aeroplanes ond engines; they are building the " mystery" boats; and they are creating the earth machine, which is the most necessary of all the implements of wa.r.' For corn, not "coin is the real sinews of war." This popular misquotation of Rabelais is truer than the right reading.

Mr. Ford was very interesting on the subject of England. He regards her social development during the last five Years as one of the great phenomena of the world, and sees in the marvel of Jut war organisation an earnest of the millennium to be. We are to have peace, all of us, when we deserve po-aco. in the past we have allowed the social cancer to grow. Some of us have tried the method of grinning and bearing it. &fl*ie of us have nibbed it with red pepper. We are now being forced to cut it out, and we shall not finish the war till we have undergone an operation. Such, T take it. h Mr. Ford's general view, his phliosonhy of Armageddon, for ho is a. mystic first and ;i mechanic afterwards.

Yet I should give quite a wrong impression -of the man and his force if T did not add that ho is also a. tvpicul American man of business. He has t:ikeu hut onp holiday in his life: ;ind <lid not Hko it. He work* every day just a.s lons as lie can without losing fitness. He trains for his v,-ork by running—and he looks a runner —by walking and by swinging the hammer. Ho ents just enough—it looks barel---enougb — to keep his machine at full pitch. Tlie energ-- i> *o .continuous that none of his co-workers has rv*>r nnted an interval of moodiness or deprnssion. He is beyond question a mechanical genius, and even some of his social ''••fiims take Oi"ir roots on the farm. The son of n farmer, he know the difficulty c{ mannp-ine and tendiner a. team of horses before ho apprenticed himself to mechanics and wns punished n« a factory annrentice hv a week's task of filing nuts.

So was born the Foul son tractor, wh'-ch is to r« vcronernte lifo on flip farm and the productivity of the Foil.