POLITICAL NOTES: Ford Speaks

• Share

(2 of 3)

"We have discovered by careful reckoning that the net costs of transporting air freight are from 13 to 15c. a pound. There is obviously a commercial profit if you can charge more than that and get the business. Come back in two years and we will tell you more about commercial and practical aviation."

Business and Politics. "The nation is on the most solid basis it has enjoyed for years, under the leadership of a President whose ability and balance are beyond question. President Coolidge should and likely will be reflected to another term in the White House when his present term expires."

Shipping. "Ford ships on the high seas and lakes now number five,* and they will increase as our needs require. They are carrying Ford products overseas and returning with cargoes of any profitable character.

"We have determined that the $100 minimum wage, even with the large crews which we carry, leaves us a substantial profit, and all talk that this is a blow to the American merchant marine or other shippers is bunk. The big shipping companies do not pay decent wages merely because they do not have to. They are interested in keeping their men away from conditions in which they might enjoy the advantages that good wages bring. They want their sailors to remain in ignorance of the better things in life in order that there will be no demand for better wages and conditions."

Language. "Speech is one of man's most marvelous tools and there is a direct relation between the kind of speech which he uses and the kind of work he does. A good and experienced engineer can tell what language a machine has ' been built in just by looking at it. There are some languages in which a machine cannot be built at all. There are some languages in which it would be impossible efficiently to manage a factory.

"The English language is the world's tool of industry, colonization and the bringing of prosperity to every kind and degree of man. It is the world's language."

Said John Erskine, author and Professor of English at Columbia University:

"This report of Mr. Ford's rather fantastic ideas makes good hot-weather reading, but in one respect they are to be taken seriously. They will be quoted undoubtedly in other lands and will provide another unfortunate illustration of the self-sufficiency which seems to be the ideal just now of many otherwise able Americans.

"In the field of business I thought it was money rather than English that talked, and in the realm of the spirit perhaps greater progress is made in other languages."

Said Prof. William E. Wild, onetime Professor of Economics at Christian College, Allahabad, India:

"Mr. Ford is right in his historicity but not in his reasoning. English is becoming the dominant language of trade because English-speaking people have developed industrially and commercially, not because English is a better or more forceful language than any other. Arabic, for example, is a far more flexible language than English, but the Arabs have not an industrial development that forces their language to include scientific terms.