22 MARCH 1935, Page 18

COUNTRY LIFE

Dagenham and Detroit During the War I spent a day with Mr. Henry Ford at Detroit and heard from him something of his philosophy of life, which is not wholly divorced from his business. He said that his first love was the farm tractor. His inventive mind was busy with it long before he grew busy with the road motor-ear. The land and the cultivation of the land have always meant more to him, perhaps, than other objects of his zeal. He expressed a great desire (as I have recorded elsewhere) to read Prince Kropotkin's wonderful little book (however much out of date) Fields, Factories and Workshops. Its chief thesis is the capacity of land to produce food in quantities beyond the common imagination ; and his descrip- tion of the Valley of Glass in Guernsey and of the French garden as perfected by the maraicher leads to the moral that the achievement of such enterprises will one day be accom- plished without the handicap of such excess of labour as the French gardener undergoes.