NOTABLE BOOKS
AMERICA'S DON QUIXOTE. How Henry Ford Tried to Save Europe. By Louis Paul Lochner, Secretary of the Ford Peace Ship. (Kegan Paul. 10s. 6d.) Tuts is the tale of a twentieth-century American effort to save mankind from its hideous crimes and follies. That effort had all the crudeness characteristic of its kind. Crude- ness seems to be inseparable from the temperament possessing vigour and conviction. The reader, and especially the English reader, must be prepared to wince again and again as he is made familiar with the modus operandi of the Ford Peace Mission. We arc carried back to pre-War days when American evangelism was sometimes a source of great profit to men who had a business-like equipment of emotional degradation. The great ideal before these people was Publi- city. It is dangerous to generalize about national virtues and vices. Measuring by rule of thumb, however, there seems to be this difference between the English and the Americans ; that the former pull down the blinds, and the latter do not. Why was it necessary to take on the Ford Peace Mission film photographers and over fifty pressmen who spent most of their time, when not drinking, in concocting thoroughly sensational and lying reports ? Why was it necessary for the inspiring utterances from the heart of the Mission to take the form of catchpenny slogans ? There is no answer to these fastidious questions. Our native squeamishness, however, cannot blind us to the interesting personality of Mr. Henry Ford, whose production of a motor-car with a foolproof gearbox has made him the richest man in the world. When we get peeps at him—he is usually nothing more than an institution, a mass of Departments —we see a shrewd, kinaiy individualist, a man with so fervent an itch for action that he has no vitality left for the contemplative life. Without the latter, he is forced to net on impulse, with results sometimes irritating, but most frequently charming—while his poor secretaries are driven to distraction in their efforts to cover up his inconsistencies, and to make him a conventional character suitable for world- wide consumption.
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