Edsel Ford, always admirable in his restraint, has told General Johnson that he "will have no truck with collective bargaining", and father Henry insists that he has "nothing to say about the National Recovery Act". No one has proved that the Fords are violating the hour and wage scales prescribed by Washington, but they refuse to throw open their books to the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, and this, since they are not members, is reasonable enough. General Johnson, however, is eager for a test of his much touted enforcement machinery, and there is little doubt that he will visit vengeance in Dearborn unless the Fords capitulate.

It is characteristic of Henry Ford and of his son that they should stand alone against the National Recovery tide. For they stood alone against much of that resounding system which made some kind of national recovery a necessity, against the growth of investment banking and the incubation of speculative enterprise. Indeed, there have been indications that they, alone of the mok-a-moks, perceived that vital contradiction which imperilled the economic organism in which their own success was hatched. Over seven years ago, when Henry Ford manufactured his ten millionth motor car, and the moguls of efficiency were prostrate in self gratulation, he ventured to inject a single sour note. His remark was commonplace enough, considered in the light of our own days, but in 1926 it had an alien and an unfriendly sound. What would happen when the market had been glutted by his ever more efficient production, when the only people devoid of a Ford tonneau were the people devoid of a Ford tonneau were the people without money or the prospects of earning it?

The 1926 answer was simple: there would be no such people. Well, there are plenty of them now, and there is also much of the banking dislocation which the Fords predicted in the post war rise. They have been right twice, when all said them may, and that fine faith which industry cherishes for every spavined abstraction is no longer with them. The current credo, "planned capitalism", has a tidy and efficient sound, but it does not mean very much. There are three things to plan; what we shall produce, how much of it we shall produce, and who is going to produce it. The essence of capitalism is that these questions shall be automatically solved by the price system, by the operation of certain obvious laws of supply and demand. If we can buy a million automobiles, they will be manufactured; if we need them, but cannot pay for them, it is witless to order that they shall be nonetheless compounded.

Such is the rigid structure of capitalism, and when production at any cost is our aim, it and the private ownership upon which it is built work very well. But when technical advances make production outstrip the capacity to buy and it is useless to contend that they have not, capitalism cannot provide for the needs of this new economic society. Plan it, regulate it in any direction but semi-public utilities, and you destroy its internal harmony, you set loose productive forces whose sole control comes in collapse. The end is chaos in any case; in the United States our specious boom is already aggravated by the disposition of banks and credit agencies to remain stagnant, Mr. Ford has a natural prejudice against the abolition of private ownership, a prejudice which any of us would entertain in his place. But this does not blind him to the folly of "planned capitalism", and I hope that his stand will be firm enough to reclaim many of the facile converts that our cotton ploughmen have made.