and through an idealist. As tender as a woman, he
is much more tolerant. He looks like a poet, and conducts his life like
a philosopher. No poet ever expressed himself through his work more
completely than Mr. Ford has expressed himself through his car and his
tractor engine. They typify him; not imposing, nor complex, less
expressive of power and mass than of simplicity, adaptability, and
universal service, they typify the combination of powers and qualities
which make him a beneficent, a likable, and a unique personality. Those
who meet him are invariably drawn to him. He is a national figure, and
the crowds that flock around the car in which he is riding, as we pause
in the towns through which we pass, are not paying their homage merely
to a successful car-builder or business man, but to a beneficent human
force, a great practical idealist whose good-will and spirit of
universal helpfulness they have all felt. He has not only brought
pleasure and profit into their lives, but has illustrated and written
large upon the pages of current history a new ideal of the business
man--that of a man whose devotion to the public good has been a ruling
passion, and whose wealth has inevitably flowed from the depth of his
humanitarianism. He has taken the people into partnership with him, and
has eagerly shared with them the benefits that are the fruit of his
great enterprise--a liberator, an emancipator, through channels that are
so often used to enslave or destroy.

In one respect, essentially the same thing may be said of Mr. Edison:
his first and leading thought has been, What can I do to make life
easier and more enjoyable to my fellow-men? He is a great chemist, a
trenchant and original thinker on all the great questions of life,
though he has delved but little into the world of art and literature--a
practical scientist, plus a meditative philosopher of profound insight.
And his humor is delicious. We delighted in his wise and witty sayings.
A good camper-out, he turns vagabond very easily, can go with hair
disheveled and clothes unbrushed as long as the best of us, and can
rough it week in and week out and wear that benevolent smile. He eats so
little that I think he was not tempted by the chicken-roosts or
turkey-flocks along the way, nor by the cornfields and apple-orchards,
as some of us were, but he is second to none in his love for the open
and for wild nature.

Mr. Firestone belongs to an entirely different type--the