Then the old scientist seized a piece of zinc paper and placed it in the phonograph, that first machine which began to speak with a human voice. Until then machines could only roar, rumble, or whistle. The phonograph was started, and into the horn the old man spoke the very same words which once in his presence had been spoken into the same horn by Edison. These were the words of the old children's song about Mary and Her Little Lamb, which ends up with laughter.

"Ha, ha, ha!" the phonograph said clearly.

We had the feeling that this instrument had been born in our presence.

"That night Edison became immortal!" the old man cried.

Tears appeared in his eyes.

And he repeated:

"Youth was Edison's strength!"

Having learned that we were writers, the old man suddenly became serious. He looked at us solemnly and said:

"Write only what you think, not for England, not for France, but write for the whole world!"

The old man did not want to let us go., He talked to us about Ford, again about Edison, about the Abyssinian War, cursing Italy, cursing war, and praising science. In vain did Mr. Adams try in the course of an hour to inject one word into this storm of thoughts, conceptions, and exclamations. He could not manage to do it. The Frenchman did not give him a chance to open his mouth. Finally, it was time to bid farewell, and here both old men showed us how it should be done. They slapped each other's arms, shoulders, and backs!

"Good-bye, sir!" cried Adams.

"Good-bye, good-bye!" the old man shouted.

"Thank you very, very much!" cried Adams, going down the stairs. "Thank you very much indeed!"

"Very! Very!" we heard from above.

"No, gentlemen," said Mr. Adams, "you don't understand anything. There are some very good people in America."

And he took out of his pocket a large red-checked family-sized handkerchief and, without taking off his spectacles, wiped his eyes with it.

When we drove past the laboratory we were informed that Mr. Ford had not yet arrived. We went on to the Ford headlight factory located fifteen miles from Dearborn. Our young guide proved quite unexpectedly to be a conversationalist, so he entertained us all the way down the road. We learned that the Ford factories have their own police force. It is composed of five hundred men; among them is the former chief of the Detroit police, and Joe Louis, the world's boxing champion. With the aid of these capable gentlemen complete peace reigns in Dearborn. There were no trade-union organizations there yet. They had been driven underground.

The factory for which we were bound presented a special interest. This was no mere factory, but the epitome of a definite new technical and political idea. We heard a lot about it, because it is very much the theme of the day in connection with all the talk one hears in America about the dictatorship of the machine and. about how to make life happy while preserving at the same time the capitalist system.

In conversation with us, Mr. Sorensen and Mr. Cameron, who together represent the right and left hands of Henry Ford, told us that if they had to build the Ford enterprises all over again, they would never have constructed a gigantic factory. Instead of one factory they would have constructed a hundred midget factories located a certain distance from each other.

We heard a new slogan in Dearborn: "Country life with city earnings."

"Imagine," We were told, "a little forest, a field, a quiet river, even a very small one. Here is a small factory. Around it live farmers. They cultivate their plots and they also work in our little factory. Excellent air, good houses, cows, geese. When a depression begins and we cut down production, the worker will not die of hunger, because he has land, bread, milk. You know we are no benefactors; we are concerned with other things. We build good cheap automobiles. If these midget factories did not produce considerable technical results, Mr. Henry Ford would never have turned to that idea. But we have already determined with precision that in a midget factory, where there is no great congregation of machines and workers, the productivity of labour is much higher than in a big factory. Thus, the worker leads a healthy and inexpensive country life while he has a city income. Moreover, we free him from the tyranny of the merchants. ' We noticed that as soon as we raise wages even a little, all the prices in Dearborn rise in proportion. That will stop with the disappearance of concentration in one place of hundreds of thousands of workers."

This idea occurred to Ford, as he later told us, some twenty years ago. Like all American undertakings, it had first been tested over a long period of time before being applied on a wide scale. Now there are about twenty of these midget factories, and Ford expects to increase their number every year. Distances between factories of ten, twenty, or even fifty miles is no problem to Ford. Considering the ideal condition of American highways, that is no problem at all.

And so everything in this idea tends in the direction of general welfare. Country life, city earnings, the depression is not terrible, technical perfection is attained. There was one thing we were not told, that there was important politics in this idea—to rid themselves of the dangerous concentration of workers in large industrial centres. Incidentally, the special Ford police would then have nothing to do. Even they could be given a cow apiece for good measure. Let the great Negro, Joe Louis, milk himself some milk bucolically and let the former chief of the Detroit police wander over the fields with a wreath on his brow, like Ophelia, and mutter:

"I have nothing to do. I am bored, bored, gentlemen!"

With Americans, words lead to action. Having reached the top of a hillock, we saw the picture which had been so graphically described to us. The headlight factory was located on a small river, where the dam created only a seven-foot fall of water. But this was sufficient for bringing two small turbines into activity. Around the factory there were actually a small wood and a meadow. One could see farms, hear the crowing of cocks, the clucking of hens, the barking of dogs—in a word, all the country sounds.

The factory itself is one small building made almost entirely of glass. The most remarkable thing about it all is that this factory in which only five hundred men work was making headlights, tail-lights, and ceiling lights for all the other Ford factories. In the midst of feudal cock-crowing and pig-squealing, the factory in one hour makes a thousand headlights, six hundred tail-lights, and five hundred ceiling lights. Ninety-seven per cent, of the workers are farmers, and each one of them tills from five to fifty acres of land. The factory works in two shifts. But if it worked full strength, its production would be one and a half times its present one. What workers who have no acres will do is not mentioned in the new idea, although those are the people who make up the entire working class of the United States.

In spite of the village landscapes spread around the factory, the workers who crowded around the small conveyors had the same sombrely intent expression as the Dearborn people. When the bell sounded for lunch, the workers, just as in Dearborn, sat down on the floor and quickly consumed their sandwiches.

"Listen," we said to the manager—that is, to the director of the factory, who walked with us along the conveyor. "Do you know how many headlights you have produced today ?"

The manager walked up to the wall, where long narrow papers hung on a nail, took off the top one, and read: