President.

that these two great men did not meet. Harding welcomed Mr. Ford at the White House several times, and already he has been a welcome visitor at the White House during President Coolidge's short time in the office.

Mr. Ford, when he withdrew his name from use as a possible candidate for the Presidency and said that he was in favor of Coolidge if he would enforce the Prohibition Laws, gave the President a great lift. That cleared away one serious obstacle from his possible re-election. I had the honor to get from Mr. Ford the interview in which he made this announcement that if Coolidge would enforce the Prohibition Law he would be for him and would withdraw his own name from consideration.

The truth of the matter is that Mr. Ford never seriously considered the Presidency. Mrs. Ford was always opposed to the idea and Mr. Ford is greatly influenced by his wife's desires. Anybody who knows him knows that.

From the very beginning I believed him when he said that he would not step across the street—and one time when he said that he would not step from a bare place on his office floor to the rug two feet away—to be the King of England or the President of the United States.

He was grateful to me for believing him when he said that he did not want to be a candidate for the Presidency. Most reporters and writers thought that he was merely bluffing; that he was playing politics. I believed him when he said that he would not be a candidate and so stated in my book on Mr. Ford; & statement that stands as a record of what I say; for the book was published long before Mr. Ford withdrew his name definitely.

However, in spite of the fact that he withdrew his name I believe that he could have been elected by a large majority if either party had selected him as a candidate; and more than that, I believe that he would make a strong President of the United States; a Lincoln type of a President in that he would not work by traditions nor by rote and rule; but that he would do the common-sense things in a horse-sense way. That is the way he has run everything that he has touched with the genius of his mind and hand.

I want to say one further word; now that the Teapot Dome scandal has touched all parties; and that is, that it is not an entire impossibility; that one of the two parties may be compelled to take Mr. Ford for its candidate in order to have a sure thing at the elections.

Mr. Ford does not care. He would not sanction my saying what I have about him politically. He has

such a position of induense and power that he is, perhaps more powerful as a private citizen than he would be as president. Already Anther Brisbane suggests that Mr. Ford be selected as one of Mr. Coolidge's advisers. In a flurry of lists of five of the greatest men in America to-day several have selected Mr. Ford in that list. A great Swedish scientist names him as our greatest American, and Dr. Leroy Burton, President of Michigan University, names him as one of the five greatest men of this age.

The Ford Hospital is, perhaps the finest expression of Mr. Ford's best self; his idealism. The New Republic calls Mr. Ford a "Hard-boiled Idealist"; and I think that I know what that paper means. It means that he is an idealist but that he knows what he is doing. He is not a silly sentimentalist; but in his idealism he insists upon getting results; just as he does in his business ventures.

The Ford Hospital was started as a public subscription enterprise. Mr. Ford made a generous subscription toward it. Those who were building it got up against it financially and came to him again. Then Mr. Ford said: "I'll take the whole thing over. I'll pay off those who have already subscribed. I'll build the hospital myself."

To date he has put about twelve million dollars in this great hospital; perhaps the best equipped hos

pital on earth at the present time. He is now, as this sketch is written, adding to this already generous venture, another million and a half dollars for a nurse's home for the hospital.

The hospital is what is called a "closed hospital," which means that doctors not on the regular staff are not permitted to operate in the hospital. He has a large staff of highly paid experts and they do all of the work, but in co-operation with the family physi cian and giving him access to all records and facts.

Mr. Ford says that he built the hospital for the common, every-day middle-class American. He says that the very rich can buy the best hospital service because they have money; and that the very poor are well cared for in the average American city by charity; but that the middle-class man, the small home-owner, the clerk, the small business man, the professional man who has not become rich, is hard pressed. It takes the savings of a life time for him if he has to go through an operation. It is for the middle group that Mr. Ford has built the hospital and the service in that hospital is given at cost. Even now, in the early stages of its development I have the authority of hundreds of friends who have gone there; and the authority of no less a personage than James Oliver Curwood, for the statement that the

costs of this hospital treatment are at least half what he has experienced elsewhere.

The Henry Ford Hospital is, as I have said, the flower of Mr. Ford's practical kind of religion.

It is his way of giving a man a chance but not charity. He says that a sick man has no chance. A well man can take care of himself. Even convalescents in this hospital, if they are poor and are worrying about money are given a chance to work during convalescence. The Ford Company sends nuts and bolts to the hospital, give the patient a black rubber cloth to go over his bed and let him sort and fit nuts and bolts while he gets well. The patients are paid five dollars a day for this service and they have contented minds while they are getting well because they are self-supporting.

Mr. Ford's religion and philanthropy are sane and lead to a self-respecting recipient. The Ford Hospital is a working out of his finest ideas and ideals. It sums up the man and no person has a right to judge Mr. Ford without taking the Ford Hospital into the considerations that form such judgment.

Mr. Ford's past has been full of romance, adventure and achievement; his present is brimming over with it. No man is more written about, as the clipping bureaus prove; and no man on earth is more interesting to humanity. His little office at Dearborn