Transcript
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...in 1898. It's quite a story with now 48 years of tension and of bloodshed, of course, besides.
So it is -- again today this -- this question of questions, whether in time the people of this country can rise to the occasion. They are lulled always asleep, by having to fight an older issue, like the Hawaii business. That shouldn't be -- before the House any longer, you see. The state rights of Hawaii becloud the real issues before this country. And the whole ballyhoo you saw about the Alaskan elections, the -- this is -- was a merry-go-round. That was just a -- fairy tale, how pleasant it was to get this 49th state of the Union, who never will be a state in the sense of the older states, because the -- the -- its geography will always outrun the -- its peoples. And the only benefit really we have received through the statehood of Alaska is that it -- finally we have a bigger state than Texas. That's important for the morale.
So I wanted you -- only to remind you that I expect great things from this paper, because I have given you the choice of the elements of this paper. It's up to you whether you want to concentrate on Guam, or on the Philippines, or on the -- on the Pacific Islands, or on Berlin, or whatever takes -- strikes your fancy most. But you ought to see that the American-defined area, and the American real area of responsibility have never coincided. So there has always been wrong teaching in -- so to speak, in the field of geography and political science, because what was in the Constitution was not the real thing, you see, in -- in -- in the government and the worries of the people who had to govern this country in Washington. They always had greater responsibilities than we allotted to them by the Constitution. You have only to think of Jefferson's problem with the Louisiana Purchase.
And since this is so, it is awkward. The only other country that has been in the same position is Russia, and have always also been marching on, and always been larger than its own organization. It's different, but not quite different, and certainly resembles America more than any other country in this respect. America and Russia have very parallel histories, as you know. The slaves were emancipated in this country in the same year in which the serfs were emancipated in Russia. And that's not accidental. And the West was opened, you see, in the same industrial rush here when the trans-Siberian railroad had to be built on the other side. And so these two colossi have always been shot into space at a larger speed than their thinking could keep up.
And one of the great errors of this country's intellectuals is that they are
ahead of the country's problems. And I wanted to bring to your attention, through this geographical -- seemingly merely geographical problem, that the intelligentsia of this country is always lagging behind in its thinking. The dregs of civilization, in the mind of the intellectuals, are the great problem of this country, that the intellectuals are not ahead of their time, but behind it. There are more real problems than what is now offered as Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard died in 1853. Do you really think that is of any importance to you at this moment? But it is an evasion, I mean. There are prophets today, and there is faith today. But why this country must go back to an individualist of the purest water, a hundred years back, why must they? Because they want to avoid today's issues. The only reason why the prophets of old are always quoted is so that you may not -- have to listen to the prophets of today. Very cheap.
And so I mean this paper not to be treated lightly as a problem of mere knowledge or geography. It's a problem of the intellectual -- intellect's responsibility to his own country's real, and very staggering situation. Because there are no easy solutions. You cannot make Berlin as they would like to, to become the 49th or 50th state of the Union, you see. Ja, you laugh, but for a German, that is natural solution, you see, Sir. He doesn't understand why it can't be done. I assure you. He doesn't, because he says the honor of the United States is engaged here, you see. And so this -- the whole organization of Europe today, you see, is problematic to the Europeans. They know very well that without some, you see, stake of the United States, it cannot be done. All these dreams of a United States of Europe -- utterly silly, because the deciding factor are the United States, and without a -- it's the same as -- after 1919, you see. If the United States go home, there's no union now -- in Europe is possible, and no peace in Europe.
So I only wanted to bring your attention that this is more a paper of your own conscience than a problem of mere knowledge. And I wanted to come back now to my own story, and to try to show you that my whole attempt here can only be to put you in a situation, which you are aware of the constant tension under which we are marching to our appointed goal, that there are these three trends of the mission of man into his own destiny: the political, the problem of boundaries in space, and organization; and the economic/industrial problem of having to eat from day to day. So industry, statehood, and Church--religion, philosophy, and sociology--are three different strands of the same life we have to lead on this globe. We live in a trinitarian reality, in a threefold reality, each time one of these strands trying to exorcise or excor- -- -corigate the others. And always the problem being: how much do we have to give for -- to our daily bread? How much do we have to give to our final, you see, destination? And how much do -- we have -- have we to give to our armaments, preparedness, antagonisms, hostilities, selfhood, autonomy? Not one of these things is to be lightened. The liberty of the United States is important. The economy of the
United States is important. And the destiny of the United States -- the people in the United States, at least, is important.
And giving you this tension, I detest telling you -- only facts one by one. That doesn't exist in history. You cannot tell a story if you do not know what people expect, what they fear, what they dread, what's upon us, today on us as in 1776. And this burden of fear and expectation is the only thing why history has to be told, that we expect things to come, to happen if we miss the bus, if we do not do our duty.
Now today, before going back to the Free Masons issue, and to the dollar bill, the new -- and its new symbolism, I want to bring you up short with the new term which perhaps may show you why I treat history as an electric field of tension, and not as a -- a physical line of something that moves mechanically year by year from -- the past into the future. That's dead time, and that's your temptation. And in order to bring you up short, I want to introduce an expression, which comes from the -- not quite from the -- by -- from the living. I would like to take a picture, a metaphor from the living, or from society. But I will be moderate. And I will use the term from the tidal waves of water. Water is the nearest in nonliving nature, in its behavior, to life. If you ever have seen a spring gargle up, you know that it moves by spurts, very much like real life. And that isn't mechanical -- doesn't go in a straight line. Already this is a good warning, that even in the physical world, life is rhythmical, as Mr. Planck has shown with his quanta principles. Even the deadest of the dead, when it moves, moves in waves, and moves harmoniously in rhythms.
Now, what I try to say is very simple. It's a new word. Take it for what it is worth. The ship of state, and the ship of Ch- -- the Church, and the ship of our economy, they work like ships in the tidal waves, where the sailor will tell you that a ship may be thrown on the shore in high tide, and in neap tide--that's the low tide--it may be left behind until another wave, you see, the next tidal wave, the next high tide comes and takes it back again. You can see it every day here on the Pacific Ocean.
This is by and large the way -- the simplest way, the crudest way of making you aware of the fact that we move in such neap tides and spring tides, and that the intellect in peacetime in a classroom, is beneaped. That is, it is left behind on dry land. And if I think of the beneaped intelligentsia of the '30s in this country, where everybody had to be a Communist if he went to Harvard, and where the war then came and just brushed this aside, because the new tidal waves swept all these cobwebs of the intellect of the intelligentsia besides, and everybody forgot it that he ever had been a Communist, then you can perhaps think that you, too, are at this moment, beneaped. And you are waiting for the
next tidal wave to be carried back into the stream of history. It may warn you that to think on your -- and to sit on your fannies is not the safest way of understanding history. The commotion, by which in great days--as of the Civil War, the World War, you see, or after Pearl Harbor--people move, makes them much more open to the understanding of the times than sitting and taking stock and criticizing other people's actions, saying, "We wouldn't have done this."
I can give you a little incident that happened to me. I was asking some boys in Har- -- in Dartmouth in 1940 to write a paper on St. Augustine. Now St. Augustine, as you may know, was an African bishop, who created the notion of a coun- -- of a real history of the redemption of the human race in the future, in his City of God. So he's quite important, because he's a father of -- history. Not Herodotus, but Aug- -- St. Augustine. And -- but he died in 430, that's long ago. So my student, one of them, ask- -- wrote: "Strange," he wrote -- began his paper. "Here I am asked to write about St. Augustine who died in 430. I, a senior at Dartmouth in 1940, who already thinks that the boys of 1917, who volunteered for the First World War were fools, and taken in by their elders." This the man wrote half a year before he had to enlist as a volunteer in the army himself. That's why it is a great story, you see.
In the spring of 1940, it was just before France was invaded and overrun, and the Low Countries, he was quite sure that in 1940, he was far superior, you see, to the sacrifices the men had made in 1917. And so St. Augustine? That was ridiculous.
And as I said, half a year later, this beneaped state of the -- his ship, you see, was changed. The spring tide reached him, and he did his duty. And that was all there was to it. I don't know if he ever has taken up St. Augustine again, but he didn't need it. But in peacetimes, you better -- have to read St. Augustine to be -- have him take the place mentally, intellectually, from the events, you see, which in peacetime do not reach into us. That's the reason why such great books, or such saints, or such thinkers should in our education play a part. They take the place of this elation, which anybody--like Oliver Wendell Holmes, for example--felt, when he enlisted as a -- in 1864, and then later -- 30 years later, as you know, be -- gave his famous speech in Boston on the faith of a soldier. Does anybody know this pa- -- speech of his? Who does? "The Faith of a Soldier," by Oliver Wendell Holmes, which is written by a very sophisticated, and I would say skeptical, mind.
Oliver Wendell Holmes was the famous justice of the Supreme Court, as you know, and served there until he was 90. And he's responsible for many of the tenets of the Supreme Court as of this moment. And when he was a young man, he enlisted there; and 1898, he came out with this speech, which I recom-
mend to you, "The Faith of a Soldier," which is a -- the only attempt I know on the part of the American intellectual to conquer himself and to see {him} in this double life of civilian and soldier intellectually, understanding that what he did then with his arms and his heart was more important than a -- what he thought in the meantime. That his action was his philosophy. That's -- that's the faith of a soldier. That's why it is an important paper, because it was written in a time when of course pacifism was rampant in this country; as always in peacetime, people here dismiss war as unnecessary.
So beneaped is the mind usually who speaks in peacetime about crises, and war, and revolutions, because he's left stranded, you understand. The wave is not carrying him. And so I offer you this expression between you and me as our private lingo, so that you understand why I'm trying to convince you that history goes by leaps and bounds. And history does not at all go in a straight line. After every great crisis, any country has to make -- pass through a makeup examination, because people are not willing to persevere. If you would persevere, as the Gospel recommends it to you, you see, then time would be one line. Yet since you and I are forgetful, and have to get two cars into every garage, we go by leaps and bounds. And beneaped we are when the water is very low. And so the next tidal wave has to lift us up, and bring us into -- into move- -- motion again.
The whole American history now has more violent neap and high -- spring tides than any other country, because it has no spiritual leadership. Because the intelligentsia here are the second generation softies. The -- here in this country, the first generation are the pioneers, always have been, and their children go soft. And this is the -- the -- the situation which is perfectly unique in America. And -- just as well we go into this right at this moment. In all other countries, the sequence is in reverse, so to speak, that the people come from settlements, settled places -- or did come. That's all over now, I mean; over there, too. But so far, down to this time, in which we meet here, ladies and gentlemen, on the continent of Europe, the thinkers and the preachers were the bold people who came after and out of settlements who had existed -- which had existed for hundreds and hundreds of years. We have practically no ghost towns in Europe. This is here quite different, you see. You have many more abandoned settlements in this country than you have anywhere in Europe.
I live in a state, the state of Vermont, where three-quarters of old -- the old settlements are abandoned. And inside these -- these villages and towns, again, 90 percent are abandoned. When I came to our town 25 years ago, there were 460 farms, and now there are 30.
So -- which goes to show -- say, that in America, the first generation is the
spiritually enlightened and -- and energetic, aggressive generation. And the second generation is sent to college. And the -- parents think the boy shall get an education. And so education in this country is a sheltered business. In Europe, the student is the revolutionary, and the adults are sedate. And in this country, the -- the grownups, the pioneers are -- the immigrants, the people who land on these shores are aggressive and have to push through; and their sons, you see, sit back and take it easy.
This is seemingly unknown to most people in this country and in Europe, but is so obvious. The place of a university, and of a college, like the University of California, here in this spot, is the opposite from the place a university did hold in Europe. In Europe, all revolutionary movements have come from the universities. In America, none.
This here is a cage, a gilded cage for parrots. All your examinations are based on repetition. Nobody thinks that you have to be honest in what you write about the examination. Just say what I -- you expect me to want to read. Now that doesn't exist in Europe, this parrot- -- perhaps in France in the schools. But not at the university level. And the whole atmosphere is that if there is a movement, a commotion outside, you may be interested in reporting on what the people outside do, but I'm sure you cannot s- -- point to any movement in the United States that was started by students, because this is a backwater. This is protection. Education in this country is a way of saying that I am -- will not do it, and therefore I -- am -- teach, or therefore I study. This is a famous saying, those who do, you see, who can, do; those who can't, teach.
Now, in Europe, gentlemen, I never thought myself, when I had to choose my profession, that I was in a less aggressive situation as a scholar and as a man at research than I would be in -- in -- as a bank president or a director and president of a railroad. These were the two dreams I entertained for a while, besides my drive to become a scholar. And they were -- in -- in the way of courage, and in the way of investment of character, they seemed to me to be absolutely on equal terms. I had never any doubt that in -- going to a university, I had to fight just as hard for my convictions as I would have as a head of big corporation. And as I said, I had -- I never doubted that I could achieve the others. Only they seemed to be of less im- -- lasting importance, you understand.
Now that's -- nobody can understand here that a man like Nelson Rockefeller might have been better done to become a scholar than to become governor of New York. Or other such examples. And I don't criticize this, because I think this is all right, as long as you know this, and as long as therefore you know that somebody has to do the fighting, the mental fighting. This famous verse from William Blake: "I shall not cease from mental fight." You know this? Who does?
("Nor let the sword sleep in my hand.")
Wie?
("Till we have built Jerusalem in every fair and pleasant land.")
Yes. But the great word is "I shall not cease from mental fight." It's the one thing that your examination system in this country of America destroys. Pragmatism, Mr. John Dewey is responsible for that. You live a too-easy life. That is, of course, since nobody wants to live {to be} -- you have many too many courses, much too man- -- many too many examinations. You are overburdened with a timetable. You are just industrial workers. You are factory people -- factory hands in your studies. But you aren't students.
Because students tremble lest the truth be forgotten. That's the essence of a student. They -- the trembling, the fear that unless you step into the breach, Shakespeare may no longer be read, the Bible may no longer be read, nothing important will be known anymore, you see, this -- this great fear that otherwise, without your interference, your children may -- will no longer learn the full language of -- of English.
I was told the -- by a Spaniard the other day the interesting fact that he said the Spanish language is much poorer than the English language. The richest language in the world, English. But the Americans don't know it anymore. So in -- a Spanish child in South America knows of its small, narrow language, many more words, you see, than the American child, of this great beauty of -- of Shakespeare's language, which it is, really, the richest language in the world. It's richer than German. I don't know about Russian, but I would think it is even richer than -- than Russian. Not inflect- -- inflection, but in vocabulary.
So without this trembling, this fear and trembling, one cannot be a student. But you think that you take a -- your silver spoon, and just eat the soup, and it's always there. Nothing will be there very soon if you go on building these magnificent palaces. Too much is gone -- going into brick. Brick is de- -- devastating of mentality and spirit. Small is all wisdom, and small is all studiousness. And you cannot have these big plants without approaching mass production.
Well, what I'm -- what I'm trying to say is that the -- nowhere in the world is this state of beneapedness--if I may coin this phrase, you see--this getting stranded in a situation from a high tide of war and revolution, and living there then on the beach and thinking there will be no other such tide, nowhere is it more rampant I think than in the American academic society. And it is therefore a secondhand society, because it denies that it was created by these greater
powers. You must be told, I'm sorry to say, that you owe this seat in this classroom to these exciting days, to these great days. That you wouldn't have them unless people had been willing to unite in those tremendous efforts. Without this feeling of owing them your e- -- own existence, I don't think you can do justice either to your own problem of learning something in history nor to the meaning of what these people did. And I offer you this term "beneaped" as perhaps explaining to you that we all -- any latecomer to life, any son, any daughter is always forgetting that their parents once had to be crazy, and fall in love, and marry each other before they could be born. That's exactly the same thing as what I'm trying to say about war and peace, you see, that the war between the sexes first had to be reconciled by a higher law, in the case of your parents' marriage. So they are perfectly able to understand your own brainstorms.
War and peace are eternal, because they are the fortissimo of the spring tide, and the piano -- pianissimo of the neap tide in human existence. But as soon as schools -- scholastic endeavors, institutions think that the neap tide of the mind is the normal situation, as long as you do not know that you are less elated, less exultant, less energetic, you see, than you could be in a higher moment of decision, then you will misjudge everything there, because you will sit in judgment over these benighted people who leaped, and who died, and who fought, and who suffered. And you say that's not necessary.
So, let's go back now to the great, decisive step the American people took by going Free Mason. And they did go Free Mason when they put on their dollar notes, "In God we trust." That is an old expression from the English Free Masonry already of the 17th century. And they did take the pyramid, and they did take the five-pointed Egyptian star, instead of David's star. They avoided two things: the Old Testament and the New Testament symbols: the Cross and the Star of David.
Now this avoidance, this taboo is the basis of the American mind to this day. You are also always joking about taboos -- as though they were unnecessary. Mr. Freud, in -- at the end of the 19th century, when everything went to pieces in Europe, dissolved these taboos, and looked at them, and found them wanting, and said, "We don't need any taboos." I don't think any modern psychoanalyst will agree with him. You have -- heard Mr. Rollo May, how he fought Freud a few days ago, just on this basis, you see, by saying, "We can't go natural." There has be- -- to be fear and anxiety, and to -- has to be all this inhibitions, say. Without them we couldn't exist." Now the American taboo is that officially neither the Cross nor the Star of David may be mentioned, although this country still consists of Christians and Jews.
To show you how important this elimination was felt to be, I may give
you a line from the poet of the Republic, from whom -- whose name you may have heard, Joel Barlow. Who has heard his name? Ja, well, he's -- or -- he's the author of "Hasty Puddings." And Hasty Pudding is still for any Harvard man, you see, the -- the best, because you can become member of Hasty Puddings if you were born in 1500.
Well, "Hasty Puddings" was a poem he wrote -- a satirical poem in 178- -- -93. The dates of Mr. Joel Barlow are perhaps important in this connection. He lived from 1754 to 1812. And he carried the American gospel back to Europe. That's why he's important, because he's one of the emanations of the -- of the change of America from a religious into a political commonwealth, who tried to propagate the new situation into the -- in the old countries. He wrote a poem against the kings of Europe. And he wrote a poem on Columbus and the discovery of America. And in this poem--I hope I can find it--which he wrote already in 1787, but which Mr. Ezra Stiles quotes already in 1783 at the great sermon preached in New Haven -- in Hartford, Connecticut -- in celebration of the peace with England. He says about St. John the Evangelist:
"{Through the dread seer in Patmos' waste --"
John, you see, was arrested by the Romans, put to work on the island of Patmos. There is to this day still St. John's Theological School. I visited the place last year. So:
"...the dread seer in Patmos' waste, who trod, led by the visions of the guiding God, saw the dim {board} of Heaven its folds unbend; and gates, and spires, and streets, and domes, descend far down the skies. His sons then rainbows crowned, the new-formed city -- for- -- city lights the world around. The -- with suns and rainbows crowned the new-formed city lights the world around."
That's America.
Now you may say, "What of it? That's just rhymes." It is not. The taboo in this verse led Mr. Stiles to remark in the {Eleata} Editor that Joel Barlow regarded the Cross not as the emblem of Christianity, but of its corruption by popery. Now that's why I'm reading you all this. Here you have a -- an important process of elimination. The Cross did not seem to convey in its purity the vision of St. John the Evangelist. Mind you, in the Revelation. And so it came about that he says -- speaks instead of the rainbow.
Now the rainbow is the -- is, as you know in the Old Testament, the symbol of Noah. And the step from Judaism and Christianity into the new histo-
ry of the United States then was expressed and symbolized by going back, before the Jews, to the covenant God made with Shem, Ham -- Japheth, and Ham and his -- their father Noah under the rainbow. For Mr. Ezra Stiles, who preached this great sermon -- 1783, I will put it on reserve. And I want you to have read it, too, before we go into the finals. Here, it's The Pulpit of the American Revolution. The last sermon is the one preached by Ezra Stiles. You will find that he bases his attempt to unite all the people in America on exactly the same ground that all the children of man were promised a peaceful coexistence, by the covenant of the rainbow. And here you see how the obsession, the taboo which exists to this day in America, that in public you must neither quote the Cross nor the Star of David, although it's in everybody's heart and mind, and is practiced in their Sunday service, or Sabbath service every day, this strange "Always think of it, and never speak of it," which is a taboo, you see, that this has found expression in the symbol of the American people of the rainbow. You not only have the rainbow division, but the rainbow has been so {curdled} that Mr. Eisenhower, when he was commander-in-chief of the Allied troops in England, had the rainbow put on the arm of every officer who belonged to his staff. And the rainbow therefore has had repercussions far outside this country, back into the war-torn and religion-torn, and party-torn European continent. The rainbow was brought back by Mr. Eisenhower as a peace maker, as a spirit, an inspiration to settle the accounts between Catholic and Protestant countries in Europe.
So I recommend you the -- the driving power of the American Free Masonry by reminding you of the important role played by the rainbow. The rainbow is that minimum of revealed religion, this reduced religion to which to this day the Free Masons in this country cling. In Free Masonry, the -- the -- we ha- -- we have still the Bible, but we have neither the Cross, you see, nor the -- Star of David.
There are 3-and-a-half million Masons in this country. If you think that there are only males -- grownup males, and add up the family, you see that this is one of the largest denominations of the country. Yet it is never mentioned. That is always pretended that there are more Roman Catholics. I don't think so, because to the Roman Catholic Chur- -- I mean, you can number any people into the Roman Catholic Church, but if you take all the divorced Roman Catholics, I don't think -- and deduct them, I don't think that the -- there are more than 20 million practicing Catholics in this country at this moment. I don't know this, by the way. The -- the -- the figures are dis- -- dis- -- disputable. But -- you must understand that to this day, Free Masonry is one of the great groups of this country. And it is the group that has given the common political language to America.
The evasive language, which divides the denominational divisions, and
yet holds on to something common -- it is not purely negative. The rainbow is not negative, nor -- and the vision of Japheth, Ham, and -- and Shem is not negative. Quite the contrary. It -- has justified since 1783 free emigration, you see, because under this vision, it was necessary to people this continent with people of all creeds, of all denominations. So it has invited the -- all the liberal immigration policy of the first 150 years of this country.
The members of these Free Mason lodges, as they are called, were in the beginning the professional people. And the necessity for their combining in these lodges is easily understood if you think that at that time, without railroads, and without good roads, and without canals, only the professional people had to get together beyond the local church limits. You had to have trustworthy friends all over the place. The committees of correspondence are a case in point, who first bolstered the revolution. The lodges served the great purpose of making people at home wherever they went. And so the lodge served the professional people in their necessity of roaming beyond the boundaries of their community, of their individual colony, and even of the American shorelines. And as you well know, Benjamin Franklin was made the president of the Grand Orient de France, in Paris; and nothing has, of course, more helped the American cause in Fra- -- in France than his membership in the Free Mason lodge. Franklin is unthinkable -- that -- unless you take him as the great model for the Free Masonry of France at that time.
Now, I left you last time with the -- historical note that in 17- -- -33, there was in Boston the first lodge started. That isn't the whole story, because this would only mean that it was English Masonry. I've already told you at this -- a minute ago that after all in Paris, Franklin paraded his membership of the lodge--which he had received in Boston, you see, and later in Philadelphia--already very early in the 18th century. The -- the quarrel between the lodge in Scotland and England, and the lodge in -- on the continent, is to this day a considerable one. We have to talk about this. I have seen my time is advanced. But what I want to point out to you in order to show you again the beneaped state of affairs in this country, that is, the late effect of this Free Masonry on an event you would hardly expect to find 10 years ago.
"Young Henry Ford, the grandson of Henry Ford"--the -- great old man, the founder of the Ford factory--when he was still at Yale, "fell in love with a girl named {Ann MacDonald}, one of 14 children of James Francis {MacDonald}, a wealthy New York broker, and one of 63 grandchildren of an inventor, Mr. {Murray}. This lady -- young lady was and is a vigorous Catholic, whereas the Fords are Methodists. Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, the prelate who assisted at the conversion to Catholicism of other famous people--I won't give the names here--gave young Henry instruction. And so Henry Ford, Jr., was admitted to the Catholic Church.
Henry's Catholicism, which is devout, is very little talked about in Detroit. At first, people wondered what his grandfather would say. The old man, a masterfully oblique character, waited until several weeks after the wedding. And then after many years of unsuccessful attempts to persuade him to do so, consented to enter the 33rd degree of Masonry at an imposing ceremony at which all the 33rddegree Free Masons in Michigan were present."
So here you have -- this is 1944, I suppose, or '45, a late effect -- aftereffect, you see, of Masonry in this country. Ford asserted, so to speak his -- his traditional stand as a free American by then becoming a Mason. And with this polarity, or with this tension, or with this reminder -- you of the high tide of Free Masonry at the beginning of this country, you see, which is reflected in this -- in this majestic step, or in this protest, so to speak, of Henry Ford, I have to stop today.