Ford, an idealist, had financed the Peace Ship, a vessel carrying a complement of (mostly) well-meaning Americans to Europe to try to broker peace and goodwill among the Great War's combatants.

Things galore had gone wrong, the Age reported, every blunder "discounting public estimation of that ill-starred enterprise".

"A still heavier blow is administered to its reputation by the further discovery that its members quarrelled among themselves, that they carried revolvers and that they menaced one another with them!"

The Age used this imbroglio to editorialise that starry-eyed idealism never works in the real world of brutes.

"The incident affords another illustration of the tremendous gulf which intervenes between theory and practice, between the glittering and alluring vision and the prosaic reality. Do we not remember the beatific vision of a model community which drew a shipload of Socialists to New Paraguay?"

Everything at New Paraguay fell apart, the Age thought, over arguments about things like who should do the "disagreeable" work of digging the sewers and who should not have to do it.

It doesn't matter how "dialectically perfect" principles are, the Age lectured, if the "ordinary mortals" they're applied to are not fit to receive them.

"This seems to be the lesson of the Ford fiasco."