Jones, His Opinions and Politics

I

WHEN Herbert Hoover defeated Alfred E. Smith in November 1928 by a popular vote of 21 millions to 15 millions, by 444 electoral votes to 87, by 40 states to 8, and incidentally wrenched from the palpitating flesh of the Solid South the fair states of Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, and Texas, if only protem.—when Herbert Hoover did all these things to Alfred E. Smith with the most consummate ease in the world for the reason that said Smith is a Roman Catholic, there was signally vindicated the dignity of the average American man as against our specialists in Mass Behavior and Public Opinion.

Upon the meaning of the last Presidential election there cannot be, and as a matter of fact there has not been, any serious difference of opinion. Everybody agrees that in November 1928 there took place in these United States a popular uprising against the Pope. A great many people rejoice in the event and call it a popular upheaval in defense of free Protestant America. A great many people deplore the event and describe it as an upflare of bigotry and hate. For our present purpose the two explanations are exactly the same. They agree in asserting that the last election showed more than thirty million Americans terribly in earnest. And when I see the dignity of the average man vindicated by the vote against A1 Smith, — or for him, — I mean only the obvious: that a bigot is a more dignified and impressive object than a ventriloquist’s dummy. For it is precisely to the level of the dummy on the knee of the vaudeville artist, the jumping jack at the end of the wire, the scarecrow flapping at the will of the winds, that the average American voter had been reduced by the specialists in public opinion who worship at the shrine of Propaganda.

It is the essential doctrine in this propaganda explanation of mass behavior that the way in which ordinary men think is determined for them by a few shrewd people on top who have managed to obtain control of the newspapers and the radios in the current fiscal year. It is a parallel doctrine that the way in which the millions vote is determined by what they have read in the newspapers or in the campaign literature or heard from the platform or over the radio during the last few weeks before election day. It is a doctrine passionately held that the political party which in the summer of a Presidential year controls the greatest number of newspapers and the largest campaign fund will win the election. This it will do by persuading, converting, or bamboozling a majority of the voters.

The propaganda theory of human conduct, as it flourished in the last decade, thus made it possible to solve a great many puzzles which had perplexed the psychologists and observers of earlier times. Try to think of some man who felt very strongly about some other man — well, let us take the way Shylock felt about Antonio. The propaganda theory makes it all as clear as daylight. Shylock hated Antonio because of what he had read and what he had heard about the merchant of Venice. The Jew, as is well known, was an assiduous patron of the Rialto Evening Graphic, and in that lively sheet he was continually being regaled with pungent gossip about Antonio’s private life as a member of the Venetian smart set. Shylock was a subscriber to the Lido Gazette, a weekly journal of serious social criticism. There he encountered many a caustic analysis of the business methods of Venice’s merchant princes, among whom Antonio figured prominently. Shylock often read in the Adriatic Monthly well-considered articles dealing with the longer trends in Venetian life, and in these the name of Antonio would frequently occur, not always in the most favorable light. By numerous other vents and channels Shylock was exposed to the sustained pressure of the anti-Antonio propagandists, lobbyists, press agents, and counsels on public relations; so that we may say of this Jew of Venice that his conspicuously neutral, insipid, and featureless soul provided a clean slate for the experts in human manipulation to write on. Any fifty-ducat-a-week ‘ink slinger’ in Venice could do what he pleased with Shylock.

Yes; Shylock hated Antonio wholly because of what he had read and been told about Antonio, and not because he, Shylock, had eyes, hands, dimensions, affections, passions. Your true-blue propagandist will entirely overlook, or else dismiss as irrelevant, the circumstance that if you tickled Shylock he laughed without any suggestion from the newspapers, and if you pricked him he bled without any editorial guidance. Always this Jew of Venice was being swayed by the gossip paragraphs in the St. Mark’s Weekly and the Levantine Review, and never by the fact that Antonio had interfered with his livelihood and spat upon his gaberdine.

And that, apparently, is what happened in the United States in the year 1928. When the four Southern states made their stand against the Pope, it must have been because the propagandists in the course of the summer campaign put it into people’s minds that a Roman Catholic ought not to be President. Had it not been for the press agents, the Protestant South would just as lief have voted for a Roman Catholic, having inherited a perfectly open mind on the subject from their fathers, who had it from their fathers. If voters in the South marked their ballots against the Inquisition, and against the fires of Smithfield, and against Louis XIV’s treatment of the Huguenots, and against James II and for William of Orange, and in short against the Scarlet Woman of Rome and in defense of the little white church on the village green — when they did all these things, it was because the propagandists put notions into their heads, and not because of anything they felt and feared on their own account.

But, on second thought, this could not be. For it appears that the secession of half the solid South from Alfred E. Smith in 1928 was a surrender to bigotry; and plainly a bigot cannot be a puppet. A bigot has eyes, hands, dimensions, organs, affections, and passions. They are affections and passions so strong that his eyes may go bloodshot, and his hands itch to get at your throat. Propaganda, in the sense in which men used the word before it became a post-Armistice fetish, can indeed play upon the bigot. Propaganda can minister to his fears, rouse his jealousies, fan his dormant hatreds. But that is not the propaganda which the decade of the 1920’s had in mind. Propaganda then was the omnipotent agency that could do with the puppet man what it pleased. In theory, and for the wilder votaries in practice, propaganda could make Texas and Alabama vote for the Pope by the expenditure of enough money on speakers, ‘literature,’ newspapers, and radio. Propaganda, as the decade used the word, denied that man is filled with hate or with memories or with fears or with anything. Man is an empty vessel into which the dispenser can pour whatever brew he pleases. But the 1928 election reminded the would-be pourers that the vessel, Man, is really filled with strange juices and compounds and prejudices, dating back some seventy years to the Civil War, a hundred and fifty years to the Revolutionary War, four hundred years to Luther and the Armada, and so an indefinite number of thousands and thousands of years back to the cave and the tree hut.

II

And yet here is an odd thing. Parallel to this doctrine of propaganda which teaches that the mass of men are putty with which you may do anything, there ran through this decade of the 1920’s the other doctrine that the mass of men are clods with which you can do nothing. Did I say parallel? These mutually destructive appraisals were frequently encountered hand in hand in the same observer, in the same book. A thread which the reader will find running through these remarks of mine is the shrieking inconsistencies and contradictions of the trained mind of our time when it contemplates the average man. The student of civilization contemplates the resident of Tenth Avenue, and finds him to be now this and now remarkably the opposite of this. . . .

Well, that is proper enough. Man has always been known as the creature in whom at any one moment you may find both this and the opposite of this. But it is the peculiar mark of the intellectual temper of our time that it denies to the average man the complicated soul structure of which we are a bit more than proud in our own educated selves. The average man must be wholly one thing, and now he must be wholly the opposite thing, depending on what particular formula I, the educated observer, have momentarily fallen in love with. For it has been the basic rule for the study of mankind in our days that we shall not look at common men and observe how they change under our eyes. The thing to watch is the formulas about common men. When a formula has served its purpose or lost its novelty we can look about for another formula. At no time is it essential to take a look at Jones.

Thus it happened, in the years after the war, that the average man was a man of granite, and also a man of straw, according to convenience. If you wished to express disapproval of the average man’s aversion to experiment and progress you spoke of him as the slave of hereditary superstitions. He was a man chained to his taboos. He was a creature dominated by fears. He was the terrorized victim of his Medicine Alen and his Old Men of the Tribe. Their vested interests required that the average man stay put, and ho has learned the lesson so well that civilization consists of the mass of mankind being dragged forward against its win.

But the very next day, and sometimes on the very next page, this human clod, this sodden product of priestly taboos and terrors and superstitions, this dull, immobile brute entity, becomes, by the theory of propaganda, the most airy, fairy, gossamer thing imaginable. He becomes Mob. He becomes Herd. He becomes Puppet. Anyone can twist him around his finger. Anyone can make him go wherever he wishes. The clod with whom you could do nothing becomes the manikin with whom you may do anything. Which it will be depends entirely on which formula is indicated at the moment — the formula that man is fettered by taboos or the formula that man is ruled by propaganda.

What no self-respecting formula will admit is that both things might simultaneously be true of the average man; that he is a creature slow to move and easy to move, lumpish and impulsive, easily duped and with a millennial wisdom of his own; a clod with a spark at the heart of it. That the average man is a complex man rarely enters the formulas of the intellectualist observer, because formulas, to be beautiful, must be simple. They must fall pat. They must answer everything, without hesitation or reservation. Only in that way can a formula become eminently quotable in printed gossip and polite conversation.

III

One possible misconstruction I am anxious to avoid. When I speak of the educated observer and his fondness for describing the common man as a puppet I am far from arguing that the motive behind the act is always contempt or dislike. Very often the impulse behind the puppet theory is commiseration. There is present the wish to make excuses for the common man. How, the educated observer asks himself, shall I explain the extraordinary fact that a majority of the American people acquiesce in or even support a world war of which I, the serious student, heartily disapprove? How shall I explain the division of the American people into political parties which have ceased to have any real meaning for me? Or, taking a problem on which there can be no difference of opinion, how shall we explain the toleration of municipal misgovernment by millions of Americans? How shall we explain the upflare of ugly passions — religious, racial, regional — in these United States?

The answer that springs from contempt and dislike is the answer given by the H. L. Mencken school of antidemocratic thought. Of course it is not a new school. It is part of the old tradition which holds that mankind is incurably bestial. Here the answer to war and municipal misgovernment and religious bigotry and censorship and the rest is simple. The great majority of men are vicious, cruel, cowardly, gluttonous, lecherous, superstitious. But, chief of all, the mass of men are envious of superior status and superior merit and ever ready to favor the lower against the higher. The democracy is a herd of grunting and rooting swine.

Prohibition, for instance, offers no puzzle to Mr. Mencken. It was put over on the American people by the yokels of the back country whose convivial pleasures are restricted to swilling raw gin and hugging the blowzy kitchenmaid behind the barn. This uncouth herd saw to it that the city ‘feller’ should not drink civilized liquor in pleasant dining rooms and in the company of charming women. Things in this country are the way they are for the reason that the great majority of the American people are disgusting animals.

But this is precisely the view against which the usual educated observer strongly protests. He wants to believe in democracy. He believes in the decency and good intentions of the average man. Under the circumstances, what other explanation can there be, whenever the common man goes astray, than to suggest that he has been misinformed, misled, deceived, betrayed? The common man does not want war. He is always dragged into war by his leaders for their own selfish ends. The common man in Virginia is not by nature Democratic, or in Vermont by nature Republican. That is only a vicious state of things inaugurated by chance but perpetuated by the politicians. The common man wants a much better type of Presidential candidate than he is getting; the nominees are ‘put over’ by the Interests, who are notorious for their control of the machinery of both parties. It is not necessary to go into details. As against the Menckenites, who hold with old Thomas Hobbes that man is hopelessly brutish, we have the idealists defending the Jean Jacques Rousseau man, who is by nature and intentions altogether admirable, but is the victim of forces outside himself.

And yet in the final account much the harsher sentence upon the common man is pronounced, not by the ‘roughneck’ Menckenites, but by the kindly and well-meaning idealists. The most familiar contribution by Mr. Mencken to the American vocabulary and to American thought is the Boob. But as a matter of fact Mr. Mencken does not in the least think of his archenemy as a boob. A boob is a ninny with whom you can amuse yourself to your heart’s content. A boob is a dolt with whom you can do what you like. A boob is the fellow to whom you sell a season’s ticket for the Brooklyn Bridge or the Congressional Library. A boob, in short, is somebody whom you can notice when you choose and disregard when you have lost interest. But what arc the facts about Mr. Mencken’s Boob? Mr. Mencken does not twist the Boob around his fingers. It is the Boob who twists Mr. Mencken around his own uncouth fingers, by the Baltimore editor’s own confession. It is the Boob that compels Mr. Mencken and the rest of us to dance to his own clownish piping.

If a boob is something ridiculous and ineffective, how can the name apply to the creature whom the Nietzschean school concedes to be in control of America? He imposes censorships and prohibitions. He dominates the legislatures which dominate the universities. He sets the standard for art and thought and taste. The Mencken yokel is not in the least a yokel, because he is not under anybody’s yoke; it is Mr. Mencken who is under the yokel’s yoke. The yokel is the confessed master. And Mr. Mencken on democracy is not thinking in the least of a collection of oafs and dolts. He is thinking of a mob of ravening wolves.

Rather is it the idealist friends of democracy that have made a boob of the common man, with the kindliest intentions. They look out on a world in which many things are amiss, and in order to absolve the common man from responsibility for this sad state of things they come dangerously near to adopting the methods of the successful criminal lawyer who obtains acquittals in murder trials by proving that his client is a victim of dementia prœcox. Mr. Mencken pays the common American man the enormous compliment of regarding him as a dangerous fanatic, as a Force. But the would-be friends of the common man have reduced him to a nonentity.

In their accounts it regularly appears that the great majority of mankind are dolls dancing to hidden wires — vocal dolls whose powers of utterance arc restricted to saying ‘War,’ ‘Peace,’ ‘Country,’ ‘Flag.’ in response to pressure applied at a point near the stomach or the heart; primitive intelligences who believe everything they are told to believe, and nothing elseprimitive emotional machines which feel whatever the engineer that presses the button wants them to feel, and nothing else.

That the emotions of the common man may be fairly spontaneous and genuine, that his thoughts may be based in part at least on his inalienable human experience, that his acts maybe dictated by something deserving the name of reason — such possibilities hardly enter into the evaluations of man as puppet. Here is a typical summation of the propaganda doctrine of human conduct as it flourished in the 1920’s: —

The range of subjects upon which men are fitted to form original opinions is very narrow. Most men are obliged to accept the opinion of someone having prestige in politics, in religion, in science, in morals. This is unavoidable, since it is possible for the average man to be expert only in the small field of his regular occupation.

And what, as a matter of fact, is the ‘small field of his regular occupation,’ outside of which the average man is precluded from framing judgments of his own? The average man’s occupation consists merely in being born, growing up, earning bis living by his labor, marrying a wife and trying to make a success of it, raising children and trying to understand them and get himself understood by them, affiliating himself with a church, a trade-union, a chamber of commerce, a life-insurance company, a fraternal order, enjoying good wages and resenting unemployment, finding out that food is good and lack of it is bad, seeing the sun rise in the morning and set at night, watching his son march off to war and, let us hope, return unharmed. The field of the average man’s regular occupation is restricted to the business of actor and spectator in the parade of life and death, of laughter and tears, and of the two and two that make four. This is all that enters into the average man’s range of intelligence and emotion.

One thing there is obviously in common between the Mencken interpretation of Man the Wolf and the kindlier interpretation of man as puppet. Both views arise out of the sense of amazement, with or without indignation, that the common man should insist on being what he is, instead of being what I, the Superman, or I, the Idealist, think the common man ought to be at this precise moment.

IV

So much, then, for the sense in which Mr. Hoover’s victory over Governor Smith in 1928 vindicated the dignity of the average man. A bigot has more human value than a marionette. A good hater is more impressive than an empty meal sack. Caliban is a richer personality than Simple Simon. It remains only to ask in whose eyes the average man was vindicated. And the answer, again, is in the eyes of the intellectual observers; for it is not to be denied that the 1928 election taught them something.

It is the peculiar quality of this type of men that it requires an upheaval, or an eruption, or a cataclysm, or at the very least a hot Presidential election, to draw their attention to the existence of things of which we ordinary men arc aware by looking at our neighbors and in the newspaper. Suppose, for instance, that the existing tension between Argentina and the United States, arising from our tariff on Argentinian meat products, should develop into a crisis. This crisis would come to some of onr social idealists as a startling reminder that millions of Americans have bacon and eggs for breakfast.

In this manner the popular triumph of Colonel Lindbergh came to some of our social students as a startling reminder that hero worship is not dead among the American people. You see, they had seen it so often stated in magazine articles and in books that this is an age of skepticism and disillusion. They had omitted to take note of one hundred and eighteen million Americans who plainly were not disillusioned or skeptical. Apparently they had not heard of Babe Ruth.

In this manner the publication of official figures showing that life insurance in force in the United States in the year 1930 amounted to nearly one hundred billion dollars came to students of civilization as a startling reminder that family affection and responsibility are not dead in the United States. The student of American civilization was too busy elsewhere to take note that life insurance was growing at an amazing rate. And of course he was too busy to inform himself by personal observation that in the year 1930 men were still concerned about the future of their wives and children in case anything happened to the head of the family. The student of civilization had read so much about the Break-Up of the Family that it came as a surprise to find in the year 1930 families still in operation.

In this manner a play called The Green Pastures came in March 1930 as an almost catastrophic reminder that there were still alive in New York a considerable number of people susceptible to the old-fashioned emotions and pieties and traditions. The student of civilization had become so deeply absorbed in his own formulas about the Moral Revolution and the Collapse of Standards that he had forgotten to take note of several million people in New York City who were but imperfectly sophisticated or ’hard-boiled.’

All these startling reminders were necessary because observers of mankind had forgotten to look at their fellow men with the eyes of fellows and of simple men. You looked at Jones exclusively in terms of Revolution or New Ages or Herd Instincts or Glands, or whatever was the latest combination of capital letters, in which alone the Truth resided. You satirized Jones, or flayed him, or debunked him, or psychoanalyzed him, or extracted his teeth for focal infections, or put him under the X-ray and the ultra-violet and the infra-red, or looked at him in the manner suggested by H. G. Wells, through the magnifying glass which distorts while it enlarges, or photographed him in his Rotarian garments and in his atavistic reversions and his sexual neuroses — but you had no time to take note that crowds adore heroes and mothers love babies and people are fond of bacon and eggs for breakfast. Such methods of observation were too direct and too commonplace.

V

Now the vogue of propaganda as the explanation of American mass behavior is due to all of us in general, and to one interest in particular.

We all suffer, though in different degree, from the inability to understand how in the world it is possible for anyone not to think as we do on any given subject. The only way in which such extraordinary conduct on the part of the other man can be accounted for, assuming that the poor fellow is not insane, is propaganda. Some external compulsion has interfered with the ordinary course of nature when Jones refuses to share our views. We are all like that; and the less we see of Jones in the body, the more we are like that.

The particular interest that has contributed to the prestige of propaganda is the complex of occupations, professions, and trades that may be grouped under the general head of Advertising.

It is not quite a subject for surprise when advertising agents and agencies, publicity managers, goodwill promoters, directors of campaigns and drives, salute with something more than satisfaction the doctrine that people can be taught always to do what they are told; that people indeed do only what they are told — provided one uses up in the telling enough white paper in the newspapers and magazines, enough pine boarding on the highways, enough electric current along the Great White Ways of the big cities. Yes, my friends, strange as it may seem, it is the professionals of publicity who most ardently testify to the irresistible efficacy of propaganda. They have even written books about it.

The efforts of the Grand Dukes of Publicity have been reenforced by one particular subdivision of the general class of All of Us mentioned a few lines back. I refer to the progressive economists and sociologists who disapprove of so many features of our business civilization. With them a favorite topic is the wastefulness of American business methods and especially the waste of advertising.

But mind you, when critics speak of the waste of advertising they do not mean that it is waste because advertising fails to make men do things or buy things. On the contrary, it is the heart of their case that advertising makes men do things they should not and buy many more things than they need or than are good for them. It is their contention that anybody who starts out with an advertising appropriation of $5,000,000 can make the American people buy anything, wear anything, eat anything, read anything, ride about in anything, smoke anything, believe anything.

Does this hideous charge arouse bitter indignation in the ranks of the advertising business? It does not. Perhaps it hurts a bit — in one’s abstract after-business hours — to be accused of making people spend their money needlessly. But how helpful it is to the advertising business to be constantly so accused! How conducive it is to the encouragement of new $5,000,000 accounts from manufacturers desirous of imposing a little more waste on the American people!

And what is the more prosaic, less Napoleonic, truth about advertising — about its effectiveness in shaping men’s lives and bank accounts in these United States, about its adequacy as a central explanation of American behavior? The truth about advertising is in kind the same as the truth about propaganda, though we may note a difference in degree. The printed advertisement is unquestionably more effective in shaping the buying behavior of the American people than are the propaganda headlines in shaping the nation’s thinking and conduct. But the doctrine of an irresistible Advertiser having his own way with the buying public is nonsense.

That is to say: —

Advertising may induce a few people to buy frequently what they do not need and induce a great many people to buy occasionally what they do not need. But the number of such victims is small in the entire mass of consumers and the entire volume of the nation’s business.

Advertising may succeed in forcing a novelty down the public’s throat and into commercial success. But such achievements are trivial when compared with the vast body of commercial success based on sound human needs, mass movements, epochal changes, new turns in civilization.

You see so much automobile advertising about you, in the newspapers, magazines, on the road, in the window displays, that it has become a commonplace for students of the national civilization to say that Americans ride in automobiles because the advertisers make them.

But it is a commonplace that Henry Ford succeeded in selling fifteen million automobiles of Model T type with very little advertising. And it is a commonplace of everyone’s experience that people buy automobiles primarily because the thing is in the air, because the Browns and the Smiths have an automobile — and the Browns and the Smiths are the most powerful motive force in human history. After the Brown automobile has laid Jones’s trenches fiat with its heavy guns, the automobile advertisement may begin to operate. Once Jones has decided to buy a car he begins to shop around in the advertisements.

Amazing force of nature, the Browns and Smiths! They are behind that mysterious rhythm of nature known as Fashion, which causes short skirts to come and go like the wind, blowing where they list.

The Browns and Smiths — that is to say, imitation — are all-powerful in the theatre. It is pretty well established by inquiry that most people go to see a show because a friend recommends it, next because of what the reviews say, and only thirdly because of the advertising.

It is the same with books. Advertising cannot make a best-seller, although advertising may ‘snowball’ a big best-seller into a huge best-seller. Advertising can make more people want the kind of book that many people already want; but advertising does not create the want. The common history of a best-selling book which does not reveal an authentic new talent is that the author s next book does not sell so well, though it is advertised much more extensively than the first book. With the third, fourth, and succeeding books the decline may be catastrophic. The reason is that the same people who said of the first book that you must not miss it told their friends that the second book was n’t nearly so good. In the ears of the man with something to sell there is no gladder sound than ‘word-of-mouth advertising.’

The enormous popularity of the cigarette was not made by the advertiser, but by the World War. There came then other mysterious forces which set everybody to puffing at the weed, including the women. A $5,000,000 advertising appropriation may ‘educate’ the public to a particular brand of cigarette, but one cannot be certain; and in any case the cigarette habit in itself came before.

Advertising stimulates package-food consumption; but the beginning came with the secular change in American civilization away from the kitchen; or perhaps it is a new form of the immemorial American picnicking habit. The thousands of cheap candy confections consumed by millions of Americans reflect the old quick-lunch habit, the old ten-minute railroad-buffet menagerie so sadly described by Mark Twain more than sixty years ago.

As to beauty preparations: the American people used to consume vast quantities of patent medicines when it was a pioneer people racked with malaria and indigestion and miles away from a doctor. As the country filled up and prosperity increased and houses were better heated and doctors multiplied, the patent-medicine bottle began to go out and the beauty jar began to come in. Advertising certainly helped to sell bottles for internal use and is now employed to sell bottles for external use; but the basic demand came not through advertising, but from a basic need, and the change has been a social change, a mass movement.

Advertising will help to sell radios, mechanical refrigeration, and vacuum cleaners; but the compulsion to buy these things comes not from the advertisers but from broad currents of change in the national life as registered primarily in the Browns and Smiths.

VI

Always it is the basic needs of a community that determine its buying behavior; and the great bulk of advertising is concerned with basic needs. In New York is unquestionably the greatest concentration of purchasing power that the world has ever seen within anything like the same area. But in the newspaper which is far and away the most powerful advertising medium in New York the receipts from automobile and radio advertising are only one sixth of the receipts from department-store and financial advertising. Yet when the specialists complain of the coercive force of advertising they do not usually think oi people being coerced into buying clothes, furniture, or a few bonds for investment.

Does it seem that the efficacy of advertising, a legitimate and useful pursuit and interest, is here being brought into question? That, of course, is not so; unless it is belittling a profession to deny it the possession of magic powers. And that is a claim which both the wise man who is out to buy advertising space and the wise man who has advertising space to sell will refuse to associate themselves with.

The advertiser is not a hypnotist, but a salesman. The advertising medium is not a siren, but a show window. In studying the advertisements, the public is really shopping around. That is actually what the woman of the house does when she goes through the department-store pages in the daily paper. The way in which these pages tell their story may unquestionably tempt Mrs. Jones to go at times a bit beyond her original budget estimate. But that happens to people who build homes, and parents who send children to college, and sometimes, it is said, even to Secretaries of the Treasury. Mrs. Jones feels after a particularly seductive statement on the department-store page that she really ought not to deny herself that ravishing pair of coonskin evening slippers with the enchanting Australian heel. But the general character of Mrs. Jones’s behavior in the department stores will be shaped by her basic requirements as by herself determined; and these requirements were determined when she met Mrs. Brown in her new spring costume and for the first time realized how shabby she, Mrs. Jones, was looking.

Let us end on a lyrico-historical note:—

What a relief it is to escape from the rush and clamor of modern American life to the peace and leisure of another uncommercialized century and another non-hustling clime! How quaintly pleasant are the street cries of old London and of old Paris about which many books have been written: the characteristic cry of the hot-muffin man, and the fried-fish man, and the old-clothes man, and the cat’s-meat man, and the knife grinder and the chimney sweep! But what they ail were doing, of course, in those romantic days, was advertising their goods and services. For the moment it is hard to recall just what is the peculiar sound produced by the man who drives a pair of goats down the streets of Málaga in Spain, and will milk them at your doorway into your own pail; but the yell which he emits is not essentially different in purpose and in ethical content from the sound made by Messrs. Wanamaker, Filene, Field, and Hahn in the department-store advertisements.