CHAPTER XI
Manufactures and Salesmanship

LOOSELY, the organisation-table of industry falls into three main branches or divisions : The Key Industries ; Manufactures ; and Farming ; as has already been shown in an earlier passage. These lines of division are not sharp and clear; the running contact and interdependence between these divisions being close and critical, as has also appeared already. But such a three-fold division is, after all, effectual, and it is readily to be seen in the large. So also, the network of business organization and management runs into three similar divisions, although in the organisation of business the lines of cleavage are even less clear and less fixed.

Of these three divisions, the Key Industries stand at the apex of the industrial system and control the issues of industrial life for the rest. The control which is exercised in this way at the apex is exercised not for the benefit of industry at large but for the profit of the owners (and management) of the key industries, as has also appeared already. The manufactures—continuation industries—and their management stand in a relation to the rest of the community which is analogous to that in which the key industries stand to the rest of the industrial system ; but with the difference that the management of these continuation industries have only a vicarious or delegated power, in that their initiative and discretion are bounded by the measures which may be taken independently by the management of the key industries.

Whenever and in so far as the use of mechanical ways and means is the ruling factor in the work to be done, the processes of industry are inordinately productive, as has already been explained. Therefore it is necessary for the businesslike management of these industries to observe a degree of moderation, if the market is not to be overstocked to an unprofitable extent. It is necessary to regulate the rate and volume of output with a view to profitable prices, and this will involve more or less unemployment of the available equipment and man-power, a variable margin of unemployment, a strategic withholding of productive efficiency for business ends. This Conscientious Withdrawal of Efficiency is what is had in mind here in speaking of Sabotage. The urgency of such a salutary margin of sabotage on output, as well as the ordinary width of the margin, has increased unremittingly during the past half-century, and this increasing urgency of it has been more particularly notable during the past two or three decades.

It is by this reasonable restriction of output that the management of the key industries controls the issues of life for the rest of the industrial system. So it is also by measures of the same character that the management of the manufacturing industries governs the conditions of life for the rest of the community, in a businesslike endeavor to meet the needs of the market in a profitable way. For one reason and another the Farmers, on the other hand, are not in a position to apply such a salutary modicum of sabotage to their work and output or to regulate prices to their own liking in the same way. They are too many, too scattered, too widely varied in their work and their interests, besides being inveterately rooted in self-help and sharp practice. So that the Farmers are by way of being the residuary losers, at whose cost much of this business is carried on.

Ever since this country began to make the turn from an agricultural to an “industrial” footing, the American manufacturing industry has been producing for a closed market. The American tariff policy also took on an aggravated form about that time, and this has contributed greatly to restrict the available market to the purchasing power of the home population, at the same time that it has enabled American special interests to maintain a high level of prices for their output. The volume of this closed market has continually grown greater, with the growth of population and the use of larger resources ; but the productive capacity of the manufacturing industries has also continually increased at a more rapid rate, due to the same circumstances and to the additional factor of a continually increasing efficiency in the industrial arts. Industry has continued to be “inordinately” productive, increasingly so. Therefore the urgency of a strategic limitation of the output has also continually increased. The various concerns that have been doing business in manufactures have been competitive sellers in a limited market whose purchasing capacity has habitually fallen short of the productive capacity of the industries which supply the marketable output. On pain of bankruptcy, therefore, it has been incumbent on these business concerns to use moderation and limit their saleable output to the needs of the market,¹ and at the same time to compete among themselves for profitable sales. Any business concern’s need of sales is indefinitely extensible, while the total volume of sales at any given time is fixed within a narrow margin. Salesmanship is the art of taking over a disproportionate share of this run of sales, at a profitable price.

These business concerns are competitive sellers, but they are so circumstanced by their closed market that they can, on the whole, not underbid one another at all effectually in the price of their wares. . Underbidding involves an enlarged aggregate output, which implies an enlarged market. In effect, their competitive strategy is confined to two main lines of endeavour:—to reduce the production-cost of. a restricted output ; and to increase their sales without lowering prices.

On the cost side of this account, again, their constant recourse has been, habitually and increasingly, to endeavour to keep production-costs down by keeping down wages.² On the side of sales and salesmanship the outcome has been a continued increase of selling-costs and a continually more diligent application to salesmanship. Under both of these heads the passing years of the new century have shown a rising curve, and under both heads the rise has been steeper since the War.

There is no call here to go into the merits of trade-unionism and collective bargaining for wages, or to review the run of “labor troubles” in recent times. These topics are controversial and irritating, and also they are of the nature of subsidiary detail, so far as concerns the present argument. But the broad fact that hired labor is of the essence of the situation under absentee ownership can not similarly be left on one side. Hired labor is an essential factor in the case, and the fact that the man-power employed in industry necessarily goes to its work for wages—on the principle of “hiring and firing” —has grave consequences for the conduct of industry and its efficiency.

As has been explained in an earlier passage, and as is sufficiently evident, the industrial system is a running balance of interlocking processes which stand in such relations of give and take that no one section or process or sequence of processes engaged in the work is independent of the rest. Wherever and so far as the mechanical industry has gone into effect the measure of team-work between the constituent processes engaged is the measure of its productive efficiency. When and so far as this running balance of give and take falls away, the system will not work. It is a system of mechanical powers and skilled workmanship running on the mechanically standardised team-work of its constituents; and the factor which finally shapes and carries out this creative teamwork in the concrete details of production is the disciplined man-power engaged. It is as an embodiment of disciplined workmanship that this man-power enters creatively into the work of production; and as such it is indispensable. It is true, of course, that the man-power without the due equipment, material resources, and technical direction, will come to naught as a creative force. So will also these other factors in the case without the due man-power, duly trained. By itself any one of them is of no account, but each is indispensable in the combination. It is only in team-work, duly balanced, that these things become creative industrial forces. The only dispensable factor in the case is the owner.

It is by force of his workmanship that the workman counts at all for production. But wherever and so far as absentee ownership has taken effect, it is by force of his salesmanship that he takes his place in the shop. The whole duty of salesmanship is to sell dear and deliver a minimum. With their turn for succinct speech, the Romans covered it all with the maxim: Caveat emptor. It is as an articulation in a working team that the workman does work, if any; but it is as a detached salesman of man-power that he comes in for his job.

Since and so far as the mechanical state of the industrial arts has gone into action, industry has been placed on a footing of absentee ownership and labor has become a commodity, to be sold dear and delivered at a minimum. At the same time the régime of absentee ownership perforce excludes personal relations and personal considerations between workmen and employers,—the type-form of employer under this régime being an impersonal incorporation. So far as human infirmities of a sentimental sort will permit, therefore, the wage relation under this régime should fall into wholly impersonal, or depersonalised, lines ; with no recourse to the blandishments of the huckstering salesman and with an unashamed appeal to the objective facts of demand and supply.

The “employment market,” or “labor market,” has visibly been approaching this finished shape, progressively ever since the country began to make the turn from agriculture and neighborhood workmanship to an industrial footing on the mechanical plan ; but it should also be evident to any moderately dispassionate observer that this progressive approach to objective nakedness in the negotiations of the employment market has not yet reached the last conceivable degree of perfection. This failure to reach perfection, during the past two or three quarter-centuries of habituation to the new régime, appears to be due to the very tenacious hold of ancient habits and transmitted preconceptions ; and perhaps also to a workmanlike bent which appears to be innate in the race, and which will not tolerate an unreserved shift from workmanship to salesmanship.³ The traditional preconception which came down from the old order of industry, under the régime of husbandry, handicraft and neighborhood workmanship, ran imperatively to the effect that human work should be of some objective human use, and it has been a slow-dying prejudice. The bias of salesmanship on the other hand is, as it has always been, to get a margin of something for nothing, and the wider the margin the more perfect the salesman’s work. The population which underlies the régime of absentee ownership and hired labor, and which makes up the industrial manpower, have come out of that earlier dispensation of unguarded workmanship, and they still carry over a residue of its habits of thought. Should they finally lose this residue of workmanlike sentiment that now cumbers their negotiations with the absentee corporations, the system of mechanical industry conducted on a basis of investment would evidently no longer work. That is to say, it would no longer yield a net output of goods and services. Even something less than a total loss of the workmanlike animus would bring this industrial system to a stalemate. The state of the case may be described by saying that there is a critical pitch or level of effectual workmanlike animus which must be maintained if the industrial system is to work along as a self-sustained going concern of production. Any decline below this critical level would bring the great industrial adventure to a close, presumably after a more or less protracted period of disorder and decay.⁴

The industrial man-power entered upon this era of mechanical industry and absentee ownership well imbued with the animus of workmanship and of salesmanship, both. The two habits of thought are, both of them, a legacy come down from the era of handicraft, household industry, and neighborly bargaining. And together they lie at the root of the established order of rights, obligations and immunities in industry and business. In America particularly the actuating incentives of life have been these two, to the passable exclusion or abeyance of other spiritual prime-movers, more particularly through that formative period during which the working principles of Americanism were matured, assimilated, and stabilised. The frame of mind in which the familiar use of “hiring and firing” is grounded dates back to the old order; when the individual workman still was technically complete and self-sufficient in his work, and entered on any undertaking as a self-sufficient salesman of his own rounded personal skill, dexterity and judgment, in a bargain with a personal employer.

By degrees, as absentee ownership has progressively taken over the ways and means of industrial life, the relation of the workman to the work in hand has lost the personal note and has come to be the relation of a hired man to his job. By degrees also, as the workmen have progressively learned that they are transients and bystanders in whatever concerns the organization and aims of any given industrial enterprise, they have also learned to draw together on a more or less lucidly collusive plan to make the most of their position in the impersonal employment market. The resulting organisations of workmen have been “trade unions”—that is to say they have been drawn on lines of workmanship—but they have been formed for a businesslike purpose. The avowed spirit of the thing has been the spirit of salesmanship. The unions have been orgrnized with a view to drive a bargain, and from the outset it has been their constant aim to sell dear, and from near the outset they have also aimed to deliver a minimum. Through it all there has run the ancient bent of workmanship, to the effect that a workman has work to do as well as a job to hold. But with time and continued experience in businesslike negotiations it has by degrees been borne in upon them that as a business proposition it is the first duty of a workman to hold a job; that he has work to do is a secondary consideration.

In all bargaining, in all transactions of merchandising and price-making, the limitation of the merchantable supply is of the essence of the case. And the more single-minded and salesmanlike the parties to the transactions may be, the more diligently will they consider ways and means of limiting the supply to such a point as will most profitably enforce a scarcity value of their vendible output. In the course of time and continued attention to salesmanship, therefore, the unions and their members have been learning that, as regards the work to be done in holding their jobs, it is to be their constant concern to devise plausible ways of withholding it. In the nature of things,—that is to say in the nature of salesmanship,— the unions are organizations for the restraint of trade. It is a delicate question, hitherto not finally decided, how far they are to be accounted “conspiracies” in restraint of trade. Necessarily they are of that general complexion, being business organizations; and they have been continually taking on more of that businesslike complexion, since there can be no effectual salesmanship without some limitation on the supply of the vendible goods. The American Federation of Labor may be taken as a type. The outcome is that both parties to the negotiations in the employment market have now reached a passably unequivocal recognition of this state of things. Employers and workmen, both, have come to realise that the sole decisive argument on either side is a refusal to go on. The rest of the voluminous disputation which habitually surrounds their negotiations is known to both parties to be so much verbiage designed to cloud the issue.

Hitherto this outcome has not been worked out to a finished clarity. There still remains, especially on the side of the workmen, a lingering sense of unworthiness in so putting salesmanship in the place of workmanship. The habitual position taken by the employer-owners in these disputes is fairly clear and unembarrassed, but hitherto the workmen have been unable to go all the way along these lines of salesmanlike strategy, such as to draw them together into an inclusive and massive formation driving to a common onset against a common adversary; such, e. g., as has sometimes been sketched out under the dread catchword of ‘One Big Union.” They are still tangled in personalities, not realising that their common adversary is a state of affairs rather than a conspiracy of sinners. And there is also still extant among them a tenacious residue of that ancient way of thinking according to which a workman should work for a living and should, in some moral sense, be able to claim a livelihood for which he is ready to work. In one way and another they are unable to see their own case in the untroubled perspective of salesmanship, in which it is to be seen that the chief end of man is to get a margin of something for nothing, at the cost of any whom it may concern. Their spiritual complexion is not yet fully commercialised, even though the great body of them may already have begun to realise that sabotage is the beginning of wisdom in industrial business. They may already believe it with their head, but they do not yet know it with their heart.

Something is also to be said in abatement on the other side, on the side of the business men who manage the industries and who hire and fire. They too are not quite clear, have not yet come into a fully objective appreciation of the facts in the case; although the remnant of handicraft tradition that sticks in their habitual thinking is not precisely to the same effect, and can scarcely be rated as a handicap. Stripped of its adventitious verbiage the position habitually taken by these substantial citizens comes to this, that in common honesty the workmen should work for a living and the owner-employers should invest for a profit ; leaving the substantial citizens to decide what may be a suitable livelihood for the workmen. In substance the constituted authorities of the nation also fall into line with the substantial citizens on this head: as how should they not? Again it is a position taken on grounds of inveterate prepossession rather than objective reasoning. Neither side has yet contemplated the converse of this proposition, that the owner-employers should invest for a living and the workmen should work for a profit; leaving the workmen to fix on a suitable livelihood for the employer-owners.

Traditional prepossessions apart, the one of these propositions is about as good as the other, of course; and neither of them falls in with the objective run of facts under the new order of business, as conducted on the impersonal footing of absentee ownership. Under the dispassionate logic of business, neither party is bound in common honesty to anything more than selling dear and delivering a minimum. So also, the common good does not lie within the range of incentives that govern these negotiations ; nor, indeed, within the range of considerations which set the limits of tolerance; except so far as “the common good” is taken to mean “business-as-usual.” And with each recurring wrangle the preamble of vituperation and sanctimony becomes more abridged and the argument shifts more quickly and more overtly to its final terms,—the “big stick” of coercive inaction, passive resistance, unemployment, sabotage. The parties to the bargaining have come to be avowed adversaries who are learning to line up as enemies, habitually preoccupied with projects of mutual defeat. It should accordingly not be a question of whether, but only of how soon the strategy of mutual defeat will result in an inclusive defeat of the combined forces of industry and business; and that should apparently resolve itself into a question of how soon the industrial man-power will, in effect, learn the complete lesson of salesmanlike sabotage,—the employer-owners have already learned it well enough to serve the turn.

And all the while the constituted authorities of the nation constitute a Business Administration whose duties are prescribed for them by that provision of the Constitution which provides that citizens must not be deprived of their property except by due process of law; which being interpreted means, in effect, that the powers and immunities of absentee ownership are to be enforced and safeguarded by any suitable use of force and at any cost to the taxpayers. Circumstances have turned in such a way as to make this the large and ordinary application of this proviso. And by the same turn of circumstances the constituted authorities have, in effect and in the main, become attorneys for one party to the industrial quarrel, thereby stimulating irritation and quickening the convergence of events to a blind corner. The industrial system requires that the management and the industrial man-power should be engaged on an increasingly close team-work in production; in effect and increasingly, on grounds of sound business they are giving much of their attention to teamwork in sabotage.

But in all these manoeuvres of businesslike management the industrial man-power is, after all, the party of the second part. The business enterprise that is of the first as well as of initial consequence is the enterprise of the business men who have the responsible management of industry. It is on them that the responsibility rests and the interest centers. And the argument therefore returns to the policies and tactics habitually employed among concerns which do business in the manufacturing industries and supply goods for the market, and to the circumstances which surround and determine their activities. This rubric covers also the merchandising business, wholesale and retail, as well as the manufacturing business in the narrower sense, which delivers the merchantable goods for distribution in the market. There is no longer a consistent cleavage between these two lines of enterprise, and a practicable line of distinction between them can no longer be drawn,—so far as concerns the present argument. Together they make up that field of enterprise that has to do with the output and distribution of merchantable goods, as contrasted with the key industries on the one hand and the farm population on the other hand. As has already been remarked in an earlier passage, the great objective circumstance which dominates the business of supply and distribution is the fact of a closed market. This circumstance determines the volume of the output, within a fairly narrow margin of fluctuation. It is an objective actuality, so far as bears on the traffic of the manufacturers and merchants, stubborn as objective facts habitually are. But it is after all an actuality created by the convergence of several circumstances, each of which may be resolved into matters of use and wont. These determining circumstances which set the bounds of the market are such as: (a) the running balance of sabotage on the output of raw and structural materials, administered for their own ends by the management of the key industries and by those interests that stand in a similar relation of arbitrary control to the output of farm products ; the ground on which this initial sabotage is carried out being the absentee ownership (or usufruct) of natural resources, and its end being an enhanced free income for the management and their absentee owners; (b) the price system, which decides that the end of endeavor shall be to make money rather than to make goods, and so decides that the making of goods shall be used with wise moderation as a means of making money; the end sought being therefore a maximum aggregate price, as contrasted with a maximum output of goods; (c) by force of the same price system, the purchasing-power of those who buy the merchantable goods is limited by their available funds for expenditure, as contrasted with their productive power; (d) within this framework of prescriptive convention, essentially in the nature of inveterate ceremonial observances, there is drawn by authority the factitious bar of a tariff in restraint of trade, by which the bounds of the market are drawn closer and the available purchasing power is restricted to a higher price level.

The outcome of it all is simple enough. These various business concerns are competitors for a closed volume of traffic. Or more specifically, they are competitive sellers each of which necessarily endeavors to increase his net share in the available purchasing fund ; the total volume of purchasing funds available at any given time being fixed within a relatively narrow margin of fluctuation. So that each of these competitive sellers can gain only at a corresponding loss to the rest. At the same time there is, by and large, no outlook for competition in this market by the method of increased output at substantially reduced prices. That expedient was tried and found wanting. The large and progressively larger net returns do not come on that footing, on the whole.⁵ That type of competition presumes an open market and a declining price level, all of which is obsolete.

The manufacturers and merchants, therefore, are engaged on a business of competitive selling in a closed market in which prices may fluctuate but can not substantially decline; a market in which one seller’s gain is an-other’s loss.⁶ The business reduces itself to a traffic in salesmanship, running wholly on the comparative merit of the rival commodities, or rather of the rival salesmen. One result has been a very substantial and progressive increase of sales-cost; very appreciably larger than an inspection of the books would show. The producers have been giving continually more attention to the saleability of their product, so that much of what appears on the books as production-cost should properly be charged to the production of saleable appearances. The distinction between workmanship and salesmanship has progressively been blurred in this way, until it will doubtless hold true now that the shop-cost of many articles produced for the market is mainly chargeable to the production of saleable appearances, ordinarily meretricious. So, e. g., whatever its other (and undeniable) merits may be, the vogue of “package goods” is to be credited wholly to salesmanship, and its cost is chargeable in the main to that account.

The designing and promulgation of saleable containers, —that is to say such containers as will sell the contents on the merits of the visual effect of their container,—has become a large and, it is said, a lucrative branch of the business of publicity. It employs a formidable number of artists and “copy writers” as well as of itinerant spokesmen, demonstrators, interpreters; and more than one psychologist of eminence has been retained by the publicity agencies for consultation and critical advice on the competitive saleability of rival containers and of the labels and doctrinal memoranda which embellish them. The cost of all this is very appreciable, but it is a necessary cost. Taking them one with another, it is presumably safe to say that the containers account for one-half the shop-cost of what are properly called “package goods,” and for something approaching one-half of the price paid by the consumer. In certain lines, doubtless, as, e. g., in cosmetics and household remedies, this proportion is exceeded by a very substantial margin ; in these lines, indeed, the choice of suitable—that is to say saleable—containers surrounded with suitable—that is to say saleable —doctrinal sentences, is the matter of grave moment ; the specific nature of the contents being, on the whole, of subsidiary consequence, if any.⁷ It is also the confident testimony of persons who are in a position to know, that except for line and color, shape and surface, of the containers, and apart from verbal differences in the doctrinal matter which surrounds them, any distinctive character in these various articles of intimate personal use is something very difficult to get at.⁸

Saleable containers are only the beginning of wisdom in latterday manufacture and merchandising. But they merit attention as being typical and illustrative of the latterday growth of salesmanship and of the latterday spirit of business at its homeliest and best. They are typical of the ways and means of salesmanship also in the respect that they serve a useful purpose for the consumer in the way of convenience and cleanliness at the same time that they enable the contents to be sold at an enhanced price. There is always something to of such a variable fringe of substantial service attaching to the ordinary ways and means of salesmanlike publicity, whether in the way of containers or in that standard run of doctrinal pronouncements that will come to mind as the type-form of such publicity ;⁹ and it is the ordinary duty of the salesman to make it appear that this outlying fringe of usefulness is the whole end and purpose of it all. One will be a competent salesman in much the same measure as one effectually “puts over” this line of make-believe.

The concerns which do business in this field are competitors in a closed market. That is to say, they are competitors for a share in the available purchasing-power that comes into the market, so that the one concern gains at the others’ cost. From which it follows that any device or expedient which approves itself as a practicable means of cutting into the market, on the part of any one of the competitive concerns, presently becomes a necessity to all the rest, on pain of extinction. The means of “getting ahead” is also the means of “keeping up.” Any concern which neglects its opportunities and falls behind is in a way to fall out of the game.¹⁰ The net aggregate result is a competitive multiplication of the ways and means of salesmanship at a competitively increasing net aggregate cost. The selling-cost per unit of the goods sold rises accordingly, and the price to the consumer rises to meet the enhanced selling-cost. The rising cost of salesmanship becomes a rising overhead charge on the business, regulated by the pressure of competitive selling, but hitherto trending upwards, apparently with a gradually accelerated rise.

As is the case with other business charges and expenditures, the effectual limit on sales-costs, including whatever is to be counted in as ways and means of selling, is what the traffic will bear. But sales-costs present some slight peculiarities in this respect, being subject to certain peculiar circumstances. By use of the proper expedients—which may be taken to mean the same as saying, by judicious expenditure of sufficiently large sums—the sales of any given line of merchantable goods, or of any given concern dealing in such goods, may be increased indefinitely. This is a well-assured proposition in folk-psychology. Beyond a certain point (to be determined by experience) an increase of sales will be had only at an increasing sales-cost per unit of goods sold; and beyond a certain further point (similarly to be determined by experience) any further increase of sales will cost more than it will bring,—that is to say the selling-cost per unit will then exceed the seller’s net price-margin over production-cost, which is more than the traffic will bear. A judicious expenditure on sales-cost should evidently approach this point, without passing it.

But the other sellers in the same market, whether they sell the same line of goods or other lines, are competitors for the same custom and will push their sales-enterprise on the same plan. Which puts the sellers, all and several, on the defensive against one another’s salesmanship; which comes to a competitively defensive expenditure on sales-costs, of such a character that none of the competing sellers can afford to fall short in his expenditures on salesmanship,—on penalty of failure. That is to say, as a business proposition, the traffic in manufacturing and merchandising will no longer bear a scant overhead charge in the way of sales-costs; or such a charge as would once have been called a reasonable over-head on that score. The conditions imposed by a closed competitive market have taken such a turn that parsimony in the matter of sales-costs will be fatal, in the ordinary case. He who hesitates is lost. Taking one such sales-enterprise with another, what the traffic will bear appears, in effect, to run between the two points indicated above, but to rise consistently toward the higher. Judicious expenditure on salesmanship, therefore, will play between these limits, touching the higher limit more frequently than the lower; with certain consequences to be noted presently.

The experience of the last few years, since salesmanship has come unequivocally to take the first place in the business of manufacturing and merchandising, has also brought out a further peculiar circumstance which attaches to this enterprise of selling goods and services in a closed market. A large, and increasing, number of the competing lines lend themselves effectually to large-scale production in the matter of salesmanship. Judicious and continued expenditure on publicity and the like expedients of salesmanship will result in what may fairly be called a quantity-production of customers for the purchase of the goods or services in question.¹¹ Experience has shown what might be expected, that the cost of production per unit of customers by the use of the later perfected methods and appliances of sales-publicity is subject to the well-known economic law of increasing returns, very much as it applies to quantity production generally, wherever machine processes are employed on an appreciably large scale.

It may be called to mind, though the fact should be familiar enough, that with the continued growth and standardisation of the business and its procedure in recent years, very much of sales-publicity has with good effect been reduced to mechanical units of space, speed, number, frequency, and the like. Much the same is true for very much of the other apparatus of salesmanship, including a reasonable proportion of the personnel. It has accordingly become practicable now to check and tally this work and its major effects in units of tangible performance. So that the fabrication of customers can now be carried on as a routine operation, quite in the spirit of the mechanical industries and with much the same degree of assurance as regards the quality, rate and volume of the output ; the mechanical equipment as well as its complement of man-power employed in such production of customers being held to its work under the surveillance of technically trained persons who might fairly be called publicity engineers. Such technicians are now diligently bred and trained for this use by all the reputable seminaries of learning.¹²

It is familiarly known to economists that up to a certain, fluctuating but effectual, limit an increasing volume of output may be turned out by methods of quantity production at a decreasing cost per unit. This law of increasing returns, or decreasing cost, will apply in the production of customers by large-scale publicity very much as in the large-scale mechanical industry generally. In the business of sales-publicity this upper limit of increasing returns is relatively high. So that up to a fairly high limit the aggregate sales-costs on a larger volume of sales will be progressively more reasonable, relatively to the net aggregate returns from the sales. The rule does not apply throughout or uniformly, but it applies rather widely and in an increasing number of lines, particularly among the staple lines of merchandise. It follows that within the application of the rule the larger selling-concerns, with larger funds and expenditures, will have something of an advantage over concerns of a smaller and middling size.

It should and appears to follow that so far as this rule of quantity-production applies, the larger advertisers among these competing concerns will tend to displace those of a smaller and middling size. The latter will drop out of the running, inconspicuously. This traffic in publicity and customers runs within a closed market, as has already been remarked, and it feeds on a loosely fixed aggregate volume of purchasing-power; so that at any given time, whatever increase of custom is gained by any given selling-concern will be lost by others, and whatever custom is shifted by publicity to any given commodity (e. g., yeast-cakes) is thereby shifted away from another or others (e.g., soap-powders).¹³ Hitherto the rule appears to hold good, on the whole, that the large selling-concerns and the large adventures in publicity are gaining at the expense of the smaller ones and are displacing the latter, particularly those of a middling size. The rule is by no means hard and fast, no more so here than in the industrial use of quantity-production. And it is also noticeable that the growth of these larger absentee selling-concerns is not greatly reducing the number of those small-scale concerns that continue to do business on a footing of intimate personal attention to their customers, and that carry their point by word and gesture. What may be called “hand tooling’’ still holds its place in the field of salesmanship. Very much as is the case in productive industry, where many minor and intimate trades and crafts still find a living in the crevices of the industrial system, so here also.

In this market virtually all sellers (manufacturers and merchants) are competitors of virtually all other sellers, irrespective, on the whole, of the diversity of goods offered for sale. The total offering of goods for sale takes up the total volume of available purchasing-power.¹⁴ But not all kinds and classes of merchantable goods lend themselves equally to propaganda by methods of the large-scale absentee salesmanship. The quantity-production of customers is visibly more applicable in some lines than in others. The experience of the past few years teaches, on the whole, that articles of intimate personal use and articles of conspicuous personal use lend themselves in some peculiar degree to this manner of propaganda. The volume of publicity devoted to the sale of such articles, as well as the resulting increased volume of sales, argues quite unequivocally to that effect. These articles and their consumption bear, or are plausibly alleged to bear, in a felicitous way on the personal well-being or the personal prestige of the consumer; and customers appear to be peculiarly open to argument and persuasion on these heads.¹⁵

As has already been remarked, the quantity-production of customers by appliances of publicity is a craft which runs on applied psychology. The raw material in which the work is to be done is human credulity, and the output aimed at is profitable fixed ideas. Current experience in publicity appears to show that among the human sensibilities upon which a sagacious salesmanship will spend its endeavors the most fruitful are Fear and Shame. Human credulity appears to be peculiarly tractable under the pressure of a well conceived appeal to fear and shame, and to set into obstinate and extraordinary shapes (action patterns) on relatively slight habituation along these lines. The fear and shame on which the sales-publicity¹⁶ proceeds in its work of turning credulous persons into profitable customers are the fear of mortal disease and the fear of losing prestige. It is not easy, nor perhaps is it worth while, to attempt any hard and fast distinction between the sense of shame and the fear of losing prestige; at least in this connection and for the present argument. These are ubiquitous traits of the race. The former rises, apparently, to a gradually advancing pitch of sensibility (and credulity) with advancing age; while the latter, the solicitude for instant personal prestige, counts for more in the period of adolescence and early maturity.¹⁷ So the publicity agents of the sovereign remedies “throw a scare into” the old generation, while the salesmen of the proprietary beautifiers work on the aspirations of the young. The beautifiers are in the nature of “pacifiers,” Between them they account for a very large and lucrative volume of absentee salesmanship, as well as a large aggregate of sales-costs, and a large diversion of custom from other lines of expenditures. The intrinsic merits of this traffic in fear and credulity will call for no reflections.

Salesmanship which has to do with merchandising follows two main lines: publicity (advertising), and personal bargaining.¹⁸ Of the two, quantity-production of publicity has been gaining over the personal bargain ever since the business of selling began its advance to the large scale. Publicity is absentee salesmanship, and fits into the run of things along with absentee ownership. It is as an expedient of merchandising in absentia that publicity has fully come into its own.¹⁹ But while sales-publicity has been gaining ground, it is doubtful if personal bargaining has lost ground, even relatively to the increased volume of sales. What is not doubtful is that between them the two account for a larger employment of manpower and a larger consumption of materials than ever before, whether counted in absolute figures or relatively to the aggregate volume of goods sold. In other words, more time, effort, and equipment—per unit of merchandise—goes into salesmanship, now than in the past; the sales-cost per unit is larger now, whether the unit be counted in terms of price or by weight and tale.

The cause of this advancing sales-cost is quite simple : —production-cost by modern industrial methods being less, the margin which can be taken up in sales-cost is more. In the nature of things sales-cost will rise to the maximum which the traffic will bear. If the net returns to any or all of the sellers who are already in the market should rise to any figure that can be called inordinate, one or another of two alternatives will follow. The sellers already in the market will competitively push their sales-cost, their expenditures on publicity and bargainers, to such a figure as to leave no inordinate returns ; or new sellers will see their chance to come in for a profit and so will cut into the volume of sales and the margin of returns.

Both methods are in constant operation. Just now their action is masked and in some degree held in abeyance, in that the situation is undergoing a somewhat sweeping change. The large-scale publicity has made good as a profitable enterprise, and the large-scale competitors have not yet begun that closer-shorn and truceless competition among themselves for dominant control of the market, which is presumably coming to a head in due time. It is all contained in the workday premises of absentee ownership and absentee salesmanship. For the time being, the pioneers in this large sales-publicity are enjoying the fruits of their businesslike initiative, in the way of generous net returns; particularly the very large ones among them, who are having things very much their own way; which means low shop-costs, ample sales-costs, high selling-prices, and lucrative margins, with large aggregate net returns. But very much as is true in the mechanical industry, so also in this large-scale mechanical publicity, what one concern with ample funds can do another concern with funds of the same amplitude in the same or another line of merchandising can do as well, just so soon as the pioneers have sufficiently proved the case. The pioneers—the current sellers of soap-powders, yeast-cakes, rubber heels, motor cars, “cost-plus” clothing for young men, and the like—are due presently to be overtaken, and their easy market cut into by others who are ready to do just as well, with the result that sales-costs by this method will rise to the maximum which the traffic will bear, leaving no more than ordinary returns on the investment. The net result in the end should be a further increase of the prices paid by consumers and a further growth of advertising agencies and their business.

The number of concerns and the aggregate capital and personnel engaged in the business of sales-publicity is already very considerable, and the growth in all these respects, as well as in the volume of the business hitherto, goes on unchecked, with a very promising outlook for continued growth at an accelerated rate in the near future.²⁰ The growth of this business, and the growing necessity of it as a means of competitive selling, has been particularly notable during the past dozen years; and at the same time it has undergone an extensive standardisation and specialisation, by which the work has come to be effectually subdivided and apportioned among the personnel within each concern at the same time that the field of publicity has been divided among the several concerns, according to locality and according to the nature of the work, particularly according to the ways and means employed, as, e.g., between news-print and “outdoor advertising.” ²¹

News-print publicity, as the use of printed matter in circulation may conveniently be called, is doubtless the largest “medium” employed for the making of sales; as it is also the most familiar and habitual, as well as the most costly in the aggregate, whether cost be counted in terms of the work and materials consumed, in the price paid for it by the advertisers, or in what it adds to the prices paid for goods by the consumers. It will include primarily advertising matter in newspapers and periodicals, but it includes also circulars, circular letters, and leaflets distributed by mail or by hand, and there is also to be counted in virtually all of the very considerable and constantly increasing number of trade periodicals devoted to special lines of the manufacturing and merchandising business, as well as the pages of trade-news and business information carried by the common run of papers, dailies, weeklies and others. On a deliberate estimate based on such data as are readily available it appears that advertising matter of the standard forms will account for something like one-half of the space occupied by printed matter in newspapers, including weeklies, rather under than over, and something appreciably less than one-half of the printed space in magazines, taking them one with another. If to this total of what would be listed as advertising space proper be added the trade-news, fashion, and financial columns, of the newspapers and the papers and magazines that are wholly or chiefly occupied with the interests of salesmanship, the total will rise appreciably over one-half the printed matter that goes into circulation in the way of newspapers and magazines. In point of expense the aggregate which is so devoted to sales-publicity doubtless runs very appreciably over one-half of the total of printed matter; advertising matter, financial news, and business comment and review being on the whole the most costly reading matter that goes to the make-up of a newspaper, both in the production of its “copy” and in the typographical composition and press work.²²

The two major divisions of sales-advertising are “News-Print,” and “Outdoor” Advertising.²³ But there are also many and various minor devices employed in the service of absentee salesmanship, which between them make up a sufficiently formidable total. They comprise, e.g., such things as show-windows,²⁴ indoor display of wares, decorative interiors, posters and personnel, trade marks, “slogans,” demonstrators, decorative and doctrinal containers.

None of these ways and means are new, in principle, though some of them, as, e. g., the “spectacular” outdoor signs, are as new in detail as the mechanical devices which they turn to account. Nor is their use confined to what would be precisely called sales-publicity. Yet in all the use of these things there is this much in common, that they are employed competitively in an endeavour to draw on the sympathies and the substance of the underlying population ; they are useful as a means by which those who make use of them come in for a competitive share in the usufruct of the underlying population, its services, workmanship, and material output. They have all been turned to account, early and late, in such enterprises as public loans, recruiting campaigns for army and navy, electioneering campaigns, campaigns for contributions to charities, relief, and such demi-military enterprises as the Red Cross ; and most notably of all for the Propaganda of the Faith.

Note to Chapter XI

Writers who discuss these matters have not directed attention to the Propaganda of the Faith as an object-lesson in sales-publicity, its theory and practice, its ways and means, its benefits and its possibilities of gain. Yet it is altogether the most notable enterprise of the kind. The Propaganda of the Faith is quite the largest, oldest, most magnificent, most unabashed, and most lucrative enterprise in sales-publicity in all Christendom. Much is to be learned from it as regards media and suitable methods of approach, as well as due perseverence, tact, and effrontery. By contrast, the many secular adventures in salesmanship are no better than upstarts, raw recruits, late and slender capitalisations out of the ample fund of human credulity. It is only quite recently, and even yet only with a dawning realisation of what may be achieved by consummate effrontery in the long run, that these others are beginning to take on anything like the same air of stately benevolence and menacing solemnity. No pronouncement on rubber-heels, soap-powders, lip-sticks, or yeast-cakes, not even Sapphira Buncombe’s Vegetative Compound, are yet able to ignore material facts with the same magisterial detachment, and none has yet commanded the same unreasoning assent or acclamation. None other have achieved that pitch of unabated assurance which has enabled the publicity-agents of the Faith to debar human reason from scrutinising their pronouncements. These others are doing well enough, no doubt; perhaps as well as might reasonably be expected under the circumstances, but they are a feeble thing in comparison. Saul has slain his thousands, perhaps, but David has slain his tens of thousands.

There is, of course, no occasion for levity in so calling to mind these highly significant works of human infatuation, past and current. Nor should it cast any shadow of profanation on any of the sacred verities when it is so called to mind that, when all is said, they, too, rest after all on the same ubiquitously human ground of unreasoning fear, aspiration, and credulity, as do the familiar soap-powders, yeast-cakes, lip-sticks, rubber tires, chewing-gum, and restoratives of lost manhood, whose profitable efficacy is likewise created and kept in repair by a well-advised sales-publicity. Indeed, it should rather seem the other way about. That the same principles of sales-publicity are found good and profitable for the traffic in spiritual amenities and in these material comforts should serve to show how deep and pervasively the scheme of deliverance and rehabilitation is rooted in the merciful gift of credulous infatuation. It should redound to the credit of the secular arm of sales-publicity rather than cast an aspersion on those who traffic in man’s spiritual needs; and should go to show how truly business-as-usual articulates with the business of the Kingdom of Heaven. As it is with the traffic in these divinely beneficial intangibles, so it is with the like salesmanship on the material plane; the marvels of commercial make-believe, too, seek and find a lodgment in the popular knowledge and belief by way of a tireless publicity, such as blessed experience has long and profitably proved and found good in the Propaganda of the Faith. Ways and means which so have proved gainful to His publicity-agents and conducive to the Glory of God—indeed indispensable to the continued upkeep of that Glory—are being drawn into the service of the secular Good of Man; so attesting the excellence of that devoutly familiar form of words which describes the summum bonum as a balanced ration of divine glory and human use. It is worth noting in this connection that those Godfearing business men who administer the nation’s affairs appear to realise this congruity between sacred and secular salesmanship; so much so that they have on due consideration found that investment in commercial advertising is rightfully exempt from the income tax, very much as the assets and revenues of the churches are tax-exempt. The one line of publicity, it appears is intrinsic to the good of man, as the other is essential to the continued Glory of God.

There is more than one reason for speaking of these matters here, and for speaking of them in a detached and objective way as mere workday factors of human conduct,—leaving all due sanctimony on one side for the time being, without thereby questioning the need and merit of such sanctimony as an ordinary means of grace, or the expediency of it as a standard vehicle of sales-publicity in putting over the transcendent verities of the Faith. It all implies no call and no inclination to lay profane hands on these verities. Taken objectively as a human achievement, the high example of the Propaganda of the Faith should serve as a moral stimulus and a pacemaker. The whole duty of sales-publicity is to “put it over,” as the colloquial phrasing has it; and in the matter of putting it over, it is plain that the laurel, the palms, and the paean are due to go to the publicity-agents of the Faith, without protest. The large and enduring success of the Propaganda through the ages is an object-lesson to show how great is the efficacy of ipse dixit when it is put over with due perseverence and audacity. It also carries a broad suggestion as to what may be the practical limits eventually to be attained by commercial advertising in the way of capitalisable earning-capacity.

Commercial sales-publicity of the secular sort evidently falls short, hitherto, in respect of the pitch and volume of make-believe which can be put over effectually and profitably. But it also falls short conspicuously at another critical point. It is of the nature of sales-publicity, to promise much and deliver a minimum. Suppressio veri, suggestio falsi. Worked out to its ideal finish, as in the promises and performance of the publicity-agents of the Faith, it should be the high good fortune of the perfect salesman in the secular field also to promise everything and deliver nothing.

Hitherto this climax of salesmanlike felicity has not been attained in the secular merchandising enterprise, except in a sporadic and dubious fashion. On the other hand, hitherto the publicity-agents of the Faith have habitually promised much and have delivered substantially none of the material advertised, and have “come through” with none of the tangible performances promised by their advertising matter. All that has been delivered hitherto has—perhaps all for the better—been in the nature of further publicity, often with a use of more pointedly menacing language; but it has always been more language, with a moratorium on the liquidation of the promises to pay, and a penalty on any expressed doubt of the solvency of the concern. There have of course, from time to time, been staged certain sketchy prodigies, in the nature of what the secular outdoor advertisers would call “spectacular displays,” apparently designed to demonstrate the nature and merits of the goods kept in stock. These have not infrequently been highly ingenious, and also quite convincing to such persons as are fit to be convinced by them. They have carried conviction to those persons whose habitual beliefs are of a suitable kind. But as viewed objectively and as seen in any other than their own dim religious light, these admirable feats of manifestation have been after all essentially ephemeral and nugatory hitherto; very much of a class with those lunch-counter sample-packages that are designed to demonstrate the expansive powers of some noted baking-powder, in miniature and with precautions. They are after all in the nature of publicity-gestures, eloquent, no doubt, and graceful, but they are not the goods listed in the doctrinal pronouncements; no more than the wriggly gestures with which certain spear-headed manikins stab the nightly firmament over Times Square are an effectual delivery of chewing-gum. Bona-fid e delivery of the listed goods would have to be a tangible performance of quite another complexion, inasmuch as the specifications call for Hell-fire and the Kingdom of Heaven; to which the most heavily capitalised of these publicity concerns of the supernatural adds a broad margin of Purgatory.

There is, of course, no call and no inclination to take the publicity-agents of the Faith to task for failure to deliver the goods listed in their advertising matter. Quite otherwise, indeed. Since the sales-publicity from which these publicity-concerns derive their revenue plays on unreasoning fear and unreasoning aspiration, the output of goods listed in their advertising matter, falls under the two general heads of Hell-fire and the Kingdom of Heaven ; so that, on the whole, their failure to deliver the goods is perhaps fortunate rather than otherwise. Hell-fire is after all a commodity the punctual delivery of which is not desired by the ultimate consumers; and according to such descriptive matter as is available the Kingdom of Heaven, on the other hand, should not greatly appeal to persons of sensitive taste, being presumably something of a dubiously gaudy affair, something in the nature of three rings and a steam-calliope, perhaps. It might have been worse.

This failure to deliver the goods is brought up here only as an object-lesson which goes to show what and how great are the powers of sales-publicity at its best ; as exemplified in a publicity enterprise which has over a long period of time very profitably employed a very large personnel and a very extensive and costly material equipment, coupled with no visible ability or intention to deliver any material part of the commodities advertised, or indeed to deliver anything else than a further continued volume of the same magisterial publicity that has procured a livelihood for its numerous personnel and floated its magnificent overhead charges in the past. In this lucrative enterprise the Propaganda of the Faith employs a larger and more expensive personnel and a larger equipment of material appliances, with larger running expenses and larger revenues,—not only larger than any given one line among the secular enterprises in sales-publicity, but larger than the total of all that goes into secular sales-publicity in all the nations of Christendom.

Of such sacred sales-publicity concerns operating as certified agents for this marketing of supernatural intangibles, the Census of 1916 enumerates 202 chain-store organizations, comprising a total of 203,432 retail establishments occupied exclusively with the sale of such publicity to the ultimate consumers; of whom there is one born every minute, and who are said to be carried on the books of these retailers to the number of 41,926,854. It has been confidently estimated, on the ground of these data, that the effectual number of paying customers will be approximately 90,000,000; regard being had to the very appreciable floating clientele and the great number of effectual consumers attached to and associated with the customers of record. The stated value of “church property” is $1,676,600,582. These tangible assets are exempt from taxation.

The figures of this enumeration are suggestive, but it takes account of only such establishments as are formally chartered to do business exclusively in the retail distribution of sacred sales-publicity. It covers no more than the certified apparatus for retail merchandising of the output. If regard be had to the equipment and personnel engaged in the fabrication, sorting, storage, ripening and mobilisation of the output, these figures will be found impossibly scant. If regard be had to the very considerable number of schools for the training of certified publicity-agents in Divinity and for generating a suitable bias of credulity in the incoming generation, as well as to the mighty multitude of convents, clubs, camps, infirmaries, retreats, missions, charities, cemeteries, and periodicals, in whole or in part given over to this work and its personnel, at home and abroad, it will be evident that any of the figures commonly assigned, whether for the material equipment, the receipts and disbursements, or for the operative personnel engaged on the propaganda, should freely be doubled, at least.¹

The man-power employed in this work of the Propaganda is also more considerable than that engaged in any other calling, except Arms, and possibly Husbandry. Prelates and parsons abound all over the place, in the high, the middle, and the low degree ; too many and too diversified, in person, station, nomenclature, and vestments, to be rightly enumerated or described,—bishops, deans, canons, abbots and abbesses, rectors, vicars, curates, monks and nuns, elders, deacons and deaconesses, secretaries, clerks and employees of Y. M. C. A., Epworth Leagues, Christian Endeavors, etc., beadles, janitors, sextons, sunday-school teachers missionaries, writers, editors, printers and vendors of sacred literature, in books, periodicals and ephemera. All told—if it were possible—it will be evident that the aggregate of human talent currently consumed in this fabrication of vendible imponderables in the nth dimension, will foot up to a truly massive total, even after making a reasonable allowance, of, say, some thirty-three and one-third per cent., for average mental deficiency in the personnel which devotes itself to this manner of livelihood.²

1: ‘The needs of the market,” of course, means “what the market will carry off at profitable prices,”

2: Other items that enter into production-costs, as, e. g., the staple raw and structural materials and the power employed, are scarcely amenable to manipulation from the side of the manufacturing business. It is, on the whole, a question of take it or leave it. The business concerns who dispose of the key industries and the staple natural resources are massive bodies and occupy a secure position at the apex of the system, and those who deal with them find it unprofitable to kick against the pricks. Except for the somewhat special case of those manufacturing concerns which do business in farm products, there is small chance of practicing parsimony in production at the cost of any others than the hired man-power. And as a business proposition parsimony becomes a question of shifting production-cost to someone else.

On the other hand the provocation to parsimony in wages is insidious and speciously promising. The industrial man-power is voluminous, but it is scarcely compact enough to be called massive. Hitherto and for the time being it seems quite unlikely that these workmen can be drawn together in such massive formation as would enable them to make head against the business concerns which, between them, control the key industries and the manufactures and transportation system. By force of circumstances these concerns that make up the great body of the business community work together, in effect, to a common end in their negotiations with the hired workmen; the common end being the defeat of the workmen and the consequent shifting upon them of so much of the production-costs as the traffic will bear. In this contest the employer-owners present a massive formation, at the same time that they habitually find themselves legally and morally in the right, resting their case on ancient principles of law and custom; so that any intervention from the side of the constituted authorities will habitually work out to their profit. The bias of the established order and of its appointed keepers runs in favor of business; so that the keepers of law and order will, in effect, be the guardians of the business interests against all comers. And the same bias of principles still runs also throughout the body of hired workmen.

3: If a native bent of this kind is to be ascribed, it should apparently be with the reservation that severe and protracted adverse habituation will very greatly, if not altogether, neutralise it in any given case, and that there also are an appreciable number of individuals in whom this bent is of so slight a force, by comparison with their other propensities, as to leave them virtually exempt from its bias.—Cf. The Instinct of Workmanship, ch. ii and iv; also John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, perhaps especially Part II, sections ii, iii and iv.

4: In effect, the question has been entertained by some, whether American industry, as well as the industry of civilised Europe, has fallen below this critical level of effectual workmanship since the War. Other causes have contributed,—as, e. g., the destruction of equipment, man-power, and morale, caused by the War, and the reinforcement of business principles brought on by the Peace,—and it is also by no means clear that the visible decline of the workmanlike animus is not a transient recession under stress. Yet the question is by no means an idle one, whether these several causes driving to a common objective have not, between them, put the situation in the way of assured eventual wreck. At the best it is a point in doubt. Of these causes of decay the two formidable ones are the loss of workmanlike morale and the over-growth of salesmanlike enterprise. Either or both should be sufficient, “in the absence of disturbing causes.”

5: It is not to be overlooked, of course, that there are such phenomena as the Ford cars and the chain-stores and mail-order houses, which cut into the profitable traffic on a footing of quantity production and underbidding. But all men know these concerns to be disturbers of the peace and enemies of society, whom the business community at large would be glad to outlaw. They are the filibusters who drive a trade on the too trustful integrity of the business community at large and the too lenient justice of the nation’s Business Administration.

6: As this matter was recently summed up at a staff conference of a certain noted advertising concern: “Blank has got the market; it is our problem to dislodge him.”

7: This is not said by way of aspersion. In these intimate mat ters of health and fabricated beauty the beneficent workings of faith are manifest; if it should not rather be said that the manifest benefit derived from these many remedies, medicaments, lotions, unguents, pastes and pigments, is in the main a work of faith which acts tropismatically on the consumer’s bodily frame, with little reference to the pharmaceutical composition of the contents of the purchased container, provided that they are not unduly deleterious. The case may, not without profit, be as similated to certain of the more amiable prodigies wrought in the name of Holy Church, where it is well known that the curative efficacy of any given sainted object is something quite apart from its chemical constitution. Indeed, here as at many other points salesmanship touches the frontiers of the magical art; and no man will question that, as a business proposition, a magical efficacy is a good thing to sell.

8: All the while, it appears on inquiry that the number of distinct articles—distinct in point of name and container—carried in stock under the head of “Toilet Goods” on the first floor of a well-known New-York department store exceeds 10,000. So it also appears on the same inquiry that floor space so devoted to the distribution of these 10,000 yields larger net earnings per square foot than any other similar area of floor space employed by this prosperous business concern. Of course the 10,000 items are not all, or nearly all, containers of fabricated beauty, but even a cursory view of the premises will find such containers very much in evidence, and will also show that this particular case presents nothing exceptional.

9: This is, of course, not intended to say that the net effect of these things, apart from their beneficial effect on sales, is ordinarily of a serviceable character ; but only that there are mitigating circumstances. Materially speaking, these things are in the nature of nuisances, but there is something to be said in abatement. There is commonly a variable, often negligible, fringe of serviceable information, and the like, attaching to their salesmanlike use. In their net effect, sign-boards, placards, car-cards, posters, electrical blinkers, and the like devices, are a public nuisance, of course—de facto, not de jure—but to a variable, though fractional, extent their subsidiary and unintended effects may often be serviceable.

10: There are exceptional cases, perhaps more apparent than convincing, where old established merchant-houses have continued to do business in a modest but profitable way on a footing of clientèle and goodwill coming down from the custom of past years. Indeed, such a house will have a substantial advantage so long as its clientèle holds out, in that it incurs but a minimum of expense for publicity at the same time that it comes in for its volume of sales at the enhanced prices which the rising costs of publicity at large entail. Increased sales-costs entail rising prices and widening margins for the general body of competing concerns, while the old established firm, which rests its business on its ancient clientèle, shares in the rising prices and widening margins without a porportionate share in the rising costs of publicity. So that a concern so placed will be in a position to maintain its volume of net earnings even while the volume of its custom is shrinking. The circumstance is perhaps best to be rated as a case of past salesmanship capitalized and carried over as intangible assets.

11: There is, of course, no actual fabrication of persons endowed with purchasing-power ad hoc, although much of the language employed by the publicity-agencies appears to promise something of that kind; nor is there even any importation of an unused supply of such customers from abroad,—the law does not allow it. Viewed in the large, what actually is effected is only a diversion of customers from one to another of the competing sellers, of course. But as seen from the isolated standpoint of any given selling-concern it foots up to a production of new customers or the upkeep of customers already in use by the given concern. So that this acquisition and repair of customers may fairly be reckoned at a stated production-cost per unit; and this operation lends itself to quantity production.

12: The schools, on private foundation or at the public charge, are turning a greatly intensified and amplified attention to the needs of salesmanship and the propagation of salesmen, and they are turning out a rapidly swelling volume of graduates in this art of “putting it over.” Indeed, this scholastic propagation of salesmen may fairly be cited as an example of quantity production; standardised both in its processes and in its output.

The production of customers by sales-publicity is evidently the same thing as a production of systematised illusions organised into serviceable “action patterns”—serviceable, that is, for the use of the seller on whose account and for whose profit the customer is being produced. It follows therefore that the technicians in charge of this work, as also the skilled personnel of the working-force, are by way of being experts and experimenters in applied psychology, with a workmanlike bent in the direction of what may be called creative psychiatry. Their day’s work will necessarily run on the creative guidance of habit and bias, by recourse to shock effects, tropismatic reactions, animal orientation, forced movements, fixation of ideas, verbal intoxication. It is a trading on that range of human infirmities which blossom in devout observances and bear fruit in the psychopathic wards.

13: In strict accuracy and to avoid the appearance of oversight, it should be added that such a closed market, that is to say the volume of purchasing-power available, will be narrowed by approximately so much as these expenditures on salesmanship may amount to in the aggregate.

14: There is the qualification, to be noted for what it may be worth, that the current, very urgent, sales-publicity may be presumed to divert a little something from savings to consumptive expenditures, and so may add that much of a margin of funds to the volume of purchasing-power currently available for expenditure on advertised goods. For what it may be worth, this unremitting impulsion to spend rather than save is to be counted in as a factor in the case.

15: It has long been a commonplace among those who are interested in these matters that proprietary remedies, “patent medicines” and the like—what are sometimes called “nostrums”— can always be marketed with a good profit by use of a suitable kind and amount of publicity, somewhat irrespective of any inherent merit in the goods,—provided always that the seller-proprietor and his publicity-agent go about the business with the requisite lack of scruple. Something to the same effect holds true of sales-enterprise in many productions of commercialised art, which are plausibly alleged to be conducive to the prestige of the consumer; as e.g., grave-stones, lap-dogs, parlor-furniture, cosmetic pigments, fashionable dress and equipage generally.

16: Of the secular order, as contrasted with the propaganda of the Faith ; for it is to be remarked—and it carries a comfortable note of authentication for salesmanship at large—that the stupendous spiritual edifice of Holy Church also rests quite secure on this profitable gift of credulous and lasting fear stabilised with tireless publicity.

17: The fear of losing prestige has often been confused with personal vanity; a mistake due to incomplete analysis of the facts in the case. Closer attention to certain everyday facts, e. g., will satisfy any passably judicious bystander that the spirit which chiefly moves the young generation in these premises is not a boundless aspiration to out-bid and out-run all competitors and reach a preeminent notoriety for a splendid and colorful personal presence. Cosmetic pigments and preposterous garments are applied to the person with a view to avoid falling short of the blamelessly best, to avoid unfavorable notice rather than to achieve notoriety, to “keep up with the times,” rather than to set the pace. And it is to this fear of derogatory notoriety that the expert advertisers of these ways and means of fabricated beauty address themselves and adapt the flow of their intoxicating verbiage. Even a cursory view of advertising matter bearing on this point will show that its dominant note is minatory; it runs, by constant suggestion, on the evil case of those foolish virgins who “get left” in the matter of personal prestige.

On any common-sense reflection it should seem highly improbable that anything but unreasoning fear would drive any person to the habitual use of these singular means of adornment. It is also known to ethnologists that practices of a similar nature and of somewhat the same aesthetic value among the peoples of the lower cultures—as, e. g., tattooing and scarification, tooth-filing, nose-boring, lip-buttons—rest directly and unequivocally on the fear of losing prestige. And at this point, as indeed at many others, it is profitable to call to mind that the hereditary human nature of these Europeans and their colonies is still the same as that of their savage forebears was in the Neolithic Age, some ten or twelve thousand years ago.

18: Salesmanship which is not immediately concerned with merchandising is less closely bound up with these two standard ways and means ; as, e. g., in the manoeuvres of salesmanship by which business is conducted in the key industries and in the money market. The more habitual recourse here is sabotage, an expert restriction of supply, though by no means to the entire neglect of publicity and bargaining. These lines of business will be considered in a later chapter.

19: In its elements, of course, sales-publicity is nothing new ; but in its eventual working-out under absentee ownership it has disclosed a character and significance beyond anticipation and beyond ancient example. Yet much of the doctrinal matter that goes into print in behalf of yeast-cakes, “style-plus” clothing, lipsticks, face-creams, and the like, still reads not unlike that ancient achievement in publicity, the royal preamble to the Code of Hammurabi, said to date from the twenty-first century B. c. There is in both the same diligent attention to over-statement and the same unfailing avoidance of all that is to be said in abatement.

And as has already been indicated, the normal guide of sales-publicity is the old Latin formula:—Suppressio veri, suggestio falsi.

20: The oldest existing advertising agency, according to figures supplied by the New York Council of the American Association of Advertising Agencies (known to the trade as the A. A. A. A.) was founded in 1864. It is still one of the largest, most reliable and most successful. It has now a business turnover of something approaching $15,000,000, and has established branch offices in several of the larger American and European cities. The life-history of this corporation may fairly be taken as typical of the business. It has been successful from the outset and has done an increasing volume of business since its foundation, but its largest growth and most gratifying success lies within the past decade. Its business turnover for the current year runs in excess of that of any previous year; not even excepting 1920, when the Treasury decision to the effect that expenditures on advertising are exempt from the Income Tax led to an extraordinary increase in such expenditures.

21: Something may conveniently be said of the comparative merits, costs, volume, and present standing of these two chief divisions of sales-publicity. During the past year, e. g., at a conference of the well-informed men of the country, interested in these matters, the estimate was offered that “national” advertising (as distinguished from “local”) in the newspapers of the country amounts at present to some $600,000,000, rather over than under. Well-informed persons within the body of conferees have held that $700,000,000 or $750,000,000 would be nearer the facts. The total expenditures for advertising in 1922, in newspapers and magazines, has been some $800,000,000; while estimates for 1923 run over $1,000,000,000.

Of outdoor advertising, Mr. E. O. Perrin, of the Media Department in the J. Walter Thompson Co., says that, “until 1919 it amounted to about $5,000,000. Since then, the increase has been tremendous, and last year (1921) the total volume of outdoor advertising in the United States exceeded $30,000,000.— Prices vary greatly—according to size and location—some of the spectacular displays rent at extremely high figures. The big Wrigley (chewing-gum) electric sign at Times Square, New York, costs the advertiser $108,000 a year,”—E. O. Perrin, “The Development of Outdoor Advertising,” in The /. Walter Thompson News, February, 1922. At a conference of outdoor advertisers the previous year in Baltimore it was stated, on a deliberate estimate, that that year’s expenditures on sign-boards alone— what are known in the trade jargon as “Bulletins” and “Posters” —were running over $60,000,000.

“In the city of Chicago ... it is possible to secure forty-eight painted walls and bulletins at a cost of $1,250 per month. The cost of a full page for one insertion in Chicago’s largest newspaper is $1,708. In Kansas City, a display of one hundred standard twenty-four sheet posters costs $755.60 per month, as against $1,064 for one full page in the leading newspaper. A representative poster campaign covering the entire country and consisting of 17,196 posters would cost the advertiser about $140,000 per month.” (The Same.)

“In this connection it is interesting to note that although the outdoor medium was first used on a large scale by the makers of patent medicines, it is now employed by nearly every type of advertiser. . . . The use of outdoor advertising during the Liberty Loan drives, as well as in recent political campaigns, is too well known to need comment.

‘Outdoor advertising is now conducted by a large number of companies scattered all over the country, many of whom are in competition with each other in various territories. . . . The Thomas Cusack Company. Considerably more than half of the total volume of outdoor advertising in the United States last year was placed by that organization. The Thomas Cusack Company owns and operates both paint and poster plants in several hundred cities and towns throughout the country, and also places advertising in nearly all the small independent plants. In fact this company is the only organisation through which complete national campaigns can be secured. There are now between seven and eight thousand men on the Thomas Cusack payroll.” (The Same.)

22: It is. accordingly, scarcely an over-statement to say that something like one half of the wood-pulp that goes through the paper mills, together with one-half the man-power and mechanical equipment engaged in the paper industry and the printing trades, is consumed in the making of competitive sales, the net effect of which is to raise the prices paid for goods by the consumers. The yearly consumption of newsprint paper in the United States and Canada is about 2,600,000 tons, according to figures submitted at a meeting of the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association.

As giving some indication of what the figures for expenditure on sales-publicity are like, in the periodical press outside of newspapers, it is reported on reliable authority that the total advertising revenues of 72 publications of this class for 1920 came to $132,414,799. This was the year immediately affected by the decision which exempts advertising expenditures from the income tax. The corresponding figures for 1919 were $97,208,791, those for 1918, $61,312,888. The corresponding total for “Color Copy” (1920) was $39,644,545. As a maximum value of advertising space in periodicals of this class, a single (preferred) page of a single issue of the presumed leader among them sold, in the winter of 1921, at the standard rate of $11,000; coupled with an engagement to buy the same space at the same rate in 13 issues during the year. This price does not. cover the preparation of the illustrations or the reading matter, which are supplied at the expense of the advertiser.—Cf. Advertising in National Publications 1914-1920, Curtis Publishing Company, 1921. (For private circulation.) Expenditures for advertising in newspapers are said to run about seven times as high as what goes to the magazines.

23: Outdoor displays have been classed under three standard forms: Bulletins (“Any outdoor sign which is handpainted in colors”) ; Poster (“A lithographed paper sign which is pasted on a metal panel”) ; and Spectacular displays (“An electric display built on a skeleton steel frame with flashing devices”).

24: “Big corporations with many branches have separate window display departments with a staff of men expert in various branches of the art, designing, color, and some even have a psychologist on the staff to decide whether the finished effect will prove alluring to the public.

“The great amount of material used in these windows has already made itself felt in several industries, the Copper and Brass Association figuring that 2,000,000 pounds of copper will be consumed during 1922.”

1: Cf. Part I of Report on Religious Bodies, 1916 by the Bureau of the Census.

2: Extra Services at St. Patrick’s

Special Holy Week services are scheduled for each day at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

To-morrow night there will be a sermon by the Rev. W. B. Martin and benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, while the tenebrse will be sung at 4 P.M. in commemoration of the sufferings and death of Christ.

On Holy Thursday communion will be given every half hour between 6 and 9 A. M. and at 10 A. M. There will be pontifical mass, blessing of the holy oils, and procession to the repository. The tenebrai will be sung at 4 P. M. and the holy hour will begin at 8 P. M.

On Good Friday adoration at the repository will take place from 8 to 10 A. M., followed by singing of the sacred psalms, sermon, unveiling of the holy cross, procession to the repository, mass of the presanctified, and reverencing of the holy cross.

The Passion sermon on Friday will be preached by Mgr. Lavelle, rector. The tenebrae will be sung at 4 P. M.

The blessing of the new fire will take place at 8 o’clock on Saturday. The paschal candle and the baptismal font also will be blessed.

Mass on Easter Sunday will be pontificated by the archbishop, who also will give the papal blessing. Pontifical vespers will take place at 4 p. M.—The Globe and Commercial Advertiser, New York, Tuesday, March 27, 1923.