became little short of a national prayer.
You well know what a heart-tending experience it was for the man in the livestock industry, for example, to have seen the price of a steer slump $15 or $20 to perhaps $30, then rise to three times that figure only to be plunged very abruptly to the point where there was no market at all for the animal. You know how the agricultural industry was affected when the wheat farmer saw the price rise from 80 cents a bushel to $2.50, only to react again until no one wanted his wheat at 80 cents.
Yes, even superficial reflection should bring the conviction that our industries need to be gotten back to normalcy, and that they be kept there as nearly as is humanly possible.
Many of you may not be connected with a publication that directly touches some industry of size and importance. Whether you are or not your intelligence and experience tell you that your welfare is inextricably bound up with theirs. If, then, you do not have it directly in your power as an editor or publisher to work for stability and normalcy in our industrial and commercial life you may at least carry with you a certain sympathy for any such movement.
HOW TRADE JOURNAL HELPS
There are numerous ways in which the trade publication in a given industry may help and does help stabilize that industry. I can not escape the time-honored analysis that employs the "firstly" and "secondly" of the preacher and editor. For simplicity we need only cite that the publication stabilizes, (1) by what it does for the producer—your loyal "Old Subscriber." and his tribe, and (2) by what it does to the fellows who deal with this immediate family.
Though it is a part of my subject, I consider it superfluous to recite any large number of ways in which the producer publication dispenses information, news, advice and criticism for the benefit of its readers. Performance of these services constitutes the reason for its existence.
It is obvious that the producer publication—using the term in its limited sense—must give the reader helpful facts about growing, harvesting, preparing for marketing his products. Even though it tell him how to build a pig-pen, or run an automobile or raise dahlias, the underlying objective is that of making him a more efficient producer.
SELFISHNESS UNSETTLING FORCE
Now, teaching a reader how to be successful and contented may have only remote effect in stabilizing the industry or branch of an industry he is linked with. It may have no such effect. Consider for a moment the labor organizations, which always class their members as producers. With utmost respect for many of Labor's great leaders and for the great good their organizations have accomplished for their members do I say it, yet I am forced to say that they do not follow policies and practices that tend to stabilize an industry, including their own.
This suggests the basic thought and principle toward which I have been heading. The real upsetting, unstabilizing force in the world of industries is selfishness. So long as the persons who work in an industry, invest their money in it or have other connection with it insist on getting out of it for their own individual benefit every possible dollar, you may not expect stability nor much of normalcy in that industry.
As one who types out a few little editorials addressed to producers each month I am unalterably opposed to this attitude as basically wrong, wasteful and harmful to everyone, in the end. Whether I have you with me on this or not, I want to say it is the duty of every trade publication editor to oppose the practice of "charging all the traffic will bear." It is a privilege and a responsibility for him to teach the folly and short-sightedness of that destructive and fallacious practice. I will illustrate by specific experience In the recent editorial which brought down upon me this topic I pointed out what
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