you read, "Continued on page 99." You turn to page ninety-nine, and somebody throws a handful of cigarettes into your face, or maybe a box of candy; or maybe it is the crack of a revolver, or the honk of an automobile-horn that greets you. The theme of the reading-matter may be the importance of war-savings, but before you get to the end of the article you have been tempted by every luxury from a diamond scarf-pin to a private yacht, and have spent in imagination more money than you will earn in the balance of your life-time.
The culmination of this process may be studied in the supreme product of Capitalist Journalism, the "Curtis Publications"; the peerless trilogy of the "Saturday Evening Post," the "Ladies' Home Journal," and the "Country Gentleman." How many boys in college are making fortunes in their spare time, selling this trilogy to all America? I don't know, but if you write to the circulation department in Philadelphia, they will tell you, and perhaps let you join the opulent band. One hundred and thirty times every year these Curtis people prepare for their millions of victims a fat bulk of "high-class"—that is to say, high-paying—advertising. As street-urchins gather to scramble for pennies, so gather here all the profit-seekers of the country to compete for your attention; they wheedle and cajole and implore, they shriek and scream, they dance and gesticulate and turn somersaults. I say "they" do it; in reality, of course, they hire others to do it; they take the brains and vitality and eagerness of our youth—they waste in a single week enough writing talent and drawing talent to create an American literature and an American art.
The stake is a colossal one. Writing ten years ago, Hamilton Holt showed that the American people were spending a hundred and forty-five million dollars a year for advertisements in periodicals. Also he stated that one Chicago department-store had spent half a million in advertising to sell fifteen million in goods. At this rate of thirty to one, the public was being persuaded, by means of advertising, to purchase four and a half billion dollars worth of goods. Allowing for the increase in extravagance and in prices today, the expenditure cannot be less than ten or twenty billions. Such is the prize to be scrambled for; and when you realize it, you no longer wonder at the raptures to which our advertisement-writers are impelled, the exhibitions of language-slinging to which they treat us.
