Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/436

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his toast “ Our Country ! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong."

verted by other appeals to the citizens of other countries though the advertisements carried in foreign languages , - French , Italian , Spanish , German , Greek , Hebrew , Persian , Chinese,

Esquimo, and Cree, have all appeared in American papers.110 In all advertising the historian finds a record of conditions

which the press as a whole has not made, which the advertiser has not made, but which unerringly give evidence of fundamental conditions of society. It is a truism that the stream can not rise higher than the source. Neither the press nor the advertiser can

in or of itself change these conditions. The advertisement, more

perfectly than any other record at his command, reveals to the student of history the hidden springs of the social order, it shows him the forces that for good or evil move mankind to thought and action.

The “ ad-less newspaper " so often urged as a remedy for all the evils laid at the door of the presswould not only not prove a pana cea,but it would deprive society of themost flawlessmirror of itself and the historian of themost unimpeachable class of evidence at his command . Such a newspaper was started in Chicago in 1911,

but given up in 1917, - nominally on account of the high cost of paper. But such a paper must carry in itself the seeds of dis solution, not because “ the advertisements pay for the news,"

but because news is ephemeral,while the advertisements funda mentally record the mainsprings of human action .

Nor is the proposal to increase the postage on the advertise

ments carried by newspapers and magazines other than a claim for the pound of flesh . It is a fatal error to consider the sole function of the advertisement that of promoting the financial side of the paper, - for good and for evil the advertisement is to

day an integral part of the periodical press and it can not be separated from it without doing violence to the periodical press as a whole. Competitive commercial advertising is an anach ronism in an age that boasts of its efficiency ; emotional appeals 110 A recent collective advertisement of thirty Chinese restaurants seems

to show that the opposition to the Chinese is at least not gastronomic.