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From The Nineteenth Century.

dom-now, unhappily, impaired by

ADVERTISING AS A TRESPASS ON THE anarchic license.

PUBLIC.

WHATEVER may be the fate of the Rural Advertisements Bill in the present session, the subject with which it deals is one which must engage the very serious attention of future Parliaments. It is sometimes assumed and not always by the kind of people who have a motive for being obtuse that the determination to check the ravages of the disfiguring advertisers is an amiable foible of a few visionary | persons morbidly sensitive to picturesque effect. The very reverse is the truth. The movement is the work of men and women who take their stand on common sense, and are well aware that they cannot carry the dictates, even of right reason, to uncompromising lengths. They are not asserting any new principle in public policy; it is rather their purpose to secure the application of time-honored methods to a department which has till now - simply because the abuse is of recent growth- - remained outside the pale of wholesome regulation. In brief, they are engaged in asserting, as a matter of grave and urgent public interest, the effectual protection of one of the chief elements in the national wealth; or, to look at the matter, not as a question of collective property, but of individual liberty, they claim for the seeing eye the same relief from wanton injury as is already afforded in the case of every other organ of sense.

There is in some minds, apparently, a good deal of confusion as to what constitutes the wealth of the nation. We all see that man needs or enjoys a great many things for the supply of which human exertion is necessary. Most of us would say that in an ideally constituted society every one ought to contribute to the common stock of comfort by a certain amount of effort, and should get as his reward his own share of the benefits resulting from the toils of the others. I, for one, hold that the existing social system gets as near to this standard as the infirmities of mortal man permit. But, unluckily, the arrangement by which labor is remunerated in money wages has developed in many a habit of mind which occasionally leads to very erroneous notions concerning the elements of general well-being. Because for so many things we depend on exertion which has to be directly purchased, and because it is convenient to estimate the value of these services in terms of the currency, people are apt to forget that a very large part of the things that minister to happiness bear no price at all. Bracing air, fine scenery, cannot be sold by the gallon or the square mile, but they form as real a part of the riches of the community that commands them as fine wheaten loaves or dainty books. An able schoolmaster rightly receives a large salary; but who would venture It is well at the outset to lay stress to appraise in figures, or who would on this essential aspect of our aims. question the essential importance of We are, in the strictest sense, cham- the infinite devotion of a wise and pions of the utilities. We are alive to tender mother? A clever cook posthe instincts and the impulses of an sesses a marketable accomplishment, industrial and competitive age. We but what would be the dinner without believe in untrammelled production and the unpriced flow of talk? I must not free exchange; in the march of inven- labor a truth which, once it is asserted, tiou; in a word, in all the fine abstrac- may appear a truism. But elementary tions which our detractors (for we are as the doctrine is, it is frequently lost. not exempt from the invariable penalty | sight of in discussions on the manifold of good intentions) fondly picture us phases of the condition-of-the-peopleas despising or neglecting. We are for problem. It is treated with tacit concivilization as against barbarism, and tempt by those who defend the for progress as against degradation. undisturbed liberty of advertising-disAbove all, we are for individual free-figurement, and this is my only excuse

for trespassing thus far on the out-ings which the plague of placards perskirts of social science. sistently wounds. Surely it is gross There is no need, surely, of demon- inconsistency, on the part of a nation strating that the aspect of unspoilt which prides itself on being practical, English country gives genuine delight to spend a large part of our resources to multitudes of our people. We are on creating a craving for what is fair not all susceptible in the same degree and dignified, and then hesitate about to the charm of landscape, but scarcely repressing abuses which render the any one is wholly indifferent to the culture imparted a source of pain. freshness of the fields and woods. If Cousider the amount of labor that is. it were not so, excursion trains and the given every year, in every English tourist traffic generally would be phe- town, to the maintenance of parks and nomena baffling explanation. It is gardens. Yet our native land, which, quite true that a great many of the till comparatively recent times, was places to which the picnicking masses one glorious panorama, is, for want of resort are not patterns of sylvan seclu- a little prescience, becoming a mere sion. But the good-humor, or, let us background for painted boards along say, the equanimity with which the the more frequented routes. It is not throng of honest folk who are having a merely a question of the mischief that day's outing bear the catchpenny eye- has been done already. The saddest sores ought not to be interpreted as and most serious part of the business deliberate acquiescence. Taste is not is, that in the miserable competition of confined to one class, and many work- the people who resort to this meaus of men, whose means do not permit them catching custom the evil must grow to escape from the horrors of the way- and spread indefinitely. side, feel as keen a resentment at the wanton fouling of what is fair as the most fastidious artist or the master of a jealously guarded Highland retreat. The simplicity of rural prospect is a portion of the national wealth which it is emphatically a popular interest to save from destruction and impairment. In many ways already the State and is either recurring disfigurement or the the municipalities, as well as private indefinite fear of encountering the benefactors, have recognized the im- detested objects. Just as certain portance both of developing the sensi- microbes abound in the soil where cerbility for beauty and of providing tain plants are grown, so this fungoid facilities for gratifying the implanted growth fastens on the highroads and tastes. Art museums are kept up at the by-ways. If a village becomes a great cost. Encouragement is given in place of pilgrimage by reason of its elementary schools to the training of old-world beauty, forthwith descends the eye and hand, with a view mainly upon it the shower of enamelled placto help the children to enjoy the ards. The weary seekers of sequesgracious aspect of outward things. tered nooks, driven from one retreat History is taught, or ought to be to another by the advance of the taught, in the hope that the study will enemy, discover one year that some engender a patriotic pride in connect- fishing hamlet has escaped the sweep ing the memories of the past with the of the advertising agent. When they scenes in which great things were return next summer they are greeted done and endured by our forefathers, by the odious soap and the execrated or in which generation after genera- pills. One snatches only a precarious tion have lived their unrecorded lives. respite; what is to multitudes the deIt is, I assert, an accepted article of light of their lives is held on sufferance public policy to cultivate the very feel-at the discretion of the foe who works

The pest, I grant, is not as yet everywhere. The enthusiastic pedestrian can escape easily enough from its immediate presence. There are stretches of country still in which no jarring emblem spoils the harmonious perfection of the landscape. But wherever the beaten track leads there

in darkness and blazons his deeds in | proclivities" do not hesitate to avow killing light. If it were possible to that undiluted town life is bad, and, suppress the resentment which these with commendable energy, municipalperpetual affronts are so admirably cal- ities have set themselves to repair as culated to cause, and regard the phe- best they may the loss by laying out nomenon in a purely scientific spirit, parks. No form of benefaction is more there would be something to admire in highly appreciated than the gift by a the stupid mechanical tenacity with local magnate of a pleasaunce for the which the persecutors do their work. masses. Lord Meath's association and the Kyrle Society have done great things in this way for the metropolis, and that admirable organization which devotes itself to the preservation of commons has saved for posterity many a fine tract of breezy down and many a picturesque old village green. But although these things are welcomed, both as good in themselves and as illustrations of the bent of popular feeling, the net result of the conflict of forces is to leave our urban population infinitely poorer in one of the essential elements of happiness.

The reader will, I hope, see at once the pertinence to the matter we are considering of the economic truism with which I delayed them on the threshold of our inquiry. If a man tried to draw attention to the fact that he wanted to sell a cough mixture by blowing up the British Museum, he would be punished for destroying property on which the people set great store. Why should he be allowed to destroy another, no less valuable and no less cherished possession-the refreshing charm of rural views? Is nature so ridiculously inferior to art? Is the attempt of the painter to simulate landscape on canvas to be recognized as a legal chattel, and the landscape itself to be treated as a thing of no worth?

Again, to look at the question in another aspect. If the vendor of blacklead follows me down the road, yelling into my ear that his article is incomparably the best, his molestation is, I suppose, actionable. Why should I have no redress when he waylays my eyes with his impudent tablet in vivid blue and white, and annoys not me only, but every one who chances to pass that way? On mere grounds of humdrum comfort we honest ratepayers are surely entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of the highway which has been made at our cost.

It is, alas! no slight or exceptional grievance that we labor under. The attack is directed against rights which are of enormous and ever-growing importance to the well-being of the community. Amid all the obstinate questionings concerning our social state, it has become a commonplace to speak with deep concern of the tendency of population to herd in great cities. Town councillors who would not for worlds be suspected of "æsthetic

The creeping blight of disfigurement has blasted infinitely more beauty than creative energy has brought into being. The measure of the loss is not the mere area of the ground that has been transformed into dumping-ground for catchpenny eyesores. If we wish to estimate aright the extent of the injury done, we have to think of the effect on the opportunities of enjoyment in the every-day life of the average individual. For one trip taken for pure purposes of pleasure, thousands of journeys are undertaken in the ordinary course of business. The view from the window of the railway-carriage used to be a real pleasure to those whom affairs called from one great centre of activity to another. A considerable portion of our city folk live out of town for the sake of escaping from the eternal tokens of competitive strife in the streets. But now the sole avenue of escape has been set thick with the horrors; and the vexatious incongruity of the intrusion adds keenness to the smart. No trifling part of the modern Englishman's existence is spent in transit to and fro between home and shop, or office, or factory. It is surely the very height of folly, while we are all bewailing the unavoid