department store, while in former days one could count on the fingers of the hands the number which made more than a decent livelihood for the publisher. But this change has not come about because men with itching palms saw the newspapers as their opportunity. It has come about because the movement of the time, the movement of the industrial forces, has had need to make use of the Press, and is adapting the Press to its own necessities.

Advertising is part of the circulatory system of twentieth-century industry; without it the system chokes up. Industry's need to make use of advertising is forcing certain changes in the newspapers, certain developments, additions, improvements, a certain new kind of progress by which the newspaper is rapidly tending to become another sort of institution. It is because this has not yet begun to be generally recognized, because they would describe to-day's newspapers in terms of yesterday's newspapers, that those who criticize the Press make irrelevant criticisms. They see that something is not as it should be, but they give only the old, old reasons.

"The palladium of our liberties' was the way of describing interchangeably the Constitution and the newspapers. And the people meant just that. So long as Americans might publish without first having obtained the permission of somebody in authority, and so long as there were no unlighted corners in the nation, Government was safe. It would seem, then, as if the newspapers should be doing the work of freedom better now than ever before. Certainly few corners of the nation are left unlighted, and never have so many readers read so many newspapers. To say nothing of the news of events which was never before gathered with such completeness, the views and prejudices of the community have never been

given such generous publicity. Whatever is spoken at meetings that has any news value at all, whatever is said in pulpits, put forward in statements, embellished in interviews, is printed for millions to read. By all the rules, the newspapers should be more than ever capable to lead the citizens; compared to those pitiful, biased, limited, amateurish sheets of 1850, of 1830, how magnificent seems the newspaper of the twentieth century, how fit to inform and incline, to direct and guide!

Yet what is the fact? Many and many have observed how little of late the people are influenced in their political decisions by what they read in newspapers, how often a candidate or a policy succeeds in face of opposition from substantially all the largest and most important newspapers; or just the other about how often a measway ure or a nominee supported by all the newspapers fails utterly. The most striking instance was the League-ofNations affair; here the voice of the people on the editorial page and the voice of the people at the polls were two flatly different matters; the preponderating newspaper influence of the country was thrown for the League and the preponderating will of the country was registered dead against it.

The newspapers are losing the ability to lead citizens. They are exchanging it, more of it each year, for the ability to lead buyers. To business, a newspaper strike has come to be of grave consequence. A week's interruption of a city's newspapers, and business is damaged. Without the facilities for daily advertising, the custom of stores, of places of amusement, falls off dangerously. The power of the Press is not growing less; the power is being shifted; the Press is powerful still, but not so much to direct men how to think, how to feel, how to vote, as to direct them how to buy.

America's newspapers used to be, before all else, the expression of the tempers and beliefs which set small groups of citizens apart from one another. Newspapers are coming to be, before all else, instruments for those needs and desires men have most in common. Large communities which formerly had a dozen newspapers are being reduced to two or three newspapers; what logical reason eventually to have even so many as two or three?

Industry did not set out to deprive the nation's thousand opinions and prejudices of their means of expression. Industry set out to reduce overhead. Industry set out to substitute for the many financially uncertain newspapers a few financially certain newspapers. Small groups of readers, those who happened to feel alike in regard to the tariff or immigration or vivisection, did not efficiently serve the advertiser. The advertiser needed readers to be centralized; he needed the largest possible number of readers divided into the smallest possible number of groups - divided, that is to say, not according to what readers believe, but according to what readers are likely to buy. The advertiser has small interest to know whether the circulation of a newspaper is composed of Republicans or Democrats; but to pursue his advertising efficiently he must know whether the newspaper's readers buy on the main floor or in the basement.

A half-dozen newspapers, one for each stripe of belief in the community, was good democracy. It was bad business. Why a separate building and machinery for each newspaper? Why not a single plant for the half-dozen? Why not one newspaper to include all opinions, instead of several newspapers, each excluding all beliefs save its own?

The newspaper to-day is a mammoth institution. It requires prodigious capital. No newspaper publisher with little means can possibly get his head above

water now. Where formerly it needed thousands of dollars to run a newspaper, it takes hundreds of thousands, even millions now. Rich men? Of course the publishers are rich men. They have to be.

And the public is not in the least disturbed that this is so. Recently a publisher in New York City, announcing another merger, stated that now at last all the metropolitan newspapers are owned by very rich men which, he said, is a most desirable consummation. And the public acquiesces. Once such a condition would have seemed impossible in America, or, if it had secretly developed, any publisher would have been thought demented who openly boasted of it. The public would have been in a panic of fear and indignation. To-day no one is even perturbed; the people see what the publisher means, and they are willing it should be so. They see it must be so. Formerly men would have demanded to know what was to become of the freedom of the Press, the safety of democracy, in such a circumstance; they would have cried out against having all measured to them by a millionaire's bushel. But now they make no demur. They see it must be; if it were not, how could there be the comics, the rotogravure supplements, the folded-in pictures for framing, the songs and puzzles, the magazine sections, the cutouts, the 'features,' the extravagant rations of news, all the great variety which gives every sort of reader something to his particular taste, all the great quantity which 'carries' the ever mounting volume of the advertising that must lead buyers to buy. The readers understand very well that it takes wealth to provide such a wealth.

Consumptionism is steadily substituting rich newspapers for poor newspapers, inclusive newspapers for clannish newspapers, forty-page newspapers for eight-page sheets. And what of it?

Is not this all advantage? Is not all that was of value still here? Fourteen editors in one place instead of fourteen editors in fourteen places: what has gone save waste, and inefficiency, and instability, and poverty? Has nothing gone then? Is the freedom of the Press nothing? For it is no less than the freedom of the Press that is going.

Why the freedom of the Press? In order to have a free Press, must we have a financially unstable, inefficient Press? How should it take from the freedom of the Press to have one strong newspaper with room for all prejudices and all preferences, rather than to have many weak ones with room for only one pet abomination and one passionate predilection? Should this make the difference between a newspaper Press with political influence and a newspaper Press with a rapidly diminishing political influence? Perhaps it should not: perhaps there is no logical reason why it should. But that is what it does just the same.

Liberals talk of consolidating the churches. Well, suppose the churches were to be really consolidated, not only all the Baptist churches merged with the Methodist, but the synagogues, the Friends' meetings, the Roman Catholic churches, the Greek Catholic churches, and all the variety of Protestant churches reduced to one or two very large, strong, centrally located churches fitted with plenty of amplifiers. The Sundaymorning service would not be the meagre, narrow, intense service of the old churches; there would be something to every taste; there would be a sermon by the rabbi and one by the Quaker, a reading by the Christian Science leader together with an exhortation by the priest, a discourse by the Naturalist and one by the Supernaturalist. The churchgoer, sitting there among his twenty or thirty thousand fellows, would not exactly 'hear both sides'; he would hear only what could give offense

to none; real differences would change automatically to merely formal differences. These consolidated churches would be financially better based, more efficient. And religion would be free, very free indeed, broad, so broad it would eventually be pretty nearly flat.

IV

One more consideration; it relates to the manner in which leaders elicit opinion, obtain the public will. A change is taking place here. So far in our actual experience there is but little more than a hint of what may come. It is difficult to think that it will ever come, that free Americans will go through with this. But meanwhile there can be no doubt of what it is and whither it tends.

The new terminology in this field of our activity is itself significant of what is taking place. When heretofore it was a matter of shaping public opinion, when it came to eliciting the public will, America's leaders said they sought the approval of the people, they talked of 'going out to the people' with their plan for a tariff, of 'educating the people' to the gold standard, or 'winning the people's consent' to a centralized banking-system. These are the phrases which have been usual. Now the proposal is to 'sell' the people a plan for a merchant marine, now the job is to 'sell' them a taxing programme. Yesterday the candidate, the Senator, the Cabinet member, put his scheme before the American people; to-morrow he will put it over. These are not merely new words for old ways; they are new words for different ways.

They are honest words too. They say what they mean and they mean exactly what they say. To seek the approval of the citizens meant to persuade them, it meant to use the human arts of eloquence, argument, rhetoric, advice, personal influence, and often a good

deal of expedient deception. To sell citizens a scheme, to put a programme over, means something else than this; it means to use the power of suggestion, of association, to use 'stereotypes, mechanical repetition, ‘dramatization,' 'interrupted ideas,' to use the new and complicated science of Publicity Publicity, which is not meant to deceive the people as did the old-fashioned propaganda, but which is meant only to overpower them.

Where does the idea of Publicity come from? Publicity comes from business; it is an adaptation of a method which business developed for its own purposes and which has become indispensable in the business world.

The office of business is to supply men's material wants. Men have several kinds of needs; for their educational needs, for their religious needs, for their need of freedom, they look to other institutions; for their physical needs, the need of shelter and clothing and transportation and food, they look to the industrial institution. How does it come about that the particular instrument of industry is adopted by those agencies which supply us, not with our physical needs, but with these other needs; is adopted by the university and the church; by the charity organization and the reform association; by Causes and Movements — above all, how does it come about that it is adopted by Government?

The manufacturer who has something to sell to a man appeals to what he should appeal to - he appeals to the man's love of comfort, to his interest in health and personal safety, to his appetites, to his love of novelty, to his acquisitive instincts; he does not appeal to his reason, his prejudices, his judgment, his moral sense. So-and-so's milk cleanest; So-and-so's powder - finest; this make wall paper - different; that brand flour satisfaction. With these

devices it is sought to fix in the reader's consciousness the association of the article to be sold with the quality of desirability. This is done through the eye, not through the mind. This result is brought about by reiteration. The suggestion of the perfume, of the package food, and desirability must confront the consumer over and over again. The consumer will not stop to read the poster on the billboard, the card in the car; he will scarcely glance at them; almost it could be said they do not gain his attention. But the posters and cards are doing their work just the same; the association which is to be established is silently deepening in that part of the consumer's psyche which the psychologists call the subconscious; slowly, steadily it is bringing about the desired result.

But now when it is a matter of organizing for a tax programme? Or, let us say, organizing for a peace programme. The publicity expert suggests some brief device be chosen 'Let there be Peace,' for instance. These four words are to do the work, these four words are to elicit the public 'will.' These four words are printed in black capitals across the white fronts of pamphlets, on wrapping papers, on stickers; they are displayed in colors on the billboards, on the fences; shown at the movies, placarded on the motor buses. The programme itself is printed at length in millions of folders with which the entire nation is flooded; it is discussed by this leader and that society; an interview here, a statement there; the newspapers are full of it. The people do not read all that is printed; they are contented to know that the details are public, are available, and have been examined by 'authorities.' The four-thousand word arguments and expositions and analyses come to the same result in the public consciousness as do the four words; they result in the association of

this peace programme with the notion of desirability.

The specific merits of the peace programme? What are its defects? Does it fit in with American policies? Is it practicable? Why, the programme must be all right or there would not be so much said in favor of it by so many people; it must be a good plan or you would not hear of it everywhere you go.' The impression, you see, has been made, the reiteration, not of facts, not of reasons, the reiteration of sheer words has done its work; the people have been overwhelmed; 'public opinion' on this particular programme is formed. If on Election Day the man at the polls should be asked to vote yes or no on this peace programme, he would vote as a man in a trance; up from the subconscious, up from the region where reason, where patriotism, where morals never operate, comes the command to vote yes on the peace programme.

Is it because many of the men who are leading the nation in the matter of its tax programmes, its peace programmes, its agricultural programmes and all the rest, are men ignorant of the science of government, are men who can use only the methods to which they are accustomed, the methods of business? No, nor do political leaders use Publicity in the feeling that this new complicated science can better elicit the will of the people than could the old natural method. The leaders have no choice. They must act less and less through men's reason and men's enthusiasms and men's faith, and more and more through men's subconscious abilities, through their irrational powers.

Is it that the American to-day has not the time to compare and weigh and estimate for himself? Partly this, to be sure. How can the citizen have time to form a judgment who must crowd forty pages of newspaper into the twenty

minutes before work in the morning, or thirty pages into the fifteen minutes after work in the evening; or who, as often as not, tries to do both? How much reflection can a man indulge in who must turn on the radio when dinner is done, and who falls asleep reading the latest best-seller? How can the man have time to feel who runs to catch the seven-thirty to the office and runs to catch the five-eighteen back again, so as to be in time for a motor ride before dinner? Feeling takes time, patriotism involves leisure, indignation does not thrive in the five minutes between the evening meal and the hour the movies begin.

But it is not really a question of the time which men have at their disposal; it is not really a question of their being 'too busy.' It is not that they are too busy to read through a considered argument on taxes or a foreign policy; no other people at any time have ever read so much as do to-day's Americans. It is a question of a new habit of mind. In a world which is dominated by things, men are gradually becoming accustomed to act in all the relations of life as they act in relation to things. The processes by which they obtain good things are coming to them to seem the processes by which they obtain good government. That an obsession with things makes a difference in the fibre of citizenship, in the stuff of character, must be true. But this leads down into subtle moral considerations; it is enough for the purpose here to consider just the difference in the purely psychological processes, the difference in the point of attack, the difference in the 'reaction,' as the psychologists seem to call almost any kind of action.

The consumer can take on trust the suggestion that the new yellow soap is a good soap; he need ask no questions; there is that in the nature of industry now which justifies his trust. He knows