Part 2

Second. The introduction of the linotype machines, rapid and multiple presses, and other mechanical devices, which vastly increase the output of every shop that adopts them.

Third. The photo-process of illustrating, which threatens to make wood- and steel-engraving a lost art, and which, on account of its cheapness and attractiveness, has made possible literally thousands of pictured publications that never could have existed before.

Fourth. The growing diffusion of education throughout the country. Our high schools, to say nothing of our colleges and universities, alone graduate 125,000 pupils a year,--all of them fit objects of solicitude to the newsdealer and subscription-agent.

Fifth. The use of wood pulp in the manufacture of paper, by which the largest item in the cost of production has been greatly diminished.

Sixth. The phenomenal growth of advertising.

I shall not attempt to amplify the first five of these causes responsible for the unparalleled growth of periodical literature. But the sixth I shall discuss at some length, for advertising is by all odds the greatest factor in the case.

In olden times the dailies carried only a very little advertising--a few legal notices, an appeal for the return of a strayed cow, or a house for sale. It is only within the past fifty years that advertising as a means of bringing together the producer and consumer began. And, curiously enough, the men who first began to appreciate the immense selling-power that lay in the printed advertisement were "makers" or "fakirs," of patent medicines. The beginning of modern advertising is in fact synchronous with the beginnings of the patent-medicine business.

Even magazine advertising, which is now the most profitable and efficacious of all kinds, did not originate until February, 1860, when "The Atlantic Monthly" printed its first "ad." "Harper's" was founded simply as a medium for selling the books issued from the Franklin Square House, and all advertisements from outsiders were declined. George P. Rowell, the dean of advertising agents, in his amusing autobiography, tells how Harper & Brothers in the early seventies refused an offer of $18,000 from the Howe Sewing Machine Company for a year's use of the last page of the magazine; and Mr. Rowell adds that he had this information from a member of the firm, of whose veracity he had no doubt, though at the same sitting he heard Mr. Harper tell another man about the peculiarities of that section of Long Island where the Harpers originated, assuring him the ague prevailed there to such an extent that all his ancestors had quinine put into their graves to keep the corpses from shaking the sand off.

Before the Civil War it is said that the largest advertisement that ever appeared in a newspaper was given by the E. & T. Fairbanks Company, and published in the New York "Tribune," which charged $3000 for it. Now the twenty large department stores alone of New York City spend, so it is estimated, $4,000,000 a year for advertising, while one Chicago house is said to appropriate $500,000 a year for publicity in order to sell $15,000,000 worth of goods. Those products which are believed to be advertised to the extent of $750,000 or more a year include the Uneeda Biscuits, Royal Baking Powder, Grape Nuts, Force, Fairy Soap and Gold Dust, Swift's Hams and Bacon, the Ralston Mills food-products, Sapolio, Ivory Soap, and Armour's Extract of Beef. The railroads are also very large general advertisers. In 1903 they spent over a million and a quarter dollars in publicity, though this did not include free passes for editors, who, I may parenthetically remark, thanks to the recent Hepburn Act, are now forced to pay their way across the continent just like ordinary American citizens.

It is computed that there are about 20,000 general advertisers in the country and about a million local advertisers. Between the two, $145,517,591 was spent in 1905 to get their products before the public. The Census gives only the totals and does not classify the advertising that appears in the dailies, weeklies, and monthlies. The Rev. Cyrus Townsend Brady, however, has made a very illuminating study of the advertising and circulation conditions of 39 of the leading monthly magazines published in the United States. The first thing that struck his attention was the fact that candid and courteous replies to his requests for information were vouchsafed by all the publishers--quite a contrast to what would have happened from a similar inquiry a generation ago. He next discovered that these 39 magazines, which had an aggregate circulation of over 10,000,000 copies per month, could put a full-page advertisement into the hands of 600,000,000 readers, or seven times the population of the United States, for the astonishingly insignificant sum of $12,000, or for two thousandths of a cent for each reader.

The Critic, August, 1905.

The amount paid by the purchasers of these 39 magazines was $15,000,000, for which they received 36,000 pages of text and pictures, and 25,000 pages of advertisements. Magazine advertisements are better written and better illustrated than the reading matter. This is because they are of no use to the man who pays for their insertion if they do not attract attention, whereas the contributor's interest in his article after its acceptance is mostly nominal. That is, the advertiser must win several thousand readers; the contributor has to win but one editor.

These 39 magazines were found to receive $18,000,000 a year from their advertisements and $15,000,000 from their sales and subscriptions. This shows that in monthly magazines the receipts from advertising and subscriptions are about the same. In weeklies the receipts from advertising are often four times as much as the receipts from sales and subscriptions, while in the dailies the proportion is even greater. The owner of one of the leading evening papers in New York told me that 90 per cent of its total receipts came from advertising. From whatever standpoint you approach the subject, it is the advertisements that are becoming the most important factor in publishing. Indeed, some students in Yale University carried this out to its logical conclusion last autumn by launching a college daily supported wholly by the revenues from advertisements. They put a free copy every morning on the door-mat before each student's room. If it were not for the postal prohibition many dailies and other periodicals would make money by being given away.

Thus you see that if there were no advertisements and the publishers had to rely on their sales and subscriptions for their receipts, the monthlies would have to double their price, and the weeklies and dailies multiply theirs from four to ten times. This advantage to the reading public must certainly be put to the credit of advertising.

The preponderance of advertising over subscription receipts, however, is of comparatively recent occurrence. Thirty years ago the receipts from subscriptions and sales of all the American periodicals exceeded those from advertising by $11,000,000; twenty years ago they were about equal; and to-day the advertising exceeds the subscriptions and sales by $35,000,000.

In 1880 the total amount of advertising was equivalent to the expenditure of 78 cents for every inhabitant in the United States; in 1905 it was $1.79. On the other hand, the per capita value of subscriptions has increased hardly at all. The reason of this is the fall of the price of subscriptions. We take more papers but pay less--a cent a copy. Comparatively few buy the New York "Evening Post" for three cents. This is all the more remarkable, because advertising is the most sensitive feature of a most sensitive business and is sure to suffer first in any industrial crisis or depression.

No wonder that the man who realizes the significance of all these figures and the trend disclosed by them is coming to look upon the editorial department of the newspaper as merely a necessary means of giving a literary tone to the publication, thus helping business men get their wares before the proper people. Mr. Trueman A. DeWeese, in his recent significant volume, "Practical Publicity," thinks that this is about what Mr. Curtis, the proprietor of "The Ladies' Home Journal," would say if he ventured to say what he really thought:--

It is not my primary purpose to edify, entertain, or instruct a million women with poems, stories, and fashion-hints. Mr. Bok may think it is. He is merely the innocent victim of a harmless delusion, and he draws a salary for being deluded. To be frank and confidential with you, "The Ladies' Home Journal" is published expressly for the advertisers. The reason I can put something in the magazines that will catch the artistic eye and make glad the soul of the reader is because a good advertiser finds that it pays to give me $4000 a page, or $6 an agate line, for advertising space.

Yes, the tremendous power of advertising is the most significant thing about modern journalism. It is advertising that has enabled the press to outdistance its old rivals, the pulpit and the platform, and thus become the chief ally of public opinion. It has also economized business by bringing the producer and consumer into more direct contact, and in many cases has actually abolished the middle man and drummer.

As an example of the passing of the salesman, due to advertising, "The Saturday Evening Post" of Philadelphia, in its interesting series of articles on modern advertising exploits, recently told the story of how the N. H. Fairbanks Co. made a test of the relative value of advertising and salesmen. A belt of counties in Illinois were set aside for the experiment, in which the company was selling a certain brand of soap by salesmen and making a fair profit. It was proposed that the identical soap be put up under another brand and advertised in a conservative way in this particular section, and at the same time the salesmen should continue their efforts with the old soap. Within six months the advertised brand was outselling its rival at the rate of $8000 a year.

The Douglas Shoe is another product that is sold entirely by general advertising. So successful has the business become that the company has established retail stores all over the country, in which only men's shoes are sold at $3.50 a pair. Now other shoe-manufacturers have adopted this plan, and in most of our large cities there are several chains of rival retail shoe stores.

But all the advertising is not in the advertising columns. A United States Senator said last winter that, when a bill he introduced in the Senate was up for discussion, the publicity given it through an article he wrote for "The Independent" had more to do with its passage than anything he said in its behalf on the floor of the upper house;--that is, his article was a paying advertisement of the bill. And in mentioning the incident to you, I give "The Independent" a good advertisement.

Universities advertise themselves in many and devious ways--sometimes by the remarkable utterances of their professors, as at Chicago; sometimes by the victories of their athletes, as at Yale; and sometimes by the treatment of their women students, as at Wesleyan. But perhaps the most extraordinary case of university advertising that has come to my attention was when, not so very long ago, a certain state institution of the Middle West bought editorials in the country press at advertising rates for the sole purpose of influencing the state legislature to make them a larger appropriation. In other words the University authorities took money forced from a reluctant legislature to make the legislature give them still more money.

The charitable organizations are now beginning to advertise in the public press for donations, and even churches are falling into line. The Rev. Charles Stelzle, one of the most conspicuous leaders of the Presbyterian Church, has just published a book entitled "Principles of Successful Church Advertising," in which he says:--

From all parts of the world there come stories of losses in [church] membership, either comparative or actual. In the face of this, dare the Church sit back and leave untried a single method which may win men to Christ, provided that this method be legitimate?... The Church should advertise because of the greatness of its commission, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature." To fulfill this command does not mean that Christian men are to confine themselves to the methods of those who first heard the commission.

The question whether advertising pays will never be known in the individual case, for, like marriage, you can't tell till you try it. But in the aggregate, also like marriage, there is no doubt of its value. The tremendous power of persistent advertising to carry an idea of almost any kind into the minds of the people and stamp it there, is amazing. How many "Sunny Jims," for instance, are there in this audience? If there are none, it is singular; for learned judges have referred to him in their decisions, sermons have been preached, and volumes written about him, though it took a million dollars and two years of persistent work to introduce this modern "Mark Tapley" to the public. Have you a little fairy in your home? Do you live in Spotless Town? Do you use any of the 57 varieties? "There's a reason." "That's all." Formerly a speaker used a quotation from the Bible or Shakespeare when he wanted to strike a common chord. Nowadays he works in an allusion to some advertising phrase, and is sure of instant and universal recognition.

The Socialists and other utopian critics, who are supposed to drill to the bedrock of questions, have looked upon advertising as essentially a parasite upon the production and distribution of wealth. They tell us that in the good time coming, advertising will be relegated to the scrap-heap of outworn social machinery, along with war, race prejudice, millionaires, the lower education of women, and other things of an undesirable nature. This has not been the experience, however, of those "sinister offenders" who have come nearest to the coöperative ownership of wealth in this country--I refer of course to "The Trusts." When the breakfast food trust was formed, one of the chief reasons for the combination was that the rival companies thus hoped to save the cost of advertising that had hitherto been required when they sold their food-stuffs in competition with each other. But they very soon found that their sales fell off after they stopped advertising, and they kept on falling off until the advertising was resumed. This teaches us that the American people have not enough gumption to buy even the staple products they need except through the stimulus of hypnotic suggestion--which is nothing but another name for advertising. Even such a benevolent institution as a great life insurance company could not get much new business on its own merits. If all the money now spent on agents' commissions, advertising, yellow-dog funds, and palatial offices were devoted sacredly to the reduction of the rates of insurance, probably fewer rather than more persons would insure. The American people have to pay to be told what is good for them, otherwise they would soon abolish editors, professors, and all the rest of us who get paid for preaching what others practice.

Now while advertising pays the consumer who buys, the advertiser who sells, and the publisher who brings both together, there is a limit to the amount of advertising which can be "carried" by a certain amount of reading matter. In newspapers we see the result of this in the vast Sunday editions, with sometimes fifty or a hundred detachable pages. In the magazines the case is different. Interesting and attractive as magazine advertising has become--it certainly should be so, considering the advertisers pay good money to put it before the people--it is not enough alone to sell a magazine, and when it forms more than half or two thirds of the number the issue becomes too bulky and the value of the advertising pages themselves decreases. In making sandwiches the ham must not be sliced too thin. That necessitates starting a new magazine; and so we find from three to a dozen periodicals issued by the same house, often similar in character and apparently rivals. This accounts for the multiplication of magazines. It is not a yearning for more love stories.