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demand, by abnormal, illegitimate expanding of certain phases of the news, or by creating features out of some of those phases, the advertiser is asked to pay for this new circulation at the same rate as for the old. Is it worth it? If featuring some news beyond its news value, sometimes beyond the public's patience, profits the beneficiaries, the regular cash customers of the papers are bound to feel unfairly treated, especially since the names of their products are given short shrift when they happen to turn up in the news. And most of these cash customers are uncomfortably aware that large amounts of free advertising are had for the asking, the asking being an organized industry in its own right. This is the dilemma of the newspaper from the advertiser's point of view: an enterprise which makes no profit on its product, but only on its by-product. The newspapers sell papers at a loss, advertising space at a profit, and give away publicity free.

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Newspapers deserve a certain amount of sympathy in their complex problem of paid advertising and free publicity. Many new factors enter into it as a result of our peculiar civilization, so that it is no longer a simple matter to draw the hard and fast line.

One such factor is the devices for duplication, which add enormously to the power of advertising and furnish the machinery for capitalizing it. Two of these devices are the syndicate and the movie, which confer, among other things, the privilege of being in two places at the same time.

The venerable ex-President of Harvard and a popular moving-picture star died the same day. Dr. Eliot received a decent tribute from the newspapers, but Rudolph Valentino's

passing was chronicled with a blazon of headlines and a fullness of detail once reserved for an assassinated President. This publicity had the logical result of stirring the herd mind, and the crowds descended on the funeral in droves. It used to be argued whether advertising created a demand or supplied one. It does both. The voluminous publicity produced a great outpouring of morbid curiosity, and the newspaper accounts of the manifestation of this curiosity added others to the mobs. The newspapers created the interest and then made news of the interest they created. Some of them showed editorial uneasiness at the disparity between the space accorded Dr. Eliot and the orgy of publicity spread out for Valentino. The uneasiness was confirmed by protesting letters from readers asking if this discrepancy was a measure of the respective values of the two men to our civilization, or even a just measure of the popular interest.

Dr. Eliot was the focus of a similar comparison some years ago - that time in comparison with a comic-strip artist. Some paragrapher proclaimed that Dr. Eliot, then President of Harvard, received $15,000 a year, but that Bud Fisher, creator of 'Mutt and Jeff,' received $150,000 a year, and wondered if that meant that Bud was worth ten times as much as Eliot. Among the comments on this was one which said that it meant just that: that Bud Fisher was ten times as valuable, worth ten times as much in our present civilization. What was overlooked was that these two men were not being compared on equal terms, even on a remuneration basis, since Bud Fisher had the advantage of a purely mechanical device denied to President Eliot, a device which multiplied him without effort or desert on his part, enabling him to be in more than one place at the same time and to earn his salary in each place. His income of $150,000 did not come from any one newspaper, but from a syndicate of newspapers; that is, he was worth $15,000 each to ten newspapers, or, as is probably the case, $1500 each to a hundred newspapers. If there were any arrangement or device or system whereby Dr. Eliot could have been president of ten universities, each paying $15,000, then he too could have earned $150,000 without doing any more work than he did to earn $15,000.

Dr. Eliot lost out in salary against the comic-strip artist and in réclame against the celluloid knight, not because 'Mutt and Jeff' and 'The Son of the Sheik' are greater services to mankind than turning freshmen into useful citizens, but because Dr. Eliot is denied the rubber-stamp publicity machine.

The moving picture is another and more remarkable instance of the effect that simultaneous duplication has on the earnings of certain stars, putting them in a class by themselves with remuneration out of all proportion to that of equally able talents in fields where power of being in two places at one time is denied. The public gasps at the profits of moving-picture stars, and is under the wrong impression that these stars earn those vast amounts of money, when as a fact they merely receive them because the original talent or gift or art or skill is mechanically multiplied.

When Douglas Fairbanks completes a film - of which he is author, producer, and star - the film is easily multiplied to any desired number of duplicates. After the film is completed Fairbanks has nothing further to do but blow about the world, enjoying columns of free publicity which increase the attendance at the ten thousand or more theatres at which 'The

Black Pirate' is showing nightly. If it were possible to make only one original film, which then could be presented in but one theatre at a time, traveling from town to town as a theatrical company travels, and it still had at the end of its tour the same popularity, Doug would presumably receive the same money; but it would take ten or twenty years to complete the run and exhaust the earning power of that particular picture, whereas now, since a film can be multiplied indefinitely and shown simultaneously in just as many cities as desire to see it, the income that under normal conditions would cover the entire earning power of a man's life is received in a few months.

This duplication of result, without any increase of the original effort, is not confined to entertainment alone. It has made chain stores possible. Formerly a grocer, druggist, or tobacconist, no matter how successful, found his earnings confined to the capacity and potentiality of one store. Now his methods can be duplicated and applied to any number of stores. The initial experience, buying knowledge, stock arrangement, window dressing, advertising, training of clerks, can be set down, reduced to a system, and applied to other stores, under one management, and thus a single storekeeper receives the profits, not from one store, but from a thousand. To some extent the same phenomenon is being exhibited by the radio. A speaker who formerly could talk only to the capacity of one hall now talks to a nation. He too is able to be in more than one place at the same time, and the corresponding publicity value is infinitely greater. These factors help to make disproportionately profitable every word printed in newspapers about a person or thing able to capitalize such advertising on so vast a scale.

They give new meaning to the word 'publicity.'

Henry Ford owes, not his success, but the size of his success, largely to the newspapers. He has received the largest free advertising campaign of any one business man. He was in a position to realize on it. He is probably shrewd enough, if he had not been presented with his advertising, to have bought it as other manufacturers have done. But, starting early, when the motor car was live news, he occupied a unique position in the new industry, and he has kept that unique position and has always furnished good copy, which, coupled with the newspaper's policy to play up subjects of popular interest, has made it possible for Ford to spend a much smaller amount in advertising in proportion to the size of his business than any other motorcar manufacturer - or, for that matter, any manufacturer of any kind and get practically one hundred per cent out of the free advertising.

It is not suggested that the newspapers could or should have handled such things differently. It is hard to determine what is news and what is not, and if the news makes a few people rich beyond calculation with the priceless gift of free publicity, that does not mean that the newspapers should confine themselves to dull topics. Yet one can think of other fields of endeavor which have equal interest, importance, and economic value to us, which receive scant consideration. One might ask why newspapers should give a page daily to organized baseball, from two to four pages to radio, as much to the motor car, at least a column daily to books and the theatre, and not have a page or two devoted, say, to electric utilities.

The American home is going to be transformed into an electrically motored, labor-saving housekeeping

device by groups of men who are no more selfish in seeking their own profit than fight promoters or movie magnates. Their product is full of interest to us all, concerns our welfare deeply, and will have as far-reaching effect on the way we live as the Dempsey-Tunney slugging match or the Ford tractor. The combined electrical interests are planning to spend seventy million dollars in the next ten years to put electric refrigerators, toasters, coffee percolators, bread mixers, hair curlers, heating pads, sadirons, and vacuum cleaners into American homes, to take the place of and render unnecessary the 'help' that no longer exists. Is it not a subject of importance? Is it not full of human interest? Could it not be featured? True, it would not sell papers, as do the details of Babe Ruth's life, or the fact that Ford pays a week's wages for five days' work. But that is poor consolation for those who live by selling electric utilities instead of baseball or flivvers. Why are not the newspapers moved with one accord to exploit such fields of gainful endeavor on their inherent interest? For one reason, lack of a personality around which to build up their features. Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin, Tex Rickard, Edward Bok, Red Grange, Suzanne Lenglen, Babe Ruth, Irving Berlin, Queen Marie, are all good copy. It is incidental, as far as the newspaper is concerned, that using them for copy presents advertising to the gainful industries with which they are associated.

The newspaper believes that men are not born with an interest in electric utilities. Neither are they born with an interest in baseball. The public concern with certain phases of life has been developed by exhaustive treatment in the news columns. That interest was put there by the newspapers, the same powerful force that has sold so many things to us in paid space. But the paying advertiser is greatly handicapped by the high cost of the space he buys. He cannot do things on the Tex Rickard scale.

Given enough advertising, the public can be interested in anything - especially the American public, already so standardized, so herd-minded, that it is timid about doing or wearing or liking anything that is not endorsed by the crowd. How many of the 60,000 at the World Series, or the 150,000 at Tex Rickard's show, or the hordes that are packing the college stadia, care that much for baseball, or prize fights, or football, and how many go only because they learn from the news

papers that they are supposed or expected to care? It is a hundred years since Edmund Burke christened the newspapers the 'Fourth Estate,' and Napoleon said that four hostile newspapers were more to be dreaded than an army. The power of the press was puny then compared with the mighty engine of publicity we have to-day, an engine which is apparently getting out of control. Like the fisherman in the Arab tale, the newspapers have opened the bottle; they are appalled by the djinni that has come out, the djinni of publicity, with vast powers for good or evil; they do not know how to control it, what to do with it, or even how to coax it back into the bottle.

A MODEST PROPOSAL

BY A PROGRESSIVE MILITARIST

'The readiness is all'

It has become a commonplace to say that no very sharp distinction can any longer exist between military and civilian populations in war. Whereas wars were formerly fought out between armies in well-defined local campaigns, and the civilian population went unmolested about its usual business, except as a city might be beleaguered or a district ravaged, the present age has seen a transformation in the practice of war which has done away with most of the difference between the combatant and what used to be called the noncombatant. A nation now

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goes to battle entire, from president to shopgirl. Indeed the shopgirl is a valuable recruit. In off hours it is her function to fold bandages or to peddle government bonds. The factory worker is even more essential. From him proceeds the supply of munitions and clothing to the armies. And not alone the laboring, but the professional classes, the men and women of wealth, even the boys and girls, throw themselves into the contest. They provide food for the soldiers in the lines by raising community gardens; they nurse or entertain the wounded at home, in hospitals, or abroad; they heap up stores of projectiles and explosives for the troops at the front. 'The dividing line between soldiers and civilians,' declares a recent writer, 'which wore perilously thin in the last war, will vanish altogether in the next great war; because from the military standpoint there is no great difference between the soldier who wields the weapon and the woman who makes it. Killing or wounding either is a handicap to the enemy; and to handicap the enemy is one of the immediate ends of war.'

To strike thus at an enemy in his most vital organs, the centres of industry that produce his military supplies, or to break down his resistance by terrorizing helpless cities, will certainly be one of the most ardently pursued objects of future attack. For it will be possible, as military writers have taken pains to inform us, to carry battle far behind and beyond the formal lines. Railroads, ammunition dumps, or densely populated cities may be bombed with high explosives or lethal gases. Where bombing is considered uncertain of success, or after it has prepared the way, the vast flotillas of airplanes which the science of a few more years will put at the service of progressive military states will be able to land at crucial points bodies of troops sufficient to destroy the productiveness of essential industrial areas. The effect of such methods of attack upon what has hitherto been the unarmed population of our cities must be obvious. Major General Sir George Aston, writing in the Nineteenth Century and After several years ago, made the following declaration of faith:

'I believe that any great industrial nation acting upon the principles of Clausewitz and the German War Book would be able, within a few hours of

the order being given, to devastate whole cities with poison gas and explosives in any foreign country within petrol radius of aircraft. I believe further that there would be no adequate "defense" against such danger. Anti-aircraft guns could not give sufficient protection, and defending aircraft could not always be in the right place.'

In this plight, General Aston can offer the noncombatant small comfort. 'The whole civilian population,' he declares, 'is exposed to immediate and direct attack by nations which place no limit upon violence in conducting war.'

In the light of such sentences may we not revise the commonplace with which we began that in future wars there will be little or no distinction between combatant and noncombatant - and supplant it with a statement more significant? We may say that armed forces, in large or small numbers, and armed, indeed, with the most efficient and destructive weapons of modern warfare, will be brought directly against people ordinarily without arms and without military training. When bombs fall in city streets we must be prepared not to inquire too closely what has become of our children, if they chance to be missed - unless, indeed, we are singularly free from that anxiety for their preservation which parents are supposed to feel; or unless - and here we strike the note of genuine importance - a system of training can be devised which will make such abrupt losses less injurious to the normal emotional balance. It is a system of training which, it is believed, would include this among its other effects that it is the business of this treatise to urge upon the country.

I do not know whether General Aston is right in thinking that no

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