ir one desire seems to be to get rid of their
money. As a consequence of this almost pathological eagerness, the
advertising bill of the American people is greater than that of all
other peoples taken together. There is scarcely an article within the
range of their desires that does not carry a heavy load of advertising;
they actually pay out millions every year to be sold such commonplace
necessities as sugar, towels, collars, lead-pencils and corn-meal. The
business of thus bamboozling them and picking their pockets enlists
thousands and thousands of artists, writers, printers, sign-painters and
other such parasites. Their towns are bedaubed with chromatic eye-sores
and made hideous with flashing lights; their countryside is polluted;
their newspapers and magazines become mere advertising sheets; idiotic
slogans and apothegms are invented to enchant them; in some cities they
are actually taxed to advertise the local makers of wooden nutmegs.
Multitudes of swindlers are naturally induced to adopt advertising as a
trade, and some of them make great fortunes at it. Like all other men
who live by their wits, they regard themselves as superior fellows, and
every year they hold great conventions, bore each other with learned
papers upon the psychology of their victims, speak of one another as men
of genius, have themselves photographed by the photographers of
newspapers eager to curry favour with them, denounce the government for
not spending the public funds for advertising, and summon United States
Senators, eminent chautauquans and distinguished vaudeville stars to
entertain them. For all this the plain people pay the bill, and never a
protest comes out of them.

As a matter of fact, the only genuinely thrifty folks among us, in the
sense that a Frenchman, a Scot or an Italian is thrifty, are the
immigrants of the most recent invasions. That is why they oust the
native wherever the two come into contact--say in New England and in the
Middle West. They acquire, bit by bit, the best lands, the best stock,
the best barns, not because they have the secret of _making_ more money,
but because they have the resolution to _spend_ less. As soon as they
become thoroughly Americanized they begin to show the national
prodigality. The old folks wear home-made clothes and stick to the
farm; the native-born children order their garments from mail-order
tailors and expose themselves in the chautauquas and at the great orgies
of Calvinis