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.

Thus you see advertising has made possible the great complex papers and
magazines of the day with their corps of trained editors, reporters,
and advertising writers, in numbers and intellectual calibre comparable
with the faculty of a good-sized university. Advertising makes it
possible to issue a paper far below the cost of manufacturing--all to
the benefit of the consumer. So far as I know there is not an important
daily, weekly, or monthly in America that can be manufactured at the
selling price. But, on the other hand, with the growth of advertising a
department had to be created in every paper for its handling. As
advertising still further increased, rival papers competed for it and
the professional solicitor became a necessary adjunct of every paper,
until now the advertising department is the most important branch of
the publication business, for it